Of Me and Others

by Alasdair Gray

  A voice said, “Yes, come round, come round.”

  Lanark went behind the picture and found a stout man leaning against a pile of pillows on a low bed. His face, framed by wings and horns of uncombed hair looked statuesque and noble apart from an apprehensive, rather cowardly expression. He wore a woollen jersey over a pyjama jacket, neither of them clean. The coverlet over his knees was littered with books and papers, and there was a pen in his hand. Glancing at Lanark in a sly, sideways fashion he indicated a chair with the pen and said, “Please sit down.”

  “Are you the king of this place?”

  “The King of Proven, yes. And Unthank too. And that suite of rooms you call the institute and the council.”

  “Then perhaps you can help me. I am here–”

  “Yes, I know roughly what you want and I would like to help. I would even offer you a drink, but there’s too much intoxication in this book.”

  “Book?”

  “This world, I meant to say. You see I’m the king, not the government. I have laid out landscapes, and stocked them with people, and I still work an odd miracle, but governing is left to folk like Monboddo and Slodden.”

  “Why?”

  The king closed his eyes, smiled and said, “I brought you here to ask that question.”

  “Will you answer it?”

  “Not yet.”

  Lanark felt very angry. He stood up and said, “Then talking to you is a waste of time.”

  “Waste of time!” said the king, opening his eyes. “You clearly don’t realise who I am. I have called myself a king – that’s a purely symbolic name. I’m far more important. Read this and you’ll understand. The critics will accuse me of self-indulgence but I don’t care.”1

  With a reckless gesture he handed Lanark a paper from the bed. It was covered with childish handwriting and many words were scored out or inserted with little arrows. Much of it seemed to be dialogue but Lanark’s eye was caught by a sentence in italics which said:

  Much of it seemed to be dialogue but Lanark’s eye was caught by a sentence in italics which said:

  Lanark gave the paper back asking, “What’s that supposed to prove?”

  “I am your author.”

  Lanark stared at him. The author said, “Please don’t feel embarrased. This isn’t an unprecedented situation.

  Vonnegut has it in Breakfast of Champions, Jehovah in the books of Job and Jonah.”

  “Are you pretending to be God?”

  “Not nowadays. I used to be part of him, though. Yes, I am part of a part which was once the whole. But I went bad and was excreted. If I can get well I may be allowed home before I die, so I continually plunge my beak into my rotten liver and swallow and excrete it. But it grows again. Creation festers in me. I am excreting you and your world at the present moment. This arse-wipe” – he stirred the papers on the bed – “is part of the process.”

  “I am not religious,” said Lanark, “but I don’t like you mixing religion with excrement. Last night I saw part of the person you are referring to and it was not at all nasty.”

  “You saw part of God?” cried the author. “How did that happen?”

  Lanark explained. The author was greatly excited. He said, “Say those words again.”

  “Is. . . is. . . is. . . then a pause, then Is. . . if. . . is. . .”

  “If?” shouted the author sitting upright. “He actually said if? He wasn’t simply snarling Is, is, is, is, is all the time?”

  Lanark said, “I don’t like you saying ‘he’ like that. What I saw may not have been masculine. It may not have been human. But it certainly wasn’t snarling. What’s wrong with you?”

  The author had covered his mouth with his hands as if to stifle laughter, but his eyes were wet. He gulped and said, “One if to five ises! That’s an incredible amount of freedom. But can I believe you? I’ve created you honest but can I trust your senses? At a great altitude is and if must sound very much alike.” “You seem to take words very seriously,” said Lanark with a touch of contempt.

  “Yes. You don’t like me, but that can’t be helped. I’m primarily a literary man,” said the author with a faintly nasal accent and started chuckling to himself.

  The tall blonde girl came round the edge of the painting wiping her brush on her apron. She said defiantly, “I’ve finished the tree. Can I leave now?”

  The author leaned back on his pillows and said sweetly, “Of course, Marion. Leave when you like.”

  “I need money. I am hungry.”

  “Why don’t you go to the kitchen? I believe there’s some cold chicken in the fridge, and I’m sure Pat won’t mind you making yourself a snack.”

  “I don’t want a snack, I want a meal with a friend in a restaurant. And I want to go to a film afterward, or to a pub, or to a hairdresser if I feel like it. I’m sorry, but I want money.”

  “Of course you do, and you’ve earned it. How much do I owe?”

  “Five hours today at fifty pence an hour is two pounds fifty. With yesterday and the day before and the day before is ten pounds, isn’t it?”

  “I’ve a poor head for arithmatic but you’re probably right,” said the author, taking coins from under a pillow and giving them to her. “This is all I have just now, nearly two pounds. Come back tomorrow and I’ll see if I can manage a little extra.”

  The girl scowled at the coins in her hand, then at the author. He was puffing medicinal spray into his mouth from a tiny hand pump. She went abruptly behind the painting again and they heard the door slam.

  “A strange girl,” murmured the author, sighing. “I do my best to help her but it isn’t easy.”

  Lanark had been sitting with his head propped on his hands. He said, “You say you are creating me.”

  “I am.”

  “Then how can I have experiences you don’t know about? You were surprised when I told you what I saw from the aircraft.”

  “The answer to that is unusually interesting; please attend closely. When Lanark is finished (I am calling the work after you) it will be roughly two hundred thousand words and forty chapters long, and divided into books three, one, two and four.”

  “Why not one, two, three and four?”

  “I want Lanark to be read in one order but eventually thought of in another. It is an old device. Homer, Virgil, Milton and Scott-Fitzgerald2 used it. There will be a prologue before book one, an interlude in the centre and this epilogue two or three chapters before the end.”

  “I thought epilogues came after the end.”

  “Usually, but mine is too important to go there. Though not essential to the plot it provides comic distraction at a moment when the narrative sorely needs it. And it lets me utter some fine sentiments which I could not trust to a mere character. And it contains critical notes that will save researchers years of toil. In fact my epilogue is so essential that I am working on it with nearly a quarter of the book still unwritten. I am working on it here, now, in this conversation. But you have reached here through chapters I haven’t clearly imagined yet, so you know details of the story which I don’t. Of course I know the broad general outline. That was planned years ago and musn’t be changed. You have come from my city of destruction which is rather like Glasgow, to plead before some sort of worldwide parliament in an ideal city based on Edinburgh, or London, or even Paris if I can wangle a grant from the Scottish Arts Council to go there. Tell me, when you were landing this morning, did you see the Eiffel Tower?3

  Or Big Ben? Or a rock with a castle on it?”

  “No. Proven is very like –”

  “Stop! Don’t tell me. My fictions often anticipate the experiences they’re based upon, but no author should rely on that sort of thing.”

  Lanark was so agitated that he stood and walked to the window to sort out his thoughts. The author struck him as a slippery person, but too vain and garrilous to be impressive. He went back to the bed and said, “How will my story end?”

  “Catastrophically. The Thaw narrative
shows a man dying because he is bad at loving. It is enclosed by your narrative which shows civilization collapsing for the same reason.”

  “Listen,” said Lanark. “I never tried to be a delegate. I never wanted anything but some sunlight, some love, some very ordinary happiness. And every moment I have been thwarted by organisations pushing me in a different direction, and now I’m nearly an old man and my reasons for living have shrunk to standing up in public and saying a good word for the only people I know. And you tell me that word will be useless! That you have planned it to be useless.”

  “Yes,” said the author, nodding eagerly. “Yes. That’s right.”

  Lanark gaped down at the foolishly nodding face and suddenly felt it belonged to a horrible ventriloquist’s doll. He raised a clenched fist but could not bring himself to strike. He swung round and punched a painting to an easel and both clattered to the floor. He pushed down the other painting beside the door, went to a tall bookcase and heaved it over. Books cascaded from the upper shelves and it hit the floor with a crash that shook the room. There were long, low shelves round the walls holding books, folders, bottles and tubes of paint. With sweeps of his arm he shoved these to the floor, then turned, breathing deeply, and stared at the bed. The author sat there looking distressed, but the paintings and easels were back in their own places, and glancing around Lanark saw the bookcases had returned quietly to their corner and books, folders, bottles and paint were on shelves again.

  “A conjuror!” said Lanark, with loathing. “A damned conjuror!”

  “Yes,” said the conjuror humbly, “I’m sorry. Please sit down and let me explain why the story has to go like this. You can eat while I talk (I’m sure you’re hungry) and afterwards you can tell me how you think I can be better. Please sit down.”

  The bedside chair was small but comfortably upholstered. A table had appeared beside it with covered dishes on a tray. Lanark felt more exhausted than hungry but after sitting for a while he removed a cover out of curiosity. There was a bowl beneath of dark red oxtail soup, so taking a spoon he began to eat.

  “I will start,” said the conjuror, “by explaining the physics of the world you live in. Everything you have experienced and are experiencing, from your first glimpse of the elite cafe in chapter one to the metal of the spoon in your fingers now and the taste of soup in your mouth is made of one thing.”

  “Atoms–” said Lanark.

  “No. Print. Some worlds are made of atoms,4 but yours are made of tiny marks marching in neat lines, like armies of insects across pages and pages and pages of white paper. I say these lines are marching, but that is a metaphor. They are perfectly static. They are lifeless. How can they reproduce the movement and noises of the Battle of Borodino, the white whale ramming the ship, the fallen angels on the flaming lake?”

  “By being read,” said Lanark, impatiently.

  “Exactly. Your survival as a character and mine as an author depend on us seducing a living soul into our printed words world and trapping it here long enough for us to steal the imaginative energy which gives us life. To cast a spell over this stranger I am doing abominable things. I am prostituting my most sacred memories into the commonest possible words and sentences. When I need more striking sentences or ideas, I steal them from other writers, usually twisting them to blend with my own. Worst of all I am using the great world given to everyone at birth – the world of atoms – as a rag-bag of shapes and colours to make this second-hand entertainment more amusing.”

  “You seem to be complaining,” said Lanark. “I don’t know why. Nobody is forcing you to work with print and all work involves some degradation. I want to know why your readers in their world should be entertained by me failing to do any good in mine.”

  “Because failures are popular. Frankly, Lanark, you are too stolid and commonplace to be entertaining as a successful man. But don’t be offended; most heroes end up like you. Consider the Greek book about Troy. To repair a marriage broken by adultery, a civilization spends ten years to smashing another one. The heroes on both sides know the quarrel is futile but they continue it because they think willingness to die fighting is proof of human greatness. There is no suggestion that the war does anything but damage the people who survive it.

  Then there is the Roman book about Aeneas. He leads a group of refugees in search of a peaceful home and spreads agony and warfare along the north and south coasts of the Mediterranean. He also visits Hell and gets out of it. The writer of this story is tender towards peaceful homes, he wants Roman success in warfare and government to make the world a peaceful home for everyone, but his last words describe Aeneas, in the heat of battle, revenging himself by killing a helpless enemy.

  There is the Jewish book about Moses. It is very like the Roman one about Aeneas, so I’ll go on to the Jewish book about Jesus. He is a poor man without home or wife. He says he is God’s son and calls all men his brothers. He teaches that love is the one great good, and is spoiled by fighting for things. He is crucified, goes to Hell, then to Heaven which (like Aeneas’s peaceful world) is outside the scope of his book. But if, as a hymn says, ‘He died to make us good,’ he too was a failure. The nations who worshipped him in their churches became the greediest and most successful conquerors the world has known.

  Only the Italian book shows a living man in heaven. He gets there by following Aeneas and Jesus through Hell after the first woman he loved married another man and died. His is the only book to show a convincing ascent to the heights of Heaven, from which he sees the whole universe is sublime, but on that journey he learns that all his political hopes for Italian peace and plenty have failed.

  There is the French book about the giant babies. Pleasing themselves is their only law, so they drink and excrete in a jolly male family which laughs at everything adults call civilization. Women exist for them, but only as rubbers and ticklers.

  There is the Spanish book about the Knight of the Dolorous Countenance. A poor old bachelor is driven mad by reading the sort of books you want to be in, with heroes who triumph here and now. He leaves home and fights peasants and innkeepers for the beauty which is never here and now, and is mocked and wounded. On his deathbed he grows sane and warns his friends against intoxicating literature.

  There is the English book about Adam and Eve. This describes a heroic empire-building Satan, an amoral and ironical but boundlessly creative God, a war in Heaven (but no killing) and all this centres on a married couple and the state of their house and garden. They disobey the great Landlord who evicts them, but promises them accomodation in his own house if they live and die penitently. Once again success is left outside the scope of the book. We are last shown them setting out into our world to raise children they know will murder each other.

  There is the German book about a respectable old bachelor doctor who grows young by selling his soul to Satan, who helps him grab everything he wants and abandon all he tires of, including the girl who loves him and Helen of Troy. He becomes Europe’s chief banker and, financed by piracy, steals land from peasants to make his own empire. When a hundred years old and blind, he dies believing he has benefited the whole human race and is received into a Heaven like the Italian one because man must strive and striving he must err, and because, he who continually strives can be saved. Yah! The only striver in this book is the poor Devil who does all the work and is tricked out of his wages by the angelic choir showing him their bums.5 The writer of this book was depraved by too much luck. He shows the sort of successful man who does indeed dominate the modern world, but only at the start and near the end shows the damage they keep doing. Surely you don’t want that kind of success?

  The honest American book about the whale comes as a relief. A captain wants to kill it because the last time he tried to do that it bit off his leg. He embarks with a cosmopolitan crew who have escaped from home life because they prefer this way of earning money. Brave, skillful and obedient they chase the whale round the world in pursuit of this living oil resourc
e and all drown in the act of destroying it, except for the storyteller. He describes the sea closing over them as if they had never existed. This book has no women or children except for a little black boy whom they accidentally drive mad.

  Then there is the Russian book about war and peace. That has fighting in it, but fighting which fills us with astonishment that men can so recklessly, so resolutely pester themselves to death. The writer, you see, has fought in real battles and believed some things Jesus taught. This book also contains” – conjuror’s face took on an amazed expression – “several believable happy marriages with children who are well cared for. But I have said enough to show that, while men and women would die out if they didn’t usually love each other and keep their homes, most of the great stories6

  show them failing spectacularly to do either.”

  “Which proves,” said Lanark, who was eating a salad, “that the world’s great stories are mostly a pack of lies.” The conjuror sighed and rubbed the side of his face. He said, “Shall I tell you the ending you want? Imagine that when you leave this room and return to the grand salon, you find that the sun has set and outside the great windows a firework display is in progress above the Tuileries garden.”

  “It’s a sports stadium,” said Lanark.

  “Don’t interrupt. A party is in progress, and a lot of informal lobbying is going on among the delegates.”