Alasdair Gray

Alasdair Gray
Alasdair James Gray (28 December 1934 – 29 December 2019) was a Scottish writer and artist. His first novel, Lanark (1981), is seen as a landmark of Scottish fiction. He published novels, short stories, plays, poetry and translations, and wrote on politics and the history of English and Scots literature. His works of fiction combine realism, fantasy, and science fiction with the use of his own typography and illustrations, and won several awards.
He studied at Glasgow School of Art from 1952 to 1957. As well as his book illustrations, he painted portraits and murals, including one at the Òran Mór venue and one at Hillhead subway station. His artwork has been widely exhibited and is in several important collections. Before Lanark, he had plays performed on radio and TV.
His writing style is postmodern and has been compared with those of Franz Kafka, George Orwell, Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino. It often contains extensive footnotes explaining the works that influenced it. His books inspired many younger Scottish writers, including Irvine Welsh, Alan Warner, A. L. Kennedy, Janice Galloway, Chris Kelso and Iain Banks. He was writer-in-residence at the University of Glasgow from 1977 to 1979, and professor of Creative Writing at Glasgow and Strathclyde Universities from 2001 to 2003.
Gray was a Scottish nationalist and a republican, and wrote supporting socialism and Scottish independence. He popularised the epigram "Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation" (taken from a poem by Canadian poet Dennis Lee) which was engraved in the Canongate Wall of the Scottish Parliament Building in Edinburgh when it opened in 2004. He lived almost all his life in Glasgow, married twice, and had one son. On his death The Guardian referred to him as "the father figure of the renaissance in Scottish literature and art".
Early life
Gray's father, Alexander, had been wounded in the First World War. He worked for many years in a factory making boxes, often went hillwalking, and helped found the Scottish Youth Hostels Association. Gray's mother was Amy (née Fleming), whose parents had moved to Scotland from Lincolnshire because her father had been blacklisted in England for trade union membership. She worked in a clothing warehouse. Alasdair Gray was born in Riddrie in north-east Glasgow on 28 December 1934; his sister Mora was born two years later. During the Second World War, Gray was evacuated to Auchterarder in Perthshire, and Stonehouse in Lanarkshire. From 1942 until 1945 the family lived in Wetherby in Yorkshire, where his father was running a hostel for workers in ROF Thorp Arch, a munitions factory.
Gray frequently visited the public library; he enjoyed the Winnie-the-Pooh stories, and comics like The Beano and The Dandy. Later, Edgar Allan Poe became a powerful influence on the young Gray. His family lived on a council estate in Riddrie, and he attended Whitehill Secondary School, where he was made editor of the school magazine and won prizes for Art and English. When he was eleven Gray appeared on BBC children's radio reading from an adaptation of one of Aesop's Fables, and he started writing short stories as a teenager. His mother died of cancer when he was eighteen; in the same year he enrolled at Glasgow School of Art. As an art student he began what later became his first novel, Lanark, which originally carried the name Portrait of the Artist as a Young Scot. He completed the first book in 1963; it was rejected by the Curtis Brown literary agency. It was originally intended to be Gray's version of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
In 1957 Gray graduated from art school with a degree in Design and Mural Painting. That year he won a Bellahouston Travelling scholarship, and intended to use it to paint and see galleries in Spain. A severe asthma attack left him hospitalised in Gibraltar, and he had his money stolen. From 1958–1962 Gray worked part-time as an art teacher in Lanarkshire and Glasgow, and in 1959–1960 he studied teaching at Jordanhill College.
Personal life
Gray married Inge Sørensen, a nurse from Denmark, in 1961. They had a son, Andrew, in 1963, and separated in 1969.
He had an eight-year relationship with Danish jeweller Bethsy Gray and was married to Morag McAlpine from 1991 until her death in 2014.
He lived in Glasgow his entire adult life.
Visual art
After finishing art school, Gray painted theatrical scenery for the Glasgow Pavilion and Citizens Theatre, and worked as a freelance artist. His first mural was "Horrors of War" for the Scottish-USSR Friendship Society in Glasgow. In 1964 the BBC made a documentary film, Under the Helmet, about his career to date. Many of his murals have been lost; surviving examples include one in the Ubiquitous Chip restaurant in the West End of Glasgow, and another at Hillhead subway station. His ceiling mural (in collaboration with Nichol Wheatley) for the auditorium of the Òran Mór theatre and music venue on Byres Road is one of the largest works of art in Scotland and was painted over several years. It shows Adam and Eve embracing against a night sky, with modern people from Glasgow in the foreground.
In 1977–1978, Gray worked for the People's Palace museum, as Glasgow's "artist recorder", funded by a scheme set up by the Labour government. He produced hundreds of drawings of the city, including portraits of politicians, people in the arts, members of the general public and workplaces with workers. These are now in the collection at Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum.
In 2003 Gray began working with gallerist Sorcha Dallas who, over the next 14 years, helped to develop interest in his visual practice, brokering sales to major collections including the Arts Council of England, the Scottish National Galleries and the Tate. His paintings and prints are also held in Glasgow Museums, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the National Library of Scotland and the Hunterian Museum.
In 2014–2015 Dallas devised the Alasdair Gray Season, a citywide celebration of Gray's visual work to coincide with his 80th birthday. The main exhibition, Alasdair Gray: From the Personal to the Universal, was held at the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum with over 15,000 attending.
His first solo London exhibition took place in late 2017 at the Coningsby Gallery in Fitzrovia and the Leyden Gallery in Spitalfields.
In 2023, Glasgow Museums acquired Grey's 1964 mural Cowcaddens Streetscape in the Fifties, which the artist described as "my best big oil painting", for display at the Kelvingrove Gallery.
Gray said that he found writing tiring, but that painting gave him energy. His visual art often used local or personal details to encompass international or universal truths and themes.
Writing
Gray's first plays were broadcast on radio (Quiet People) and television (The Fall of Kelvin Walker) in 1968. Between 1972 and 1974 he took part in a writing group organised by Philip Hobsbaum, which included James Kelman, Tom Leonard, Liz Lochhead, Aonghas MacNeacail and Jeff Torrington. In 1973, with the support of Edwin Morgan, he received a grant from the Scottish Arts Council to allow him to continue with Lanark. From 1977 to 1979 he was writer-in-residence at the University of Glasgow.
Lanark, his first novel, was published in 1981 to great acclaim, and became his best-known work. The book tells two parallel stories. One, the first written, is a Bildungsroman, a realist depiction of Duncan Thaw, a young artist growing up in Glasgow in the 1950s. The other is a dystopia, where the character Lanark visits Unthank, which is ruled by the Institute and the Council, opaque bodies which exercise absolute power. Lanark enters politics believing he can change Unthank for the better, but gets drunk and disgraces himself. Later, when he is dying, his son Sandy tells him "The world is only improved by people who do ordinary jobs and refuse to be bullied." There is an epilogue four chapters before the end, with a list of the work's alleged plagiarisms, some from non-existent works. The title page of Book Four, which was used as the cover art on the paperback, was a reference to Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes.
Lanark has been compared with Franz Kafka and Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell for its atmosphere of bureaucratic threat, and with Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino for its fabulism. It revivified Scottish literature, inspired a new generation of Scottish writers, including Irvine Welsh, Alan Warner, A. L. Kennedy, Janice Galloway and Iain Banks, and has been called "one of the landmarks of 20th-century fiction", but it did not make Gray wealthy. His 2010 illustrated autobiography A Life in Pictures outlined the parts of Lanark he based on his own experiences: his mother died when he was young, he went to art school, suffered from chronic eczema and shyness, and found difficulty in relationships with women. His first short-story collection, Unlikely Stories, Mostly, won the Cheltenham Prize for Literature in 1983. It is a selection of Gray's short fiction from 1951–1983.
Gray regarded 1982, Janine, published in 1984, as his best work. Partly inspired by Hugh MacDiarmid's A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle, the stream-of-consciousness narrative depicts Jock McLeish, a middle-aged Conservative security supervisor who is dependent on alcohol, and describes how people and sectors of society are controlled against their best interests, over a background of the sadomasochistic sex fantasies that McLeish concocts to distract himself from his misery. Anthony Burgess, who had called Gray "the most important Scottish writer since Sir Walter Scott" on the strength of Lanark, found 1982, Janine "juvenile".
The Fall of Kelvin Walker (1985) and McGrotty and Ludmilla (1990) were based on television scripts Gray had written in the 1960s and 1970s, and describe the adventures of Scottish protagonists in London. Something Leather (1990) explores female sexuality; Gray regretted giving it its provocative title. He called it his weakest book, and he excised the sexual fantasy material and retitled it Glaswegians when he included it in his compendium Every Short Story 1951-2012.
Poor Things (1992) discusses Scottish colonial history via a Frankenstein-like drama set in 19th-century Glasgow. Godwin 'God' Baxter is a scientist who implants Bella Baxter with the brain of her own unborn child. It was Gray's most commercially successful work and he enjoyed writing it. The London Review of Books considered it his funniest novel, and a welcome return to form. It won a Whitbread Novel Award and a Guardian Fiction Prize.
A History Maker (1994) is set in a 23rd-century matriarchal society in the area around St Mary's Loch, and shows a utopia going wrong. The Book of Prefaces (2000) tells the story of the development of the English language and of humanism, using a selection of prefaces from books ranging from Cædmon to Wilfred Owen. Gray selected the works, wrote extensive marginal notes, and translated some earlier pieces into modern English.
Around 2000, Gray had to apply to the Scottish Artists' Benevolent Association for financial support, as he was struggling to survive on the income from his book sales. In 2001 Gray, Kelman and Leonard became joint professors of the Creative Writing programme at Glasgow and Strathclyde Universities. Gray stood down from the post in 2003, having disagreed with other staff about the direction the programme should take.
Gray's books are mainly set in Glasgow and other parts of Scotland. His work helped strengthen and deepen the development of the Glasgow literary scene away from gang fiction, while also resisting neoliberal gentrification. Gray's work, particularly Lanark, "put Scotland back on the literary map", and strongly influenced Scottish fiction for decades. The frequent political themes in his writing argue the importance of promoting ordinary human decency, protecting the weak from the strong, and remembering the complexity of social issues. They are treated in a playfully humorous and postmodern manner, and some stories, especially Lanark, 1982, Janine, and Something Leather, depict sexual frustration.
Will Self has called him "a creative polymath with an integrated politico-philosophic vision" and "perhaps the greatest living [writer] in this archipelago today". Gray described himself as "a fat, spectacled, balding, increasingly old Glasgow pedestrian". In 2019 he won the inaugural Saltire Society Lifetime Achievement Award for his contribution to Scottish literature.
His books are self-illustrated using strong lines and high-impact graphics, a unique and highly recognisable style influenced by his early exposure to William Blake and Aubrey Beardsley, comics, Ladybird Books, and Harmsworth's Universal Encyclopaedia, and which has been compared to that of Diego Rivera.
He published three collections of poetry; like his fiction, his poems are sometimes-humorous depictions of "big themes" like love, God and language. Stuart Kelly described them as having "a dispassionate, confessional voice; technical accomplishment utilised to convey meaning rather than for its own sake and a hard-won sense of the complexity of the universe…. His poetic work, especially when dealing with the relationship, or lack thereof, between the sexes, is memorable and disconcerting in the way only good poetry is."
Political views
Gray was a Scottish nationalist. He started voting for the Scottish National Party (SNP) in the 1970s, as he despaired about the erosion of the welfare state which had provided his education. He believed that North Sea oil should be nationalised. He wrote three pamphlets advocating Scottish independence from England, noting at the beginning of Why Scots Should Rule Scotland (1992) that "by Scots I mean everyone in Scotland who is eligible to vote." In 2014 he wrote that "the UK electorate has no chance of voting for a party which will do anything to seriously tax our enlarged millionaire class that controls Westminster." Gray described English people living in Scotland as being either "settlers" or "colonists" in a 2012 essay.
He frequently used the epigram "Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation" in his books; by 1991, the phrase had become a slogan for Scottish opposition to Thatcherism. The text was engraved in the Canongate Wall of the Scottish Parliament Building in Edinburgh when it opened in 2004. It was referred to by SNP politicians during the 2007 Scottish Parliament election campaign, when they became a minority government for the first time.
In 2001, Gray was narrowly defeated by Greg Hemphill when he stood as the candidate of the Glasgow University Scottish Nationalist Association for the post of Rector of the University of Glasgow. A longstanding supporter of the SNP and the Scottish Socialist Party, Gray voted Liberal Democrat at the 2010 general election in an effort to unseat Labour, who he regarded as "corrupted"; by the 2019 election he was voting Labour as a protest against the SNP for not being radical enough.
Gray designed a special front page for the Sunday Herald in May 2014 when it came out in favour of a "Yes" vote in that year's independence referendum, the first and only newspaper to do so. The newspaper described independence as "the chance to alter course, to travel roads less taken, to define a destiny", and the editor, Richard Walker, criticised the scare tactics of the "No" side and stressed that independence was normal. Gray's design, and his and the paper's support for independence, attracted widespread coverage at the time and later. The cover consists of a large thistle surrounded by Scottish saltires. Iain Macwhirter of the Herald wrote that it was "striking", and The National said Gray's image had "galvanised the 'Yes' movement". The Sunday Heralds website doubled its traffic, and the newspaper's sales rose by 31% after it supported "Yes". Despite Scotland narrowly voting against independence, Gray felt the result was more favourable than a narrow Yes win.
Later life
In 2008, Gray's former student and secretary Rodge Glass published a biography of him, called Alasdair Gray: A Secretary's Biography. Gray was broadly approving of the work. Glass sums up critics' main problems with Gray's writing as their discomfort with his politics, and with his frequent tendency to pre-empt criticism in his work. Glass's book won the Somerset Maugham Award in 2009.
In 2014 Gray's autobiography Of Me & Others was released, and Kevin Cameron made a feature-length film Alasdair Gray: A Life in Progress, including interviews with Liz Lochhead and Gray's sister, Mora Rolley.
In August 2015 a dramatisation of Lanark was performed at the Edinburgh International Festival. was adapted by David Greig and directed by Graham Eatough. (It had previously been dramatised at the festival by the TAG Theatre Company in 1995.)
In June 2015 Gray was seriously injured in a fall, leaving him confined to a wheelchair. He continued to write; the first two parts of his translation of Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy trilogy were published in 2018 and 2019.
Death and legacy
Alasdair Gray died at Queen Elizabeth University Hospital on 29 December 2019, the day after his 85th birthday, following a short illness. He left his body to science and there was no funeral.
Nicola Sturgeon, first minister of Scotland, remembered him as "one of the brightest intellectual and creative lights Scotland has known in modern times." Tributes were also paid by Jonathan Coe, Val McDermid, Ian Rankin, Ali Smith and Irvine Welsh. The Guardian referred to him as "the father figure of the renaissance in Scottish literature and art". His works are archived at the National Library of Scotland.
Sorcha Dallas was responsible for packing and organising his items posthumously and establishing the Alasdair Gray Archive in March 2020. The Archive is a free community resource caring for Gray's studio and visual and literary materials. It commissions new works, offers access and education opportunities as well as partnering on projects and events. One such event is Gray Day, held annually on 25 February in celebration of Gray's life and works.
Selected writing
Novels
Lanark (1981),
1982, Janine (1984),
The Fall of Kelvin Walker (1985),
Something Leather (1990),
McGrotty and Ludmilla (1990),
Poor Things (1992),
A History Maker (1994),
Mavis Belfrage (1996),
Old Men In Love (2007),
Short stories
Unlikely Stories, Mostly (1983),
Lean Tales (1985) (with James Kelman and Agnes Owens) (1995),
Ten Tales Tall & True (1993),
The Ends of Our Tethers: 13 Sorry Stories (2003),
Every Short Story by Alasdair Gray 1951-2012 (2012),
Theatre
A Gray Play Book (2009),
Fleck (2011),
ReferencesNotes'''
Works cited
Further reading
Anderson, Carol and Norquay, Glenda (1983), Interview with Alasdair Gray, in Hearn, Sheila G. (ed.), Cencrastus No. 13, Summer 1983, pp. 6 – 10,
Craig, Cairns (1981), Going Down to Hell is Easy: Alasdair Gray's 'Lanark', in Murray, Glen (ed.), Cencrastus'' No. 6, Autumn 1981, pp. 19 - 21,
External links
Official website
The Alasdair Gray Archive
Gray Day
Guardian video interview (2011)
Alasdair Gray at 80: From the Archive BBC archive clips
Under the Helmet 1964 documentary about Gray and his work
Alasdair Gray Rereads Podcast Alasdair Gray reads excerpts from favourite books. Recordings made in the last year of his life
1934 births
2019 deaths
20th-century Scottish dramatists and playwrights
20th-century British male writers
20th-century British short story writers
20th-century Scottish novelists
20th-century Scottish painters
21st-century Scottish dramatists and playwrights
21st-century British male writers
21st-century British short story writers
21st-century Scottish novelists
21st-century Scottish painters
21st-century Scottish male artists
21st-century Scottish writers
Academics of the Glasgow School of Art
Alumni of the Glasgow School of Art
Artists from Glasgow
British erotica writers
Costa Book Award winners
People educated at Whitehill Secondary School
Postmodern writers
Scottish dramatists and playwrights
Scottish illustrators
Scottish contemporary artists
Scottish male novelists
Scottish male painters
Scottish muralists
Scottish nationalists
Scottish poets
Scottish political writers
Scottish republicans
Scottish science fiction writers
Scottish short story writers
Scottish socialists
Translators of Dante Alighieri
Writers from Glasgow
Writers of Gothic fiction
Writers who illustrated their own writing
20th-century Scottish male artists