Alasdair Gray conference in Glasgow: Celebrating the maker of imagined objects

The international provenance of “Gray Studies” or more broadly, the global interest in Scottish literature, should come as no surprise, though to many people it probably will. We’ll return to this question. But surely Alasdair Gray himself should need no introduction to readers of The National. Still, there are always folk who need to find out.

More than many great writers, Gray encouraged such first-time seekers-after-knowledge not to be shy, to ask questions and to make the needful discoveries.

Gray was born in 1934 in Riddrie, Glasgow, and his life was committed to “making imagined objects”. As a polymath, an artist and writer practising his arts from childhood on, he came to be most famed for his literary works, and especially his breakthrough novel, Lanark (1981).

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I first met him at a party given by friends, Italian translators, in a Glasgow flat, where we were standing next to the drinks table, saying hello in a hesitant way as you do when you’re in a company you don’t know very well. For some reason our conversation quickly arrived at the prospect of China and we both somehow lit up, speculating on what that country was once long ago, what it was now and what it might yet be, what its ethos might mean, what we knew of it, how we could imagine it. Neither of us had ever been there.

We talked of translations, their extent and possibility, their necessity and limitation. Of all writing as translation of some sort. Of the imagination as the means by which translation might be made. Of Ezra Pound and Hugh MacDiarmid, cabbages and kings.

We paused after three hours. Almost everyone else had left. It seemed no time had passed. I knew him over the 40 years since then, not as a close friend but as one with whom I could pick up the conversation wherever it had last been left, and he’d remember it as well as I.

And I remember the launch of Lanark at the Third Eye Centre, in Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow, on February 25, 1981. The book stays with me, a hard fact, a symbol of its era, always ready to be returned to, and advanced from once again.

In his poem “Easter 1916”, WB Yeats has a river that runs and keeps on running but a stone stays still “in the midst of all”. And Wallace Stevens has a poem, “Anecdote of the Jar”, in which he places “a jar” in Tennessee and the wilderness around it suddenly rises up into a relation with it, as if the humanly-made object transforms nature into something to be seen in a new way, related to the human presence.

Robert Frost has a poem, “For Once, Then, Something”, in which he describes himself looking down into the deep water in a well, and glimpsing something in the dark depths, something white, just briefly seen for a moment, then gone: “What was that whiteness? / Truth? A pebble of quartz? For once, then, something.” The publication of Lanark was a stone in the river, a jar in the wilderness, “Something”, for sure.

LIKE Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s A Scots Quair in the 1930s, and James Robertson’s And the Land Lay Still in 2010, Lanark was a planned work. The Quair takes us from a Scottish farm to a small town to an industrial city: panorama Scotland. It starts in prehistory and ends in Gibbon’s contemporaneous early 1930s industrialised Britain, the gulf between rich and poor increasing.

And the Land Lay Still covers half-a-century of Scottish life, from regeneration just after the Second World War to the affirmation of the potential for Scotland’s self-renewal circa 1999.

The historical chronology was carefully determined. (And to get to know the world Alasdair Gray grew up in, Robertson’s novel is a good guide to Scotland in the 1950s and 60s especially.) The structure in both works was carefully designed. So was that of Lanark. The three works are epic visions of Scotland, past, present and possible.

Lanark was planned as four “books”, two written in realist form, depicting a young artist growing up in Glasgow in the 1950s and 60s, two in a parallel universe in which Glasgow and its characters are transformed into a dystopian, nightmare vision of an industrial city named Unthank, where all the vicious liabilities of capitalist exploitation are highlighted or exaggerated and portrayed in non-realist, nightmarish, sometimes surrealist forms.

And more than this, Lanark is meant to be read in a deliberate sequence, beginning with the non-realist “Book Three” then following that with the realist “Book One” and “Book Two” and then ending with “Book Four”.

Thus, the bewilderment of Lanark (the character) at the beginning (Where is he? Where am I?) is “explained” in the central books before returning the reader to the strange world of Unthank for the conclusion.

The proposition that the novel makes and delivers so powerfully is that life is a constant renewal and renegotiation of imagination and reality, connected by a Mobius strip of twisting, turning consequence. This structure was deliberate and intended.

THE word “epic” is one of the woolliest of literary terms. It usually just means a long poem with some fighting in it. It’s often also used to describe a foundational narrative which depicts events leading to the creation of something new, a city, a society, a confirmation of belief and development, a rising from ruins. And it also suggests scale: something big.

Well, Lanark is an epic novel.

I first read it in its era, in the aftermath of 1979, the year when a referendum on Scottish devolution was confirmed by a majority in favour but the result was torpedoed by the Westminster government, and the year when Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government was elected by a majority of voters in England, not Scotland.

In the 1980s, Lanark in prose fiction, alongside Edwin Morgan’s collection of poems Sonnets from Scotland (1984), and Liz Lochhead’s play Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off (1987) might be taken as the first of three literary paradigms of self-determination, each enacting the same principle that reality cannot do without imagination and can imagination help transform reality.

And that partnership of imagination and reality is a gauntlet thrown down: reality is both what you’re given and also what you make. My understanding of Scottish independence arises from that: we don’t just accept what’s given, we make something from it. After a weekend of such mass delusion about the glorious givens of royalty, making something better seems emphatically pertinent.

Since 1981, Lanark has been understood as opening the door to a fertile period not only for Scotland’s literature but for all its arts, and for scholarly re-appraisal of them. The former Scots Makar and a friend of Alasdair’s, Liz Lochhead, once suggested that Gray is at least partly responsible for the transformation that has happened in Scotland since 1981.

It was followed by a sequence of similarly complex, inventive novels including: 1982, Janine; Poor Things; A History Maker and Old Men In Love, as well as collections of short stories and poetry. There were also works of non-fiction, most notably political writings and The Book of Prefaces.

I worked with Alasdair as a colleague when he held a Joint Professorship in Creative Writing at the University of Glasgow alongside friends and long-time collaborators and fellow writers James Kelman and Tom Leonard for three years starting in 2001.

Alasdair was arguably the most acclaimed and most influential writer in post-war Scotland. His last major work was a translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy, Hell, Purgatory and Paradise. It’s not simply a translation, though, but rather a reduction, a distillation, a refashioning, an annotated revision.

Alasdair’s voice comes through in the words spoken to Dante in Canto 17 of his version of the Paradiso:

The light from which my grandsire smiled now blazed

like golden mirror in the brightest sun.

He said, “Consciences dark with their own sin

or shame at another’s guilt will indeed

feel pain, but do not nurse hypocrisy!

Make the truth plain! Let them scratch where they itch.

Your verses may taste bad at first; digested

they will be nourishing. Write like the wind,

hitting high mountains hardest. What more

can poet do? That is why you have been shown

only the famous down below in Hell

and up Mount Purgatory. Folk ignore

examples set by those they don’t know well.

That’s the question, and the command: “What more can poet do?” It’s at the heart of the famous line from Lanark about Glasgow being a place where many people live but “nobody imagines living”: that leads us to a universal human truth, and poetry and all the arts are the answer. The closing lines of Gray’s rendition of Dante’s Paradiso deliver the vision of a world we’re always trying to make:

As my eyes dwelled in it I seemed to see

a human form. Like the geometer

battering his brain in vain to find how

circles are squared, I tried to see or feel

how such a human form could live in light

eternally. The wings of my fancy

could not fly so far, until in a flash

I saw desire and will: both are a pair

of finely balanced wheels kept turning by

love that revolves sun, sky and every star.

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Anthony Burgess called Gray “the greatest Scottish writer since Walter Scott” and Will Self asserted he was “possibly the greatest writer in this archipelago”, so Gray’s literary reputation seems assured and continues to grow. But his visual practice has often been thought of as minor, complementary, marginal. The forthcoming conference, however, promises to address Gray’s work as a visual artist alongside that of his work as a writer.

And there’s much more to it than that.

The International Alasdair Gray Research Network has the long-term ambition of becoming a critical international hub for all things Gray, though at the moment the focus is on several projects interlinked with the conference. If you want to be on the database, contact Rodge Glass at r.glass@strath.ac.uk.

Registration is open for the conference, with details at the University of Strathclyde website: strath.ac.uk