Alasdair Gray 1934 - 2019

The team are saddened to learn of the death of Alasdair Gray this morning, who we recently interviewed for issue 20. Alasdair was a great man who contributed so richly to the arts in Scotland with his boundless talent for painting and writing, and who was vocal on the need for social change. A Glasgow icon, he will be deeply missed but never forgotten.

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The Conversation with Alasdair Gray
Published in Gutter Issue 20, Spring 2019

Gutter arrives at Alasdair Gray’s West End flat to find it as full of books, paint, and activity as ever. Alasdair is at a desk drawing mandalas in fluorescent yellows and pinks. His assistant is fitting portraits of the tradesmen who refurbished the Oran Mor to large mirrors that will soon hang in that venue. Around them both, the array of paintings, drawings, small animal skulls and brushes create an atmosphere not unlike a catacomb.

Over more than sixty years Alasdair Gray has become the iconic artist of the city of Glasgow. Often hailed as a polymath, his novels, plays, political writing, portraiture and murals cover the city’s walls. From church ceilings and subways stations to tattoos and stage productions, Gray’s work is ubiquitous. He is perhaps second only to Rennie Mackintosh in the pantheon of artists who define the aesthetics of Glasgow. 

Gray’s paintings, like his books, weave together fantasy, history, politics and reality, pulling his wider scientific world view within a microcosm, focussing on the everyday people that inhabit a city or space. The motifs of socialism and Scottish nationalism are ever-present amongst the skulls and monsters that surround his characters, in the guise of fantastic underworlds, and more real nuclear threats to Glasgow. His visual works favour decisive lines of ink or paint with monochromatic planes, but any simplicity is fractured by annotation, decoration and typography that blur the boundaries between his written and drawn work. He defines art as ‘everything people do carefully more than once.’

Born in Ridrie, Glasgow in 1932, and enrolling at the Art School in 1952, Gray began working on Lanark in 1954. After thirty years on his first book, others such as 1982 Janine, Something Leather and Poor Things followed more quickly and won international acclaim. In recent years Alasdair Gray has focussed on painting and translation. He suffered a near-fatal fall in 2015 in which he broke his neck and has in the years since worked on his translation of Dante Alighieri’s divine comedy which he is eager to talk about today. 

Alasdair’s voice varies as he speaks, offering asides and commentaries, annotating and impersonating himself. From booming patrician Morningside to conspiratorial Glaswegian, interviewing Alasdair is at times like having a conversation with more than one person, and it is easy to see how the fractured sense of narrative voice that dominates sections of 1982 Janine and other books of Alasdair’s emerged. 

Gutter sits in an armchair in front of the monumental painting of northern Venus emerging from the sea that Alasdair has been reworking for many years. Behind us is a bank of books and some twenty or more portraits of known and unknown Glasgow figures. Tea is brought out by his assistant. It is mid-morning, and Alasdair wheels his chair around to face us. 

Gutter: You’ve just published the first installment of your translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy, Hell. Where are you with Purgatory and Paradise, and what drew you to translating Dante?

Alasdair Gray: In fact I have finished my translation. It was a project that I suppose started at least four years ago. And it was started I think mainly because I have no ideas for any fiction of my own. 

I don’t know Italian, I’ve read about ten or twelve English translations of Dante.  They were written in what one can only call translatorese, which is understandable because Dante invented Terza Rima, a special rhyme scheme used particularly for his Divine Comedy. It is unique, using verses of three lines each, unified by the fact that the first and last line of each of these verses rhyme and the middle line of each verse rhymes with the first and last line of the verse following, which gives it a kind of unity from start to finish. That is comparatively easy to do in Italian because end rhymes come quite easily in Italian where most words end a, e, I, o, or u. They don’t often end in a consonant. And therefore most translators – though not all, Clive James for instance doesn’t attempt it. But most of them attempt to make the English rhyme by using archaisms or the kind of language that is only used in poetry or in translations, what Gerard Manly Hopkins called Parnassian. 

I felt that since I had become rather irritated with the translations, surely I could produce a form of English that sounds more like everyday speech. I tried to keep the Terza Rima by having the end rhymes where I could easily do it, and where I couldn’t I used interior rhymes. That’s how I went about it. 

My wife, who was alive then, thought that it was a waste of time, and I could understand why. I thought perhaps we wouldn’t get publishers to take it, because almost every second year a new English translation comes out. This is because there has never been a really very good translation that has been promoted, by a government for instance, as has happened with the bible. As a result the bible is translated into English seldom more than once a century, and sometimes not even that. But Dante has had by now well over a hundred English translations. 

G: And why was it that you decided to add to that number? 

AG: I translated it, I suppose, because I wanted to read a version that was written in the kind of English I could speak. And I was quite surprised and pleased of course, when Cannongate decided to publish it. As I say, the whole thing has been translated and Inferno, or Hell as I call it, came out last year, 2018. Purgatory will probably come out this year. I think it quite likely that the whole book, including Heaven or Paradiso, will come out in 2021 – if I’m spared – which is the 700th anniversary of Dante’s death. And I hope that when that comes out I will have managed to put in a number of illustrations. As things stand I have only been able really to design the covers for Hell and Purgatory, but I am looking forward to getting down to illustrating some pages of the complete book over the next couple of years, if I make it till then. 

G: You say that it is in a modern spoken English, but there are decisions in your version that are more esoteric than that, for instance the decision to reference Tories and Whigs.

AG: Yes. Well, the words Guelph and Ghibelline mean very little to people nowadays. But looking into it, the Guelph identified with those religious factions supporting the pope, and the Ghibelline tended to be those who identified with the Holy Roman Emperor, who was elected out of the kings of Europe. So it was about whether the papacy had authority over the kings of the earth. I felt that the difference was between what might be called older money and new money, which is of course the difference between the Tories who identified with The Landed Interest and the Whigs identified with The Moneyed Interest, the merchant classes. But of course these two distinctions were never universally obeyed, and geographic locations as well as intermarriage ensured that the Guelphs, Ghibellines varied and blended as much as Whigs and Tories do. And therefore I felt it wasn’t a bad modernisation. 

I am trying to think what other modernisations I have made. There are a few, what will be called Scotticisms, I use the word Kirk instead of church, because to my ears it has a crisper more definite sound and I do occasionally use words such as aglee for instance, for distorted or squint. But most people will know it, particularly if they know Burns. And all intelligent readers of English should of course know Burns. 

G: Do you still enjoy it after four years of translation?

AG:   Oh yes. Yes. It is a great poem, a very great poem. I have always been fascinated by epic forms, though a monoglot. I was first fascinated by hearing Louis MacNeice’s translation of all five books of Goethe’s Faust which were acted on the BBC’s Third Programme some time in the 1950s. I got the Penguin translation which was not by MacNeice, and that was quite a good lesson, you realise that every translation of a great poem, out of the original language, has a different flavour to it. I was rather struck by that. 

Particularly you’ve got the prologue outside the gates of heaven which is a version of the book of Job in which Satan is presented as being quite a confidante of God’s, the equivalent of a spy or chief of police, reporting on the state of mankind. He is asked about the state of humanity and he says, ‘It’s just as bad as usual. And it’d be a damn sight better without your gift of heavenly glimmering.’ He calls it reason, using light celestial, just to outdo the beasts in being bestial. In the end the young God says, ‘What do you think of my servant Faust’ and Mephistopheles says, ‘Well, he’s as badly off as any of them. He’s a good man, but he finds it quite easy to be good, because you made it very easy for him.’  So, the devil doesn’t divert Faust by taking things away from him, but instead gives him everything he wants and believes that will have the effect of parting him from God. So he does it; he gives him youth and wealth, and fame and the love of the woman he desires, with no strings attached. 

I was fascinated by this story as a whole, but I was annoyed by the ending. Because at the end of Faust, his deal with Mephistopheles is that he should be allowed everything he likes and he should only lose his soul if he ever becomes contented, he says

Whenever to the passing hour
I cry: O stay! thou art so fair!
To chain me down I give thee power
To the black bottom of despair!

And Goethe has him  achieve everything that a highly successful nineteenth century politician and financier could getwith the help of Mephistopheles. And when he is very old indeed, about a hundred years, and he has become blind, he hears the sound of what he assumes at last to be the great dykes being erected to create a new kingdom for mankind – but in fact it is the sound of his own grave being dug. He announces that he feels almost content, he could almost say to the passing hour ‘stay for a moment, you are so fair.’ And in that instant he dies, and falls into the tomb.

So you’ve got Mephistopheles assuming, ‘aha, now I have won his soul.’ But, dear me, no. Instead, God’s angels come down just as the devils have come to capture Faust’s soul, and the angels pour down floods of roses. 

The final words are that the divine spirit of woman leads man eternally onwards and upwards. And you think, ‘But it was Mephistopheles who did all the work! Made him rich, let him time travel, marry Helen of Troy. The devil has done all the work.’

So I wrote my own version of that play, the first half of which is based almost entirely on Goethe’s Faust. It’s called ‘Fleck.’ Only he doesn’t sign a document selling his soul to Satan, rather Mephistopheles takes it for granted that he is buying his soul by giving him everything he wants, but in fact it turns out that he hasn’t quite brought it off. Fleck has become the most highly paid scientific consultant of the global employers’ federation, and there has been a nuclear meltdown in one of the far eastern countries, and they call upon him to satisfy the world’s population that there is nothing to fear, and this sort of thing won’t happen again. But in fact he tells the world they must unite to prevent the capitalist exploitation of the world, and so the devil loses out!

G: What do you think about capitalism and politics in Scotland at the moment? 

AG: Well, I’m not at all pleased with the Scottish Nationalist Party. The Scottish legal system has largely been ruined. Partly due to the Lockerbie disaster, because the USA were very keen to get one man blamed for it, the Scottish legal system was ruined in order to find him guilty. Even though to prevent an inquiry they eventually had to let him off. 

G: Do you think that’s representative of the SNP though? What would you want to see the Scottish Government doing?

AG: I’d have thought they would least maintained the separate Scottish Legal system, wouldn’t reduce the number of police stations. They’re just withdrawing, they’re doing what the Westminster government is doing, they’re concentrating wealth in the hands of a smaller and smaller social class. And I had hoped they would do the opposite. 

G: Do you think the gradualism of the SNP approach is the problem, to have Independence, but no real difference? 

AG: The fact that they are doing nothing of what I had rather hoped: encouraging the spread of land ownership, more crofting, more people developing their own land. In fact they have gone the opposite way. This government have done more to concentrate power in the hands of the big landowners, oh dear, dear. 

G: What do you think those who want independence for Scotland should be doing now?

AG: All folk who want a just society should strive for social equality — abolition of richer and poorer classes.

G: Do you feel a return to sympathy with the Labour Party then?

AG: Well, yes, Corbyn is the one cheerful thing I see. If he was allowed to do it, and we shall see about that? Oh dear dear dear.  Governments must command all surplus wealth to stop us wasting the planets resources, and should start by abolishing tax havens! 

G: In Fleck, and your Divine Comedy, there are similar themes of purgatory and afterlife that preoccupy your characters in Lanark and 1982 Janine. What do you think draws you to these ideas?

AG: Not quite the same, no. I disagree greatly with Goethe’s ideas. I don’t disagree with Dante. Though I have changed or rather dispensed with some of the things in Dante that I found too difficult. 

My biggest change is in his Paradiso in which he journeys up through all the planetary spheres, and of course in his world the sun is a planet and all the heavenly bodies revolve around the earth. But the thing that he attempts to explain is why the moon is an imperfect body, why has it got spots on it.  He suggests it might be caused by dirt in the atmosphere, and there’s a long and quite elaborate explanation, and it’s the most unconvincing piece of the whole poem. The point is I couldn’t translate it without it seeming ridiculous. I kept Dante’s insistence that it was a perfect sphere, but I didn’t use his utterly unconvincing argument as to why it seemed not to be, I just couldnae do it, that’s the main place my version departs from Dante’s. Because I couldnae bring myself to put forward his arguments. 

However everything else is there. I have no desire to in any way modernise his vision of the entire universe. I did realise though that to a great extent Dante’s inferno contains only those suffering in it who are still devoted to the crimes they have committed, they have never abjured them or given them up. The reason why it’s not an unbearable piece of writing is that all the characters that he meets are able to give quite a good account of themselves.

G: But you don’t agree that your own fictions use an underworld or a purgatory in order to present a vision of the world or the universe? 

AG: Yes, well, I agree. Especially 1982 Janine.I don’t, however, believe in the immortality of the soul. So I can’t be presented in a profound agreement with Dante on certain important matters, but my disagreement with him over the eternity of the soul doesn’t spoil my understanding of his comedy. 

G: But have you ever believed in the devil, Alasdair?

AG: Now, I had a tendency to believe in God once. I didn’t ever believe much in the devil at all. My mother went to church, and I went to Sunday school until I found it boring. My father called himself an agnostic, rather than an atheist. He said that as an atheist you had to say that you didn’t believe in God, but in order to say that you had to know what God was. And since people who believed in him didn’t believe it was possible to say exactly what God was, he didn’t think he could say he didn’t believe in him, so he preferred the term agnostic.

When I was twelve or thirteen I remember reading Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and finding the hellfire sermon in that quite disturbing, as I had never heard a hellfire sermon before. Since I didn’t have a really Calvinist or Catholic education, I was never bothered by the devil. There was a point at which a man, Gordon Macpherson, who had been a minister, asked me to do a series of illustrations mocking the pretensions of the church. But I couldn’t think how to, as I wasn’t sufficiently annoyed by the church, having never been subjected to it. And then, a friend suggested I should illustrate TS Eliot’s poem the ‘Hippopotamus’ which is a slightly sardonic, almost satirical poem about the Christian church. 

The broad-backed hippopotamus

Rests on his belly in the mud;

Although he seems so firm to us

He is merely flesh and blood.

Flesh and blood is weak and frail,        

Susceptible to nervous shock;

While the True Church can never fail

For it is based upon a rock.

The hippo’s feeble steps may err

In compassing material ends,        

While the True Church need never stir

To gather in its dividends.

I illustrated that poem and I liked them very much, the seven illustrations. And I decided I would like to make prints of them, and I wrote to Faber & Faber for the copyright and I was told that TS Eliot had explained that he did not ever want this poem illustrated, and so the copyright was not available. I think because he wrote it before he was completely converted to Anglicanism. A few years passed before I was able to see a way through, which was to translate it into Lallans, which I did.

 The muckle hippopotamus

spelders in glaur apo’ his kite.

A solid fact he seems tae some.

They arena right.

The hippo’s coorse digestive tract

erodes through frequent emptying.

The Kirk’s the only solid fact

that winna ding.

In gaitherin o’ warldly gear

the hippo often gangs agley.

The Kirk can hunker on her rear

and draw her pay.

That was how I came to illustrate a poem to some extent mocking the pretensions of the church, but that’s all I’ve had to do with them.

G: So you are interested in redemption but not an immortal redemption?

AG: Well, it’s here. Redemption is here. A parable for life.  Dante is very funny in some ways, he has a sense of humour. Like one of the jokes you have in the circle of the hypocrites,  in which the sinners are confined to ditches in various states of pain, separated by circular dykes linked by bridges. The ditch surrounding them is a lake of boiling tar in which corrupt town councillors are flung in., and the demons of the medieval kind, which have tails and horns and bat wings go around with pronged forks, keeping the councillors under the boiling tar. And Dante finds that the bridge which will take them over to the next dyke has fallen. They are told that it fell when Christ came down to bring his ancestors out of hell 1300 years earlier, but a party of demons will escort Virgil and Dante around to the next bridge. On the way along there is an interruption because  the corrupt councillors boiling in the tar keep getting close to the shore to keep their faces as far above the tar as they dare, then dodging down when the demons get close. But one of them isn’t fast enough, and he’s caught by the hair and yanked up. Virgil and Dante want to have a few words with the bloke who’s been hoisted out of the boiling tar, before the demons start tearing his skin off and doing nasty things to him ashore.

 And Dante says ‘are there any Italians in there?’ and the poor soul says ‘oh yes, lots. If you want to meet any, there is a whistle that we give to say the coast is clear, so if you hide behind me, I’ll whistle and quite a few will come ashore.’ So they get the decoy to sit on the edge of the ditch and whistle, and they hide behind him. But instead of whistling he takes a deep breath and jumps back into the tar. The demon grasps at him, but he manages to leap clear into the tar, and another demon leaps over and crashes into the tar, and the other demons occupy themselves in rescuing their fellow demons and so Dante and Virgil carry on without their escort. And they reach the place where hypocrites are punished, and they all seem to be wearing peacock coloured robes of amazingly beautiful and varied colours, but they are actually made of crushing lead, and so the hypocrites can only move on slowly, weeping all the time. And Virgil gets into a conversation with one of them and says ‘how can we get out of here? Where’s the next bridge over?’ and the hypocrite says ‘well there’s no bridges over, they’ve all fallen. They fell when Jesus Christ came down. But there’s a place where the rocks are piled up and you can climb out there.’ 

And Virgil says ‘But that Captain Stinktail’ referring to the Devil ‘told me there was a bridge further on’, and the hypocrite who was a religious man from Bologna says ‘yes, in Bologna we heard that devils are guilty of every kind of vice and seems that telling lies may be one of them!’

G: How do you feel about the violence of those images? I find it quite shocking. Do you think they are more shocking to us now than they were in medieval times? 

AG:  It is not so bad. The fact that Dante has known and seen people burned to death for heresy changes it, and so it is more shocking to us nowadays, but of course it was always shocking. But one of the great things, for instance, in one of the regions he comes to early on, you’ve got those who have sinned against god, not by being heretics, but by blaspheming. Blasphemers believe in God, heretics do not. Heretics don’t believe in the eternity of the soul. So there are blasphemers who are violent against God, and blasphemers who are violent against Art, the usurers, who don’t make a living by making things, but by exploiting the use of money to get money.

G: The bourgeoisie. 

AG: Yes. And that was then regarded by the church as being a sin. Well they are all on a huge plain on which flakes of fire descend like snow and everyone there is continually batting them off.Dante notices one man who seems to be putting up with the flakes of fire, and looks contemptuous of his torture. He is one of those in Greek mythology who made war on Thebes, and in mounting the wall of Thebes he announces that not even Zeus could stop him, whereupon Zeus struck him down with a thunderbolt. This bloke is lying there saying: ‘Zeus thinks he can bring me round to worship him or admit his supremacy by keeping me here under a rain of fire, but he won’t manage it, even if everyone else in the universe submits to him, one person’s will still hold out.’ And Virgil is slightly annoyed with this and tries to explain that the God you are blaming isn’t the true God, Zeus is not Jehovah.
 And the man basically says, ‘What difference does it make, they’re all the same.’ Which is, of course, true, as far as I’m concerned. 

G: And did your own brush with mortality during the process change how you worked on the text?

AG: No. When I stopped suffering my ideas were the same as before the accident.

G: Do you think the writer or artist has a different relation to death? What of your work would you like to live on?

AG: Everyone who makes something that survives them has overcome death to that extent: especially if it is another human being. It may also be a well-built wall or other work of art.

With this, soup and sandwiches arrive and the interview is over. It is touching to see Alasdair switch so swiftly from discussing heaven, earth and hell, to thanking his carer as she cheerfully tends to him. Gutter thanks Alasdair Gray for his time and thoughts on humanity, refuses the last copy in Scotland of the new poetry pamphlet, and steps back out into the wind and rain of Hillhead.