Hind The Dear Green Place

and Fur Sadie
1. Auflage 2011
ISBN: 978-0-85790-150-7
Verlag: Polygon
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 352 Seiten

WINNER OF THE GUARDIAN FICTION OF THE YEAR AWARD ONE OF THE LIST'S BEST SCOTTISH BOOKS OF ALL TIME Set in nineteen-sixties Glasgow, this novel portrays the struggles and conflicts of young working-class hero and would-be novelist Mat Craig, whose desire to define himself as an artist creates social and family tensions. This classic of Scottish twentieth-century literature is renowned for its vivid descriptions of Glasgow and the fight for individual creative expression; it remains as authentic and relevant more than fifty years after its original publication. Includes an Introduction by Alasdair Gray as well as Archie Hind's unfinished novel Fur Sadie and one of his essays 'Men of the Clyde'. * 'An exciting first novel worth a dozen more seasoned efforts' - Guardian 'The best novel ever written' - Skinny 'A touching insight into human strength and frailty' - Daily Mail

Archie Hind was born in 1928. Educated in Glasgow, where he has spent most of his life, his jobs have included bus driving, glass sculpting and data processing. He studied writing for a year at Newbattle College under Edwin Muir and attended WEA lectures by Jack Rillie of the English Department at Glasgow University; both men were to influence him and his writing. The Dear Green Place first published in 1966 is Hind's only novel and won both the Guardian Fiction Award and the Yorkshire Post's Award for Best Book.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Hind, Archie

Leseproben

Introduction

In 1928 Archie Hind was born in Dalmarnock, an industrial part of east Glasgow. His father, a stoker on locomotive engines, worked for fifty-one years on the railways, with an interval as a soldier in World War One. Though liked by workmates and friends he was so bad a husband that when her son Archie was seven and older brother nine their mother left home with her two-year-old daughter. Ten years later the parents were reconciled; meanwhile the boys lived with their father and his widowed mother. The home Mrs Hind had abandoned, while decent and clean, was like most tenement homes in Glasgow between the wars, a room and kitchen with communal lavatory on an outside landing. Baths had to be taken in public bathhouses and Archie sometimes used these less than he wished, to stop people seeing bruises from his father’s beatings. These stopped when he and his brother grew strong enough to hit back.

The brutal part of his upbringing was not the most formative part and has no place in his novel , where the hero’s father is based on a more representative Glasgow dad, a tolerant, intelligent Marxist uncle. The mainstream of working-class thought and culture in Glasgow was the Socialism of the Independent Labour Party, the party George Orwell most favoured, and which returned seven Scottish MPs to Westminster before World War Two. After 1946 the best of these died or joined the Parliamentary Labour Party. Like most Socialists between the two great wars Archie’s people had been hopeful about the Russian Revolution and would have distrusted the U.S.S.R. more if the British government had not been so friendly to Fascist Italy, Germany and Spain.

Archie grew up with a love of literature and music – he and his brother both loved singing, and he learned piping in the Boys’ Brigade. Leaving school at fourteen he entered Beardmores, the largest engineering firm in Britain. It had built cars, planes, the first British airship, and still made great steam engines for ships and railway locomotives. By the late 1960s Scottish steam-powered industries were obsolete, but Archie joined the firm when World War Two was giving it a last profitable lease of life. For two years he was a messenger, reporting to Head Office on the progress of shafts and propellers shaped in the forges, turning sheds and workshops. He should have become an apprentice when sixteen, but his father wanted the higher wage Archie earned by shifting to a warehouse supplying local grocers. In 1945 or 6 he could have gone to university, since the last act of the government that brought Britain through the war had enabled any student to attend colleges of further education who passed the entrance exam. This would have been well within Archie’s power; but have meant even less money for his dad than an engineering apprenticeship. Archie only left home when eighteen and conscripted into the British Army. He served with the medical corps for two years in Singapore and Ceylon.

Which tells nothing about the birth and growth of his wide erudition and strong imagination through reading, close attention to recorded music and broadcasts, and intense discussion with those of similar interests. British professional folk often think creative imaginations unlikely outside their own social class – on first reading Virginia Woolf thought James Joyce (despite his Jesuit and Dublin University education) had all the faults of a self-taught working man. Who in Glasgow could see the growth of an unusual mind in a twenty-year-old ex-Beardmores progress clerk, warehouseman and demobbed medical corps private? Jack Rillie could, the Glasgow University English lecturer who ran an extra-mural class in literature. Archie attended it and on Jack Rillie’s recommendation went to Newbattle Abbey, the Workers’ Further Education College in Midlothian. The Principal was the Orkney-born poet Edwin Muir who, with his wife Willa, were the foremost translators of German language novels by Broch, Musil and Kafka. Archie became a friend of both.

By now he had decided to write a book that he knew would never sell enough to support him – a book that would leave him in the eyes of all but those who liked unusually careful writing. Soon after Newbattle Archie married Eleanor, a girl he had met through the Tollcross Park tennis club. She accepted him and his strange ambition while foreseeing the consequences, perhaps because her Jewish mother and Irish father came from people who did not identify worldly success with great achievements. Her mother had been brought from the Crimea to Scotland by parents escaping from Czarist pogroms, and like many Jews in Glasgow she attended left-wing meetings. At one of these she had met John Slane, a coalminer who learned to make spectacles while studying at night classes. They married and he became an optician successful enough, and rich enough, to buy Eleanor a beautiful Steinway grand piano and give it house room. But he hated her marriage to a man who supported his growing family by working as a social security clerk, trolley-bus driver and labourer in the municipal slaughterhouse between writing a novel that would never earn a supportive income. Archie and Eleanor made friends with writers and artists met through a new Glasgow Arts Centre which met in premises leased by the painter J. D. Ferguson and his wife Margaret Morris, founder of the Celtic Dance Theatre.

I met them in 1958 when they had three sons (Calum, Gavin, Martin) and young daughter Nellimeg, whose mental age was arrested at less than two years by minor epilepsy. Their last child Sheila was born five years later. I had recently left Glasgow Art School and the Hinds had the only welcoming home I knew where literature, painting and music were subjects of extended, enjoyable conversations. It was a room and kitchen flat like that where Archie had been born, but in Greenfield Street, Govan. The room held the children’s bunks so social life was always in the warm kitchen which, despite many evening visitors, never seemed overcrowded. These were years when London critics thought Osborne’s , Amis’s , Braine’s , were a new school of literature created through the agency of the welfare state. These three works described working-class lads acquiring middle-class women. Archie and I thought they described nothing profound when compared with the best writings of Joyce and D. H. Lawrence, Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald. We admired , and found we were both working on a novel about the only struggle we could take seriously – the struggle to make a work of art. This has been an important theme in poetry and fiction since Wordsworth’s . It inspired Archie most in the poetry of Yeats and fiction of Thomas Mann. He liked good jazz and American Blues, the songs of Edith Piaf and The Beatles, but thought most highly celebrated contemporary work – Beckett’s dramas, John Cage’s music, abstract expressionist painting and Warhol’s Campbell’s soup icons – indicated a thinning in the rich intellectual texture of Western culture. I was not so sure, but agreed that as writers we should maintain that texture. Our novels were both about low-income Glasgow artists doomed to failure, this coincidence worried us slightly, but we had chosen that theme long before meeting each other, and had to put up with it.

In the middle 1960s the Hinds moved to Dalkeith where Archie worked with Ferranti’s Pegasus, an early computer filling nearly the whole floor of a building. He left that job to finally complete his novel, and having completed it, worked as copy-taker in the , Edinburgh, while awaiting publication. In Milne’s Bar he sometimes conversed amicably about sport and politics with Hugh MacDiarmid. In 1966 the novel was published in Hutchinson’s New Author series. Its title, , was Archie’s translation of or , Gaelic words that became . They had previously been translated , , and (in imperial days when it was the second largest and smokiest city in Britain) the or . Archie’s translation is now generally accepted.

All good novels are historical – describe living people in a definite place and time. shows a city that had grown between 1800 and 1960, becoming for almost a century the second biggest in Britain. The earliest paragraphs give the layout – a city completely unlike London, for in Glasgow the homes of labourers, tradesmen and professional folk were intermingled with parks, shops, thriving factories with smoking chimneys and districts of old industrial wasteland. The time is about the 1950s when unemployment hardly existed and most of the labour force, though poorly housed by later standards, had the better wages and working conditions promised to the trade unions by the wartime coalition government. This Scottish region of the newly established British Welfare State gives Mat Craig the chance to occasionally dodge the commercial forces that, before 1939, would have made him an industrial serf, or political activist, or even destitute. He has enough room to exercise, however painfully, what was once a bourgeois or aristocratic privilege – the free will needed to attempt a work of art. The only other twentieth-century novel I know that places a writer’s struggle in an equally well imagined city is Nabokov’s novel .

Published in 1966, won four prizes: