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.
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.
