Of Me and Others. Alasdair Gray

Box of Delights. A sub-division of this had children who found lost or hidden lands. Prodigiously productive Enid Blyton wrote a shelf of books about these – The Valley of Adventure, Sea of Adventure, Island of Adventure, and others. In adolescence, I enjoyed similar books written for immature adults – Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, Rider Haggard’s She, The Return of She and Allan Quartermain. There were films about them – King Kong and Lost Horizon. In a BBC radio dramatisation I heard H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds and at once ordered through Glasgow Public Libraries all his early romances, which I still think are science fiction’s unsurpassable best. His The First Men on the Moon shows an impossible adjacent planet, yet imagined in gloriously convincing detail that also makes it excellent social criticism. That novel, his The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds describe exotic worlds elsewhere, but are no more escapist fiction than Gulliver’s Travels and Orwell’s 1984.

      Before leaving secondary school I decided to write a book about a fantastic world of my own invention that would also grotesquely satirise the world I knew. In planning this I was inspired by Kafka’s The Trial, translated by Edwin and Willa Muir, and also by their foreword saying that Kafka’s protagonist, like John Bunyan’s Pilgrim, was seeking salvation in a world where neither Heaven nor Hell are clearly signposted. This novel in which a bureaucracy uses a rented bedroom, the attic of a slum tenement, a pub’s bar room and a cathedral outside service time to entangle a man could be happening in Glasgow, and the bureaucrats were more humane and believable than Orwell’s Thought Police. Kafka’s junior bank manager was so ruthlessly selfish that I never doubted his guilt. And now I was also reading books about the growing pains of young men in worlds nearer my own in time and space – David Copperfield, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Sons and Lovers. I realised that books which, as Milton says, the world would not willingly let die must present real local experiences such as those Dickens, Joyce and D.H. Lawrence suffered, even if they were combined with strange Heavens, Hells and magic wonderlands elsewhere. Many books in the Bible did that, and most folk tales, the stories of Hans Christian Andersen and poems I loved and knew by heart, especially the Scottish Border Ballads. In a public library (Denistoun, not Riddrie) I found Tillyard’s The English Epic and its Background which, after briefly surveying the great epic poems and histories of Greece, Rome, Italy and Portugal, concluded that since Milton’s time, great epics were likely to be in prose, and mentioned Walter Scott’s most Scottish novels as almost (though not quite) amounting to a national epic. So I set out to write an epic, and a Scottish one.

      Like many Scots children’s primary and secondary schooling, mine had said nothing about Scottish culture. Until the 1970s our state schools had generally a broader and higher standard than their English equivalents, but aimed to qualify the smartest pupils for high positions in London, Oxford, Cambridge, Canada, Australia and elsewhere, so in Scotland English literature was taught as if no Scot had contributed to it, though some Irish and American authors were named. We had heard of Robert Burns because most of our parents knew some of his poems and many were sung on the BBC Scottish Home Service, but R.L. Stevenson was dismissed as a writer for very young children and the only Walter Scott novel given to us was Ivanhoe. This tells how the Normans in England became acceptable to Saxons they had conquered – a fine lesson for Scottish children! For most of the 20th century the poet Hugh MacDiarmid was treated as a pest by Scottish politicians and ignored as a poet by British academics, though his work and critical writing had won the attention of French and American professors of literature. In 1958, Hogg’s The Private Memoirs & Confessions of a Justified Sinner, with a preface by Andre Gide, came to Glasgow Public Libraries and me, proving that a Scottish tradition of combining local and supernatural events existed in prose as well as poetry. But to work well in a book, the Scottishness of Scottish characters must be taken for granted. Dostoyevsky slightly spoils some great novels with sentences about Russian-ness. Gillespie by MacDougall Hay is a nearly great novel about a dull but cunning, mean, greedy grocer becoming wealthy in a Highland fishing village, blighting lives around him as he does so. This account of late 19th century capitalism at work through interesting people in a small town would be almost as good as Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge and Brown’s The House with the Green Shutters, were it not nearly ruined by a first chapter suggesting that Gillespie’s parents were doomed to produce a monster by their weird, uncanny Scottish home. I saw that the local setting of my epic, like the supernatural part, must be shown without comment in convincing details.

      I was 44 in 1979 when this novel was completed and accepted by an Edinburgh publishing house. Two years passed before it was printed. I did not foresee that it would be a successful book but I knew that a print factory would soon be stamping paper with properly spaced type and binding it into books of 560 pages each. I imagined shelves of them in warehouses and shops, each as solid as a brick yet each containing my soul – my inner being – along with everyone and everything that had helped to make me, including (of course) every story I had enjoyed.

      This sense that my main reality would become books that would outlast my body brought peace and relaxation that were helped by a new job that, in return for a little easy, agreeable work, gave me a steady wage and an office with a view across Kelvingrove Park. I was writer in residence at Glasgow University, which meant discussing the writings of a few students who wanted my advice, but did not require me to write anything. Nor did I wish to write. I had no ideas for another story, had no intention of seeking them. I was at last free to enjoy reading for its own sake as I had done as a child. Escapist fantasy no longer interested me. I bought Ezra Pound’s complete Cantos, having gathered they were great poetry about the good and bad monetary roots of our civilisation, something we should all understand, especially since economists believe only they can do it. I also bought The Road to Xanadu by Livingston Lowes, a study of how Coleridge had come to write his great long poem and a fragment of one.

      I was not a very productive versifier, but interested in the working of creative minds.

      I found Pound’s Cantos hard going apart from the denunciation of extortionate money lending (which Marx called Capitalism) as a blight upon well-made art and building. He quoted Chinese and Renaissance scholars, founders of the USA republic and examples of Mussolini’s public work schemes in many pages, amounting, in my mind, to a formless, confusing fog. But suddenly a line from one of his Chinese Cantos spoke clear sense to me:

       Moping around the Emperor’s court, waiting for the order-to-write.

      The last three words were obviously hyphenated because they were translations of one Chinese word. This suggested a highly cultured, hierarchic empire which might train a man from infancy to be its greatest poet, and flatter him with high rank and privileges, yet prevent him from writing a word before it wants a poem to justify the government’s most appalling crime. I lifted a pen, wrote these sentences –

       Dear mother, dear father, I like the new palace. It is all squares like a chessboard. The red squares are buildings, the white squares are gardens…

      – and started inventing another new world elsewhere. Livingstone Lowes’ book had also stimulated this by showing that more exotic domains than Kubla Khan’s had gone into making Coleridge’s great poetic fragment. There was the artificial paradise in the Atlas Mountains where assassins were trained, the happy valley where Abyssinian princes were confined, a sacred Himalayan grotto and a source of the Nile. This was reviving in a middle-aged man the pleasures of childhood den-making and every lost, secret, romantic world that had once entertained him in books, comics and films. I enjoyed giving my dumb poet a luxurious apartment, garden and servants, and inventing the cruel education that qualified him for these privileges, and revealing the huge confidence trick through which the vast, exploitive empire was ruled, since the Emperor turns out to be a puppet managed by ventriloquists. I believe that, for its length, Five Letters from an Eastern Empire is my best story.

      After its publication in 1983 a producer in Scottish BBC Radio decided to broadcast it, and asked if I would like the reader to be a particular actor. I suggested Bill Paterson. “But surely he has a Scottish voice?” said the producer, who was English. I said, yes, Bill Paterson had a Scottish voice, but there were many Scottish