George Friel
MR ALFRED M.A.
A NOVEL
Introduced by Douglas Gifford
Contents
Introduction
MR ALFRED M.A.
Arguably, the writing of George Friel (1910–75) is far more widely known today than it was during the author’s lifetime. His short stories were finally collected and published in book form in 1992, a mere eighteen years after his death and more than half a century after their author had originally planned to publish a collection of stories. His first novel, The Bank of Time (1959), finally made it into paperback in 1994–await of only thirty-five years. The appearance of this collection of his three greatest novels may now accelerate the slow process of popularisation of a still-neglected literary canon.
In his lifetime, Friel was a prophet without much honour in his own country. He found it very hard indeed to get his work published. His inscription to a good friend inside the copy of his novel Grace and Miss Partridge (1969) nicely summarises some of the frustrations he encountered getting his work into print:
In explanation of the long delay
I wrote a story in 63
about a partridge in a bare tree.
I typed it clear in 64
and tried my publishers once more.
Back it came in 65 –
Ah well, I said, I’ll still survive.
It lay unread till 66
till Mrs Boyars1, promising nix,
asked to see it again in 67,
accepted it – so all forgiven.
I got no proofs till 68
and that was November, rather late.
Printed at last in 69,
so now it’s yours as well as mine.2
The novel in question was not written by an unknown writer. It was to be George Friel’s third published novel, and it followed the minor triumph of The Boy Who Wanted Peace (1964), a book which received wide acclaim from mainstream critics and fellow writers, and one which was compared favourably with Brighton Rock, Lord of the Flies and A Clockwork Orange, among others. And yet the publisher prevaricated.
The author, for his part, was no trimmer before the winds and fads of literary fashion. He was the uncompromising realist who also penned the lines:
Seven times I wrote this story,
Not for cash or fame or glory,
Just to get the telling right
Though it never see the light.
If it’s printed I confess Truly
I could not care less.3
All of Friel’s writing is based on Glasgow, its new housing schemes, its industrial wastelands, its blackboard jungles, the nooks and crannies of its closes and sandstone tenements. No writer can paint this landscape with more laconic authority or grim humour. Friel tried to describe this world ‘like it was’, unvarnished and unidealised. Defending himself from the accusation that his fictional world was bleak and depressing, he asked rhetorically, ‘What am I going to do? Put my head in the sand and say that everything is lovely? Surely a novelist, even in Glasgow, if he is writing about contemporary life, must tell the truth as he sees it. If I could see a lot of sweetness and light in Glasgow I would be happy to write about it: this is life. If you say what is going on then something might get done. But if you play Mr Glasgow and pretend that it’s a fine warm-hearted city then you are kidding yourself, kidding the public, and pledging the future to no reform.’ (Interview in The Guardian, 24 March 1972.)
After Glasgow, a second key theme of George Friel’s fiction is the world of Scottish education. If they read no other fiction in the course of their studies, all trainee teachers should read the novels of Friel. They tell us more about the Scottish school system of the 1950s and ’60s than any history book could – and, by extension, offer us much to ponder regarding the kind of school system we have today. When the psychiatrist asks Mr Alfred why he doesn’t like the new methods and new schemes of work in his profession, Mr Alfred explains: ‘Well … all that’s said in their favour is that they’re new. I don’t like that. It’s not a reason.’ (p. 584) What would Mr Alfred – in his own literary way, a champion of traditional values – make of the current orthodoxies of Scottish education, after a further quarter of a century of relentless novelties?
Like Friel, many modern Scottish writers have been teachers by profession. One thinks of Sorley Maclean and Norman MacCaig, Robin Jenkins and Iain Crichton Smith, to name but a few. But unlike any of these writers, the world of school is uniquely central to Friel’s novels and stories. School in his fiction is a metaphor for the uneasy relationships between the adolescent and the adult world, whether individual or institutional. At the individual level, Percy Phinn is the not-quite adult leader of the Brotherhood in The Boy Who Wanted Peace, whose authority over the gang rests on the fact that he is bigger and older than his schoolboy rank-and-file; likewise Miss Partridge’s potentially sinister hold over Grace; and Mr Alfred’s more innocent infatuation with Rose Weipers.
Friel tried for an authentic picture of the school system he worked within. He had no wish to demonise or idealise it. Sometimes the picture he painted went too close to the bone for the apologists for the system, and he was certainly no friend of political correctness. It seems fairly clear that Friel blames the system for failing to face the facts of the situation it had to cope with. As he rambles semi-coherently at the apocalyptic end of the book, Mr Alfred finds a piece of chalk in his pocket, and this sets him off:
‘Talk and chalk,’ he said. ‘That’s me. Out-of-date. The child is master of the man. New methods. Visual aids. Projects. Research. Doesn’t matter half the bastards can’t read. Do research just the same. Discover Pythagoras’ theorem for themselves. Could you?’ (p. 575)
Or again:
‘You must never say a child is stupid,’ said Mr Lindsay. ‘There are no stupid children, just as there are no bad children.’
‘But there are,’ said Mr Alfred. ‘Whether you believe in
