325- ] English Literature - Alasdair Gray - Poor Things

325- ] English Literature

Alasdair Gray

                                                  Poor Things

First edition

Author        Alasdair Gray

Cover artist Alasdair Gray

Language    English

Publisher    Bloomsbury Press

Publication date   1992

Publication place  United Kingdom

Media type Print (hardback and paperback)

Preceded by          McGrotty and Ludmilla

Poor Things: Episodes from the Early Life of Archibald McCandless M.D., Scottish Public Health Officer is a novel by Scottish writer Alasdair Gray, published in 1992. It won the Whitbread Award and the Guardian Fiction Prize the same year.

A postmodern retelling of the 1818 gothic horror novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley, the narrative follows the life of Bella Baxter, a surgically fabricated woman created in late Victorian Glasgow. Bella’s navigation of late 19th century society is the lens through which Gray delivers social commentary on patriarchal institutions, social equality, socioeconomic matters and sexual politics.

The novel itself is epistolary, being composed of a fictional novella entitled Episodes from the Early Life of Archibald McCandless M.D., Scottish Public Health Officer, several extended letters, a spread of original illustrations, as well as an Introduction and Critical Notes. The bracketing Introduction and Critical Notes feature a meta-textual component, in that they simultaneously exist in the novel’s fictional canon, but are also credited to real-life author Alasdair Gray.

The novel is illustrated by Alasdair Gray, despite the text claiming the illustration were created by Scottish painter and printmaker William Strang.

Plot

The story begins in 19th-century Glasgow with Archibald McCandless, a young medical student who becomes involved with the eccentric and brilliant surgeon Godwin Baxter. McCandless meets Bella Baxter, a beautiful, childlike woman who lives under Godwin’s care. According to McCandless’s account, Bella is the result of a radical experiment: Godwin discovered the body of a pregnant woman who had drowned and, in a grotesque act of science, revived her by implanting the brain of her unborn fetus into her adult body. This experiment supposedly created a new life—Bella—with the physical form of a grown woman and the mind of a newborn.

Under the guidance of Godwin and Archibald, Bella quickly matures intellectually and emotionally, developing into a curious, assertive, and sexually liberated woman. Though McCandless falls in love with her, Bella resists his romantic idealization and seeks her own experiences. She leaves with the decadent lawyer Duncan Wedderburn on a whirlwind trip across Europe and the Middle East. During their travels, Bella confronts the inequalities and absurdities of the Victorian world, eventually realizing that Wedderburn sees her more as a possession than a partner. Disillusioned, she escapes him and returns to Glasgow.

Back home, Bella becomes a champion of women's rights, social reform, and public health. She and Archibald eventually marry—not as a result of submission, but as a conscious, equal partnership built on mutual respect and shared political ideals. Together, they work to improve the lives of the poor, challenge the hypocrisy of the upper class, and confront the outdated moral structures of their time.

However, a letter from Bella herself—now known as Victoria McCandless—completely contradicts McCandless's memoir. She reveals that the resurrection story was a fabrication, a romantic fantasy created by Archibald to mythologize their relationship and his own sense of loss and failure. Bella insists that she was always a fully formed, intelligent woman, and that her life with Godwin and later Archibald was nothing like the fairy tale described in the memoir. This revelation casts doubt on everything the reader has just read, turning the novel into a postmodern puzzle about truth, memory, and the way stories are shaped by those who tell them.

Notes

Poor Things contains illustrations by Alasdair Gray, which the text claims are by the Scottish etcher and illustrator William Strang. There are also punning additions of fragments of images from Gray's Anatomy. One feature of the novel that has attracted comment is the page of review quotes, featuring a printed erratum strip. Some of these reviews are patently fictitious (such as those from the Skibereen Eagle and the Private Nose) and others are attributed to real publications, but seem so harsh that their authenticity is called into question.

Film adaptation

A film adaptation of the book was produced with Yorgos Lanthimos directing and Tony McNamara writing the script after the presentation of Denisse Nichols. The cast includes Emma Stone, Mark Ruffalo, Willem Dafoe, Ramy Youssef, Christopher Abbott, Kathryn Hunter, and Jerrod Carmichael.[4] The adaptation was released in theatres on December 8, 2023.[5] The film enjoyed rapturous acclaim, winning several prizes including the Golden Lion at the 80th Venice Film Festival as well as four Academy Awards later that year.

By Rodge Glass January 22, 2020Arts & Culture 

324 English Literature - Alasdair Gray

324- ] English Literature

Alasdair Gray

Alasdair Gray, the Man and the Work

One night in summer 2015, under a vast night sky mural in the Òran Mór Arts Centre auditorium in Glasgow, there was a film showing. In fact, two. The subject of both, Alasdair Gray, once an intense, asthmatic working-class boy from northeast Glasgow and now Scotland’s most celebrated literary artist, was in the audience, fidgeting and scratching as he watched. Above us, I could see his Garden of Eden mural writ large on the ceiling, despite the low light. I was also scratching myself—seeing Alasdair do it always made my eczema worse. I was waiting for the right moment to ask him to sign a picture for my baby daughter. He was eighty, at the time. I was afraid I might not see him again; I was living in England. Now, in the weeks after his death, days after I’ve moved back to Glasgow again, I wonder how to make sense of his loss. Our conversation that night, conducted while watching the pop-up screen, made me re-engage with his work in a new way. And it gives me something to do now he’s gone.

Over the twenty years we knew each other Alasdair was always charitable with me, unfailingly kind and supportive, even though the publication of the biography I’d written about his life, a not entirely uncritical book, was difficult for him. But honesty matters, now: ours was a pretty one-sided relationship. I was forty-five years younger than Alasdair, a young fan when we met in 1999. I was one among so many aspiring writers, keen to learn, dizzied by his achievements, and by the way he seemed both extraordinary and ordinary. Gray referred to himself as “an increasingly fat Glasgow pedestrian”; the novelist Will Self called him “a little grey diety.” Alasdair used Tipp-Ex to write his name onto his rucksack in distinctive capitals—he designed his own font—then carried it around the streets of Glasgow’s West End while locals and tourists whispered about who they’d just spotted on the street. He was the internationally regarded author and illustrator of Lanark, Poor Things, Unlikely Stories, Mostly, and 1982, Janine. He was responsible, along with the likes of Liz Lochhead, James Kelman, Agnes Owens, and Edwin Morgan, for transforming the Scottish literary landscape Morgan had once called “a wasteland” into the rich, varied, diverse, and outward-looking place it is today. He made Glasgow the subject of his life’s work, creating “imagined objects,” as he called his creations, about his disappearing, changing city. In Lanark, the famous line, “not even the people of Glasgow live in it imaginatively” was rendered obsolete by his own achievements. No wonder people whispered when he passed them on Byres Road.

I first met Alasdair when I served him a drink at a pub, then was his tutee at the University of Glasgow when I was working on my debut novel (he once rewrote an entire chapter by hand, sticking bits of paper on with glue to cover over my words). Later, I worked for him as secretary, dogsbody, driver, and much else besides. My writer’s education took place in his bedroom, on a cheap chair at his bulky old computer, while he waved his finger shakily over my shoulder, shuffling words around on the screen, writing his books off the top of his head as I typed. He sang music hall ditties on the toilet. He was free, and maddened, and maddening, too. He was utterly single-minded at times, easily distracted at others. He was disarmingly honest and was often taken advantage of by others. From the day I began work at his home, Alasdair insisted on paying me a “tradesman’s wage,” which was sometimes more than he was earning himself, and certainly more than I’d been paid at the pub. Over the four years I worked with him, Alasdair turned plays into novels, recycled emblems and vignettes, reused and reworded old sentences he felt he hadn’t got quite right decades earlier. He wrote a novel based on rejected radio plays from the seventies and once fell asleep trying to finish off a political book, having got horribly distracted by the Act of Union of 1707. It was not a regular job.

He was the most inspiring individual I’ve met and he shaped my worldview. In more recent years, though I’ve grown up, moved away, had a family of my own, and mostly concentrated on my own work, I’ve always returned to both the man and his work. In the avalanche of good wishes, emails, pictures, sketches, and videos sent by well-wishers in recent weeks—some just wanted to tell their Gray anecdote to someone, so they told me—I felt grateful to find out new things about the life I had spent so long trying to piece together. One man contacted me with details of Alasdair’s anti-apartheid work with South African writers, way back when. Another sent a personal sketch doodled inside a book. Another, a copy of a letter I had long ago typed for Alasdair while he boomed with laughter behind me. Despite his death, because of it, people kept bringing him back to life.

The first film shown in Òran Mór was a rarely seen BBC documentary, Under the Helmet, from 1964. In flickering black and white it showed a stick thin, serious, be-suited young Alasdair Gray looking into the camera saying, “This isn’t how I talk to my wife. This is how I talk to a television machine.” By today’s standards, the pace of the film was achingly slow, the tone dry. The camera panned steadily over Gray’s visual works, lingering on details while the artist read his grim poetry over the top. A black Adam and white Eve, embracing, their chins locked together facing skyward on a Glasgow church wall, soon to be demolished. The serpent, feet sticking out, looking on. In Under the Helmet, the documentarians indirectly suggest that their buttoned-up subject was no longer alive, believing a dead young Scottish artist might be more interesting to viewers than a live one. They had good reason for that suspicion. Gray had been ignored by critics and the public, painting his murals for free, sleeping on floors. Soon, his major early murals would be knocked down, neglected, marginalized, painted or papered over. This would keep happening for another forty years before a radical reappraisal in his old age. In the early sixties, Gray’s literary reputation was also still in its infancy, with Lanark nearly two decades from publication.

I first watched Under the Helmet on an old video copy while writing my Gray biography. At the time, what preoccupied me was the detail: which works were featured, how they were featured, and what material difference the broadcast made to Gray’s working life at the time. Soon after it aired, he published a piece called “An Apology for My Recent Death.” Meanwhile, the documentary made him connections that led to radio play commissions in London. But seeing the film a second time, something struck me that suddenly seemed incredibly obvious. The program had been curated by Gray himself, with one aim: to focus on the work, backgrounding the artist. In the near-darkness of Òran Mór, the old Alasdair watched his younger self quizzically. He was unsure what to do with himself. At one point, his whiskey sloshed onto my hand as he talked. His opinion on how art should be perceived, he whispered, had not changed in the intervening fifty years. Using almost exactly the same words as the Alasdair on the screen, Gray complained into my ear that artists are so often seen within the context of their personal lives, and that these things have nothing at all to do with art itself. I remember smiling. “I respectfully disagree, sir,” I said, in my bad impression of a Radio 4 voice. “But then, I would.” I think he laughed, though maybe it was a wince. I wish I’d just had the courage to listen and not speak. These are the things that bother you, when someone dies. The stupid things you said. How you can’t unsay them.

The second film shown that night, made by director Kevin Cameron and again broadcast by the BBC, this time for Gray’s eightieth birthday in 2014, was a different beast entirely. But for the subject’s distinctive reedy, stuttering voice and his way of moving his head when talking, it might have been a film about someone else entirely. This artist was a confident extrovert—overweight, joyful, loud, often laughing or talking in different accents—shown designing the subway mural at his local station, or wobbling on the scaffolding of his greatest work at Òran Mór, totally consumed by painting, which he said was more relaxing than writing because it was physical exercise as well as mental. In this incarnation Gray was still highly self-aware, but he was now playful with it. He had already achieved his aims. Against the odds, Gray had become famous in his own lifetime, an overnight sensation in middle age. After Lanark, he produced over thirty books and a thousand paintings, portraits, illustrations. and murals. This was the man many in Scotland and around the world now recognize, the so-called national treasure (he hated that), the socialist, the democratizer, who said his favorite sound was the “the sound of deadlines whooshing past my ears!”–and whose misattributed quotation (“Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation.”)  adorns the Canongate wall of the Scottish Parliament. Who turned down a knighthood, honorary degrees, and literary awards, and who reveled in replying to aspiring writers that no, sorry, he couldn’t help them get published because he was “such a selfish auld bugger.”

Cameron’s film is done with subtlety and affection, and no small amount of insight, though Gray the man, the personality, is very much front and center. In one scene, Alasdair is shown hungover, having lost the plans for the next stage of his Òran Mór mural. He looks every bit the hapless alcoholic as he ambles down the road from his house, manic with fear at all that work wasted. (The plans were later found in the pub.) While watching, Alasdair turned to me and said, “I do understand why folk show me this way. But I wish they’d just concentrate on the work.” I’m not going to pretend I know if he was referring to me, too, in that comment, but whether he was or not doesn’t matter. I know that’s what I did in my biography. So concerned to get the man on the page for future generations, his voice, his movements, his opinions, his loves, and his losses, I sometimes forgot to foreground the work. Which is why, after that night in 2015, I told Alasdair I would return to writing about him, but this time concentrating on the work and its legacy. The last conversation we had in person discussed all the ways we might approach this together in years ahead. “If I’m spared,” he said, as he always did. After he was confined to a wheelchair, that sentence held greater weight.

Over the next few years, I’ll be closer to Alasdair’s Gray work than ever. I’ll be convening a conference in Glasgow reappraising his art, which was for too long seen as a small room in the house of his reputation. I’ll be commissioning new works that respond to Alasdair’s, as he responded to those who came before him. Meanwhile, he and I were due to appear together at Glasgow’s Aye Write! Book Festival in March to discuss his last book, Purgatory, part two of his response to Dante’s Inferno. We spoke about it shortly before he died. Instead I’ve curated an event featuring writers, artists, and friends who will read from his writing and discuss his work, its scope, its impact. The event will be called Remember Alasdair; I expect it to be busy and emotional. But after our discussion in Òran Mór, we will focus on the work. Many of us will miss the man. The man was worth remembering. But it’s the work that matters most.

Rodge Glass is a novelist, senior lecturer in creative writing at the University of Strathclyde, and Alasdair Gray’s biographer. 

Alasdair Gray, the Man and the Work

One night in summer 2015, under a vast night sky mural in the Òran Mór Arts Centre auditorium in Glasgow, there was a film showing. In fact, two. The subject of both, Alasdair Gray, once an intense, asthmatic working-class boy from northeast Glasgow and now Scotland’s most celebrated literary artist, was in the audience, fidgeting and scratching as he watched. Above us, I could see his Garden of Eden mural writ large on the ceiling, despite the low light. I was also scratching myself—seeing Alasdair do it always made my eczema worse. I was waiting for the right moment to ask him to sign a picture for my baby daughter. He was eighty, at the time. I was afraid I might not see him again; I was living in England. Now, in the weeks after his death, days after I’ve moved back to Glasgow again, I wonder how to make sense of his loss. Our conversation that night, conducted while watching the pop-up screen, made me re-engage with his work in a new way. And it gives me something to do now he’s gone.

Over the twenty years we knew each other Alasdair was always charitable with me, unfailingly kind and supportive, even though the publication of the biography I’d written about his life, a not entirely uncritical book, was difficult for him. But honesty matters, now: ours was a pretty one-sided relationship. I was forty-five years younger than Alasdair, a young fan when we met in 1999. I was one among so many aspiring writers, keen to learn, dizzied by his achievements, and by the way he seemed both extraordinary and ordinary. Gray referred to himself as “an increasingly fat Glasgow pedestrian”; the novelist Will Self called him “a little grey diety.” Alasdair used Tipp-Ex to write his name onto his rucksack in distinctive capitals—he designed his own font—then carried it around the streets of Glasgow’s West End while locals and tourists whispered about who they’d just spotted on the street. He was the internationally regarded author and illustrator of Lanark, Poor Things, Unlikely Stories, Mostly, and 1982, Janine. He was responsible, along with the likes of Liz Lochhead, James Kelman, Agnes Owens, and Edwin Morgan, for transforming the Scottish literary landscape Morgan had once called “a wasteland” into the rich, varied, diverse, and outward-looking place it is today. He made Glasgow the subject of his life’s work, creating “imagined objects,” as he called his creations, about his disappearing, changing city. In Lanark, the famous line, “not even the people of Glasgow live in it imaginatively” was rendered obsolete by his own achievements. No wonder people whispered when he passed them on Byres Road.

I first met Alasdair when I served him a drink at a pub, then was his tutee at the University of Glasgow when I was working on my debut novel (he once rewrote an entire chapter by hand, sticking bits of paper on with glue to cover over my words). Later, I worked for him as secretary, dogsbody, driver, and much else besides. My writer’s education took place in his bedroom, on a cheap chair at his bulky old computer, while he waved his finger shakily over my shoulder, shuffling words around on the screen, writing his books off the top of his head as I typed. He sang music hall ditties on the toilet. He was free, and maddened, and maddening, too. He was utterly single-minded at times, easily distracted at others. He was disarmingly honest and was often taken advantage of by others. From the day I began work at his home, Alasdair insisted on paying me a “tradesman’s wage,” which was sometimes more than he was earning himself, and certainly more than I’d been paid at the pub. Over the four years I worked with him, Alasdair turned plays into novels, recycled emblems and vignettes, reused and reworded old sentences he felt he hadn’t got quite right decades earlier. He wrote a novel based on rejected radio plays from the seventies and once fell asleep trying to finish off a political book, having got horribly distracted by the Act of Union of 1707. It was not a regular job.

He was the most inspiring individual I’ve met and he shaped my worldview. In more recent years, though I’ve grown up, moved away, had a family of my own, and mostly concentrated on my own work, I’ve always returned to both the man and his work. In the avalanche of good wishes, emails, pictures, sketches, and videos sent by well-wishers in recent weeks—some just wanted to tell their Gray anecdote to someone, so they told me—I felt grateful to find out new things about the life I had spent so long trying to piece together. One man contacted me with details of Alasdair’s anti-apartheid work with South African writers, way back when. Another sent a personal sketch doodled inside a book. Another, a copy of a letter I had long ago typed for Alasdair while he boomed with laughter behind me. Despite his death, because of it, people kept bringing him back to life.

The first film shown in Òran Mór was a rarely seen BBC documentary, Under the Helmet, from 1964. In flickering black and white it showed a stick thin, serious, be-suited young Alasdair Gray looking into the camera saying, “This isn’t how I talk to my wife. This is how I talk to a television machine.” By today’s standards, the pace of the film was achingly slow, the tone dry. The camera panned steadily over Gray’s visual works, lingering on details while the artist read his grim poetry over the top. A black Adam and white Eve, embracing, their chins locked together facing skyward on a Glasgow church wall, soon to be demolished. The serpent, feet sticking out, looking on. In Under the Helmet, the documentarians indirectly suggest that their buttoned-up subject was no longer alive, believing a dead young Scottish artist might be more interesting to viewers than a live one. They had good reason for that suspicion. Gray had been ignored by critics and the public, painting his murals for free, sleeping on floors. Soon, his major early murals would be knocked down, neglected, marginalized, painted or papered over. This would keep happening for another forty years before a radical reappraisal in his old age. In the early sixties, Gray’s literary reputation was also still in its infancy, with Lanark nearly two decades from publication.

I first watched Under the Helmet on an old video copy while writing my Gray biography. At the time, what preoccupied me was the detail: which works were featured, how they were featured, and what material difference the broadcast made to Gray’s working life at the time. Soon after it aired, he published a piece called “An Apology for My Recent Death.” Meanwhile, the documentary made him connections that led to radio play commissions in London. But seeing the film a second time, something struck me that suddenly seemed incredibly obvious. The program had been curated by Gray himself, with one aim: to focus on the work, backgrounding the artist. In the near-darkness of Òran Mór, the old Alasdair watched his younger self quizzically. He was unsure what to do with himself. At one point, his whiskey sloshed onto my hand as he talked. His opinion on how art should be perceived, he whispered, had not changed in the intervening fifty years. Using almost exactly the same words as the Alasdair on the screen, Gray complained into my ear that artists are so often seen within the context of their personal lives, and that these things have nothing at all to do with art itself. I remember smiling. “I respectfully disagree, sir,” I said, in my bad impression of a Radio 4 voice. “But then, I would.” I think he laughed, though maybe it was a wince. I wish I’d just had the courage to listen and not speak. These are the things that bother you, when someone dies. The stupid things you said. How you can’t unsay them.

The second film shown that night, made by director Kevin Cameron and again broadcast by the BBC, this time for Gray’s eightieth birthday in 2014, was a different beast entirely. But for the subject’s distinctive reedy, stuttering voice and his way of moving his head when talking, it might have been a film about someone else entirely. This artist was a confident extrovert—overweight, joyful, loud, often laughing or talking in different accents—shown designing the subway mural at his local station, or wobbling on the scaffolding of his greatest work at Òran Mór, totally consumed by painting, which he said was more relaxing than writing because it was physical exercise as well as mental. In this incarnation Gray was still highly self-aware, but he was now playful with it. He had already achieved his aims. Against the odds, Gray had become famous in his own lifetime, an overnight sensation in middle age. After Lanark, he produced over thirty books and a thousand paintings, portraits, illustrations. and murals. This was the man many in Scotland and around the world now recognize, the so-called national treasure (he hated that), the socialist, the democratizer, who said his favorite sound was the “the sound of deadlines whooshing past my ears!”–and whose misattributed quotation (“Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation.”)  adorns the Canongate wall of the Scottish Parliament. Who turned down a knighthood, honorary degrees, and literary awards, and who reveled in replying to aspiring writers that no, sorry, he couldn’t help them get published because he was “such a selfish auld bugger.”

Cameron’s film is done with subtlety and affection, and no small amount of insight, though Gray the man, the personality, is very much front and center. In one scene, Alasdair is shown hungover, having lost the plans for the next stage of his Òran Mór mural. He looks every bit the hapless alcoholic as he ambles down the road from his house, manic with fear at all that work wasted. (The plans were later found in the pub.) While watching, Alasdair turned to me and said, “I do understand why folk show me this way. But I wish they’d just concentrate on the work.” I’m not going to pretend I know if he was referring to me, too, in that comment, but whether he was or not doesn’t matter. I know that’s what I did in my biography. So concerned to get the man on the page for future generations, his voice, his movements, his opinions, his loves, and his losses, I sometimes forgot to foreground the work. Which is why, after that night in 2015, I told Alasdair I would return to writing about him, but this time concentrating on the work and its legacy. The last conversation we had in person discussed all the ways we might approach this together in years ahead. “If I’m spared,” he said, as he always did. After he was confined to a wheelchair, that sentence held greater weight.

Over the next few years, I’ll be closer to Alasdair’s Gray work than ever. I’ll be convening a conference in Glasgow reappraising his art, which was for too long seen as a small room in the house of his reputation. I’ll be commissioning new works that respond to Alasdair’s, as he responded to those who came before him. Meanwhile, he and I were due to appear together at Glasgow’s Aye Write! Book Festival in March to discuss his last book, Purgatory, part two of his response to Dante’s Inferno. We spoke about it shortly before he died. Instead I’ve curated an event featuring writers, artists, and friends who will read from his writing and discuss his work, its scope, its impact. The event will be called Remember Alasdair; I expect it to be busy and emotional. But after our discussion in Òran Mór, we will focus on the work. Many of us will miss the man. The man was worth remembering. But it’s the work that matters most.

Rodge Glass is a novelist, senior lecturer in creative writing at the University of Strathclyde, and Alasdair Gray’s biographer.

323- ] English Literature - Alasdair Gray

323- ] English Literature 

Alasdair Gray

-Born  28 December 1934

Riddrie, Glasgow, Scotland

Died  29 December 2019 (aged 85)

Govan, Glasgow, Scotland

Occupation

Novelist artist playwright academic teacher poet muralist illustrator

Alma mater Glasgow School of Art

Genre Science fiction dystopianism surrealism realism

Literary movement        Postmodern literature

Years active          1951–2019

Notable works      Lanark

                               1982, Janine

                               Poor Things

                              The Book of Prefaces

Spouse                  Inge Sørensen

​                              (m. 1961; sep. 1969)​

                               Morag McAlpine

​                              (m. 1991; died 2014)​

Children               1

Website                Official website

                            Alasdair Gray Archive

Alasdair James Gray (28 December 1934 – 29 December 2019) was a Scottish writer and artist. He published novels, short stories, plays, poetry and translations, and wrote on politics and the history of English and Scots literature. His works of fiction combine realism, fantasy, and science fiction with the use of his own typography and illustrations, and won several awards.

 Utilising a postmodern writing style, Gray's works have been compared with those of Franz Kafka, George Orwell, Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino; and often contain extensive footnotes explaining the works that influenced them. His books inspired many younger Scottish writers, including Irvine Welsh, Alan Warner, A. L. Kennedy, Janice Galloway, Chris Kelso and Iain Banks. His first novel, Lanark (1981), is considered a landmark of Scottish fiction; in a 2016 public poll by the BBC, it was named the third-best Scottish novel of all time. He was writer-in-residence at the University of Glasgow from 1977 to 1979 and a professor of Creative Writing from 2001 to 2003; simultaneously holding the latter position at the University of Strathclyde.

Gray studied at the Glasgow School of Art from 1952 to 1957. As well as his book illustrations, he painted portraits and murals, including at the Òran Mór venue and one at Hillhead subway station. His artwork has been widely exhibited and is held in several important collections. Before Lanark, he had written plays for radio and television.

Gray was a Scottish nationalist and a republican, and wrote in support of socialism and Scottish independence. He popularised the epigram "Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation" which was engraved in the Canongate Wall of the Scottish Parliament Building in Edinburgh when it opened in 2004. He lived almost all his life in Glasgow, married twice, and had one son. After his death in 2019, The Guardian referred to him as "the father figure of the renaissance in Scottish literature and art".

Early life

Gray's father, Alexander, had been wounded in the First World War. He worked for many years in a factory making boxes, often went hillwalking, and helped found the Scottish Youth Hostels Association. Gray's mother was Amy (née Fleming), whose parents had moved to Scotland from Lincolnshire because her father had been blacklisted in England for trade union membership.[4] She worked in a clothing warehouse. Alasdair Gray was born in Riddrie in north-east Glasgow on 28 December 1934; his sister Mora was born two years later. During the Second World War, Gray was evacuated to Auchterarder in Perthshire, and Stonehouse in Lanarkshire . From 1942 until 1945 the family lived in Wetherby in Yorkshire, where his father was running a hostel for workers in ROF Thorp Arch, a munitions factory.

Gray frequently visited the public library; he enjoyed the Winnie-the-Pooh stories, and comics like The Beano and The Dandy. Later, Edgar Allan Poe became a powerful influence on the young Gray. His family lived on a council estate in Riddrie, and he attended Whitehill Secondary School, where he was made editor of the school magazine and won prizes for Art and English. When he was eleven Gray appeared on BBC children's radio reading from an adaptation of one of Aesop's Fables, and he started writing short stories as a teenager. His mother died of cancer when he was eighteen; in the same year he enrolled at Glasgow School of Art. As an art student he began what later became his first novel, Lanark, which originally carried the name Portrait of the Artist as a Young Scot. He completed the first book in 1963; it was rejected by the Curtis Brown literary agency. It was originally intended to be Gray's version of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

In 1957 Gray graduated from art school with a degree in Design and Mural Painting. That year he won a Bellahouston Travelling scholarship, and intended to use it to paint and see galleries in Spain. A severe asthma attack left him hospitalised in Gibraltar, and he had his money stolen. From 1958–1962 Gray worked part-time as an art teacher in Lanarkshire and Glasgow, and in 1959–1960 he studied teaching at Jordanhill College.

Gray married Inge Sørensen, a teen-aged nurse from Denmark, in 1961. They had a son, Andrew, in 1963, and separated in 1969. He had an eight-year relationship with Danish jeweller Bethsy Gray. He was married to Morag Nimmo McAlpine Grayfrom 1991 until her death in 2014. He lived in Glasgow his entire adult life.

Visual art

After finishing art school, Gray painted theatrical scenery for the Glasgow Pavilion and Citizens Theatre, and worked as a freelance artist. His first mural was "Horrors of War" for the Scottish-USSR Friendship Society in Glasgow. In 1964 the BBC made a documentary film, Under the Helmet, about his career to date. Many of his murals have been lost; surviving examples include one in the Ubiquitous Chip restaurant in the West End of Glasgow, and another at Hillhead subway station. His ceiling mural (in collaboration with Robert Salmon, Nichol Wheatley and others for the auditorium of the Òran Mór theatre and music venue on Byres Road is one of the largest works of art in Scotland and was painted over several years. It shows Adam and Eve embracing against a night sky, with modern people from Glasgow in the foreground.

In 1977–1978, Gray worked for the People's Palace museum, as Glasgow's "artist recorder", funded by a scheme set up by the Labour government. He produced hundreds of drawings of the city, including portraits of politicians, people in the arts, members of the general public and workplaces with workers. These are now in the collection at Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum.

In 2003 Gray began working with gallerist Sorcha Dallas who, over the next 14 years, helped to develop interest in his visual practice, brokering sales to major collections including the Arts Council of England, the Scottish National Galleries and the Tate. His paintings and prints are also held in Glasgow Museums, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the National Library of Scotland and the Hunterian Museum.

In 2014–2015 Dallas devised the Alasdair Gray Season, a citywide celebration of Gray's visual work to coincide with his 80th birthday. The main exhibition, Alasdair Gray: From the Personal to the Universal, was held at the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum with over 15,000 attending.

His first solo London exhibition took place in late 2017 at the Coningsby Gallery in Fitzrovia and the Leyden Gallery in Spitalfields.

In 2023, Glasgow Museums acquired Gray's 1964 mural Cowcaddens Streetscape in the Fifties, which the artist described as "my best big oil painting", for display at the Kelvingrove Gallery.

Gray said that he found writing tiring, but that painting gave him energy. His visual art often used local or personal details to encompass international or universal truths and themes.

Writing

Gray's first plays were broadcast on radio (Quiet People) and television (The Fall of Kelvin Walker) in 1968. Between 1972 and 1974 he took part in a writing group organised by Philip Hobsbaum, which included James Kelman, Tom Leonard, Liz Lochhead, Aonghas MacNeacail and Jeff Torrington. In 1973, with the support of Edwin Morgan, he received a grant from the Scottish Arts Council to allow him to continue with Lanark. From 1977 to 1979 he was writer-in-residence at the University of Glasgow.

Lanark, his first novel, was published in 1981 to great acclaim, and became his best-known work. The book tells two parallel stories. One, the first written, is a Bildungsroman, a realist depiction of Duncan Thaw, a young artist growing up in Glasgow in the 1950s. The other is a dystopia, where the character Lanark visits Unthank, which is ruled by the Institute and the Council, opaque bodies which exercise absolute power. Lanark enters politics believing he can change Unthank for the better, but gets drunk and disgraces himself. Later, when he is dying, his son Sandy tells him "The world is only improved by people who do ordinary jobs and refuse to be bullied." There is an epilogue four chapters before the end, with a list of the work's alleged plagiarisms, some from non-existent works. The title page of Book Four, which was used as the cover art on the paperback, was a reference to Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes.

Lanark has been compared with Franz Kafka and Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell for its atmosphere of bureaucratic threat, and with Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino for its fabulism. It revivified Scottish literature,[41] inspired a new generation of Scottish writers, including Irvine Welsh, Alan Warner, A. L. Kennedy, Janice Galloway and Iain Banks, and has been called "one of the landmarks of 20th-century fiction", but it did not make Gray wealthy. His 2010 illustrated autobiography A Life in Pictures outlined the parts of Lanark he based on his own experiences: his mother died when he was young, he went to art school, suffered from chronic eczema and shyness, and found difficulty in relationships with women. His first short-story collection, Unlikely Stories, Mostly, won the Cheltenham Prize for Literature in 1983. It is a selection of Gray's short fiction from 1951–1983.

Gray regarded 1982, Janine, published in 1984, as his best work. Partly inspired by Hugh MacDiarmid's A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle, the stream-of-consciousness narrative depicts Jock McLeish, a middle-aged Conservative security supervisor who is dependent on alcohol, and describes how people and sectors of society are controlled against their best interests, over a background of the sadomasochistic sex fantasies that McLeish concocts to distract himself from his misery. Anthony Burgess, who had called Gray "the most important Scottish writer since Sir Walter Scott" on the strength of Lanark, found 1982, Janine "juvenile".

The Fall of Kelvin Walker (1985) and McGrotty and Ludmilla (1990) were based on television scripts Gray had written in the 1960s and 1970s, and describe the adventures of Scottish protagonists in London. Something Leather (1990) explores female sexuality; Gray regretted giving it its provocative title. He called it his weakest book, and he excised the sexual fantasy material and retitled it Glaswegians when he included it in his compendium Every Short Story 1951-2012.

Poor Things (1992) discusses Scottish colonial history via a Frankenstein-like drama set in 19th-century Glasgow. Godwin 'God' Baxter is a scientist who implants a suicide victim with the brain of her own unborn child. It was Gray's most commercially successful work and he enjoyed writing it. The London Review of Books considered it his funniest novel, and a welcome return to form. It won a Whitbread Novel Award and a Guardian Fiction Prize. It was later adapted into a film starring Emma Stone, directed by Yorgos Lanthimos; the novel was adapted for the screen by Tony McNamara.

A History Maker (1994) is set in a 23rd-century matriarchal society in the area around St Mary's Loch, and shows a utopia going wrong. The Book of Prefaces (2000) tells the story of the development of the English language and of humanism, using a selection of prefaces from books ranging from Cædmon to Wilfred Owen. Gray selected the works, wrote extensive marginal notes, and translated some earlier pieces into modern English.

Around 2000, Gray had to apply to the Scottish Artists' Benevolent Association for financial support, as he was struggling to survive on the income from his book sales. In 2001 Gray, Kelman and Leonard became joint professors of the Creative Writing programme at Glasgow and Strathclyde Universities. Gray stood down from the post in 2003, having disagreed with other staff about the direction the programme should take.

"Glasgow is a magnificent city," said McAlpin. "Why do we hardly ever notice that?" "Because nobody imagines living here… think of Florence, Paris, London, New York. Nobody visiting them for the first time is a stranger because he's already visited them in paintings, novels, history books and films. But if a city hasn't been used by an artist not even the inhabitants live there imaginatively."

— Lanark (1981)

Gray's books are mainly set in Glasgow and other parts of Scotland. His work helped strengthen and deepen the development of the Glasgow literary scene away from gang fiction, while also resisting neoliberal gentrification. Gray's work, particularly Lanark, "put Scotland back on the literary map", and strongly influenced Scottish fiction for decades. The frequent political themes in his writing argue the importance of promoting ordinary human decency, protecting the weak from the strong, and remembering the complexity of social issues. They are treated in a playfully humorous and postmodern manner, and some stories, especially Lanark, 1982, Janine, and Something Leather, depict sexual frustration.

My stories try to seduce the reader by disguising themselves as sensational entertainment, but are propaganda for democratic welfare-state Socialism and an independent Scottish parliament. My jacket designs and illustrations—especially the erotic ones—are designed with the same high purpose.

— Contemporary Novelists (1996)

Will Self has called him "a creative polymath with an integrated politico-philosophic vision" and "perhaps the greatest living [writer] in this archipelago today". Gray described himself as "a fat, spectacled, balding, increasingly old Glasgow pedestrian". In 2019 he won the inaugural Saltire Society Lifetime Achievement Award for his contribution to Scottish literature.

His books are self-illustrated using strong lines and high-impact graphics, a unique and highly recognisable style influenced by his early exposure to William Blake and Aubrey Beardsley, comics, Ladybird Books, and Harmsworth's Universal Encyclopaedia , and which has been compared to that of Diego Rivera.

He published three collections of poetry; like his fiction, his poems are sometimes-humorous depictions of "big themes" like love, God and language. Stuart Kelly described them as having "a dispassionate, confessional voice; technical accomplishment utilised to convey meaning rather than for its own sake and a hard-won sense of the complexity of the universe…. His poetic work, especially when dealing with the relationship, or lack thereof, between the sexes, is memorable and disconcerting in the way only good poetry is."

Political views

Gray was a Scottish nationalist. He started voting for the Scottish National Party (SNP) in the 1970s, despairing about the erosion of the welfare state which had provided his education. Gray believed that North Sea oil should be nationalised, and wrote three pamphlets advocating Scottish independence from the United Kingdom, noting at the beginning of Why Scots Should Rule Scotland (1992) that "by Scots I mean everyone in Scotland who is eligible to vote." In 2014 he wrote that "the UK electorate has no chance of voting for a party which will do anything to seriously tax our enlarged millionaire class that controls Westminster." In a 2012 essay, Gray expressed his disapproval of English immigrants to Scotland who in his view only came to Scotland to advance their careers in the arts.

He frequently used the epigram "Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation" in his books; by 1991, the phrase had become a slogan for Scottish opposition to Thatcherism. The text was engraved in the Canongate Wall of the Scottish Parliament Building in Edinburgh when it opened in 2004. It was referred to by SNP politicians during the 2007 Scottish Parliament election campaign, when they became a minority government for the first time.

In 2001, Gray was narrowly defeated by Greg Hemphill when he stood as the candidate of the Glasgow University Scottish Nationalist Association for the post of Rector of the University of Glasgow. A longstanding supporter of the SNP and the Scottish Socialist Party, Gray voted Liberal Democrat at the 2010 general election in an effort to unseat Labour, who he regarded as "corrupted"; by the 2019 election he was voting Labour as a protest against the SNP for not being radical enough.

Gray designed a special front page for the Sunday Herald in May 2014 when it came out in favour of a "Yes" vote in that year's independence referendum, the first and only newspaper to do so. The newspaper described independence as "the chance to alter course, to travel roads less taken, to define a destiny", and the editor, Richard Walker, criticised the scare tactics of the "No" side and stressed that independence was normal. Gray's design, and his and the paper's support for independence, attracted widespread coverage at the time and later. The cover consists of a large thistle surrounded by Scottish saltires. Iain Macwhirter of the Herald wrote that it was "striking", and The National said Gray's image had "galvanised the 'Yes' movement". The Sunday Herald's website doubled its traffic, and the newspaper's sales rose by 31% after it supported "Yes". Despite Scotland narrowly voting against independence, Gray felt the result was more favourable than a narrow Yes win.

Later life

In 1990, he co-founded the publishing company Dog and Bone Press with Chris Boyce and Chris's wife, Angela.

In 2008, Gray's former student and secretary Rodge Glass published a biography of him, called Alasdair Gray: A Secretary's Biography. Gray was broadly approving of the work. Glass sums up critics' main problems with Gray's writing as their discomfort with his politics, and with his frequent tendency to pre-empt criticism in his work. Glass's book won the Somerset Maugham Award in 2009.

In 2014 Gray's autobiography Of Me & Others was released, and Kevin Cameron made a feature-length film Alasdair Gray: A Life in Progress, including interviews with Liz Lochhead and Gray's sister, Mora Rolley.

In August 2015 a dramatisation of Lanark was performed at the Edinburgh International Festival. was adapted by David Greig and directed by Graham Eatough. It had previously been dramatised at the festival by the TAG Theatre Company in 1995

In June 2015 Gray was seriously injured in a fall, after which he used a wheelchair. He continued to write; the first two parts of his translation of Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy trilogy were published in 2018 and 2019.

Death and legacy

Alasdair Gray died at Queen Elizabeth University Hospital in Glasgow on 29 December 2019, the day after his 85th birthday, following a short illness. He left his body to science and there was no funeral.

Nicola Sturgeon, first minister of Scotland, remembered him as "one of the brightest intellectual and creative lights Scotland has known in modern times." Tributes were also paid by Jonathan Coe, Val McDermid, Ian Rankin, Ali Smith and Irvine Welsh. The Guardian referred to him as "the father figure of the renaissance in Scottish literature and art".

His personal and literary archive, including manuscripts, typescripts, diaries and correspondence, is held at the National Library of Scotland.

Sorcha Dallas was responsible for packing and organising his items posthumously and establishing the Alasdair Gray Archive in March 2020. The Archive is a free community resource caring for Gray's studio and visual and literary materials. It commissions new works, offers access and education opportunities as well as partnering on projects and events. One such event is Gray Day, held annually on 25 February in celebration of Gray's life and works.

Selected writing

Main article: Alasdair Gray bibliography

Novels

Lanark (1981), ISBN 978-1-84767-374-9

1982, Janine (1984), ISBN 978-1-84767-444-9

The Fall of Kelvin Walker (1985), ISBN 978-0-8076-1144-9

Something Leather (1990), ISBN 978-0-330-31944-7

McGrotty and Ludmilla (1990), ISBN 978-1-872536-00-2

Poor Things (1992), ISBN 978-1-56478-307-3

A History Maker (1994), ISBN 978-1-84195-576-6

Mavis Belfrage (1996), ISBN 978-0-7475-3089-3

Old Men in Love (2007), ISBN 978-0-7475-9353-9

Short stories

Unlikely Stories, Mostly (1983), ISBN 978-1-84767-502-6

Lean Tales (1985) (with James Kelman and Agnes Owens) (1995), ISBN 978-0-09-958541-1

Ten Tales Tall & True (1993), ISBN 978-0-15-100090-6

The Ends of Our Tethers: 13 Sorry Stories (2003), ISBN 978-1-84195-626-8

Every Short Story by Alasdair Gray 1951-2012 (2012), ISBN 978-0-85786-562-5

Theatre

A Gray Play Book (2009), ISBN 978-1-906307-91-2

Fleck (2011), ISBN 978-1-906120-37-5 

322- ] English Literature - Alasdair Gray

322- ] English Literature

Alasdair Gray

Scottish novelist, playwright, and artist

Alasdair Gray (born December 28, 1934, East Glasgow, Scotland—died December 29, 2019, Glasgow) was a Scottish novelist, playwright, and artist best known for his surreal atmospheric novel Lanark (1981).

Gray’s family was evacuated from Glasgow during World War II. He later returned to attend Whitehill Senior Secondary School, where he wrote and drew for the school magazine, and the Glasgow School of Art. He went on to work as a muralist and a scene painter for local theatres. Throughout the 1960s and ’70s he also wrote plays for television, radio, and the stage, all the while working on a novel that would be decades in the making. When he finally published Lanark, his first book, it was hailed as a landmark of Scottish literature.

Subsequent fiction included 1982, Janine (1984), The Fall of Kelvin Walker (1985), Poor Things (1992), A History Maker (1994), and Old Men in Love: John Tunnock’s Posthumous Papers (2007). His short fiction was collected as Unlikely Stories, Mostly (1983), Ten Tales Tall & True (1993), and The Ends of Our Tethers: 13 Sorry Stories (2003). Every Short Story, 1951–2012 was published in 2012.

In 2000 Gray edited The Book of Prefaces, which he also designed and illustrated, and he began restoring murals he had painted in the 1970s. In 2001 he became a professor of creative writing at the University of Glasgow. Throughout his career, Gray’s murals, writings, and political activism endorsed socialism, opposed war and nuclear arms, and advocated Scottish independence. He notably argued for the latter in Why Scots Should Rule Scotland (1992; rev. ed. 1997) and Independence: An Argument for Home Rule (2014). Of Me and Others (2014) was a compilation of autobiographical writings.  

321- ] English Literature - Alisdair Gray

321- ] English Literature

Alisdair Gray

 Alasdair Gray (1934 – 2019) was a Glasgow-born writer and artist. Over decades creating poems, plays, short stories, novels, political essays, murals, paintings, drawings and prints, he built a legacy as a polymath and one of Scotland’s most uncompromisingly original artistic voices.

Gray has been called “the father figure of the renaissance in Scottish literature and art”. A mammoth figure in Scottish literature, his 1981 debut Lanark is recognised by many as his crowning achievement. The other definitive novels 1982, Janine (1984) and Poor Things (1992) add to a body of literary work arguably unsurpassed in post-war Scottish writing.

His writing is boldly eclectic – weaving together an enormous number of literary and artistic influences. He was playful with form – at times making creative use of text and typography – and genre, with his works spanning realism, fantasy and science fiction, often in one go.

Gray – who referred to himself as an artist who fell into writing – had a similarly unmistakeable style in his visual art. In an expansive career, he produced paintings, prints, illustrations, murals, typeset his own books and designed his own font. Glasgow is imbued with his work, including famous murals at the Oran Mor venue, Hillhead subway station and the Ubiquitous Chip pub and restaurant. 

320- ] English Literature - Alasdair Gray

320- ] English Literature

Alasdair Gray

 Born in Glasgow, Scotland December 28, 1934

Died December 29, 2019

Websitehttp://alasdairgray.info/

Genre Science Fiction & Fantasy, Fiction

Alasdair James Gray was a Scottish writer and artist. His first novel, Lanark (1981), is seen as a landmark of Scottish fiction. He published novels, short stories, plays, poetry and translations, and wrote on politics and the history of English and Scots literature. His works of fiction combine realism, fantasy, and science fiction with the use of his own typography and illustrations, and won several awards.

He studied at Glasgow School of Art from 1952 to 1957. As well as his book illustrations, he painted portraits and murals. His artwork has been widely exhibited and is in several important collections. Before Lanark, he had plays performed on radio and TV.

His writing style is postmodern and has been compared with those of Franz Kafka, G