Of Me and Others by Alasdair Gray

Joe Brace

Alasdair Gray’s Of Me and Others begins with an unflinching essay titled Middle Age Self Portrait from 1987.

Gray describes his ‘muscular legs… small bum…and bulging paunch’ and his ‘overeager manner of one who fears to be disliked’, before launching into a family history told first by his father and then retold by the protagonist of Gray’s first novel.

All the themes of this book and indeed of all Gray’s books are found here in this opening: Glasgow; the layering of the same stories from different viewpoints; self-deprecation belied by a clear and confident authorial voice.

For those unfamiliar with Gray’s novels, his first and most successful book may be summarised briefly. In Lanark (1981), Books 1 and 4 concern a nameless young man who arrives in a dreamlike, sunless city which resembles Glasgow and/or Kafka’s Prague, where people suffer from grotesque and bizarre diseases, including one which slowly turns the sufferer into a dragon. The hero recovers and has a spiritual/meta encounter with God/the author.

In Books 2 and 3, a mural painter graduates from Glasgow School of Art in the bleak pre-war period, is unsuccessful in art and love and goes mad. Gray designed every aspect of the book from the front cover to the font, adding in his own illustrations, page borders, and footnotes and sidenotes, and has continued to do so for everything published since.

Of Me and Others is decorated with a design of irises and butterflies, with his familiar page layouts and sidenotes contextualising or contradicting the essays they sit alongside. The volume is a collection of all his non-fiction writing, a companion to his A Life in Pictures (2010). The 62 pieces it contains span 1951 to 2018 and include articles, epilogues lifted from his novels, obituaries, a funding report, a Declaration of Intent written for Tommy Sheridan’s Scottish Socialist Party, an account of his father’s life, book reviews and a constitution for a crofters’ community. Many of these have been printed before. It is a testament to the consistency of his writing and politics that these disparate pieces do make up a coherent whole, unified by strong and recurrent themes.

This is also the book’s principal weakness. Of Me and Others revolves around three main motifs (the postSecond World War welfare state built by Labour, his debt to it and his grief at its passing). Gray’s totemic moments used to illustrate these (the closure of Glasgow’s People’s Palace; the obliteration of social housing simultaneous with Glasgow’s crowning as European Capital of Culture) will feel infuriatingly familiar to anyone attempting to read this in one sitting.

In some of the later essays, instead of repeating verbatim paragraphs on the same subject, Gray substitutes a six-line block of asterisks with a footnote referring you back to an earlier piece. This will appeal to some readers and dismay others.

Gray enjoys actively forestalling criticism, tackling objections both in the foreword and in the essay by a fictitious Scottish academic called Sidney Workman, who lambasts Gray for his plagiarism, his ‘hackneyed’ devices and his ‘shameless padding’. This essay is also a reprint of the epilogue from Gray’s novel Old Men in Love (2007).

For the devotee of Gray’s novels, there is the detective-like pleasure of identifying influences and inspirations: the brilliant, dead friend in 1982, Janine, the suggestion that led to Five Letters from an Eastern Empire and the pungent texture of mid-century Glasgow that shapes Lanark.

For those interested in the history of British literature, Gray provides an eloquent and utterly subjective depiction of Glasgow and its literary scene throughout the second half of the 20th century. Moreover, it gives a vital sense of life as a jobbing novelist and painter, living grant to grant and commission to commission, always producing, always well behind deadline. Gray eulogises this, while acknowledging his dole years and his frustrations at the time given to primary-school teaching.

There is a quote, often misattributed to Gray, which he has used as the frontispiece for several of his books (although not this one): ‘Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation.’

This collection of essays shows the optimism and perseverance needed to do that.