Book review: Alasdair Gray: A Secretary's Biography

Review by ALLAN MASSIE

A BIOGRAPHY OF SOMEONE WHO is still alive can never be wholly satisfactory. Too many punches have to be pulled. The enterprise becomes more questionable still when the book is written with the close collaboration of its subject.

Rodge Glass, having first introduced himself, unsatisfactorily, to Alasdair Gray while working as a barman in a Glasgow pub, became his part-time secretary, gofer and general factotum, before being appointed Gray's Boswell. Some will find an element of pretentiousness in the designation, all the more so because they took to addressing each other occasionally in letters as Johnson and Boswell. Others will regard this as an example of Gray's tendency for ironic self-deflation. However, since Glass makes it clear that from an early age Gray was interested in fame, while admirably indifferent to wealth, this may be another of the masks Gray wears.

This is a quirky, admiring, enthusiastic book. Nevertheless, it is not a work of hagiography. It's clear that Gray asked to be painted warts and all, and his faults, failures, irritating habits, vanity and moments of self-doubt are not glossed over. So it's an honest book, and frequently severely critical. Glass allows himself to wonder whether Gray's painting is really much good, and whether the neglect of his work as a visual artist may not be justified, no matter how frequently Gray complains of this. "If the art was really that good," he asks, "would it not have been noticed by now?"

Like most writers, Gray has led a fairly uneventful life, much of it more interesting to him than to anyone else. This is natural. Writing books is for the most part a solitary pursuit, and the most intense hours of a writer's existence are lived in the mind. There's not much material for a biographer there. Glass ekes it out with passages from his diaries, and these offer a lively, affectionate, if sometimes irritated, portrait of Gray's daily life over the past few years. This may have unbalanced the book, but Glass has assiduously collected reminiscences of the greater part of his subject's life of which he had no direct knowledge himself, while the diary sections allow Gray himself to comment on his early years and subsequent career.

The book is therefore an unusual hybrid, but it's an engaging one, and the portrait of Gray convinces: excitable, sometimes irascible, eccentric, hard-working and very determined.

Gray is not by any means a one-book author. Indeed, he has been prolific as novelist, playwright, essayist, polemicist. Nonetheless, it's fair to say that nobody would be writing his biography but for Lanark. It was by far his most ambitious book. He worked on it, intermittently, for almost 30 years, before it was published by Canongate in 1981. He had endured rejections, not all undeserved, revised many passages several times, seen excerpts published in a number of magazines, and displayed a remarkable commitment to the book and confidence in its worth. Its publication was hailed as a breakthrough for Scottish literature. Anthony Burgess called it a masterpiece, and said Gray was "the first major Scottish novelist since Sir Walter Scott" (with apologies to Compton Mackenzie and Eric Linklater – though not, strangely, to Stevenson).

It was not an easy book, for the naturalistic (Duncan Thaw/Glasgow) sections were not married comfortably to the fantastic Lanark/Unthank ones, to the confusion of some readers, while the typographical tricks, the authorial asides, the postmodernist criticism of the work you were actually reading made some question Gray's seriousness. That he was serious (while also playing games) now seems abundantly clear, and Glass gives us a roll call of younger Scottish writers, among them Janice Galloway, Iain Banks, Ron Butlin, A L Kennedy, Irvine Welsh and Ali Smith, who have acknowledged their debt to Lanark and said that it gave them a confidence to write about Scottish life which they might not otherwise have had.

For many, Gray opened a window of opportunity. Many more of course simply delighted as readers in his virtuosity. Glass quotes Edwin Morgan as saying "Lanark changed everything. It changed everything for Alasdair personally, but also helped to change the landscape for Scottish writers." For my part, I found the Duncan Thaw sections a brilliant portrait of the artist as a young man, had my doubts, which have since deepened, about the Lanark ones. But that is largely a matter of personal taste.

Yet the influence ascribed to Lanark is in some respects misleading. In one of its most famous passages, one character observes that "Glasgow is a magnificent city", and asks, "Why do we hardly ever notice that?" To which Duncan Thaw replies, "Because nobody imagines living here." "Imaginatively," we are told, "Glasgow exists as a music-hall song and a few bad novels. That's all we've given to the world outside. It's all we've given ourselves."

In the context of the novel this is fair enough; there are two young students speaking, and we can easily believe that this is what they think. Taken out of that context, as the words have often been, the remarks are absurd. Yet they have persuaded many who should know better that until Gray published this novel, Glasgow was neglected by artists and the Scottish literary scene was shrouded in darkness. Then God said, "let Lanark be, and there was light."

In truth, things were very different. Glasgow had been often imagined, and sometimes, as in George Blake's fine novel The Shipbuilders, very well imagined indeed. Then four years before Lanark was published, there was Alan Spence's wonderful collection of related short stories about a Glasgow childhood and adolescence, Its Colours They Are Fine. That book and the novel, The Magic Flute, which Spence published a few years later, are to my mind finer than Lanark, partly because Spence can imagine and inhabit people other than himself, and doesn't drift into the fantastic.

Moreover, by 1981, William McIlvanney, whom I consider the best living Scottish novelist, had already published four novels, including Docherty and his Glasgow crime novel, Laidlaw. Indeed, with McIlvanney, Spence, Gordon Williams and Alan Sharp, west of Scotland writing was in vigorous good health before Lanark appeared. McIlvanney, incidentally, gets no mention from Glass, and Spence only because his "Glasgow Zen was advertised on the back of Gray's booklet".

To make these points is not to detract from Gray's achievement, which has been remarkable; but it is to put it in context and redress the balance. If, again, he has written nothing since to match Lanark, that too is not surprising. It was a book into which he had put the first 40-odd years of his life, one whose first sketches were penned while he was still an adolescent. Little that he has written since has been without interest – though Burgess found that in 1982, Janine the "large talent" of Lanark was "deployed to a somewhat juvenile end". (Glass thinks it "Alasdair's finest, bravest book".) Most of his work has had that essential quality, the individual voice, and his essay in criticism, The Book of Prefaces, was a fascinating and agreeably provocative work, though, Glass tells us, a commercial flop.

If one sometimes thinks that the latter part of his career has been disappointing, that may be said of most novelists. Few of us have more than a handful of books in us, and Lanark may be considered a handful of books in one; the rest is craftsmanship, and Gray is a deft craftsman. It may be that he would have produced something more substantial than the various exercises in book-making of the last 20 years, if the success of Lanark had not made him a Scottish celebrity, with an admiring and uncritical coterie. If also I find myself less than enthusiastic about his fondness for typographical tricks and decoration, that is because I think a novel should read as well if vilely printed in a cheap edition as when the book itself is a thing of beauty. Which simply means that we have different ideas about fiction. There may, however, still be ambitious work to come: an unfinished modern imitation of Goethe's Faust may yet be completed.

One might point to some careless proof-reading in Glass's biography. The actor Corin Redgrave appears as "Corinne" in the text and "Connie" in the index; and David Maclennan of the ran Mr theatre is given as McLellan. But, overall, Glass presents Gray to us endearingly, showing us his charm, intelligence and integrity. He is honest, but not censorious about his failings. If "no man is a hero to his valet", Alasdair Gray has remained one to his secretary, who has done a good job, if not quite in the Boswell class (perhaps because Gray, for all his intelligence and virtues, is not quite a Samuel Johnson).