Alasdair Gray: 'There isn't much time. Better get on with it'

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/nov/18/alasdair-gray-scotland-author-interview

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Just at the moment I think Alasdair Gray is going to finish his answer to my main question – about the huge act of creative completion he is undertaking – he veers off, unprompted, into a disquisition on sex and his failures with women.

"I was brought up to identify sexual intercourse with matrimony, which made me almost incapable of it," the 77-year-old Gray hoots like a bagpipe chanter blowing jazz arpeggios. The improvisational emphases and tonality mark the unmistakable voice of Scotland's most important living novelist – trilling with hilarity one moment, plummeting into mock sonorousness the next.

"Sex in, shall we say, the experimental sense."

I wonder where he is going with this and why.

"Not that I didn't try!" Gray persists. "But I always tried to seduce women when I was drunk."

Finally, he seems to reach a conclusion: "I'm afraid, in Scotland, that's all too frequent!"

We laugh and I primly seek to bring the conversation back to the main subject: his nearly 1,000 pages of collected short stories, which span 61 years of writing and have finally reached the printers after multiple extended deadlines. These were no surprise to his publisher, Canongate, whose history with Gray dates back to the publication in 1981 of his first and greatest novel, Lanark (though he insists he prefers 1982, Janine), which had taken nearly 30 years to complete.

It was worth the wait. A legend in Glaswegian literary circles long even before it was published, Lanark is the novel that, inarguably, changed the landscape of modern Scottish fiction.

Gray recalls his feats of deadline-juggling with relish, reciting from memory a letter he wrote to Canongate director Jamie Byng about a reworking of Faust he had agreed to write: "The good news is that the book is going excellently. The bad news is that it will certainly not be finished by August this year. Or August any year! You'll have to wait till I give you the deadline, and then you can believe in it." Gray's voice soars to a pitch of parodied grandiosity as he remembers offering to return his already spent advance.

Byng, apparently, remained sanguine with the proposed timeline and the book, Fleck, was eventually finished.

Not all publishers have been so patient. The last section of Every Short Story comprises "endnotes" which detail the publication history of his past collections. As much as his twin artistic concerns (the collision of the fantastic and the ordinary), Gray's twin material obsessions (broken contracts and financial crises) become comic-grotesque tales in their own right.

In 1992, while trying to finish his landmark literary encyclopedia, The Book of Prefaces, he approached a publisher at Jonathan Cape for an advance on a new collection of stories because, as he openly told him, he needed the money to complete the earlier commission. The next day, the publisher exploded down the phone to Gray's agent, telling her that he didn't see why he should give "a fucking advance for a book of stories to a fucking writer who needed the money to write another fucking book for a different fucking publisher". Gray gleefully related his reaction to Liz Calder at Bloomsbury, who duly offered to publish the stories herself.

Yet, as he approaches 80, Gray has finished almost everything on almost every front of his artistic life. Lanark is established in the canon of modern British fiction; The Book of Prefaces eventually came out in 2000; his pictorial autobiography, A Life in Pictures (which tells the story of his parallel life as draftsman, designer and painter) was published in 2010; his cosmic murals (on the former church ceiling of the Oran Mor pub and the Hillhead subway station in Glasgow) are now permanent testaments to his Michelangelo-esque productivity; the short stories represent a monumental body of work; rejected scripts have been recycled as new stories; and Canongate is preparing collections of his novellas, plays and poetry.

"All big jobs know better than their artists how long they will need to be properly finished," Gray writes in A Life in Pictures. Now they have been. Surely, I ask, this bringing of things to completion is a form of redemption granted to very few artists?

But Gray is not done with the subject of women, disappointingly few of them though there have been in his life. "They always sickened with me in the end," he digresses. "They all got somebody they preferred. Except for Morag!" His marriage to Morag McAlpine has lasted 21 years and will, he says, "definitely be till death do us part".

Suddenly, I get the point. Gray has not been digressing. He has been sticking faithfully to the theme. As in publication, so in relationships: job finally done?

"Delayed gratification!" Gray rejoices and refers me to Solzhenitsyn's description of the "law of the last half-inch" in the Soviet gulag. The law states that, as you come to within that final fraction of completing your work, you should pray you will discover some insuperable impediment that seems to make the job impossible so that, if you can just concentrate on finishing that last, impossible part, the work will finally be good.

"Of course," he adds, "the urge to complete things is associated with the greater proximity of death." Like a version of the episode in Lanark in which the hero meets his own author, he takes up a mock-authoritarian tone with himself: "There isn't much time, Gray, better get on with it!"

And he breaks into a peal of unsettlingly hollow laughter, which somehow undermines his own declaration that he has been "lucky".

Gray's laughter can be many things. It can be delightful, infectious and brilliant; it can also be defensive, emptily madcap, even aggressive. "Ach, what's the point in saying anything," he gripes later, detecting that I haven't followed him all the way into an argument about Scottish culture suffering at the hands of a "self-appointed London cognoscenti".

We are talking in his modest flat in the West End of Glasgow which represents the only aspect of financial security he has achieved. The Fabian socialism of his father, reinforced by Gray's love of the British welfare state, is all but nostalgia now. His hopes for an independent socialist Scotland, outside of Nato have recently been abandoned by the Scottish National party. His political beliefs remain unchanged; the world is not what it should be.

And though he writes comically about his publishing history, it is clear that, beneath the retelling, his were dark creative struggles, shot through with affronts and humiliations. While he may have been responsible for liberating new writers from a postwar cultural hangover in Scotland (subservient to English culture, riddled with self-denigration), he is less pleased by the success of a writer such as Irvine Welsh (whose aggressive confidence would have been impossible without the space opened up by Gray and James Kelman) than he is haunted by the lack of recognition accorded to other artists and dramatists (namely, friends of his).

All of Gray's own work has, to varying degrees, been autobiographical – returning constantly to childhood, family, friends and Glasgow, transmogrifying the ordinary first person into a spectacular cosmos – and vice versa. It may be that old age and the imminence of completion are bringing him back to the agonies out of which he brought himself into being as an artist in the first place.

The work is nearly complete, but that last half-inch comes at the greatest cost.