Alasdair Gray - most prolic, multi- gifted and bibulous of writers Liiz Callder News - Books Thursday, 2nd January 2020

Liz Calder recalls the writer and artist, who has died at the age of 85

Sharp-eyed literary trainspotters may have noticed that Alasdair Gray had more than one UK publisher, and that despite his Scottish nationalism, two of them were London-based. For over a decade he offered some of his works to his first and primary publisher, Canongate, and others to Cape and later to Bloomsbury. It came about this way. In the early '80s I was editing books by the Scottish historian Angus Calder (no relation). He told me of his wildly gifted writer friend Alasdair Gray, whose beloved publisher, the tiny Scottish house of Canongate, founded in 1973 by Stephanie and Angus Wolfe-Murray, was strapped for cash and couldn't afford to offer Alasdair an advance for his next book. Canongate had heroically published his magnum opus, Lanark, in 1981, to universal acclaim, followed by Unlikely Stories, Mostly. Could we at Cape step in and publish his new novel, 1982, Janine? We could. It came out in 1984. In 1987, after I moved from Cape to join others in setting up Bloomsbury, Alasdair decided to share his books between Canongate and Bloomsbury. So it went for the next decade, during which we published Poor Things, Ten Tales, Tall and True, Old Men in Love and others. Alasdair was the most generous of souls as well as the most prolific, hardworking, loyal, multi-gifted and bibulous of writers. His natural state was penury: whenever he received any money, his first instinct was to give it away. When the Royal Literary Fund gave him a grant, it was strongly advised to give it to him in instalments lest he give it all away in one go. When in 1992 Poor Things won both the Guardian and the Whitbread fiction prizes, his friends gathered round to see him receive his cheque (see photo). At this point, his trousers were well hitched around his waist; as he approached the award-giver, he was holding them up with one hand, rather unsuccessfully.

www.bookbrunch.co.uk Design by: BDS Digital © BookBrunch Ltd. Alasdair was a prodigiously energetic and ambitious artist and writer. Perhaps his most extraordinary project for Bloomsbury was The Book of Prefaces (2000). I have no record of the contractual delivery date for the book, but the deadline was overtaken by at least a decade. Alasdair says it took him 16 years. But what a book it was! As was his habit, Alasdair provided the texts, the profuse illustrations, the two blurbs (author's and publisher's), portraits of all 30 contributors and 10 more of other helpers, the marginalia and other decoration, the colour of the reading ribbon, the endpapers, and the case blocking designs bearing the inspiring exhortation, "Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation." He supplied the best description of this work of a lifetime, as follows: "To every generation appears an ageing writer who with some work behind him and no ideas for more, decides to produce THE BOOK OF BOOKS by grafting together pieces cut from the corpus of other authors, mostly the mighty dead whose copyrights have lapsed.... OUR BOOK OF PREFACES is fat with introductions to great books by their own authors. Read here what Shakespeare, Dr Johnson and Mark Twain wanted you to think of their work, what Bernard Shaw wanted you to think of him, etc etc.... Warning to Parents, Teachers, Librarians, Booksellers. Do not let children handle this book. It will help them to pass their examinations without reading anything else." Even now I can hear Alasdair's operatic peals of laughter as they shattered quiet afternoons in Soho Square. I bet the folks at Canongate are missing them too. Photo from left: Lucy Ellmann, Beryl Bainbridge, Geraldine Cooke, Alasdair Gray, Liz Calder, Ronan Bennett

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