Alasdair Gray's unique genius is important for Scottish independence

The film, based on his novel Poor Things, has swept the board at this year’s Oscar nominations. The ‘’feminist reimagining of Frankenstein’’ is in the running for no fewer than 11 awards. They include best picture, best original score, best cinematography, best adapted screenplay, best costume design, best make-up and best film editing.

But it’s the big stars that have really dragged the movie into the spotlight. Emma Stone (below), who won an Oscar for her performance in La La Land in 2017, has been nominated as best actress and Mark Ruffalo (Marvel’s Hulk) as best supporting actor.

Stone wasn’t far wrong when she likened the film’s success so far to a ‘’surreal dream’’. Gray’s work seems as far away as possible from producing a mainstream block buster. Novels such as Poor Things and the even more astounding Lanark can best be described as challenging. Gray himself was almost certainly a genius but he was an idiosyncratic one.

Poor Things director Yorgos Lanthimos, himself an Oscar nominee, had to make some compromises to lift his film into the big league, most controversial of which was excising Glasgow entirely from the film.

READ MORE: Poor Things director responds to row over divisive change from Alasdair Gray book

When Lanthimos came to shoot his film, he came nowhere near Scotland’s largest city and Gray’s beloved home. Glasgow has been used as Gotham in Batman and Batgirl, Philadelphia in World War Z and New York in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, but was apparently not up to the job of portraying itself.

Gavin Lundy’s YouTube channel Ossian Scotland does a good job of exploring what he calls ‘’The Poor Things Problem’’, pointing out that Glasgow’s locations were pretty central to the book. We can’t be sure what Gray, who died in 2019, would have though of the director’s decision, but we do know that depicting Glasgow in cultural works was pretty important to him.

A character in Lanark points out that no-one visiting cities such as Florence, Paris, London or New York for the first time is a stranger because they have already been introduced to them in books, paintings and films. The same could not have been said of Glasgow, described in Gray’s novel as ‘’a magnificent city’’.

In one of Lanark’s best known passages, Gray has a character say: ‘’If a city hasn’t been used by an artist, not even the inhabitants live there imaginatively.’’

Gray and Glasgow have an incredibly close relationship. His books included examples of his amazing artwork, which are also on public display in the city, including at Hillhead underground station, the Oran Bar and Kelvingrove Art Gallery.

He was also a passionate and long-standing supporter of Scottish independence, describing himself as a civic nationalist and distancing himself from narrow-mindedness and xenophobia.

In 1992 he published Why Scots Should rule Scotland, which looked at our country’s dysfunctional relationship with Westminster and argued that we needed control over our own government in an independent Scotland.

So when I was editor of the Sunday Herald and decided to take the newspaper out for independence in the run-up to the 2014 independence referendum, there was no-one with whom I wanted to collaborate more than Alasdair Gray.

READ MORE: Poor Things - What I thought of the film as an Alasdair Gray fanatic

He had worked with the Sunday Herald before that. I had earlier asked him in to write about the phrase ‘’Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation’’, which had been attributed to him by SNP politicians campaigning in the 2007 general election. He readily agreed to do so but when he pitched up on deadline day to write the article there were two immediate problems.

First, Gray pointed out he hadn’t actually written the phrase. He had found it in a poem by Canadian Dennis Leigh and put it on the front of a novel in 1984. That problem was hardly insurmountable. Gray had, after all, recognised its significance to Scotland and had never tried to pass the work off as his own. A piece on why the words had such resonance in a Scottish context would still be fascinating.

The second problem was trickier. Gray confessed that he could not use a computer and our office had no typewriter to hand. A member of staff was duly assigned to type his words into the publishing system.

My confidence was further battered a few hours later when our guest writer asked to move the deadline … to Sunday. After I explained that the later deadline wouldn’t work for a Sunday newspaper, work resumed at what appeared to be a leisurely pace. We relaxed … until with just over an hour to go our panicking staff member sought me out to say that the piece made no sense.

Matters became a tad more fraught when a theatre called us to say that the imminent appointment that Gray had told us about was not to see the performers but to BE the performer. Gulp!

However, we had all reckoned without the genius of Alasdair Gray. With the clock ticking he expertly instructed our reporter how to restructure the whole article in the way he had always intended. The result was brilliant when it appeared in the newspaper and on its website the following day.

Among many wonderful insights was the following paragraph: ‘‘I hate hearing folk say ‘I’m Scots and proud of it.’ All people should love their land where the government does not punish them for saying what they think, but the only people who think their nation can only be made worse, not better, are likely to be very rich.’’

You can read the whole piece, which was republished by The National to commemorate Gray’s death, here.

I was fortified by the success of that collaboration when I visited Gray’s flat off Glasgow’s Byres Road in 2014 to ask him to design the Sunday Herald’s front page proclaiming our support for a yes vote in the referendum. He was thrilled that a mainstream Scottish paper would, for the first time, support independence and happily agreed to contribute.

READ MORE: Last piece of Alasdair Gray archive joins Poor Things at National Library

So it was with as spring in my step that I walked back to the flat in sunshine and high spirits some weeks later to collect the finished design. Instead of a finished front page I found the artists scrabbling to find his drawings. I confess to panicking but I should have remembered that Alasdair Gray’s brain does not work in the same way as those of lesser mortals.

Just as he had moved around the component parts of the ‘’Better Nation’’ article to form a coherent, brilliant whole, he handed over a number of seemingly random images which could be seamlessly combined to create a superbly detailed front page. The ‘Sunday Herald says Yes’ front page remains my favourite produced during my ten years editing the newspaper.

I’m incredibly proud that the unique genius of Alasdair Gray provided an important chapter in the story of the Sunday Herald and the resulting launch of this newspaper, which later this year will celebrate its tenth anniversary.

The film of Poor Things will hopefully bring his work – his writing and his art – to an even wider audience. Would I personally have preferred to have seen Glasgow play as important a role on the big screen as it did in the novel? Yes. Would I have liked to see the Scottish aspects of the story foregrounded rather than buried? Of course.

But you can’t argue with 11 Oscar nominations, two Golden Globes and one Golden Lion. And you can’t help being seduced by Yorgos Lanthimos’ sumptuous and distinctly weird visuals, or the refashioning of the source material into what Emma Stone describes as a rom-com in which the lead character falls in love with life itself.

In the end, Poor Things will encourage more people in more countries to engage with the books of Alasdair Gray – books in which Scotland has a beguiling role – and broaden the perception of what stories can attract large, mainstream audiences into the cinema.

That may mean we will one day be able to visit our local cinemas to see on the big screen an adaptation of Lanark that captures the novel’s full imagination, intelligence, ambition and, yes, Scottishness. And surely that would be something to truly celebrate.