Of Me and Others. Alasdair Gray
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and is a fable about a monstrously pushy young Scot getting rich quickly in London. He is buoyant with energies released by his escape from a nastily religious father who has used the god of Calvin like a rubber truncheon to batter his children into submission. Neither father nor son in that fable much resemble my father, or his father, or me, and none of the incidents in it befell any of us. When copying a thing from experiences of myself or acquaintances I sometimes gave it a context like that where it happened, sometimes did not. My most densely and deliberately autobiographical writing is in books 1 and 2 of Lanark. Apart from the encounter with the Highland minister, the encounter with the prostitute, the fit of insanity and suicide, nearly every thought and incident is copied from something real in context where it happened, but so much of my life was not copied that Lanark tells the story of a youngster estranged by a creative imagination from family, friends, teachers and city.
I hope this is a convincing tragedy. It was not mine. My family and half my teachers did not stunt my imagination. They encouraged it Scottishly, by allowing me materials and time to paint and write, not praising me to my face but talking about the results of my work when they thought I could not hear. My family and schooling made art seem the only way to join mental adventure, physical safety and social approval. They pressed upon my bundle of traits in a way which made anything but art and writing seem dull or threatening.
The foregoing paragraph is written to indicate both connections and divergences between life and art. The following questions were asked by Christopher Swan and Frank Delaney in August 1982 when preparing a BBC broadcast interview, and may illuminate the same subject.
Question. What is your background?
Answer. If background means surroundings: the first 25 years were lived in Riddrie, east Glasgow, a well maintained district of stone-fronted corporation tenements and semi-detached villas. Our neighbours were a nurse, postman, printer and tobacconist, so I was a bit of a snob. I took it for granted that Britain was mainly owned and ruled by Riddrie people – people like my father.
If background means family: it was hardworking, well-educated and very sober. My English grandad was a Northampton foreman shoemaker who came north because the southern employers blacklisted him for trade-union activities. My Scottish grandad was an industrial blacksmith and congregational kirk-elder. In the 30s, when my father married, he worked a box-making machine in a factory, hiked and climbed mountains for a hobby, and did voluntary secretarial work for the Camping Club of Great Britain and the Scottish Youth Hostel Association. My mother was a good housewife who never grumbled, but I now know wanted more from life than it gave – my father had several ways of enjoying himself. She had very few. They were, from that point of view, a typical married couple. I had a younger sister I bullied and fought with, until we started living in separate houses. Then she became one of my best friends.
Q. What was childhood like?
A. Apart from the attacks of asthma and eczema, mostly painless but frequently boring. My parents’ main wish for me was that I got to university. They wanted me to get a professional job, you see, because professional people are not so likely to lose their income during a depression. To enter university I had to pass exams in Latin and mathematics which I hated. And of course there was homework. My father wanted to relieve the drudgery of learning by taking me cycling and climbing, but I hated enjoying myself in his shadow, and preferred the escapist worlds of comics and films and books: books most of all. Riddrie had a good library. I had a natural preference for all sorts of escapist crap, but when I had read all there was of that there was nothing left but the good stuff: and myth and legend, and travel, biography and history. I regarded 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.
Q. When did you realize you were an artist?
A. I did not realize it. Like all infants who were allowed materials to draw with, I did, and nobody suggested I stop. At school I was even encouraged to do it. And my parents (like many parents in those days) expected their children to have a party piece – a song or poem they would perform at domestic gatherings. The poems I recited were very poor A. A. Milne stuff. I found it possible to write verses which struck me as equally good, if not BETTER, because they were mine. My father typed them for me, and the puerile little stories which I sent to children’s radio competitions. When I was eleven I read a four-minute programme of my own compositions on Scottish BBC Children’s Hour. But I was eight or nine years old when it occured to me that I would write a story which would get printed in a book. This gave me a feeling of deliriously joyful power.
Q. What sort of things did you draw when you were a child?
A. Space ships, monsters, maps of imaginary planets and kingdoms, the settings for stories of romantic and violent adventure, which I told my sister when we walked to school together. She was the first audience I could really depend on in the crucial years between seven and eleven.
Q. How did your parents react to your wish to become a professional artist.
A. They were alarmed. 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. That I should choose to become a seedy parasite in order to make obscure luxury items hardly anybody wanted worried them, as it would worry me if my son took that course. So till a few years ago I was embarrassed when I had to tell people my profession. But that feeling of shame stopped last year when I earned enough to pay taxes, so it was not important.
Q. Is it possible that your concentration on Scottish subject matter will make Lanark inaccessible to the non-Scottish?
A. You would not be interviewing me if my book was only accessible to Scots. And all imaginative workers make art out of the people and places they know best. No good writer is afraid to use local place names – the bible is full of them. No good writer is afraid to use local politics – Dante peoples Hell, Purgatory and Heaven with local politicians. I don’t think Scotland a better country, Glasgow a better city than any other, but all I know of Hell and Heaven was learned here, so this is the ground I use, though sometimes I disguise the fact – just as Dean Swift pretended to describe an island people by pygmies, when describing England.
Q. What made you write 1982 Janine?
A. A wish to show a sort of man everyone recognizes and most can respect: not an artist, not an egoist, not even a radical: a highly skilled workman and technician, dependable, honest and conservative, who should be one of the kings of his age but does not know it, because he has been trained to do what he is told. So he is a plague and pest to himself, and is going mad, quietly, inside.
Q. What are the main themes of your painting?
A. The Garden of Eden and the triumph of death. All my pictures use one or other or both. This is nothing abnormal. Any good portrait shows someone at a point in the journey from the happy garden to the triumph of death. I don’t regard these states as far-fetched fantasies. Any calm place where folk are enjoying each other’s company is heavenly. Any place where crowds struggle with each other in a state of dread is a hell, or on the doorstep of hell.
Q. How important to you is religion as a theme?
A. Religion is not a theme, religion – any religion – is a way of seeing the world, a way of linking the near, the ordinary, the temporary with the remote, the fantastic, the eternal. Religion is a perspective device so I use it, of course. I differ from the church people in seeing heaven and hell as the material of life itself, not of an afterlife. Intellectually I prefer the Olympian Greek faith. Emotionally I am dominated by the Old Testament. Morally speaking I prefer Jesus, but he sets a standard I’m too selfish to aim