Old Men in Love

by Alasdair Gray

  In 1981 senior academics had just started lecturing on popular culture, so by ostentatiously blending fairy tale, science fiction and horror film elements with liftings from twentieth century authors most fashionable with academics, Gray boiled them into that 560 page postmodern stew, Lanark. The epilogue with my edited footnotes persuaded critics that the author was as smart as themselves. Favourably reviewed by the London press, Lanark was short-listed for the Booker prize, and two years after publication was on the curriculum of Scottish literature courses. Since then most studies of contemporary Scots literature suggest Lanark began a new Scottish Renaissance, without exactly dating the old one.

  Between Lanark and Old Men in Love Gray has published eighteen books, none more than normal length. They consist of:

  Two realistic novels involving sadomasochistic fantasies,

  Four books of short stories (one shared with his friends Agnes Owens, James Kelman),

  Two satirical novellas about young Scotsmen in the London media world,

  Two science-fiction fantasies, one set in nineteenth-century Glasgow, one in a war-games future,

  Three pamphlets urging Scots home rule, the last written with Professor Adam Tomkins,

  Two histories of literature,

  Two collections of verse,

  One autobiographical pamphlet published by the Saltire Society,

  One play script.

  The novels and stories above are mostly prose versions of forgotten plays written between 1967 and 1977 for early television, radio and small stage companies. He admits this in epilogues usually headed Critic Fuel which, like the one in Lanark, defuse criticism by anticipating it. Since Lanark he has frequently given interviews suggesting his latest work of fiction will be the last since he has “no ideas for more”. These efforts to hold public attention have succeeded in Scotland, though most critics at home and abroad agree that his most pornographic novel, Something Leather, should be forgotten. Even so he has received a more than fair share of critical attention in two Festschrifts.

  The Arts of Alasdair Gray (Edinburgh University Press, 1992), and Alasdair Gray: Critical Appreciations (British Library, 2002). The second is not a Scottish production, but like the first nearly every critic in it is Scottish and about half are friends of Gray, some of them close friends. Both books have a multitude of Gray’s illustrations, which proves Gray had access to the proofs, so must have overseen the texts. A cool, serious appraisal of Gray’s work cannot be found in them or, I believe, anywhere in Scotland, but they show why he has a following among bibliophiles – those who enjoy books for visual and typographical reasons quite separate from their literary value. Before appearing as a novelist at the age of forty-five Gray had not only failed as a dramatist, but as a commercial artist, portrait painter and mural painter. By bringing visual showmanship to book production he has contrived, with illustrations and jingling rhymes, to make the jackets, blurbs, boards, typography, layouts and even errata slips in his publications more entertaining than the main texts. Not since William Morris’s News from Nowhere and Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories has an author so controlled the appearance of his books, often varying them from one edition to the next, allowing collectors to always find something new. The two festschrifts are no doubt useful guides to these parasites on the tree of literature.

  But outside academia and bibliomania Gray’s reputation is fading. Younger folk find more up-to-date working-class realism in Irvine Welsh, better science-fiction fantasy in Iain Banks. The minority interested in brazen Postmodern obscurantism find Gray’s Lanark far surpassed by James Kelman’s Translated Accounts (published 2001). Of all his works only Lanark has never been out of print, but here – and finally, claims Gray – we have over a hundred thousand words of his very last novel.

  Henry James said H.G. Wells made novels by tipping his mind up like a cart and pouring out the contents. At first Old Men in Love seems to have been made in the same haphazard way, but some research in the National Library of Scotland shows it is stuffed with extracts from Gray’s earlier writings. The two big historical narratives are from television plays commissioned by Granada in the 1970s. The Greek one was broadcast in a series called For Conscience’s Sake, with Christopher Logue in the part of Socrates. It extensively plagiarised Plato’s Symposium and passages in Plutarch. For a Queen Victoria’s Scandals series Gray then plagiarised Henry James Prince’s published diaries and Hepworth Dixon’s Spiritual Wives. He refused to let his name be attached to the broadcast because a producer or director had changed the script in ways he disliked, after which British television had no use for Alasdair Gray. The archive has three typed dialogues for a TV play about Filippo Lippi that was never commissioned, so Old Men in Love has only three Florentine chapters. These rags of forgotten historical plays fill nineteen chapters.

  The rest are stuffed with a great deal of half-baked popular science tipped in from Gray’s 2000 anthology The Book of Prefaces, also political diatribes from pamphlets published before three general elections that were victories for New Labour. These diatribes were and are protests against the dismantling of peaceful British industries and the welfare state, a process that has made Gray and many other professional people richer. The description of an anti-war march was written for The Herald in February 2003, then added inappropriately to The Ends of Our Tethers, a collection of tales printed in 2004. (It may be no coincidence that Will Self describes a similar protest march in The Book of Dave, published 2006.) Like most Scotsmen Gray thinks himself an authority on Burns, so we find an essay about Burns mostly published in volume 30 of the 1998 Studies in Scottish Literature, edited by Professor Ross Roy. The most shameless padding is in chapter 17 which reprints verbatim a section from chapter 8. The marginal note signposting this obviously invites readers to think it a charmingly eccentric Shandyan device, but Laurence Sterne’s typographical stunts in Tristam Shandy are never more than a page long. This repetition is beyond a joke.

  Three literary ploys try to unify the whole rag-bag. The Introduction uses the text-as-found-manuscript invented by Scott for his Tales of My Landlord novels and afterwards plagiarised by Hogg, Pushkin, Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky and Gray in two earlier novels. From Scott also comes the printing of portentous quotations as epigraphs, some genuine and some pseudonymous, a device run to death by Pushkin, Poe, George Eliot and Rudyard Kipling. All but the introduction are cynically sandwiched between references to the 2001 Trade Center atrocity and May 2007 Scottish election in order to give the whole thing spurious contemporary relevance. When all the above is discounted we are left with the dreary tale of a failed writer and dirty old man, who comes to a well-deserved end through an affair with a drug-dealing procuress. This story is neither tragic nor funny.

  The best criticism of Gray is to quote his own and believe it. In an 1990s epilogue to Something Leather he says all his stories were about men who found life a task they never doubted until an unexpected collision opened their eyes and changed their habits. The collision was usually with a woman, and the transformation often ended in death. He adds that knowing how his talent works shows it is defunct because imagination will not employ whom it cannot surprise. After that Gray published nine more fictions with this hackneyed plot, Old Men in Love being the last. The four old men are all versions of Gray in fancy dress, with the Socratic collision homosexual, and though this novel may indeed be his last I cannot simply dismiss it (as Allan Massie dismissed Gray’s 2004 The Ends of Our Tethers) by calling it a collection of scraps from a tired writer’s bottom drawer. Neither the blurb which Gray lured Will Self into writing nor the egoism of the text will repel empty-headed fans of these egregious authors. Many may fall under the influence of its sinister propaganda for Scottish Nationalism and Socialism.

  Far too many have forgotten or never known that the German acronym for National Socialism is Nazi. Yeats’ The Countess Kathleen, first performed in Dublin 1902, was a bad poetic play that annoyed orthodox Catholics but scandalously excited Irish
Nationalists. After the 1916 Easter Rising Yeats wondered if his play had stimulated rebellion among “certain men the English shot”. From their comfortable studies plausible authors often give murderous lunatics high-minded excuses for atrocities. Old Men in Love cunningly avoids Hugh MacDiarmid’s rabid Anglophobia; but as Billy Connolly, the New Labour Party and all respectable defenders of the 1707 Union point out, racist hatred of the English is what the Scottish lust for an impossible independence feeds upon. This book should therefore not be read, or if read, swiftly forgotten.

  Goodbye, Mr Gray.

  Sidney Workman

  17 Linoleum Terrace

  Kirkcaldy, June 2007

  Notes

  1 Mastermind is Tunnock’s invariable nickname for Francis Lambert, who in the 1970s achieved some fame through BBC television by doing well on a general knowledge quiz show called Mastermind.

  2 This sentence introduces Brunelleschi in Vasari’s The Lives of the Great Artists translated by Julia and Peter Bondanella in the Oxford World’s Classics edition.

  3 The farmer may be exaggerating the height of Athena’s statue by Phidias. A popular website says it was only 12 metres or 38 feet high.

  4 Dionysus’ quarry was a cavernous space called The Ear of Dionysus, because there was a point where the owner, without being seen, could hear every word spoken by slaves working there.

  5 Chapman: A Scottish literary magazine founded in 1970 by Walter Perrie but edited since 1976 by Joy Hendry.

  6 No name, no pack drill is British Army slang suggesting namelessness ensures freedom. Pack drill is punishment any senior officer can impose on a soldier of lower rank, but only if he knows the soldier’s name, rank and number.

  7 Blackhill: a Glasgow housing scheme built in the mid 1930s, known as a Slum Clearance Scheme because folk from the poorest areas of central Glasgow were put into it. The school where Tunnock had worked was there. The scheme was notorious for its high level of crime so was mostly demolished in the 1970s and given another name.

  8 This quotation is from Antigone by Sophocles.

  9 Davidson’s Runnable Stag is in many anthologies. T.S. Eliot was influenced by his Thirty Bob a Week. Hugh MacDiarmid, 18 when Davidson’s body was left by the tide on a south coast beach, said it struck him like, a bullet hole in the lands-cape, God seen through the wrong end of a telescope. In The Sign of Four Holmes gives Watson The Martyrdom of Man, saying “let me recommend this book – one of the most remarkable ever penned.”

  10 Polis is Glasgow phonetic dialect for police.

  11 Spud is demotic for potato: a popular article of British working-class diet, usually served boiled with meat or fried as chips. Being commonplace yet comfortably nourishing, it is sometimes used as a mild term of endearment.

  12 Heraghty’s is a public house on Kilmarnock Road about a mile south of the Clyde.

  13 Brother Guido, christened Guido di Pietri, received the monastic name Giovanni da Fiesole, but is better known as Fra Angelico, 1387-1455.

  14 Messy Tom is an English translation of Masaccio, Italian nickname of the mural painter Tommasso Guidi, 1401-28?.

  15 Granchio, better known as Nicolaus Krebs of Cusa, was the best Renaissance philosopher. He rejected Aristotle’s doctrine that mathematics deal with large and small things by saying everything was infinitely divisible in the eyes of God, so all size is relevative. Also that only God was eternal and infinite with His centre everywhere and limits nowhere – so the world and everything else was contained by God, and never at rest.

  16 Vasari says that when a slave in North Africa Filippo interested his owner by sketching him in charcoal, the Muhammadan never having seen a portrait before. Eventually Filippo was ransomed and returned to Florence by way of Naples.

  17 This letter was stapled to a page of John Tunnock’s diary between the last entry and the next. The writer is a left-wing historian and literary critic who taught at the Universities of Sussex and Nairobi before settling in Edinburgh, and author of The People’s War: Britain 1941-1945 and Revolutionary Empires: English Speaking Empires 1400–1780s.

  18 A stickit Minister is Scots for a student clergyman who fails to qualify.

  19 Calder is here over-modest. He is a competent poet with three published books of verse, the first of them translations of Catullus into Lowland Scots.

  20 Carlyle’s Life of Frederick the Great tells how King Fred’s Prussia was about to be conquered by a trio of nations when the Russian Czarina died, at which Fred’s other enemies made peace with him. Goebbels was reading this in 1945 when he heard of President Roosevelt’s death. He rushed to Hitler with the good news that history was repeating itself, and though Russian troops were in the suburbs of Berlin, Britain and the U.S.A. would now join Germany to fight the U.S.S.R. (The top Nazis believed the U.S.A. was mainly fighting them because Roosevelt was a Jew.)

  21 This long dash indicates the only friend of John Tunnock who has refused permission to let their name be printed.

  22 This demonstration was on February 15th 2003.

  23 Protestants instead of protesters may be a hint that anti-war protesters are heirs to the traditions of the 15th century Reformation.

  24 This story is Drinking Coffee Elsewhere from Z Z Packer’s collection of that name published by Canongate, Edinburgh, 2004.

  25 This quotation is from the Bible for Today edited by John Stirling and published by Oxford University Press in 1941.

  26 Many Glasgow families called the evening meal tea or high-tea, and called the mid-day luncheon, dinner. Tea was usually eaten when the wage earner came home around 6 o’clock, and contained a large main course followed by a variety of biscuits and cakes and several cups of tea.

  27 From Chambers Biographical Dictionary: HARRIS, Frank (1856-1931), British writer and journalist, born, according to his autobiography, in Galway, but according to his own later statement, in Tenby, ran away to New York at the age of fifteen, became boot-black, labourer building Brooklyn Bridge, and worker in a Chicago hotel, but in 1874 embarked upon the study of law at the University of Kansas. About 1876 he returned to England and entered the newspaper world. Perhaps the most colourful figure in contemporary journalistic circles, an incorrigible liar, a vociferous boaster, an unscrupulous adventurer and philanderer, with the aspect and outlook of a typical melodrama ‘Sir Jasper’, and an obsession with sex which got his autobiography, My Life and Loves (1923-27) banned for pornography, he had a great impact on Fleet Street as editor of the Fortnightly Review, Saturday Review, Vanity Fair and of the Evening News, which became under his aegis a pioneer in the new cult of provocative headlines and suggestive sensationalism.

  28 Stoor is demotic Scots for dust or muck, so Stoory means dirty.

  29 See note 26.

  30 Kelvin Aqueduct, Maryhill: architect Robert Whitworth, built at a cost of £8509 in 1787-90, 400 feet long and 70 high, then the largest canal aqueduct in Britain. Four rusticated arches of 50 feet carry spandrel walls horizontally arched from the massive cut-water buttresses needed to contain the waters of the Forth and Clyde Canal.

  31 Lumber: Scottish demotic verb, meaning to intimately caress late at night in the back yards of homes to which a girl’s boyfriend would be denied entry by her parents, therefore also a noun for a girl thus caressed.

  32 Tawse of extra hard, thick leather manufactured in Lochgelly, Fife.

  33 Kilquhanity a boarding school, in a country house near Castle Douglas, was run on pupil self-government lines by John and Morag Aitkenhead, a kindly couple. Their discipline did without punishment. Their example was A. S. Neill’s English boarding school, Summerhill.

  34 After World War 2 healthy men over 18 years were conscripted into the British Armed Forces for two years until 1958, when the British empire was nearly extinct. Those who refused conscription for political reasons were jailed. Roughly 10,000 refused on religious grounds and were not penalized.

  35 Glasgow University stands on Gilmore Hill.

  36 This statement is in Au
den’s Elegy for W. B. Yeats. Tunnock mistakenly assumes that one short quotation sums up a great poet’s whole attitude.

  37 Scott’s Heart of Midlothian led to Scots law ending concealment of pregnancy as a capital offence; Melville’s Whitejacket led to the USA navy abolishing flogging.

  38 Glasgow University Magazine mocked this edition of Catullus’ poems for omitting all explicitly sexual verses.

  39 This and the next two paragraphs are identical with three in chapter eight, the Prologue.

  40 Tunnock acquired the knowledge in these first paragraphs from Dr Chris Burton of Glasgow University’s Department of Geology.

  41 This is the only complete chapter in a chaos of scribbled papers, news cuttings, copies of extracts from other people’s work. These were raw materials of a book intended to explain Scotland’s part in the first Crusade, its lack of an archbishop in Catholic times and Calvinism; also its present place in the international financial war machine. A report on unused mineral beds (chiefly coal) were mixed with prophecies that in 2020 or earlier, bankers will combat oil famine by hastily exploiting nuclear power and mutated crops. This will make everything catastrophically worse until folk see that their only hope is in small co-operative Socialist nations. The next diary extract explains why this huge work was abandoned.

  42 All animals are sad after sexual intercourse.

  43 The funnel was on The Waverley, the last Clyde-built passenger steamer. The research tower is currently the tallest structure in Scotland (127 metres) and the only one in the world designed to revolve round a static pylon to which it is hinged, allowing visitors a splendid 360 degree view over the city. It has been static since 30 January 2005 when 10 people were trapped for 5 hours half way up in the lift.