PICTURE INTO WORD INTO PICTURE: THE USE OF IMAGE IN THE WORK OF ALASDAIR GRAY AND WHERE IT COMES FROM
by Rodge Glass
(A couple of Gray Cherub-and-skulls, as seen on the cover of poetry book Old Negatives) ORIGINS Since childhood, the notions of image and word have been strongly connected in the mind of Alasdair Gray. His father’s library contained the plays of George Bernard Shaw and the essays of Marx, and these both had a lasting effect on his politics and personality, but the books he discovered with pictures in them, at home and at Riddrie Public Library, were equally as important. Particularly those by authors who did their own illustrations. Though now highly unusual (perhaps because it is cheaper for publishers to do blander artistic work in-house that they believe will suit market trends), it was not always so. The likes of Lewis Carroll, whose Alice in Wonderland Gray read, and Rudyard Kipling, whose Just So Stories and The Jungle Book provided early inspiration, ushered a young Alasdair towards a simple but important childhood realisation we all experience when we see something we find interesting or useful in the world around us, whether it be someone using a knife, throwing a ball or illuminating a story with pictures. Namely, if someone else can do it, then so can I! Seeing there did not have to be strict rules over what jobs an author could take on, Alasdair developed both his creative talents. Since then he has not limited himself, conceiving all his works not just as texts to be stuck between covers, but as an aesthetic whole whose parts are indivisible. Those writers before him had an influence not only in opening up the possibility of mixing forms, but also in the style he developed and the themes he has explored since. Rudyard Kipling is one whose artistic influence can be seen clearly even to this day. Like Gray, Kipling cut up his prose with biblical images, one famous one being a procession of animals that appeared in Just So Stories, echoing the Noah’s Ark tale. The Jungle Book contained an illustration done by Kipling’s father, John Lockwood Kipling (also an artist), showing Mowgli hiding in a tree. But far from his Disney reincarnation, this rather classical-style, muscle-bound boy seemed to merge into the tree he sat in, holding one hand up for a bird to rest on, leaving the other to dangle down and stroke the head of a wolf below. The image is not dissimilar to Alasdair’s ‘Garden of Eden’ or his murals at Greenhead Church or Oran Mor Arts Centre, which use animals and humans interacting happily in
a natural setting – usually the Genesis telling of the beginning of the world which has provided Gray with inspiration these last 70 years. But why has an atheist Scottish Socialist spent so many years concentrating on these apparently safe, traditional themes? ‘Because,’ says Gray, ‘any form of happiness seems to me to be a form of heaven, any form of unhappiness a form of hell. The Genesis story includes both.’ And because young children copy what they see. William Blake was another key artist who inspired Gray when he was young – also another who often painted the Garden of Eden (‘The Agony of the Garden’) and Adam and Eve (‘The Angel of the Divine Presence Clothing Adam and Eve’, ‘God Judging Adam’). Blake even dared to depict God – something Gray’s alter-ego Thaw does to tragic effect in his debut Lanark. Alasdair has often been called Blake’s natural successor – he was not only a writer and artist but, like Gray, a poet too, and there are definitely similarities between them when it comes to representing The Bible, as well as in their interests and opinions about the world around them. Blake was not intimidated by convention, and much of his work rebelled against those of his era. He supported the French Revolution but rejected The Terror that accompanied it; though not a believer in organised religion, he did a series of 21 engravings to accompany the Book of Job (a story Gray would tackle in his own ‘Job’s Skin Game’1); his insistence on designing illustrations and printing words together kept him poor for most of his life. Gray discovered Blake’s work at a crucial age, and his influence cannot be overstated. As a teenager, literary works like The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1793) helped convince Alasdair that he should be working on a grandly epic novel that could incorporate all his talents. TEENAGE YEARS: JOINING TOGETHER As he grew older, Alasdair began to not only illustrate his stories but also blend picture into word into picture. While working on the germ of the idea for Lanark in the early 1950s, Alasdair began to pass his spare time writing stories and poetry in artist’s notebooks, framing his favourite verses with illustrations in pencil evoking the dark themes his writing dealt with while an adolescent – loneliness, confusion,
the drouth
17
frustration. In one early drawing a horned angel stood solemnly underneath the words: ‘Alone Alone cold cold cold and alone’; in another a hunched, naked man sat central on one page below the words ‘anarchy crouched beastwise in the dark’. If there was ever any doubt that these twin loves of art and words had become fully inter-connected in Gray’s mind, surely these personal drawings are the evidence of it. This style of amalgamation for effect developed steadily from teenage work into the adult when Alasdair began to get stories published in magazines, so had actual printed pages to dissect and arrange. The opening paragraph of early short story The Spread of Ian Nicol, first published in 1956 in Ygorra (and finally published in a book as part of Unlikely Stories, Mostly in 1983), is still one of the author’s favourites today. But it would not be as effective without the depiction of the back of Ian Nicol’s head on the first page, suggesting he might be about to split down the middle: the last page would not work as well without the inverse pictures of the two Ian Nicol’s facing each other, in matching caps, ready for a fight. The simple, fablelike aura of the sentences is echoed by the same spirit in the drawings, and the fables in Unlikely Stories, Mostly would be less without them. OLD NEGATIVES: A SKETCHBOOK IN PRINT More than 30 years after The Spread of Ian Nicol, Alasdair’s first poetry book, Old Negatives, was finally published (Jonathan Cape, 1988). This showed how those early ideas were developed into a book, as the poems dealt almost exclusively with work finished before the publication of Lanark, being split into four verse sequences representing four periods of Gray’s life, 195283. The book is almost like a Gray sketchbook in print. A Picasso-style depiction on the inside cover shows a mother figure drawn sparely with abrupt, straight lines, with both a fully-grown man and woman contained inside her womb, embracing. They are surrounded by other creatures of the earth, with an owl, swan and octopus sharing the womb, something which echoes the themes and images found in the very first Gray explorations. This book is almost as much picture as word – all in black and white, like the old pencil drawings. The cover for the first verse sequence of the four, ‘In a Cold Room – 1952-57’, shows a serpent (there’s The Bible again) coming out of a young man’s head, with an unbroken egg resting in its mouth.
(Two of the four verse sequence covers in Old Negatives, with the Serpent and Egg of ‘In a Cold Room’ depicted on the left.) A strange place for something so delicate to survive, perhaps, but then Alasdair’s imagery always juxtaposes the soft with the hard. One of his most oft-reproduced images is to be found replicated 15 times on the cover of Old Negatives – a winged cherub crouched inside a skull (see top of article). The delicate surviving in tough circumstances is the main theme throughout, with Alasdair the sensitive young artist in a chilly, unforgiving world. The bleak, adolescent introspection of some of these illustrations contrasts sharply with the confident playfulness of the images and textual mucking about to be found in later work, often overtly political. At the beginning of Unlikely Stories, Mostly, a young Sir Thomas Urquhart sails towards the text, being blown onwards by a winged head. At the end, an older, white-haired Urquhart sails onward again via a map of Scotland.
(A Young Sir Thomas Urquhart, being blown onwards in Unlikely Stories, Mostly.)
18
the drouth
This kind of direct statement relating to the themes of the book is replicated elsewhere, like on the original hardback edition of Gray’s book 1982, Janine, where a naked man is surrounded by many reproductions of the letter ‘Y’, both upright and upside down, with the same effect appearing in the mental breakdown section of the novel. (The upsidedown ‘Y’s also represent the ‘legs astride astride astride’ motif that runs through the sexual fantasies of protagonist Jock McLeish.)
(The image on the original hardback of the Gray novel 1982, Janine, replete with Ys.) This technique of forewarning continued throughout Gray’s career. On the hardback of the 1994 Canongate novel A History Maker, a fantasy about future wars in Scotland, a gold-coloured imprint of the stump of a tree with one surviving branch is accompanied by the words ‘TRY AGAIN’. The point could hardly be more clear. BATTLING THE SYSTEM There has been a long tradition of authors fighting the realms of what is possible to put in a book, as seen with the example of Blake. In the main, Gray has worked with people who understand his need for his books to be physical things of beauty. His works must be pleasant on the eye, and make sense in the context of the book’s themes. Every page has to be laid out in a very specific way. He considers every part of the process to be his business, and largely that has been indulged, though it has made the production of Gray books a complicated, protracted and expensive business, not always satisfying.2 The great Glasgow poet Tom Leonard called working with Alasdair being ‘like a sandcastle fighting the sea’. Joe Murray, typesetter for the sprawlingly ambitious project The Book of Prefaces, agreed with that opinion after working for months on end on the project, painstakingly putting every individual Prefaces page together, lining up art, original text and commentary time and again exactly as Gray desired only to have to go back and alter it when Alasdair changed his mind. The section on Shakespeare was a particularly difficult one to marry in Gray’s mind and on the page (he does not work with computers, so needs technological experts to make his visions real). One particularly fraught afternoon, the usually cool Murray lost his temper, telling Alasdair ‘to fuck off and not come back’ … until the following day, at least. All bad feeling was quickly abandoned after Alasdair’s peace offering of a curry, a few pints and a promise to be less anxious to achieve utter perfection, but the story goes to
show how difficult it can be to arrange books amongst art, especially with purists who have a vision that may not be practical, easy or consistent with the demands of technology. The following day came, Alasdair changed his mind about how to present the bard yet again, and all 613 pages had to be rearranged to accommodate him. These days, quite understandably, Joe Murray does not like to think about Shakespeare.
(The cover design for THE BOOK OF PREFACES. Troublesome Will Shakespeare top left.) An early edition of his book Something Leather side-stepped the Gray artwork problem entirely, with the publishers thinking him too much hard work: they simply neglected to mention they were junking his cover. He disowned the work and did not use those publishers again. But there has always been resistance from businesses to anything considered expensive hard work. Alasdair was originally told his desired version of the short story Logopondancy was impossible to produce because it split the typed page diagonally. He suggested that if it was possible for Blake, it should be possible for him. Similarly, 1982, Janine ran into technical problems concerning its mental breakdown section where the page divides many ways at the same time, though Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting was applauded for using similar techniques 10 years later once Janine had opened the doors. THE IMPORTANCE OF HAVING CONTEMPORARIES Decades before the invention of Janine, the avant-garde writer B.S. Johnson was having similar struggles. Johnson had many things in common with Gray. They were of similar age, were both old-style working-class Socialists, both dealt in many different types of art (poetry, TV and radio plays, novels, short stories, essays) and were trying unusual presentations of their work. Johnson’s great project was pushing the novel forward through inventive visual and stylistic techniques. In his acclaimed novel Albert Angelo he printed several blank pages to indicate blackout, a technique which later appeared in Gray’s 1992 Frankenstein pastiche Poor Things. One of Johnson’s books had a hole cut through so the reader could skip onwards if desired. He often directly addressed the reader, and his characters even sometimes cheekily referred to the fact they knew very well that they were part of a novel thankyouverymuch. As Johnson got older, he got more ambitious. His ‘novel’ The Unfortunates appeared as loose sheaves in a box that could be read in any order – it was a feat to get the thing published at all in 1960s Britain, but Johnson was perhaps ahead of his time. His publishers, and the public, didn’t get it, and many of the boxes of The Unfortunates were pulped.
the drouth
19
Johnson and Gray met at a London party in 1964, nine years before Johnson committed suicide: Alasdair had already been impressed by Albert Angelo. ‘I read it and, how should I put it … I approved,’ he has said.3 The two certainly had the same politics when it came to writing. It is a shame they are not still contemporaries. Johnson felt desperately alienated by the rest of the publishing industry, and believed no one else appreciated what he was trying to do. He also thought there was no one else trying similar things. He may well have enjoyed Alasdair’s Oracle character in Lanark who spoke outside of quotation marks, and approved of the attitude of ‘why the hell not?’ that came along with it. THE END: THAT UGLY WORD AND WHY WE SHOULD CELEBRATE STEALING Some critics mistakenly imagine Alasdair Gray’s ideas are somehow entirely ‘new’ or (and here comes that ugly word) post-modern, because they are extraordinary. But as we have seen with the examples of Kipling, Blake and B.S. Johnson, there have always been mavericks working outside the usual rules. It suits some fans to believe Gray’s works are post-modern because it makes them feel they are reading something devastatingly fresh and exciting, that they have uncovered something meaningful. They have. But they are ideas that are part of a long-established tradition. It is a peculiar thing to want our artists to create in a vacuum: all have inspirations, all have influences, so why not explore them? It does not demean Gray’s achievements to search for the origins of his work in that of others. On the contrary, in Gray’s case it is nothing less than an advert for his favourite topic: Socialism. He discovered most of his heroes for free on the shelves of a small local library – so now he believes in free education, equality of opportunity and in the redeeming power of art and literature. Gray has spent many years trying to debunk this idea of his work being post-modern, instead calling himself an ‘oldfashioned modernist’ in the tradition of Lawrence Sterne and James Joyce – he even went to the lengths of laying out some pages in Lanark so they looked like Old Testament commentary. Then there was the creation of an Index of Plagiarisms to prove that his plots, speeches and themes were taken from elsewhere, but this only led critics declaring his book even more original. Responses to Alasdair Gray’s protestations tend to be patronising, with critics assuming he speaks out of either ignorance of his own genius or a kind of false humility. Humility, perhaps, but it is not false. He just understands that it is not very important to make beautiful things without help from others. On the contrary, sometimes it is the best way.
20
the drouth
Footnotes This was published in 2003 in The Ends of Our Tethers, Gray’s most recent collection of short stories. It describes the life of a modernday Job who suffers with eczema and has two sons who died on 11 September 2001 in the World Trade Center. 2. The political book How We Should Rule Ourselves (Canongate, 2005), written jointly with Glasgow University Professor of Law Adam Tomkins, is a good example of this. Gray was happy with much of the text itself, but was desperately unhappy with how small the print was, thinking the final pamphlet ‘too flimsy to be taken seriously’. AG 2005. 3. AG interview with RG, 03/06. 1.