Nothing could seem less personal than these stories, grotesque and distant from the world of a Glasgow Art College student of the 1950s. But the Nastler-Creator of Lanark is a wilful and wayward conjuror, and in fact Parisian intellectual Pollard is yet another version of Duncan Thaw, Bohu, Kelvin Walker, McLeish, Lanark, Thomas Urquhart. Pollard’s “I can only represent Gods, and lonely intelligences, and multitudes viewed from a very great distance … To pay the printers … I went shabby and hungry …” surely recalls the similar complaints of Lanark, Thaw and Nastler? Even closer to home and to Duncan Thaw is Pollard’s student career; “I depressed my professors at the Sorbonne by finally submitting no thesis. A poet need not truck with bureaucrats.” But a new and yet more striking identification also enters here. Gray has Pollard explicitly link his loneliness with that of God, and his proud intellectual separation from humanity with God’s. “My infancy resembled that of God, my ancestor”, he tells us. Behind this “joke” of Pollard lies a strange metaphysic of Gray’s, which will extend itself in the Gray-Nastler-Lanark-Thaw manipulations of the novel and become most sophisticated in Jock McLeish’s recognition of God within himself, the inner voice which stops his suicide in Janine. This story marks the introduction of this final, spiritually enigmatic theme, which enables Gray to envisage a possible and positive ending to his Urquhart-like quest.
Pollard’s story doesn’t reach the qualified optimism of passages of Lanark or the stern acceptance of self in Janine. Pollard (the name suiting his human insufficiency, his blighted growth) fails in his attempt to find love, since Lucie will not accept his estimate of himself as mirrored in the myth of Prometheus, nor will she surrender to the intolerable selfishness which will use her as supporting anima. She tells him that he is “the cleverest, most deluded man I have ever met. Rewriting Prometheus Unbound is like rewriting Genesis, it can be done but who needs it? It is just another effort to put good wine in a filthy old bottle.” Both Pollard and Lucie recognise the sham of his “divine” vocation, his noble destiny. She reduces his grandiose self-projections to what could be seen as their only reality:
My poor dwarf, you are the last nineteenth-century romantic liberal. That is why corrupt government wishes to make you a national institution. Which brings me, beloved, to what you REALLY want from me: cunt. In your eyes it probably looks like an entrance to the human race …
The Holy Fool is often reduced in Gray’s work by the ferocious female. What emerges is a profoundly personal statement of despair about the mismatch of human needs and longings. Beautiful girls love worthless men; the central figure finds increasingly that talent and intelligence are no guarantee of success in sexual and emotional relations. Thus the identification with God is both admission of failure (who wants a relationship with something so inhuman?) and consolation for that failure. The story ends with a howl of anguish — trapped by the earthy manageress, his unloved mistress, he cries out:
Lucie, if you do not return I must fall forever into her abyss … Oh Lucie Lucie Lucie save me from her. The one word this poem exists to clarify is lonely. I am Prometheus. I am lonely …
And Gray’s carefully arranged illustrations and emblems now begin to tail off, till, after the drawing of Prometheus, naked, arms outstretched, falling, we are left with final drawings of the voyaging knight, now an old man, sailing on stoically till — watch the endpapers — he’s last seen edging past Arran, past Ailsa Craig which carries a sign (his destination?) “Glasgow 78 miles”. Thus Gray slyly connects his allegories to home. ‘Prometheus’ was even more revealing of this connection. While Lucie had read through Pollard’s version of the myth of Prometheus, recognising his distortion of the myth for his own sexual and emotional needs, Pollard had waited, vultures tearing at his liver, for her response — which was rejection. “Pollard” then makes his final revelation.
This story is a poem, a wordgame. I am not a highly literate French dwarf, my lost woman is not a revolutionary writer manque, my details are fictions, only my meaning is true and I must make that meaning clear by playing the wordgame to the bitter end.
Who is speaking? It must be the author behind Pollard. Who is that? We can’t simply say ‘Gray’ — for Lanark shows us there can be authors behind authors behind authors. Gray’s allegories express yet conceal their continual agonising over a basic human situation in which a highly talented but socially eccentric and physically unattractive protagonist has to realise that his idealistic Promethean aspiration after truth and justice and beauty may finally be seen as self-interested sexual desire dressed up to look good.
There’s even further satire on Gray’s part, in that Pollard’s great project, the completion of Aeschylus’s lost Prometheus Unbound, isn’t even original. Gray knows of Shelley’s 1820 version, of course, and how Shelley’s sentiments anticipate Pollard’s. Clearly Pollard is being shown as a derivative egotist rather than an original genius. When one places this alongside Gray’s mockery of his own literary creativity (and of course, his mockery of literary criticism) in his “Index of Plagiarisms” in Lanark, the full paradox of Gray’s literary achievement can be recognised. It is an achievement which rests on Gray’s perception of his own creativity which constantly questions the validity of that creativity, and questions the emotional and sexual motivation behind it, firstly in relation to himself, and thereafter in relation to writers and artists at large.