Canongate, the publisher of Alasdair Gray, announced on Sunday that the writer and artist had died in the early morning in his home city of Glasgow at the age of 85.
I first read Alasdair Gray's Lanark in 1998, while studying Scottish Literature at Glasgow University as an Erasmus student (one of those opportunities many young people will be denied once the UK gets out of the EU, and you should thank Brexit for that).
I had never heard about this writer or his works and I started reading Lanark without knowing what to expect. I didn't even know at the time that Gray, born in Glasgow in 1934, was a prolific writer and artist working not too far away from the student village where I was living at the time.
I was immediately blown away. I thought it was a superb novel. It was bizarre and weird: reading about Lanark in Unthank was like having a dark and dystopian Alice in Wonderland trip, and then there was the story of Thaw in Glasgow and that list of plagiarisms I found simply amazing.
Lanark soon became my favourite book in that year's reading list and it also tempted me to change the subject of my dissertation (that was on another contemporary Scottish author).
Besides, it generated several immediate questions in my mind: I was an avid reader, but had never heard of Alasdair Gray, how was that possible? And, why hadn't Lanark been translated in Italy, my home country?
The questions became an obsession: I distinctly remember Professor Douglas Gifford doing a class about Alasdair Gray and Lanark during which I sat in utter silence. So, while Professor Gifford exasperatedly suspected I was unable to take part in the group's textual analysis because I hadn't read the book, I simply didn't care. I found all that redundant as I had just read a great novel, I was lost in my personal literary stupor, my existential dissertation crisis and my translation dilemma.
Five years later, when Gray was doing a reading in a pub in Glasgow with James Kelman and Tom Leonard, I finally found the courage of asking the writer himself why Lanark hadn't been translated into Italian. He simply replied, "Maybe it's not good enough!" then he shrugged and started laughing loudly, in that peculiar and infectious laughter he had. I joined him, but deep down I knew it wasn't true. Lanark was simply too good.
Time passed, things changed and, between 2015 and 2017 Lanark was eventually translated into Italian and published in four volumes. Gray didn't change, though. Every time I saw him at readings he remained the same - humble, restless, and generous with his readers (he never behaved like a star, never refused to answer a question you may have had for him or to sign a book).
A prolific artist and writer, Gray often claimed in interviews that he was "unfashionable". This definition didn't obviously refer to his attire - his trademark baggy trousers, shirt with braces or matched with jumper with a casual hole here and there, messy hair and crooked glasses.
Gray's definition referred to his writing and drawing/painting style. And in this he was right, he was and remains "unfashionable" because he is untrendy and therefore timeless. That's why there are messages for us in his career (he started writing Lanark as a student in 1954, but published it at 46, proving that good things come to those who wait) and in the complex allegorical worlds of Lanark (we are probably infected by the same metaphorical diseases that have spread through Unthank, visual manifestation of something that is deeply broken inside each and every one of us on the emotional level). Deep down, there is also a lesson for fashion.
Cut and paste exercises rule the creative arts and in the last decades the fashion industry has been intent on plagiarising the past to build an uncertain future.
Lanark features a dense list of plagiarisms, pages in which the author reveals the sources behind specific parts of Lanark. It's a great list that features Gray's favourite works and it goes from Jorge Luis Borges to Walt Disney's Pinocchio, passing through John Bunyan, Robert Burns, Franz Kafka and the Reverend Charles Kingsley (just to mention a few ones...).
Maybe that's what some fashion designers should do as well, be brave enough to admit where everything they did was stolen from and come up with a collection in which they point out all their plagiarisms. In a way, it would be more honest than regurgitating the past and pretending it is something new.
As for Gray, unlikely icon of style, but amazing polymath, he will be greatly missed, but his spirit will be haunting Glasgow's West End, and his memory will live on through his novels and plays, his essays, art and murals. Who knows, maybe at some point there will even be a Netflix series taken from Lanark (Unthank's diseases would be a visual feast...) or maybe he will become the inspiration for a fashion collection. Somehow you can indeed imagine fellow Scotsman Christopher Kane getting inspired by Gray's fetishistic fantasy 1982, Janine.
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