David J Black

It had to be Ukraine – you can blame Putin’s new pal in the White House! With a moving contribution from our now legendary war correspondent Jen Stout, an amazing ghost story from novelist James Robertson, sundry Scottish folk bands, and performances like you wouldn’t believe from an array of talented Ukrainian dancers, singers, and musicians which, I swear, had the Lord Provost jangling his chain of office, it was wow! all the way.

Your scrivener yet entertains a prescient recurring dream in which Julie Fowlis and the Oban High School pipe band round off their coming Tartan Week appearance in New York’s Carnegie Hall with a full-blast rendering of Ukraine’s wonderful national anthem.

For all that, one was sorry to miss Gray Day. Alasdair himself, were he still with is, would without question have deferred to the cause of Ukraine. His best known epigram, “work as if you live in the early days of a better nation” reflected his views not simply as a Scot, but as a citizen of the world. It was carved on a plaque on the new Scottish parliament, and when I informed him his name had been mis-spelt his reply was “well that’s a relief – maybe they meant a different Alasdair Gray.” 

On another occasion he offered to do a quick portrait sketch of your scrivener and set about the task with enthusiasm, though not too successfully. We agreed it was never going to be a masterpiece, and he signed it with the tailpiece “not well drawn”. Plea in mitigation: wine had been taken.

Enough of reminiscing. It’s time for a movie. There has been some errant speculation as to who might have been the model for Willem Dafoe’s character Godwin Baxter in the film Poor Things, based on Gray’s novel, which deservedly won Emma Stone an Oscar for her portrayal of Godwin’s Frankenstein-like creation, Bella Baxter, though for some reason no baubles at all for Mr Dafoe, who had to spend six hours a day in make up. An award for endurance might have been thoughtful.

An example of celluloid second guessing is proffered by a blogging US film journalist one of whose specialisations appears to be conjecture. “Is Stalked by my Amish Boyfriend based on real events?” and “Is Mothers’ Instinct based on a true story?” are among her other posers. Mr Dafoe’s role, she firmly concludes, “is not based on a real person”. How could she possibly know this?

Poor Things: Episodes from the Early Life of Archibald McCandless, MD: Scottish Public Health Officer by the “dystopian fantasist” Alasdair Gray was published in 1992, about a decade after Lanark: A life in Four Books, which had taken the literary world by storm, though not quite enough of a storm to get it on the short list for the much coveted Booker Prize. Nor enough, indeed, to allow it in to a 2008 Guardian list of books which really should have won the Booker Prize.

This probably tells us more about the Southern bias of the UK publishing industry than it does about the quality of the books being judged. Fellow writers like Anthony Burgess and William Boyd, it may be noted, hailed Lanark as one of the most significant novels of the 20th century, while Will Self proclaimed Gray as “perhaps the greatest living writer in this archipelago today”.

Cast as Poor Things’ Godwin Baxter, Mr Dafoe set about developing his role by studying interview clips Gray gave up to the year of his death in 2019. He concluded, with good reason, that the author’s own mercurial and solipsistic personality had furnished more than enough raw material for Bella’s sinister, if curiously sympathetic, creator. Yet this was far from the whole story. Admittedly, those of us who knew Alasdair Gray, to whatever degree, were aware that his character was perfectly summed up by the old Scots word ‘kenspeckle’. There is no exact English equivalent, but ‘flamboyantly eccentric’ gets us close.

Possessed of a wonderfully febrile imagination, the author of Poor Things would dance on his signature stutter as an essay in performance just to keep a room engaged. The stutter would vanish whenever he read a poem, and programme producers feared perpetually the possibility that it might ruin an interview. It rarely, if ever, did – though sometimes by the narrowest of margins.

Until Lanark’s publication Alasdair Gray was known as a bumbling, unkempt graduate of Glasgow School of Art who made a living from mural-painting and teaching by day, while, for almost 30 years, he was rumoured to be nightly engaged in wrestling with with a great bildungsroman project which was destined to become Scotland’s Ulysses, only much better, it seemed.

Some were sceptical. Gray was congenial and spent much time in the pub. His circle included the late John Byrne, artist, playwright, and sometime husband of actress Tilda Swinton. Popularly regaled as ‘the two Glasgow polymaths’, the artist-authors had a following among their fellow art school graduates, in particular those who would later become actors, such as Peter Capaldi, who appeared in a 1987 film scripted by Gray with the American star Stewart Granger, and Robbie Coltrane, to whom Gray had sent a 1990s screenplay for Poor Things in anticipation of a film which never came to pass. Helena Bonham-Carter was to be his chosen Bella.

There was another star in Gray’s firmament, however, with peculiarities even more marked than his own. Bill Skinner had unusual theories about particle compression and the origins of life, and a museum of curiosities in his mother’s respectable Glasgow flat. A bombastic anti monarchist and nationalist, he’d founded his own post-war political sect, the Scottish Republican Socialist Party, of which, for many years, he was the sole member. In 1982 its apparent ghost may have been absorbed into the short-lived Scottish Republican Socialist Movement, now a ghost in its own right.

Gray, taken by Skinner’s exotic narcissism, drew him several times over the years. A 2010 drawing has him at a table with vaguely science-related objects before him. A 2011 print shows him at his desk with a petri-dish containing an amoeba-like object alongside a copy of his booklet Some Progressive Theories and Discoveries of Origins. Both images were posthumous. An undated drawing shows a man with a craggy face and strong jaw not unlike Mr Dafoe’s more surgically dramatic version, and may have been from the life. A larger drawing (illustrated) dating from 1968 shows Skinner in a white lab coat alongside three anatomical sketches of human heads, an image which could almost have been a storyboard for the film, and is picked up on the cover of the book.

Getting a fix on Bill Skinner, a shipyard worker turned lab technician who died in 1973, is not easy. Gray often elicited character from real people. Archibald McCandless was a play on the name of BBC producer Norman McCandlish. Godwin a nod to Mary Shelley’s maiden name: Baxter? Who knows. His fellow writer Bernard MacLaverty was an approximate model for the Godwin Baxter figure on the book jacket, though it has been recalled that Gray dipped his artist’s brushes into a Baxter’s soup can of muddy water, which may be meaningful.

Gray biographer Rodge Glass wrote of Skinner in the anthology Lean Tales. He “lived with his mother, never married, worked for several bosses in jobs that didn’t last, and had no descendants or relatives”. That sad picture (writes Glass) is then turned on its head as Gray describes an inspiring, lively man with many friends, a home more like a laboratory, a talent for painting and a remarkable sideline in inventing strange alcoholic drinks. Gray hailed his friend with the words “he succeeded in life” and at one pont collaborated with him on a proposed book Papyrii Occult: Skinner and Gray.

Those who retain meaningful memories of Skinner are few in number. John Byrne and Robbie Coltrane probably knew him, but they are no longer with us. The Scottish film producer Tom Kinninmont worked with Gray on the film The Story of a Recluse, an unfinished R.L. Stevenson novella which he’d completed. Skinner’s name was familiar to him, he recalls, but that was all.

Willem Dafoe had no option but to work with the material available. He delivers a fine performance which does, indeed, capture something of Gray’s quirky essence. Alasdair Gray could be hard to please, but he would almost certainly have approved of Dafoe’s Godwin Baxter, and been delighted, moreover, with Ms Stone’s (episodically unclad) Bella.

One crucial aspect of the film would, for sure, have appalled and angered Gray – the decision to write Glasgow out of the script, and replace it with Victorian London. This is is all the more mystifying in light of the fact that the Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos knew Gray at first hand, having visited him in Glasgow to purchase the film rights. If not exactly a sin of cultural dis-appropriation, this removal of Glaswegian grit from an otherwise perfect oyster has taken much of the sheen of this pearl of a film’s authenticity, and for no good reason.

Relocating a narrative from its literary setting is not unknown, of course. The “square of ancient, handsome houses, now for the most part decayed from their high estate” of Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde was based on Edinburgh St James’s Square, around which the youthful RLS put in much drinking and girl-chasing time, yet his novel was set in London, and is none the worse for that. We might also ruefully reflect that much of Braveheart was filmed in Ireland, for tax-break reasons, with squaddies from the Irish Defence forces drafted in as extras.

With Poor Things this loss of the book’s genius loci is both noticeable and irritating, especially from a Scottish perspective. Glasgow, after all, is a well used film backdrop, and has benefited from some relocating in its own right, as when it became Philadelphia for the Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie zombie movie World War Z.

Even so, there was no compelling case for ‘Londonising’ Poor Things other than a possible perception that it might have benefited box office receipts. It’s a director’s prerogative, of course, to set his film anywhere he chooses, but in writing Glasgow out of the script of his film Yorgos Lanthimos has unwisely filleted St Mungo’s fish, for all that Poor Things was, in other respects, a remarkable film. On the other hand, would Outlander have been the blockbuster it was had it been set in Middlesex or Suffolk?