A Life In Pictures. Alasdair Gray

Girl in Search of God, a fable of comparative religions in which a black girl, converted by a missionary to faith in a one-and-only God, searches for him through the African bush. She meets a series of white people, old and young, who claim to be God, or variously describe Him, explain Him or tell her to do without Him. At last she meets Voltaire and Bernard Shaw who persuade her to stop searching for God and do His will by cultivating her own garden – that part of the world we can improve by working with each other through Socialism. He must have read me that book because I had heard God referred to by playmates in our back green, or perhaps on a BBC broadcast, because I knew no adults who talked of Him. Dad said I kept asking him if the next God would be the real one. I must have forgotten all about this because the story bored me as much as his little books of tree identification, unlike The Tinderbox or Snow Queen. His reading must have struck me as a lecture and I wanted to get my knowledge without having it injected. Luckily our house had bookcases where I dug it out by enjoying pictures in a 12-volume Harmsworth Encyclopaedia and The Miracle of Life, a natural and prehistoric history and human anatomy book.

       The Miracle of Life, editor Harold Wheeler, Odhams Press Ltd, 1938, 25 x 17 cm

       The Jabberwock illustrated by John Tenniel from Alice Through the Looking Glass , Lewis Carroll, 1871, 19 x 12 cm

       The Jabberwock illustrated by John Tenniel from Alice Through the Looking Glass , Lewis Carroll, 1871, 19 x 12 cm

       The Jabberwock illustrated by John Tenniel from Alice Through the Looking Glass , Lewis Carroll, 1871, 19 x 12 cm

       The Jabberwock illustrated by John Tenniel from Alice Through the Looking Glass , Lewis Carroll, 1871, 19 x 12 cm

       Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling, illustrations by the author, 1902, 19 x 12 cm

       Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling, illustrations by the author, 1902, 19 x 12 cm

       Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling, illustrations by the author, 1902, 19 x 12 cm

      Just So Stories, Rudyard Kipling, pictorial initial by the author, 1902, 19 x 12 cm

      These enlarged without contradicting the fantasy fictions I enjoyed in other illustrated books. I was delighted to discover how fantastically different our world had been at different times in the past, and that our galaxy contained an unknown number of other worlds where perhaps anything I could imagine might happen. When 11 or 12 I found for myself Dad’s copy of The Adventures of the Black Girl in Search of God and thoroughly enjoyed its story and pictures, for the reading I most enjoyed had both, whether tales of magic or history or science. I loved tales that embraced several genres, like the cartoon adventures of Rupert Bear in Christmas annuals where fairies, dwarves, boy scouts, talking animals, a Chinese conjurer, an eccentric inventor led Rupert wildly astray but always got him home in time for bed. I enjoyed The Dandy and The Beano – the main comics for British under-12s in those days – with such grotesque characters as Big Eggo (an ostrich), Lord Snooty and his Pals, Desperate Dan and Freddy the Fearless Fly. I liked books of wide geographical and historical sweep and do not know when I found many I liked best had been illustrated by their authors – Kipling’s Just So Stories, Lofting’s Doctor Dolittle tales, Thackeray’s Rose and the Ring, Edward Lear’s Nonsense Rhymes and Hendrick van Loon’s Story of Mankind and Home of Mankind. I learned the main shapes of the world’s continents from a toy globe of the world on which I plotted the course of the Nautilus in Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.

       The Rose and the Ring, William Makepeace Thackeray, illustrations by the author, 1854, 17 x 11 cm

      The Rose and the Ring, William Makepeace Thackeray, illustrations by the author, 1854, 17 x 11 cm

       Doctor Dolittle in the Moon , Hugh Lofting, frontispiece by the author, 1929, 19.5 x 12.5 cm

      The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle, Hugh Lofting, illustration & frontispiece by the author, 1923, 19.5 x 12.5 cm

      The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle, Hugh Lofting, illustration & frontispiece by the author, 1923, 19.5 x 12.5 cm

      Orthodox Jews, Christians and Mohammedans learn that the universe is a book written by God in which people are good or bad characters. Books taught me that repulsive things and ideas could be made manageable in stories and pictures, though for years I could not re-read Alice Through the Looking Glass without trying not to see the picture of the Jabberwock. Its buck teeth, antennae, feathery claws and three-button waistcoat seemed as horrid as an engraving in Pouchet’s The Universe of a caterpillar being eaten from inside by ichneumon grubs.

       The Scene of Our History is Laid Upon A Little Planet; The Medieval World, Hendrick Wilhelm van Loon, 1946, 21 x 13.5 cm

       The Scene of Our History is Laid Upon A Little Planet; The Medieval World, Hendrick Wilhelm van Loon, 1946, 21 x 13.5 cm

       The Scene of Our History is Laid Upon A Little Planet; A Tower of Babel; Hendrick Wilhelm van Loon, 1946, 21 x 13.5 cm

       The Scene of Our History is Laid Upon A Little Planet; Nineveh , Hendrick Wilhelm van Loon, 1946, 21 x 13.5 cm

       How Japan Was Made; The Pacific, from The Home of Mankind , Hendrick Wilhelm van Loon, 1949, 21 x 13.5 cm

       How Japan Was Made; The