ALEX NEISH GALLERY: AGAINST THE MONSTROUS REGIMENT
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In 2009, I
was living in Morton Grove, a Chicago suburb. It was the 50th
anniversary of the publication of Naked Lunch by William S Burroughs. I was invited to do
a piece on his time in that city for the no-longer-extant Nakedlunch.org, the
site collecting all the worldwide events for the half-century anniversary of
that seminal work. Scotsman Alex Neish had, when studying at Edinburgh
University, published in Jabberwock, the university mag, the first chapter of
Naked Lunch, And Start West, sent to him by Allen Ginsberg. I tracked Neish
down on the net, and inadvertently caused a bit of a Scottish literary stooshie
by interviewing him. Folk back here in Scotland loved it:
The interview was plagiarised by a hack from The Scotsman, who would not give
me a credit, or even an apology, when contacted. Not linking to it, or even
naming him, but it annoyed me for obvious reasons.
Anyway, I still go on occasional wee obsession sessions. A couple of nights ago
I went searching through archives of The Guardian, whom Neish wrote for in the
very early 60s, and am enclosing here, in chronological order, the stuff of his I found there. I hope you find
it interesting. Neish unfortunately died last year, so this can be used partly
as a memorial page for him. He was a world-renowned pewter collector, so if you
are interested you can read some information about his collection in Stirling at the
Smith Art Gallery And Museum:
https://pewterbank.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/The-Neish-Collection-Smith-Museum-Stirling.pdf Anyway. Onto the more literary/newspaper angle. The first article written by the
(eventual) international businessman I could find in The Guardian was from
Thursday, February 23rd, 1961, entitled Scotland and the Arts. His
disdain for a Scotland he regarded as parochial and insular at the time
shines clearly through; dunno how many Guardian writers would quote the Marquis
de Sade to express their disaffection with their home country! Click on any images on this page to render them more legible, increasing the page size if you need; if you then save the image, you can increase its size, and it will maintain its legibility:
The next mention of his name is from Friday, March 3rd, 1961. His
article Scotland and the Arts seems to have upset Michael Goldberg, the Chairman
of the Glasgow Citizens’ Theatre, motivating him to write a complaining letter to the newspaper. Always liked rattling stuffy artistic cages, did old
Alex!
Sunday,
July 16th, 1961 brings us his next piece, a more whimsical short
article about Toys From Nurseries of the Past, at the Museum of Childhood in
Edinburgh. Which is a lovely place, incidentally. Given his literary
disposition, it’s notable he perks up more during the last paragraph, when
delighting over horror books and mags from the 19th century:
Neish’s
next foray into the Guardian, from Thursday, August 31st, 1961, finds him having a wee patented rant about parochial Scottish literature and poetry
and Hugh MacDiarmid, in A Voice For A' That. You have to wonder if the unnamed Scottish writer in the last paragraph sneering at writing in Scots and Lallans as being "ceremonial artistic suicide" might have been...the writer of the article himself? You never know...
1961’s
last piece from Neish, Black Days on the Border, on Tuesday, November 7th, finds him musing slightly cynically on the boundless joys
of life in Canonbie in Dumfriesshire during the Cold War. As is the norm for the area, Dracula and 11th-century-born
Persian poet Omar Khyyam get a look-in. To my eye, Alex gets in a wee dose of
pre-Hunter S Thompson prototypical Gonzo journalism. He has, in the fourth paragraph, an old man quoting
the Khyyam poem Rubaiyat in supposed passing conversation, and shortly afterwards says that “In many places this
dialogue would have passed as unexceptional.” Which is sarcasm of the highest
order, of course: there are not too many areas of Scotland where quoting
ancient Persian poets would be regarded as “unexceptional.” Except maybe in certain sniffy cliquey cafes near the Scottish Poetry Library in Edinburgh, that is. This approach of Neish's raises a whole
lot more stylistic questions I could never even hope to answer, but it’s definitely fun to think
about:
Thursday,
January 24th, 1962, finds Neish interviewing his rogue writer friend,
the notorious Alex Trocchi (another angry Scottish writer) about literature and his novel Cain’s Book. Of course, this being the nutcase Trocchi, the cretinous comforts and joys of heroin get wistfully purred over. Bold Testament indeed:
Thursday, February 22nd, 1962, has Neish writing about the Scottish literary and poetic giant Hugh MacDiarmid. The journalist clearly admires the much older writer’s pugilistic spirit, but notes how this also helped paint MacDiarmid into a corner, as did his later writings in English. The title of the article, Fighting Words, could very well count as the young Scottish literary rebel Neish's own artistic credo:
The next day, Friday, February 23rd, 1962, finds Neish interviewing another literary renegade, John Calder, the publisher who staged the (in)famous Edinburgh Writers’ Conference in August of that year, in the article Writers' Man. Neish’s anger at Scotland and its literature is obvious from the first paragraph. He clearly respects Calder as a forward-looking literary visionary, recognising a fellow international cage-rattler traveller, and Scot Who Escaped. It's probably just as well Neish moved to South America later on that year; it seemed Scotland was doing his overheating head and heart right in back then:
Wednesday,
February 28th, 1962, has irate (are we detecting a theme yet?)
letter-writer John Wain (no, not that one) from London setting Neish straight
on Hugh MacDiarmid’s apparently myriad failings. So there, that’s you telt,
Alex!
Saturday,
March 3rd, 1962, brings another letter volley in the Hugh MacDiarmid
good-vs-bad, grab-the-drunk-jaggy-thistle battle. Neish gets defended and put straight in the two letters
here, one from reader Ian Rodger of Buckinghamshire, and the other from a
clearly annoyed (I am laughing here) W.G. Henderson, Sales Manager of
MacDiarmid’s Scottish publisher Oliver and Boyd Ltd. They positively love Hugh MacDiarmid, and publishing
him, and don’t you forget it, you...you...recalcitrant young footpad!
Wednesday,
March 7th, 1962. Neish hasn’t taken well to Mr.
Henderson of Oliver and Boyd taking a condescending potshot at him a few days before. He has to get in a wee retaliatory
jab:
Friday,
March 21st, 1962: Ronald Stevenson of
the Scottish Arts Club in Edinburgh, whatever that is, delivers the final down-and-out K.O. in this whole bloody, visceral, poetic letter war. He points out Neish's 'curious lacunae' in the whole Scottish publishing matter, and you just know when your curious lacunae are being pointed out that it's...game over:
Saturday,
April 14th, 1962. Art in the Mill finds our unusually sanguine,
contented-seeming freelancer musing over the opening of a modern art gallery in
Langholm, Dumfriesshire, a former home of his. Some of the comments in it are
hilarious. Neish seems to have had a knack for finding people with a definite caustic,
humourous ambivalence towards their chosen career fields to talk to. Maybe he just brought out the imp of the perverse in kindred anarchic artistic spirits:
Tuesday,
June 12th, 1962. Village in a City brings an unusually melancholic,
slightly wistful, sombre piece from Neish, as he discusses a small Edinburgh
village with its fast-becoming-obsolete inhabitants. Some nice poetic imagery
here round the start, when he talks about Dean Village. Seemed like writing about the country, its landscape and people suited him more than writing about airy-fairy, arty-farty cultural subjects, and who can blame him?
Saturday,
June 16th, 1962, and a letter from the local chaplain, Graeme Watson, sets the writer straight on Dean
Village’s inhabitants:
Thursday,
August 9th, 1962: in Beyond Argentina, Neish, now living permanently
abroad, interviews literary giant Jorge Luis Borges. I would imagine the bits
from Borges in the conversation about literary nationalistic provincialism and escaping tradition would have
resonated with the young Scottish writer; he certainly had access to some incredible people to interview:
Saturday,
August 18th, 1962: in Before Edinburgh, Neish finds the Argentinian descendants
of Scottish ex-pats insufferable. The experience he describes here sounds exactly like being from Scotland and
living in America. He finds he just can’t escape the Auld Country, no matter
how hard he tries to, or how far he goes away from it. Nae luck, big man!
Friday,
September 28th, 1962. In Viva Les Revoluciones, the Scottish ex-pat
muses on military revolution in Argentina with an extremely cynical, bored,
laconic Argentinian, Carlos, who points out that the army are rusty because they
have never been in combat. Cut to twenty years later, and Maggie 'Belgrano' Thatcher needing political approval gained from winning a ‘war’…
Thursday,
December 6th, 1962 – Neish interviews Eduardo Mallea, whom I confess
I have never heard of. Mallea says he writes because he cannot speak, which is where the title of the article comes from. You wonder if the interview was done in sighing sign language, or maybe a series of clicks and whistles like a dolphin. Semaphore? Charades? Clearly following his own literary bent, Neish must have
read these authors and wanted to talk to them, taking advantage of his
geographical proximity to them to do so. Mallea muses on loving and leaving –
or not leaving – a country. You wonder if Neish’s own story inspired some of
the material in the interviews, about escaping tradition, old versus new, writers leaving versus staying. We will never know.
Thursday
March 21st, 1963: Neish interviews erudite affluent South American literary taste
arbiter Victoria Ocampo. No, I can’t pretend to have heard of her before now, either.
What does shine through in these interviews and articles is that Neigh knew his literary stuff, which would
surely have made his own lack of literary success a more bitter pill to
swallow. Latin Primer is the last article written by Neish I could find in The
Guardian:
And
yet, we still have one more thing to close with. Even though Neish clearly gave
up journalism and writing for the business world (and pewter collecting) in the
early 60s, he was included in New Writers 5, published by Calder and Boyars,
previous Neish interviewee John Calder’s seditious imprint. The volume, which Neish
shared with some other writers, received a so-so review in The Guardian on
Friday, June 28th, 1967. I have included this review here; looks
like Neish made the right move in stepping away from writing, given the business
– and pewter-collecting – success he had in later life:
And that, as
they say, is that. I hope you have enjoyed what I have dug up. I think Alex
Neish is a fascinating wee footnote in Scottish taste-making literary history. His forward-and-outward-looking
publication of William S Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso,
etc, in the late 50s/early 60s in insular, kaleyard-worshipping Scotland showed just how in-tune he
was with literature back then, as did the interviews and articles I just posted
above here. I think he at least deserves some small degree of recognition for
his literary endeavours, and I hope I have gone some small way to addressing
that much-needed recognition balance.
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