A Life In Pictures. Alasdair Gray
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working-class homes, enlarged their grants by taking a temporary job, but in 1953 Dad allowed me to stay at home to write my Portrait of the Artist as a Young Scot. With the plot complete in my head there was now enough material (I thought) to write the book quickly, but the first few sentences on paper proved that I lacked a decent prose style. Hitherto diaries and school essays had been filled by writing as I talked, pouring out thoughts as they sprang to mind, but a narrative in that gushing voice was not convincing. I struggled to make my words calm and unemotional, especially when describing emotional disturbance. I learned to use as few adjectives and adverbs as possible, and to not describe what people feel when their actions and words convey it. After two months I returned to Art School having managed to write only what finally became chapter 12, and the mad visions in 29. The book was growing and mingling with ideas for a modern Pilgrim’s Progress inspired by Kafka, as Edwin and Willa Muir interpreted him.
Nude at Red Table , 1954, ink and coloured papercollage, 61 x 32 cm
Reclining Nude , 1955, ink on paper, 61 x 32 cm
Nude on Chair , 1954, felt-tip pen and paper collage, 70 x 48 cm
Anatomy Museum Sketches , 1954, ink on paper, 30 x 21 cm
Mum’s death, and my alternating asthma and eczema bouts, left me fascinated and horrified by the structure of bones, nerves, veins, glands, muscular and connective tissues that amount to a human being. I felt the horror could best be overcome by understanding them as Leonardo and Michelangelo had done, by studying morbid anatomy. I asked Mr Barnes to help me apply to Glasgow University Medical department, for permission to sketch in their dissecting room, but I was only allowed to sketch pickled and bottled specimens in the department’s museum. I soon stopped doing so. Drawings like these gave too small an idea of how the living limb would work. The specimens that disturbed me were monstrous births like the cyclops and two-headed baby which may have been exhibits originally acquired by John or William Hunter, the 18th-century instigators of modern surgery who founded the university’s Hunterian Collections. They proved that the nature of things – which for me was how God worked – could give dreadful undeserved pain to innocent folk, pains that nuclear radiation and warfare would multiply.
The Artist in Wartime , 1954, poster, 76.5 x 51 cm
Student Poetry Reading 1 , 1955, poster, 51 x 76.5 cm
Student Poetry Reading 2 , 1955, poster, 76.5 x 51 cm
But I neared the end of my second Art School year on a friendly footing with most students and teachers I knew. Several girls enjoyed my company, despite my total failure to start a sexual romance with ones who attracted me. The Art School had no literary and debating society of the kind I had enjoyed at Whitehill, so I and Malcolm Hood started one. I sang in a choir run by a friend – performed in School concerts – had become a Recognized Character whose reputation (I heard later) was enhanced by many who thought I would die young. The State Bar in Holland Street, off Sauchiehall Street, was the School’s favourite pub when Glasgow pubs closed at 9 p.m., even at Hogmanay, supposed to be Scotland’s happiest festival and certainly the most drunken. Both my parents had celebrated it cheerfully but soberly. Around closing time on 31st December 1954 I left the State Bar and leant over the bonnet of a parked car feeling very sick and drunk. I was hailed by a small group leaving after me. They took me with them to parties in houses near the university I had never visited before or since. This was the best Hogmanay of my life; all later ones have been anticlimaxes. Bob Kitts was in the group, a London art student who had been invited north for the new year by Glasgow students he had met when on holiday in France. By talking and talking and talking with Bob I grew steadily sober.
His father had been a merchant seaman who, unlike mine, had suffered unemployment during the Depression, but later worked as a driver for the GPO. World War Two had changed life for the Kitts as much as the Grays. The parents stayed in London while Bob, his two brothers and sister were evacuated to Cornwall, separated and billeted with strangers. As often happened, young Bob was with people who treated him badly until his strong-minded mother found out. She took him away and placed him with a kindly family he remembered fondly. During the London Blitz the father and mother were bombed out, so after the war the family were reunited in a completely different home, but resumed the Cockney tradition of summer holidays in the farms of Kent, earning money by hop-picking and sleeping in tents after sing-songs round a camp fire. Until 1960 every fit young British male had to serve two years in the armed forces. I (luckily) was unfit, but Bob had served two years in Henlow RAF base. This allowed him to attend night school classes and make a portfolio of work that had got the Slade Art School to accept him as a student. His fees and living expenses were, like mine, paid by the new Welfare State so we were both Socialists – Bob said his family never had anything to Conserve. We were both fascinated by the visual arts, loved the writings of Dylan Thomas and Scott Fitzgerald, and were writing a semi-autobiographical novel inspired by Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. While discussing time and space in image and word one of us said, “The only logical outcome of our interest in word and image is filming,” and the other agreed. We arranged to meet again as soon as possible and correspond with each other in future. On the night we met, Bob also met a Glasgow girl, Hilary Leeming, then a domestic science student. I came to enjoy a relaxed, platonic friendship with her that I later enjoyed more than once with the lovers of friends.
Drawing of Robert Kitts , 1955, ink on paper, 30 x 21 cm
Hilary Leeming , 1959, ink on paper, 30 x 21 cm
Portrait of Bob , 1958, ballpoint pen on paper, 30 x 21 cm
In the 1954 summer holiday I took part in an Art School visit by bus, ferry and train to Florence, Rome and Venice. Dad was then a site clerk at Arden, south Glasgow, where one of the new housing schemes that came to surround the city was being built. To pay for the trip he got me work as a joiner’s labourer and, during the Glasgow Fair Fortnight, as a day watchman. I made several sketches to help me make one of those large, complex, realistic compositions I have hardly ever had time to complete. I was also planning a picture for an Art School competition with a small money prize for the winner. The given subject was The Marriage Feast at Cana where Christ did his first miracle before his mother and disciples – six fishermen, a doctor, lawyer, tax collector, artist, handsome young lad and the accountant, Judas. In Italy I looked for faces illustrating this social and psychological range and found some among sculpture in Italian museums, where the pictures I mostly enjoyed were small early tempera paintings in clear bright colours and labelled Primitive. Beside them the wild dramatic gestures and swirling drapery of big high Renaissance oil paintings seemed very dull, though I now know they were seen through brown layers of varnish that restorers would soon start to remove. But these richly dressed folk had obviously been painted