David J Black

Alasdair Gray was the quintessential Glasgow author. The city is imprinted on his text, albeit with a hint of his idiosyncratic urban metaphysic. With a grid street plan and a wise-cracking populace well seasoned with the descendants of 19th century Jewish, Italian, and Irish immigrants and their 20th century Asian successors Glasgow is the nearest thing Scotland has to a gutsy American city. Moreover, Gray was drawing upon a tradition of distinctly Scottish ‘mythic realism’ which dates back to James Hogg’s 1824 Confessions of a Justified Sinner. And Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde.

We might wonder how much more unobserved Scottishness lurks within the American literary canon, and indeed it’s surprising how deep-rooted that Scottish link was in the nascent DNA of American writing. Some Scottish references are downright quirky, as when the narrator in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Nick Carraway, claims to be a descendant of the Scottish Dukes of Buccleuch (a challenging pronunciation, for many Americans!)

Herman Melville, on the other hand, was genuinely descended from a minister of Scoonie, in Fife, and visited Scotland in 1856, a few years after he had written Mardi: A Voyage Thither, which features “Kaleedoni, a country integrally united to Dominora”. This is clearly Scotland (or Caledonia) contained within a dominant Britain. “In Kaleedoni was much to awaken the fervor of its bards.” Melville wrote “Upland and lowland were full of the picturesque; and many unsung lyrics yet lurked in her glens. Among her blue, heathy hills, lingered many tribes, who in their wild and tattooed attire, still preserved the garb of the mightiest nation of old times.” This nostalgia seems at odds with Melville’s support for the ‘Young America’ movement which encouraged ‘patriotic’ American authors to break away from European literary precedents by developing a more independent model relevant to the values of the new democratic republic.

This sentimental link was not universally shared among Scots of American descent. The architect of the Washington monument, Robert Mills, declared he had no interest in his Dundee ancestry and wished to be only a fully-fledged American. Washington Irving, whose father was from Shapinsay, in Orkney, was different. His reputation may have been based on comic depictions of characters in New York’s Dutch community who shared with the Scots the status of quaint outsiders. Walter Scott read extracts from Dietrich Knickerbocker’s History of New York to his house guests and reported “our sides have been absolutely sore with laughing”. Irving would, in time, become an Abbotsford house guest and a long time friend. He was also close to the Scottish artist Sir David Wilkie, and dedicated his Tales of the Alhambra to him.

Edgar Allan Poe, a major influence on Alasdair Gray, even attended the Kailyard Grammar School in Irvine, Ayrshire, though not for long. His studies involved lurking around the nearby graveyard where he would be set to copying inscriptions from the monuments, which possibly tells us something about the later turn of mind of the author of The Raven. His family’s immigration was short lived, though enough to enable visits to Glasgow and Edinburgh. The headstone of his relatives “David Poe, late carrier in Saltcoats – and Ann Allan, his wife” is now a revered artefact in the local Museum.

There are other examples a-plenty. I recall reading somewhere in America that the writer William Faulkner (original family name Falconer), who gave us the immortal phrase “the past is never dead; it is not even past” kept an inherited Jacobite sword hanging in his study. Upton Sinclair was keenly aware of his Scottish ancestry, and John Steinbeck, a Hamilton on his mother’s side, had Burns to thank for the book title Of Mice and Men. The Quaker Poet John Greenleaf Whittier was another fan of Burns.

It may not matter overmuch to cinema audiences that these Scots-American literary links actually existed, though Alasdair Gray was profoundly aware of them, and celebrated “Melville’s Moby Dick with its combination of great idioms: natural history, factory ship, oil industry, Shakespearean monologue, Yankee wisecracks, Wordsworthian meditation.” He also admits “I stole a passage from Edgar Allan Poe” for Lanark.

There were other influences on Alasdair Gray too. Shaw, Ibsen, Dante, Burns, Sterne, Joyce, Swift, Kafka - especially Kafka – yet the metaphysical golden thread between Scottish and American literary fiction in the decades following US independence – especially the era of the Young America movement and The Democratic Review – has its perceptible, if faint, echo in the Victorian setting of Poor Things.

There is, today, a pressing reason why we should retain such cultural links in our transatlantic collective memory, and it can be summed up in one word. Ukraine. America, increasingly, has chosen to detach itself from the post-Second World War values of the rest of the democratic world. The result of this isolationism could be disastrous for all of us, and it would only be a general benefit if our senior politicians would recognise the ties that bind us together, rather the disagreements which divide us.

On the other hand, it was probably too much to expect a Greek film maker and his Australian scriptwriter to grasp this sort of subtlety, but it can certainly be argued that Poor Things would have been a more nuanced film if it had kept elements of that Glaswegian hinterland.

At least we have William Dafoe to thank for retaining something of the Clydeside spirit in his interestingly crafted accent. Alasdair Gray would have chuckled with satisfaction, no doubt about it, though what Bill Skinner would have made of it is anyone’s guess.