Book review: Of Me and Others by Alasdair Gray

Reviewer: Alan Taylor

IN 1957, when he was 23, Alasdair Gray was awarded a travelling scholarship by Glasgow School of Art. It was his intention to spend the money sketching in Scotland of which he had visited little. The trustees, however, insisted he must go abroad. Gray chose Spain as his preferred destination. The trip, as brilliantly described in an account written on his return, was formative, not least because it could have been the end of its author. Homesickness was the first of his ailments. “I do not love Glasgow much,” he recorded, “I sometimes actively hate it, but I am home here.” Having previously been hospitalised with asthma, he was again poleaxed by it when he reached London. There, it was suggested that he might benefit from leaving Britain asap. Accompanied by an art school friend, he boarded a ship and immediately fell ill, this time perilously. “How are your bowels?” asked the ship’s doctor, a dipsomaniac Scot. Apparently, they were in fine order. “Buy a tin of Eno’s salts from the ship’s store,” said the doctor. “Use them regularly.” This, it transpired, was the prelude to a Dante-esque nightmare which Gray describes in his typically lucid, sober and formally easy style. Originally drafted as a report, he later included it in a collection of stories. As this gallimaufry shows, he has always been in the recycling vanguard. What did the tour teach him? “Not much about the world, a lot about myself.”

It is getting on for four decades since I first read a word by Alasdair Gray. I recall finding an extract from Lanark in Scottish International, an admirable magazine edited by Bob Tait. What I have always liked about Gray’s work is its honesty and sanity, its wit and invention, and the way he sculpts sentences in a manner that I imagine would have pleased Orwell and Kafka. He does not go in much for similes. He seems not to be interested in illuminating one thing or person by likening them to others. In some hands this could result in prose of ineffable dullness but in Gray’s the sentences and paragraphs and pages unfurl fluidly until you are compelled to go with the flow.

His personality is that of someone who has no mask, who says it like it is, who is imbued with that much underrated virtue, commonsense. On occasion, of course, this has led him into quicksand, one example being when he talked about the colonisation of Scottish culture by “English settlers”, which some numbskulls interpreted as racist. Gray himself cites another in Of Me and Others, a prose companion to A Life in Pictures. Appearing in 1982 at the Traverse Theatre on an all-male panel to discuss ‘The Predicament of the Scottish Writer’, he took it upon himself to address the question why there were no women speakers. “Forgetting that Joan Lingard was in the audience and that she and Muriel Spark and Jessie Kesson and Naomi Mitchison and Ena Lamont Stewart and Elspeth Davie and Ann [sic] Smith and Agnes Owens and Marcella Evaristi and Liz Lochhead would constitute a brace of quintets twice as dazzling as our enplatformed one, I stammeringly suggested that the proportion of male to female Scottish writers, statistically calculated, might, er, not, er, perhaps justify, er, the presence of more than half a woman...”

You can imagine what the response to that was. I was there and the longer Gray spoke the deeper into the mire he sank. Yet only those programmed to take umbrage were truly offended, most of us realising that no sexism was intended. For, as the contents of Of Me and Others demonstrate, Gray is an exceptionally generous writer and a willing and eloquent defender and champion of women – the museum curator Elspeth King, the writer Agnes Owens, the playwright Susan Boyd, to name but three – who had either been unfairly treated or were liable to be overlooked.

Persistent readers of his phenomenal oeuvre – his books, poems, plays, short stories, essays, novels, occupy a shelf in my library – will be familiar with many of the pieces reprinted here but, arranged in chronological order, they offer an essential portrait of an artist emerging in the second half of the twentieth century. At its core is a cri de coeur for culture and education in a country that has often struggled to define what place they should have in it. “When I was twenty-one,” Gray writes, “the Scotland I knew was confident in the many goods it made and exported, but many educated people had very little confidence in Scottish visual and literary art, not because we lacked them, but because our education had stopped us seeing them.” The writer’s own education is illustrative. “My family and half my teachers did not stunt my imagination,” he writes. Isn’t that ‘half’ wonderful?

His parents were what used to be called good people, who worked hard, did their bit for the wider community and wished the best for their children. They were churchgoers and teetotal who were “alarmed” when their son told them he had ambitions to be an artist. “They wanted art to enrich my life in the spare time left over from earning a wage; but they thought, quite correctly, that living to make it would bring me to dole-queues, and wearing secondhand clothes, and borrowing money, and having my electricity cut off – bring me to the state many respectable working folk are forced into during depressions, for reasons they cannot help.”

Instrumental in Gray’s intellectual growth was Riddrie Public Library, to which he never loses an opportunity to pay tribute. “I regard a well-stocked public library as the pinnacle of democratic socialism. That a good dull place like Riddrie had one was proof that the world was essentially well organized.” See what I mean about common sense. Near the end of his sixteenth year, one of the teachers, a Mr Meikle who did not stunt his imagination, asked him give an account of the books he’d read. For reasons best known to himself Mr Meikle kept it and after his death his widow returned it to Gray. It is a remarkable document because it shows how it was possible to become well-read simply by applying for a library membership card. Among the authors in whom he immersed himself were HG Wells, George Bernard Shaw, Robert Louis Stevenson and Charles Dickens.

Since Gray was unsuited to physical exercise, Mr Meikle gave him the school magazine to edit. It was this enlightened teacher who explained to his prodigy the philosophy of Scottish education, which in those forward-thinking days was designed to produced generalists rather than specialists. “Students of science and engineering needed a grounding in English before a Scottish university accepted them, arts students needed a basis of maths, both had to know Latin....” Back then, however, it was possible to complete your education without learning much about the history and culture of the country in which you lived. Mr Meikle, by the way, appears in Lanark, with his “small black moustache and ironical eyebrows”, his name unaltered, the highest compliment an author can pay.

This is typical of Alasdair Gray. Throughout his long and productive career he has remained true to himself and his roots. Now well into his ninth decade and not in the best of health he continues to create, most recently a translation of Dante’s Inferno, despite the fact that he knows next to no Italian. He is a socialist and a nationalist and would dearly like to see an independent Scotland, agreeing with his departed friend Philip Hobsbaum that “the Scots deserve Scotland”. It would be good to think that, in turn, we deserve a writer and artist who has done what he could to make the predicament in which we find ourselves an opportunity to manage our own affairs. What, he was once asked, did he see as his contribution to literary history? To which he modestly replied: “I will be happy if I’ve written books that people want to read.”