Gray's Anatomyalasdair Gray Is Very Nearly Three Score Years and 10. On the Eve of His Birthday, the Painter and Writer Reveals an Exciting New Work: His Life Story

Summary

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SIGHING, Alasdair Gray says, "Interviews are pointless. Because, if you don't mind me saying so, everybody who interviews me asks me what amounts to the same questions. One of the commonest is, 'Do you see yourself as a writer who occasionally paints or a painter who occasionally writes?'" Sitting in his home just off Glasgow's Byres Road, he recalls how, in a recent television documentary, he doubled up to conduct a trick-photography interview with himself.

For the interviewer persona, he carefully, with a bathbrush, plastered his hair "as some balding people do, attempting to hide the bald patch". It was, he says, "not a thing that occurred to me to do till a very dear friend of mine said she disliked Anthony Burgess because she didn't like the way he did his hair."

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Gray's Anatomyalasdair Gray Is Very Nearly Three Score Years and 10. On the Eve of His Birthday, the Painter and Writer Reveals an Exciting New Work: His Life Story

But Gray is a generous interviewee, a thoughtful subject, fond of detail and historical reference, an excitable raconteur.

Nevertheless, rather than risk boring the reader with an interview, here is a presentation of a meeting with Alasdair Gray, disguised as an encyclopaedia. It seems appropriate. "Encyclopaedia" is the prized word a four-year-old Duncan Thaw uses to show off to his friends in Lanark.

The Harmsworth was Gray's childhood favourite.

ABORTION

The living room of a Glasgow tenement. A husband and wife drink red wine and talk with an interviewer. The man has bristling hair and laughs loudly. The woman makes occasional disapproving noises.

Alasdair Gray: No I don't think I'm like my father, but other people do.

Morag McAlpine: I never met the man.

But, yes, I can see it.

A: She doesn't quite approve.

M: Regimental behaviour. (She shakes her head. )

A: A tendency to over-neatness. But, well, my mother was pretty much that way too.

M: I must have told you my mother was strongly recommended even in 1949 to have an abortion. She wasn't very healthy and it did actually happen in those years.

A: And did she have it? The abortion?

M: Well, obviously not, since I'm sitting here.

A: You didn't tell us that the proposed abortion was to be performed on you. It might have been performed on ...

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