1982 Janine (44 page)

We all felt ashamed of ourselves, and that was Hislop's last day as a teacher.

But I did right to stop him belting Anderson. Afterward in the playground the class gathered round me, again and again telling each other and everyone who joined us what Hislop had done to Anderson, what I said to Hislop, what they had all said to Hislop. A lot of them, yes, girls too, walked home with me and only went to their own houses when I entered mine. I had not become their leader in any way, they just liked being near me because they were glad I existed. They felt safer and stronger because I was one of them. They liked being near me because they were glad I existed. I was thirteen or twelve, maybe. I would like to make other people glad I exist before I die:

We were all ignorant. We didnae know how to be good to each other.

Dry this tearwet face on corner of flannel sheet. Thus. I feel different. A new man? Not exactly the same man, anyway. What is this queer slight bright fluttering sensation as if a thing weighted down for a long time was released and starting, a little, to stir?

Don't name it. Let it grow.

Before I die I will make folk glad I exist again. How? Go away for a holiday and think about that. Lie on a beach under a warm sun. Drink wine, not spirits. The right sort of leisure will breed new ideas, revive old ones I have forgotten. It is ideas which make people brave, ideas and love of course. I will have a holiday, I will think, and I will return to the only place I am able to understand. I once thought I would have done better in London, or Cape Canaveral, or Hollywood even. I had been taught that history was made in a few important places by a few important people who manufactured it for the good of the rest. But the Famous Few have no power now but the power to threaten and destroy and history is what we all make, everywhere, each moment of our lives, whether we notice it or not. I will work among the people I know; I will not squander myself in fantasies; I will think to a purpose, think harder and drink less; I will be recognised by my neighbours; I will converse and speak my mind; I will find friends, allies, enemies if need be, and I (don't name it). Yahoohay, this has been an exhausting night, the longest of my life. I am not a massive man but I must be tough to have survived a night like this last. Hm. Hmn.

Janine is worried but trying not to show it. She concentrates on the sound of two unfastened studs in her skirt clicking with each step she takes. “That's a sexy noise,” a childish voice says, and giggles.

‘Act calm,' thinks Janine. ‘Pretend this is just an ordinary audition.' And then she thinks, ‘Hell no! Surprise them. Shock them. Show them more than they ever expected to see.'

Standing easily astride she strips off her shirt and drops it, strips off her skirt and drops it, kicks off her shoes and stands naked but for her net stockings. I need the stockings. A wholly naked woman is too dazzling so she stands naked but for fishnet stockings, hands on hips and feeling an excited melting warmth between her thighs. She is ready for anything.

I will stand on the platform an hour from now, briefcase in hand, a neater figure than most but not remarkable. I will have the poise of an acrobat about to step on to a high wire, of an actor about to take the stage in a wholly new play. Nobody will guess what I am going to do. I do not know it myself. But I will not do nothing. No, I will not do nothing. O Janine, my silly soul, come to me now. I will be gentle. I will be kind.

Footsteps in corridor.
KNOCK KNOCK.
A woman's voice.
“Eight-fifteen, Mr McLeish. Breakfast is being served till nine.”

My voice.
“All right.”

You have noticed lines in this book taken from Chaucer Shakespeare Jonson The Book of Common Prayer Goldsmith Cowper Anon Mordaunt Burns Blake Scott Byron Shelley Campbell Wordsworth Coleridge Keats Browning Tennyson Newman Henley Stevenson Hardy Yeats Brooke Owens Hasék (in Parrott's translation, slightly shortened) Kafka Pritchett Auden cummings Lee and Jackson, so I will list only writers whose work gave ideas for bigger bits.

The matter of Scotland refracted through alcoholic reverie is from MacDiarmid's
A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle
. The narrator without self-respect is from Dostoevsky's
Notes
from Underground
, Céline's
Journey to the End of Night
, the first-person novels of Flann O'Brien and from Camus's
The
Fall
. An elaborate fantasy within a plausible everyday fiction is from O'Brien's
At Swim-Two-Birds
, Nabokov's
Pale
Fire
, Vonnegut's
Slaughterhouse-Five
. Making the fantasy pornographic is from Buñuel's film
Belle de Jour
and from
The Nightclerk
, a novel by someone whose name I forget. The character of Mad Hislop is taken from Mr Johnstone in
Tom Leonard's poem
Four of the Belt
, which he here allows me to reprint:

Brian McCabe's
Feathered Choristers
in the Collins Scottish short-story collection of 1979 showed how all these things could combine in one.

The most beholden chapter is the eleventh. The plot is from the programme note to Berlioz's
Symphonie Fantastique
; rhythms and voices are from the Blocksberg scenes in Goethe's
Faust
and night town scenes in Joyce's
Ulysses
; the self-inciting vocative is from Jim Kelman's novel
The Bus-
conductor Hines
; the voice of my nontranscendent god from e e cummings. The political part of Jock's vomiting fit is from
The Spendthrifts
, a great Spanish novel in which Benito Pérez Galdós puts a social revolution into the stomach and imagination of a sick little girl. The graphic use of typeface is from Sterne's
Tristram Shandy
and poems by Ian Hamilton Finlay and Edwin Morgan.

Though too busy to be aware of the foregoing influences while writing under them I consciously took information
and ideas (which she would disown) from a correspondence with Tina Reid, also anecdotes from conversations with Andrew Sykes, Jimmy Guy and Tom Lamb, also three original phrases of Glasgow invective from Jim Caldwell. Richard Fletcher informed and improved the book's electrical and mechanical parts. The fanciful use of light and space technology comes partly from conversations with Chris Boyce and partly from his book,
Extraterrestrial
Encounters
.

Flo Allan typed all perfectly with help from Scott Pearson in the denser pages of chapter 11. Ian Craig, the art director, Judy Linard the designer, Jane Hill the editor, Bunge, Will, Phil and Tom the typesetters, Peva Keane the proofreader, worked uncommonly hard to make this book exactly as it should be.

And now a personal remark which purely literary minds will ignore. Though John McLeish is an invention of mine I disagree with him. In chapter 4, for example, he says of Scotland, “We are a poor little country, always have been, always will be.” In fact Scotland's natural resources are as variedly rich as those of any other land. Her ground area is greater than that of Denmark, Holland, Belgium or Switzerland, her population higher than that of Denmark, Norway or Finland. Our present ignorance and bad social organisation make most Scots poorer than most other north Europeans, but even bad human states are not everlasting.

Finally I acknowledge the support of Mad Toad, Crazy Shuggy, Tam the Bam and Razor King, literature-loving friends in the Glasgow Mafia who will go any length to reason with editors, critics and judges who fail to celebrate the shining merit of the foregoing volume.

In retreat,
The Monastery of Santa Semplicità,
Orvieto,
April 1983

A.G.

“1982 JANINE has a verbal energy, an intensity of vision that has mostly been missing from the English novel since D. H. Lawrence.”

Jonathan Baumbach,
New York Times

“I recommend nobody to read this book … it is sexually oppressive, the sentences are far too long and it is boring … hogwash. Radioactive hogwash.”

Peter Levi,
The BBC Book Programme, Bookmark

“On the strength of LANARK I proclaimed Alasdair Gray the first major Scottish writer since Walter Scott. 1982 JANINE exhibits the same large talent deployed to a somewhat juvenile end.”

Anthony Burgess,
The Observer

“Where LANARK was sprawling or self-indulgent, 1982 JANINE is taut, witty and deft.”

Nicholas Shrimpton,
Sunday Times

“I cannot rid myself of the notion that, despite its glaring faults, which do not exclude the modishly cryptic title, this work offers more hope for the future of fiction, considered as art and vision, than the vast majority of novels published since the second world war. The chief reason for this, albeit grudging accolade is that 1982, JANINE is about the world as it is rather than as it used to be … It's a pity … that Mr Gray is a late starter. If he were a young writer just embarking on his career I would, without hesitation, predict a brilliant future for him once he had dropped irritating mannerisms and, most important, refined and strengthened his prose style.”

Paul Ableman,
The Literary Review

“His style is limpid and classically elegant.”

William Boyd,
The Times Literary Supplement

“Gray is an authentically Rabelaisian writer, meaning not just that his work is bawdy and exuberant but that he is in love with the power of language to encompass life … Here is an original and talented writer, plainly in his prime.”

Robert Nye,
The Guardian

“There is a respectable school of thought which believes that the best thing to do with writers like Alasdair Gray is to ignore them and hope they'll go away. Well, they won't go away, and they take encouragement from the silence of their critics … Gray has been compared with MacDiarmid but, on closer inspection, bears a close resemblance to the Scottish buffoon, Compton Mackenzie. Those who have seen him on television will know the kind of chap he is. A vainglorious lout … the sort of writer who continually practises his speech for the Nobel Prize in front of the mirror. And he may well get to deliver it, for he is a profoundly reactionary penman … There is nothing here to differentiate 1982 JANINE from the cruelty, stupidity, and moral fascism to be found in trash like
‘Suedehead',‘Skinhead' and paperbacks aimed at the young and uneducated.”

Joe Ambrose,
Irish Sunday Tribune

“I have read reviews of these books which make me suspect that the commentators had never read them. 1982 JANINE is not pornography but a thoughtful and sad study of the human predicament; to be trapped in a world where the little man, woman or country will always be exploited by the big bullies.”

J. A. McArdle,
Irish Independent

“If Alasdair Gray were a pornographer he would be rather a good one. He is not a pornographer, however. His power to titillate is betrayed by humour and pathos, the worst enemies of true porn. Humour is what makes the book bearable, though Gray's humour is very Scottish – that is to say, black.”

George Melly
New Society

“As it develops, 1982 JANINE becomes a polemic of a good-hearted, old-fashioned kind, cheerfully enlivened by merry typographical japes, some of which need a magnifying glass to decipher, and including a sad little tale of true love lost through a young man's silly snobbery. But afterwards, not much remains. It is like a brilliant theatrical occasion that holds the audience riveted at the time but leaves them wondering, on the way home, what it all added up to.”

Nina Bawden,
Daily Telegraph

“The fragmented style may suggest Joyce and Beckett, but it becomes apparent that it owes more to the Scottish tradition which juxtaposes stark realism and wild fantasy and descends from Dunbar and David Lindsay, through Urquhart and Smollett to Scott, Stevenson and George Douglas Brown.”

Seumas Stewart,
Birmingham Post

“His fictions seem easily to inhabit all possible literary worlds, potent hybrids in a class of their own.”

William Boyd,
The Tatler

DK–7200 Grindsted
Denmark
July 26th 1984

Dear Mr Gray,

This is one of those boring letters where someone who likes your books writes to you to tell you so – so if that sort of thing gives you the creeps, ditch it! And, no, I haven't written a novel of my own, so I'm not writing to ask how to get it printed.

I bought JANINE on the knowledge of your name, and not because some hurried crit said it was pornographic. He either did this because he's only dipped into one chapter, or in the hope of stimulating sales and doing you a favour – perhaps both.

And my goodness what an enthralling book – the unities! – particularly the evolution of character. Marvellous! In 1949 I went to do my National Service, at Catterick, and one of my best mates came from Cotton Road, and we used to go to ‘the jiggin” at Rutherglen Town Hall. Also, my uncle Billie Barrie, of Kilsyth, was Chief Cashier on the Glasgow Corp. tramways, so there's hardly a mile of route, or an inch of ferry I haven't been on (in 1950/51) in either the one company or the other. So I could ‘follow' you, and have the accents in my head.

Funny you remembered there were trams (most authors don't!). Getting off at Waverley what I noticed about the Edinburgh cars was not so much their funereal colours – after all, lots of Corporation buses and trolley-buses down in England looked exactly the same – but how old they looked. Up in Aberdeen, one sizzled about in super streamliners; in Glasgow mad wee Irish girls who could only just see over the controls drove Coronation cars at 70 m.p.h. along the Paisley Road Toll at night – and then you got to Edinburgh, and tall, creaking cars, with an open front step, rumbled gently up, looking like something out of a Will Rogers silent film.

And Denny's never particularly articulate command of the language utterly deserting her in crises, and her reverting to keening or a primitive steam-whistle shriek. You certainly dredged up memories there (Dundee, 1953 – and I thought I'd long forgotten!).

Once or twice I thought you were betraying the Suspension of Disbelief conspiracy by talking directly to the reader (of course we really know this is only a story, a la Salman Rushdie) but I slowly twigged it was the dialogue with God. Sorry about that.

For chapter seven you claim inspiration from the programme note to Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique – one of my favourite bits (bits? how many symphonies would like to be called a ‘bit?') of music. Did you know that Berlioz, in his original programme (which he later swopped round the order of) took the note direct from Beethoven's Pastoral? Yes, well …

Thanks for a most enjoyable, and challenging, tour inside someone's very believable head.

Yours sincerely
David Clayre