‘Spending half your lifetime turning your soul into printer’s ink is a queer way to live’
Written over a period of almost 30 years, Alasdair Gray’s masterpiece, Lanark, was first published by Edinburghbased Canongate Books on 25 February 1981. Gray passed away in 2019, but on Thursday, to mark the 40th anniversary of its release, fans will mar
Q So how autobiographical is Lanark?
Book 1, the first half of the Thaw section, is very like my life until 17 1⁄2 years, though much more miserable. Also the hostel for munition workers which my dad managed during from about 1941 to ’44 was in Wetherby, Yorkshire. I shifted it to the Scottish west highlands to preserve some national unity and bring in some references to Scotland’s Calvinist past, though the Wee Free clergyman is sheer invention. I have never met such a man. The second half of the Thaw book is true to friends I made at art school and some of my dealings with the staff, for I filled notebooks while there with details to be used in my Portrait of the Artist as a Young Glaswegian. But unlike James Joyce’s portrait I intended my artist to end tragically –
Q Why?
Young artists couldn’t make livings by painting easel or murals in 1950s Scotland. Nearly all art students became teachers, apart from a few who got into industry or advertising or became housewives. I supposed I would have to survive by some kind of compromise like that, but I had no intention of letting Thaw do so. Which is why I made him dourer, more singleminded than I am. His inability to attract women, and sexual frustration would also help push him towards madness. The episode with the prostitute, by the way, was sheer invention. It struck me as the sort of thing that would likely happen if I went with a prostitute. So I never did. In 1954 I was so sure of my Thaw story that, instead of taking a summer holiday job like most art students, I got Dad’s permission to stay at home and write it. Having rapidly filled notebooks with ideas and descriptions I felt able to finish a novel in ten weeks. At the end of that time I had written what is now chapter 12, The War Begins, and the hallucinatory episode ending chapter 29, The Way Out. I had found I did not want to write in the gushing emotional voice of a diary, but in a calm unemphatic voice readers would trust. This is not my normal reading voice. To make it a normal written voice I had to continually revise.
Q But where did Lanark come from?
From Franz Kafka. I had read The Trial and The Castle and Amerika by then, and an introduction by Edwin Muir explaining these books were like modern Pilgrim’s Progresses. The cities in them seemed very like 1950s Glasgow, an old industrial city with a smoke-laden grey sky that often seemed to rest like a lid on the north and south ranges of hills and shut out the stars at night. I imagined a stranger arriving, making enquiries and slowly finding he is in hell. I made notes for that book. I wrote a description of a stranger arriving in a dark city, in a train on which he is the only passenger. But the Thaw novel had to be finished, I thought. Then one day in Dennistoun public library I found Tillyard’s The English Epic and its Background, which I will not attempt to describe in detail, but the lesson I took from it was this. The epic genre can be prose as well as poetry and can combine all other genres – convincing accounts of how men and women act in common and uncommon domestic, political, legendary and fabulous circumstances. Nothing less than an epic, I decided, was worth writing, and was helped to the decision by remembering how much I enjoyed works that mingled different genres; childhood pantomime, The Wizard of Oz film, Hans Andersen’s stories, Amos Tutuola’s Palm-wine Drunkard, Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner, Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, Kingsley’s Water Babies, Goethe’s Faust, Moby Dick, Shaw’s Adventures of the Black Girl in Search of God, classical myths and some books of the bible. All these mingle everyday doings with supernatural ones. I now planned to put my journey through hell in the middle of my Portrait of the Artist as a Frustrated Young Glaswegian. In some chapter before Thaw went mad he would attend a drunken party and meet an elderly gent like himself but thirty or forty years older who would tell him a queer fantastic story, enjoyable for its own sake. Only when the readers reached the end of Thaw would they see the interior narrative was a continuation of it. The design of the book now hung in my mind like a scaffolding put up for the erection of a large castle, with a few towers (that is, chapters) completed or partly complete. Most of what happened to me before the novel was finished provided me with building materials that I stored in notebooks until I could construct the other towers and connecting walls. For example, chapters 7 to 11 describe an institute, a province of hell in which modern professional middle-class folk are the devils. This derives from both other writers and my own experience. The architecture of the place partly derives from H.G. Wells’s Selenite empire in The First Men on the Moon and 21st-century London in The Sleeper Awakes, but mostly from the afterlife hell in Wyndham Lewis’s Malign Fiesta. This was part of a trilogy, The Human Age, later published as novels, but the last two books were first written as plays for the BBC Third Programme and broadcast several times around 1955. I heard one such broadcast while in Stobhill hospital then, an experience that also gave me material for chapter 26 – Chaos – which describes the experience from a patient’s point of view. I had been sent there with what our family doctor called “stasis asthmaticus”, and which I ascribed to my quarrel with a very nice girl who only liked me as a friend, whereas I wanted her to be my (A) lover and (B—later of course) wife. In the institute chapters I describe it from a very poorly qualified doctor’s viewpoint, and mingled atmospheres and details from Wyndham Lewis’s hell, Stobhill hospital, the London underground railway system and the London BBC television centre. I experienced the last when I had plays produced or commissioned there in the middle and late 1960s. But chapters 7 to 11 were written in 1969 and ’70, by which time Lanark’s story was becoming greater than Thaw’s, and I had decided to put the last inside the first. That large change came about because in 1961 I married and, in September 1963 became a father. The most significant part of my life no longer seemed my eccentrically frustrated youth. The toils of later life which I shared with many other folk now looked as important.
Q Are you telling me that the fantastic and grotesque events in books 3 and 4 are also autobiographical? How can they be?
Lanark becomes Lord Provost of Unthank. You were never a figure in the local politics of Glasgow.
I know, but experience allowed me to generalise. A writer whose play has been chosen for a TV production is very like a politician chosen for an important position because he has made a speech that appeals to widespread sentiment. He then discovers he depends on a host of directors, producers, dramaturges and technicians to whom he is a temporary creature, of use in assisting their work if he does not tamper with the notions it suggests to them. The writer of what was once his script may feel good if the production is finally applauded: will certainly be blamed if it is not, but his part in the business may strike him as one that could have been done as well or better by someone with less or very different ideas. TV production taught me all about politics.
Q In what sort of order were the parts of the
book completed?
Book One was completed in its present form before my son was born. My wife and I were living on Social Security money then so I sent the completed part to Spenser Curtis Brown’s literary agency because I felt the book good enough to stand alone, though I would have preferred to complete it in the big way I had planned. But Mr. Curtis Brown rejected it so I did complete it as planned. By the mid-1970s I had completed Book Three and linked it to Book One with my Oracle’s Prologue. I had a good agent who liked my work by that time, Frances Head, a London lady. She showed it to three London publishers, who tried to persuade me to split the Thaw and Lanark narratives in two and make separate books of them. They said it would be dangerously expensive for them to risk publishing so big a first book by an unknown novelist. But my first marriage had collapsed in an amicable way, I had no need of money and was greedy for fame instead, so I refused them. Books Two and Four were written side by side— I moved from completing a chapter in one to a chapter in the other with an increasing sense of running downhill. In 1975 and ’76 I was carrying manuscripts around and working on them in all kinds of places. I remember waking up on the livingroom floor of my friend Angela Mullane’s house after a party where I had fallen asleep for a usual Scottish reason, and resuming work there and then because it was a quiet morning and none of the other bodies on the floor were awake. I couldn’t do that now. I was then a young fellow of forty or thereabouts. At the end of July 1976 the whole book was completed, typed and posted to Quartet Ltd, the only London publisher Frances Head had been able to interest in it. She, alas, had died of lung cancer. Quartet books turned it down for the usual reason – it was too long for them to risk the high cost of printing. I sulked for half a year then posted it to Canongate, the only Scottish publishing firm I knew. Five or six months passed before I got an enthusiastic letter from Charles Wilde, the Canongate reader, saying the Scottish Arts Council would probably subsidise printing costs. Chapters had appeared in Scottish International, a short-lived but widely read literary magazine eight or nine years earlier, so north Britain was more ready for it than the south. I finally signed a contract with Canongate on the 20th of March 1978.
Q Lanark was published three years later. Why did it take so long?
Canongate arranged a joint publication with Lippincott, an old well-established firm in the USA; but before the book was printed Lippincott got swallowed up by Harper & Row, another old wellestablished USA firm. This caused delay. Then American editors proof-read the book, decided my punctuation was inconsistent. I told them that I used punctuation marks to regulate the speed with which readers took in the text – some passages were to be read faster than others, so had fewer commas. There was more delay while I restored my text to its original state. However, the delays gave me time to complete the illustrative title pages and jacket designs.
Q Were you relieved when Lanark was finally off your hands?
Yes. For a while before I held a copy I imagined it like a large paper brick of 600 pages, well bound, a thousand of them to be spread through Britain. I felt that each copy was my true body with my soul inside, and that the animal my friends called Alasdair Gray was a no-longer essential form of after-birth. I enjoyed that sensation. It was a safe feeling.
Q So you the time spent upon Lanark over so many years was time well spent?
Not entirely. Spending half a lifetime turning your soul into printer’s ink is a queer way to live. I’m amazed to recall the diaries I wrote when a student, often putting the words into the third person as a half-way stage to making them fictional prose. I’m sure healthy panthers and ducks enjoy better lives, but I would have done more harm if I’d been a banker, broker, advertising agent, arms manufacturer or drug dealer. There are worse as well as better folk in the world, so I don’t hate myself.
The first annual Gray Day takes place on Thursday 25 February, for more information visit www.grayday.info. To coincide with Gray Day, Canongate are publishing a new edition of Lanark, as well as new editions of Gray’s novellas Mcgrotty and Ludmilla and The Fall of Kelvin Walker, as well as his short story collection Unlikely Stories, Mostly. For more information see www.canongate. co.uk