“Be my Boswell!” he shouted, dancing a jig around the room and raising a
finger to the heavens. “Tell the world of my genius!”
This is the writer and artist Alasdair Gray, frisking with the author of this
book. James Boswell was sneered at for being Johnson’s spaniel. Rodge Glass,
a Jewish Mancunian who went north to study creative writing with Gray, and
who then served as, while eventually for some reason ceasing to be, Gray’s
secretary, can come across at times as a rather larger creature, bounding
along and “bouncing” about, as he says himself, in tune with his master’s
achievements, helping with his plights and postponements. His book is
friendly. It is also frank.
At one point he meets up with his master in mid-afternoon Edinburgh. Gray is
due to address one of his many meetings in the evening, and has been
drinking. They set off down the steep Royal Mile, and end up in a tangle at
the foot of it, as if to celebrate the devolved Scotland then, perhaps, in
parliamentary session near by: Gray, a do-what-you-want democrat, has always
wanted a separate, republican Scotland, and may have his doubts about
devolution, but must surely be quite pleased with the arrival of government
at Holyrood. After the tumble, he made it to the meeting, let it be said.
Few biographers can ever have come so close to their subject.
Glass has no desire to behave as a patient scholar or a discursive critic. His
footnotes are of the kind that tell you that well-known writers are
well-known, and one of them appears to know very little about Edmund Wilson.
His book is almost as much about what it was like to write it as it is an
anatomy of Gray’s life and work. “Not only do I care greatly for Alasdair,
but I also wish him to care greatly for me.” This promotes an intimacy and
contributes to what is, in its way, a successful and appealing book. Gray is
made vivid, as is his membership of the remarkable generation of West Coast
Scottish writers which got going after the Second World War – Archie Hind,
James Kelman, Agnes Owens, Tom Leonard, his lifelong friends. The early
life, and the early recruitment of his powers, are of great interest: the
fireside dramas, the bed-settee, the school magazine, the public library,
the Butler Education Act, which, as Gray acknowledged, did much for
working-class children – these are likely to bring pangs of recognition to
anyone who was there or thereabouts at the time. We are in that unforgotten
country where you were advised to enjoy yourself when you could, while you
were still young.
Glass’s candour ranges widely. Is Gray’s art – his drawings – important? “What
if it has been ignored because it’s no good?” Gray is shown peeing into the
sink in mid-dictation. A close woman friend is cited: “He’s the nicest man
I’ve ever met – I just couldn’t take the drinking”. His “head-shaking”
second wife, Morag, seems at one stage to be “acting as a counter-balance to
the cuddly treatment he gets from everyone else”.
The circumstances of his birth suited the legend, the hero, that he later
became in Scotland, and beyond, when his fiction was reviewed and read in
London and “even”, as Glass puts it, in Los Angeles. His grandmother refused
to let her daughter into the house when her waters broke, and his father had
to cycle round Glasgow for medical assistance. Panic, Gray has suggested,
with reference to this refusal. His parents were good to him, apparently,
with his mother somewhat occluded in the present record and in his own
autobiographical accounts; and he has a sister of independent mind. He grew
up in the Riddrie district of the city, was a “dreamy” pupil of the sort
that used to be detected in the Scottish schools of the period, went to
Glasgow Art School, and became a reluctant teacher. He had begun, and was to
continue, to suffer from eczema and asthma. Success, when it arrived, could
be arduous too. “I thought to myself – I am now a famous and established
man! I must now be able to make some kind of living . . . . I soon realised
this was going to be more difficult than expected, and I thought, Oh fuck!”
The expletive is overused now in print: here, it is exquisite.
The legend of Alasdair Gray was to embody that of Gulley Jimson, the obsessive
painter hero of Joyce Cary’s influential novel of the period, The Horse’s
Mouth. It has also embodied a version of the Faust story, in which he has
taken an interest. Gray can come across as a Dr Faustus whose potions and
alembics would sometimes miscarry, but who has kept going.
He married Inge Sorensen, a Danish nurse, by whom he had a son, but the
marriage rapidly went wrong, and this would seem to have encouraged a
chronic preoccupation with sexual difficulty. His life can appear to be
enclosed in the dream of rejection which ensued. “Being bad at sex” was “one
of his favourite subjects”. In the late 1980s Inge returned to the flat
where Gray was now living with Morag, asked to be taken in, and died in the
vacated marital bed. “It is hard to believe that he could not have just
gently refused her request”, writes Glass. There is a great deal of Gray in
this refusal to refuse.
In 1981 he published his most famous book, Lanark, which had undergone a
gestation of many years. The novel, or more than novel, folds together two
stories, that of the man Lanark and that of Duncan Thaw. The two are held
together by the magnetism of duality; they are the same but different.
According to Glass, “Thaw thinks life instead of living it, and Lanark does
life without thinking it”. They are united by a surliness, a refusal to
please, which marks them off from most other suffering sensitives in the
literature of the modern world. They speak as they find. The Lanark material
which surrounds the Thaw narrative is expressed in fantastic terms, and
also, though the link has been disowned, in science fiction terms. The Thaw
narrative is virtually naturalistic and is a novel in its own right, largely
based on features of the Gray agon, for all the suicidal ending. To say that
it is humanly superior to the rest of the novel – an outcome of those long
years of contemplation and elaboration – is to risk indictment as an enemy
of the ludic and the fantastic, of magic realism, of the postmodern.
Speaking as I find, I think it a risk worth taking. What chiefly matters is
that the Thaw narrative is a wonderful evocation of the dark, interesting,
liquid Glasgow of Gray’s youth – of its weathers and waters and overcast
skies, its outspoken folk, with their pursuit of art and knowledge amid all
this inclemency.
“Nothing less than an epic, I decided, was worth writing”, reports the
Tailpiece in Lanark. Gray has taken a relaxed view of what an epic is, and
he shares it with James Hogg, who claimed in one of his hyperboles that his
satirical verse saga, Queen Hynde, was Scotland’s “best epic poem”. This
view of epic is among the affinities that bind together these two versatile
writers. It is also a reason for the elaborations that encircle the Thaw
narrative.
Both the Glass narrative and Gray’s fictions raise questions relating to fame
and neglect, and the fate that awaits the lover of women. The impression is
given that Gray became popular when he became famous. Women threw themselves
at him then, said one woman. Late in Lanark, Lanark is at his curtest when
told by one of these women of Gray’s: “Bet you enjoy being famous”. “I’m
not”, replies Lanark. “Modest, eh?” “No, but I’m not famous either.” A few
pages later, Lanark is “suddenly a famous man with important papers in his
briefcase. Women loved him”. Meanwhile the woman who thought Gray was the
nicest man she’d ever met said that there were times when it could seem that
he “just wasn’t thinking of anyone else” but himself. They are still
friends. The problems Gray faced in this quarter enter profoundly into his
writings. They are not the stuff of gossip. In discussing the biographical
implications of a rape fantasy projected in Gray’s work, Glass remarks: “we
do not usually make that connection between author and art, so why make it
here?”. Elsewhere in his book, biographical connections are made to
considerable effect, but it’s certainly true that such connections can give
rise to puzzles. Will Self was to cut the present knot with the claim that
with Gray “the maker and the made are 100 per cent the same thing”.
In 1982 Janine, published shortly after Lanark, fantasy is present in high
concentration. Rapes are imagined. Political discourse co-exists with
satirico-sadomasochistic reveries. Suspense is missing. Characters are
phantasmal. Ten years later came what is widely seen as one of his best
books, Poor Things, a Stevensonian-Shavian tall tale of medical men of
Faustian predilection in Victorian Glasgow: Bella Baxter is a belle dame
sans merci who teaches the lessons of a humanitarian socialism and has the
rival narratives of Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Witty and
ingenious and well told, it bears witness to what the fantastic has been
able to do for Gray.
In 2007 he was heard to complain that in the field of modern art “he and his
contemporaries had been ignored”. He could hardly have said the same about
his own literary reputation. Having survived the per ardua ad astra of the
mid-century ambitious Scot, he has been famous for a long time now:
troubled, cuddled, with the scars to show for his celebrity – as caught in
Glass’s mirror, a charming, irascible man in the Scottish mould. Charm is
not supposed to be popular in his native city, but an exception has been
made for Gray. He has not been locked out of the world of publicity: he has
had his agent, his secretary, his various London publishers and his fan
following, and this book comes to an end in what Glass calls “the glitzy
mainstream” – at a launch of one of his books in Soho, publicity girls
flocking round him as in someone’s reverie. He adjourned to a restaurant,
where he lifted a finger to the sky, invoked his publisher and assured his
guests: “Nonono! BLOOMZZBURRRAAAAYY! Er, BLOOMZZBURRRAYY will pay, surely?
I, er, I believe they have made some money . . . from a young magician”.
The episode has a touch of the light fantastic, and of the exotic. There he
is, famous, in the thick of Media London, alluding to Harry Potter. But his
heart belongs to Glasgow.
Rodge Glass
ALASDAIR GRAY
A secretary’s biography
352pp. Bloomsbury. £25.
978 0 7475 9015 6
Karl Miller’s books include Boswell and Hyde, 1995, Dark Horses: An
experience of literary journalism, 1998, and Electric Shepherd: A likeness
of James Hogg, 2003.
