Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (140 page)

In
Present Times
(1984), Frank Attercliffe (a former footballer with a mad, institutionalised wife), after a dark night of the soul, breaks out of sports reporting for a Yorkshire newspaper to become world-famous with a play about a rugby league changing-room. It is, as one of his comrades grudgingly puts it, a ‘bleak but promising’ end to his struggles. The ending of A
Temporary Life
(1973) is bleak and unpromising. The hero Colin Freestone (former professional light-heavyweight, broken nose, explosive temper), having given up his marriage (his wife’s mad), his affair with a toff’s wife, and his job teaching at the local art college, takes on work as a dustman. ‘This is the job I’ve chosen, of my own volition,’ he defiantly declares. Scraping up dog turds with his council shovel parodies the mining which he has ‘escaped’. The most curious of Storey’s novels remains
Radcliffe
(1963), in which the sensitive, grammar-school-educated, artistic hero finally takes a marquee-erector’s hammer to the head of his loutish working-class alter ego and, having exorcised his proletarian self, withers away in a prison for the criminally insane. There is no
strength left in him. He has murdered his vital part – or perhaps England murdered it.

I know that Socialism can improve social life, that the work we like best is not done for money, and that books and art are liberating.

The English have always relished the story about the voice from the pit, after the first night of John Home’s tragedy,
Douglas
: ‘Whar’s yur Wully Shakespeare noo?’ Scots, we apprehend, revere Scottish literary genius. Despite his wishes in the matter it was Alasdair Gray who in 1981 (in the wake of his country’s Devolution Referendum) was elevated to justify the cry ‘Whar’s yur Jimmy Joyce noo?’ The loudest voice in the chorus was that of arch-Joycean Anthony Burgess, in his review of
Lanark
: ‘The best Scottish novelist since Walter Scott.’ (Wasn’t there someone called Stevenson?)

Scottish fiction is not, as Burgess’s bizarre literary history suggests, a centuries-long desert. Such comments also thrust a mantle on Gray which – the most engagingly self-deprecating of writers – he resolutely shrugs off. ‘This is a man’, his biographer reminds us, ‘who insists on quoting negative reviews on the backs of his books and has invented a fictional critic to tear apart his own work.’ As an artist (a field in which he has also been hosannaed), Gray groups himself with ‘those interesting second-raters’. Genuflection is, as he reminds us, a bad posture from which to read his novels or look at his pictures. He was born in east Glasgow, the son of a folding-box machine-cutting operative. His mother was a former shop assistant. The couple met on a works outing. Gray’s father, Alexander, had served in the ranks in the First World War, surviving to bring back a shrapnel wound in his belly, a small pension and lifelong radicalism. There was a bookshelf full of the English translations of Lenin’s works in the house Alasdair grew up in.

He was the first of three children and the only son. The family had settled in one of the new post-war housing schemes in Riddrie. It was not, Gray stresses, a slum but a working-class community – even if that meant ‘communal lavatories on the communal stair’ and municipal bath-houses. Alexander is recorded as ‘skelping’
(bashing) his son, which Alasdair connected with his later writing blocks. He was, from childhood, always readier with the crayon than the pencil. It was also in childhood that his lifelong afflictions of eczema, asthma and susceptibility to tormenting nightmares became apparent. This, like the skelping, affected his later work. ‘Healthy children’, he writes in
Lanark
, ‘exercise their imagination by playing games together. I was not healthy. My imagination was mainly exercised in solitary fantasies fed by films and pictures and books.’ And, one could add (thinking of
1982, Janine
(1984) and
Something Leather
(1990)), violent sexual fantasies.

Gray was five years old when war broke out. Alexander’s factory skills were suddenly at a premium and he was transferred, with the family, to northern England where, for the duration, he wore a suit and tie and was a temporary member of the middle class. ‘We even had a cleaner,’ Gray’s sister wistfully recalled. It was, Alasdair said, ‘the happiest time of my life’. After the war it was back to the working class, the communal bog, and Riddrie – where people like them belonged. An escape route opened up for Alasdair with the 1944 Butler Education Act which enabled him to win a ‘scholarship’ to the local ‘grammar’. It was this enlightened political measure, he said, ‘that finally made me an author and an artist’ and spared him the kind of impoverished lives bleakly chronicled in
Lean Tales
(1985).

Gray’s mother died of cancer when he was eighteen. At the same period there were the first stirrings of what would, after thirty years of slow cooking, become
Lanark.
The conception of its depressive-asthmatic-wholly unlovable alter ego hero, Duncan Thaw, was the initial building block; another block was E. M. W. Tillyard’s book on the epic. Ironically, given his Virgilian aspiration, it was Gray’s failure to get a sufficiently good grade in Latin which prevented him from going to university. But already large ambitions as a poet, novelist and mural artist (the most socialist variety of painting) had been formed. The last of those ambitions was fostered by his being admitted to Glasgow School of Art. Despite illness, he won prizes and travelling scholarships – although he was never happy away from home. Like other art-school graduates, he fell back on short-term teaching contracts as his standby source of income. He was, a friend observed, ‘pathologically careless with money’. His vision as an artist was grand in scale but he was already fascinated by typography and book design – functions which, as an author, he would wrest from the publisher with the result that one
sees
, as much as
reads
, a Gray novel (oddly, given the narratives embedded in his murals, one can read those works as stories).

At the 1961 Edinburgh Festival, Gray met the woman who would become his first wife, the Danish nurse, Inge Sorensen. He was twenty-six and inhibited sexually – and drunk when he proposed (it always worked for him, he later said). The couple married in post haste and honeymooned on Arran where, it is reported, sex did not
occur. They would later have a child, born in 1964, before the marriage broke down. Gray married again, happily, in 1991, and has one son, Andrew.

Over the 1960s and 1970s he picked up work scene-painting in Glasgow theatres. There were commissions for murals, occasional falling back on the dole, and – most significantly – a string of dramatic works for BBC radio and TV. His attempts to place early drafts of
Lanark
were wholly unsuccessful, but he had better luck with some shorter pieces. And readings from his great work in progress had already brought him to the attention of literary and university circles in Glasgow.
Lanark: A Life in Four Books
was finally published by the Edinburgh firm, Canongate, in 1981 and showered with prizes. For the common reader, however, it was – and still is – a tough nut to crack. Following the epic’s
in medias res
rule, it begins with Book Three, with the Prologue and Epilogue similarly perversely located. The narrative adopts three distinctly different stylistic modes. Most striking to the eye are the exuberant and erotic cover illustrations Gray designed (a feature which made the production unusually expensive). In the primary storyline, a character who cannot remember his name, and adopts that of a region, ‘Lanark’, finds himself in a mysterious world which has the characteristics of Glasgow. It is identified as ‘Unthank’ (ungrateful place). The hero, searching for sun and his own identity, develops a scaly skin condition, ‘dragonhide’ (a transparent allegory of Gray’s eczema) which will eventually metamorphose him into the thing traditionally slain in literature. W. S. Burroughs’s ‘mugwumps’ in
Naked Lunch
may also come to mind.

The second stream in
Lanark
– the story of Duncan Thaw – is realistic, a recognisable transcript of Gray’s own life, in conventional narrative style. It is a grimly unvarnished tale. ‘Let Glasgow flourish by telling the truth’ is the motto on Gray’s frontispiece. Duncan, believing himself a sex murderer, commits suicide. The book is embellished with a number of flamboyantly eccentric features: a meeting between Thaw and his creator, Gray; an owlishly elaborate ‘Index of Plagiarisms’ covering everyone from Kafka to Walt Disney who may be thought to have been an influence. Ralph Waldo Emerson, it is sagely recorded, is
not
plagiarised. Looming over the whole is a sense of vast historical, social, personal deprivation. ‘Why are you content with so little?’ Lanark is asked. He replies: ‘What else can I have.’

The book makes a physical impact on its reader. Gray the novelist does to the traditional book form what Gray the mural artist did to the traditional wall, often by deft touches – the ‘GOODBYE’ on the last page of
1982, Janine
, for example. Culturally the impact of
Lanark
was momentous. James Campbell’s verdict, ‘probably the greatest Scottish novel of the century’, attracted little contradiction. It was, as Joyce said of
Finnegans Wake
, a book to keep the professors busy and a Gray industry subsequently cranked up in the Scottish universities. Gray was appointed
a writer-in-residence at Glasgow University and would over time get the degrees
honoris causa
that his poor Latin had earlier denied him. Wry as ever, he claimed
Lanark
was ‘overrated’.

After 1981 he was a literary lion – although never flush with money. Sexual attention he did get and, as his biographer records, he enjoyed it. Sex would, in fact, be the preoccupation of his next major work,
1982, Janine
(1984). The novel began as a short story and was conceived in a seething mood of anti-Thatcherism. The hero, Jock McLeish, is the Glasgow equivalent of that era’s ‘Mondeo Man’. A middle-class conservative salesman, ‘happily’ married, he has an involved, fetishised, sado-masochistic relationship in his head with a cerebral sex-toy, Janine, or ‘Superb’ (Superbitch):

Superb is a greedy sexy bitch who knows how to get what she likes. Helen [his wife] was a gentle woman I want not to remember, shy of sex and with no greedy appetites (could I be wrong about that?).

The novel came to him, he said, looking around and trying to imagine what was going on behind the inscrutable faces he observed in places like railway stations. The novel’s stream of consciousness ends: ‘I will stand on the platform an hour from now, briefcase in hand, a neater figure than most but not remarkable.’ Will McLeish kill himself? ‘I will not do nothing,’ he promises himself. But perhaps he will. The misogyny disturbed many of Gray’s admirers – particularly women. Was Scotland’s greatest novelist a pornographer? By way of defence, he contends that ‘life for most women is a performance in a male sex fantasy’ and for men, sexual torment. Why do women’s clothes say such different things from women’s mouths, McLeish wonders? He tells it as he sees it.

Gray continued writing and painting in conditions of less financial and physical discomfort, but writing remained hard work. His experimental
Book of Prefaces
(2000) was thirteen years in preparation and his visual-textual
A Life in Pictures
(2010) almost as long. His socialist principles softened somewhat, although his 1992 polemic
Why Scots Should Rule Scotland
confirmed his lifelong dislike of the Union with England and his distaste for those gifted Scottish people who, unlike himself, ‘fucked off down to London’.

We look on past ages with condescension, as a mere preparation for us … but what if we’re only an after-glow of them?
The Siege of Krishnapur

What was it that ‘made’ J. G. Farrell a writer? An impossible but oddly tantalising question. What one can say is that if Jonas Salk had been a year earlier with his vaccine, we would not have had the so-called Empire Trilogy:
Troubles, The Siege of Krishnapur
and
The Singapore Grip.
And, had the novelist who wrote them not died in 1979 (mysteriously, as his biographer Lavinia Greacen is at pains to stress), he might well, by now, have joined Salk on the Nobel winner’s platform at Stockholm.

When he went up to Oxford in October 1956, after two gap years, ‘Jim’ Farrell had it all. Head boy at his public school, ‘rugger was pretty well my life’, he later recalled. He was clever and had got a place at Brasenose to read law. It was not his choice: his parents wanted their son (the second of three) to become ‘an eminent Dublin solicitor or barrister’. Jim was handsome, shy with girls, and tipped the scales at just under 14 stone. He was what in earlier times was called a ‘hearty’ and now a ‘jock’. A ‘full blue’ was in prospect, a respectable degree – and a lot of post-game piss-ups in the Turf Tavern along the way. This was the era of Oxbridge immortalised by Frederic Raphael’s
Glittering Prizes
TV mini-series. The university’s cream of the crop were not, like their predecessors, merely ‘brilliant’ – they were ‘celebrities’. Greacen gives a roll call of Jim Farrell’s starry contemporaries: Brian Walden, Alan Coren, Dudley Moore, Paul Johnson, Grey Gowrie, Ferdinand Mount, Paul Foot, Richard Ingrams, Ved Mehta, Auberon Waugh and Dennis Potter – to name, as they say, a few.