ALASDAIR Gray once famously – or notoriously – referred to incomers to Scotland as “settlers” or “colonists” and his biographer, the novelist Rodge Glass, might be seen in this light. Beyond the sensationalism that Alasdair’s words provoked, what did he mean? And what’s the balance between self-expression in art and the understanding of the world you come from, the new world you come into and inhabit, and share with others?
We’re immersed in celebrity culture, the cult of the ego, the politics of the usurper, but art is always about forms of communication between people of different dispositions and character. In the conversation arising from the Second International Alasdair Gray Conference, Alan Riach asks Rodge Glass about his own approach to “The Gray World” and his own writing … Alan Riach: Rodge, you said that when you first met Alasdair, you were young, in your early 20s, in a new country, far from family and friends, and desperate to be a writer but with no idea how.
Can you tell us a bit about that? Where had you come from and why come to Glasgow and why was being a writer your priority back then? And – beyond the biography – does your own work in any sense come out of the experience of Glasgow and of knowing Alasdair?
Rodge Glass: Sure. I had come from an Orthodox Jewish community in Manchester where I spent my summers and winters on Jewish camps, went to a Jewish Primary School, was taught modern and ancient Hebrew and we had a rabbi as a teacher. In the choir, we sang religious songs in Hebrew as well as some comedy songs about what it’s like to be Jewish. I remember “Hebrew is a Complicated Difficult Language” was an old hit – “Son You’ll Be a Doctor” played on clichés about what Jewish parents want for their children.
Although I was the first in my family to go to university, it was always assumed that our generation should be doing that. It was a route to assimilation and financial security, as it is for so many immigrant communities.
I remember we all had to wag our fingers as we said the words “and that – is – that!” Back then we were taught to support Israel like our community football team. On Israeli Independence Day, injured Israeli soldiers came to talk to us, and there was definitely a sense we had that a lot of people didn’t like Jews, and we were or had been under threat for thousands of years.
In the shadow of the Holocaust that was especially understandable but personally I always had a difficult relationship with Judaism and with the Jewish relationship to the Jewish state. I’m a terrible pretender and I over-worry a lot of the time, and I felt from very young that I was doing something dishonourable by singing prayers to a god I did not believe in.
The community I grew up in contained many people who felt they were given a place to belong, a safe place where it was OK to be Jewish, culturally and religiously. To an extent I envied that sense of belonging, and still do. But I never felt it was for me. I felt it was someone else’s faith, and that in focusing on it so much as a child, I had missed out on so much of what else there was in the world to learn about, to be interested in, to get involved in. I was, from then on, interested in every community apart from my own.
I’m saying this because at 18 I went with the Jewish youth movement I’d been in since 12 to live in Jerusalem. Over that year I also worked on a kibbutz in the desert and for the first time heard about Palestine and Palestinians and began to learn about the complexities and injustices of Israel-Palestine. All this just made me all the more uncomfortable with my own upbringing and, hugely conflicted, I left for Scotland at 19, on my own.
AR: Why Scotland?
And why Glasgow?
RG: Chance, and charity. In Manchester, I’d failed my A Levels, or at least one of them – I and my whole class failed an exam, which later became a minor scandal. The teacher taught the wrong material.
But at the time I just didn’t have the grades to get into where I’d wanted to study Politics and European History and I honestly would have studied anywhere that accepted me. I had a couple of interviews at universities which decided against offering me a place. Strathclyde took pity – and that was the first of four times in my life I’ve been drawn to Strathclyde, or drawn back to it, either by accident or design.
That was 1997. It’s funny, I didn’t fully appreciate how lucky I was at the time. I just had my route out and grabbed it with both hands. I hadn’t taken English at A Level in England, thinking I wasn’t good enough at it. I took Literature as an option class at Strathclyde, picked a Modern Scottish Literature module, started writing stories, and then I was off.
AR: Arriving in Glasgow for the first time must have been … Well, I’m not sure … RG: I remember coming up the motorway and seeing the Glasgow’s Miles Better sign for the first time, thinking, well, if I can handle Jerusalem, I’ll be fine here. I’d been this nerdy, bookish English kid in Jerusalem with all these Trainspotting posters on my walls, and I read all the Irvine Welsh I could get my hands on while I was working on the kibbutz.
I loved Marabou Stork Nightmares (hugely influenced by Gray’s 1982 novel Janine, I later learned) but of course I was completely ignorant, knowing little about Scotland or Glasgow when I arrived.
I learned about the place through its culture, history, musicians, artists, and writers and fell in love with the place – partly because of what it had to offer, but also partly because it welcomed me with open arms, and was so different, and so far, from where I came from.
No-one meant me any harm in how I was raised, I have wonderful parents and come from good people. But I felt deeply alienated from the religion and the politics of the Middle East. I just didn’t know how to disentangle those two things – Judaism and Israel - so I ran from them. I joined a band, did hundreds of gigs, read all the contemporary Scottish literature I could get my hands on, and started writing stories. These started out as versions of Jewish fables, and my first two novels were heavily influenced by that world I was running from.
AR: Could you introduce your novels to us?
RG: All of my work is, in a sense, an exploration of how we try to make sense of whole lives. I’ve published three novels: No Fireworks, Hope for Newborns and Bring Me the Head of Ryan Giggs. They are quite different in terms of genre, setting and approach – but they all deal in different ways with how a whole life might be reduced or understood.
Bring Me the Head of Ryan Giggs does this by following a fictional footballer who is the least-successful-ever player for Manchester United.
I invented someone from the famous Class of ’92, someone who played once, made a bad mistake, then found it impossible to escape the shadow of that event for the rest of his life.
This might seem very different from my biography of Alasdair, but for me it all comes from the same place – a fascination with the ways lives, real and imagined, are understood, or misunderstood.
That novel was a biography of a fictional character. I’m still interested in this same territory, though in new ways. I’m working on a memoir about HHT, the rare blood condition I share with my nephew. He died on the day he was born. This book will examine which lives deserve to be remembered, and how. It’s all part of the same thing, as I see it – it’s an interest that started when I arrived in Glasgow in the 90s, wanting to be a writer, trying to start again.
AR: So all of this was also part of the process of self-exploration and identification and finding out about the world you had come into?
RG: Yes, I was trying to process and understand what I was in those early years in Glasgow.
But this meant that by the time I met Alasdair I was desperate for some kind of way to remain in this new artistic community I’d found myself in, as well as find a way to financially survive without having to go back.
AR: What was the “artistic community”? Who were these people? Where did you meet and have the conversations?
RG: Well, from ’98 I was playing in a band, travelling, gigging a lot, and I fell in love with Scottish alternative music. It seemed there was something on every week I wanted to see, and lots of people I felt I had things in common with.
Being English, and Jewish, didn’t seem to exclude me from any of this, to my surprise. So naturally I was grateful for that. But from ’99 onwards I was in writing groups, and those increasingly became my community.
The great Shetland poet Robert Alan Jamieson ran the first group in Glasgow I went to regularly. Jen Hadfield was in that, in her early days. Nick Brooks, too, who first published at the same time as me, and several other fine writers.
I was supported and encouraged: this is how everyone gets better.
Not by magic, or the muse, or by hoping or wishing, but by old-fashioned graft and by feeling part of something you want to stick with. I signed up for the then Glasgow-Strathclyde joint MLitt in Creative Writing and learned a certain Alasdair Gray was going to be one of the tutors … AR: That was the beginning of the next chapter … RG: Well, I’ve written seven books now and just finished my first in a while, about the author of Under the Skin Michel Faber, who spent 25 years in the Scottish Highlands. But even in that new work – which is all about compassion and generosity in fiction – I see the escape I was making way back when, and how knowing Alasdair offered me the way out I needed.
I’ll always be grateful for it. His work has allowed me, for more than 20 years now, to feel both special and also part of a group with a commonality that can’t be denied. There was plenty of that sense of commonality at the conference.
AR: And it continues, undeniable.
