LITMIR.BIZ

      Middle Age Self Portrait

       Saltire Society was founded in 1936 by people who wished to see, “not just a revivals of the arts of the past, but a renewal of the life that made them, such as achieved by Scots in the 18th century.” It publicized new buildings, good restorations of old ones, while issuing pamphlets on Scots history, law, philosophy, famous writers, usually dead. In the 1980s it started printing autobiographical booklets about modern authors. MacDiarmid & Goodsir Smith were dead, so theirs were edited out of their personal accounts still in print. Naomi Mitchison and I wrote our own. Mine, published in 1988, was last of a series which should have continued while any Scots knew they had a literature.

      ON MONDAY, 18TH MAY, 1987, 10.30 PM. My birth certificate says I am 52 years, 167 days, 40 minutes old. My passport says I am 1.74 metres or 5 feet 9! inches tall. According to the scales in the lavatory I weigh 13 stones and 7 pounds in my socks, semmit, underpants, bath robe, national health spectacles and false upper teeth: from all of which a doctor will deduce I am not in the best of health. I have the lean, muscular legs and small bum of the brisk pedestrian but the bulging paunch of the heavy drinker, the fleshy shoulders hunched too near the ears of the asthmatic with bronchial tendencies. The neck is thick; hands and feet and genitals small; the chin strong and double with the underside not yet grossly pendulous; the moustache pale sand colour; the straight nose survives from the years when I was thin all over; the eyes are small and sunken with blue-grey irises; the brow straight and not deeply lined; the hair of the scalp is fading from nondescript brown to nondescript grey and thinning behind a slightly eroded scalp-line. In repose the expression of the face is as glum as that of most adults. In conversation it is animated and friendly, perhaps too friendly. I usually have the over-eager manner of one who fears to be disliked. When talking freely I laugh often and loudly without being aware of it. My voice (I judge from tape-recordings) is naturally quick and light, but grows firm and penetrating when describing a clear idea or recollection: otherwise it stammers and hesitates a lot because I am usually reflecting on the words I use and seeking to improve and correct them. When I notice I am saying something glib, naive, pompous, too erudite, too optimistic, or too insanely grim I try to disarm criticism by switching my midland Scottish accent to a phony form of Cockney, Irish, Oxbridge, German, American or even Scottish.

      At present I sit on a low comfortable chair in the room where most of my work and sleeping is done. I wear the aforementioned socks, semmit etcetera, and am being painted by Michael Knowles B.A. (Hons.), a quiet-spoken English artist living in Edinburgh who hopes to sell the portrait to the Royal Scottish Museum. I like and fear the idea of becoming a thing with an unliving public shape, but I obviously like it more than fear it for I am embalming myself in words for the Saltire Self-Portrait Series while Mr Knowles paints me doing it. I had planned to start less blatantly with a platitude everyone would accept, a platitude told in rhyme to make it seem original. I would then cunningly shift to an account of the people who made me, using old certificates and memories but mostly some pages my father once wrote about his early life in Bridgeton. I was reading these pages an hour ago when Mr Knowles arrived. I laid them down, we arranged the furniture to let the window-light fall equally on me and on his canvas, then the pages could not be found though we rummaged for them in all the places I could think of and a few where they could not possibly be. From childhood this habit of slyly, casually hiding valued objects from myself has deprived me, sometimes permanently, of money, travel tickets, useful tools, keys, paintings, notebooks, manuscripts and appliances to assist breathing when the asthma is bad. A psychiatrist once suggested these losses were caused by a hidden wish to attract attention and get proofs of love from those close to me. I doubt it. I have often inflicted such accidents on myself when nobody is close and nobody notices. The cause may be a sneaking appetite for disaster which Edgar Allan Poe calls The Imp of the Perverse and associates with alcoholism, irrational vertigo and procrastination. The older Freud calls it The Death Wish, perhaps too sweepingly. It has done me no lasting harm. Perhaps a defective grasp of solid externals is sometimes not caused by unconscious will, but by too much reflecting on mental innards. I’ll find the lost pages eventually. They are certainly within arm’s reach, and I may use them to add dignity to an otherwise selfish narrative.

      Meanwhile, what am I for? What does this ordinary-looking, eccentric-sounding, obviously past-his-best person exist to do apart from eat, drink, publicize himself, get fatter, older and die? Stars, herbs and cattle exist without reasons, they fit the universe wherever they occur without need of language to maintain their forms, but a born human has no foreseeable shape. It is turned into a Chinese housewife, a neolithic hunter, an unemployed car mechanic or Ludwig van Beethoven by an always changing when and where pressing on a unique yet always ripening or rotting bundle of traits: traits joined by a painfully conscious need to both stay the same and grow different. This need generates ideas, arts, sciences, laws and a host of excuses, because one of our traits is garrulity. Even in sleep we talk wordlessly to ourselves. So what are you for, Gray?

      At present I do not know. Until a few years ago I wanted to make stories and pictures. While writing or painting I forgot myself so completely that I did not want to be any different. I felt I was death’s equal. We live and have lived, die and will die in this place and millions have been and will be forgotten with hearts and faces we struggle to keep until folded in sleep or gone rotten, and most, before dying, give blood to son or daughter and when the bones of these children crumble, remain not even memories – names cut on stones, perhaps: otherwise we are a procession as featureless as water unless we get into a lasting image or repeatable pattern of words. But the most necessary and typical people are seldom commemorated in art and history which whore after the rich, the disastrous, the eccentric and love, above all, monstrous folk with one ability, one appetite so magnified that they seem mere embodiments of it – that is how our heroes and gods get made. I tried to tell convincing stories by copying into them pieces of myself and people I knew, cutting, warping and joining the pieces in ways suggested by imagination and the example of other story-makers, for I wanted to amuse, so my stories contain monsters. I do not decry them for that, but I have no new ideas for more. Can I entertain with some of the undistorted facts which generated them?

      Early last century a Scottish shepherd whose first name is now unknown fathered William Gray, a shoemaker who fathered Alexander Gray, a blacksmith in Bridgeton, east Glasgow, a district then brisk with foundries, potteries and weaving sheds. And Alexander married Jeanie Stevenson, powerloom weaver and daughter of a coalminer. She became his housewife and bore another Alexander, who became a clerk on a weighbridge on a Glasgow dock, then a private in the Black Watch regiment in France, then a quartermaster sergeant there, then worked a machine which cut cardboard boxes in a Bridgeton factory until another world war began.

      While some of this was happening Hannah, wife of a Northampton hairdresser called William Fleming bore Henry Fleming who became a foreman in a boot-making factory, and married Emma Minnie Needham. Henry, nicknamed Harry, also became a trade-unionist, and his bosses put his name on a list of men not to be employed in English factories. He and Minnie came to Glasgow where she bore Amy Fleming who first became a shop assistant in a clothing warehouse, then married Alex Gray the folding box maker, thus becoming a housewife.

      She and Alex lived in Riddrie, a Glasgow corporation housing scheme where she bore Alasdair James Gray who became

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