Growing Up In The West. John Muir
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that his perspective on the people he sketches is partial and contingent, that ‘what was true of them outside my personal intervention and knowledge is missing’. And this, it may be, is the cardinal lesson of the book: that in the business of understanding other people one can never be an adept or an expert, but only and always an apprentice.
*
The great triumphs of Glasgow fiction in the 1980s and beyond – the successes of Kelman and Gray, and the subsequent achievements of Janice Galloway, Jeff Torrington, A. L. Kennedy and Andrew O’ Hagan – have encouraged a drift towards cultural amnesia. While the glories of the now engross both readers and critics, a whole tradition of antecedents and exemplars is slipping out of view. And where earlier urban fiction has received critical notice, it has sometimes been glibly disparaged as gloomy and unadventurous, a drearily homogenous ‘Glasgow school of crisis’.17 It is to be hoped that Growing Up in the West will complicate this picture, testifying as it does to the verve, variety and ingenuity of West of Scotland fiction in the decades prior to the ‘Glasgow Renaissance’. And this – the high literary quality of the works collected here – is the central point to emphasise. If these books have a claim on our attention, if they deserve to be rediscovered and re-read, it is firstly because of their literary merit. They are four finely realised works of fiction. Beyond that, however, they can do us the service of correcting our foreshortened perspective on the literary past, reminding us of a time when the Scottish urban novel itself was growing up in the West.
NOTES
1 Alasdair Gray, Lanark: A Life in 4 Books (London: Picador, 1994), p. 243.
2 On Glasgow fiction generally, see Moira Burgess, Imagine a City: Glasgow in Fiction (Glendaruel: Argyll, 1998), and the same writer’s The Glasgow Novel: A Complete Guide, 3rd edn (Hamilton: The Scottish Library Association, 1999).
3 Margery McCulloch, Edwin Muir: Poet, Critic and Novelist (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993), p. 28.
4 Critical studies which treat Muir’s fiction and autobiography together include: P. H. Butter, Edwin Muir (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1962); Elgin W. Mellown, Edwin Muir (Boston: Twayne, 1979); and Margery McCulloch, Edwin Muir: Poet, Critic and Novelist.
5 McCulloch, p. 29.
6 Selected Letters of Edwin Muir, ed. by P. H. Butter (London: Hogarth Press, 1974), p. 67.
7 Douglas Gifford, The Dear Green Place? The Novel in the West of Scotland (Glasgow: Third Eye Centre, 1985), p. 7.
8 See Professor Butter’s introduction to the 1982 Paul Harris edition of Poor Tom.
9 Chapman, 52 (Spring 1988), a special Hendry number, contains much useful information on the writer’s life and work. See also the biographical note to J. F. Hendry, Marimarusa (Thurso: Caithness Books, 1978).
10 On the New Apocalypse, see J. F. Hendry, ‘Apocalypse Now: The Image and the Myth’, Chapman, 31 (Winter 1981/ 82), 45–54.
11 Cairns Craig, The Modern Scottish Novel: Narrative and the National Imagination (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), pp. 124–5.
12 Douglas Gifford, ‘A New Diversity’, Books in Scotland, 26 (Winter 1987), 6–14 (p. 14).
13 Isobel Murray and Bob Tait, Ten Modern Scottish Novels (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1984), p. 123.
14 Craig, p. 54.
15 Murray and Tait, p. 143.
16 John Lloyd, ‘A Novelist in the Mirror: An Interview with Gordon M. Williams’, Scottish International (August 1971), 22–8 (p. 28).
17 This term was coined by Beat Witschi in his Glasgow Urban Writing and Postmodernism: A Study of Alasdair Gray’s Fiction (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1991).
Liam McIlvanney
Edwin Muir
PART ONE
ONE
WHEN ONE EVENING in the early autumn of 1911 Tom Manson saw his brother Mansie coming out with Helen Williamson through the gate of the Queen’s Park in Glasgow, he stopped as if he had been given a blow on the chest. He told himself that he must be mistaken; but, no, there was no doubt about it; Mansie and Helen were walking along there like old friends. They had not noticed him, but with their faces turned towards each other went off along the park railings towards Pollokshaws Road. Behind his incredulous rage Tom felt honestly alarmed for them; they were so completely unconscious of their danger; they had no idea that they had been seen! But then, as by the single turn of a screw, his fury completely flooded him, sweeping out everything else. He turned and walked down Victoria Road. ‘By God, I’ll get even with him!’ he thought, but no expedient came to his mind, and his anger took another leap upwards.
He pushed open the swing-door of a pub and went up to the counter. The barmaid smiled at him; he could see that all right; but at the same time it was only a distant glassy re-arrangement of her features, so he paid no attention to it but ordered a double Scotch, and when that was swallowed, a second one which he drank more slowly. His anger now quite filled him, yet when he turned into Garvin Street and neared his home it took another leap upwards, lifted him up with it, so that he seemed to be walking partly on the air. Slamming the house door behind him he made at once for the room where he and Mansie slept and began to haul his clothes and belongings to the parlour. The sound of furniture banging brought his mother from the kitchen.
‘What are you doing, Tom?’ she cried. ‘You’ll break the bit sticks o’ furniture if you’re no’ careful.’
‘Leave me alone!’
‘But, lamb, what’s the matter?’
‘If you think I’m going to sleep another night in the same room as that—’ He had to stop, for only one word would come to his tongue, and he could not speak it out before his mother. So in revenge he said: ‘I’m leaving tomorrow. I’m going to ship on the first liner I find.’
‘But what’s wrong, Tom? Tell me what’s wrong?’
‘Leave me alone!’ he shouted. ‘Can’t you leave me alone!’
His mother turned, and her bowed back as she left the room filled