Echoing the Arch
In memory of Desmond Tutu
(1931 – 2021)

by David Betteridge

He was portrayed as a dancing man,
and one given to laughter,
but he marched as often as he danced,
and he wept.

He marched at risk of his life
for justice and for peace.
He wept at their denial,
and their breach.

How long, he cried, echoing the Psalmist,
how long shall I take counsel in my soul,
having sorrow in my heart daily?

He is remembered for his consoling
and for his reconciling;
but he as often challenged and confronted,
saying to his allies, when he thought
them wrong, as to his foes,
Stop and No and How long?

A poor boy, be became rich in talent;
he out-scholared his teachers;
a servant of his God, he led peoples
and nations; not proud,
he boldly assumed the role of Moses
facing down Pharaohs;
he made his words a sword,
and the course of his life
a long battleground.

Look to the rock from which
you were hewn, he exhorted,
echoing Isaiah.
He became that rock,
hard, resistant, a sure place
on which to build.

His arch spanned great divides;
he embraced spectrums of folk,
seeing them as one;
he was a rainbow of hope,
even when others saw none.

Lighten mine eyes, he prayed,
lest I sleep the sleep of death.

Dead now, sleeping now,
he lives on, lightening our eyes,
still dancing and marching,
and laughing and weeping
as we remember him,
still consoling and reconciling,
and challenging and confronting.

It falls to us and others now
to look to our own rock
and become it,
and to echo the arch
that was this great warrior.

Tidings

by David Betteridge

For Ken Robson, shepherd, of Stanhope Farm
in Tweeddale, with whom the author worked
two lambing seasons, in 1964 and 1965.
In his practice, Ken Robson brought
the term “good shepherd” to active life.

On the first day of Christmas,                                                                                                                                                                                                                        a bent trader said to me:
Blessed are they which do hunger
and thirst: for they shall make
my till ring.
He spoke merrily.

On the second day of Christmas,
the trader’s accountant said to me:
Cursed are the poor:
for they have too little cash to bring.
He spoke disdainfully.

On the third day of Christmas,
a banker-felon said to me:
Blessed are the meek:
for they shall shrink from saying Boo,
challenging my fat goose.
He spoke dismissively.

On the fourth day of Christmas,
the banker’s offshore banker said to me:
Cursed are they that mourn:
for they shall stir up others’ sympathy,
and let kindness loose.
He spoke maliciously.

On the fifth day of Christmas,
a cabinet minister said to me:
Blessed are the merciful:
for they shall acquit me always
of my every tort.
He spoke assuredly.

On the sixth day of Christmas,
the minister’s lawyer said to me:
Cursed are the pure in heart:
for they cannot be coerced
or fooled or bought.
He spoke frustratedly.

On the remaining days of Christmas,
others spoke in no better terms to me -
the world’s Herods, Judases, and the like -
venting evil against the world’s poor,
for whom they held a killing spite.
They spoke bitterly...

Wheesht, my troubled soul!
Ignore these stridencies of power;
instead attune, and listen hard,
and hear a gentler voice,
one that is kind and clear,
that goes against the louder strain,
and calls and calls for justice
and for peace, holding
them dear.

As down the ages,
so this bleak Christmas, once again,
steadfastly, this quiet urging
makes its never-granted claim.

Wheesht, attune and listen,
as a parent searching for a child listens,
or as a shepherd, cocking his ear,
concentrates to catch the sound
of his lost lamb’s bleat,
until he finds the place at last
where a burn has carried the poor mite
down, from a windy hill
to a wet peat!

To celebrate his 79th birthday, David Betteridge writes about swords, sickles and class struggle

I

Have a slow look at the drawing shown above. Is it not an image that captures our eye, engages our intelligence, and feeds our imagination, springing as it does from the artist’s own eye and intelligence and imagination? By means of his long-practised craft, the artist transports us into a Tale of Two Fields, of Two Bladed Implements, of Two Adversaries representing Two Classes, and of Two Ways of Life and Death. We see more than an illustrative drawing. We see an emblem, transcending the historic past in which it is set, and speaking of and to all times. This emblem is, I would claim, a gift to be treasured, likely to stick in our memories. It is beautifully stark in its overall impact, and subtle in its detail. Look, for example, at which blade overlaps which; and look at the two hands holding them. One is gauntleted, implying rank. The other is bare, implying the opposite.

The artist who drew our “Sword & Sickle” emblem above is Bob Starrett, best known as a political cartoonist. He is a latter-day “Eccles” or “Gabriel” of Clydeside and beyond, as readers of his Rattling the Cage know, and readers of the Culture Matters site, as also the many activists who have gone to him asking for campaign designs for leaflets or posters, and invariably got them, sometimes within a turnaround time of a day or a night.

II

Does it affect your appreciation of Bob’s drawing when I tell you that it accompanies, or might accompany, a poem? It was drawn at my request to accompany a four- line fragment that was written by William Blake in the early 1790s, probably in 1793. This was a time when war with France was looming. England was an armed camp, with troops being recruited and drilled in many places, sometimes disrupting farm-work. There were shortages of grain, occasioning protest and social unrest. Blake’s loyalties in this turmoil of international and class war are clear from this little poem:

The sword sung on the barren heath,
The sickle in the fruitful field:
The sword he sung a song of death,
But could not make the sickle yield.

Compared with associates who were active at the time - Thomas Paine, William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, et al - Blake was surely the most root-and-branch radical of them all, if that is not a contradiction in terms. To borrow a term from David Erdman’s book about Blake, he was a “Prophet Against Empire”, and the Empire that he stood against had many aspects, all abhorrent to him, all grist to his poetic and artistic mill, and all inter-related. So the Sword represents more than War, as the Sickle represents more than Peace.

Behind the Sword there is a nexus and a history of class rule, that Blake often signified in his poetry and his art by reference to the Crown, legitimised by the Church, and maintained by armies of soldiers, teachers, false prophets, and other agents of the Repressive State Apparatus, as modern parlance has it.

Behind the Sickle there is a nexus and a history of resistance to class rule, of which Blake was a part, both in his support for political action and in his production of literary and artistic works of opposition. These speak with greater reach and resonance today than in his own day. They draw on the earlier tradition of the Diggers and the Levellers (defeated) from the English Revolution of the Seventeenth Century, and feed into the rising Socialist Movement of the Nineteenth, Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries (still not defeated).

Blake’s “Sword & Sickle” little poem was never published in his lifetime. It was hidden away in a crammed-full notebook, along with screeds of other writings and some drawings, from which Blake excavated the raw material for several of his finest books.

Out of this notebook came, for example, the highly wrought combination of text and design, Songs of Innocence and of Experience. One of the songs in it is the often quoted “London”. Here Blake showed a growing recognition of the growing centrality of Capital, industrial and commercial, in people’s lives. It provides a helpful context for the interpretation of the “Sword & Sickle” poem.

III

In its first draft, in the scribbled notebook, “London” starts as follows:

I wander thro each dirty street
Near where the dirty Thames does flow
And see in every face I meet
Marks of weakness marks of woe...

When it was printed and published, soon afterwards, the too-obvious adjective “dirty” had been amended to the much more telling “charter’d”, thereby pointing to the growing convergence of Law and the cash nexus that Blake observed all around him, at close hand, and suffered from himself. At the same time, as E.P. Thompson and others have detailed, the English working class was in the process of “making”, or self-making, as more and more folk were thrown on history’s scrap heap or herded into “dark satanic mills”. Blake was firmly in and of and for that class.

In the penultimate verse of “London”, Blake powerfully compressed his chosen images into telling rhymes. In doing so, he demonstrated how inter-related the different forces in his “Empire” were, in an evil hegemony:

How the Chimney-sweepers cry
Every blackning Church appalls,
And the hapless Soldiers sigh,
Runs in blood down Palace walls.

E.P. Thompson, following David Erdman, notes that, in the 1790s, it was common among radicals to “stress the identity of interests of soldiers and the people”; and the chimney sweeps can be taken as representatives of all enforced Labour, and also of stolen childhoods, and hence of ruined, shortened lives.

There is a companion piece of verse that underlines the “cash nexus” idea that is part of the web of meanings implicit in both “London” and “Sword & Sickle”. It is the following quatrain, also to be found in Blake’s notebook:

There souls of men are bought & sold
And milk fed infancy for gold
And youth to slaughter houses led
And beauty for a bit of bread.

So, in interpreting both Bob Starrett’s emblem and William Blake’s poem that inspired it, we see more than a pacifist plea, or an anti-war protest. We see a root-and-branch opposition to class society, expressed elliptically in the languages of image and word respectively, and hinting, through reference to the Sickle, at its future undoing.

If Blake can be called a Prophet Against Empire, is it too fanciful also to call him a Prophet for Communism, or at least for those early defining decrees that Lenin wrote for the young Soviet Union, namely the Decree on Peace and the Decree on Land. These were passed on 26 October, 1917 by the Second Congress of Soviets of Workers’ and Peasants’ Deputies. A fortnight later they were followed by a Decree on Abolishing Classes and Civil Ranks.

To echo and adapt Wordsworth remark on Milton, we might wish that Blake, thou shouldst have been living at that time!

David Betteridge writes about the poem 'History'

What interests me about the existence of archives is that you enter the past which is as it were in the present tense. And so it’s another way of people who lived in the past who perhaps are still living or perhaps are dead; a way of them being present....
- JOHN BERGER

“History” is a poem which packs a lot of meaning into its eight lines: 

History

by John Berger

The pulse of the dead
as interminably
constant as the silence
which pockets the thrush.

The eyes of the dead
inscribed on our palms
as we walk on this earth
which pockets the thrush.

The poem is included in a 90th birthday tribute published in Culture Matters.

Let us start with Berger’s cunningly chosen title, which points, or seems to point, to the poem’s content, or maybe to the way by which we might approach reading it. “History”, he announces. Why History, we wonder, and what aspect of History? So we read on, to find out what references there are to the Past, because History is about the Past, isn’t it?

Oddly, only Berger’s “the dead”, in both verses, seems to belong to the Past, until we consider that “the silence” is similarly devoid of life, and that “the earth” is a place where graves are dug. And, again oddly, all the verbs in the poem are in the Present tense, not the expected Past, namely “pockets” (twice) and “walk” (once). The poem seems to imply that the dead are alive, making their presence felt in the here-and-now. They are described as having a “pulse” that is “interminably constant”, and as having eyes that are “inscribed on our palms / as we walk on this earth”. (How like a painting by Dali this surreal image is!)

What of the living in this poem? Where are they? Who are they? As well as us, who walk about, looking and seeing and listening and thinking, Berger cites the thrush. He is thinking, perhaps, of the songthrush, that sings its song twice over, as is well known; or, if he is not, we, his readers, are free to conjure up that response if we wish, sharing as we do the wealth of the English language with the poet. Layers and webs and wisps of inter-textualities are all about, ready to pop into our minds as we read, bestowing an aura of extra meaning to a given text, while not contradicting it.

What presence does our thrush, full of song, have in the poem? The second half of each of the two verses tells us: first the thrush is “pocketed” by “silence”, and then it is pocketed by “this earth”, that is to say it is seized by death, or snaffled, or taken into possession, just like that. So the poem demonstrates both life-in-death and death-in-life. That is Berger’s History; or maybe it is Natural History, more like, to use an old-fashioned term. That is the constant dual reality in which we all have our being. That is the “mystery” of Berger’s little gem of a poem.

There is an alternative way of appreciating the poem, it occurs to me, looking at it again, starting not with the title and with times Past and Present, but starting with the poem’s references to Life and Death. Let us see how these twins relate, using italics and bold to distinguish them.

The pulse of the dead
as interminably
constant as the silence
which pockets the thrush.

The eyes of the dead
inscribed on our palms
as we walk on this earth
which pockets the thrush.

The poem makes these images of life and death work together – indeed walk together – very well. Line by line, we are made to see how Life and Death co-exist and interpenetrate, and do so “interminably”, being “constant” in their togethering. Significantly, the term “earth” belongs equally in both categories, as my bold italics is intended to show, earth being both the habitat of the living, and, jointly with silence, their “pocketer”.

So, as before in our first reading, we come to the same realisation of the poem’s “both-and” wisdom. Let us now explore the context – other times and places – in which Berger considered the poem’s themes. Here we can draw on the inspired scholarship of Tom Overton, Berger’s archivist; and what a voluminous archive it is that Tom has worked on, a whole vanload of boxes of decades of work driven from Berger’s house in the Haute-Savoie by Jamie Andrews of the British Library to its place of safe keeping and public access, in London.

Dear David

Thanks for writing... It looks like the section you quote comes from p16 of And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief As Photos. But as so often with JB, he’s revisiting and rephrasing an older thought in a newer context: in this case a section of a longer poem collected in Andy Croft’s edition of JB’s Collected Poems on p 43, and annotated “Jura, 1973”. JB was often hazy on remembering the dates of his writings in general, but here I think the voice and thought sounds very much of that place and period...

Happy writing — please do send me what you make of it!

V best
Tom

Straightaway, following Tom’s advice, I went to Berger’s marvellously mixed reflection on Time and Space, and Death and Life, and, cross-cutting all, the power of Poetry, namely And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief As Photos, published by Writers and Readers in 1984. I say “mixed”, because, like many of Berger’s books, it is a many-genred work, shifting rapidly and repeatedly between prose and poem, essay and memoir, fact and fiction, narrative and description.

Here is what I found on p 16: a passage in prose, prefacing the poem that we have been gnawing like a bone. In it, Berger notes the death of one of his friends, and then comments on it, and on all deaths. Key to that passage is the following thought:

Tony is no longer within the nexus of time as lived by those who, until recently, were his contemporaries. He is on the circumference of that nexus.... Yet he is also within that nexus as are all the dead...

I have to confess that I find the passage hard to understand. It appears to be self-contradictory; but then comes the poem, and in its eight lovely lines the contradiction is resolved, clearly and elegantly. A remark of David Constantine’s is proved correct, that:

Berger’s whole oeuvre – poetry, fiction, political and literary essays – is of a piece. Some poems... appear there not as lyrical interludes but as further condensations of accounts, events, characters, in the prose...
- Preface to The Long White Thread of Words: Poems for John Berger, Smokestack Books, 2016)

Chasing up Tom’s second reference, I turned to p 43 of Berger’s Collected Poems (Smokestack Books, 2014), and had a look at the poem printed there, also called “History”. Here, through the poet’s eyes, we gaze on a blue sky (not, as before, on the earth), and on buzzards (not on a thrush); but we have the same collapsing of Past and Present into a sort of Present Habitual, “regular as the sun / millennia powdered into blue /sky of all moments lived...” and we have the same sense of the presence of Death, co-habiting with Life: “the intent head / the yellow beak / the gut demanding food / talons that grip...”

These two poems by Berger both called “History” show him in a characteristic role, that of Death’s Secretary, to borrow one of his self-descriptions. “You see,” he said to an interviewer not long before his own death:

I think that the dead are with us…they are a presence. What you think you’re looking at on that long road
to the past is actually beside you where you stand...
- The New Statesman, June, 2015

Reading around, as we have been doing, looking for leads in and out of other texts, and seeking confirmations from other contexts, is akin, is it not, to Berger’s own practice as a writer, and his own practice as an artist and art-critic, too? Consider this observation from his Ways of Seeing (Penguin Books, 1972):

We are never just looking at one thing, we are always looking at the relationship between things and ourselves. Our vision is continually active, continually moving, continually holding things in a circle around itself, constituting what is present to us as we are.

Having done all this looking – looking at, and behind, and beyond, and between the eight lines of Berger’s “History” – how do we regard the poem when we return to it, as we are bound to be drawn to do, there being so much meat on its bone? There is still a “mystery” here, but one in which we can feel entirely at home.

History

by John Berger

The pulse of the dead
as interminably
constant as the silence
which pockets the thrush.

The eyes of the dead
inscribed on our palms
as we walk on this earth
which pockets the thrush.

David Betteridge writes critically and creatively about the artwork above, Nature writing, Bertolt Brecht, and eco-communism.

The idea of nature contains, though often unnoticed, an extraordinary amount of human history - Raymond Williams

What you see above is a lino print called “Leaf of Tree”, by Owen McGuigan. 

It hangs on the wall above my computer at home, is mounted on white card, and is surrounded by a broad hardwood frame. It measures five inches across by seven inches tall. Looking at it, as I often do - it draws my attention to it, inspiringly - I find that it invites two kinds of looking: one from above, so to speak, as if I was a bird gliding over a fertile landscape, and the other slower, more detailed, as if I was an insect prospecting this way and that way at close quarters. How does this “Leaf of Tree” image strike you, I wonder? 

For most people, probably, the thoughts and feelings that the print arouses will be pleasant ones, and for three reasons. The first reason is physiological: the highest-density part of our eyes’ retina is most sensitive to green, so responds to that colour with greatest acuity. The second reason is aesthetic: the placing of one larger leaf, stylised, within a pattern of smaller leaves is very skilfully handled; we look, and we recognise beauty. The third reason is associative: the image triggers memories in us of previous leafy encounters, whether in the real world, or mediated through art or literature.

Those 35 square inches of art might stand for three or five or 35 acres of green growth, or more, or for the whole world if you think so; or they might stand for some smaller singular Dear Green Place, dear only to you. For me, the fresh green of “Leaf of Tree” conjures up a summer’s day in a wood in Argyll. I hear the waves slapping on Loch Etive, not far from where I stand. The sun is shining directly on, and through, a panoply of sessile oak leaves, highlighting their veins in all their intricacy. I am also reminded of William Morris’s lovely plant designs, particularly “Acanthus”, “Orchard” and “Willow Bough”. 

Building on these or similar associations, we might even go on to interpret the colour green and the idea of “green” in a symbolic way, seeing in growing things the very principle of life, as Walt Whitman did when he wrote his Leaves of Grass:

I guess it must be the flag of my disposition,
       out of hopeful green stuff woven...
I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic...
Growing among black folk as among white...
I give them the same, I receive them the same...
All goes onward and outward...
       and nothing collapses...

Having images such as “Leaf of Tree” on display at home, or stored electronically, is pretty commonplace. Looking at them, we can readily feed our senses and our imaginations, for the reasons given above. It is also commonplace to want to read and be reminded of green things, especially in dark times such as we live in now - and when are times ever not dark? Books about Nature are consistently in lists of best-sellers.

During the recent Covid-19 lockdown, my “Leaf of Green” took on especial significance for me. It inspired me to wrestle some green thoughts into a chapbook of poems, including the one given below:

While the pot boils

(Looking out of my kitchen window during the Covid-19 pandemic)

Even in these dark days,
the world does not forget to green
and grow.

My neighbour’s apple-tree progresses well,
no longer bare twigs, but leaves and flowers.

With fruit to come, it gives sanctuary
to a pair of nesting wrens,
who get on busily with everything
that their lives demand,
heedless of what we humans know,
or do not know.

The tree waves and bends
in the frequent wind. 
I note it does not break.
Like the wrens, it is industrious.

How readily Earth’s habitats renew,
recycle, and remake!

A critic of puritanical bent might argue that such “nature worship” or “nature wallowing” as is found in the above poem - and in Nature writing generally, perhaps - is a deplorably “escapist” habit, a turning away from the “real” business of dealing with the world. George Fox, founder of the Society of Friends (Quakers) was an early example of this stern and restrictive school of criticism. In 1670, or thereabouts, he wrote to his followers as follows:

And therefore, all friends and people, pluck down your images; I say, pluck them out of your houses, walls, and signs, or other places, that none of you be found imitators of his Creator, whom you should serve and worship; and not observe the idle lazy mind…

Later, and famously, from a secular, communist standpoint, Bertolt Brecht wrote as follows, apparently as puritanically as Fox, but significantly not quite:

To those born later 

Truly, I live in dark times!
The guileless word is folly.

A smooth forehead
Suggests insensitivity.

The man who laughs
Has simply not yet had
The terrible news.

What kind of times are they, when
To talk about trees is almost a crime
Because it implies silence about so many horrors?
That man there calmly crossing the street
Is already perhaps beyond the reach of his friends
Who are in need?

Being a great poet, and a man fully alive, Brecht carefully avoided the extremism that was found in Fox, who went so far as to prefer grey to all other colours. “Almost a crime,” Brecht declared; therefore not a crime, although some on the Left might still think it is, trapped in the notion that tree-talk can only be a turning aside from the realities of the class struggle, and therefore a holiday from the building of socialism. No, Brecht was careful to keep for himself a certain licence to talk about trees, and write about them, and delight in them. These things he did throughout the years of the Second World War and Cold War, up to his swan-song Buckow Elegies. Consistently, he used trees as an emblem for pleasure, well-being, and for continuity across generations.

“Lovely trees,” he exclaimed in “Finnish Landscape”, and “Such scents of berries and of birches there!” He saw no need to repress his delight in Nature. It resurged again and again, gaining expression in other poems that he went on to write, often about gardens, including, most luxuriously of all, his friend Charles Laughton’s garden on the Pacific coast near Los Angeles. Brecht singled out the fuchsias for praise: “Amazing themselves with many a daring red”.

Always the dialectician, Brecht contrived to plant negatives among his positives, creating a complex context for his celebration of green beauty. So, in “Finnish Landscape”, written in 1940, with war spreading from country to country and across continents, he wrote:

 Dizzy with sight and sound and thought and smell
The refugee beneath the alders turns
To his laborious job...
[He] sees who’s short of milk and corn...
And sees a people silent in two tongues.

And in the Californian “Garden in Progress” (1944), he added to his picture the fact that there was “crumbling rock” destabilising the garden.  Even as the gardeners worked to finish their planting, “Landslides / Drag parts of it into the depths without warning.”  Meanwhile, the poet was aware of the gunfire of warships exercising off the coast, and thought of “a number of civilisations” ready to collapse.

The same delight in the things of Nature as Brecht’s, again voiced in communist terms, and again set in a complex context, is found by the wagon-load in William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890). Near the end of this imagined visit to a future commonwealth, Morris’s alter ego William Guest is told by his guide, Ellen, that:

O me!  O me!  How I love the earth, and the seasons, and weather, and all things that deal with it, and all that grows out of it...

Here Morris’s green utopia is used as a method of criticising capitalism, of opposing it, and of rejecting it, while at the same time re-imagining how a society might better function in future. His utopia is as much a dramatising of a communist “structure of feeling”, as defined by Raymond Williams, as it is an outlining of a political programme. It is an early example of eco-communism, where Green and Red go hand in hand, albeit simply.

There is an eloquent passage in Ernst Fischer’s The Necessity of Art where he quoted Brecht regarding the same critical use of utopia as Morris deployed:

Dreams and the golden “if”
Conjure the promised sea
Of ripe corn growing...

To Brecht’s “Dreams and the golden ‘if’” we might add our own corollary: “Hope and the green leaf”.

II

So far, we have looked at the “Leaf of Tree” image as a finished product, its only context being provided from our own store of memories of similar green things, and images of things, and writings about them. Your store will be different from mine, of course, although I guess - I hope - that there will be enough commonality between them for us to agree that “Leaf of Tree” is well worth looking at, and looking at many times, and that doing so is a rewarding experience: in a nutshell, that it is life-affirming.

Now it is time, in the second half of the essay, to show the process by which “Leaf of Tree” came into being, and to put it in its full context -  a context that includes its artist, its time and place of production, and the culture out of which it came and into which it feeds. Knowing these extra things about the image is unlikely to change our first opinion of it, but may give depth and confirmation to that opinion, and increase the range of associations that the image prompts in us.  “Oh no,” a formalist critic might protest, narrowly, “we should only be concerned with what lies within the frame.”  We, preferring a cultural materialist perspective, will not be deterred.  As when we get to know anything or anyone new, so with “Leaf of Tree”: we want to ask of it, Where are you from?

Here is where “Leaf of Tree” is from: namely a garden shed on the very boundary of Glasgow and Clydebank. The artist is Owen McGuigan, a former shop-fitter, now retired. He is well known in Clydebank and beyond as Clydebank’s best archivist and celebrator.  His principal medium is photograph and video, although latterly he has also used drawing, print-making, jig-saw and wood panel burning as media for his vision.  Visit his website here, and be bowled over by its very great volume, beauty and range of reference. All in all, there are sufficient images archived on Owen’s website to satisfy legions of social historians and Bankies wanting a visual record of their hometown, legions of art-lovers, and to inspire legions of poets. 

Owen has contributed to the Culture Matters website, on the subject of ship-building’s double legacy in “Profit and Loss” (28 January, 2017), and on war and peace in “The Pity of War” (23 July, 2018) and “No More War” (10 November, 2019).

I have picked out a few examples of Owen’s work below, to keep his “Leaf of Tree” company: -

Trees in winter, Dalmuir Park

 A garden game, devised for grandchildren during the Covid-19 lockdown

Cleaning up the Forth & Clyde Canal: a recent photo

The Clydebank blitz: a jigsaw composition

 Elegy for Glasgow School of Art: aftermath of its second fire, June, 2018

Profit & Loss: Ship-building anatomised

Dogwood and spider

Even these few examples give a good impression of Owen’s range of styles and subject matter. What unites them is a strong shape, a clear content, and skill. They are all labours of love, produced in Owen’s leisure time. This fact gives them a special significance, rescuing them, and rescuing Owen, from any nexus of commodities and marketplaces. In Raymond Williams’s words:

The real dividing line between things we call work and the things we call leisure is that in leisure... we make our own choices and our own decisions. We feel for the time being that our life is our own.

The garden shed that is pictured above is only one of Owen’s favoured workshops. That is where he works when he works alone. On other occasions, when he works with others, sometimes as a tutor, sometimes as a learner, always collaboratively, then he has two other places to go to, both close to home. One of them is an arts centre in Dalmuir Park, in an old park superintendent’s house; the other, rejoicing in the name “The Awestruck Academy”, is in a defunct snooker hall in Clydebank’s pedestrianised town centre. 

Ten thousand such cultural hubs across the land, for community use, sited wherever “To Let” signs are commonest, would serve the people there in the way rising sap serves a tree. Ten thousand such hubs devoted  specifically to socialist and trade union work would specifically serve the labour movement. There are several pieces on the Culture Matters website exploring this notion, notably Rebecca Hillman’s “Rebuilding Culture in the Labour Movement” (27 November, 2017), Mike Quille’s “Culture for the Many, Not the Few” (13 December, 2018), and Chris Guiton’s “Profound New Visions of a Better World” (10 June, 2019). They underpin the argument being advanced here.

Regarding the two cultural hubs in Clydebank that Owen favours, and is fostered by, he mentions them in a contribution he has written for this essay, giving the “Leaf of Tree” back-story.  From it, you will realise that the image that is at the heart of this essay is unique: it is the first, and so far the only print made from Owen’s linocut:

I have had a fascination about trees since I was a boy, from climbing them in Whitecrook Park with my two sisters in the 50s, and our mum taking us berrypicking at Blairgowrie during the school holidays, where on our day off my two sisters and I would go to the forest around the loch and light camp fires. I can still smell that. Later in life, my nephew David and I did a lot of hill walking. We walked the West Highland Way together, and I loved walking inside a silent forest. The family and I even built a cabin up at Carbeth, in the hills, which we had for twelve years before vandals set fire to it.

So, over the years, trees have been a recurring theme in my work. More so when I joined the Dalmuir Park Art Class in 2013. We did a lot of nature-themed projects. Last year we all did a big tree mural, and over the year we added various elements to it reflecting the seasons. I made a video of this project:

Usually, when I sat down at the art class to start a lino- cut, I never planned what I was going to do. An idea of a tree inside a leaf popped into my head. The final title was a play on the words “Tree of Life”, an image that has always fascinated me. I made some Christmas decorations of it, although it was a lot of work, as they were handmade. 

The first linocut that David saw was at the Awestruck Academy in Clydebank, on a board that someone had set up with several linoprints. David was taken by the image, and I said I would print one for him. I looked through all my linocuts, and, as usual, it was the one that was missing! Then I remembered that Sandra Anton, the Community Ranger that runs our art class, liked the linocut herself and wanted to display it at home, so I let her take it. I asked her, but she had been decorating and stored it somewhere, and couldn’t find it. I then did a new linocut especially for David and printed it for him. This was the inspiration for David to create his latest poetry book.  

III

Looking again at Owen’s “Leaf of Tree”, taking into account both the context and the process of its making, we can agree that the image suggests much more than a bit of green growth. We can agree, in reality and metaphorically, that a leaf - any leaf, anywhere and everywhere - is sustained by a twig, and the twig is sustained by a branch, and the branch by a tree’s bole, and the bole by a system of roots, and the roots by the soil into which they dig down and spread.  And we can agree that the tree - any tree - might well not stand alone, but is part of a greater habitat.

So Owen, by analogy, is a vigorous part of a pretty extensive living, growing and interdependent People’s culture, rooted in Clydebank, but reaching further by means of the internet. The culture that he and his co-producers spring from, and feed back into, is a foreshadowing of the greater culture to which Socialism will lead; but it is not only a foreshadowing. It is also a preparation for that greater culture, sharing good practice and educating desire now.

Brecht, as we have noted, kept an appreciative eye open for trees wherever he went. He was speaking equivocally when he commented that, during political crises, “To talk about trees is almost a crime.” No! On the evidence of Owen’s image of a green leaf, and all the associations it carries for us when considered in context, as in this essay, we can state, unequivocally, that not to talk about trees is almost a crime.

The green leaf delights the eye,
and leads the mind to a hundred habitats
where it may either rest or roam.

Hope and the green leaf inspire the wish
that such green habitats - where humankind
keeps step with Nature’s ways - might be
for all of us our proper home.

Labour and hope, if only shared
world-wide, and people-wide,
will make at last that vision real,
bringing to detailed life the concepts
of our commonweal.

In the year of the CPB centenary, David Betteridge remembers Maurice Levitas, stalwart of the CPGB and a veteran of Cable St. and the Spanish Civil War

You have made me build upon reality as upon a rock...
You have made me see the logic of the world
and the possibility of happiness...

- from Canto General by Pablo Neruda

Picture two young men playing chess. Both are intently studying the board, considering their moves; but one is even more intent than the other, straining muscle and nerve, heron-like. He is the embodiment of focus. Then he swiftly reaches out a hand, lifts the crucial piece, makes his move, and sits back. The game has not been won, but neither has it been lost. La lucha continua.

On reflection, the image of a heron is inadequate. That fish-spearing bird with its keen yellow eyes is necessarily an opportunist. It has only one strategy, which is to find a time and a place that maximises the chance of a fish swimming within range of its beak. A chess player, however, must deploy many strategies, chess being a drawn-out complex of possibilities and unpredictabilities, constraints and openings.

A better image for our intently studious young man would be that of a military commander. Imagine (say) a latter-day George Washington or General Giap sitting alone in his tent, in a dangerous place, part-way through a long campaign. He is interpreting his maps, analysing from every angle the order that he will give to his troops the following morning. Aristotle, who thought a lot about such matters, called this highest order of decision-making phronesis, sometimes translated as practical judgement; and he cited military commanders along with ships’ captains as being arch-exponents of it.

Zoom in now, like a film-maker, and picture in close-up the chess pieces that our two young men are playing with. These pieces are ill-shapen, hard to recognise as kings, queens, knights, etc., having been improvised from well-chewed crusts of bread, tweaked and squeezed while still mushy between finger and thumb, and then baked hard in the sun. The board is also improvised, from a grubby scrap of cardboard. The black squares, like the black pieces, are made dark with mud and cigarette stubs, and the white squares, which are far from white, are represented by the dun colour of the cardboard that lies between the shaded squares.

The young hands which fashioned these chess pieces and this board, and the guiding eyes and brains behind the hands, are more used to handling weapons than bread-paste; and in the case of the super-intent man, more used in previous years to handling the curved needle of an upholsterer, the pick and shovel of a labourer, and the blowlamp of a plumber. (I can tell you this, from knowledge that I gained later.)

This is Spain that we are picturing, towards the end of the Civil War. Our young men are members of the International Brigade, captured some months earlier on the Aragon Front, battling against the Fascists. Now they are interned in a prison camp at San Pedro de Cardena. Every day, there is the chance of a beating, or a ritual humiliation, or a putting to death. The man I am singling out for your attention will go on after release – as part of a prisoner exchange – to become, eventually,  a teacher and a teacher-trainer, and the author of a book on education, Marxist Perspectives in the Sociology of Education. He will also become the first person to translate all of Pablo Neruda’s book-length Canto General from its original Spanish into English. The copy that I have, from which I have taken my motto text (above), was photocopied for me from the original by the young man’s future daughter Ruth, some years after her father’s death at the age of 84 in 2001.

I am referring to Maurice Levitas, a stalwart of the CPGB, a veteran of Cable Street as of the Spanish Civil War, and a great influence for the good over many decades, in several countries and in various contexts. Some of you reading this will have known him through his political work. I knew him through his teaching, being a student of his at Neville’s Cross College in the late 60s, although I realise, as soon as writing these words, that the distinction between “political work” and “teaching” is one of convenience only. Morry, both in his theory and his practice, approached both occupations with the same devotion to the same concepts, skills and attitudes.

It is these concepts, skills and attitudes that I want to review in this memoir, to see how they might feed into our continuing struggle for revolutionary socialism, leading to communism, as they fed into Morry’s. I reckon that we can find all we need for this review in our picture of the young chess player in Spain, in the same way as a tissue sample holds and reveals a person’s DNA.

First, and most obviously, just being there, a combatant in Spain, proved Morry’s understanding of internationalist and anti-fascist politics, and proved his courage to translate that understanding into action. Lying behind his internationalism were the virtues of solidarity with and openness to others, and lying behind his anti-fascism were the virtues of hunger for justice and anger at its denial.

Consider Morry’s ability to turn the focus of his mind to playing chess with a fellow prisoner-of-war, even in the context of constant deprivation and threat: there we find evidence of a great intellectual vigour, I think, allied to a resilience of spirit.

Looking ahead, in a flash-forward of history, we know that the first thing Morry did on being released from the camp was to start campaigning for the release of another prisoner, Frank Ryan, leader of the Irish Republican Congress, who was still interned. A sense of loyalty was strong in Morry all his life, not only loyalty to comrades joined in struggle along the way, but also loyalty to his guiding principles. It is sometimes hard to reconcile the two. So it was that at certain turning points, notably 1968 and 1989, Morry’s independence of judgement led him to diverge from others on the Left, including me, but he never wanted that to disrupt or divide.  

When I consider what features might be desirable in a political party, as I increasingly do, I suppose I am looking for the same virtues that I found in my mentor Morry, only writ large, that is to say written into the political party’s collective body and soul, and passed on through collective action and education and, crucially, by example, from generation to generation.

I mentioned Pablo Neruda’s Canto General earlier, and Morry’s labour of love in translating it, not that it was ever read by more than a few friends and family members, which is a pity. Here we have a Communist epic of world importance, a book-length sequence of poems that narrates the history of the Americas, that celebrates the continent’s beauties and riches, that celebrates the labour of its people, transforming Nature into Culture, that identifies with the poor and oppressed in their fight-back against exploiters and tyrants, that looks to a Communist future. Here we have a Nobel Prize-winning poet, Neruda, at the height of his creativity, tested and confirmed in his politics by the Spanish Civil War, as was Morry, albeit in different ways. Here we have a Chilean Walt Whitman combining the “we” of a whole class, indeed of a whole world, and the “I” of an author who sees his task as being our representative voice. No wonder Morry was drawn to this work, and devoted himself to translating it.

There is a section of Canto General that is highly relevant to our consideration of Morry’s political virtues, and how these might be writ large in a political party. It is the second-to-last section of the last part of Canto General, the part called “I Am”, where Neruda takes stock of things. He addresses his peroration “To My Party”, that is to say the Chilean Communist Party. I have already quoted from this Section XXVII of “I Am” at the beginning of this piece, as a motto text. Here are some more lines from it:

You have gathered in me the force
        of all those who live...

You have made me indestructible because with you
       I do not end in myself...

You have given me the liberty
      which the isolate does not possess...

You taught me the unity of mankind
      and the differences among them...

In these terms and for the reasons given, Neruda praised his party. In similar terms, with some poetic licence, a student (myself) praises his old teacher (Morry). Practising the same virtues that Neruda identified and Morry embodied, parties of the Left today will succeed in the continuing struggle, finding a way forward out of our present entrapment in defeat - or seeming entrapment - and make our next necessary move.

You have made me an adversary of the wicked
and a wall against frenzy...

You told me of the rectitude that the tree requires...
You taught me to set bondage alight like a fire.

La lucha continua.

David Betteridge takes us along Glasgow’s Byres Road, enjoying several works of public art by the late Alasdair Gray, who died on 29 December, 2019, the day after his 85^th birthday

Perhaps the best thing I could do is write a story in which adjectives like commonplace and ordinary have the significance which glorious and divine carried in earlier comedies. What do you think? - Alisdair Gray, Lanark

I

This is a stub. Many more hands and minds besides my own would have to be set to work, to write a piece giving proper value to Alasdair Gray’s achievements. Like his admired William Blake, he was an artist as well as a writer, a lover of both the epic and the miniature, a deviser of both encyclopedias and minute particulars. He ranged over many genres, deploying details from his own life (a long one) and his own city (Glasgow), but at the same time he regarded the whole world with its many cultures and many histories as his oyster (not forgetting the cosmos in which the world has its unique place). He was, as Ali Smith wrote in an eloquent short obituary, “a renaissance man”. He was, she judged, the very heart of that revival in Scottish life to which he contributed, and from which he drew strength. 

A walk of a few hundred yards along Byres Road, in Glasgow’s West End, affords a good introduction to the man and his work. 

II

 On the corner overlooking the Botanic Gardens, there is a former church, now converted to a bar, restaurant and performance area called the Oran Mor, which in Gaelic means “big song” or even, some would have it, “great melody of life”. That epithet describes Gray pretty well.

As you enter the Oran Mor from Byres Road, look down at the white and grey marble floor of the porch. There, carved into the tiles, you will see “WELCOME”, in 32 languages. Gray took great care with the lettering of this message, as with every aspect of every part of his quite substantial contribution to the Oran Mor’s conversion. For all those words of greeting that were in the Roman alphabet, he designed his own lettering, using sans serif block capitals that slightly taper away from you as you read them. This lettering he called Oran Mor Monumental.

Go to the third floor. There, extending across the breadth and length of the ceiling, you will see one of Gray’s largest and most ambitious works: a painting that combines myth and legend, Biblical reference and astronomical lore. “It’s a song of praise to the colour blue,” wrote Figgy Guyver, after a visit she paid to view it, and also “a heartfelt, humanist plea for people to come together for a better future.” This plea is directly expressed in words, as well as art. In gold lettering, across the roof beams, we read: “Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation.” This motto, borrowed from the Canadian author Dennis Lee, has been widely adopted as a motto for modern progressive Scottish politics, thanks to Gray’s use of it. 

Looking up, you will see a cross-section of Creation boldly and beautifully represented. As in Gauguin’s famous Tahitian triptych, big questions are asked: “Where are we from?  What are we?  Where are we going?” and answers are given, if we search for them. The planets and the Milky Way give us a sense of Time and Space. The Tree of Life drives its roots into fossils and skeletons. A varied fauna and flora inhabit land, sea and air.  A naked Adam and Eve kneel, entwined in one another’s arms. A phoenix rises. 

The present day and the present city are not forgotten, either. Contemporary citizens, including folk who worked on, and work in, the Oran Mor have their likenesses portrayed here, honouring their labour. Gray’s is a democratic intellect, and a democratic aesthetic, and a democratic structure of feeling.                

As you leave, as a companion piece to the “WELCOME” on the way in, you will see, and walk on, a set of 32 carved tiles bidding you “GOODBYE”. Many of Gray’s books end on a similarly friendly note, from his early masterpiece Lanark onwards, as if he wanted you to feel that reading the books was akin to visiting him, maybe at home, maybe in a shared public space, and he was your host. “Goodbye,” he says, as you turn the last page.  I see him as a latter-day Interpreter, as in Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress. In his House, we are shown “excellent things, such as would be helpful to [us]”.

In fact, the more you immerse yourself in the print-world of Gray’s published works, the more parallels you discover between them and buildings. As you make your way through them, the books seem to have doors and windows, and rooms and corridors, and stairs and landings, with good labelling and sign-posting so you do not get lost, all in Gray’s distinctively bold, clear style.

Gray was fortunate in having Canongate as his publisher for Lanark, as for many subsequent books, as its owner Stephanie Wolfe-Murray gave him creative control over all aspects of its look, from the grand plan of the art-work to the details of line-spacing and indentation. Like William Blake or William Morris before him, Gray was enabled to work in the combined roles of artist,  artisan and author.

III

After leaving the Oran Mor, turn left along Byres Road, and very soon you come to Hillhead Public Library. It was much used by Gray in the second half of his life, when he lived at various addresses in the West End, just as, in his earlier years in the East End, Riddrie Public Library had been a favourite haunt, being almost a home from home for the inveterate bibliophile. 

In his retrospective memoir, A Life in Pictures, Gray tells of an occasion when one of his teachers at Whitehill Senior Secondary School invited him to give a lecture to the school’s Literary and Debating Society. This he did, with specially drawn illustrations projected on an epidiascope. These illustrations are recognisably by the same hand, and from the same mind, as all his later art-work, including the Oran Mor ceiling. Gray appears to have developed his skill and found his genius very young. His chosen subject for the lecture was “A Personal View of History”, no less, typically encyclopaedic. He started with The Ice Age and The Stone Age, and ended with The Industrial City and The Triumph of Socialism.

Along this onward march, full of epic horrors, two sunnier episodes are celebrated. Babylonian priests are pictured  “recording an eclipse, having devised an alphabet and calendar that made writing history possible”. Later, the schoolboy lecturer showed his audience The Sermon on the Mount, when Jesus tells the people of the slave-based empires of the world that “every human soul was equally valued by God”. Regrettably, his art-work for that episode was mislaid, as he explains in A Life in Pictures. 

For the end-point of History, The Triumph of Socialism, he chose as example and symbol the nearby Riddrie Public Library. “I thought,” he tells us, “this well-planned, well-stocked public library was a triumphant example of local egalitarian democracy.” Here we find the bedrock of Gray’s later more developed politics. He never lost his youthful Spirit of Forty-Five. Again, as with The Sermon on the Mount, we only have his word for it, as, for some reason, the drawing of the Library “was to be”, but was in fact never actually drawn. 

IV

I started writing this short guide to Gray’s visible legacy in Glasgow’s West End shortly after his death at the very end of 2019. For inspiration, and for refreshing my memory, I followed the route that I am here recommending. Arriving at the wide inviting entrance of Hillhead Public Library, I found that I could not pass it without going in.

There, next to the librarians’ issue desk, was a display of all Gray’s books that they had in stock, and a table set aside where his fellow-readers were invited to sign a book  -  not so much a Book of Condolences, more a Book of Celebrations. Already, after only a few days of the library and the book being open after the New Year holiday, page upon  page of entries had been written. As I read through them, I became aware that “Alasdair” had been well-loved as a local worthy, a kindly man, and a great conversationalist, as interested in his interlocutors as in himself; but, at the same time, “Gray” was well-regarded as an important author-cum-artist, who had put his native Glasgow and Scotland on a world map, and also brought the world to the very streets of this city. This “fat, spectacled, balding, increasingly old Glasgow pedestrian”, as he once described himself, had made his mark, a large and indelible one.

There is a point of correction to be made regarding Gray’s self-description as a “pedestrian”. For his final few years, after a fall that nearly killed him, he was a wheelchair user.  Undaunted, after seven months in hospital, he was to be seen again, visiting his  favourite places, going about his many ploys, and continuing his last great project, his re-telling of Dante’s Divine Comedy. How like Blake, who also immersed himself in the old Tuscan’s Hell, Purgatory and Paradise!

V

 After Hillhead Library, proceed further along Byres Road to another place where Gray’s presence is felt, namely Hillhead Subway Station.

Look across the entrance hall, beyond the turnstiles that lead to the platforms and trains. There, confronting you, is Gray’s final work of public art, a mural made of ceramic tiles, two metres high and twelve metres wide. “All Kinds of Folk” it is called, and so it is identified in elegant lettering to the left. Alternatively, it is called “Folk of All Kinds”, to the right. In the middle is a panoramic view of the streets and buildings of Hillhead, the busiest part of the West End. The panorama is so boldly three-dimensional that you can imagine yourself walking there. It is flanked on both sides by panels of equally bold drawings of the very kinds of folk whom Gray imagined using the subway.

He gives us Lucky Dogs and Financial Wizards, Hard Workers and Brain Babies, Lovely Mums and Bonny Fechters, Lassies and Lads, Cocky Chaps, and others. A|few beasts and fairy-tale figures are thrown in for good measure, including Urban Foxes, Fiery Dragons, Birds of Paradise, and Unicorns. The effect is to make you smile, and that was Gray’s intention, as he indicates in a bit of verse inscribed on the wall:

Do not let daily to-ing and fro-ing
To earn what you need to keep going
Prevent what you once felt when wee
Hopeful and free.

Now look below the station’s “Exit” sign. There, in black block capitals, you will read that same motto that you saw in gold on the Oran Mor ceiling, regarding early days, a better nation, and working. Those block capitals, by the way, like all the lettering here, were specially designed for this project. They are based on Gray’s own handwritten letterforms, for that reason being known as Gray Display.

VI

I had got this far into writing my piece, when Covid-19 closed down everyday life as we are used to living it. The three places that I have described above  -  the Oran Mor, the Library, and the Station  -  are now in lockdown, as is a fourth place that I would have directed you to, namely a restaurant and bar in a lane off Byres Road, the Ubiquitous Chip, the decor of which, on a lavish scale, was Gray’s work. (He was paid for doing it, it is said, by the promise of free dinners for ever.) 

It was my intention to illustrate my conducted tour with photographs taken specially for it, but that cannot now be done until Glasgow and the world return to the old normal, for good and ill, supposing that is possible. What with “self-isolating” and “social-distancing”, and shutters being up, it is as if we are suddenly inhabiting a nightmarish or dystopian or purgatorial or infernal scene of a kind that Gray might have included in the “Unthank” chapters of Lanark. You can, however, find plenty of already existing photographs online, and so compose your own visual commentary for the itinerary.  You might well begin here and then progress to Gray’s official website, and then delve into his publisher’s website.

My thanks are due to Canongate for giving me permission to enliven my text (above and below) with illustrative material from their files. Maybe, post-Covid-lockdown, I will be able to return to my tour of Gray venues and take photos of my own, for splicing  in.

How, then, are we to leave this inconclusive ramble? There is no better way than in Gray’s own words. In an interview that he gave in the year before he died, to Gutter magazine (Spring, 2018), he remarked on the pleasure he took from being able to work and create, even in old age and ill health; in fact, especially in old age and ill health. At the time, he was putting the finishing touches to the “Heaven” part of his Divine Comedy, “Englished in prosaic verse”, as he put it, after Dante. In words that reveal a great deal about himself, Gray concluded the interview as follows:

Everyone who makes something that survives them has overcome death to that extent: especially if it is another human being.  It may also be a well-built wall or other work of art.

VII

ENOUGH TO LIFT MY EYES TO

An imagined meeting with Alasdair Gray,
in a Glasgow street

“There’s not a street in Glasgow,
Anyplace, or Purgatory that I don’t know.
I’ve sojourned here for all my years,
studying the root and consequence
of the world’s good and the world’s ill,
watching both succeed, pondering
how the one can let the other grow.”
Looking up intently from his wheelchair,
like a tree’s last stubborn leaf
lit by a late sun, in a winter’s wind,
not torn, not shaken even,
he held my attention as he spoke.
I thought of the Ancient Mariner,
as for a long moment he had me
in his close focus there.
We were like two islands in a flow
and counter-flow of passing folk.

“For self-protection,” he explained,
“or, if hurt, self-heal, I carry with me
images and words that speak truths,
some from the past, some being formed.
Reviewing them can feed them present life,
and make them for a moment real.
“Whoever harrows any kind of Hell
must do the same. But…” -
he cautioned with a work-worn hand -
“know this: there is no certain Paradise
at journey’s end, perhaps no journey’s end;
but I have seen, for sure,
occasional glimpses of a far-off hill,
part-grey, part-green, chequered bright.

“It is not the steep slope
that Dante wrote of in his Purgatorio.
Rather, it is some high point,
beyond our city’s boundary,
that catches now and then whatever rays
there are of the day’s light.
It is enough for me to lift my eyes to.”
Then, "Look!" he cried,
and gave a sudden whoop of joy,
pointing across the street to where,
in a park, a chestnut tree stood tall.
“Imagine,” he said, “imagine playing there,
swinging on a knotted rope,
collecting conkers, being Tarzan,
being a dryad, trying not to fall.”
Studying that tree, we saw -
he made me see - a rain of golden orioles.
As if so many falling meteors,
as if directed by a hidden hand,
in a swoop, they cascaded to the tips
of the bare boughs.
There they perched for a short while,
overlooking the neighbouring ground.
Talismans, they flashed forth
against the evening’s blue.
I see them now, transfiguring
the landscape of my mind’s-eye view. 

David Betteridge notes how Remembrance Sunday at least marks the huge cost paid by the enforced many, not the few

Watching the ceremony from The Cenotaph on TV this morning was an experience of mixed thoughts and mixed emotions. The huge scale of warfare in present and past times, and on a global scale, was well highlighted by the programme, and the huge cost, paid by the enforced many, not the few. Also highlighted was the central role played by, and given honour to, royal and political elites. There they were at The Cenotaph, some in military uniform, some guilty of, or complicit in, or condoning of war crimes, their faces standing properly to attention.

Sadness was there, of course, especially among veterans, remembering and honouring the dead and the ruined and the bereaved, who, of course, include millions of those on the “enemy side” and in “civvy street”. After the two minutes silence, and the wreath-laying, we were treated to the spectacle of the march past and the taking of the salute. Flags and red poppies were to the fore, in profusion, dominating the scene!

How I wanted to see or hear the voice of “No More War”, or at least some hint that the next war was not being legitimised or consoled beforehand. Some of us on the Left may be pacifists, some may see a justification for armed self-defence, or for wars of liberation, but few of us want, I guess, the sort of ceremony that we see each year from The Cenotaph: homogenised and packaged in such a way that it seems as much a glorying in military power and presumed “national unity” as a questioning.

White poppies, of course, have stood as a symbol for the sort of thinking and feeling I am trying to express here, ever since the Co-operative Women’s Guild first produced and sold them in 1933. Similar thinking and feeling is to be found in a red poppy mosaic by the Clydebank photographer and archivist artist, Owen McGuigan. See “The Pity of War” on this website, where that mosaic and the process of making it are examined in depth. Under Owen’s hands, the red poppy of Armistice Day is deconstructed into the blood and dirt and grief and waste and futility that is essential to all wars. He called his mosaic “100 Years”.

As a footnote to that article, “The Pity of War”, I would like readers of Culture Matters to see the mock-up that Owen made for “100 Years”. He wanted to test how well he could stick the pieces of the mosaic down on a board, and how long they would be sure to stay in place.

See below, where the basic design elements of the larger mosaic are experimented with. To me, this mock-up is a very fine little work of art in its own right.

Note by the artist, Owen McGuigan:

While I was working on the “100 Years” mosaic, it occurred to me that I should make a test piece, because, thinking ahead, I knew that the mosaic would be grouted with light grey floor tile grout when it was finished. I wasn’t sure how the grout would react with the plywood shapes, and I didn’t want to ruin the mosaic after all the time and effort I had put into it. Hence, the creation of “Blood, Tears, Death & a Broken Heart” (shown above), which incorporates the main elements of the large piece, mounted in a birch plywood frame.

I finished this piece seven months before grouting the “100 Years” mosaic, and displayed it at an art exhibition, and in a craft shop, to see how it would react to different environments. Fortunately, it was very stable with no reaction.

 David Betteridge re-tells an old tale, inspired by John Berger, Timothy Neat, and Margaret Bennett, with drawings by Bob Starrett

The Cave of Gold

by David Betteridge

On 23rd February, 2017, in Edinburgh, an event was held by the Royal Scottish Academy, in commemoration of an honorary member who had died a few weeks earlier, on 2nd January, in Paris. That member was John Berger, the Marxist critic, writer, and artist, who was not only honorary, but honoured, and also greatly loved. You only need to read a few of the obituaries that were published at the time to get a feeling for the fact that here was a friend to many, a giver and receiver of goodwill, as well as an artist, critic, story-teller, essayist, poet, dramatist, film-maker, etc. of international reach.

Ali Smith’s obituary, written for “The Guardian” on 6th January, provides a good example. She concluded that, “A reader coming anywhere near his work encounters life-force, thought-force – and the force, too, of the love all through it.” Then there is Jacob Brogan’s obituary, written for “The New Yorker” on 9th January. “It was hope,” he wrote, “that allowed Berger to write so beautifully... Hope names a commitment to change the world.” And there is Yasmin Gunaratnam’s obituary, written for “Red Pepper”, on 19th January. “Immersed in his story-telling and stories about him,” she explained, “I saw up-close what he meant by a story-teller’s hospitality, how language and writing can offer a sense of community.”

You will also find voices raised in hostility to John Berger’s memory – as in Michael Henderson’s obituary, for example, in “The Spectator” on 4th January – because, being anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist and fiercely combative all his life, in fact being “Permanent Red”, to quote the title of an early collection of his essays, Berger quite properly made enemies as well as friends.

The Edinburgh event served as the best of obituaries, a multi-disciplinary and multi-genre affair, attended by a multiplicity of friends, including some who had never met the man, or corresponded directly with him, but who felt they knew him through the comradeship of his works, as Gunaratnam described.

One contributor to the event was Timothy Neat (artist, photographer, biographer, poet, historian, teacher, and expert in mushrooms and honey), who screened a film that he had made in 1989, “Play Me Something”. In this film, John Berger plays a leading role, that of a story-telling Stranger. The story that he tells is one of his own, the last in his “Once in Europa” collection, about a chance meeting of two lovers-to-be at a Festa de l’Unita on the Venetian island of Giudecca, one of the couple being a cattle farmer from inland, the other a shopworker from the city.

As well as being narrated in Berger’s voice-over, this story is partly dramatised in the film, and is embedded in a second film-drama about strangers meeting on the Hebridean island of Barra. As they sit waiting at the tiny airport for a delayed flight to Glasgow, they get drawn into the Stranger’s story-telling, and, in the process discover unexpected affinities. This latter drama, the Barra one, is acted by a motley selection of players, including the cultural earthquake, Hamish Henderson, and the great folklorist and singer and teacher and publisher, Margaret Bennett. She rounds off the film with a singing of the magnificent Gaelic song, “Uamh an Oir” (“The Cave of Gold”).

At our event on 23rd February, again Margaret Bennett sang this song, and explained to us its significance in Gaelic culture, conveying as it does truths about gifts and debts, beauty and horror, tradition and hope, all in a few minutes of compressed beauty.

What, you may wonder, has such an ancient song, from Scotland’s cold Atlantic seaboard, got to do with Berger’s modern story about a workers’ rally on a warm island in a Mediterranean lagoon? Is it not a strange film that sets out to make a unity of such opposites, including such disparate characters? The answer lies in the relevance of the story to our political imaginations. Neat’s film and Berger’s story inside it express an age-old longing for a future that transcends the past, and gives us a pre-echo of dreams come true, even when we know such a thing will be difficult to achieve. “Play Me Something” celebrates love, hope, and the need to change the world politically to achieve a fully human community : the very values highlighted in the Berger obituaries quoted above.

Berger’s friend and mentor, the Marxist philosopher Ernst Fischer, made a convincing case for such “heart of the heartless world” creations as “Play Me Something”. He saw them as a necessary complement to cultural creations of the “tell it like it is” sort. He argued for a both-and culture, without which we cannot see the world, and time, and ourselves as we really are, in the round:

... the function of art is to re-create as every individual’s experience the fullness of all that he is not, the fullness of humanity at large. And it is the magic of art that, by this process of re-creation, it shows that reality can be transformed, mastered, turned into play.

Being a poet as well as a philosopher, Fischer underscored his case in verse, in an elegy:

Deep in the dreams of the world’s morning
may the future’s face be mirrored,
and may legend become the goal
of a mature people...

(See Fischer’s “The Necessity of Art: A Marxist Approach”, translated by Anna Bostock, 1963, slightly edited above.)

With these ideas buzzing in my head, I decided to delve into the history of the song that Margaret Bennett sang. There I discovered a Gaelic ur-story, of deep resonance, from which the “Uamh an Oir” song sprang, a story which I already knew (in part) under the title of “The Silver Chanter”, but which I had not realised was kith and kin with the song. It is one of the great stories of the world, from the same deep source as Orpheus.

Inspired by its magic, I decided to try my hand at re-telling it. Here is that re-telling:-

“WE HAVE WORDS...”

We have words; we have tunes. Having them, we have wings. We can be eagles, or wrens, or swallows, or snow geese, or golden orioles, or any kind of bird we like. Fly with me now. We have a cloudless sky, or can imagine one. Look, below us, there! lying off Scotland’s Atlantic coast, do you see a mountainous island shaped like a riding-boot that has come apart at the top? Zoom in close now! Do you see a high cliff facing West, and at its foot the entrance to a sea-cave? The cave is called Uamh an Oir, the Cave of Gold.

I can tell you four things about this cave. One: it is very deep. Some say it extends as far as Fairyland; others say it extends as far as Hell. Two: somewhere in the cave there is a hoard of gold; or maybe it is the glow of the setting sun falling on the rocks at the cave’s entrance that makes it seem a Cave of Gold. Three: the cave is guarded by a ferocious Green Dog. It hides in the dark, always ready to kill. Four: no-one who has gone into the cave has ever come out.

One day, centuries ago, a piper stood on the cliff-top, in a grassy hollow, out of the wind. He was a tall young man, as strong as a bull leaping. At his feet lay a little grey dog, his constant companion. The young man’s pipes were in his hands, but he was not playing. He was groaning and sighing, despairing of ever mastering the instrument. How he longed to play the music that was in his heart and head, but not yet in his fingers!

A woman appeared at his side, so quickly he didn’t see her coming. “I have watched you,” she said, “over many days and many years. I have seen, and heard, your devotion to the pipes. You deserve to succeed; and you deserve to be helped.”

She was slender, like a birch tree. She wore a velvet cloak the colour of moss. She had bare feet. The young man realised that this woman speaking to him was one of the Fairy Folk.

“Answer me this question,” said the fairy woman. “Think hard: would you rather be a famous piper, with wealth and honours, but without much skill; or would you rather be a skilful player, the world’s best, but without fame?”

The young man’s answer came swift and sure: “I would rather be skilful,” he said.

“In that case,” said the fairy, “you will be rewarded not only with skill, but also with fame. Your answer proves that you are worthy of both.”

The fairy then pulled a strand of hair from her head, and took the young man’s pipes from his hands into her own. She wrapped the strand of hair round and round the pipes’ chanter, tying the circlet with a tight knot.

“As long as that hair remains in place on the chanter,” she said, “your playing will have in it all the beauty that your heart and head long for; but there is one condition that you must accept: a year and a day from now you must stand before me, in Fairyland, which you will enter through the Cave of Gold, and there you must play for me.”

The young man accepted the condition. Then, as quickly as the fairy had appeared, she disappeared.

For the next year and a day, the young man travelled among his clans-people. He travelled far and near, high and low, playing for them, his little grey dog always with him. Like spring rain and summer sun, the magic of his music refreshed all who heard it. They were happy as never before. They felt vigour and health rise up in them. They made peace with their neighbours, wherever there was conflict. They saw their cattle and their crops grow fat. It was a golden age, still remembered, still spoken of; and the echo of the young man’s playing is still heard in the best of today’s piping.

On the 366th day, the time came for the young man to keep his promise. As the sun began to set over the sea, he went down from the cliff-top by way of a zig-zag path, down to the Cave of Gold, his dog trotting after him.

 A great number of his clans-people went with him, to wish him well. They were afraid for him, knowing that the cave was a great swallower of lives; but “No,” the young man reassured them, “I will be back soon, believe me. The power of my music will tame the Green Dog, and any other beast or fairy or person who might wish me harm.”

The piper went into the cave, his dog too. All the while, the piper played; and, as he played, his clans-people plotted his progress, step by step, even after he had disappeared into the dark. You see, there is a kind of speech woven into pipe music. If you listen with understanding, the pattern of the music’s notes and grace-notes speaks to you, and you know all that the piper intends you to know.

After a few minutes, the piper sent this coded message: I’ll be back with you, out of this cave, with a tale to tell, maybe good news. I’ll be back in less time than it takes a singer to start and finish her song.

On he went, further and deeper. The sound of his playing grew fainter. Then he sent this second message: I’ll be back with you, out of this cave, in less time than it takes a calf to grow to a heifer, and give birth to her own calf.

On and on he went, towards his meeting with the fairy woman, until the sound of his playing was so faint it could hardly be heard. Then he sent this third message: I’ll be back with you, out of this cave, in no less time than it takes an infant boy at the breast to train as a warrior, and become the chieftain of his clan.

It was nearly nightfall now. The setting sun showed only its topmost rim over the sea’s horizon. Its golden glow on the rocks at the cave’s mouth was darkening to grey.

Suddenly, there was the sound of a scrabbling of claws on these rocks, and the piper’s dog hurtled out of the cave, its eyes wide with a great fear. All of its grey hairs had been shed. Naked, it trembled in the gloom.

The clans-people standing there strained to hear what next the piper might communicate.

Oh, that I had three hands came the young man’s utterance, only just audible, from far underground, maybe from Fairyland, maybe from Hell. Oh, that I had three hands - two hands for the pipes and one for my drawn sword!

After that, there was only silence.

                                                  ******************

To hear Margaret Bennett’s beautiful and compelling singing for yourself, see here.....

......Or get a copy of the CD produced by her son Martyn in 2002, “Glen Lyon”. It is a notable recording, full of imaginative musical effects and sound effects, and includes “The Cave of Gold”, sung by Margaret Bennett, as one of its tracks.  

I started with John Berger. I want to round off with a poem inspired by remarks of his about the power of song, remarks contained in a late compilation of his writings, “Confabulations”. He wrote: “A song narrates a past experience… it fills the present… it leans forward…” None better than “Uamh an Oir”.

Songlines

by David Betteridge

Imagine a song so crammed with gold
it rings like a giant gong
or the Big Bang
conveying memories and desires,
facts and dreams,
traversing time.

As one voice in tradition’s relay dies,
another joins, keeping the beat,
keeping the tune,
chasing forever each next year’s Spring,
each next sunrise.

Imagine!
Sing!

Our song bestows on future folk
the world’s past,
for the world’s gain.

David Betteridge discusses the life and work of Alex Hamilton, 1949-2018. It is a companion piece to Jim Aitken's essay-obituary of Tom Leonard.

I

This is not a proper obituary, although it started out as such. It is more a “thinking-through-writing” kind of thing, trying to wrestle a meaning out of some confusion. My subject is my friend of forty years, recently deceased, the prolific and talented and largely unpublished author, Alex Hamilton, aka Sandy Hamilton (to those who knew him from childhood), aka S&eh? (to those with whom he exchanged emails, who shared his love of puzzles), aka Alex. Hamilton (with a precise or pedantic dot after the first name, as he sometimes signed himself), aka Alexander P. Hamilton (as inscribed on the brass plate screwed to his coffin, which, following his own instructions, was lowered into the ground without a word being spoken), aka Django Ross or Cordelia d’Amfreville (pen-names that he adopted, the first mainly for works where he explored the punning possibilities of several languages, the second mainly for erotica).

As an author, Alex is remembered, if at all, for being one of the contributors to a handsome paperback collection of prose and verse published in 1976 by Molendinar Press, Three Glasgow Writers. The other two contributors were Tom Leonard and James Kelman, whose careers as authors, and later as professors of literature, rose and rose, while Alex’s flat-lined, then declined. I have been trying to understand why the two succeeded, by all measures, while the other, my friend, failed.

Alex reading at the Third Eye Centre, Glasgow, in 1976, at the launching - jointly with Tom Leonard and James Kelman - of Three Glasgow Writers, published by Molendinar Press. This still is taken from a video recording of the occasion, reproduced here by permission of the Contemporary Centre for Arts, Glasgow. (Ref. TE3/1976/117)

You can read Tom Leonard’s works and you can read works about him quite readily, whether in book form or online, as in Jim Aitken’s superb essay in Culture Matters, written a few weeks after Tom’s death, which came a few weeks after Alex’s. Even more readily, you can read James Kelman’s works and works about him, and you can go on reading them, as he is still alive, happily, and still producing noteworthy literature - witness his recent novel, Dirt Road. Alex’s works, by contrast, are hard to find, either because they were never published, or because they are tucked away in magazines e.g. Gutter, or are long out of print. It was not always so, however.

In 1981, three of us, Ian Murray, Adam Currie and myself, all friends of Alex’s, persuaded him to let us publish a selection of his short fiction, under our Ferret Press banner. With support from the Scottish Arts Council, this collection came out the following year, with the title Gallus, Did You Say? and Other Stories. In putting this selection together, we were able to draw on a pretty wide range of previously printed and/or broadcast outings. Ian Murray’s Introduction to Gallus lists some of these sources:

Alex. Hamilton was born in Glasgow in 1949 and still lives there, as he has done for most of his life. He is known best for the stories in this collection, which have been published and broadcast both in Britain and the United States. His work has appeared in many journals and magazines, including the Times Educational Supplement, Akros, and Transatlantic Review, and in the book Three Glasgow Writers (Molendinar Press, 1976). Some of his stories have been broadcast on BBC television and radio and Radio Clyde. The author’s reputation as a reader of his own work makes him a frequent visitor to schools and colleges, where he was invited to give over 20 readings last year, and he has read from his more adult fiction at the Kelso and Frayed Edge Festivals, the Third Eye Centre, and the University of Glasgow.

Alex. Hamilton was awarded Scottish Arts Council writer’s bursaries in 1974 and 1979.

II

What went wrong - if indeed it is fair to call failing to get published necessarily wrong - after the initial interest in his work? Part of the answer, it may be argued, was Alex’s retreat, after Gallus, from writing in a fluent and readable and refreshing mixture of vernaculars, with some Scottish Standard English spliced in whenever he judged that a character’s speech-style demanded it. Alex himself did not regard it as a retreat, but rather as an advance, a striking-out into new literary territories, with new language uses to suit. If readers did not see fit to advance with him, he reckoned that that was their loss. In an email sent to me in 2016, he wrote this, referring to himself, oddly, in the third person:

He's long since given up writing for the (etymologically & demotically) ignorant. He - I - write(s) for a player-audience of two. If you exit before I do, there'll be a player-audience of one. If I exit before you: "CURTAIN!".

First of all, post-Gallus, Alex began to experiment with very short texts in a most elegant style of English, almost Augustan. One such piece, I recall, was called “Abdul, the Tobacco Curer”. He duplicated and spiral-bound a few copies for giving to friends, and for submitting (unsuccessfully) to publishers. Its content was slight, I have to say. Then he went on to elaborate that style in other texts, playing with words at every twist and turn, and wangling in allusions, drawn from various sources, print and otherwise. Thereafter, other languages besides English were plundered and bent to the same purposes, including French, Greek, Latin, Russian, and especially Scots. An interest in typographical high jinks followed, and photo-montage. Joyce’s portmanteau coinages and Mallarme’s calligrams were among his inspirations. As the form that he used became increasingly witty, and increasingly condensed, to the point of extreme brevity, his content became decreasingly significant, I thought. Often, the whole point of a text was a single pun, or a paradox.

When we discussed his writing over too much beer, or, in later years, over coffee or wine, and I questioned the form-over-content imbalance, Alex replied that he had no interest in putting across messages of any kind. He would leave such sententious and tendentious stuff to those authors with axes to grind. He held especial scorn, for example, for Susan Sontag and such engaged essays of hers as Regarding the Pain of Others.

Once, he went so far as to say that he no longer held any belief in any grand narratives or big themes, his early commitment to Socialism and membership of the Labour Party having lapsed, as also his optimism regarding the possibility of any substantial social or political progress. Too many years working as a project manager on various EEC- and EU-sponsored public-private enterprises on brown-field sites - a job he entered after leaving the teaching profession - had tired him, and jaundiced him. He grew to distrust the political and business elites whom he was hired to serve, as also the popular and populist movements that gained support in the Nineties and Noughties across much of Europe.

Technological progress was a different matter: he embraced it happily, notably in connection with computing, hi-fi, and medicine; and for a while he engaged full-heartedly and doggedly in certain discrete issues that impinged on his life, as he listed in an email to me dated 2010:

Yup, sir: the enlightenment continueth. Wickedness encroacheth, or attempts to.

I've played my little part agin: the poll tax; the identity card scheme; the proposed closure of the FM network; & the environment on various fronts (& backs). 

Persistence. 

III

So that you can see and judge for yourselves, what I mean about Alex’s “retreat” - or his “advance” as he regarded it - let me juxtapose an early bit of text (published) against several later ones (unpublished):

From Our Merry (1976):

See, she had this wee kitten in her hands, and it was that toty you’d have thought it shouldn’t have been away from its mother....

“Heh, that sa a wee stoatir,” says Andy, and bends down to get a stroke at it.

“Lee it alane, you!” goes Merry, just as sudden as that, screaming and cuddling it real tight the way she does with her dolls. “Yir no tae touch it, awright? Awright? ... Kiz it’s mines!”

“Heh, wait a minnit, Merry,” I goes. “Whitdji mean, it’s yours? It’s probbli jiss ta stray ur that an that mean zit’s naebdi’s... relse if it sno a stray, it’s sumdi else’s.”

Compare the above with the following typical mini-text emailed to me in 2010. Note his copyrighting:

I think that I mentioned that I'm re-reading - and re-enjoying - Ellman's Joyce.

The attached occurred yestreen.

            PRODDY GÆL SUN

Anglophile Ἴκαρος was a dead loss to his patter.

                                               © DJANGO ROSS

Or this (2017):

As you know, I've been immersed in færie tales for the past couple of years, including Joseph's (translated) versions of a wheen of Celtic wans. Like you and Berger and the tellers of yore, my attitude is that a story's only a story, for if the hearers' interest wanes, you don't get your dram...

Currently reading thro - one per eve, of course - the latest (Penguin) translation of 1,001 Nights, which attempts to give all the stories, y compris the centuries' accretions. They haven't succeeded, but - kiz they hivnae nklewdit mines.

Which allows me to tell you of which, videlicet:

Sharazad's One Thousand and Second Tale

Woman, saith the Caliph. These three years, these thousand and one nights, thou hast succeeded in pleasing thy Lord. Thus, woman, I'm raisin thee to the status of my currant Sultana.

Or this, with graphics and a touch of colour, called The Retiree (2015):

IV

The last time I saw Alex was at a screening of The Sense of an Ending at the Glasgow Film Theatre. Afterwards, he praised the film, and said even better things about Julian Barnes’s novel, of the same title, on which the film is based. I was surprised to hear Alex speak well of these two contemporary works, as he usually saved his plaudits for the past, notably for works from the eighteenth century. He especially liked Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which he read and re-read several times over, in its complete six-volume edition; and, from the first half of the twentieth century, he especially liked James Joyce’s exuberant and encyclopedic two novels, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, complemented or contradicted by Samuel Beckett’s increasingly condensed late plays and novellas. Julian Barnes and the film-makers did well, I thought, to break into this company of merit.

Looking back, from after Alex’s death, I begin to see the deep relevance that The Sense of an Ending had for my friend, especially when considered in light of the essay in literary criticism, by Frank Kermode, that lay behind the novel and the film, that Alex knew from his student days.

I have a hunch that Alex consciously shaped the way he lived and worked during the last decades of his life, with especial urgency in the last few years, by when I suspect he was beginning to have intimations of mortality. He shaped it so that the resulting narrative would made sense to him, even though the wider world’s narrative did not. In so doing, he was exercising the same set of skills that Kermode reckoned a novelist exercised in writing fiction, and we exercise in reading it.

Alex’s narrative prompted him systematically to edit loose ends from his life, cutting them out abruptly if that proved the neatest thing to do. Friends and family alike got this treatment. What is more, he increasingly ordered his life along almost monastic lines, governed by a sort of home-made liturgy of the hours. He set aside time each day for reading, and for writing; for listening to BBC Radio 3; for walking to the library to consult the only journal he had any regard for, The Economist; and for calling in at a shop where he could buy past-their-date foodstuffs cheaply, including not-quite-stale bread. Twice a week, he walked to a branch of Tesco about a mile from his house, sometimes on the way to a free concert or lecture in the University or Art Galleries; there he bought items that were discounted. Once, I recall, when I met him there by chance, he pounced on a tin of sardines, at 39p. “This is enough,” he told me, “for three meals, with a bit of bread.”

When at last his doctor told him how little time remained to him, without fuss Alex engaged the services of a lawyer, and gave his final instructions. (I know about this from a phone conversation I had with Alex’s former wife, after the event; she in turn had learned the details from the lawyer.)

Alex wanted to be interred with no ceremony in a plot in the same graveyard as his parents. He wanted the money that he had saved from his frugal living to be spent on two things: the printing of a collection of his writings, the details of which I have not yet been able to discover, and the performance of a cello concerto, in memory of his father, who had been a skilled worker in the shipyards, as well as a skilled amateur cellist. (This concerto he had already commissioned, from Edward McGuire.)

Eddie was one of the last people to see Alex. He visited him a couple of times at his flat. This is how he describes their meetings:

I had not been in touch with him for a few months and thought it was time to update him on progress in my composing the cello concerto that he had commissioned the year before. So, on October 4th 2018, I brought him a bound copy of the draft version of the piece, and pointed out where music had to be completed in each of the 3 movements. I was able to say the soloist - Robert Irvine - was hoping to premiere it in the Spring of 2019. It was not until about 2 hours into our conversation that he told me about his terminal cancer diagnosis. So I said I'd keep in regular touch. My next and final visit was nearly 3 weeks later on October 24th, again at his flat. He was much weaker then but was optimistic about attending the concerto premiere in the Spring. So I was surprised to learn that he had died a week or two after that - I had planned a third visit in November. I hadn't heard about him going into the hospice.

There was one matter that took Alex and Eddie a while to agree on: how to phrase the concerto’s dedication. Alex did not want his own name to appear on the score, only his father’s and the composer’s. After some discussion, they agreed to add the words “Commissioned anonymously”. My own suggestion to Eddie was that, when he publishes the work, he changes the dedication to, “Commissioned anonymously by his son”. Why edit oneself out, and become a ghost? That is one of the questions about Alex that I am puzzling over.

V

Alex’s burial did not go the way his sense of an ending had prescribed. To start with, there were more people at the graveside than he wanted, ten in all, if you count the undertakers and the gravediggers, plus a Golden Labrador called Hector, who seemed to enjoy the outing, to judge from a photograph taken by an old school-friend, who decided to invite himself along. The dog is straining at his lead, eager to be off sniffing. The photograph also shows another eager soul, quite unmourning because of her young age, namely Alex’s infant grand-daughter, whom he never knew he had. There were also more words spoken in that country churchyard than Alex had bargained for, not at the moment of interment, but immediately afterwards, when half an hour of animated conversation burst out. Some of it sprang from the mourners’ pent-up anger or sadness or bewilderment at the way Alex had lived his life, and treated them; some of it sprang from shared memories, or from shared curiosity about the others.

While there was no ceremony or service or religious observation, there was one little gesture of traditional leave-taking from one of the ten. The old school-friend took a handful of soil from the box offered by the undertakers. He went to the grave’s edge, and threw it on top of the coffin with its bright new brass name-plate. He didn’t want to not do anything after all the years he had known Alex - or Sandy, as he called him - and enjoyed his company.

Email attachment received from Alex in 2015

I have a sense of an ending of my own, different from Alex’s, and better than the one that actually happened. I have only belatedly arrived at it, some months after Alex’s grave was filled in, and the mourners went home, and the JCB mini-diggers that did the digging were taken to other jobs.

First, I would have been there at the graveside, along with many, many others - we should have invited ourselves. His old pals, James Kelman and Tom Leonard, would have been there, Tom Leonard restored to health, without any need of his walking-stick and a tube up his nose. Second, a cellist would have played the Sarabande from Bach’s Cello Suite Number 3, just as a colleague of my sister’s had done at her funeral some years earlier. Alex was there, and expressed great pleasure at hearing that noble music. Third, a jazz guitarist would have played another piece of music that Alex liked, Django Reinhardt's Nuages. When he was young, Alex played the guitar quite well, and till the end kept his instrument out of its case in his living room; but latterly he was unable even to hold it properly, let alone play it, as a disabling disease turned first one hand, then the other, into crab-like claws. Django famously lacked the use of two fingers, after being burned in a fire; Alex lacked the use of any. Fourth, every one of us there would have thrown our handful of earth into the grave, and either recited something or sung something, con brio. Fifth, we would all have gone to a pub somewhere afterwards, and held a riotous wake. Sixth, every one of us would have received a fat package through the post a few weeks later, from Alex’s lawyer. In it would have been a volume of Alex’s best writing, handsomely printed, and a CD of Eddie McGuire’s Cello Concerto. Seventh, we would have learned that we had been misinformed, and that Alex’s life never had taken a wrong turning.

This is me writing fiction, of a consoling kind.

VI

Looking back, summing up, it is clear that Alex was for a while a significant figure in an informal movement combining authors and publishers and broadcasters and readers and teachers, especially secondary school teachers such as Alex himself was at that time. Collectively, they shifted the centre of gravity of Scottish Literature further towards the vernacular, or vernaculars (plural) rather. Others continued that movement, with increasing success, while Alex chose to follow his other path, pursuing other projects. Tom Leonard and James Kelman, his former book-mates in the Molendinar Press volume, went on to become international faces and voices of the movement, each in his own distinctive way, and many others joined them, one of my favourites being Anne Donovan. Her story Hieroglyphics (2001) says a lot about vernacular and standard forms of a language, and says it in a vernacular so precise that it is an idiolect. Reading it sheds light on Alex’s early work.

The story describes a child’s struggles to decipher print, coming to Standard English texts from a Glasgow vernacular starting place. One word that gives her especial difficulty is her own forename: MARY. “That's ma name. Merry. But that wus spelt different fae merry christmas that you wrote in the cards you made oot a folded up bits a cardboard an yon glittery stuff that comes in thae wee tubes...” Here we find a lovely echo of lines written by Alex a generation earlier.

He similarly transliterated that girl’s forename as “Merry”, in his own story “Our Merry”, from Three Glasgow Writers.  I remember querying Alex’s use of “Our” in his title, at the time we were getting Gallus ready for the press. I asked him if “Oor” was not the form he needed. Quickly and correctly, he pounced on my levelling, flattening, ignorant tin-ear. “It might be ‘Oor Wullie’,” he said, referring to D.C. Thompson’s cartoon character, “but in the North part of Glasgow, where my character comes from, and where I come from, it’s just as I wrote it: ‘Our Merry’.” There we see the same precision that made him place a dot after his own forename. “Alex. is an abbreviation,” he insisted. “It’s an abbreviation of Alexander, cutting the word short; hence the dot. So now yir tellt!”

VII

It would be a mistake for me to try to draw too large a conclusion about literary careers from considering Alex’s particular example. There is no compelling reason why writers should confine themselves to using vernaculars, there being plenty of good poems, short stories, novels, plays, etc. written in varieties of Standard English. There is no compelling reason, either, why they should desist from word-play and allusion and experimentation with layouts and fonts. If overly “realist” and “anti-formalist” assumptions were allowed to govern which works are deemed good, and therefore published, and which are deemed not good, and therefore not published, literature would be impoverished. Had such criteria been applied in the past, we would have lost access to a great deal of Hugh MacDiarmid’s polymath and polyglot output, to take one mighty example.

Other writers, too, would have remained in a limbo of unpublishability. Scotland’s first modern Makar, Edwin Morgan, would have suffered; or, at least, his concrete poetry inventions would have failed to make it into print. Similarly, some of Alastair Gray’s most typographically adventurous pages. And where would Hope Mirrlees’ s Paris be?

My comradely disagreement with Alex about the later direction of his writing did not relate to its form, considered on its own, nor to the demands it makes on us as readers to raise our game, but to its diminution of content. That is to say, my disagreement related to his conscious avoidance of engagement with the world, and the peoples in it, and their unavoidable concerns with big issues. In fact, I enjoyed Alex’s textual extravaganzas, as did a friend in London, the composer and poet David Johnson, to whom I showed some of Alex’s later work. “It is the sort of experimentation that excites by sound and rhythm more than sense,” he wrote, “as if he was writing in a language invented on the spot, or from a sort of speaking in tongues. Is it visionary? Mad? These questions alone spark an interest in me...” No, I just wanted Alex’s adventures in form to serve something bigger; and so, I suppose, did all those publishers who so often sent him rejection slips, or plain ignored his submissions.

Ernst Fischer considered this diminution of content phenomenon, across all the arts in his far-ranging study, The Necessity of Art: A Marxist Approach. He saw it as a problem intrinsic to late capitalism, affecting creative individuals who were, or who became, detached from the realities of society, or indeed from their own true natures; in other words, as in Marx’s classic definition, individuals who were alienated. Fischer wrote:

The de-socialisation of art and literature produces the recurring motif of flight: the motif of deserting a society which is felt to be catastrophic.....

Alex’s flight became the dominating feature of his life and his work alike. How I wish he had chosen - had been willing and able to choose - to stay in touch with more things, more people, more issues, while still playing as he wished with form and language. How I wish he could have made Joan Miro’s manifesto-motto his own. In a 1948 interview, Miro, speaking of his own work, said, “Plant your feet firmly on the ground if you want to be able to jump up in the air.”

Suddenly, having pursued my argument thus far, I am aware of a certain rather large anomaly, namely a work-in-progress of Alex’s called The Reinhardt Variations, which I have only just remembered. It recounts the tale of a young technocrat’s journeys across several nations of Eastern Europe. Here, Alex avoided the form-over-content imbalance. He rendered chunks of real life, experienced at first hand, taken from a time and from places undergoing epochal change. Sure, the language may have been difficult in places, compressed, over-written perhaps, full of parodies of different kinds of writing, from newspaper journalism, to company report, to political polemic, to letter, to diary entry; but it was about something significant. Unfortunately, he never finished the novel, or even, latterly, spoke of it. It sank. I am left wondering if anything of it survives, maybe on a memory-stick or disk. I hope so, as it would show that Alex’s “retreat” (or “advance”) in his writing was not in a straight line, not 100 percent consistent. 

VIII

There was a conference on brownfield site development in Moscow some years before Alex retired, that he attended. He was called to speak about his own work on such projects, being at the time employed by the European Commission in a variety of countries. He prefaced his remarks by quoting, in Russian, the opening sentence of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” The same holds true, he told his fellow-attendees, even more so, of countries. As his life wore on, and the world’s politics got ever more dysfunctional, as it seemed to him, and as his own affairs went the same way, he became an expert in unhappiness; but it was his genius to carry on nonetheless, to hold fast, with a wry smile on his haggard face, and a bon mot forming in his mind, to be saved in his computer file.

Although, as I have shown, he favoured playfulness over seriousness in his writing, and in his public persona, I sensed a deep seriousness inside him, that darkened and hardened and shrank as the years went by, ending up as a nihilism similar to - and maybe even modelled on - Samuel Beckett’s, but without the Irishman’s great concern for the “still, sad music of humanity”, achieved through plain speech beautifully handled. A passage in Beckett’s Molloy expresses this nihilism perfectly. Alex read the novel both in its original French and in its later English translation, and sometimes quoted from it:

All I know is what the words know, and the dead things, and that makes a handsome little sum, with a beginning, a middle and an end as in the well-built phrase and the long sonata of the dead. And truly it little matters what I say, this or that or any other thing...

Clearly it did matter, however, at least some of the time. Alex’s dying instruction to his lawyer to arrange for a selection of his writings to be published was proof of that.

IX

There is much more that I could say about Alex’s life, and the way he chose to live it and to end it, yoking on as he did of a sort of Stoicism, if that is not too grand a term for his self-directedness, and his matter-of-fact acceptance of all the losses he suffered, and in some cases brought on himself; or should he be termed a Cynic, rather; or just a plain old misanthropic bastard? Maybe I have already said too much, divulging private matters about my friend. My intention is not to speak ill of him, but to recognise and try to understand his pursuance of his chosen craft, and to mourn the things that went wrong.

I am left with the questions I started with. The biggest one is this: how could a man who knew so much about other people’s lives choose so narrow and austere a narrative for himself? Here was a man who was deeply read in such deep studies of life as King Lear - to the extent that he sometimes adopted the mad king’s estranged and then reconciled daughter’s name, Cordelia, as a pen-name - and yet, looking back with selective fondness to his long-dead father, he chose to elevate his role as a son over all his other dealings with people, including his own daughters? And how could he lavish so much care on his complex weaving of witticisms and word-play - much ado about little - while neglecting so much else? It was as if, to reverse the idea contained in a line spoken by Cordelia in Shakespeare’s tragedy, Alex wanted his epitaph to be: “My tongue's more richer than my love.”

Ernst Fischer’s analysis of the de-socialisation of literature puts Alex in his historical context, but I am still left wondering why. Why, in this particular case, yet not in others, do we see a recurrence of Fischer’s motif of flight? To take two obvious counter-examples, Tom Leonard and James Kelman, both of whom came from similar class origins to Alex’s, and pursued similar destinations: they signally stayed grounded, never ballooning away into the least hint of alienation. Why the difference? Clearly, there is no simple iron law or hidden societal hand requiring de-socialising and flight. There must be other factors at work also.

Reading a life is the hardest thing.

X

While struggling to put this piece together, I found that a verse-elegy began to form in my mind. It went through about a dozen drafts, before the following text emerged. Alex would have thoroughly disapproved both of its form and of its content.

Dead Letters

by David Betteridge

Friend, I let you down;
and you let me go.
In doing so, you let me down;
and we let the silence that ensued
between us grow and grow.
We both were wrong,
needing as we did -
and still do - the other there,
in touch, if not in step or tune,
aware.

Disuse, the destroyer,
eroded friendship’s base;
and then, not telling anyone,
you went to a private place,
and straightway died;
you died with unanswered letters
left, and no good-byes.
I am not the only one estranged.
Year on year, you cut adrift
alike your family and your friends,
you hurting man.

Young, you kept your ear
close to the People’s complex voice;
you wrote their lives;
and your voice was heard.
Then, by cold degrees,
you privileged your own small take
and slant on things,
and your own sharp wit.
These led you to your solitude,
and turned the key on it.

Too soon you settled
into garret-ways, ensconced
in the clean order of your top-floor flat,
with the storm-doors shut.

Sitting there,
you pleasured in thesauruses,
and in the alphabet.
You had software that provided
every font of every type.
You wove them closely
into ever-dwindling texts,
with an ever-dwindling sense of right.

Your favourite letter
of the twenty-six was “O”.
You wrote the “O” that gives expression
to surprise; the “O” of salutation, too;
and the “O” of moans and groans,
extending once, in a tale of yours,
to twenty pages, then in colours
fifty more, some garish red, some blue.
You wrote the Venn diagram’s encircling “O”,
that separates one thing from the rest,
including (and excluding) self;
also the “O” that signifies an open wound,
or eye, or grave; and, finally, the “O”
that is the empty “O” of nothing, of which
no thing will come, as Lear observed;
and so it proved,
as your life’s course attests.

You found delight in Joyce,
striving to out-fun in print
that magic-making Irishman.
Now and then, in miniscule,
you ran him close,
but quite forgot to keep
your soul and heart engaged,
as he did his, and your feet
earth-pressed, like Antaeus.

Words, old friend, lost friend:
they were your true companions.
You kept faith with them,
cherishing them till death,
punning cleverly all the way
to the grave full-stop of your last breath.

Why did you not keep faith
with more?

Why did you turn
from the prime substantial world?
Why did you favour emptied signs
and metaphors?

Too late now to redraft
your life’s plot,
to redirect the great talent
that you had,
that it might serve a better end!
What’s done is done.
We must let it be.

Oh, that you’d kept in touch
with wider themes,
and with wiser friends than me!

Further reading: Caroline McAfee’s contribution, called “Glasgow”, which is part of Varieties of English Around the World, published by John Benjamins, Amsterdam and Philadelphia, 1983, available online. It contains extracts from Alex’s short stories, and from an early novel, Stretch Marks.