Across its two rooms, The Alasdair Gray Archive has three windows that each frame the same view. The Forth and Clyde canal bends under a white wooden bridge in the centre. In heavy rain, its water looks like it might run over its banks and down onto Garscube Road below. To its right are two pylons planted on raised grass, their telephone wires guiding a path up towards Hamiltonhill Claypits and Ruchill park. At the top of the path you can look across the same view Duncan Thaw and Kenneth McAlpin did in Lanark, when McAlpin asked why nobody ever notices Glasgow is a magnificent city and Thaw answered, ‘Because nobody ever imagines living here’.
Thaw’s musings here are the socio-historical basis of Gray’s ‘Portrait of the Artist as a Frustrated Young Glaswegian’. He lists the inadequacies of Glasgow’s post-enlightenment imaginary which produced in art nothing more than ‘a music hall song and a few bad novels’, in industry only ‘ships and carpets and lavatory pans’ and in politics a failed communist revolution whereby ‘nobody was killed except by bad pay, bad housing, bad feeding’. Seduced by his first term at art school, friendship with the self-confident, middle-class McAlpin and their discussions of poetry, drama, music and philosophy, Thaw folds into his mind in a crisis of selfhood which is inseparable from Glasgow’s crisis of civic self-determination. His existential and artistic frustrations are one with a city haunted by the post-enlightenment, post-industrial spectres of its past, which stultify its ambition in the present and make unthinking automata of its citizens.
Thaw’s childhood friend, Coulter is Gray’s mouthpiece for the Glaswegian automata. Two chapters earlier, he writes the pair into a conversation that directly parallels Thaw’s later conversation with McAlpin. The two cross another bridge, ‘a plank bridge’, which leads them up to the top of the Cathkin Braes. It is Fair Fortnight, the final two weeks of July when the foundries stop and the smoke clears enough to see the whole city. The Clyde flows through it from the East, guided by ‘a skeletal procession of cranes marching into the West’, piercing the horizon which is ruled by ‘the highland bens…like a line of broken teeth’. Without its soot-black patina, the city appears like the gaunt body of a man broken by overwork and the shortbread hills that surround it like his scurvy smile.
It is an unsentimental depiction somewhat reminiscent of Hugh MacDiarmid’s Glasgow poems. In one from 1947 he writes, invoking Rainer Maria Rilke’s ‘watch in an empty room’:
To see and hear the clock in Glasgow’s horrible,
Like seeing a dead man’s watch, still going though he’s dead.
Every thing is dead except stupidity here,
Smelling like the dissection of bad innards
Or like the cold stench of ashes and foul water.1
Béatrice Duchateau notes the context of MacDiarmid’s writing against the 1938 Empire Exhibition which was one ‘aesthetically striking manifestation of the need to project the city’s commitment to progress and modernisation during difficult times’.2 The exhibition, held in Bellahouston Park nine months before the outbreak of WW2, was a nostalgic insistence on Glasgow’s imperial might despite the collapse of its heavy industries throughout the Great Depression. It took ten months to build and of its seven-hundred and sixteen exhibits, the Palace of Arts is the only major building that remains. The exhibition’s central tower, Scotland’s first skyscraper, was repossessed by the British Army and demolished after standing for just a year. One builder died during its construction, killed in the name of infrastructural ‘progress’ by a steel beam that fell from its rope sling.
MacDiarmid is critical of such an attempt to clean up Glasgow’s ‘mean city’ image in marketing alone, unsympathetically presenting the traumas of industrial decline (razor gangs, tenement slums, alcoholism, isolation, numbness, cultural emptiness, and so on) to undermine any new depiction of the city that fails to adequately resolve them. It is a critique of modernisation that is constant and obsessive yet ineffectual as painting over potholes. The city clock ticks incessantly forward while its citizens are pulled along like floating corpses. Gray pre-empted a similar criticism of the city’s shallow imagination, publishing Lanark at the beginning of the ‘Glasgow Miles Better’ campaign which culminated in the 1988 Garden Festival – a half-centenary, nostalgia-on-nostalgia remake of the 1938 Exhibition.
The effects of this shallow imaginary bleed into Coulter, who Gray presents on the verge of becoming Clyde driftwood. He has recently begun an engineering apprenticeship in a Royston machine shop which he describes to Thaw in three stages. The initial ‘novelty’ of being a ‘man’ lasts until the second Monday when you realise you ‘have tae keep shoving [your] face against this grindstone’ which lasts until numbness quickly kicks in:
You get up, dress, eat, go tae work, clock in etcetera etcetera automatically, and think about nothing but the pay packet on Friday and the booze-up last Saturday. Life’s easy when you’re a robot.
It is this labour-induced machination which MacDiarmid uses to diagnose the ‘pettifogging spirit’ of Glaswegians who he describes as ‘pusillanimous and frigid time servers […] incapable of any process of spiritual growth and conquest’. It is likely a testament to their divergent social natures, and time living in Glasgow, that Gray is more sympathetic in his diagnosis, albeit of a similar spirit. Unlike MacDiarmid’s blind and ‘stupid’ poetic subjects, Coulter is at least aware that his lack of ambition stems from being in work ‘that’s only bearable if [he] feel[s] as little as [he] can’. Stymied political imagination and despondency, passed down through Westminster to the city chambers, begets that of its citizens, producing the cultural and creative void that Thaw describes to McAlpin.
Until relatively recently, that void has been understood in Scottish Literature as the period between the first and second renaissances spearheaded by MacDiarmid and Gray, respectively. In his introduction to Moira Burgess’s The Glasgow Novel: A Complete Guide (1999), Douglas Gifford praises Burgess’s successful counter to Lanark’s most quoted passage. ‘The problem about Glasgow fiction – and perhaps culture generally – isn’t so much that it hasn’t existed until recently’, he emphasises, ‘but that it just hasn’t been recorded and transmitted’. It is a kind of archaeology to unearth the city’s buried histories and takes an empathetic archivist to preserve them. Work like the late Elspeth King’s at The People’s Palace and now Sorcha Dallas’s at The Alasdair Gray Archive provides that providence.
Their deeply local curation and recording of art, literature, labour movements, communities and stories otherwise lost in skips proves the Glasgow imaginary is not inherently shallow nor defined by a 50-year impasse. The difficulty of their work, and what makes it so necessary, comes back around to the city’s obsession with blind progress. I’m reminded of an anecdote about the construction of the Kingston Bridge built over North Street Cemetery: during the demolition process, coffins would regularly spring out of the soil before being bulldozed back into the ground and covered in concrete.3 It is an image befitting a city content to ignore its dead in the name of quick-fix, quick-money modernisation. This apathy builds foundations of ever-shifting rubble from which only a culture based on civic marketing campaigns, nostalgia and self-flagellating stereotypes can take root. ‘People Make Glasgow’ only insofar as they keep battering its coffins into the ground.
Gray’s Unthank is a dystopic rendering of that shifting rubble which stems, in the novel as in real life, from the council’s rash pursuit of capitalist development. Unthank’s tangled motorways and empty glass towers are woven between cobbled streets and gable-ended tenements. Like Glasgow, it is an unfinished landscape wherein the old streets have ‘a half-erased look’ and demolition sites become nothing more than ‘spaces cleared for carparks’. Lanark, Thaw’s doppelganger, describes the cars which seem to speed along the motorway, reach a barrier, turn around and come back again, as if caught on one of Glasgow’s ‘bridges to nowhere’ – structures from the council’s inner-city ring road plans which were half-finished and then abandoned in the 1980s.
Gray was closely inspired by the drastic urban changes happening around him while living in Garnethill, one of the areas most transformed by the construction of the M8. In his ledger, now displayed in The Alasdair Gray Archive, he obsessively documented these changes in drawings, diary entries and photographs. His reimagining of them in Lanark is an act of preservation which effectively slows down Glasgow’s restless flitting between destruction and reconstruction, enough to permit some time for critical reflection.
In Thaw, that reflection entangles the self and the city and then immediately unravels them when he asks, after stating Glasgow permits existence and no more:
‘But who, nowadays, is glad to just to exist?’
‘I am. At the moment,’ said McAlpin, watching the sunlight move among rooftops.
‘So am I,’ said Thaw, wondering what had happened to his argument.
The self-contradiction is typical of Gray, working here to shrink Thaw from his own head, and his grandiose philosophising on the civic imaginary, by an abrupt realisation that the city he describes is not the one he lives in. For Thaw and McAlpin, Glasgow’s lid of smoke grey sky is lifted, making pure existence akin to spiritual contentment rather than the numbness Coulter describes. Comparing his future to Coulter’s, Thaw realises he has escaped the only existence he knew for Glaswegians, considering himself ‘nearly the luckiest man living here’ because he has managed, somehow, to outrun fate.
Thaw cannot, however, outrun the sense of guilt that comes from abandoning his station. To assuage it, he theorises upon his own art as a public duty ‘to give Glasgow a more imaginative life’. Though even he realises, as Gray too relentlessly emphasised, the relative emptiness of that duty which is so overshadowed by the ordinary public service work of nurses, teachers, librarians, bus drivers and bin-men. The real reason he paints, he quickly amends, is because he feels ‘cheap and purposeless’ when he does not. His stated purpose then belies a spiritual disconnect with his city, nation and class as his art takes him beyond the Riddrie estate he grew up in.
As it plays out in Lanark, this dual experience of existential-artistic disorientation yet rootedness in place actually does ‘give Glasgow a more imaginative life’, that is perhaps more impactful than Gray would give himself credit for. As William Boyd writes in his introduction to the 2016 Canons edition: ‘to read Lanark throughout as a “loving analysis” of Glasgow is to seriously limit and confine the effects and resonances of the novel: rather like reading Ulysses solely for what it can tell you about Dublin’. The merit of a city as everchanging as Glasgow, unlike one so fossilised as Edinburgh, is the possibility to transgress multiple shifting identities. In preserving the urban changes he saw happening around him, then, Gray lay the narrative foundations to think beyond them.
What he saw was the possibility that Glasgow could pursue a new internationalism to replace its post-imperial nostalgia. Even MacDiarmid, despite his vitriol, recognised ‘in the eyes’ if not the minds of working-class Glaswegians ‘an experience which contains a criticism of modern existence’. By presenting the unexceptional lives of workers in Glasgow, MacDiarmid and Gray expand the particular to universal experiences of degradation and economic stagnation. In Lanark, the once-ordinary, now-exceptional life of Thaw epitomises that expansion, while emphasising the liberating influence that art and literature can have over it. The novel itself thereby becomes a regenerative force in the Glasgow imaginary, rooted, as it necessarily is, but not stifled by the particularities of the city.
End Notes
- Hugh MacDiarmid, ‘Glasgow’, in Hamish Whyte (ed.), Noise and Smoky Breath: An Illustrated Anthology of Glasgow Poems (1983), pp. 37–40.
- Béatrice Duchateau, ‘Urban Scotland in Hugh MacDiarmid’s Glasgow poems’, Études Écossaises 15 (2012): 39–58.
- https://www.gwsfhs.org.uk/2020/10/24/lost-graveyards-north-street-anderston/