The Ends of Our Tethers by Alasdair Gray Page B

pupil’s hand?
    I don’t know, but if so Britain is
a very queer nation.

AIBLINS

    L ONG AGO A COLLEGE OF further education paid me to help folk write poems, stories and other things that bring nobody a steady wage. I had applied for the job because I was in debt and needed a steady wage. The college also provided an office, desk, two chairs and flow of hopeful writers who met me one at a time. I must have talked to nearly a hundred of them while the job lasted but can now only remember:
A shy housewife writing a novel about being the mistress of a South American dictator.
An engineering lecturer writing a TV comedy about lecturers in a college of further education.
Two teenage girls, unknown to eachother, who wrote passionate verses against the evils of abortion.
A dauntingly erudite medical student writing a dissertation proving, by Marxist dialectic, that Rimsky Korsakov’s Golden Cockerel was a better forecast of mankind’s political future than Wagner’s Ring .
The twelve-year-old daughter of Chinese restaurateurs who, led in by an older sister or perhaps mother or aunt, gravely handed me a sheaf of papers with a narrow column of small neat writing down the middle of each, writing that tersely described such horribly possible events that I feared they were cries for help, though of course I treated them as fiction.
And Ian Gentle.
    Â   
    Ian was a thin student whose manner suggested he found life a desperate but comical game he was bound to lose. He gave me a page of prose telling how raindrops slide down leaves and stems, then join between grass blades in trickles that gradually fill hollows in the ground making them pools, pools steadily enlarging until they too join and turnfields into lakes. Without emotional adverbs and adjectives, without surprising metaphors, similes or dramatic punctuation, Gentle’s ordinary words made a natural event seem rare and lovely. My new job had not yet taught me caution. I looked across the desk, waved the page of prose at him and said, “If I had written this I would strongly suspect myself of genius.”
    He smiled slyly and asked, “Can I sell it?” “No. Too short. If you made it part of a story with the rest equally good Chapman might print it but Scottish magazines pay very little. Even in England the best literary magazines pay less for a story than a shop assistant’s weekly wage. But this is a beautiful description, perfect in itself. Write more of them.”
    He shrugged hopelessly and said, “I can’t. You see I was inspired when I wrote that.” “What inspired you?”
    â€œSomething I heard by accident. I switched on the radio one night and heard this bloke, Peter Redgrove, spouting his poetry, very weird stuff. I’m not usually fond of poetry but this was different. There was a lot of water in what he recited and I’m fond of grey days with the rain falling steadily like Ioften saw it on my granny’s farm when I was a wee boy. I suddenly wanted to write like Peter Redgrove, not describing water behaving weirdly but water doing the sort of things I used to notice and like.”
    â€œIf a short burst of good poetry has this effect on you then expose yourself to more. There are several books of Redgrove’s poetry. Read all of them, then read MacCaig, Yeats, Frost, Carlos Williams, Auden, Hardy, Owens —”
    â€œWhy bother?”
    â€œYou might enjoy them.”
    â€œBut what would it lead to?”
    â€œIf they inspired you to write more prose of this quality … and if you persisted with your writing, and got some of it into magazines … eventually, at the age of forty, you could end up sitting behind a desk like me talking to somebody like you.”
    He giggled, apologised and asked if nobody in Scotland earned a living by writing. I told him that a few writers of historical romance, crime fiction, science fiction and love stories earned the equivalent of a