Ugly Stuff Work

Sold the myth of artistic genius, we are told that everybody should aim for the top. We’d do better to recall Icarus: head for the heights and we are certain to fall. The post-war period, though, had a solution: when walking the tightrope make sure there’s a safety net. But do the young listen? Do they heck! Alasdair Gray ponders the consequences. Lanark, A Life in 4 Books.

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The time structure is copied from Reverend George MacDonald’s The Golden Key, so Gray tells us. Useful that… What is important is time’s irrelevance; all that episodic filler, the boring bits between a few significant events, has been eliminated. Our hero able to age impossibly quickly, so silhouetting the main theme, of rapid descent from precocious promise to early senescence. There are distant echoes of Angus Wilson’s No Laughing Matter, another book that telescopes many decades into a few scenes; allowing the writer to concentrate on the few months of meaningful activity - it takes less than a hundred days to define a character. Wilson and Gray inventing a new way to write an epic that isn’t simply a chronicle, with its dangers of tedium and banality. They do risk the clichés of classroom history, whose references to public events are both intrusive and obvious: I-spy-with-my-little-eye…Sir Anthony Eden! Dull. Better read Morgan and Marquand than suffer such low grade allegory;1 less novel than crossword puzzle. Nevertheless, they take the risk….

It is why the author intrudes - in an epilogue, inserted between chapters 40 and 41 - to tell Lanark about the book, his own working methods, and the literary and philosophical references he’s encoded into his life. With such a catalogue we don’t have to worry about any of that. Good Mr Gray, he knows what he’s about.

The novel is set over roughly three decades: the 1940s, 50s and 60s. It begins in oil-paint realism, with the portrait of a clever but strange boy and his early growth as an artist. Shy, withdrawn, obsessed with art and literature, Duncan is cut off from both relatives and peers; his parents do not understand him, his oddness disturbing his fellow pupils. And the teachers… They lack the touch. Step on the brake. And stop for a minute, as we wait for the lollipop lady to usher the kids across the road. It’s time to think about school. School should be this boy’s salvation; the one place where talent can break free of those restrictive social norms. It fails here. Duncan too much the artist, too independent and self-willed, to accept the constraints of the curriculum. Brilliant in the arts he has no interest mathematics, of which he is hopeless. This upsets his teachers; and threatens his academic future, for the university demands he kowtow to this troublesome subject. Then there’s his attitude. Duncan has too many edges, and won’t allow others to sandpaper them smooth. Too obdurate - he is replete with his own vision - he’ll not conform to the (reasonable) demands of an institution that should, in truth, be his real home. Foolish lad. Never to get the best out of this place. While such non-conformity is calamitous long term: no decent job, a low income, and little intellectual life, as he scavenges around society’s fringes for scraps of culture and intelligence. It’s not just wilfulness. Duncan is extremely precocious, which always carries high risks. One shoots across adolescence, like a rocket through space, to crash land in the desert of one’s twenties. Rapid burn-out not the only problem. Precocity can severely limit a talent that develops too early and too quickly. In learning so rapidly you resist the influence of others, whom you dismiss as inferior and useless.

He could only rest when working properly. After sketching bulbs and boxes the class was given plants, fossils and small stuffed tropical birds. Thaw let his eyes explore like an insect the spiral architecture of a tiny seashell while his pencil point marked some paper with the eye’s discoveries. The teacher tried to correct him by rational argument. She said, “Are you trying to make a pattern out of this, Duncan?  I wish you wouldn’t.  Just draw what you see.”

“I’m doing, that Miss Mackenzie.”

“Then stop drawing everything with the same black harsh line. Hold the pencil lightly; don’t grip it like a spanner. That shell is a simple, delicate, rather lovely thing. Your drawing is like the diagram of a machine.”

“But surely, Miss Mackenzie, the shell only seems delicate and simple because it’s smaller that we are. To the fish inside it was a suit of armour, a house, a moving fortress.”

“Duncan, if I were a marine biologist I might care how the shell was used. As an artist my sole interest is in the appearance. I insist that it appears beautiful and delicate and should be drawn beautifully and delicately. There’s no need to show these little cracks. They’re accidental. Ignore them.”

“But Miss Mackenzie, the cracks show the shell’s nature – only this shell could crack in this way. It’s like the wart on Cromwell’s lip. Leave it out and it’s no longer a picture of Cromwell.”

“All right, but please don’t make the wart as important as the lips. You’ve drawn these cracks as clearly as the edges of the shell itself.”

Behind the teacher’s back several classmates made gestures like spectators at a boxing match….

Duncan was an artist before he went to Glasgow Art School. Danger! Danger! He knows enough to reject its teachings, which is disastrous. Not because society is wary of non-conformists and teachers don’t appreciate smart alecks who reject their advice; no, this is not a social but an artistic issue. Without outside influence - an artistic rite of passage that breaks him - Duncan cannot grow. Trapped inside his own self-sufficiency, he is stuck forever in his precocious teenage self. Mind syphoning off feeling, the emotions emasculated by excessive control, the pores of sensitivity are closed off to contemporary influences. A certain rigidity takes hold. And with the accumulating years, a distance develops between mind and experience. Personality and art become stylised, with the ever present risk of caricature and self-parody. Cut off from others we become our own cliché. Artificial. Wooden.

To prosper there has to be some compromise with the community. Not all conformism is bad. A dry field is irrigated by little streams: that arid mentality must open the sluice gates to the river of human intercourse. To submit to another’s rules is to learn new ways of looking at life, softening that late adolescent mind, its tendency towards the overly rational and mechanical. Mature and fruitful work requires an openness to others; it is to trust and garner our feelings, whose rich soil of a sensibility is always on the verge of depletion. Let the world in! Or else be a barren land. To be changed against our will - only then can our talent escape our totalitarian instincts.

Duncan will not compromise. He does none of the coursework and has no interest in examinations. His talent has arrived too soon, and traps him.2 A tragedy; for our hero has neither the financial backing (his father is not rich) nor the psychological resources to exist as an artist in an adult world. By not conforming he loses his vocation. His life to become a series of attempts to avoid the inevitable; all doomed to failure, like the church where he paints the scenes from Genesis. The reference to Gulley Jimson is intentional, although the differences between the two are large and telling. Jimson is a mature artist, who survives by using his quick wits, his charm and his utter indifference to the feelings and property of others – if he doesn’t seduce his clients he blackmails, bullies or steals from them. Gulley Jimson.3 He lives off women and sponges from friends; an entire existence dedicated to getting just enough cash to complete the next canvas. Yet even Jimson knows he can’t do without society; thus he latches onto a succession of people foolish enough to believe in his genius. Duncan lacks these survival instincts. Mentally he remains a boy. When the (reasonable) demands of his environment press upon him – follow the teacher’s advice, do the assigned course work, pass exams – his instinct is to run away: to jump into the spaceship that is his art. You can do this at school. But after 21 you are not supposed to play the astronaut. That demanding mistress Work calls…. Duncan is helpless. His case hopeless. A complete mental collapse. 

Between school and office we can linger for a while in a small plaza called freedom; early adulthood, a liminal space that lasts for a few years at most.4 In historical time Duncan lives in the amorphous period of the late fifties/early sixties, the incubator of that infamous technicolour decade.5 We hang around the young bohemians of Unthank, which has a passing resemblance to Glasgow, although Kafka is the town planner, his blueprint The Castle. These characters resemble the art students of Duncan’s youth, although no longer artists they act the part of fashionable aesthetes: hipsters. It is a performance that disguises the hollowing out of the artistic will. This twilight time between the end of full-time education and adult employment, where freedom faces rapid extinction, is a strangely bleak place for the talented; Lanark (Duncan Thaw’s alter-ego) suffers accordingly.6 Our hero is depressed. He sits for hours on the balcony of the Elite Café looking for a glint of sunlight; an obvious but effective metaphor. Like Kafka, the allegory is easy to grasp, but then suddenly slips from our fingers: it is an expressionist vision not some symbolic Meccano set. Feelings not meanings are conveyed here. A heavy malaise overhangs Unthank, which is reflected in the new high-rise buildings which blot out the sun. This lack of light and warmth has entered the people, who have contracted a disturbing skin disease: dragonhide. The sensitive aesthetic soul of youth is giving way to the utilitarian armour of maturity.

There are moments we take the elevator down into our hero’s clinical depression. But when the doors open we step out into sci-fi territory…. People regularly disappear, and nobody knows why. It happens to Lanark. He is sucked down through a hole in the floor, and tumbles into the Institute, an underground complex that resembles the Welfare State. There is a hospital, research scientists, civil servants, politicians; and a constitutional king.

The Castle is a brilliant allegory about office work, which captures the uncanniness of authority within large and complex institutions, where the locus of power is vague, and - to the outsider - shifts and changes continually. Today the clerk on the reception desk is a tyrant; tomorrow he acts the weak underling, bent out of shape by bosses whose faces we never see. The very size and inwardness of the place – do the officials ever look out of the window? – making it opaque and impervious to external influence. We have no idea what goes on in there. 

Lanark explores the same territory, though its author chooses different staircases and corridors. For sure, the Institute is first portrayed as an oppressive place; but this is not Gray’s theme. The Institute is a benign dictator that kills the soul through medical help, good housing, and nourishing food. Bureaucrats kill with their kindness; especially those who do not fit in.7 Lanark is particularly unfortunate. Unlike Duncan, he has no talent to hide in; just an instinctive non-conformity that rebels against the organisation’s carefully calibrated atmosphere, its endless rules and practical ways. Yet, because the Institute is benign, it reluctantly tolerates Lanark’s behaviour, his instinct to be free.

The Institute cures the dragonhide. It also allows Lanark, though with some resistance, to save Rima from certain death: her case seemingly hopeless, for encased completely in the disease she is a 100% dragon. The Institute usually recycles such lost causes into energy. You’re getting the picture? The Institute is progressive and efficient, and it feeds, clothes, and houses its members, who live in safety and comfort. An artificial paradise, which nevertheless has costs: we have to rigidly follow its rules; the Institute so finely calibrated that even walking the wrong way down a corridor can cause a power cut. When he saves Rima, Lanark creates a minor crisis by walking against the air current.... In this community such actions are condemned. The maintenance of its precarious balance far more important than the quirks of individuals, even though enormous amounts of time and energy are spent in trying to save each one. The Institute exists to make happy and healthy humans, but they must submit to its machine-like mentality. Refuse to adapt, and you’re expendable.

There is a dark side to paradise. It survives by living off the earth. All nature, and this includes human beings, are raw material to feed its operation. Life itself is an energy source. This disturbs Lanark.

He is allowed to leave, if he takes a companion. He takes Rima, who prefers to stay; a reminder to all radicals of their stubborn peculiarity. Stepping outside the Institute they enter the Intercalendrical Zone, where days stretch into decades or shrink to minutes: time a lottery. Ageing rapidly, they pop up in Unthank in the late 1960s.  

It’s a new world. The city conquered by motorways and colonised by office blocks. A new master is in charge: not the Institute but the Creature. The Octopus; The System; The Military-Industrial Complex are other names the 20^th century has given it. We call it the Washington Consensus. Corporate capitalism has Unthank in its paw; squeezing out its life between those enormous fingers of profit and growth. The place is dying, no longer able to supply the energy that the large corporations need. Even the Institute works for the Creature, which wants to destroy Unthank, no longer profitable in its decline. A sense of doom, once mostly metaphysical, has come to feel very concrete; the physical infrastructure of the city is on the edge of collapse. 

The radicals to the rescue….

The bohemians have changed. No longer hanging out in the foyers of art cinemas or experimenting with sex and personal relations (Sludden and his clique always more interested in each other than in art or literature) they have transmogrified into radical politicians; setting up communes, forming strike committees, and infiltrating the local political elite, whom they now take over. Sludden, using his charisma and the new media to sell his populist politics, becomes the city’s provost; Lanark, isolated and otherworldly, his useful idiot; who, in a bravura scene, is flown back to the Institute to stop the destruction.

Intercalendrical time has its fun. Returning to the Institute Lanark finds that it too has been transformed. The crazy scientist Ozenfant rules; while the building no longer looks like a hospital but an hotel, hosting corporate conferences. Capitalism is the boss. Full of high cynicism and deceptive pleasure – plenty of pretty girls are willing to remove their knickers8 - Lanark is easily tricked into losing his documents, with their revelatory secrets. This fellow is too innocent to stop Unthank’s fall.  

He returns to Unthank, now an old and lonely man. The final scenes are apocalyptic, as the city suffers an environmental catastrophe; only the miraculous intervention of the author, who with literary chutzpah writes back the sea, preventing a Biblical deluge. Then, in a moment of peace, Lanark is granted a vision that appears to redeem his life: “a slightly worried, ordinary old man but glad to see the light in the sky.” The book ends in a cemetery about to fall into the ground, not even the stones of John Knox to survive the oblivion. Yet this glimpse of light consoles Lanark; a strange man, not at home on this earth.

The early promise of art ends with a mystic’s ecstasy, while humanity itself faces annihilation. A bleak book. The forces of the modern world too great to be overcome. Our best hope: a few revivifying sparks of enlightenment, when an individual loses himself in a moment of wonder. Duncan Thaw in his art. Lanark to sunlight.

The ghost of Angus Wilson walks these pages. Many are the echoes of this now forgotten author in Lanark. Is The Old Men at the Zoo an unaccredited influence? But surely Gray would have entered it into his Index of Plagiarisms…. I suspect it’s due to Wilson’s prominence amongst the “English language fiction printed between the 40s and 60s of the present century” that gives, we are told, this novel its final shape. And don’t forget the literary context. Both are writing about by a culture that began its decline in the late 1950s; social democracy, that marriage of convenience between big business and the state, already contemplating a divorce by the end of the next decade.

Gray’s vision is bleaker and starker (and more vital) than Wilson’s. It is an outsider’s view, with the outsider’s pessimism. A non-conformist will always be agin their society, because they cannot stand the obedience that it requires, which in their case has to be consciously accepted not habitually absorbed. Those who are outside will always be aggrieved at the power and reach of the culture’s institutions, whose edicts they can never wholly escape. Authority always a threat to those who cannot ignore it. Even when his precocious talent is insuring him of educational success - that great liberator from social norms, if used wisely - Duncan finds what should be a congenial environment alien and menacing. He will not conform. So weakening his chances of independence. Thus he comes to rely on the good will of a few teachers and administrators who believe enough in his talent to let him contravene the rules. Tellingly, it is another outsider, an English lecturer, who recognises his genius, and persuades both the authorities and his father that Duncan should study at Glasgow’s School of Art. Although he recognises how lucky he is, Duncan is not grateful (Unthank?). Foolish boy. He cannot see beyond his own eccentricity. School, which should be a liberator, is believed just another institution whose rules confine and inhibit his creative soul. A wiser student could have learned a lot from the conventional Miss Mackenzie. He rebels, and joins a loose group of friends, who respect his talent and share his non-conformist views, though they lack his strange visions. Nor are they are artists. Within this group he remains largely alone, too odd to be loved, too independent to be needed emotionally. We live with Duncan, in page after wonderful page, as he find his own path through his student years, his non-conformity rife with emotional pain (a true original always lonely) but who is yet creatively alive. In retrospect this time can seem a paradise, a few short years, when the future, with all its utilitarian cares, had yet to exist. Anything seems possible then.

Duncan is fated to fail…the author tells him so! “The general outline” made up long ago, cannot be changed this late in the work. Duncan, it seems, has never had any liberty. We are reminded of the historical interventions of War and Peace, where freedom is simply the illusion of looking at life too closely: expand the vision and the individual is nothing but an auxiliary in History’s army, whose general…well, take your choice: Liberal, Marxist, Christian.… Gray writes as a social scientist. Duncan’s fall was pre-ordained. His life the short promise and long decline of the post-war dream of an equitable and socially responsible society, whose inspiration are the idiosyncratic socialists of the 19th^-century; those cranks and humanists who lived before the bureaucrats and the ideologues turned their ideas into an industrial machine. For a few years after the war it seemed possible to realise this dream. This fantasy couldn’t last. It didn’t.

“Yes,” said Coulter glumly. “You know what you want and you’re in a place where they’ll help you get it.”

“It was an accident,” said Thaw defensively. “If the head librarian hadnae been in America, and my Dad hadnae insisted I go to night classes, and the registrar hadnae been English and liked my work-”

“Aye, but it was an accident that could happen to you. Not to me. No accident but an atom bomb can get me out of engineering. I’ve no ambitions, Duncan. I’m like the man in Hemingway’s story, I don’t want to be special, I just want to feel good.  And I’m in work that’s only bearable if I feel as little as I can.”

“In four months you’ll be in the drawing office and learning something creative.”

“Creative? What’s creative about designing casings for machine units? I’ll be better off, but because it’s better wearing a clean suit than dirty overalls. And I’ll get more money. But I won’t feel good.”

“It’ll be years before I earn money.”

“Mibby. But ye’ll be doing what you want.”

‘True,” said Thaw. “I’ll be doing what I want. I suppose” – he turned and waved toward the city – “I’m nearly the luckiest man living here.”

They re-entered the wood and came to a clearing with the iron structure of a child’s swing in it. Thaw ran and jumped onto the wooden seat, grabbed the chains on each side and swung violently backward and forward in greater and greater arcs.

“Yah-yip-yeaaaaaaaaaah!” he shouted. “I’ll be doing what I want, won’t I?”

Coulter leaned against the trunk of a tree and watched with a slight ironical grin.

“They can help you get it.” Coulter is right, and his quiet irony can mean many things, including the hunch that Duncan won’t be doing exactly what he wishes…. You can want too much too quickly. The ruin of a talent, if the holder of the talent is ignorant of the world’s workings. 

If…. If Duncan had been more mature, more sociable, less egocentrically conditioned; if he’d nurtured those who can help him. If…but Gray is saying there are no ifs. Duncan was born to fail. There is a flaw in his personality. One needs more than talent and lucky accidents to succeed in what - let us not forget - is a luxury craft. Accept the world, and you may get the most out of it. A truism for artists, who depend so much on others. Our hero will not listen to such sanity. Conformity is beyond him.

At the art school a teaching post seemed assured. Secure employment, where he could do his own work on the side. Few people are so lucky. It is not enough for Duncan; a man who has no practical idea how to fund his vocation. This artist prefers dreams to realities. Alas, one day he will be forced to wake up. Only to do what he wants to do - no community will accommodate such arrogance, especially from a young man without wealth or status. His dream - the post-war dream?9 - of a new renaissance, where public institutions commission artists to create beautiful public spaces, became the Welfare State, a modest form of social amelioration, that in improving lives killed the soul: “work that’s only bearable if I feel as little as I can”. Nevertheless, it’s better than mere survival, and is adequate for most us most of the time.

Duncan was born into the wrong century. Passive people like himself need patrons. In egalitarian times the artist must have the guile and wit of a Gulley Jimson to survive the indifference of the modern world. Too alone; too naïve; too unsophisticated; too uncompromising…there was never much hope of success. A young genius turned into an orthodox old man; there’s his paunch, his thinning hair, that one glad glimpse of the sun.

This is a requiem for a road not taken. Does the author believe that Duncan - and by extension Scotland - could have driven down a better and brighter one? His hero’s very precociousness denies it.

(Review: Lanark; A Life in 4 Books)

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1. Kenneth O. Morgan, The People’s Peace: British History 1945-1990; David Marquand, The Unprincipled Society.

2.  Another brilliant study of precocity: Jane Gardam’s Crusoe’s Daughter. See my comments in Killing King Reason.

3.  Joyce Cary, The Horse’s Mouth.

4.  Its first fictional documentation: Hurry on Down. See my A Short Sprint.

5.  For another brilliant story about this time: Alice Munro’s The Albanian Virgin in Open Secrets.

6.  This could be the theme of Rumble Fish.

7.  Before the New Right there was a strong Left wing attack on the Welfare State - not to abolish it, but to make it more flexible and human.

8.  Compare Angus Wilson’s descriptions of conference life in As If By Magic. By the early 1970s discrete prostitution was a sine qua non of the professional circuit.

9.  See A.S. Byatt’s The Virgin in the Garden. The idea of a New Jerusalem of the post-war Labour government slipped into the new Elizabethan age at the coronation of the queen. Both promised a British renaissance, although of different sorts. Duncan has imbibed both and fused them together.