Long 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 a 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 television comedy about lecturers in a college of further education.
Two teenage girls, unknown to each other, who wrote passionate verses against the evils of abortion.
A dauntingly erudite medical student writing a dissertation proving that Rimsky-Korsakov's Golden Cockerel was a better forecast of mankind's political future than Wagner's Ring.
The 12-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.
He 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 and make them pools, pools steadily enlarging until they too join and turn fields 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 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 should print it but Scottish magazines pay very little. Even in England, the best literary magazines pay less than a shop assistant's weekly wage for a story. 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?"
"Something 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 I often saw it on my granny's farm. I suddenly wanted to write like Peter Redgrove, not describing weird things but something I've noticed and liked."
"If 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, Carlos Williams, Auden, Eliot, Hardy, Owen-"
"Why bother?"
"You might enjoy them."
"But what would it lead to?"
"If they inspired you to write more things 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 anyone 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 teacher's income by writing a new novel every year or two.
"Thanks," said Gentle, standing up to leave, "I don't think I'll bother. But if it's genius you want, read Luke Aiblins's stuff. It's as weird as Redgrove's."
"Is he a student here?"
"In a way yes, but then again, not really."
"Tell him to show me his work."
"I will, but he's hard to pin down."
In the college refectory a week or so later a sociology lecturer walked over to me looking so grimly defiant that I feared I had offended her. She placed a slim folder with a bright tartan cover on the table beside my plate and said, "Read these poems. I typed them, but they're written by Luke Aiblins, a truly remarkable student of mine."
"I hear he's a genius."
"He is, but needs guidance. Can I make an appointment for him?"
We made an appointment. She said, "I think I can ensure that he keeps it, though it won't be easy. He's very hard to pin down."
She left. I glanced through the poems and saw they were beautifully spaced and typed. None had titles. I read the first with interest, reread it with astonishment and a third time with pleasure. I then knew it by heart.
Bone caged, blood clagged, nerve netted here I sit,
bee in stone honeycomb or beast in pit or flea in bin,
pinned down, penned in,
unable to die or fly or be any one thing but me
a hypochondriac heart chilled
by the spittle of toads that croak
on the moon's cryptic hemisphere.
But yet, loft-haunter, tunnel-groper, interloper among men,
I am the Titan and my pen
wet with blue ink or black
alone can tell them what they thought and think and give
them back
the theme, scheme, dream whose head
they broke, and left for dead.
Crown, King and Divinity, all these shall be mine
to twine and take and make into a masterpiece of fine
thread and strong line;
or let me write my life ten volumes in one book
of good and bad friends, women who will and will not
walk with me,
the warped, harmonious, happy, sick and dead.
While I have eyes to look, so let it be. Amen.
His other poems were equally resounding. I was now keen to meet him, quite unable to imagine him.
He kept the appointment and was a dazzlingly beautiful boy of eighteen or nineteen. His head of neatly curling brown hair and brown eyes harmonised perfectly with brown sweater and fawn slacks. Relaxation and eagerness don't usually blend, but in him they did. He entered with the happy air of someone who has all the love he wants while looking forward to more; he sat down, folded his arms and leaned toward me with an enquiring tilt of the head and encouraging smile. Beauty in people makes me want to stare with my mouth open. In men it almost strikes me as indecent, yet I felt a pang of envy that I quelled by turning my chair a little so that I looked past, not at him. As I cleared my throat to make an opening remark, Aiblins said: "Excuse the question: why don't you look straight at me?"
"I look straight at hardly anyone in case they think me rude. I suppose I'm afraid of most people, but I'm not afraid of their writings. I like yours very much. You know that the rhymes of words inside a line matter as much as rhymes at the end. You know that the rhythms of lines in a verse can vary. You enjoy playing with the sounds of words and you make them entertaining for the reader."
"Right," said Aiblins, smiling and nodding.
"You have also learned from some very abstruse poets, Donne and Hopkins. Am I correct?"
"Eh?" said Aiblins.
"Have you read John Donne and Gerard Manley Hopkins?"
"No. Wait a minute. Yes. I once dipped into them but my work is original. I hear it inside this," Aiblins tapped the side of his head with a finger.
"Never mind, Leavis says inspiration is often unconscious reminiscence. Now, creative writing teachers usually urge people to use the plainest, commonest words because many of the profoundest and loveliest and funniest ideas have been put into plain words. 'To be or not to be, that is the question.' 'I wish I were where Helen lies.' 'So you despise me, Mr Gigadibs.'"
"No," said Aiblins reassuringly.
"I was quoting Browning. Now these well-meaning instructors forget that the same great wordsmiths very often relax or ascend into sonorous complexities: 'Shark'd up a list of lawless resolutes,' 'And Ele??l? to th' asphaltic pool,' 'each hung bell's Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name,' (and here I flatter you) 'a hypochondriac heart, chilled by the spittle of toads that croak on the moon's cryptic hemisphere.' That line of yours is absurdly pompous, grotesque, almost insane but..." I started laughing "... it works! We are often depressed for reasons we don't understand but feel are caused by something huge and distant, something..." I paused on the verge of saying weird, an Ian Gentle word "... something uncanny that might as well be on the moon."
Aiblins, who had looked puzzled for a moment, smiled and said, "Right."
"But I want to point out that these are the first poems of a very young writer, someone who is (excuse the simile) like a bird flapping its wings to attract attention before it launches into the air. You know that because it is your only theme. You should now-"
"Excuse me," said Aiblins quietly yet firmly, "Are these my poems?"
He lifted the folder from the desk, glanced inside then laid it back, shaking his head, smiling and saying, "Yes, my poems dressed in tartan. Women are incredible. What can you do with them? You were saying?"
"The theme of all your poems is the great poet you are going to be. It is a prologue to your life's work, a convincing prologue, but not enough."
"Why not?"
"Take the first poem, the best, and the first verse, also the best: 'Bone caged, blood clagged, nerve netted ' etcetera. You are describing a state of confinement and frustration everyone has sometimes felt, poets and housewives and schoolchildren and ditch-diggers and college lecturers. Right?"
"Hm. Maybe," said Aiblins.
"Verse two. 'Loft-haunter, tunnel-groper, interloper' etcetera. Here you state your feelings of being both above and below others, being an outsider as we called ourselves in the 1960s, so you're still talking for a lot of people, especially young ambitious ones. Right?"
"You're getting warm."
"Then comes 'I am the Titan and my pen' etcetera. You now declare yourself a masterful figure like Prometheus, someone who will help humanity recover something fine that it has spoiled and lost: innocence perhaps, faith, hope, love or only God knows what. So you are not now speaking for all humanity, you are describing what some very confident priests, politicians, prosperous idealists and writers sometimes feel, but you are speaking mainly for Luke Aiblins."
Aiblins smiled and nodded.
"Now look at verse three! 'Crown, King and Divinity, all these shall be mine'. What do these three words with initial capitals mean?"
"You tell me. You are the grand panjandrum, the salaried professor, the professional critic. I'm just a humble poet. You tell me my meaning."
"I think they mean that you feel sublimely smug because of your verbal talent, but I suggest that until you write well about something else you are like a runner jogging up and down at the starting line before the pistol is fired."
"Another simile," said Aiblins brightly. "What are you reading these days?"
"Henryson's 'Fables'."
"You enjoy that stuff?" said Aiblins, incredulously.
"Yes. When I concentrate I find it astonishingly good. I'm concentrating just now because I'm reviewing a new edition of them for 'Cencrastus'."
"Hallelujah! Keep concentrating. I'm sticking to Shakespeare. Have you read 'The Two Gentlemen of Verona'?"
"No. I've never even seen it acted."
"You should. It's great. Some idiots think he wrote very little of it but-"
For fifteen or twenty minutes Aiblins talked about 'The Two Gentlemen of Verona' until I had no desire to read or see that play, then he looked at what seemed a new expensive wristwatch, apologised for having to leave now, lifted the folder, went to the door and paused to say, "Mark Twain."
"Yes?"
"Have you read his 'American Claimant'?"
"No."
"You should. And don't blame yourself too much for the things you've just said. A couple of them made sense. Think on! I'll contact you when I need you."
I was left feeling horribly confused. Was he a genius? Was I an idiot? His damned poem kept repeating in my head when I would have preferred to remember MacDiarmid's 'Watergaw' or Hardy's 'After a Journey' or even Lear's 'The Dong With the Luminous Nose'. Did that mean it was better than these? Impossible. But why could I not forget it? He had said he would contact me. A few weeks after seeing him, I approached his sociology lecturer. She was chatting with colleagues in the staff club.
"Pardon me," I said. "Can you tell me how Luke Aiblins-"
"I can tell you nothing about Luke Aiblins except that he is mad, stupid, nasty and has thank God left this place for good."
She turned her back to me.
The college changed its creative writing teacher every two years, perhaps to avoid pension contributions. I found similar jobs elsewhere, then had a book of poems published, then another. I visited Edinburgh Castle with an American friend and saw that an attendant in one of the regimental museums was Ian Gentle. I asked if the job bored him. He shrugged and said, "Not more than teaching, or punching railway tickets, or nursing in a mental hospital, or canning peas, which I have also tried. It's like reincarnation. You don't need to die to become somebody else. Have you read Schopenhauer's 'The World As Will and Idea'?"
I had not and asked if he ever saw Aiblins.
"Poor Luke," said Gentle, "I'd rather not say anything about poor Luke."
I left the castle with a weird feeling that Aiblins would soon appear again.
Yet I was unprepared when the phone rang and a voice said, "Luke Aiblins contacting you as arranged. Remember?"
"I remember you but remember no arrangement. It's years since you said you'd contact me."
"I'm doing it. I have a job for you. You're at home?"
"Yes, but- "
"I'll be there in ten minutes."
He hung up on me and arrived in four.
He was no longer beautiful because his nose was thickened and flattened except at the tip, which bent sideways. He was also haggard, with long bedraggled hair, wore a shabby duffel coat and carried a duffel bag, things I had not seen since my own student days. His manner was still eager but more tense. I asked if he would like tea or coffee.
"No, thanks," he said, settling into an armchair with the bag between his legs, "let's get down to business. You are at last able to help me because you are the king."
"What do you mean?"
"Poet Laureate of Dundee!" he said, grinning.
"I was born there."
"Honorary Doctorate Saint Andrews University!" he said, chuckling.
"I was a student there."
"Winner!" he said, almost inarticulate with laughter, "Winner of the Saltire award and a colossal Arts Council bursary for 'Antique Nebula! Antique Nebula!! Antique Nebula!!!'"
"Have you read it?"
"Enough of it to see that it's crap, rubbish, pretentious drivel, an astonishing victory of sound over sense. You won't mind me saying that because you're intelligent so must know it's crap. I bet you often have a wee laugh to yourself about how you've fooled the critics. Ours is a comic opera wee country with several comic opera imitations of English establishments. They're even thinking of giving us our own comic opera parliament! Our old literary crazy gang, MacDiarmid, Goodsir, Garioch etcetera were also crap but they've died, leaving your clique on top. You are now the boss and godfather of Scotland's literary mafia and at last in a position to help a real poet."
From the duffel bag he removed and handed me a thin, grubby folder with a tartan cover. I looked into it then told him, "These are the poems your teacher typed twelve years ago."
"Of course. You said you liked them, so prove it. Get one of your posh London publisher pals to print them. Tell them you'll write an introduction. Of course you won't know what to say so I'll write it. It will appear under your name, so you'll get the credit for introducing a book that won't give you any bother at all."
"Mr Aiblins," I said, "since you invoke the past, let me remind you that I praised the poems for heralding better work. Where is it?"
"Have you learned nothing in the past twelve years?" he groaned, then with an air of immense patience said, "The voice in my head says there is no point in dictating more poems to me before the first lot are in print, so to get the later poetry we both want, you must first get these published. Send them to Faber or Bloodaxe with a strong letter of recommendation by registered post tomorrow. Phone regularly at weekly intervals and pester them till they've read it and offered a decent advance against royalties and a definitive publication date. And photocopy them before posting because then you can send single poems- "
I said, "Listen-"
"No! Last time we met I did the listening, now it's my turn to lay down the law. In the weeks before publication prepare for it by getting single poems published in 'Stand', the 'London Review of Books', the 'Times Literary Supplement', 'Chapman' and 'Cencrastus' beside good reviews of the book itself by well-known poets rather than academics. I suggest for England, Ted Hughes and Craig Raine; for Ireland, Heaney and Paulin; for Scotland, Lochhead and Duffy; for former colonies, Les Murray, Walcott, Ben Okri and Atwood. We have only one problem. My wife won't let me into our house, the people I'm staying with are trying to push me out, so for a while I'll have no contact address. Fear not, I do not plan to camp on your doorstep. I'll call here once a week for your report on developments at an hour you, not me, will choose. Make it as late or early as you please. Well?"
I said, "Mr Aiblins, I am not the godfather of a Scottish literary mafia. There is no such thing. No firm will publish a book, no editor commission a review of it or print a poem from it because I order them. It is also many years since I was employed to show an interest in other folks' writing. I am now a selfish old bastard who cares for nobody's writing but his own. Please go away and tell that to as many other writers as you can. But you appear to be in poor circumstances. I am not. By a coincidence I refuse to explain, I have ?70 in notes upon me. Here, take them. Goodbye!"
"You condescending piss-pot!" he said, smiling as he took the money. "But buying my poems won't get rid of me. I know they'll be safe here because your only claim to fame, your only hope of a place in world literature depends on them. So why postpone that? Your 'Antique Nebula' will be forgotten long before critics notice where you got the few good lines in it."
"Are you suggesting that I have plagiarised you?" I cried, horrified. "I deny it! I deny it!"
"You sound as if you believe that," he said, frowning thoughtfully. "Perhaps you're unconscious of it. Perhaps most plagiarism is unconscious reminiscence."
"I am staring hard at that brass-topped coffee table," I told him, "because it is tempting me to lift it as high as I can in order to smash it down on your idiotic skull. But instead I will phone for the police if you do not take your poems and get the hell out of here."
"Dearie me, dearie me," he said waggishly. "I seem to have annoyed the poor fat bald wee man. He must still envy me. I wonder why?"
He strolled with bag and folder to the front door, which I opened. On the doorstep he turned and said quietly, "One last word of advice. Publish these poems under your own name then try to live up to them. You'll fail, but the effort may make a real man of you, if not a real writer. And think of the fame you'll enjoy! I won't resent that because great poems are more important than fame. Here, take them."
I closed the door on him. A moment later the folder, bent double, fell in through the letter box. My self-respect felt as if it had been squeezed between the heavy rollers of a mangle. His poems were so strongly associated with this feeling that I could not bear to pick them up. Opening the door of a cupboard holding gas meters, I kicked them inside and shut it. I so dreaded hearing from him again that I fixed an answering machine to my telephone and never took a call direct, but he never called again.
Time passed away. So did the Berlin wall and the Russian empire. In the 'Times Literary Supplement', I read reviews of abstruse books by the former student who liked classical opera and now had a medical practice in Stuttgart. I discovered that the little Chinese girl who once visited me was now an award-winning feminist poet who wrote popular, very gruesome crime thrillers under a pseudonym. I read her works closely for signs of my influence and detected none at all.
One day I heard a friendly, eager voice say, "Hullo, how are you? What are you reading these days?"
I stopped and after a moment recognised poor Aiblins. He was completely bald with many bruises on his head and face and many unhealed cuts between them. He wore jeans, a leather jacket and shambled in a way I had not seen before, but his battered features had amazingly recovered the happily relaxed expression I had first envied.
"What happened to your face, Luke?"
"Oh, I had an argument in a pub with a man who glassed me so it became a police matter. I mean the police took me in and gave me a doing before turning me out. But it was all just usual reality, it doesnae matter. Have you read 'The American Claimant' yet?"
"Not yet. Can I buy you a drink?"
I said this because we were in a street very far from where I live.
After two unsuccessful attempts we found a pub that would serve him and sat with pints in a quiet corner. I admitted I had not yet read Two Gentlemen of Verona and steered the talk away from literature by asking if he ever saw his wife nowadays.
"Neither her nor my son. In fact, she kicked me out before he was born because she hated the name I was going to give him-a lovely name it was too, a perfect poem in itself: 'Tristram Pilgrim Aiblins'."
He announced the name with great enthusiasm then repeated it slowly as if separately enjoying each syllable, then asked if I knew what it meant. I said, "Tristram means 'sadly born.' I'm not surprised the mother didn't want her boy called that."
"You've forgotten what Aiblins means. That makes a difference."
"What does Aiblins mean?"
"Look it up, wordsmith," he said, laughing. "Consult a dictionary, you antique Scottish nebula."
"But how did you know a son was coming before he got born?"
He tapped his brow saying, "I heard it in here."
I asked if his inner voice ever gave him poetry nowadays. He said, "I think it's trying to. Sometimes a good line gets through but never a whole couplet or verse because the government is jamming me."
"The government? How?"
"It keeps sending other voices into my head, loud ones that accuse me of terrible things I've never done, never even imagined doing. Why? Why should the government spend money on elaborate broadcasting equipment just to torture me with false accusations only I can hear? It makes no sense. It's a total waste of taxpayers' money."
He did not say this angrily or miserably but with a kind of puzzled amusement. I said, "Some people in high places must think you very dangerous."
"Yes, but why?"
"Tell me a line your own voice has given you."
He pressed a finger to the side of his brow and after a while said, "Since breathing is my life, to stop I dare not dare."
"I like that line. Any more?"
"Er... Great vessels sink, while pisspots stay afloat."
"Better and better. Do you still think I'm a pisspot?"
He grinned apologetically and murmured, "If the cap fits... Oh here's another coming through: To die, to me, today, is like returning home from a war."
"That's the best line of all. You're still a poet, Luke, in a fragmentary way."
"The government must want to keep me fragmentary. Has your inspiration ever been broken up by outside broadcasting?"
"No."
On his discoloured, distorted face appeared a smile of pure childish happiness mingled with sly mischief.
"Your work isn't good enough to frighten them," he murmured and gave my shoulder a consoling pat.
"True. I must leave now."
I gave him money that he tranquilly accepted and hurried away in a state very near panic. By pretending to share his worldview I had almost been convinced by it. I was glad to learn later that the dare not dare line came from the introduction to John Lennon's "In His Own Write", that the sunk ship and floating pisspots were from a translation of a Gaelic proverb in one of MacDiarmid's most rambling monologues. I haven't found the source of the third, which may be a genuine Aiblins invention. But I am afraid to re-examine the verses in the creased folder, afraid to show them to people who could judge them differently. It might emerge that I have driven a great poet insane by suppressing his earliest works. For the same reason I am afraid to destroy them.
