, The wee wee man
AFTERTHOUGHT JOHN WELLS
John Glashan, the creator of tiny..beardecl men mooning about in front of enormous heaps of architecture, is certainly one of the funniest cartoonists we have. He could also, given a fair fashionable wind and a shove off by a few temporarily crazed critics, very easily be launched as a Sensitive Literary Figure, or even as One of the Foremost Creative Intellects of our Generation. All the evidence is already there: it simply needs one of the official buffoons to start clasping and unclasping his hands and making ecstatic faces and raving off about 'these towering, massy palaces, these gorgeous slabs of Gothic and Palladian archi- tecture, blocked in on the paper with this wonderful solidity of emphatic black pen and wash . . . representing somehow the whole weight of accumulated tradition under which the creative spirit groans . . . almost crushing the unsubstantial line drawing of the bearded dwarf that is the artist . . .' and he's away.
The other element on which the vultures might at any moment alight is the lean and subtly muscled meat of Glashan's prose. "This man" . . . one savours the clear echoes of Goethe's "der Mensch." even of "Ecce Homo" itself—"this man is endeavouring"—the under- tones of "streben" are unmistakable—"this man is endeavouring to hypnotise a bird while his brother finds it more rewarding to stand with his back to the mirror then turn round quickly to see if he can catch a glimpse of the back of his head." The coy hint of Doppelgiingerei, of the Wiederholte Spiegelung . . . surely this is
man triumphantly coming to terms with the absurdity of his own cosmic insignificance. Not 70' since Joyce and etc.' And there is certainly a great deal of the fine prose for them to pick over in The Penguin John Glashan published this month at five shillings.
However, there is one aspect of Glashan's work which will almost certainly escape the critics, and which, by extension, casts light on a great deal of established literary achievement. Although he is without a beard, there is much of his favourite character's quietly obsessive concentration in the man himself. He will explain when rung up that he is 'just completing a plan for the total destruction of the universe,' remain happily engrossed in a bank, turning the blotter into a cheque payable to himself for a million pounds, and make remarks that are plucked glittering from the subconscious to strangers at parties. But what gives all these minor eccentricities the golden ring of pure humour, apart from the charm of his neat white smile and impeccably cut Savile Row check suit, is unquestionably his voice.
It is the accent, a clipped Glasgow academic tone, always level and yet with a slight querulous air of dissatisfaction to it, that gives the words not only their colour, but also their form. To hear another man, introduced to a society beauty for the first time, remark 'Good evening. You might not think it, but beneath this suit I have a small but perfectly formed body,' could seem merely strange : to hear the same line faultlessly delivered in precise and matter of fact university Scots is a rich and memorable experience. Similarly, if one has once heard the voice, it is possible to enjoy the full flavour of the drawing in which a small bearded man with a slightly itching fist is addressing an even smaller bespectacled bearded man: 'Normally I don't hit men wearing glasses, but as yours are machined from the finest laminated tungsten steel with double convex plastic lenses, I may be compelled to deviate from this archaic ruling.'
The Scots voice after that somehow becomes a part of the rather mannered handwriting in which all the captions are printed. The little cleanshaven person looking up appealingly at the reader and observing, 'My job is changing the blotting paper in a bank. One day, the man who tells me when to change it, said, if you can keep neat and tidy, attentive and of pleasing disposition there could come a time when you yourself may be delegating this responsibility,' also speaks for some reason with the same quietly confident accent. The working class father smoking a pipe in his armchair and reading a newspaper with the headline 'tie TOLD ME HE WAS A GROUP CAPTAIN SAYS NUN' and talking to his son : 'For forty years I worked down a sewer so you could have all the things I never had . . .' speaks with a precise Scots voice : even the headline achieves its maximum comic impact when read out in that accent. It is perhaps worth considering how much we have lost of the work of prose writers who are now dead and whose voices were never recorded. Not only have we lost the original intonation for ever, but except in those rare cases where books are read out on the radio in the all-purpose BBC voice with comic dialects for the bits in inverted commas, no one ever even considers the tone of voice important. Musicians, even those who can go down to Brighton in a crowded compartment on the train, reading a printed score and having the whole symphony booming away in their head, would always admit the possibility of that printed score being interpreted in different ways by different soloists and conductors: an actor reading a script would admit the same of printed dialogue: but prose is for some reason con- sidered uninflected, because the original inflec- tion is dead.
It might be a useful exercise, if you have the time, to begin listening to the Scots inflection of the Glashan jokes, and then per- haps move on to Smollett and Dr Arbuthnot. My own pieces should be read out with a slight Spanish lisp.
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