Lanark_ a life in 4 books - Alasdair Gray [167]
Was Adam a Negro? Duncan Thaw thinks so….
“I have no trouble finding nude models,” he remarks, with something suspiciously like a wink….
He hopes this will be the first of many murals. He hopes to make a lot of money this way. He says he needs it.
He felt as if there was poison in his chest, as if half his blood had been removed. He sat still until the old minister wandered in and asked, “Have you read … ?”
“Yes.”
“It’s unfortunate. Unfortunate.”
“Surely she was trying to be cruel!”
“No, I don’t think so. I met many reporters when I was chaplain at Barlinnie Jail and on average they’re no more wicked than other people. But their job depends on being entertaining, so they make everything look as clownish or as monstrous as they can. If any more reporters come, Duncan, my advice is to tell them nothing you really feel or believe.”
A reporter came that evening, took Thaw for a drink in a pub and explained that he too would have been an artist if his uncle hadn’t opposed the idea. Thaw said, “Please tell your readers I am not an atheist. I may have my own conception of God, but it doesn’t clash with the opinions of the church, my employer.”
This appeared two days later under the heading:
NOT AN ATHEIST
The Cowlairs “mad muralist,” Duncan Thaw, has denied he is an atheist. He says he has his own conception of good but it doesn’t clash.
After this Thaw noticed that journalists weren’t interested in his thoughts, though they asked him what it felt like to sleep alone in a big building and kept photographing Adam and Eve. An exception was a tall man in a beautifully cut grey suit from the Glasgow Herald. He sat for half an hour in the front pew staring at the ceiling, then sat on the organ stool and gazed at the Eden wall. At last he said, “I like this.”
“I’m glad.”
“Of course it will be almost impossible for me to criticize it. It isn’t cubist or expressionist or surrealist, it isn’t academic or kitchen sink or even naive. It’s a bit like Puvis de Chavannes, but who nowadays knows Puvis de Chavannes? I’m afraid you’re going to pay the penalty of being outside the main streams of development.”
“The best British painters are that.”
“Eh?”
“Hogarth. Blake. Turner. Spencer. Burra.”
“Oh, you like these? Turner is good, of course. His handling of colour anticipates Odilon Redon and Jackson Pollock. Well, I’ll do my best for you, though this is one of my busy weeks. The Glasgow and Edinburgh schools are having their diploma shows, so I haven’t much space.”
At the end of an article about other people the Herald said this:
It isn’t easy to discover Cowlairs Parish Church in the depths of northeast Glasgow, but hardy souls who make the effort will find Duncan Thaw’s (unfinished) Genesis mural worth a great deal more than a passing glance.
The newspapers sickened him of the mural. He had taken months to make every shape as clear and harmonious as possible, putting in nothing he didn’t feel lovely or exciting. He knew that reports must always simplify and twist, but he also felt that the most twisted report gives some idea of its cause, and his work had caused nothing but useless gossip. He lay curled on the pulpit floor, dozing and waking till afternoon, then rose and stared, biting his thumb knuckle, at the unfinished wall. All he could see in it now were complicated shapes. With a slam and clattering McAlpin and Drummond came in followed by Macbeth. Thaw gazed at them astonished and relieved.
“We are here,” said Drummond, “because we read in the papers that you are holding weekday services in which Negroes are raped by white women.”
“You will gather that we are slightly puggled,” said McAlpin. “Stotious,” said Drummond.
“Miraculous,” said McAlpin.
“Full,” said Drummond.
They starting running round the church along the backs of pews, zigzagging through the nave and up into the gallery, pausing