Lanark_ a life in 4 books - Alasdair Gray [1]
In the early seventies (1971–75, to be precise), when I was studying for my MA degree at the University of Glasgow, there was occasional talk of Lanark amongst my circle of friends. Alasdair Gray was someone known to me by sight (we had mutual friends) and by reputation as a painter and muralist. Doubtless we drank in the same pub – The Pewter Pot in North Woodside Road – from time to time but I don’t remember ever meeting him properly. However, Lanark had something of the whiff of legend about it, even then: it was reputed to be a vast novel, decades in the writing, still to see the light of day. Rather like equally heralded masterworks-in-progress, such as Truman Capote’s Answered Prayers or Harold Brodkey’s Runaway Soul, Lanark was talked about as an impossibly gargantuan, time-consuming labour of love, a thousand pages long, Glasgow’s Ulysses – such were the myths swirling about the book at the time, as far as I can recall.
And so, finally, to have Lanark in my hand a few years later was something of a shock: it was indeed long, five hundred and sixty pages, and it bore Gray’s highly distinctive black and white drawings on the cover and inside. My abiding sensation as I began to read was one of intense and excited curiosity.
One final anecdotal digression to do with the tangled skein. It is unusual, as a young novelist/critic, to possess some years of apocryphal familiarity with a novel you are sent to review. Even more unusual, in the case of Lanark, was that I was also familiar with its publisher, Canongate – then a very small, Scottish, independent publisher almost wholly unheard-of outside Edinburgh literary circles. I knew about Canongate because I had met its then owner/publisher, Stephanie Wolfe-Murray.
In the early summer of 1972 (aged twenty) I was living alone in my parents ‘isolated house in the Scottish borders – about three miles from the town of Peebles. I was working as a kitchen porter in the Tontine Hotel in Peebles trying to earn some money to pay for a trip to Munich (where my German girlfriend lived). Not owning a car or a bicycle, I used to hitchhike to and from work. I was quite often given a lift by a young woman who drove a battered Land Rover (she often drove this Land Rover in bare feet, I noticed, a fact that added immeasurably to her unselfconscious, somewhat louche glamour). This was Stephanie Wolfe-Murray, and she lived further up the valley in which my parents’ house was situated. In the course of our conversations during the various lifts she gave me I must have told her – I suppose – about my dreams of becoming a writer. She told me in turn that she had just started up (or was in the process of starting up) a publishing house in Edinburgh, called Canongate. I filed this information away (thinking it might be useful). I have never met or seen Stephanie Wolfe-Murray since that summer of 1972 (I did get to Munich, though, in time for the Olympics and the Black September terrorist disaster) – and I’m wholly convinced she has no memories at all of the Tontine Hotel’s temporary kitchen porter to whom she was giving occasional lifts that summer – but for me it was a strange moment to see ‘Canongate Publishing’ on the title page of Lanark and realise the unlikely connection – and stranger now to think that Lanark was the book that put Canongate squarely and indelibly on the literary map.
Such are the complexities of personal history that enfold the simple reading of a book. I haven’t read Lanark since that 1981 review (though I have read and reviewed other of Alasdair Gray’s novels and stories – and have since met him on a few occasions) and to re-encounter a closely-read and greatly admired novel twenty-five years on is not necessarily to be encouraged – I abandoned