EVELYN WAUGH AND ALASDAIR GRAY
ONE:
Email to Sorcha Dallas, Custodian of the Alasdair Gray Archive located in Glasgow.
Hi Sorcha,
Nice to meet you yesterday and to hear your intro to the Alasdair Gray Archive. The Gray chair, table and ledger is a great triptych, surely the best way to get catapulted into the creative life of Alasdair Gray. Though having said that, back at my own base, I looked through the Projects page and was struck by how brilliant The Armchair Monologues is. Congrats to all concerned.
The visit has left me comparing and contrasting all things Gray with all things Waugh. The Waugh archive is a humble shed full of files and books, the shed being attached to Evelyn Waugh’s grandson’s house in Milverton, Somerset. Alas, Alexander, who was a superb literary advocate of Evelyn Waugh, died in 2024. Where next for Waugh Studies? Evelyn really needs someone with a contemporary art background to set up the kind of structures and opportunities that you have, but I can’t see that happening.
I would still like to know if Alasdair Gray had any books by Evelyn Waugh in his library. I’d like to think he would have been aware of the great Penguin edition of Waugh that was around all through the 70s and 80s. Here is one of them:
Evelyn designed the cover for the original book, published in 1928. And his drawing style and subject, as with the Penguin designs by Bentley, is not unlike Alasdair’s. (Or at least that’s what I’m trying to persuade myself.) Indeed, I might scout around for drawings by Alasdair that might somehow adorn a notional edition of Decline and Fall, Vile Bodies, Black Mischief and A Handful of Dust. Those four books are a kind of parallel to Lanark: A Life in Four Books. I read the Waugh novels in 1975/76 and I read Lanark in 1982. I suspect Waugh's and Gray's creativity were driven by much the same things (sexual frustration and artistic ambition). Both those authors made a huge impact on my own evolving relationship to the world.
As I write this email a vague plan to expand it into a page for my Evelyn Waugh website begins to form. So maybe I’ll do that.
Best of luck with the ongoing Archive. If Alasdair could see what you’ve done he would be overcome with joy. If Evelyn could see what you’ve done he would get drunk with envy.
Best wishes
Duncan
TWO:
Doing what I said I might do: From vague plan to the following specific set of paragraphs.
Nobody will ever have considered Alasdair Gray and Evelyn Waugh together before. But why not? Basically, because they were from a different generation (Waugh born 1903, Gray 1934) and, more importantly, their politics were poles apart.
Gray was a socialist and a Scottish Nationalist. Waugh was a conservative Englishman. What I'll be arguing and illustrating is how their commitment to their own art, their blending of visual art and literature, and how they responded to a perceived rejection in love, means that they had an awful lot in common. I'll try and tease that out. Or maybe I'll just go for it by invoking the best work of each author and throwing one at the other and seeing what sticks. Starting with this:
Reproduced and annotated with the forbearance, I hope, of the copyright holder.
Alasdair Gray designed the cover of his own book, Lanark, just as Evelyn Waugh designed the cover of Decline and Fall. Readers of this website may be aware of Waugh's artwork (he designed many book covers for Chapman and Hall) but they won't be familiar with the following image except as the cover for Decline and Fall, Waugh's first novel.
In Decline and Fall, the protagonist goes from being a teacher, to a high society bridegroom, to a prisoner in solitary confinement, to a man of the cloth, which is where he started at the beginning of the book 'reading for the church at Scone College, Oxford'.
Does the cover concept even begin to work for Lanark? The protagonist goes from schoolboy to art student, to mysterious writer, to political bigwig. He goes from being a child to an old man. So, no, such a quartet of 25-year-olds doesn't work. All this exercise emphasises is that Gray and Waugh were into the visuals of their books, and constantly pictured - in their minds, on paper or canvas - what they were writing about.
Book One of Lanark was rejected by a London publisher in 1964 when Alasdair Gray was thirty and had been working on the material for eight years or so. In contrast, Evelyn Waugh's first novel, the aforementioned Decline and Fall, was published by his father's firm as soon as it was written in a Dorset pub where the 25-year-old was nightly in the company of the girl (also called Evelyn) he would marry the same summer the sun-kissed book came out. Gray's novel is a sensitive account of a harrowing Glasgow childhood. Waugh's was the hilarious story of young man, Paul Pennyfeather, who had been sent down from Oxford for indecent behaviour. The delicious comedy of naivety sees the book's protagonist get involved with a using, high-society beauty, an affair which ends up with Paul in the clink. However, 'stone walls do not a prison make. Nor iron bars a cell.' One laughs all the way through this dew-fresh book, whereas the story of Duncan Thaw is angst ridden at almost every turn.
.
Reproduced with the forbearance, I hope, of the copyright holders.
Let Glasgow flourish by telling the truth? Let Oxford flourish by taking the piss. Glasgow School of Art versus Oxford University? One up to the public school toffs.
Book two of Lanark follows Duncan Thaw as he tries to make it as an art student in Glasgow by isolating himself from other students and painting a mural in a church. Waugh's second novel is called Vile Bodies and deals with the romance between Adam and Nina. He was in the middle of writing it when his wife, known as She-Evelyn, wrote to tell him she'd fallen in love with a mutual friend, John Heygate. Waugh introduced a character called 'Ginger Littlejohn' and the second half of the book sees Ginger win Nina, lose Nina and win her again, much to Adam's disappointment. The book is funny but there is no disguising the bitterness.
.
Reproduced with the forbearance, I hope, of the copyright holders.
Does Waugh dissect Adam's emotions and responses to what is happening? No, not really, he's far too skilled a writer for that. The treatment is remarkably subtle, and Nina is not given a particularly hard time. But in reality, Evelyn Waugh was a broken man. Just as broken as Duncan Thaw is at the end of Book Two of Lanark where - disappointed in love, frustrated in art - Thaw commits suicide by drowning. Waugh's 'suicide' - death of the self - was in the form of converting to Roman Catholicism and travelling alone to East Africa.
.
Reproduced with the forbearance, I hope, of the copyright holders.
Book three of Lanark is the vital one, for in it Glasgow is transformed into Unthank, and Duncan Thaw into a mysterious, bookish 24-year-old man called Lanark. Gray has another go at portraying his city's art world, this time establishing closer relations to his fellow young folk.
Book three is placed in front of Books one and two, which would be crucial to the work's success. The reader comes across an imaginative achievement from the word go, and is not asked to read a more conventional narrative until more than a hundred pages into the work. But it must be remembered that none of this four-book cycle was published until 1981 when Alasdair Gray was nearly 50. Meanwhile, in Waugh's parallel world. The 30-year-old author gets back from Africa, writes a travel book about the experience, then writes a novel where the protagonist, Basil Seal, is much more confident (after all Vile Bodies was a bestseller) and helps Seth - an African that Basil knew at Oxford University - to run an African country. Civilisation, colonialism and barbarism. But where if not in Basil's manipulative heart is the source of the barbarism?
By the way, I'm having trouble deciding whether to use the black-and-white illustrations from my 1982 Granada copy of Lanark, which is falling apart, or the coloured-in versions that can be bought for about £1,000 as posters from Glasgow Print Studio.
.
Reproduced with the forbearance, I hope, of the copyright holders.
In book four of Lanark, our eponymous hero seems to make progress in his personal and political life. Via local councils, he gets an opportunity to move into government. Lanark is ageing quickly (then even more quickly) but he has a wife and son and they console him. He needs a lot of consolation as society is crumbling in front of his eyes and despite his best efforts to hold things together.
Meanwhile, Evelyn Waugh has made another solo journey, this one to the middle of the Amazon Jungle. Evelyn was in love again, this time with 'Baby' Jungman, but his feelings were not reciprocated, so again he dived into his religion and threw himself into such a danger-laden travel plan. When Waugh got back to Britain, he wrote another travel book and then the novel, A Handful of Dust, which ends with Waugh's protagonist, Tony Last, having to read the complete novels of Charles Dickens, volume by volume, over and over again, to the madman who had come to his rescue.
Gray has the last laugh over Waugh, as his 4-book creation comes across as layered and original, in part thanks to its 3, 1, 2, 4 structure. Whereas Waugh's four novels are not usually seen as increasingly desperate responses to frustrations in love. They go from happy to sad to cold to saddest.
Let us imagine Waugh himself lost in the jungle, forever having to read the four books of Lanark to a native that had decided there is no more layered work in existence, and that on each reading a different master (Joyce, Dante, Scott…) came to mind.
Tony Last's body was never found. But a headstone was mounted in the grounds of Hetton Abbey - the gothic house which marital infidelity had driven him out of - by a well-meaning, distant relative who had inherited the property. I've always thought the stone's inscription hilarious, and I've come across an Alasdair Gray image that provides the perfect opportunity to celebrate it's absurdity:
Reproduced and annotated with the forbearance, I hope, of the copyright holder.
1902 was the year of Evelyn Waugh's birth. (1903, actually.)
1934 was the year of Evelyn Waugh's death. (When he got back from the jungle he married, but not for love, and raised six children. He was dead all right. But life had to carry on in the intermittently lack-lustre way it did, until 1966, when the small bit of him that was still alive gave up the ghost.)
1934 was also the year of Alasdair Gray's birth.
THREE:
Back to those archives.
Part two was the 'serious' bit. (Sort of.) Now for some fun…
It was Neil Scott who encouraged me to visit the Alasdair Gray Archive where I took a few rushed photos such as the following one. It's not deliberate or appropriate that Sorcha Dallas is out of shot, as she has done everything to ensure the existence of the archive. But it is fortuitous for my photo that the face of Alasdair Gray is more or less visible behind the Custodian's arm. 
The next photo was not taken by me (probably by Ellie Harrison, who can also be seen in profile above). It is an excellent composition showing Neil sitting in Alasdair's seat in front of the old two-legged desk that Gray reclaimed and made functional by screwing the back of it to his library wall. Dig the seat though: two lines of metallic studs connecting stretches of green velvet to pieces of dark, Victorian wood. 
Reproduced with the forbearance, I hope, of the copyright holder.
On the wall behind the desk is a selection of books from Alasdair Gray's library. Most of Gray's library is in the room next door, the books shelved in the same order as they were found in the author's flat. Sorcha Dallas was responsible for clearing Gray's flat in the three months available to do so, and no doubt she did her best to accomplish the task in a systematic way. I'm not quite sure of the justification for separating the books shelved behind Neil in room one from the majority of the library in room two. Perhaps it's an attempt to get double the impact from a finite number of books. In any case, it makes a lot more sense than what happened to Evelyn Waugh's library.
When Waugh died unexpectedly at the age of 62, his wife was afraid (unnecessarily) that she and her six children would be impoverished, so she accepted an offer of a few thousand pounds for Waugh's library from an American, Harry Ransom. And so Waugh's superb and invaluable library, collected over a lifetime's intense interest in books, was imported to the University of Austin, Texas, where it was put into storage. The physical fabric of the library was also included in the deal: bespoke shelving, sculpture and carpets. Let me put it this way:
Reproduced with the forbearance, I hope, of the copyright holder.
The Harry Ransom Centre at the University of Austin is what the place is called and where many European authors' archives ended up. Ransom's booty also included most of Waugh's manuscripts, though they have been digitalised in recent decades and I have managed to obtain copies of the key ones. Thus removing the need to fly thousands of miles. Gray's manuscripts are held by the National Library of Scotland, Glasgow University Library and the Mitchell Library, each of which fine, public institutions I've visited for one reason or another.
I notice that there are three paperback volumes of Dante's Paradise Lost on the shelves. (Top right of the photo below.) Sorcha has told us that Alasdair Gray could not read Italian but that he used this Italian edition in coming up with his English version of the work. It was the last work Gray completed before he died. Reminds me of Evelyn Waugh's late biography of Ronald Knox, in that Knox's main achievement in life was to produce a new English version of the New Testament and the Old Testament. 
Reproduced with the permission of Neil Scott.
Sorcha, in her role as the Custodian of this Archive, has drawn our attention to the literary and artistic value of the book that rests open on Alasdair's desktop. It's an old ledger that Alasdair added to in various ways. For instance, photos of the Glasgow that Gray was familiar with, drawings both of real people he knew and others who populated his imagination, and even pages of manuscript. All this competes for attention with the original owner's mundane entries written in ink. Some of Lanark is written into the ledger, also in flowing ink, though I expect these paragraphs were then copied into other notebooks.
The recto of this particular double-page is dominated by photos that Alasdair stuck on top of what was already there.
It reminds me of The Book of Blood that was part of Evelyn Waugh's library. A unique Victorian volume full of religious symbols such as crucifixes dripping with red ink. 
The above is a typical page, though the photos - of Evelyn in Amazon explorer mode and of 'Baby' Jungman as chief banisher to the jungle - are additions I've made to my digital copy of the page. Well, if the technique was good enough for Alasdair, it's good enough for me.
Neil Scott comes back into the room. What does his hand signal mean? Does he want me to desist from taking photos or is he simply re-saying hello? 
I can't see why Neil would mind my taking a picture of one of Alasdair Gray's most atmospheric paintings. From children playing with a ball in the foreground, to the figure in apparent distress seen against the light from a room in the top floor of the tenement.
Although Evelyn Waugh did not paint much (he drew and made woodcuts and prints when he was a young man), in later life he collected Victorian paintings, and each year he went to the summer show at the Royal Academy, making his way to the room that displayed the three or four paintings shown annually by Charles Spencelayh, whose vision was inspired by the Victorian era. Here is an example of a classic Spencelayh. An elderly man sitting down surrounded by symbols of his inner life and his history.
Reproduced with the forbearance, I hope, of the copyright holder.
It's the details that make these paintings so absorbing. I apologise for the low quality of the above image which I scoured the internet for.
If it was only a few days ago that I visited the Alasdair Gray Archive in Glasgow, it was fourteen years ago that Alexander Waugh invited a coach-load of attendees of an Evelyn Waugh Conference at Downside, to his home in Milverton, near Taunton in Somerset. It's here that the Evelyn Waugh archive is housed as you'll soon see. But he had already selected a few items from the archive to show us as it was more practical to have his visitors sit comfortably in the kitchen of his house than to stand in the cramped archive.
Here's one exhibit showing a frontispiece that Evelyn made for the first edition of Vile Bodies. 
It reminds me a bit of this image that Alasdair used with the title page of Unlikely Stories, Mostly. Though in this image the forces of nature/culture are under man's control.
Reproduced with the forbearance, I hope, of the copyright holder.
The Vile Bodies frontispiece was also used as the cover design for the many early editions of the book. But something I have always found fascinating is that Evelyn (probably) took this photo of his home after his first wife had skedaddled with John Heygate. 
©Alexander Waugh, Waugh Family Archive, Milverton.
It's the only record of the shared space at Canonbury Square, Islington. On top of the mantelpiece, Evelyn has placed a painting of his, what I strongly suspect was an alternative cover to Vile Bodies. It features a target, a top hat, a bowler hat and letters that spell out the word 'BOGUS'. Not as strong a composition as the crashing racing car, but of compelling biographical interest nonetheless. On the table is a pile of books, and the book on top (a magnifying glass told me) is Living by Henry Green. That's a novel about factory life written by his Oxford (inevitably) friend, Henry Yorke, who wrote under the name of Henry Green.
Second exhibit from the Waugh Archive, circa 2011. Alexander is holding aloft one of the large-paper editions that Waugh paid for his publisher to print of each of his first four novels. Which suggests that the author was thinking of them as a set. 
The book's linen cover sports a coat of arms. Evelyn calculated that he had the right to have this on the front of his house. It drew on hereditary possessions on his mother's side (Herbert) and his father's (Waugh). Don't ask me for the details, that pedigree chum stuff doesn't float my boat.
However, Evelyn also had the coat of arms made into a book plate. Here is one that I've added two small figures to.
Bookplate, prior to annotations, courtesy of Alexander Waugh.
The 'Industria Ditat' (work enriches) thing reminds me of something that Alasdair Gray came up with by way of book embellishment:
Reproduced, I hope, with the forbearance of the copyright holder.
The coat of arms bookplate is the second of two bookplates that Waugh designed for himself. This was the first:
Bookplate courtesy of Evelyn Waugh Library, Harry Ransom Center, Univ. of Texas.
Which just about brings to mind this title page from Gray's Unlikely Stories, Mostly:
Reproduced, I hope, with the forbearance of the copyright holder.
I suspect if Alexander Waugh had opened up that red, hardback copy of Black Mischief, the title page would have appeared as in this Penguin:
Reproduced, I hope, with the forbearance of the copyright holder.
Has Alasdair Gray ever drawn an image of a man shooting a gun into the air? And did he claim it to be the work of a 'native artist'? Alas, my knowledge of his images is not encyclopaedic. Basically, I am grabbing whatever I have to hand and hoping that the parallels - and the reader's imagination - are strong enough to make connections. 
I remember taking this photo. Or rather I remember Alexander saying: "Bloody hell, Duncan. Can you do something about that flash?"
The rest of the party went back onto the bus while I was invited into the archive. Alexander hoped I might visit it again when there was more time to spend considering its riches, but this was a chance for me to form a first impression. I hope the rest of the bus party didn't mind too much as I took full advantage of the opportunity.
I think I described the Waugh Archive as being kept in a shed. Looking at the above photo I am reminded that it was a low-ceilinged room at the back of the house. The shelving was functional but no more than that. One felt sorry for the loss of the beautiful library of Evelyn's to another continent.
As you can see, the objects in the library are books and files. The files contain letters, some of which were published in The Letters of Evelyn Waugh, but many more remain unpublished. Letters and diaries form 13 volumes of 'Personal Writings' of the 43 book series comprising The Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh. Fifteen of the 43 volumes have been published over the last decade (only one volume of Personal Writings), but what will happen to the rest now that Alexander Waugh has died?
The project is all so exclusively literary. Worse, pedantically academic. The Penguin editions mostly have notes and introductions already - what a waste of time is the million pound OUP initiative! And nobody is interested. Actually, that's not true. I doth protest too much! I would love to have access to several of the volumes. But not even city libraries can afford more than one or two of these £100 volumes.
I wonder if the Oxford University Press poisoned dear Alexander in 2024. So as no longer to feel obliged to print and bind the books. I don't suppose that possibility has been investigated by Inspector Morse. I would be willing to investigate it, but only as a contemporary art project.
Speaking of which. Part four. Let the fun really start.
FOUR:
An Armchair Monologue Variation.
As I said in my email to Sorcha Dallas, the website of AGA has a Projects page and on that is something called The Armchair Monologues. It focuses on Alasdair's library seat and Michael Pedersen has written a poem about it from the chair's perspective. The poem begins:
The writer sits here, sometimes, though mainly
it's the bums of visitants—crisp crunching
tongue-flappers—the odd dog with
its belly full of sun. Cheek of them,
leaving litter braising in my fissures, the body's
party-bag of skin shavings, crushed
eyelashes, & the rest.
It's all good, the poem I mean, but I shouldn't quote too much of it, thereby encouraging the reader to go in search of the full thing. However, I must quote this part where the chair is talking about Alasdair Gray:
A piece of advice, if you ask him
& he doesn't rejoinder, don't repeat
the damn question. He heard you fine—
it's not a shun, just not to his, albeit queer,
taste.
Those lines remind me that Evelyn used to have a pre-printed postcard which he would post to correspondents: 
Back to the poem for one last extract about the chair, which I suspect Alasdair picked up on the street as he did his old desk:
One final musing
from this seventies kid, naebody's bairn,
found begging by the roadside:
when possible, do simple things
to make others happy, even when it's easier
not to—it helps the crowded hearted ones
in their great uncluttering.
On the AGA website the poem is read sweetly by its author, Michael Pedersen, and annotated beautifully by Ben Woodcock. Here sits Alasdair on the seat in his flat in the West End of Glasgow: 
Reproduced with the forbearance, I hope, of the copyright holder.
And here is an equivalent image of Evelyn Waugh sitting in his library/study at Combe Florey, the house in Somerset where he lived his final decade.
I shouldn't really use the image, as it may be an infringement of Bridgman Images copyright. The photo was taken by Mark Gerson, who twice gained access to Waugh's library and took illuminating photos in 1959 and 1963. I hope reproducing one of Gerson's important historical images at this point can be accepted as representing fair use in a non-commercial context:
Reproduced with the forbearance, I hope, of the copyright holder.
Rodge Glass, Gray's biographer, tells us: 'Alasdair Gray was not always the rapidly aging, fat Glasgow pedestrian he likes to describe on the inside leaf of his books'. While Evelyn Waugh's note to a visitor to Combe Florey, who he was due to meet for the first time at the local railway station, told him to look out for a man who was 'short, elderly and corpulent'.
It was not so much that Gray and Waugh shared a certain physique, but that they valued objectivity, lacked vanity and looked to poke humour at themselves. Would they have enjoyed each other's company? If they avoided the subject of Politics (with capitals S and E), certainly.
Shall we arrange a meeting between them? Are you up for it, Alasdair?
Reproduced with the forbearance, I hope, of the copyright holder.
Perhaps they could meet up at the Royal Academy and peruse the annual exhibition of Charles Spencelayh paintings.
Reproduced with the forbearance, I hope, of the copyright holder.
Alasdair was at regular if infrequent visitor to London, after all.
Reproduced with the forbearance, I hope, of the copyright holder.
It was almost as difficult for Waugh to get from his homes in Gloucestershire and Somerset to Mayfair. But he managed to do it for most of his life, staying at The Hyde Park Hotel from where he made - often drunken - sojourns into Piccadilly via White's club.
After a convivial, largely liquid lunch, Alasdair and Evelyn regard the first of the Spencelayhs which features an old man with the red bandana handkerchief that often crops up in a Spencelayh composition. 
.
Reproduced with the forbearance, I hope, of the copyright holders.
The painting is called, The Passing of Time, and features an elderly man turning the pages of a photograph album. There is a grandfather clock in the background, as there often is in Spencelayh pictures, and an abundance of apples.

Imagine the pleasure with which Evelyn and Alasdair would have drank in the details of this picture. The grandfather clock ticking out the afternoon in the background. The apples ripening over days on top of the mirror. One apple has been peeled and eaten as the old man in the picture has flicked through the pages of the photo album covering how many years? The mirror playing on the word 'reflection'. How exquisite is this painting? One could look at it for minutes, months, a lifetime, two people's lifetimes. I feel sure that Evelyn and Alasdair could have looked at it for minutes that felt like months. Why not?
'What do you think, Evelyn? Fancy an apple?"
"We don't have that many left, Alasdair."
"True. And they need to be eaten while they're still ripe. Before ripe turns to rot."
"And while we've still got teeth, tongue and tastebuds for the job."
In due course, they shuffle to the next picture, Not Alone.
..
Reproduced with the forbearance, I hope, of the copyright holders.
A masterpiece of nomenclature and symbolism (though ignore the labels, which are not part of the painting, just part of the only reproduction of it I could trace). The old man is seated, red bandana neatly showing, with hands folded on calf-bound bible, a look of earnest faith in his eyes, an oleograph of Christ behind his head, and an empty bird cage signifying the loss of some fellow creature that was important to him.
Evelyn: "Do you think his wife has left him?"
Alasdair: "Possibly. But Christ is sticking by our friend."
Evelyn: "May we all be so lucky… I would dearly like to own that."
Alasdair: "Me too. Though I prefer my bird cages occupied."
They shuffle on a few paces.
Evelyn: "Like this one?"
.
Reproduced with the forbearance, I hope, of the copyright holders.
Alasdair: "Call me old-fashioned, but I prefer to take my hat off when talking to a bird."
Evelyn: "Can you imagine reading aloud the novels of Charles Dickens, over and over again, to such a man?"
Alasdair: "Sadly, yes."
They move on, until standing in front of the fourth of four Spencelayhs.
Evelyn: "This one then?"
.
Reproduced with the forbearance, I hope, of the copyright holders.
Alasdair: "Perfection. He is a fine figure of a man, is he not?"
Evelyn: "We are all fine figures of men. And those of us that are women are fine figures of women also."
Alasdair: "Did you say 'wimen'?"
Evelyn: "I don't think so. Certainly, I didn't mean to."
Alasdair: "Wimen!"
Evelyn: "I loved one or two of them in my younger days, to no avail I thought at the time. But I now realise that in loving one or two of them in vain, I have come to love them all unconditionally. Men and women."
Alasdair: "Ach…Ach… Ach… Ach what's this?… Ach…Ach… Ach… Ach tears… Ach…Ach… Ach… Ach floods of them…Ach…Ach… Ach… Ach stop it… Ach…Ach… Ach… Ach why stop it?…Ach…Ach… Ach… Ach poor children, poor children."
Evelyn: "We were all ignorant. We didn't know how to be good to each other."
Alasdair: "Ach well…Ach well… Ach well..."
I've just noticed something. That the final lines of Gray's 1982, Janine and Waugh's Officers and Gentlemen call out to each other:
My voice. "All right."
"All right, Halberdier Colour-Sergeant Oldenshaw. All right."
I'll leave it there.
Reproduced with the forbearance, I hope, of the copyright holders.
Yes, we'll leave it there.
Notes
1) This text is full of embedded plagiarisms, as Alasdair Gray would/might have put it. It's Evelyn Waugh and AG that I've riffed off, by and large, the most obvious example being the end of 1982, Janine.
2) This is the site where Alasdair Gray's visual art work can be seen and purchased.
3) And this is the WRITING page of Neal Scott's site.
4) If you've enjoyed this essay and want to know more about Alasdair Gray. This is his official archive.
5) This page being of particular relevance to the above essay.

