The Kiln by William McIlvanney

shiftless. Except that you're blond. It was a blond gypsy.’)
    The hair could be better. There is plenty of it but it's much too fine. He insisted on getting a crew-cut last year, against the advice of Mr Guthrie, the barber who is also a phrenologist. (‘You're an intellectual, son. I can tell by the bumps.’) The result was an unqualified disaster. Separate strands of hair kept waving in all directions. He went about for a fortnight like a porcupine. That was his first experience of being a recluse.
    He stares in the mirror and wishes he were John Garfield. He is not. He is Thomas Mathieson Docherty, who still hasn't come near to fulfilling any of the five ambitions he set for himself thissummer: to have sex (preferably with a human being but let's not be too choosy); to face up to Cran; to read as many books as possible; to come to terms with his partial estrangement from his family and friends; to begin his life's work as a writer.
    He has told John Benchley about wanting to start what John calls ‘the magnum opus’ before the end of the summer. It seems a reasonable enough idea. His example is Thomas Chatterton, ‘the marvellous boy’. But he feels he should make a few modifications to the model. The fact that Chatterton committed suicide at seventeen doesn't seem to him an example he should necessarily follow, especially since he hasn't really written anything he likes yet and this doesn't give him much time. He will be eighteen in November. What does appeal to him about Chatterton was his hunger for fame while he was more or less young enough to enjoy it. For anything beyond about twenty-five seems to him to be bordering on the twilight world.
    (Dear Thomas Chatterton ,
    Could you not have given it another week or two?)
    But that project isn't going well. He has just abandoned his second attempt to find the form for what he wants to say.
    The clock striking another nail into my tomb.
The creak of darkness closing in the rain—
This painted night locks up her hired room.
Straightens her clothes and takes to the streets again.
     
    My mind like a miser huddled on his hams
Counts his beliefs like pennies in his palms.
The loose change of my father's prodigal ease,
A vast inheritance of verdigris.
     
    The future flutters fiercely for release.
Caged in the rusty past.
The present's fingers bleed on the rusted bolts.
The key is lost.
     
    Each man who lives must live towards a grief
And while he lives must bear mutation out.
The world turns not on faith but disbelief
And here the final certainty is doubt.
     
    We meet no god in names that we create.
We meet our own refusal to continue.
God waits for us in loving and in hate.
In action's arm and in endeavour's sinew.
Himself he gave us in the things we are
And bade us worship him with every scar.
He named himself in everything we do.
And shall we dare to christen him anew?
    This isn't any good, he feels now. He can't believe that, when he finished it maybe eight weeks ago, he thought it was worth memorising. It is part of a 800-line poem he wrote in a fortnight called ‘Reflections in a Broken Mirror’. It was meant to be more or less his philosophy of the world. But then what does he know about the world? It's embarrassing. After he had finished it, he wrote a letter to T.S. Eliot, offering to let him see it. For three weeks afterwards, he suspected the postal service of incompetence or T.S. Eliot of having died. But when no news arrived of the death of a major poet he got his sister Allison to make a typescript surreptitiously at her work and he sent it off to Chatto and Windus. A nice letter came back, talking of ‘great intellectual vigour’ and the impossibility of publication. He keeps the letter in his notebook, regarding it as his first review.
    But now he wishes he could forget those lines he memorised. They keep coming back into his mind and suffusing it with the intellectual equivalent of a blush. They have become especially embarrassing because they