A Life In Pictures. Alasdair Gray

1949, 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

      Rupert the Bear, circa 1930, Alfred Bestall, 21 x 13.5 cm

      Rupert the Bear, circa 1930, Alfred Bestall, 21 x 13.5 cm

      I enjoyed escapist fantasies well into my teens, when Dad’s Collected Plays of Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells’ early science fantasies prepared me for more adult reading. Dad subscribed to a book club, The Readers’ Union, so every month a volume arrived by post that I never foresaw or expected but eventually read – Orwell’s 1984, Denton Welsh’s A Voice Through a Cloud, Bowen’s The Death of the Heart, The Best of Hemingway, The Best of James Joyce, Waley’s translations of Classical Chinese poems and that comic epic, Monkey. But the most potent influence was The Horse’s Mouth by Joyce Carey. He drew this frontispiece for the Penguin paperback edition – it was not in the first copy I read in the late 1940s. It is shown below because the novel’s atmosphere is in this pub interior – in the sardonic resignation of the hero among his mockers – in the full-bodied barmaid almost lazily lifting a bottle to strike one of them down – and in the moon reflected in the Thames beyond the window.

       The Horse’s Mouth , Joyce Cary, author’s frontispiece, 1944, 18 x 11 cm

      Set in 1938 it describes the last weeks in the life of an old artist who cares for nothing much but the great painting he tries to make while pennilessly surviving by sponging on friends or robbing a former mistress. Years earlier he had been a successful painter of oil colours, but discovering the work of William Blake moved him to paint big murals of a kind Blake regretted never being commissioned to paint. Gulley Jimson cannot get commissions either since the only folk with faith in his art are a cobbler and postman who think it right to respect outcast intellectuals, and an ugly stammering boy who wants to be an artist. This very funny, high-spirited story persuaded me that making a fine work of art for people who did not want it was the greatest thing I could do. The Horse’s Mouth quoted so much of Blake’s exciting verse that I found in Riddrie Public Library a book containing Songs of Innocence and Experience and the minor prophetic books. In a cheap Everyman edition I found his illustrated Gates of Paradise. In the great Mitchell Public Library by Charing Cross (mostly built with money Andrew Carnegie donated circa 1900) I found facsimiles of his hand-coloured books, with the illustrations and commentary on the Book of Job.

      The Gates of Paradise, William Blake, three emblems, 1793, 17 x 10 cm

      WHAT IS MAN? The Sun’s Light when he unfolds it Depends on the Organ that beholds it.

      At length for hatching ripe he breaks the shell

      AGED IGNORANCE Perceptive Organs closed, their Objects close

      These were huge boosts to mature free thinking. Blake’s verses and drawings do not amount to a system because he thinks all big systems are political or religious traps used by the rich and powerful to manage others – for their own good of course! Blake’s pictures and writing deal with good and beautiful things while condemning governments and churches that promote mere obedience as a virtue, while using warfare, poverty and hunger to compel those who disagree. Blake, like Robert Burns, never doubted what babies and the wisest people know: what naturally feels good and bad is good and bad, before suppression of these natural feelings perverts them.

       The Gates of Paradise , William Blake, four emblems, 1793, 17 x 10 cm

       WATER Thou Waterest him with Tears

      EARTH He struggles into Life

      AIR On Cloudy Doubts & Reasoning Cares

       FIRE That ends in endless Strife

      I was well aware of my own perversity. Like many children I was obsessed with torture fantasies. American comics (being sold for the first time in Britain) showed a lot of these because the USA publishers’ moral code allowed pictures of glamorous women wearing very little, but forbade showing them in amorous clinches, so their adventures involved physical violence and bondage instead. There is violent action and some bondage in Blake’s art but no perversity, though his men and women, often floating or leaping through space, are usually naked. When fifteen or sixteen I discovered Aubrey Beardsley and loved the way he made innocent fun of mild perversity. He drew naked bodies beautifully, but also enjoyed inventing fantastic costumes for them to dress and undress in. I studied his illustrations along with Blake’s in the Mitchell Library, and failed in attempts to make pictures combining Beardsley’s solid blacks with Blake’s rich colouring.

       Infant Joy from Songs of Innocence by William Blake

      But The Horse’s Mouth also prepared me for a difficult future. The character of Jimson was partly based on J.D. Fergusson (whom Joyce Carey met in Edinburgh), and partly on Stanley Spencer, but these painters had enough money not to suffer for their art. Jimson was shown wrestling with the penury undergone by Van Gogh and Gauguin. I later learned that Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Cézanne, though never poor, also suffered terrible defeats. In a late notebook Leonardo asked himself “What has been done? Tell me if anything was ever done?” The statue that would have proved him a sculptor as great as Michelangelo was destroyed by French soldiers using it as target practice and his only mural, The Last Supper, was crumbling when he completed it. In a derelict chapel Jimson finally paints a great mural on the theme of the Creation, persists in painting it as municipal workmen demolish the building. He falls from the scaffolding and, badly injured, is carried away in an ambulance when the adventure of his life (and death, which quickly follows) strikes him as comic. He bursts out laughing and a nun tells him, “You should be praying, not laughing.” He replies, “It’s the same thing, Mother” – a wonderful end to a book and a life.

       The Comedy of the Rhinegold , Aubrey Beardsley, title page to unpublished book, circa 1896, 28 x 21 cm

      When babies start focusing their eyes all they see is amazing novelty. Wordsworth’s Ode on Intimations of Immortality in Childhood tells how this lovely sense of the world “fades into the light of common day”. All educations must prepare us for pain but some do it too thoroughly. Life becomes daily grind – painful acceptance. I was taught that the universe and evolving life there should be a grand setting for an adventurous future, though like many teenagers