17 Nov 2012 19:38:33
The novelist, playwright, poet, muralist, illustrator, pamphleteer and literary historian Alasdair Gray has been called all sorts of things: the 20th century's William Blake, Glasgow's Piranesi, "the greatest Scottish novelist since Walter Scott" (by Anthony Burgess), "a creative polymath with an integrated politico-philosophic vision" (by Will Self), a glorious one-man band, the dirty old man of Scottish letters. On the evidence of Every Short Story 1951-2012, we could slap a few more tags on to this bewilderingly varied talent: Glasgow's Borges, perhaps, or Scotland's VS Pritchett. Gray's two best-known novels, Lanark and 1982, Janine, are hybrids in which realism is echoed and amplified by wilder and more experimental forms. Lanark, conceived as an epic of postwar Scotland, is a Kafkaesque/Orwellian dystopia wrapped around a naturalistic portrait of the artist as a young man in 1940s and 50s Glasgow. It is now thought of as probably the classic Scottish novel of the late 20th century – a book which dramatised the hollowing out of the Empire's second city and helped make the recent flowering of Scots literature possible. 1982, Janine, which the author himself regards as his best work, is a lurid sado-masochistic fantasy, punctuated with political rants, which takes place inside the head of a drunken Scottish Tory; all this is set against another beautifully rendered realistic narrative, about the protagonist's sentimental education. The most accessible of his major novels, Poor Things, published in 1992, is a historical pastiche, a Victorian reworking of the Frankenstein story.
Gray's collected short stories come in at an overwhelming 900 pages, in a handsome quasi-Edwardian hardback designed by the author, and illustrated with his distinctive frontispieces, mocked-up woodcuts, heraldic emblems, totemic symbols and line portraits of strong women. The book illustrates the vast range of his writing – and, it must be said, its sometimes very uneven quality.
It starts with a short HG Wells-style fantasy about a star falling into a tenement backyard, published by Collins Magazine for Boys and Girls in 1951, when Gray was 17. It ends with a couple of downbeat snapshots of old men struggling with illness and drink in the 21st century. One of the six volumes anthologised here, Ten Tall Tales and True, advertises its contents as including social realism, sexual comedy, science fiction and satire. But this is just scratching the surface. In this book you'll also find exotic fables, humorous sketches, pastiche, political diatribes, anecdotes, doodles, scraps of conversation. You'll find opening lines such as "I met Jesus Christ only once …" and closing lines such as: "Whatever the future of the human race it is not likely to dispense with dentists."
Gray is a genius, a born storyteller whether at a visionary or a more down-to-earth level; even the poorest of the stories contains something intriguing or funny. But he's also a chancer and a bodger, given to cobbling together short stories from bottom-drawer leftovers. The incidental pleasures of Gray's books include the author's own commentaries – "critic fuel", he sometimes calls them. The endnote here, a brief critical autobiography (itself rehashed), is typically and charmingly open about his occasional need to rush a book into print in order to pay off debts or fund some other grand project.
Of the six volumes collected here, the most admired is the first, Unlikely Stories, Mostly. Like Lanark, it was published in the early 1980s but was written over the three decades preceding. It's a series of fantastical fables, showing the influence of Kafka, Swift and Johnson's Rasselas. Some of the early pieces, written while Gray was at Glasgow School of Art, are nice but a little throwaway, such as "The Spread of Ian Nicol", about a riveter who starts to split in two. Others are awesome. The stand-out story is probably "Five Letters from an Eastern Empire", inspired by a line in Pound's Cantos ("Moping around the Emperor's court, waiting for the order-to-write") and "describing etiquette government irrigation education clogs kites rumour poetry justice massage town-planning sex and ventriloquism in an obsolete nation". His Brueghelesque Tower of Babel stories, "The Start of the Axletree" and "The End of the Axletree", are also memorable, though over distance, some of Gray's visionary pieces can resolve into strained political allegory or let-me-tell-you-my-dream rambling (no one, I suspect, ever wished the final section of Lanark longer than it is). I was also very struck by "The Comedy of the White Dog", which starts as a realistic story about sexually uneasy 1950s bohemians, and resolves into a truly strange tale about a monstrous dog claiming droit de seigneur.
The stories have been rearranged slightly since their first publication. Some of the non-fiction pieces which he published in Lean Tales, a book he wrote jointly with James Kelman and Agnes Owen, have been removed, which seems a pity: the one remaining piece of non-fiction, about his friend and patron Andrew Sykes, a sociology professor and judo enthusiast who turned from left-wing radical into pinstriped Thatcherite, is fascinating. Something Leather, an episodic 1990 novel which, as Gray remarks, "most critics have agreed … is my worst", has been repurposed as a book of short stories, now entitled Glaswegians. "Eight pages of sado-masochistic male fantasy" have been excised, in the hope of redirecting attention away from the more lurid aspects towards the fact that it contains some pretty good realistic short stories. This makes sense: the fantasies don't, I think, give much, while some of more naturalistic pieces are tremendous. It also contains a broad but amusing satire on the campaign to turn Glasgow into 1990's EU city of culture – featuring an art installation called "The Bum Garden", and lots of posh English people, their speech spelt out phonetically, in revenge for the "See you Jimmy" stuff inflicted on the Scots down the years. "But shooali the natives have some local cultcha of their own?", and so on.
The penultimate volume, 2003's The Ends of Our Tethers, "shows the high jinks of many folk in the last stages of physical, moral and social decrepitude – a sure tonic for the young" (according to Gray's original blurb, sadly lost here). It's an uncharacteristically muted collection, often mourning failed relationships. Perhaps it shouldn't have been a surprise that a writer as excessive as Gray can also do something as restrained and classical as "Miss Kincaid's Autumn", but it was. Finally, there's Tales Droll and Plausible, a collection of new (or newly recycled) work, which sees him as exuberant as ever, though mortality is looming large – along with ecological catastrophe. (Gray's motto, "Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation", has been modified on the front cover, with the last two words changed to "better world".) I'm not sure that any of these will make it into the Scottish canon, but "Gumbler's Sheaf", about an old man composing furious letters to representatives of the horrible modern world, made me laugh out loud.
