Lanark

by Alasdair Gray

  “I am not religious,” said Lanark, “but I don’t like you mixing religion with excrement. Last night I saw part of the person you are referring to and it was not at all nasty.”

  “You saw part of God?” cried the author. “How did that happen?”

  Lanark explained. The author was greatly excited. He said, “Say those words again.”

  “Is … is … is …, then a pause, then Is … if … is. …”

  “If?” shouted the author sitting upright. “He actually said if? He wasn’t simply snarling ‘Is, is, is, is, is,’ all the time?”

  Lanark said, “I don’t like you saying ‘he’ like that. What I saw may not have been masculine. It may not have been human. But it certainly wasn’t snarling. What’s wrong with you?”

  The author had covered his mouth with his hands, apparently to stifle laughter, but his eyes were wet. He gulped and said, “One if to five ises! That’s an incredible amount of freedom. But can I believe you? I’ve created you honest, but can I trust your senses? At a great altitude is and if must sound very much alike.”

  “You seem to take words very seriously,” said Lanark with a touch of contempt.

  “Yes. You don’t like me, but that can’t be helped. I’m primarily a literary man,” said the author with a faintly nasal accent, and started chuckling to himself.

  The tall blond girl came round the edge of the painting wiping her brush on her apron. She said defiantly, “I’ve finished the tree. Can I leave now?”

  The author leaned back on his pillows and said sweetly, “Of course, Marion. Leave when you like.”

  “I need money. I’m hungry.”

  “Why don’t you go to the kitchen? I believe there’s some cold chicken in the fridge, and I’m sure Pat won’t mind you making yourself a snack.”

  “I don’t want a snack, I want a meal with a friend in a restaurant. And I want to go to a film afterward, or to a pub, or to a hairdresser if I feel like it. I’m sorry, but I want money.”

  “Of course you do, and you’ve earned it. How much do I owe?”

  “Five hours today at fifty pence an hour is two pounds fifty. With yesterday and the day before and the day before is ten pounds, isn’t it?”

  “I’ve a poor head for arithmetic but you’re probably right,” said the author, taking coins from under a pillow and giving them to her. “This is all I have just now, nearly two pounds. Come back tomorrow and I’ll see if I can manage a little extra.” The girl scowled at the coins in her hand and then at the author. He was puffing medicinal spray into his mouth from a tiny hand-pump. She went abruptly behind the painting again and they heard the door slam.

  “A strange girl,” murmured the author, sighing. “I do my best to help her but it isn’t easy.”

  Lanark had been sitting with his head propped on his hands. He said, “You say you are creating me.”

  “I am.”

  “Then how can I have experiences you don’t know about?

  You were surprised when I told you what I saw from the aircraft.”

  “The answer to that is unusually interesting; please attend closely. When Lanark is finished (I am calling the work after you) it will be roughly two hundred thousand words and forty chapters long, and divided into books three, one, two and four.”

  “Why not one, two, three and four?”

  “I want Lanark to be read in one order but eventually thought of in another. It’s an old device. Homer, Vergil, Milton and Scott Fitzgerald used it.2 There will also be a prologue before book one, an interlude in the centre, and an epilogue two or three chapters before the end.”

  “I thought epilogues came after the end.”

  “Usually, but mine is too important to go there. Though not essential to the plot it provides some comic distraction at a moment when the narrative sorely needs it. And it lets me utter some fine sentiments which I could hardly trust to a mere character. And it contains critical notes which will save research scholars years of toil. In fact my epilogue is so essential that I am working on it with nearly a quarter of the book still unwritten. I am working on it here, just now, in this conversation. But you have had to reach this room by passing through several chapters I haven’t clearly imagined yet, so you know details of the story which I don’t. Of course I know the broad general outline. That was planned years ago and mustn’t be changed. You have come here from my city of destruction, which is rather like Glasgow, to plead before some sort of world parliament in an ideal city based on Edinburgh, or London, or perhaps Paris if I can wangle a grant from the Scottish Arts Council3 to go there. Tell me, when you were landing this morning, did you see the Eiffel Tower? Or Big Ben? Or a rock with a castle on it?”

  “No. Provan is very like—”

  “Stop! Don’t tell me. My fictions often anticipate the experiences they’re based upon, but no author should rely on that sort of thing.”

  Lanark was so agitated that he stood and walked to the window to sort out his thoughts. The author struck him as a slippery person but too vain and garrulous to be impressive. He went back to the bed and said, “How will my story end?”

  “Catastrophically. The Thaw narrative shows a man dying because he is bad at loving. It is enclosed by your narrative which shows civilization collapsing for the same reason.”

  “Listen,” said Lanark. “I never tried to be a delegate. I never wanted anything but some sunlight, some love, some very ordinary happiness. And every moment I have been thwarted by organizations and things pushing in a different direction, and now I’m nearly an old man and my reasons for living have shrunk to standing up in public and saying a good word for the only people I know. And you tell me that word will be useless! That you have planned it to be useless.”

  “Yes,” said the author, nodding eagerly. “Yes, that’s right.” Lanark gaped down at the foolishly nodding face and suddenly felt it belonged to a horrible ventriloquist’s doll. He raised a clenched fist but could not bring himself to strike. He swung round and punched a painting on an easel and both clattered to the floor. He pushed down the other painting beside the door, went to a tall bookcase in a corner and heaved it over. Books cascaded from the upper shelves and it hit the floor with a crash which shook the room. There were long low shelves around the walls holding books, folders, bottles and tubes of paint. With sweeps of his arm he shoved these to the floor, then turned, breathing deeply, and stared at the bed. The author sat there looking distressed, but the paintings and easels were back in their old places, and glancing around Lanark saw the bookcases had returned quietly to the corner and books, folders, bottles and paint were on the shelves again.

  “A conjuror!” said Lanark with loathing. “A damned conjuror!”

  “Yes,” said the conjuror humbly, “I’m sorry. Please sit down and let me explain why the story has to go like this. You can eat while I talk (I’m sure you’re hungry) and afterward you can tell me how you think I could be better. Please sit down.” The bedside chair was small but comfortably upholstered. A table had appeared beside it with covered dishes on a tray. Lanark felt more exhausted than hungry, but after sitting for a while he removed a cover out of curiosity. There was a bowl beneath of dark red oxtail soup, so taking a spoon he began to eat.

  “I will start,” said the conjuror, “by explaining the physics of the world you live in. Everything you have experienced and are experiencing, from your first glimpse of the Elite café to the metal of that spoon in your fingers, the taste of the soup in your mouth, is made of one thing.”

  “Atoms,” said Lanark.

  “No. Print. Some worlds are made of atoms but yours is made of tiny marks4 marching in neat lines, like armies of insects, across pages and pages and pages of white paper. I say these lines are marching, but that is a metaphor. They are perfectly still. They are lifeless. How can they reproduce the movement and noises of the battle of Borodino, the white whale ramming the ship, the fallen angels on the flaming lake?”

  “By being read,” said Lanark impa
tiently.

  “Exactly. Your survival as a character and mine as an author depend on us seducing a living soul into our printed world and trapping it here long enough for us to steal the imaginative energy which gives us life. To cast a spell over this stranger I am doing abominable things. I am prostituting my most sacred memories into the commonest possible words and sentences. When I need more striking sentences or ideas I steal them from other writers, usually twisting them to blend with my own. Worst of all I am using the great world given at birth—the world of atoms—as a ragbag of shapes and colours to make this second-hand entertainment look more amusing.”

  “You seem to be complaining,” said Lanark. “I don’t know why. Nobody is forcing you to work with print, and all work involves some degradation. I want to know why your readers in their world should be entertained by the sight of me failing to do any good in mine.” “Because failures are popular. Frankly, Lanark, you are too stolid and commonplace to be entertaining as a successful man. But don’t be offended; most heroes end up like you. Consider the Greek book about Troy. To repair a marriage broken by adultery, a civilization spends ten years smashing another one. The heroes on both sides know the quarrel is futile, but they Continue it because they think willingness to die in a fight is proof of human greatness. There is no suggestion that the war does anything but damage the people who survive it.

  “Then there is the Roman book about Aeneas. He leads a group of refugees in search of a peaceful home and spreads agony and warfare along both coasts of the Mediterranean. He also visits Hell but gets out again. The writer of this story is tender toward peaceful homes, he wants Roman success in warfare and government to make the world a peaceful home for everyone, but his last words describe Aeneas, in the heat of battle, killing a helpless enemy for revenge.

  “There is the Jewish book about Moses. It’s very like the Roman one about Aeneas, so I’ll go on to the Jewish book about Jesus. He is a poor man without home or wife. He says he is God’s son and calls all men his brothers. He teaches that love is the one great good, and is spoiled by fighting for things. He is crucified, goes to Hell, then to Heaven which (like Aeneas’s peaceful world) is outside the scope of the book. Jesus taught that love is the greatest good, and that love is damaged by fighting for things; but if (as the song says) “he died to make us good” he too was a failure. The nations who worshipped him became the greediest conquerors in the world.

  “Only the Italian book shows a living man in Heaven. He gets there by following Aeneas and Jesus through Hell, but first loses the woman and the home he loves and sees the ruin of all his political hopes.

  “There is the French book about the giant babies. Pleasing themselves is their only law so they drink and excrete in a jolly male family which laughs at everything adults call civilization. Women exist for them, but only as rubbers and ticklers.

  “There is the Spanish book about the Knight of the Dolorous Countenance. A poor old bachelor is driven mad by reading the sort of books you want to be in, with heroes who triumph here and now. He leaves home and fights peasants and innkeepers for the beauty which is never here and now, and is mocked and wounded. On his deathbed he grows sane and warns his friends against intoxicating literature.

  “There is the English book about Adam and Eve. This describes a heroic empire-building Satan, an amoral, ironical, boundlessly creative God, a lot of warfare (but no killing) and all centered on a married couple and the state of their house and garden. They disobey the landlord and are evicted, but he promises them accommodation in his own house if they live and die penitently. Once again success is left outside the scope of the book. We are last shown them setting out into a world to raise children they know will murder each other.

  “There is the German book about Faust, an old doctor who grows young by witchcraft. He loves, then neglects, a girl who goes mad and kills his baby

  son. He becomes banker to the emperor, abducts Helen of Troy and has another, symbolic son who explodes. He steals land from peasants to create an empire of his own and finances it by piracy. He abandons everything he tires of, grabs everything he wants and dies believing himself a public benefactor. He is received into a Heaven like the Italian one because ‘man must strive and striving he must err’ and because ‘he who continually strives can be saved.’ Yah! The only person in the book who strives is the poor devil, who does all the work and is tricked out of his wages by the angelic choir showing him their bums.5 The writer of this book was depraved by too much luck. He shows the sort of successful man who captains the modern world, but doesn’t show how vilely incompetent these people are. You don’t need that sort of success.

  “It is a relief to turn to the honest American book about the whale. A captain wants to kill it because the last time he tried to do that it bit off his leg while escaping. He embarks with a cosmopolitan crew who don’t like home life and prefer this way of earning money. They are brave, skilful and obedient, they chase the whale round the world and get themselves all drowned together: all but the storyteller. He describes the world flowing on as if they had never existed. There are no women or children in this book, apart from a little black boy whom they accidentally drive mad.

  “Then there is the Russian book about war and peace. That has fighting in it, but fighting which fills us with astonishment that men can so recklessly, so resolutely, pester themselves to death. The writer, you see, has fought in real battles and believed some things Jesus taught. This book also contains”—the conjuror’s face took on an amazed expression—“several believable happy marriages with children who are well cared for. But I have said enough to show that, while men and women would die out if they didn’t usually love each other and keep their homes, most of the world’s great stories6 show them failing spectacularly to do either.”

  “Which proves,” said Lanark, who was eating a salad, “that the world’s great stories are mostly a pack of lies.” The conjuror sighed and rubbed the side of his face. He said, “Shall I tell you the ending you want? Imagine that when you leave this room and return to the grand salon, you find that the sun has set and outside the great windows a firework display is in progress above the Tuileries garden.”

  “It’s a sports stadium,” said Lanark.

  “Don’t interrupt. A party is in progress, and a lot of informal lobbying is going on among the delegates.”

  “What is lobbying?”

  “Please don’t interrupt. You move about discussing the woes of Unthank with whoever will listen. Your untutored eloquence has an effect beyond your expectations, first on women, then on men. Many delegates see that their own lands are threatened by the multinational companies and realize that if something isn’t quickly done the council won’t be able to help them either. So tomorrow when you stand up in the great assembly hall to speak for your land or city (I haven’t worked out which yet), you are speaking for a majority of lands and cities everywhere. The great corporations, you say, are wasting the earth. They have turned the wealth of nations into weapons and poison, while ignoring mankind’s most essential needs. The time has come etcetera etcetera. You sit down amid a silence more significant than the wildest applause and the lord president director himself arises to answer you. He expresses the most full-hearted agreement. He explains that the heads of the council have already prepared plans to curb and harness the power of the creature but dared not announce them before they were sure they had the support of a majority. He announces them now. All work which merely transfers wealth will be abolished, all work which damages or kills people will be stopped. All profits will belong to the state, no state will be bigger than a Swiss canton, no politician will draw a larger wage than an agricultural labourer. In fact, all wages will be lowered or raised to the national average, and later to the international average, thus letting people transfer to the jobs they do best without artificial feelings of prestige or humiliation. Stockbrokers, bankers, accountants, property developers, advertisers, company lawyers and detectives will become
schoolteachers if they can find no other useful work, and no teacher will have more than six pupils per class. The navy and air forces will be set to providing children everywhere with free meals. The armies will dig irrigation ditches and plant trees. All human excrement will be returned to the land.

  I don’t know how Monboddo would propose to start this new system, but I could drown the practical details in storms of cheering. At any rate, bliss it is in this dawn to be alive, and massive sums of wealth and technical aid are voted to restore Unthank to healthy working order. You board your aircraft to return home, for you now think of Unthank as home. The sun also rises. It precedes you across the sky; you appear with it at noon above the city centre. You descend and are reunited with Rima, who has tired of Sludden. Happy ending. Well?”

  Lanark had laid down his knife and fork. He said in a low voice, “If you give me an ending like that I will think you a very great man.”

  “If I give you an ending like that I will be like ten thousand other cheap illusionists! I would be as bad as the late H. G. Wells! I would be worse than Goethe.7 Nobody who knows a thing about life or politics will believe me for a minute.”

  Lanark said nothing. The conjuror scratched his hair furiously with both hands and said querulously, “I understand your resentment. When I was sixteen or seventeen I wanted an ending like that. You see, I found Tillyard’s study of the epic in Dennistoun public library, and he said an epic was only written when a new society was giving men a greater chance of liberty. I decided that what the Aeneid had been to the Roman Empire my epic would be to the Scottish Cooperative Wholesale Republic, one of the many hundreds of small peaceful socialist republics which would emerge (I thought) when all the big empires and corporations crumbled. That was about 1950. Well, I soon abandoned the idea. A conjuror’s best trick is to show his audience a moving model of the world as it is with themselves inside it, and the world is not moving toward greater liberty, equality and fraternity. So I faced the fact that my world model would be a hopeless one. I also knew it would be an industrial-west-of-Scotland-petitbourgeois one, but I didn’t think that a disadvantage. If the maker’s mind is prepared, the immediate materials are always suitable.