Authors: William McIlvanney
‘The kiln,’ he said more than once, ‘is where cley either hardens in tae brick or breaks down intae rubbish.’
He had obviously decided which Tam would do. Each time he appeared at the tea-break he was pushing Tam further to the edge of the group, leaving him no place for his pride to stand. No matter what sense of himself Tam might have achieved during the day, Cran would unravel it at night. He seemed to enjoy doing that, a steady forbidding of Tam to be himself.
‘
I SUPPOSE YOU'RE SOMETHING OF A CURIO
to them,’ John Benchley says.
Not just to them. He's something of a curio to himself, he thinks, as he goes on responding mechanically to John's remarks. Taking the night-shift job in the brickwork for the summer has produced another split in his sense of himself. He feels he is subdividing into such a crowd of multiple personalities he'll never be able to unify them into any kind of order. He can imagine how Cran and the
others would react if they knew he tried to write poetry. Ritual stoning with reject bricks. But at the same time as he doesn't really fit in there, he cannot honestly believe that his acceptance for university is real and that he will be starting there at the end of the summer. This is not what anyone in his family has ever done. A part of him is waiting for the inevitable day when an official-looking envelope will land on the doormat addressed to him. He knows roughly what its contents will be.
(Dear Mr Docherty,
We regret to inform you that there has, of course, been a mistake in the matter of your being given a place at this university. We trust that this error has not inconvenienced you too much by, for example, giving you absurd fantasies concerning the possibility that learned men will waste their time on a working-class toerag from Graithnock. We do, however, hope that you will find in the future some activity more suited to your abilities, such as shovelling shit. Yours faithfully.
An Amazingly Clever Man)
His sense of being outside any social norm hones in on him with fresh intensity now and distances him even further from conversation with John Benchley. He sees his lips moving and he realises that it is not what he is saying that matters but his need to say it, the compelled persistence of his nature. He has often persuaded Tam of the necessary existence of God but, Tam realises now, while he was doing so, he had a mole on his cheek, about an inch from his left nostril. That mole becomes more and more significant as Tam looks. It appears to him now as one reason why, after going through his devoutly Christian phase, he decided to become an agnostic.
For what is the point of the mole on John Benchley's left cheek? If the universe has one coherent divine purpose, that purpose should include everything. In his omniscient wisdom, what could God possibly have meant by putting a mole on John Benchley's left cheek? Come on, God, check your books. What was it you meant by that again?
He remembers a poem he wrote in his secret notebook, where he often stores little cosmic anomalies he thinks he has found
because, if he ever reaches the Golden Gates, never mind the questions St Peter may put to him, he has a few he'd like to ask St Peter. And if Peter can't answer them, he doesn't even want in, because if heaven is as ramshackle a conception as earth is, they can keep it. The harps are probably not even in tune and the milk and honey's guaranteed to be sour. And what about the company? All those bland do-gooders sitting around, unable to remember one really bad thing they did. An eternity of boredom. Not one spicy story among them.
(‘Let me tell you about another sin I never committed.’)
Oh boy. It will be enough to make you ask for a transfer.
(‘Excuse me. I think there's been a mistake here. You think you could go through your records again? Just check it out? I think you must have missed the time I stole two biros and a Dinky toy from Woolworth's. Should be listed somewhere. It was a Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith. One of the dearest models. I've been a right bad bastard. Where do you get the lift that takes you downstairs?’)
The company's bound to be better in hell. They must have some stories to tell.
(‘How did you finish up down here?’
‘How did I finish up here? Wait till you hear this one . . .’)
He wrote the poem after he had heard about Mrs McAfferty's new baby. She lived near them in Dawson Street at the time, though she moved later to one of the prefabs in Altonhill. The child was a boy and soon after the birth Tam overheard his mother tell his father, in the quiet reverential voice she always used when referring to the inexplicable oddities an inscrutable fate visits upon the unsuspecting innocent, that wee John McAfferty had been born with one toe missing from each foot. His father, with typical pragmatism, observed that it would only be noticeable if he went swimming at Barassie shore and then - the Scottish climate being what it is - most people would probably just think it was frostbite. But the small pointless cruelty of it stayed with Tam for days and eventually crystallised in a poem that for no reason he could understand made the child both English and the son of a man travelling on a train.
(The Englishman opposite coming from Crewe
Speaks of his son, who is John Edward Frew.
John Edward, it seems, has hazel-brown eyes
And a talent for drawing beyond all dispute.
But, strangest of all, and to mankind's surprise
John Edward has only four toes on each foot.
And this is a fact which has troubled my dreams.
And, taking my bath when the water is hot,
I look at myself and my toes say, it seems
That we number ten and John Edward's do not.'
It's a question which, dying, I leave to the wise
To settle the wherefors and find out the whys.
If I get to heaven, I'll straighten my tie
And ask a policeman the way to God's seat.
Introducing myself, I'll say, ‘Dear God, why
Does John Edward Frew have eight toes on his feet?’)
And he'll have other questions. What part of the divine plan is it which demands that some children be born spina bifida? Or decrees that there should be such a thing as congenital syphilis? Or arranges a world in which there can happen the casual horror that befell a man he heard of recently? The man was in his thirties and having a holiday with his family.
(Yea, and it came to pass that he did an thing of great evil and that was as an abomination in the sight of the Lord.)
At least it must have been, if we are to believe that what happens to us has any connection with divine justice. What he did was, he went hill-walking on his own, only in safe and well-frequented places. But he stumbled and scraped his leg on a rock and later he was dead. The abrasion of the stone had burst the skin and there had been rat's urine on the rock and it entered his bloodstream. Hey presto. We have a widow and two fatherless children. And why not?
(And God writ upon stone other commandments. And one of them did read: thou shalt not scrape thy leg against the rock that hath upon it the pish of the rodent. For thou shalt die thereof and the name of thy dying shall be called among men Weil's disease.)
Uh-huh. Back to the drawing-board, God.
‘How goes the writing?’ John Benchley is saying.
It is a moment or two before Tam can focus on who John is. It takes all your concentration, giving God a row.
‘Well. It goes.’
‘Have you finally started the masterpiece yet?’
Tam takes the question seriously. There it is again. One part of him suspects that he doesn't have the ability to deserve a university place and another part of him has the gall to believe he can become a writer. Why can't he introduce the two parts to each other?
‘I think maybe,’ he says to John.
He is being cagey. He has started to write something which he thinks may be his final statement on the nature of human experience but he knows that writers don't like to talk about these things. It would be like letting air into the womb. (‘You don't want to talk it all away.’ Or something like that. Ernest Hemingway,
The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.
)
‘So what form will it take?’
He hesitates. He is trying to shape a statement that will satisfy John's probing curiosity without damaging the foetus he thinks he is carrying.
‘It will,’ he says carefully, ‘be a blank verse play about working-class experience. Ah suppose. But just a play for reading. Not for performance.’
‘Sounds like Goethe's
Faust,’
John says, smiling into his sherry. ‘In a way.’ He is smiling still. ‘Sort of. Kind of.’
Who is Goethe again? Tam has heard of him. But why does the name jar some tender place in his mind? Then he remembers he went into Fulton's bookshop when he was fifteen, sweaty and dishevelled from two successive games of pitch-and-putt, and asked Mr Fulton if he had any of the works of Go-eth in stock. Mr Fulton stared at his muddy, grass-stained hands for so long that Tam could feel them enlarging to a grotesque size.
‘I suppose you're referring to Goethe,’ he said condescendingly. ‘And please don't touch any one of these books. Why don't you come back when you've had a bath?’
Go-eth. His mind cringes all over again. Maybe his literary aspirations will never survive his background. He often
pronounces big words and foreign names in a strange way because he has only ever read them. Where he comes from, he has never heard anybody say them. He supposes he has been suppressing the name of Goethe ever since and he certainly has never tried to read him, as if some rule has banished him from the privilege. Maybe he will always be -the joke gives him a certain masochistic pleasure - a Visigo-eth.
‘You have a title?’ John asks.
‘A working title,’ Tam says, very professional.
‘What is it?’
‘“Actions in Generic Tense.”’
That leaves John thoughtful.
‘Hm,’ he says. ‘Probably better not to offer it for performance. Not a title calculated to have them queuing round the block.’
Tam knows John is trying to understate his sense of how ludicrous Tam is. He is a kind man. He is trying not to laugh. Faced with that not unfamiliar feeling of adult disdain (some of his teachers were expert at that), Tam feels a familiar response. It is a desire not to back off from his pretensions but to come ahead with them. He knows they can be ridiculous but he also knows they're who he may be in embryonic form. He feels the colossal energy they give him - a desire to test himself and discover who he is, more powerful than any intimidation that can come against it. (Maybe that's what Bernard Shaw means by the life-force?)
He watches John sipping his sherry and can see the wisdom of his attitude, as he could see the wisdom of the Latin teacher who, when he had a full page of poetry in this year's school magazine, said to him sneeringly in front of the class, ‘Don't worry, Docherty. It's a phase we all go through. You'll get over it.’ Tam hopes not. He has always found that teacher pathetic. Who would want to be like him? An expert in desiccation who might be able to conjugate
amare
but don't ask him to feel it. Did you have to kill your dreams to be wise? He remembers a line of Yeats he has rewritten to suit himself in his notebook: ‘Imaginative decrepitude is wisdom.’ He is in no hurry to get there.
‘Anyway, it would seem to be an improvement on your last venture. “The Fourteen Stations”. Remember them?’
Unfortunately, he does. He told John about six months ago that
he had found the form for what he wanted to say. His idea was the fourteen stations of the Cross as a symbol of any individual life. He would follow one character's life, dividing it into fourteen phases. John had glanced away, slightly embarrassed.
‘It sounds,’ he said so quietly Tam could hardly hear him, ‘like the sort of idea you might get late on a Saturday night when you're stuck for the subject of a sermon.’
It wasn't long afterwards that Tam had abandoned the project and started on ‘Reflections in a Broken Mirror’.
‘Verse?’ John says. ‘Is it set in contemporary times? Just now?’
‘Aye. It's about the people around me. Ah suppose. The way they live. I want to try and catch some kind of essence of my life so far. Before it goes.’
‘You've probably got time. Do you think blank verse is an ideal medium for expressing working-class life?’
‘It's very flexible. It lets you move from the particular to the general. The universal.’
‘Hm. But you don't think it's a less than natural medium for writing about working-class life?’
‘You could put Hamlet in jeans,’ Tam says.
John's thin laugh puts on weight. It is almost beefy. It must be relief. Tam laughs as well. Perhaps they are both relieved, John at having been released from having to humour Tam's grandiose ambitions, Tam at not having to expose them any more. He decides not to reveal his secret writing life to anybody else ever again. Silence is strength. It is not that other people's tendency to pour very cold water on his enthusiasm is going to quench it. He may not know his Goethe from his Go-eth but it will take a lot of fire brigades to douse the energy that burns in him. It is just that he finds himself getting angry at the complacency of the people who do that to him and he has enough talent for anger without unnecessary reasons for it. It is better to change the subject. He does it successfully while he finishes his second sherry and it is time to go.
‘Good night. Young Werther,’ John says at the door.
Tam doesn't understand the reference.
‘Young Werther in the Grand Hall, eh?’ John calls after him.
IT WOULD BE A LONG TIME BEFORE HE KNEW WHO WERTHER WAS
. But at least the reference to the Grand Hall had been clear enough. Why had the dancing meant so much to him? Saturday nights weren't just a social experience, they were a religious observance. He couldn't imagine not going to the dancing every Saturday. Some undeniable impulse turned him towards that place at the same time each week, like Moslems towards Mecca. (Maybe it wasn't surprising that a chain of dance-halls had been given that name.) The compulsion could perhaps be traced to that night when he was fifteen and his mother asked him to go to the dancing.