by Rodge Glass (Bloomsbury, £25)
The initial disappointment anyone who reveres the towering—or teetering—figure of Alasdair Gray must feel on picking up this story of his life is that "the little grey deity," as Will Self has dubbed Scotland's greatest living author, is not here receiving the treatment of a commensurately ordained biographer. Rodge Glass is, rather, a smart novice: a young English novelist whose credentials consist of an apprenticeship served in Glasgow as Gray's secretary, a job that appears to have involved a ragtag of duties, from teaching his mentor how to use email, to saving him from drunken falls in the street, to taking down dictation of letters, wisecracks, ideas, indiscretions and stories.
"Be my Boswell," Gray commands Glass early in their relationship (chuckling gleefully, one assumes); and, although he formally disowns the comparison, the protégé seems to have taken the master at his word. Glass is no Richard Ellmann, providing a magisterial exegesis of James Joyce's genius; nor a Patrick French, excoriating the personal darkness of VS Naipaul. Instead, as becomes clear within the first few pages of Alasdair Gray: A Secretary's Biography, these are the excitable journals of an ingratiating acolyte. To this degree, at least, the Boswellian allusion may be apt. But one must ask: is there here the level of rapport sufficient to unravel the long struggle behind the most remarkable act of literary-cultural resurrection—Gray's reimagining of Glasgow—performed by any British novelist in the last 60 years?
Lanark, published in 1981 when Gray was in his late forties, was his first novel. Nearly 30 years in the writing, it ranks as one of the most protracted debuts in literary history. In the 20th century, perhaps only Joyce's effect on Dublin is comparable to Lanark's imaginative impact on a local and national literature.
Within Lanark, one of Gray's two alter egos, Duncan Thaw, is challenged to explain why no one notices the magnificence of his home town. Thaw replies: "Because nobody imagines living here." He compares Glasgow to Florence, Paris, London, New York. You never see these places as a stranger, Thaw explains, because you've 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." In Lanark, however, a city Gray once described to a London publisher as a "provincial town" is transformed into a phantasmagoric cosmopolis of the imagination. Gray saw it as if for the first time—as an accretion of tragic Victoriana and early modernism capable of fantastic, nightmarish rediscovery. After Lanark, neither inhabitants nor visitors would ever fail to imagine it.
And it wasn't only Glasgow that was reimagined. Gray's voice and style were far too idiosyncratic to generate literary imitators, but it is no exaggeration to say that every important Scottish writer of the last 27 years, from James Kelman to Irvine Welsh to Ali Smith, has read and drawn sustenance from his creation. No postwar Irish, Welsh or English novel, with the possible exception of Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, has had an equivalent proto-cultural impact.
The first time Rodge Glass encounters Alasdair Gray in a Glasgow pub, he offers to buy his future boss a drink if he will answer one question: "Do you think Lanark is a postmodern work, or merely one that has been called postmodern by critics?" Gray flees his admirer with the retort: "I can buy my own alcohol!" Glass later makes more successful approaches, but his original question is not as gauche as it sounds. What kind of a writer is Gray? If he is not merely a purveyor of postmodern jiggery-pokery, is he instead the carrier of a long Scottish tradition? It's certainly possible to trace in Gray the philosophical scepticism of David Hume, the divided histories of Walter Scott, the psycho-supernatural eeriness of Robert Louis Stevenson and the literary-salvaging reflexes of Robert Burns. Yet the chief fictional inspirations for Lanark may equally be Nineteen Eighty-Four and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
Lanark presents a massive puzzle that raises an equally big thesis. Though Gray has produced other ambitious novels, much of his later work, as both a writer and painter, may be seen as reinforcing for posterity what he called the "petit-bourgeois model of the universe" created by his first book. The pity is that, while his biographer touches glancingly on most of Gray's thistly issues, Glass doesn't really provide an underlying argument.
Nevertheless, what Glass lacks in scholarly exegesis, he makes up for in a story finely told and, above all, in the intimacy of his contact with his subject. There are critical slips and clichés—a constant reference to Gray as a maverick and an outsider being the most recurrent and redundant—and a lack of deeper historical and literary context. The postmodernist question could, for example, easily have been wrapped up into a larger view of Gray's great work as an editor, The Book of Prefaces. But Glass has done something that in some ways suits the persona of his subject just as well. Always a believer in his own artistic importance, Gray is possessed of a very special kind of literary solipsism: one riddled by self-parody, self-knowledge, sadness, anger, humour, generosity and affection. He is one of the last great British eccentrics.
A blurb inside the cover of Gray's short story collection The Ends of Our Tethers, characteristically written by the author himself, reads: "Alasdair Gray is a fat, spectacled, balding, increasingly old Glasgow pedestrian who has mainly lived by writing and designing 18 books, most of them fiction." This, in all his ordinary, vulnerable glory, is the man Glass gives us. Frequently witty, and unafraid to chide his master for his failings, he presents a kaleidoscope of Gray's oddities, viewed through a long tunnel of the personal unhappiness the man has travelled in pursuit of his art. This is certainly no Life of Johnson. But an aspiring author's need to ingratiate with a great one, animated by reflexes of exposure and self-exposure, is the essential Boswellian tic. And as a result, Glass has produced a portrait that is critically intimate to the point of being genuinely, unashamedly loving.
