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By Root 1518 0

foggy enclosing force dissolves saying, “He is too strong for us – he has women behind him.” I also felt it in the climax of The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man when Stephen Dedalus sees the young bare-legged girl paddling on the beach, and she accepts the worship of his glance, and with a heartfelt “Holy God!” he turns and walks toward the sunset knowing he will be an artist, which is the greatest sort of priest. Also in Joyce Cary’s The Horse’s Mouth when Gulley Jimson, fatally injured in the destruction of his mural painting, is carried off laughing in the ambulance because he knows he was doing his best work right up to the end. And Joyce Cary’s novel brought me to the books of William Blake because Gulley Jimson kept quoting him. The Glasgow Mitchell Library had facsimiles and originals – and Blake’s work in verse and picture and prose struck me then and strikes me now as true, beautiful and good. The airy freedom of his naked figures felt like liberation. So did the elaborately clothed, slightly perverse figures of Aubrey Beardsley. And in case this all sounds too high-minded I was terribly stimulated by the highly coloured American comics which first came to Britain in the late 1940s when I was in my early teens. They showed Wonderwoman, Sheena the Jungle Girl and other females with figures and faces like glamorous film-stars of that time, but wearing much less clothing, and since the representation of normal sexual practice was forbidden by the USA moral code their adventures involved them in capture and bondage instead. Such fantasies compensated for my own sexual timidity.

Q This spate of information about the fiction you enjoyed suggests a terrible lack of interest in the life around you.

A Not lack of interest but lack of anticipation. I misled you if I suggested I had no friends of my own. I had several, especially one I called Coulter in the novel. We went on discursive walks and sometimes biycle rides together. But I could not take part in the sports he liked (running, and watching football) and nights out at the Dennistoun Palais. His accounts of his social adventures fascinated me like stories in books I read. I had no social skill apart from tête-à-têtes and haranguing people at the school literary and debating society – the skills of Adolf Hitler. I wanted to be part of it, wanted to be an exciting, welcomed person in other people’s lives-especially in the lives of girls who attracted me. Nothing like that seemed possible till I got to Glasgow School of Art in 1952, a few months after my mother died. All that is described as I remember it in Lanark. Memory is an editing process which inevitably exaggerates some episodes, suppresses others and arranges events in neater orders, but nobody assumes that of their own memory. I don’t.

Q So how autobiographical is Lanark?

A Book 1, the first half of the Thaw section, is very like my life until 17½ years, though much more miserable, as I explained. Also the hostel for munition workers which my dad managed during from about 1941 to ’44 was in Wetherby, Yorkshire. I shifted it to the Scottish west highlands to preserve some national unity and bring in some references to Scotland’s Calvinist past, though the Wee Free clergyman is sheer invention. I have never met such a man. The second half of the Thaw book is true to friends I made at art school and some of my dealings with the staff, for I filled notebooks while there with details to be used in my Portrait of the Artist as a Young Glaswegian. But unlike James Joyce’s portrait I intended my artist to end tragically –

Q Why?

A Young artists couldn’t make livings by painting easel or murals in 1950s Scotland. Nearly all art students became teachers, apart from a few who got into industry or advertising or became housewives. I supposed I would have to survive by some kind of compromise like that, but I had no intention of letting Thaw do so. Which is why I made him dourer, more single-minded than I am. His inability to attract women, and sexual frustration would also help push him towards madness. The episode