Alasdair Gray

A good poem is a tautology.

Alasdair James Gray (December 28, 1934 – December 29, 2019) was an award-winning Scottish writer and artist.

See also:

Lanark: A Life in Four Books (1981)

Quotes

Work as if you were in the early days of a better nation.

Work as if you live in the early days of a better world.

Unlikely Stories, Mostly (1983)

Unless otherwise indicated, quotations are cited from the 1984 Penguin Books reprint.

• Work as if you were in the early days of a better nation.
  • Frontispiece
  • Variants on this epigraph appear in other books by Alasdair Gray; one of them, "Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation", is now engraved on a wall of the Scottish Parliament building. [1] They are all loose paraphrases of a couplet from Dennis Lee's "Civil Elegies":
    And best of all is finding a place to be
    in the early days of a better civilization. [2]
  • Gray later devised a more distinct variant of this, because he believed the "nation" version should be credited to Lee:

Work as if you live in the early days of a better world.

• As quoted in "Early Days of a Better Nation" by Harry Mcgrath, in Scottish Review of Books (28 March 2013)

• I asked the headmaster of literature, "Why are there so many headmasters and so few poets? Is it easier for you to train your own kind than ours?" He said, "No. The emperor needs all the headmasters he can get. If a quarter of his people were headmasters he would be perfectly happy. But more than two poets would tear his kingdom apart."
  • "Five Letters from an Eastern Empire", p. 88

• A good poem is a tautology. It expands one word by adding a number which clarify it, thus making a new word which has never before been spoken. The seed-word is always so ordinary that hardly anyone perceives it. Classical odes grow from and or because, romantic lyrics from but or if. Immature verses expand a personal pronoun ad nauseam, the greatest works bring glory to a common verb.
  • "Prometheus", pp. 208-9

• This slip has been inserted by mistake.
  • An erratum slip in the first edition.

Quotes about Gray

• The first major Scottish novelist since Walter Scott.
  • Anthony Burgess Homage to Qwert Yuiop (1987) p. 400

• Gray is in my estimation a great writer, perhaps the greatest living in this archipelago today.
  • Will Self, in Phil Moores (ed.) Alasdair Gray : Critical Appreciations and a Bibliography (2002) p. 3

External links

• alasdairgray.info (official website)
• Alasdair Gray at DMOZ
• Alasdair Gray at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
• Alasdair Gray at Edinburgh Central Library (video in several parts)
• Documentary: Unlikely Murals, Mostly ... Part1 (video in several parts)
• "Alasdair Gray: 'I regard my work as deeply unfashionable'" · Guardian video interview with Charlotte Higgins (2011)
• Guardian obituary (29 December 2019)