Of Me and Others

by Alasdair Gray

  I am happy to have completed this play with a hero who, though not Christian, has a Christ-like moment so beats the Devil, helped by God who starts and ends the play, while saying a few lines in the last act. My Nick is identical with the Mephistopheles of Goethe. No other characters are, except perhaps God. Goethe called his national epic a tragedy, though his ending stops it being one. I call Fleck a comedy because dying well is the happiest thing anyone can do if they don’t believe in personal immortality.

  * This play and postscript was printed as a book by Two Ravens Press in 2008. Every theatre in Scotland rejected it and the best efforts of an important London theatre agency could not get it accepted in England, so for three years I promoted it by reading parts at Scottish literary festivals. At Edinburgh’s International Book Festival in 2012 I at last produced a reading of the whole thing, and had my readers paid at the Equity rate, by getting nearly every part read by published and well-known authors.

  Old Men In Love –

  Sidney Workman’s Epilogue*

  IN HIS INTRODUCTION TO THE 2007 reprint by Canongate of Gray’s first book, Lanark, William Boyd says that years before the publication in 1981 it had a Scottish reputation as “a vast novel, decades in the writing, still to see the light of day... an impossibly gargantuan, time-consuming labour of love, a thousand pages long, Glasgow’s Ulysses – such were the myths swirling about the book at the time, as far as I can recall.” Boyd is referring to the early seventies when he was a student at Glasgow University.

  I was then a young lecturer in English at the Adam Smith Teachers’ Training Institute, Kirkcaldy, and knew of Lanark through the publication of two early chapters in Scottish International, a short-lived but influential quarterly. Finding some of my students impressed by what they thought “the novelty” of that sample I wrote to the editor, Robert Tait, pointing out how much it owed to Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude published three years before, and the first magic realist novel to be noticed internationally. Scottish International did not print my letter but Gray certainly read it. Shortly before Lanark was published in 1981 he sent me a proof copy and letter begging me to return it with any critical remarks I wished to make. “The severer the better!” he wrote. “I promise to take account of them, and acknowledge your contribution.”

  This request seemed honest so I honestly replied, saying (among other things) that the only apparent reason for combining two very different narratives in Lanark was the author’s assumption that a heavier book would make a bigger splash. I also noted several misleading and unjustified ploys in a so-called “epilogue” between chapters 40 and 41. On receiving a final copy of the book I found my criticisms had moved Gray to change his book in one way only: he had separated my strictures and added them as footnotes to his “epilogue”. But he certainly acknowledged me as their author! The novel’s success in Scotland led to smiling colleagues congratulating me on my part in it. Lecturers from other colleges began greeting me with surprise because they had thought me a figment of Gray’s imagination – thought the footnotes a device to deflect criticism, not voice it. Gray had lured me into a trap. That I really exist has led those who know this to see me as Gray’s dupe or stooge, thus irrevocably damaging my career. Since the mid 1980s it has been obvious that my Cambridge First will never lead to a more important teaching post, and that only retirement will let me escape from Fife. This has left me with a strong but unenchanted interest in Gray’s work.

  In February 2007 I received a parcel through the post and, opening it, had a déja vu experience that almost set my hair on end. It was a proof copy of Old Men in Love and letter from Gray profusely apologising for the bad effect of Lanark upon my career, which had been the opposite of his intention. Old Men in Love (he wrote) was a chance for us both “to set the record straight”. He invited me to review it, at any length I liked, with any other of his books. He promised to publish this review as an epilogue to Old Men in Love without comment or alteration, and since this novel would be his last (for he is seventy-two and in poor health) I could be sure of having the last word. This smooth invitation was obviously Gray’s way of obtaining another critic-deflecting device. I have accepted it with open eyes, believing that a cool statement of facts will let me at last indeed “set the record straight”.

  The attention that Gray’s first novel Lanark received in Scotland is not surprising. A small country of about five million souls will make the most of what literature it has, and Lanark appeared in 1981 when northern universities urgently needed such a book. For nearly two centuries Scots literature had been taught as a branch of English. The post-war increase in Scottish national feeling finally made it a separate university course with only some twentieth-century poetry worth lecturing upon, and hardly any fiction. England had H.G. Wells, D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Forster, Greene and Orwell, but the only well-known Scottish author was a thriller writer, John Buchan. From Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales to D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow England has had a great tradition of great literature showing its social breadth. The nearest Scots equivalent since Burns, Hogg and Sir Walter has been a line of dour working-class novels set in depressed local communities. Brown’s House with the Green Shutters (1901), Grassic Gibbon’s Scots Quair (1934) were the best and William McIlvanney’s Docherty (1975) the most recent. When Docherty received the Whitbread award Scots critics hoped McIlvanney would go on to produce something new and surprising, but McIlvanney, tired of high critical attention and low royalty cheques, turned to crime thrillers and left a gap in modern Scots literary courses that Lanark filled perfectly.

  In the first place it was very big, combining several genres with a short linking story. One half was in the Scottish depressed working-class tradition, enlivened by elements from Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The other half was a Kafka-esque pilgrimage mingled with science fiction. They were linked by a Borges type of story, a fantasia on memory, and the whole was welded together by devices that began to be labelled Postmodern in the 1980s, most of these being in the so-called “epilogue”. Here, like Fowles in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Gray described himself inside his book, writing it. He put in a large index of authors he had plagiarised, except for Fowles, and named many friends and acquaintances in a west of Scotland literary clique that east coast critics had begun to call “the Glasgow literary mafia”. He disarmed criticism yet further by enlisting me, as I have described.

  In 1981 senior academics had just started lecturing on popular culture, so by ostentatiously blending fairy tale, science fiction and horror film elements with liftings from twentieth century authors most fashionable with academics, Gray boiled them into that 560 page postmodern stew, Lanark. The epilogue with my edited footnotes persuaded critics that the author was as smart as themselves. Favourably reviewed by the London press, Lanark was short-listed for the Booker prize, and two years after publication was on the curriculum of Scottish literature courses. Since then most studies of contemporary Scots literature suggest Lanark began a new Scottish Renaissance, without exactly dating the old one.

  Between Lanark and Old Men in Love Gray has published eighteen books, none more than normal length. They consist of:

  Two realistic novels involving sadomasochistic fantasies,

  Four books of short stories (one shared with his friends Agnes Owens, James Kelman),

  Two satirical novellas about young Scotsmen in the London media world,

  Two science-fiction fantasies, one set in nineteenth-century Glasgow, one in a war-games future,

  Three pamphlets urging Scots home rule, the last written with Professor Adam Tomkins,

  Two histories of literature,

  Two collections of verse,

  One autobiographical pamphlet published by the Saltire Society,

  One play script.

  The novels and stories above are mostly prose versions of forgotten plays written between 1967 and 1977 for early television, radio and small stage companies. He admits this in e
pilogues usually headed Critic Fuel which, like the one in Lanark, defuse criticism by anticipating it. Since Lanark he has frequently given interviews suggesting his latest work of fiction will be the last since he has “no ideas for more”. These efforts to hold public attention have succeeded in Scotland, though most critics at home and abroad agree that his most pornographic novel, Something Leather, should be forgotten. Even so he has received a more than fair share of critical attention in two Festschrifts:

  The Arts of Alasdair Gray (Edinburgh University Press, 1992), and Alasdair Gray: Critical Appreciations (British Library, 2002). The second is not a Scottish production, but like the first nearly every critic in it is Scottish and about half are friends of Gray, some of them close friends. Both books have a multitude of Gray’s illustrations, which proves Gray had access to the proofs, so must have overseen the texts. A cool, serious appraisal of Gray’s work cannot be found in them or, I believe, anywhere in Scotland, but they show why he has a following among bibliophiles – those who enjoy books for visual and typographical reasons quite separate from their literary value. Before appearing as a novelist at the age of forty-five Gray had not only failed as a dramatist, but as a commercial artist, portrait painter and mural painter. By bringing visual showmanship to book production he has contrived, with illustrations and jingling rhymes, to make the jackets, blurbs, boards, typography, layouts and even errata slips in his publications more entertaining than the main texts. Not since William Morris’s News from Nowhere and Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories has an author so controlled the appearance of his books, often varying them from one edition to the next, allowing collectors to always find something new. The two festschrifts are no doubt useful guides to these parasites on the tree of literature.

  But outside academia and bibliomania Gray’s reputation is fading. Younger folk find more up-to-date working-class realism in Irvine Welsh, better science-fiction fantasy in Iain Banks. The minority interested in brazen Postmodern obscurantism find Gray’s Lanark far surpassed by James Kelman’s Translated Accounts (published 2001). Of all his works only Lanark has never been out of print, but here – and finally, claims Gray – we have over a hundred thousand words of his very last novel.

  Henry James said H.G. Wells made novels by tipping his mind up like a cart and pouring out the contents. At first Old Men in Love seems to have been made in the same haphazard way, but some research in the National Library of Scotland shows it is stuffed with extracts from Gray’s earlier writings. The two big historical narratives are from television plays commissioned by Granada in the 1970s. The Greek one was broadcast in a series called For Conscience’s Sake, with Christopher Logue in the part of Socrates. It extensively plagiarised Plato’s Symposium and passages in Plutarch. For a Queen Victoria’s Scandals series Gray then plagiarised Henry James Prince’s published diaries and Hepworth Dixon’s Spiritual Wives. He refused to let his name be attached to the broadcast because a producer or director had changed the script in ways he disliked, after which British television had no use for Alasdair Gray. The archive has three typed dialogues for a TV play about Filippo Lippi that was never commissioned, so Old Men in Love has only three Florentine chapters. These rags of forgotten historical plays fill nineteen chapters.

  The rest are stuffed with a great deal of half-baked popular science tipped in from Gray’s 2000 anthology The Book of Prefaces, also political diatribes from pamphlets published before three general elections that were victories for New Labour. These diatribes were and are protests against the dismantling of peaceful British industries and the welfare state, a process that has made Gray and many other professional people richer. The description of an anti-war march was written for The Herald in February 2003, then added inappropriately to The Ends of Our Tethers, a collection of tales printed in 2004. (It may be no coincidence that Will Self describes a similar protest march in The Book of Dave, published 2006.) Like most Scotsmen, Gray thinks himself an authority on Burns, so we find an essay about Burns mostly published in volume 30 of the 1998 Studies in Scottish Literature, edited by Professor Ross Roy. The most shameless padding is in chapter 17 which reprints verbatim a section from chapter 8. The marginal note signposting this invites readers to think it a charmingly eccentric Shandyan device, but Laurence Sterne’s typographical stunts in Tristam Shandy are never more than a page long. This repetition is beyond a joke.

  Three literary ploys try to unify the whole rag-bag. The Introduction uses the text-as-found-manuscript invented by Scott for his Tales of My Landlord novels and afterwards plagiarised by Hogg, Pushkin, Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky and Gray in two earlier novels. From Scott also comes the printing of portentous quotations as epigraphs, some genuine and some pseudonymous, a device done to death by Pushkin, Poe, George Eliot and Rudyard Kipling. All but the introduction are cynically sandwiched between references to the 2001 Trade Center atrocity and May 2007 Scottish election in order to give the whole thing spurious contemporary relevance. When all the above is discounted we are left with the dreary tale of a failed writer and dirty old man, who comes to a well-deserved end through an affair with a drug-dealing procuress. This story is neither tragic nor funny.

  The best criticism of Gray is to quote his own and believe it. In an 1990s epilogue to Something Leather he says all his stories were about men who found life a task they never doubted until an unexpected collision opened their eyes and changed their habits. The collision was usually with a woman, and the transformation often ended in death. He adds that knowing how his talent works shows it is defunct because imagination will not employ whom it cannot surprise. After that Gray published nine more fictions with this hackneyed plot, Old Men in Love being the last. The four old men are all versions of Gray in fancy dress, with the Socratic collision homosexual, and though this novel may indeed be his last I cannot simply dismiss it (as Allan Massie dismissed Gray’s 2004 The Ends of Our Tethers) by calling it a collection of scraps from a tired writer’s bottom drawer. Neither the blurb which Gray lured Will Self into writing nor the egoism of the text will repel empty-headed fans of these egregious authors. Many may fall under the influence of its sinister propaganda for Scottish Nationalism and Socialism.

  Far too many have forgotten or never known that the German acronym for National Socialism is Nazi. Yeats’ The Countess Kathleen, first performed in Dublin 1902, was a bad poetic play that annoyed orthodox Catholics but scandalously excited Irish Nationalists. After the 1916 Easter Rising Yeats wondered if his play had stimulated rebellion among "certain men the English shot". From their comfortable studies plausible authors often give murderous lunatics high-minded excuses for atrocities. Old Men in Love cunningly avoids Hugh MacDiarmid’s rabid Anglophobia; but as Billy Connolly, the New Labour Party and all respectable defenders of the 1707 Union point out, racist hatred of the English is what the Scottish lust for an impossible independence feeds upon. This book should therefore not be read, or if read, swiftly forgotten. Goodbye, Mr Gray.

  Sidney Workman June 2007

  17 Linoleum Terrace, Kirkcaldy

  * Workman explains here how he came to supply critical footnotes for my Lanark: A Life in Four Books, published in 1981 by Canongate. It seemed right that he supply a critical epilogue to what is surely my last novel, published by Bloomsbury in 2010.

  An Upper Clyde Falls Mural

  Most of this was written in 2008 to publicise the renovation of the work. Each day I was driven to the site by my neighbour and assistant, Robert Salmon. On the way home one day we heard on his car radio a BBC announcer say Alasdair Gray was renovating a recently found mural painted 40 years before. I was astonished, could not think why me and my work were now thought news-worthy by any broadcasting company. This was a novelty. Then I recalled that every news item before that had been about the onset of the financial crisis we still undergo. News presenters had needed ANY cheery story to end on. Me and my restoration job was all, in their hurry, they could find, in the abscence of a Scots celebrity giving birth.


  IN 1969 THIS DECORATION was made part of an old pub, The Tavern, Kirkfield Bank, which is one of the long narrow villages on the banks of the upper Clyde between Hamilton and Lanark. James Campbell, a local builder, now owned it and was turning the rooms upstairs into a flat for his parents, while making an old store behind the public bar into a lounge bar. He wanted a wall painting in that lounge, and the architect planning the renovation suggested he commissioned that from me – the architect had been my fellow pupil at Glasgow’s Whitehill Secondary School. When a student of mural painting I had painted a Horrors of War room for the Scottish-USSR Friendship Society, and after winning my diploma had painted a cloudy firmament on the ceiling of Belleisle Street Synagogue, south Glasgow, and in 1963 had completed the first week of Genesis in the chancel of Greenhead Church of Scotland, Bridgeton. The last, so far my biggest and best job had been demolished as part of a road-widening scheme that was later abandoned, but still suggested I was qualified for a mural painting job. The area offered was 4 feet high by 25 feet long, being the space above the back of a wall-length sofa. This shape suggested to me a landscape of the Upper Clyde Falls less than a mile away, which I had first visited a few months earlier. Like many painters and writers before me I had thought these wonderful, both as natural features and parts of Scotland’s national, social and industrial history. William Wallace started his guerrilla war for Scottish Independence in Lanark and used a cave in the gorge between Cora and Bonnington Linn as a hiding place. Throughout the 19th Century these were tourist attractions. After Wordsworth saw them he considered writing an epic poem about how wild natural scenery and political freedom were akin. Turner was only one of the professional landscape artists who painted the Linns – Gaelic for waterfalls. David Dale the humane factory owner, Robert Owen the founder of cooperative socialism, built their model industrial village of New Lanark in the narrow valley below Cora Linn, for they used the force of the falls to drive their factory’s spinning machines. In the 1920s Scottish Electricity built a weir above Bonnington Linn which diverted the same force to a power station above New Lanark, and twice a year the station is switched off to let folk see how grand these falls once were. That is how I had seen them shortly before the commission.