Shades of Gray

From a distance, the life of the brilliantly subversive Scottish writer and artist Alasdair Gray has often seemed one of chaos and dissipation. Things don't look much better up close in Rodge Glass' Alasdair Gray: A Secretary's Biography, which variously paints him as garrulous, self-centered and a "bloody devious old bastard" to boot. That's probably not the picture Gray had in mind when he agreed to let Glass, his factotum and former student, be his biographer and shouted, "Be my Boswell ... Tell the world of my genius."

The result is a strange but nourishing stew of interviews, anecdotes and entries from Glass' diary that lay bare Gray's high self-esteem, but also capture his reckless enthusiasm for every project that takes his fancy; his poems, plays, political treatises, paintings, drawings and even typography all deftly recycle the stuff of his own life story. Born in Glasgow's East End in 1934, Gray was always as at home with words and pictures as he was set apart from society by his lifelong asthma and eczema. At Glasgow's School of Art, he specialized in mural-painting before graduating to a life of persistent penury with a four-year, wage-free commission to paint The Seven Days of Creation on the ceiling and walls of a local church. Almost no one saw it before the building was razed.

Gray wove his early struggles into Lanark, the autobiographical novel that finally put him on literature's world map in 1981. His novels and stories since then, as well as the murals he barters for lunches, or the exquisite illustrations and typography of the Book of Prefaces he spent more than a decade fussing over, have rarely reverberated beyond Glasgow or his faithful readers. Glass portrays an artist too engrossed in his own creativity to notice. Gray, a jack of all trades, is master of one: himself.