Hullo again. When Canongate published Lanark in 1981 I was 45 and thought the book would become famous, when I was dead. A London publisher told me Lanark might get a cult following in the USA and would do less well in Britain. But since 1981 it has been steadily reprinted here, and I have often been asked the following questions.
Q What is your background?
A If background means surroundings: 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 dad who knew Glasgow’s deputy town clerk (he also lived in Riddrie) and others who seemed important men but not more important than my dad. If background means family: it was hardworking, well-read 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 elder. My dad fought in the First World War, which made an agnostic Socialist of him. He received a stomach wound that got him a small government pension, worked a cardboard-box cutting machine in a factory that survived the 1930s depression of trade, and in 1931 married Amy Fleming, a shop assistant in a Glasgow department store. She was a good housewife and efficient mother who liked music and had sung in the Glasgow Orpheus Choir. Dad 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. Mum had fewer ways of enjoying herself after marriage and I now realise wanted more from life, though she seldom grumbled. So they were a typical 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 go 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. So half my school experience was passed in activities which felt to my brain like a meal of sawdust to the mouth. 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 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. I realize I am talking here about my life from 11 years onward, after the Second World War. During it, with evacuation in 1939 to a farm in Auchterarder (an experience I used in The Oracle’s Prologue) in the mining town of Stonehouse, Lanarkshire (which I used in 1982 Janine, my second novel) and Wetherby in Yorkshire, life was not under the almost total jurisdiction of the Scottish Education system with my parents’ full support, so not at all dull.
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 magazines and 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 occurred to me that I would one day 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. If you have read Lanark you will notice how much of Book 1 – the first half of the Thaw section – draws upon my childhood. It does not show how much help and sympathy my mum, dad and sister gave me. I took it for granted as something natural and ordinary because so did they. When I came to use the material of my childhood in that novel what I remembered were our quarrels – they were more dramatic than the support I took for granted.
Q When and why did you want to make a story of your life?
A Surely everyone wants to be a hero or heroine? I’m sure all children do, probably when they stop being babies and find they have very little power over the world, apart from the power they imagine having. Books contained worlds I could grasp and manage through day-dreaming. The complete plays of Bernard Shaw and Henrik Ibsen stood on the middle shelf of a bookcase in my parents’ bedroom beside Carlyle’s French Revolution, Macaulay’s essays, The History of the Working Classes in Scotland and Our Noble Families by Tom Johnson, a Thinkers Library volume called Humanity’s Gain from Unbelief, an anthology of extracts for atheists called Lift up Your Heads, a large blue-grey bound volume with The Miracle of Life stamped in gold on the spine. This contained essays on the Dawn of Life, What Evolution Means, Life that has Vanished, Evolutions as the Clock Ticks, The Animal Kingdom, The Plant Kingdom, Man’s Family Tree, Races of Mankind, The Human Machine at Work, Psychology through the Ages, Discoverers of Life’s Secrets. The 476 pages (excluding the index) were half given to black-and-white photographs and diagrams. The middle shelf also held Shaw’s Quintessence of Ibsenism and The Adventures of a Black Girl in Search of God, and I believe the last was the first adult narrative brought to my attention, though I cannot remember it. I remember first reading it with pleasure and excitement in my middle teens, but years later my father told me he had read it to me when I was wee – perhaps four years old. The story presents an evolutionary view of the human faith through the quest of a black girl through the African bush. Converted to Christianity by an English missionary she sets out to find God, not doubting he can be found on earth, and encounters in various clearings the gods of Moses, Job and Isaiah, then meeting Ecclesiastes the Preacher, Jesus, Mahomet, the founders of the Christian sects, an expedition of scientific rationalists, Voltaire the sceptic and George Bernard Shaw the socialist, who teach her that God should not be searched for but worked for, by cultivating the small piece of world in our power as intelligently and unselfishly as possible.
The moral of this story is as high as human wisdom has reached, but I cannot have grasped it then. My father told me that I kept asking, “Will the next god be the real one Daddy?” No doubt I would have liked the black girl to have at last met the universal maker like my father: vaster, of course, but with an equally vital sense of my importance. I am glad he did not teach me to believe in that, for I would have had to unlearn it. But my first encounter with this book was in a pre-history I have forgotten or suppressed, though I returned to it later. It was a beautifully made book with crisp clear black woodcuts decorating covers, with title-page and text in a style reminiscent of Eric Gill. Like the text it convincingly blended the mundane and exotic.
This was all on the middle shelf of our Riddrie bedroom bookcase. The shelf above was blocked by the orange-red spines of Left Wing Book Club, four-fifths of it being the collected works of Lenin in English: dense text with no pictures or conversations in it at all. The bottom shelf was exactly filled by the Harmsworth Encyclopaedia, because the bookcase had been sold along with the Encyclopaedia by the publisher, who owned the Daily Record in which they were first advertised. This contained many pictures, mostly grey monochrome photographs, but each alphabetical section had a complex line drawing in front, a crowded landscape in which an enthroned figure representing Ancient History (for example) was surrounded by orders of Architecture, an Astronomical telescope, glimpses of Australia and the Antarctic with Amundsen, and an Armadillo and Aardvark rooting around a discarded Anchor. I gathered that these volumes contained explanations of everything there is and had been, with lives of everyone important. The six syllables of the name EN-CY-CLO-PAED-I-A seemed to sum up these thick brown books which summed up the universe, so saying it gave me a sense of power confirmed by the pleasure this gave my parents. But the four colour plates showing flags of all nations and heraldic coats-of-arms gave an undiluted pleasure which was purely sensuous. I was fascinated by the crisp oblongs and lozenges holding blues, reds, yellows, greens, blacks and whites combining in patterns more vivid and easily seen than anywhere else, apart from our Christmas decorations.
Healthy children exercise their imaginations by playing games together. I was not healthy. My imagination was mainly exercised in solitary fantasies fed by films and pictures and books. From these I sometimes got the feeling that life could be glorious, a feeling often inspired by sexual episodes in books and not always the best episodes. I felt it in 1984 when Winston saves the girl he detests from stumbling in a corridor in the ministry of Truth, and finds after she has given him a note saying, “I love you”; also when David Copperfield gets the courage to propose to Agnes, who then tells him she has always loved him. Also in Peer Gynt, when his mother Aase and fiancée Solveig save him from The Great Boig by ringing the church bells and that vast foggy enclosing force dissolves saying, “He is too strong for us – he has women behind him.” I also felt it in the climax of The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man when Stephen Dedalus sees the young bare-legged girl paddling on the beach, and she accepts the worship of his glance, and with a heartfelt “Holy God!” he turns and walks toward the sunset knowing he will be an artist, which is the greatest sort of priest. Also in Joyce Cary’s The Horse’s Mouth when Gulley Jimson, fatally injured in the destruction of his mural painting, is carried off laughing in the ambulance because he knows he was doing his best work right up to the end. And Joyce Cary’s novel brought me to the books of William Blake because Gulley Jimson kept quoting him. The Glasgow Mitchell Library had facsimiles and originals – and Blake’s work in verse and picture and prose struck me then and strikes me now as true, beautiful and good. The airy freedom of his naked figures felt like liberation. So did the elaborately clothed, slightly perverse figures of Aubrey Beardsley. And in case this all sounds too high-minded I was terribly stimulated by the highly coloured American comics which first came to Britain in the late 1940s when I was in my early teens. They showed Wonderwoman, Sheena the Jungle Girl and other females with figures and faces like glamorous film-stars of that time, but wearing much less clothing, and since the representation of normal sexual practice was forbidden by the USA moral code their adventures involved them in capture and bondage instead. Such fantasies compensated for my own sexual timidity.
Q This spate of information about the fiction you enjoyed suggests a terrible lack of interest in the life around you.
A Not lack of interest but lack of anticipation. I misled you if I suggested I had no friends of my own. I had several, especially one I called Coulter in the novel. We went on discursive walks and sometimes biycle rides together. But I could not take part in the sports he liked (running, and watching football) and nights out at the Dennistoun Palais. His accounts of his social adventures fascinated me like stories in books I read. I had no social skill apart from tête-à-têtes and haranguing people at the school literary and debating society – the skills of Adolf Hitler. I wanted to be part of it, wanted to be an exciting, welcomed person in other people’s lives-especially in the lives of girls who attracted me. Nothing like that seemed possible till I got to Glasgow School of Art in 1952, a few months after my mother died. All that is described as I remember it in Lanark. Memory is an editing process which inevitably exaggerates some episodes, suppresses others and arranges events in neater orders, but nobody assumes that of their own memory. I don’t.
Q So how autobiographical is Lanark?
A Book 1, the first half of the Thaw section, is very like my life until 17½ years, though much more miserable, as I explained. Also the hostel for munition workers which my dad managed during from about 1941 to ’44 was in Wetherby, Yorkshire. I shifted it to the Scottish west highlands to preserve some national unity and bring in some references to Scotland’s Calvinist past, though the Wee Free clergyman is sheer invention. I have never met such a man. The second half of the Thaw book is true to friends I made at art school and some of my dealings with the staff, for I filled notebooks while there with details to be used in my Portrait of the Artist as a Young Glaswegian. But unlike James Joyce’s portrait I intended my artist to end tragically –
Q Why?
A Young artists couldn’t make livings by painting easel or murals in 1950s Scotland. Nearly all art students became teachers, apart from a few who got into industry or advertising or became housewives. I supposed I would have to survive by some kind of compromise like that, but I had no intention of letting Thaw do so. Which is why I made him dourer, more single-minded than I am. His inability to attract women, and sexual frustration would also help push him towards madness. The episode with the prostitute, by the way, was sheer invention. It struck me as the sort of thing that would likely happen if I went with a prostitute. So I never did. In 1954 I was so sure of my Thaw story that, instead of taking a summer holiday job like most art students, I got dad s permission to stay at home and write it. Having rapidly filled notebooks with ideas and descriptions I felt able to finish a novel in ten weeks. At the end of that time I had written what is now chapter 12, The War Begins, and the hallucinatory episode ending chapter 29, The Way Out. I had found I did not want to write in the gushing emotional voice of a diary, but in a calm unemphatic voice readers would trust. This is not my normal reading voice. To make it a normal written voice I had to continually revise
Q But where did Lanark come from?
A From Franz Kafka. I had read The Trial and The Castle and Amerika by then, and an introduction by Edwin Muir explaining these books were like modern Pilgrim’s Progresses. The cities in them seemed very like 1950s Glasgow, an old industrial city with a smoke-laden grey sky that often seemed to rest like a lid on the north and south ranges of hills and shut out the stars at night. I imagined a stranger arriving, making enquiries and slowly finding he is in hell. I made notes for that book. I wrote a description of a stranger arriving in a dark city, in a train on which he is the only passenger. But the Thaw novel had to be finished, I thought.
Then one day in Dennistoun public library I found Tillyard’s The English Epic and its Background, which I will not attempt to describe in detail, but the lesson I took from it was this. The epic genre can be prose as well as poetry and can combine all other genres – convincing accounts of how men and women act in common and uncommon domestic, political, legendary and fabulous circumstances. Nothing less than an epic, I decided, was worth writing, and was helped to the decision by remembering how much I enjoyed works that mingled different genres; childhood pantomime, The Wizard of Oz film, Hans Andersen’s stories, Amos Tutuola’s Palm-Wine Drunkard, Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner, Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, Kingsley’s Water Babies, Goethe’s Faust, Moby Dick, Shaw’s Adventures of the Black Girl in Search of God, classical myths and some books of the bible. All these mingle everyday doings with supernatural ones.
I now planned to put my journey through hell in the middle of my Portrait of the Artist as a Frustrated Young Glaswegian. In some chapter before Thaw went mad he would attend a drunken party and meet an elderly gent like himself but thirty or forty years older who would tell him a queer fantastic story, enjoyable for its own sake. Only when the readers reached the end of Thaw would they see the interior narrative was a continuation of it. The design of the book now hung in my mind like a scaffolding put up for the erection of a large castle, with a few towers (that is, chapters) completed or partly complete. Most of what happened to me before the novel was finished provided me with building materials that I stored in notebooks until I could construct the other towers and connecting walls.
For example, chapters 7 to 11 describe an institute, a province of hell in which modern professional middle-class folk are the devils. This derives from both other writers and my own experience. The architecture of the place partly derives from H. G. Wells ‘s Selenite empire in The First Men on the Moon and 21st-century London in The Sleeper Awakes, but mostly from the afterlife hell in Wyndham Lewis’s Malign Fiesta. This was part of a trilogy, The Human Age, later published as novels, but the last two books were first written as plays for the BBC Third Programme and broadcast several times around 1955. I heard one such broadcast while in Stobhill hospital then, an experience that also gave me material for chapter 26 – Chaos – which describes the experience from a patient’s point of view. I had been sent there with what our family doctor called ‘stasis asthmaticus’, and which I ascribed to my quarrel with a very nice girl who only liked me as a friend, whereas I wanted her to be my (A) lover and (B – later of course) wife. In the institute chapters I describe it from a very poorly qualified doctor’s viewpoint, and mingled atmospheres and details from Wyndham Lewis’s hell, Stobhill hospital, the London underground railway system and the London BBC television centre. I experienced the last when I had plays produced or commissioned there in the middle and late 1960s. But chapters 7 to 11 were written in 1969 and ’70, by which time Lanark’s story was becoming greater than Thaw’s, and I had decided to put the last inside the first.
That large change came about because in 1961 I married and, in September 1963 became a father. The most significant part of my life no longer seemed my eccentrically frustrated youth. The toils of later life which I shared with many other folk now looked as important.
Q Are you telling me that the fantastic and grotesque events in books 3 and 4 are also autobiographical? How can they be? Lanark becomes Lord Provost of Unthank. You were never a figure in the local politics of Glasgow.
A I know, but experience allowed me to generalise. A writer whose play has been chosen for a TV production is very like a politician chosen for an important position because he has made a speech that appeals to widespread sentiment. He then discovers he depends on a host of directors, producers, dramaturges and technicians to whom he is a temporary creature, of use in assisting their work if he does not tamper with the notions it suggests to them. The writer of what was once his script may feel good if the production is finally applauded: will certainly be blamed if it is not, but his part in the business may strike him as one that could have been done as well or better by someone with less or very different ideas. TV production taught me all about politics.
Q In what sort of order were the parts of the book completed?
A Book One was completed in its present form before my son was born. My wife and I were living on Social Security money then so I sent the completed part to Spenser Curtis Brown s literary agency because I felt the book good enough to stand alone, though I would have preferred to complete it in the big way I had planned. But Mr Curtis Brown rejected it so I did complete it as planned. By the mid-1970s I had completed book Three and linked it to Book One with my Oracles Prologue. I had a good agent who liked my work by that time, Frances Head, a London lady. She showed it to three London publishers, who tried to persuade me to split the Thaw and Lanark narratives in two and make separate books of them. They said it would be dangerously expensive for them to risk publishing so big a first book by an unknown novelist. But my first marriage had collapsed in an amicable way, I had no need of money and was greedy for fame instead, so I refused them.
Books Two and Four were written side by side – I moved from completing a chapter in one to a chapter in the other with an increasing sense of running downhill. In 1975 and ’76 I was carrying manuscripts around and working on them in all kinds of places. I remember waking up on the livingroom floor of my friend Angela Mullane’s house after a party where I had fallen asleep for a usual Scottish reason, and resuming work there and then because it was a quiet morning and none of the other bodies on the floor were awake. I couldn’t do that now. I was then a young fellow of forty or thereabouts.
At the end of July 1976 the whole book was completed, typed and posted to Quartet Ltd, the only London publisher Frances Head had been able to interest in it. She, alas, had died of lung cancer. Quartet books turned it down for the usual reason – it was too long for them to risk the high cost of printing. I sulked for half a year then posted it to Canongate, the only Scottish publishing firm I knew. Five or six months passed before I got an enthusiastic letter from Charles Wilde, the Canongate reader, saying the Scottish Arts Council would probably subsidise printing costs. Chapters had appeared in Scottish International, a short-lived but widely read literary magazine eight or nine years earlier, so north Britain was more ready for it than the south. I finally signed a contract with Canongate on the 20th of March 1978.
Q Lanark was published three years later. Why did it take so long?
? Canongate arranged a joint publication with Lippincott, an old well-established firm in the USA; but before the book was printed Lippincott got swallowed up by Harper & Row, another old well-established USA firm. This caused delay. Then American editors proof-read the book, decided my punctuation was inconsistent. I told them that I used punctuation marks to regulate the speed with which readers took in the text – some passages were to be read faster than others, so had fewer commas. There was more delay while I restored my text to its original state. However, the delays gave me time to complete the illustrative title pages and jacket designs.
Q Were you relieved when Lanark was finally off your hands?
A Yes. For a while before I held a copy I imagined it like a large paper brick of 600 pages, well bound, a thousand of them to be spread through Britain. I felt that each copy was my true body with my soul inside, and that the animal my friends called Alasdair Gray was a no-longer essential form of after-birth. I enjoyed that sensation. It was a safe feeling.
Q So you the time spent upon Lanark over so many years was time well spent?
A Not entirely. Spending half a lifetime turning your soul into printer’s ink is a queer way to live. I’m amazed to recall the diaries I wrote when a student, often putting the words into the third person as a half-way stage to making them fictional prose. I’m sure healthy panthers and ducks enjoy better lives, but I would have done more harm if I’d been a banker, broker, advertising agent, arms manufacturer or drug dealer. There are worse as well as better folk in the world, so I don’t hate myself.