From his extraordinary art to our everyday memories, Alasdair Gray is steeped into Glasgow

In a spring 2019 interview we conducted with Alasdair Gray for Gutter magazine, exploring his urge to translate Dante’s Divine Comedyand his interest in the themes of afterlife and purgatory within, Alasdair told us that he didn’t believe in the immortality of the soul. It was a delicate balancing act not to pry too closely into his own recent brushes with ill health and mortality—but the parallels were intriguing. When we asked him, “Do you think the writer or artist has a different relation to death? What of your work would you like to live on?” He replied, “Everyone who makes something that survives them has overcome death to that extent: especially if it is another human being. It may also be a well-built wall or other work of art.”

How others were inspired by Alasdair’s work can be summed up best in a quote from his novel Lanark: "Glasgow is a magnificent city," said McAlpin. "Why do we hardly ever notice that?" "Because nobody imagines living here," said Thaw... "Think of Florence, Paris, London, New York. Nobody visiting them for the first time is a stranger because he's already visited them in paintings, novels, history books and films. But if a city hasn't been used by an artist, not even the inhabitants live there imaginatively." This is the gift he bestowed on many.

We were fortunate to publish Alasdair a few times in Gutter, a decade-old Glasgow-based literary magazine now run by a co-operative board of editors. When reading the submissions for each issue, it’s hard to overestimate how many young writers are inspired by him, walking in their minds the everyday and surreal depictions of the city he conjured up. I can't think of Alasdair’s writing without also seeing his paintings in my mind's eye: a sort of 3d depiction of familiar streets, tilting surreally, with the presence of heaven and hell, good and evil, always lurking in their cracks and crevices and in the light that shines down from above.

Not long after I first read Lanark, I was a student taking a year out midway through my degree, fatigued by depression and the need for funds. I was working in a jewellers’ in the West End of Glasgow to the mad soundtrack of hundreds of watches ticking off-rhythm in the windows, which I’d look out of regularly, wishing I was spending the summer days outside, still young enough to be resistant to the adult idea of having to work every day. Sometimes Alasdair Gray would pop in for batteries. It was strange to brush up against the presence of this totemic figure, doing something as everyday as buying an alarm clock, picking out the cheapest one—like a character popped out of the book I’d just held in my hands. I wondered what, in particular, he wanted to wake up for the next day.

I didn’t know Alasdair personally, but it was easy to come across him around the West End, often shuffling along to the pub (before his health prevented it). I can hear his eccentric giggle, as though played on an erratic flute; I can see him accidentally dropping all his leaves of paper to the ground during a talk. Some flatmate stole my copy of Something Leather, his fetishist novella about a skirt. My driving instructor once told me he’d painted her when she was a barmaid several decades prior; she regretted deeply having lost it. In the jewellers’, we’d store newly-framed paintings of the artist Allan Richardson, popping in on his lunchbreak from sweeping the streets. When Gray created a mural for Hillhead subway, there he was. As much as Alasdair was interested in Glasgow—and could see the religious, political, and class layers of the city—he was interested in people more than prestige. His visual portraits have the bold and confident lines of stained glass.

Even after the news coverage rolls on from his death this week, Alasdair Gray will be steeped into Glasgow. His spirit permeates the streets and the libraries; it colours the walls and the imaginations of the people.