In May, I was lucky enough to interview my favourite living writer, Alasdair Gray, for the Pulp.net website. Thanks to his extremely helpful and friendly biographer, Rodge Glass (who has a story in this Issue’s showcase) and an extremely amenable Alasdair, I was also able to ask a few questions of my own; the questions I’d wanted to ask at various events I’d seen Gray speak and read at over they ears but was too shy. I’m delighted to be able to share his responses with you here and my very great thanks go to Alasdair and Rodge for their time and insights.

1 - ‘1982 Janine,’ my favourite of your novels, was the book that really kick-started my passion for contemporary Scottish writing. When it was first published I read it over and over as I could not believe I could ever read something as good again. I understand it is the novel you class are your best. Why is it your favourite?

Because the man it describes – Jock McLeish, an electrical engineer – is an ordinary man: not an artist like half my main character in ‘Lanark,’ my first novel.

2a - Regarding the elaborate typography in ‘1982 Janine,’ I understand you have never used computers yourself. How difficult was it to translate your ideas onto the printed page via someone else?

I have never used a computer because I assume it is an unusually clever typewriter, and I never learned to type. But I paid people, usually friends, to type my manuscripts, and then made changes to these, until a satisfactory version could be given to the printer. In Chapter 11 of ‘1982, Janine,’ my narrator suffers a mental breakdown so that at least three voices are raving in his head simultaneously. To convey this I needed three streams of type on the same page, expanding or contracting as the words got louder or softer: which was conveyed by the type getting bolder or smaller. I helped my typist convey this by spacing the words more or less widely in delineated columns and pasting them together. The head of the printing department at first said modern technology could not handle such a job, but I persuaded him that it could.

2b - How were you/the publisher able to find a typographer capable of such a task when really there was no real precedent to typographically linking form with content to such an extent at that time?

It may be true that my typographical antics in ‘1982, Janine’ had not been previously used to the same extent, but I had first used them in ‘Unlikely Stories, Mostly,’ and got ideas for them from the mouse’s tale (and tail) in ‘Alice in Wonderland’ and gnat’s speech in ‘Through the Looking Glass.’

3 - What’s the latest with the proposed ‘Lanark’ film?

It is nowhere. Twenty years ago, working with Sandy Johnson, a television director, I wrote a film script with two thirds of the storyboard. I doubt if it will ever be funded.

4 - Due to the length and complexity of the ‘Book of Prefaces,’ you had all sorts of problems with funding until the project was ultimately rescued by the financial intervention of a Glasgow publican. As the time wasted applying for various funding, endlessly re-explaining the project in itself drew the project out to such an extent, how do you think funding for such important projects would be better distributed?

You are mistaken that I wasted time applying for official funding. When I saw such an application would indeed take and waste months of my working hours, I begged money from my publican friend, and he gave it. Alas, I have no time to write a detailed essay upon how I think the taxpayer’s money should be used to pay productive artists. But I believe the part currently used to pay administrators and consultants should be reduced to 90%, no matter how much middle-class professional unemployment this causes.

5a - What was your earliest idea for a book?

At the age of nine I wanted to write a fairy story of the kind I enjoyed (‘Alice in Wonderland’ + ‘House at Pooh Corner’ + ‘Wind in the Willows’ + ‘Doctor Dolittle Stories’) that other people would enjoy.

5b - What inspired it?

The books I have just named. But over the years as I struggled to write it I was adding Dickens and R.L.Stevenson and James Hogg and Kafka and D.H.Lawrence and Melville to my inspirers, while seeing the outcome would be a sham if I learned nothing from my own family and all the people I knew.

5c - Was the original idea turned into a book?

Yes, Lanark, published in 1981, when I was 45.

5d - Did the characters end up in subsequent books/plays as was the case with the characters from your radio and stage plays who ended up in ‘Something Leather’ and ‘The Fall of Kelvin Walker’?

Some people I knew were twisted into characters who acted in radio and television plays broadcast between 1968 and 1977.

6 - What is your relationship with your characters? Have you ever found it hard to disengage from a character? Are you always in control of them or do they sometimes take you on their own journey?

I find them entertaining – the reader or audience couldn’t if I didn’t. When I get sick of them I change or dismiss them.

7 - The Scottish media have a tendency to create divisions between the Scottish people – city rivalries; urban/rural tensions; enflaming existing tensions, rather than celebrate our wonderfully diverse culture. Why do you think it tries to perpetuate this division?

Lack of imagination.

8 - According to legend, several hundred copies of your first book, ‘The Comedy of the White Dog’ were returned to you from the publisher in the early 1980’s and were subsequently destroyed. Is there any truth in this? What encouraged such drastic action and do you regret it now?

The publishers were a small writer’s co-operative of which I was a founder member. We printed the books cheaply, had to distribute them ourselves, found hardly any bookshops wanted to sell our cheap little books, and could not be bothered collecting the money due us from the books that were sold. When we gave up the press in the late 1970’s each of the authors (Kelman, Lochhead, Leonard, Spence, McDougall, MacNeacail and me) each got back hundreds of copies. I had no wish to cart mine around.

9a - Your mural, ‘The Seven Days of Creation’ in Greenhead Church of Scotland, Bridgeton was destroyed when the church was demolished, but a painting based on the mural was used on the dust jacket of the ‘Lanark’ 20th Anniversary boxed set and illustrations of the processes involved in painting the mural featured in Book 2 of the novel. Are any segments or interpretations of your other murals, lost when buildings were destroyed, featured or due to be featured in forthcoming books?

Only three of my murals have been completely destroyed. Two early ones have been restored, a big new one was completed in 1997 and I am currently working upon my best and biggest.

9b - How do you feel about the loss of these murals?

Resigned.

9c - Can we look forward to a long overdue major retrospective of your artwork sometime soon?

I am at work upon ‘A Life in Pictures,’ a book with reproductions of most of my paintings, to be published by Canongate in 2006.

10 - ‘The Songs of Scotland’ book (a collection of 100 classic and traditional songs from Scotland – which details origins and alternative versions and features simple piano scores) which you worked on in conjunction with Wilma Paterson, must have been an enjoyable project. Could you say something about the processes involved in selecting which songs to feature and the development of the book?

All the songs were chosen by Wilma Paterson, who also provided most of the introduction and most of the marginal commentaries on them. I grouped them under various headings – SO IT’S WAR! – LADS WANT LASSIES – BONNIE CHARLIE – LASSIES WANT LADS – SKULLDUGGERY AND SUDDEN DEATH etc. This enabled me to design a different title page for each section.

11 - You have remained incredibly loyal to Canongate Books (the original publisher of ‘Lanark’) alternating publication of your books between them and Bloomsbury. As a fellow Canongate author I’d be fascinated to hear something about your relationship with them over the years and your thoughts on their recent successes.

In the 80’s when Canongate published my first two books (‘Lanark’ and ‘Unlikely Stories, Mostly’) it was not a rich company. When half way writing my third book ‘1982, Janine’ I ran out of money so had to do other jobs because Canongate could not pay me the £1000 advance which would have given me time to finish it. About a year later, Liz Calder of Cape gave me that advance. Some Scottish newspaper reports indicated that since Canongate of Edinburgh had made me a literary success, I was rejecting it to enrich myself in London. To show I am still Scottish at heart, but grateful to a good friend I have since then alternated between Canongate (who could seldom pay royalties owed me before Jamie Byng became director) and English publishers where Liz Calder is director.

12 - I very much enjoyed the 2003 collection ‘The End of Our Tethers,’ which was your first published fiction in 7 years. It was refreshing to read a book that looked at different aspects of getting older as publishers and readers still seem oddly squeamish about literature featuring people in the “latter” stages of their lives. In a society where the life expectancy of the population is rising, an upping of the retirement age is being considered and a great majority of the reading public are from the older generation, do you think the arts and media are becoming too “youth-centric” and if so, what do you see as the reasons behind this?

I havenae the faintest idea.

13 Your pamphlet, ‘How We Should Rule Ourselves,’ was published by Canongate in the run-up to the recent General Election. As a committed Republican with considerable clout, have you at any point in your life considered entering politics in an official sense?

Only in fantasies. A serious politician needs to keep his mouth shut while putting up with a great deal of boredom and should never get drunk. This disqualifies me from being anything but a writer.

14 - Canongate published both ‘How We Should Rule Ourselves’ and your novel, ‘The History Maker’ in conjunction this month, and you are working on your biography with Rodge Glass.

I am not working on my biography with the rather pushy Rodge Glass. He has started work upon a book about my life and working methods. He is equipped to do so because we met when I was his Creative Writing tutor at Glasgow University in 2001 and I saw the first drafts of his forthcoming novel, ‘No Fireworks’. Finding him an excellent, patient secretary who could use a computer I have since dictated parts of several books to him, and hope to dictate more. I will not read any of the book before it is finally published, though I promise not to sue him for libel action.

FUTURE PROJECTS:

The Oran Mor Mural: a scheme of decoration for the auditorium of a Glasgow Arts and Leisure Centre to be completed in the foreseeable future.

A Life in Pictures: semi-autobiography to be published by Canongate, 2006.

Three Men in Love: A Historical Triptych About Money at Play (fiction) to be published by Bloomsbury, 2007.

© Laura Hird
Reproduced with permission

---

Laura Hird is the Orange and Whitbread nominated author of the collection, ‘Nail and Other Stories’ and novel, ‘Born Free.’ Her short stories have been published in numerous magazines and anthologies internationally. Her new collection of short stories is due to be published by Canongate Books in May 2005. She runs and edits her own loosely arts-related website on which she seeks out and publishes new poetry, short stories, reviews, interviews etc. She was born and lives in Edinburgh. Her new collection, ‘Hope and Other Stories’ will be published by Canongate in 2006 and she is currently working on a book of her mother's letters.

---

© 2005 Laura Hird All rights reserved.