The synagogue beside it was from Hill Street. The twin-towered building was from the theological college on Park Circus, now converted to luxury flats. Writing about The City for the Guardian, Gray said that itĬrowded together parts of Glasgow that excited me. His paintings also carry multiple perspectives, as in one my favorites, The City, which he made when he was fifteen. The realist sections are given to a man named Duncan Thaw in a recognizable Glasgow, and the others to Lanark in Unthank-a city of fables and farce and moral tales. Lanark, famously, is made up of both a realist book and an allegory. If the manuscript hints at how deeply his art and writing are intertwined, the sketches-the fairly realist face and the near-fantastical serpents-hint at the two worlds he tends to inhabit. Illustrations, cover design, frontispieces-they’re all designed by Gray. When he signed on with his longtime publisher, Canongate, they gave him a remarkable degree of creative control over his books. After graduating from the Glasgow School of Art in 1957, he worked as a painter and muralist for nearly twenty-five years before publishing Lanark.

They complement Gray’s dense, looping handwriting on, in this case, a draft of Lanark: A Life in Four Books-a monumental, six-hundred-page work published in 1981, and the first of Gray’s landmark novels of Scottish contemporary experience.Īs that manuscript page suggests, Gray’s work as an artist is integrated into his writing. The man’s face has been expertly hatched, and the snakes seem to have been doodled by a cheerful hand. On the page that accompanies Alasdair Gray’s interview in our Winter 2016 issue, there are two drawings: a hooded man in profile, and a den of snakes rising happily out of a pyramid. With every one of our Writers at Work interviews, we include a manuscript page, giving a glimpse into writers’ approaches to editing and revision. Alasdair Gray, Small Boy Sleeping (Stuart Maclean), 1970, ink drawing with watercolor and acrylic on board.

Lanark by Alasdair Gray