of glamorous women wearing very little, but forbade showing them in amorous clinches, so their adventures involved physical violence and bondage instead. There is violent action and some bondage in Blake’s art but no perversity, though his men and women, often floating or leaping through space, are usually naked. When fifteen or sixteen I discovered Aubrey Beardsley and loved the way he made innocent fun of mild perversity. He drew naked bodies beautifully, but also enjoyed inventing fantastic costumes for them to dress and undress in. I studied his illustrations along with Blake’s in the Mitchell Library, and failed in attempts to make pictures combining Beardsley’s solid blacks with Blake’s rich colouring.
Infant Joy from Songs of Innocence by William Blake
But The Horse’s Mouth also prepared me for a difficult future. The character of Jimson was partly based on J.D. Fergusson (whom Joyce Carey met in Edinburgh), and partly on Stanley Spencer, but these painters had enough money not to suffer for their art. Jimson was shown wrestling with the penury undergone by Van Gogh and Gauguin. I later learned that Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Cézanne, though never poor, also suffered terrible defeats. In a late notebook Leonardo asked himself “What has been done? Tell me if anything was ever done?” The statue that would have proved him a sculptor as great as Michelangelo was destroyed by French soldiers using it as target practice and his only mural, The Last Supper, was crumbling when he completed it. In a derelict chapel Jimson finally paints a great mural on the theme of the Creation, persists in painting it as municipal workmen demolish the building. He falls from the scaffolding and, badly injured, is carried away in an ambulance when the adventure of his life (and death, which quickly follows) strikes him as comic. He bursts out laughing and a nun tells him, “You should be praying, not laughing.” He replies, “It’s the same thing, Mother” – a wonderful end to a book and a life.
The Comedy of the Rhinegold , Aubrey Beardsley, title page to unpublished book, circa 1896, 28 x 21 cm
When babies start focusing their eyes all they see is amazing novelty. Wordsworth’s Ode on Intimations of Immortality in Childhood tells how this lovely sense of the world “fades into the light of common day”. All educations must prepare us for pain but some do it too thoroughly. Life becomes daily grind – painful acceptance. I was taught that the universe and evolving life there should be a grand setting for an adventurous future, though like many teenagers I often felt lonely. I shared no sport with other youths, was fascinated by girls but afraid to touch them so never went to dance halls. I had friends but only talked freely to them one at a time, so was not asked to parties. But the chaotic inner feelings and ideas (some splendid, some horrible) that made me socially awkward were, I knew, the essential raw materials of art. I became sure I could paint and write any big thing I imagined, if allowed time to work on it long and hard enough. This confidence in my artistic abilities and contempt for my character or social self – except as a source of raw material – is perhaps frequent among artists, and helps us survive in societies with no use for us.
Note that the pictures I most loved and learned from all had clear outlines. I must have feared or distrusted anything vague or liable to shift and depart. Making a picture is one way of stopping some shapes of things changing – stopping time as long as the picture lasts. It is not strange that over the years I became more and more fascinated by the difficulty of depicting moving water and clouds, and those times of day and weather that Turner (that other great Cockney William) painted so wonderfully well.
This union of confidence in work with a highly interested, but basic contempt for my self is frequent among artists, and perhaps many other folk.
Three: Miss Jean Irwin, 1945–52
IN 1945 WE came home to Riddrie. In Wetherby I had played with other boys of my age, climbing trees, making dens in bushes, damming streams. I had a mental map of what was then a small market town on the Great North Road after it crossed the River Wharf, with the hostel my dad managed, racecourse to the east, the school and church on a cross-roads to the west. From walks and cycle rides I knew the countryside around it with the villages Bilton and Bickerton. I was now old enough to discover that Riddrie was one suburb of a huge smoky industrial city where my family was an unimportant detail – Glasgow was too big for me to mentally grasp.
Dad’s unsuccessful efforts to get a better job than cutting boxes on a machine, Mum’s worry about money and the future were also depressing. He found relief most evenings in unpaid secretarial work for the Camping Club of Great Britain (Scottish branch) and in weekend climbing and camping excursions on which he would have loved to take us all. Mum could no longer enjoy these. I could but usually refused to go because I hated being guided by his greater knowledge and experience of open-air life. I also had the excuse of very bad bouts of mainly facial eczema alternating with asthma attacks. These enabled me to stay at home in the small bedroom, at the small version of a senior executive’s desk my dad had made when his hobby was carpentry. Here I sat scribbling pictures and illustrating stories of magical worlds where I was rich and powerful, fantasies nourished by escapist literature borrowed from Riddrie Public Library, early Disney cartoon films, BBC radio dramatizations of Conan Doyle’s Lost World and H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds.
One day Mum put some of my scribblings in a handbag and took me by tram to Kelvingrove. She had read in a newspaper that Miss Jean Irwin held an art class on Saturday mornings in Kelvingrove, and I believe she hoped (though she never said so) that this class would get me out of the house and give me more friends. Children in it were supposed to be recommended by teachers, but my mum was an independent woman. A half-hour tram ride brought us to Kelvingrove, not yet open to the general public, but she swiftly got admission from an attendant who explained where to go. We went up broad marble stairs and along to a marble-floored balcony-corridor over-looking the great central hall, and I heard exciting orchestral music. At the top of more steps we saw twenty or thirty children busy painting at little tables before very high windows, painting to music from a gramophone, as record players were then called. I drifted around looking at what these kids painted while Mum showed my scribbles to Miss Irwin, who let me join her class.
Miss Irwin’s class , circa late 1940s
For the next five years Saturday mornings were my happiest times. This once-a-week sense of unusual well-being partly came from dependence on appliances like those in most British homes which, apart from the lighting, were mostly pre-electric. Our hot water taps drew on a tank behind the coal fire that warmed our living room. Baths were not taken casually and Friday was my bath night. Mum washed clothing in a deep kitchen sink, rubbing it a piece at a time on a ribbed glass panel in a wooden washing board, squeezing water out by passing it with one hand through a small mangle (which we called The Wringer) into the shallower sink, while turning with the other a handle that made the cylinders revolve. Bedclothes were then hung to dry on our back green clothes lines, other clothing on the kitchen pulley or a clothes horse before the living-room fire. After that she ironed them. Washing machines only became common in Britain halfway through the 1950s. Mum may have worked hard enough to give me a change of clothes twice a week, but I only remember how fresh newly laundered socks, underwear and shirt felt when I dressed on Saturday morning.
If the day was warm enough to go without a jacket I felt the whole city was my home, and that in Kelvingrove I was a privileged part of it. The art class children came an hour before the public were admitted, I was always earliest and could therefore take the most roundabout way to the painting place, starting with a wide circuit
