Essays: Retrospective

RETROSPECTIVE

Glasgow in the 1950s wasn’t the easiest of places to grow up, dragging, as it did, its own version of the 19th century along with it, long after other places had moved firmly into the 20th. Façades had not been stonecleaned, nor had slums been cleared, though there was an odd beauty to the days when thick fog made the whole city feel like the deck of a ship somewhere on its way to the North Pole. Anti-Catholic and anti-Irish prejudice was rife and even discreetly institutionalised, so that coming from a Catholic family meant constant awareness of discrimination, of a kind of difference that brought a measure of danger with it. What was going on in the family but could never be, and never was, acknowledged, gave an added dimension of unreality, and succeeded in turning life into an ontological puzzle. How much of all of this was in fact happening?

The Jesuit secondary school in Glasgow had only a few priests on its staff, but there were enough of them to set the tone. A premium was placed on academic excellence, and arriving at Cambridge just turned 18 felt like the start of a holiday that would never end. Cambridge being still an overwhelmingly male institution in the early 1970s, the hothouse atmosphere was anything but suitable for sexual exploration. So the mysteries, and potential ecstasies, of being gay were postponed till 1973, graduation, arrival in Rome, and more than a decade spent in Italy teaching English as a foreign language. A fortunate encounter beneath an olive tree in Umbria brought eight years of substantial happiness, companionship, erotic fulfilment and enthusiastic travelling, with a man who continues to be, to all effects, my next of kin.

By then I spoke more Italian than English, and was more comfortable in the acquired language. What explains the choice of Gaelic to write poems? Was it enough that my parents would never be able to read them? Not for many years would I discover my father thought I wrote the poems in English first and then translated them. Returning to Scotland in 1985 was necessary if I was to start writing, but also because I needed to face up to a whole range of issues I had merely escaped from, on a temporary basis. I became passionate about Scottish literature, researching it, writing it and teaching it. To all effects a nationalist, though consistently a Labour voter throughout the Thatcher years. An academic post brought respectability and security along with an alibi, a shield which made it possible to write novels as well as poems.

Many members of staff in university literature departments desperately wanted to be writers, and convinced themselves, for one reason or another, that they could not be. The tensions that get released when a colleague launches a career as a novelist can prove unmanageable. Becoming a writer changed the way I read and taught. It is not my fault if the two roles, academic and novelist, became ultimately irreconcilable. All alibis have the potential for turning destructive. The dominant tendencies in Scottish fiction after 1995 made me wonder whether I actually wanted to be a Scottish writer and, welcome as the arrival of a parliament was (I would vote for independence tomorrow!) the kind of country I had hoped to end up living in seemed further off than ever.

Writing is a path, and following it demands life choices which can be postponed, but not indefinitely. Living in another culture and being surrounded by another language beckoned again. Five years in love with a Hungarian man had brought me to Budapest and, though my initial reactions were contradictory, I decided there could be no better place to spend a transition period, if not the remainder of my life. I was lucky enough to abandon university teaching with a minimum of financial security. The new environment unleashed a flood of poetry and provided the setting for a new novel. It has been a relief to stop being two, or several people, and to try to make a go of being one.

August 2006

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