The Fall of Kelvin Walker

12/12/2025

Literature    Download PDF  

Nietzsche or Nurture

In Chapter 3 of Alasdair Gray’s The Fall of Kelvin Walker, the titular character from a Scottish village is in London trying to make something of himself and has thus far only succeeded in making a modest hash of his personal finances. He has taken a woman he met in a cafe out for an expensive meal and discovers that when the bill comes, he doesn’t have the cash to cover it. Jill finds a way to pay the difference and takes him back to the flat she shares with her painter boyfriend. Looking at paintings on the wall and a work on the easel, Kelvin says to Jake,   “I cannot understand how a man capable of painting these should waste his time on that.” Jake replies, saying, “the first two are reproductions. The one on the easel is mine.” Jake might be inept, but he is undeniably modern, evident when Kelvin asks what his painting is about and Jake says, “It’s about black and white.”
He is an abstract painter who isn’t interested in content but form, and we could see Alasdair Gray, in both painting and literature, wishes to straddle old-fashioned forms with new-fangled methods. Just as his paintings are neither quite modern nor old-fashioned, one can say the same about his fiction: Lanark, Poor Things, Something Leather, Unlikely Stories, Mostly. Speaking of the art, Margery Palmer McCulloch says, “...one can see from the illustrations in A Life In Pictures, Gray’s visual art does not conform either to what he considered the old-fashioned conventions of his teachers or to the early twentieth-century formal innovations of European artists such as Picasso, Braque, Matisse or the Scottish J. D. Fergusson.” (The Bottle Imp)
The fiction also doesn’t quite conform to the modern, but is far from 19th-century realism either. It instead seeks to find in tone the need to tell a story well, and a reflexive awareness that he is telling it far too simply. In other books, this voice becomes part of its material form, with both Unlikely Stories, Mostly and Poor Things making much of Gray’s artwork in the book’s design. In both these works, he also makes much use of different fonts, italics and bold. They are fine examples of what Cairns Craig has called the typographic muse. In The Fall of Kelvin Walker Gray offers typographical sobriety, perhaps partly because the work originated as a theatre production filmed in 1968, with Harry H Corbett as Jake. But that doesn’t mean it is any different from other Gray books when it comes to his most important contribution to contemporary literature: a voice that manages to create the smoothest of narratives within the most facetious of tones. It is as though the story is there to illustrate a thesis the writer himself isn’t sure he believes in but insists he must offer nonetheless. The voice is the opposite of hectoring, while it possesses a paradoxical assertiveness. It is there when the narrator says, “London was wealthy. Other British cities, Glasgow for example (he had seen Glasgow) had been built by money and still contained large amounts of it, but money seemed a slower substance in the north — a powerful substance, certainly, but stolid.” It is the generalization within the perceptually specific, even more evident when the narrator says that those in the north had not been liberated by money: “Their faces were as severe, their mouths as grimly clenched as those without. But here in London — had it happened a year ago or a century or many centuries? — money had accumulated to a point where it had flashed into wealth, and wealth was free, swift, reckless, mercuric.” That question mark undermines the authority of the generalization and leaves us with an omniscient narrator who suddenly doesn’t seem so omniscient after all.
        Speaking of the work in a 1995 interview with Mark Axelrod, Gray said, “as to my political reasons for writing it—I had none at all. The politics of any story I tell are the politics of the country where I live.” He offers a political position as a pun on position, finally less about a stance than a socio-political reality. “I see myself as another Scottish writer nurtured by the postwar welfare state”,  he notes, and adds that the idea for the project initially came to him in 1964. “I got a telegram from a friend in the London BBC, telling me to phone him, reversing the charges. I had no telephone then, was living on the social security dole with my wife and our one-year-old son…He [friend and documentary filmmaker Bob Kitts] arranged for me to leave the Sauchiehall Street labor exchange (where I had to sign in punctually once a week), go by taxi to Glasgow airport, collect my tickets at the B.E.A. desk, fly to London, and be met by a glossy Daimler, which drove me at once to the headquarters of BBC television…” (The Review of Contemporary Fiction)
          Gray tells it as he would in his fiction, as a world of absurd contrasts (the dole and the Daimler) that can coexist in reality and must inevitably coexist on the page. The contrasts often register a baffled innocence that in another narrator might be conveyed by registering, condescendingly, characterisational ignorance. Far into the book and long after Jill has left the aggressive yet materially docile Jake, for the docile but materially aggressive Kelvin, she sits thinking about her time. The narrator compares her being with Jake and with Kelvin, saying, “she wondered why when the days she had no housework and hung about waiting for Jake had been more interesting. She decided that the interest came from uncertainty about time. When waiting for Jake her reading might continue for ten minutes or an hour or six hours. With Kelvin she had four vacant hours at least five days a week.” The narrator proposes that she was more herself waiting for an unreliable man than waiting for a reliable one, and by the end of the book, she will be back with Jake, who has a proper job and is no longer domestically violent. When Jake and Jill initially split up, the narrator tells us that “Jake had an uncanny sensation of being part of a world he could not control. Even when smashing furniture in the heat of wrath he was doing what he liked, but now he felt reality was being pulled like a rug from under his feet by forces he could not recognise, though Kelvin, standing still and wooden, seemed to be the centre of them.” As for Kelvin, after his fall, after his brief and brilliant career as a TV interviewer is over, and after his father has condemned him on live television, “Kelvin had tied his body in a knot for two reasons, One was to shield him from the falling glances of the studio audience and those three extra millions who were surveying him through the cameras…the other was to protect him from the shattering contempt of his [minister] father.”
   In each instance, characters are somehow beside themselves; in the sense that they aren’t quite father to their thoughts — more like second cousins as the narrator takes over their minds, all the better to comprehend them since the characters can’t quite do so themselves. Yet if we accept this approach, it is perhaps for two reasons: the first is a jovial assumption that nobody knows themselves very well, and we could all benefit from a benign narrator capable of determining what our thoughts and feelings really might be. The second is that Gray’s narrational voice insists this is a work that isn’t to be taken too seriously and that the characters are one-dimensional figures, given three-dimensionality by the facetiousness of Gray’s thesis. If characters hardly know what they think and feel, and success looks as though it is predicated on absurd luck and idiotic ambition, then a character like Kelvin Walker can rise and fall within a period of months. Equally, Jill can accept getting knocked about by Jake, and Jake can realize that his abusive behaviour masks a deep tenderness. Whatever the potential suspect sexual politics one might see in the Jake and Jill relationship, Gray wants to extract from it an affection for his characters. Gray might have little interest in realism, but he could well have had in mind an interview the most famous Scot of his era (and a near contemporary) offered when, in the very year Gary wrote the play, Sean Connery said in Playboy magazine: “I don't think there is anything particularly wrong about hitting a woman - although I don't recommend doing it in the same way that you'd hit a man. An open-handed slap is justified - if all other alternatives fail and there has been plenty of warning. If a woman is a bitch, or hysterical, or bloody-minded continually, then I'd do it.”  
  Of course, we have no idea if Gray read the interview or not - that isn’t the point; it is only to say that attitudes like Jake’s were not unusual and could be expressed by a famous actor in the mid-sixties without fearing it would end his career. Jake and Jill are devoted to each other in their way, and Gray proposes that they just need to grow up a bit, with Jake needing to realize the affection is far from one-sided. When earlier in the book Jake returns with a bouquet of red roses, he still can’t quite match his hope with his expectation, and Gary inevitably fills in for him. “For half an hour Jake, moved by that self-denying impulse which surfaces in most people when they are absolutely certain of getting what they want, argued on Kelvin’s behalf.” Gray proposes that Jake only wants to argue Kelvin’s case because it is a lost one, but he argues for it nevertheless, and Gray draws out the humour of someone who might be feeling that he has found a way back into Jill’s affections, even if he is arguing another man’s case. It is funny because the narrator knows better than he does exactly what he is doing.
          “I do not need to approach the notion of audience, since I write a language which, if purged of repetition, pompous cliche, and needlessly long words, makes sense to most people”, Gray says. “If an American reader finds my Scottish references and idioms more confusing than the Wessex ones of Hardy and the Irish ones of Joyce, it is because I am an inferior writer, not because I write with a narrower audience in mind.” (Dalkey Archive)  He also reckons that the problem might be one of labelling: “I still meet decent, intelligent folk who say they feel they ought to buy a book of mine but fear it will be too clever for them…That is what comes of being praised or condemned as a postmodernist.” (Dalkey Archive)  The term is often more intimidating than the results, and in Gray’s hands needn’t usually cause a reader many difficulties since the purpose isn’t to make the story more convoluted, but to insist on a tone that makes the narrative stupendously straightforward. A combination of Rastignac and Dick Whittington, Walker is a 1960s version of the man making good at a time when working-class figures in the arts and elsewhere were beginning to do alright for themselves (including, of course, Mr Connery). Kelvin’s prompt rise to the top may be narratively improbable, but it would have been socially conceivable, just as seventy years earlier, no matter how vivid Thomas Hardy’s Jude The Obscure is, as it covers hundreds of pages in the life of its titular character, Jude’s attempts to rise educationally are seen as impossible. The energy of Gray’s novella comes from the combination of social possibility meeting narrative absurdity, and the postmodern in Gray’s hands is, in some ways, a product of societal changes as readily as literary ones. It is as if he knows he can get away with the most fast-paced of tales because post-war Britain offered social change at a velocity that was not so very different. After all, the person he relies on to give him a leg up is Hector McKellar, a man also from the same village as Kelvin: Glaik. He first hopes to use McKellar’s name in a vain attempt at getting a foot in various doors that he knows would remain unopened were he to use his own nomenclature. Later at an interview, he discovers that a Mr Brown knows that he isn’t who Walker claims to be, as he knows McKellar very well — they were at Edinburgh University together.  If Walker keeps insisting he is McKellar, Brown will have no choice but to inform the police. But he also says: “give me your address. If I can recommend you to a position of power without suffering the consequences I’ll get in touch.”
      Yet what Gray captures too is a lethargy within the pace of change, and the ongoing presence of a class system that indicates, despite the surface opportunities for those on the make, many are still clearly a product of their background. These may be paradoxes, perhaps, but Gray has never been shy of those. Jake admits that when saying people who know little take for granted positions of power, he is well aware why. “I know what I’m talking about. My parents are rich. I’ve been to public school. I’m a member of the ruling classes all right but thank God I’m a decadent member.” He might bully Jill a bit, but that is only because he is in a bad mood; nothing so grand as seeking power. He sees Kelvin as a young man who hasn’t had his confidence bought and paid for, a prosthetic assurance financed by parents belonging to a class that they insistently make sure will be their children’s lot as well. It might seem there are contradictions in the book, but Gray would probably say these are less of his making than the consequences of a post-war Britain, one that has kept in place many aspects of British society, welded onto them a post-war welfare state, and this leaves in place many with the privileges they have to come to expect, over several generations, while most will remain within their working class confines, now given architectural clarity in the high rise housing estates peppering the skylines of numerous cities, including of course Gray’’s own: Glasgow. But out of them, and also from small villages and towns throughout Britain, will appear people like Kelvin Walker, as though formed from an assumption of post-war hope which proposed that while people like Kelvin may not be running the country, they can certainly get on if they have ambition, energy and glaik.
     Glaik, after all,  isn’t only the fictional village Kelvin Walker comes from; it is also a Scots word for deception and a fool. It is a combination that can work well even if it isn’t very sustainable, especially when Kelvin thinks he might be able to have a proper say in things. When early in the book he announces to Jill why he has no interest in starting at the bottom as she suggests, he says, "nowadays the ladders are so long that the folks who start at the bottom have to retire before reaching the middle. Nearly all the people at the top started climbing a few rungs under it. Furthermore, the nearer the top you are the less real qualifications matter.” What matters is “…total self-confidence and the ability to see when the folk under you are doing their jobs, and you can usually see that by the expression on their faces.” If these are the requisite skills and Walker possesses them, then why should his background hamper him from such positions?
             This doesn’t mean we have a functioning society, but it does allow for a class system to seem more mobile than it is, and Kelvin manages, through McKellar, to get a job interviewing various people in politics. Out of the paradox that proposes Britain is changing quickly and hardly changing at all, Kelvin comes along and proves both claims simultaneously true. He gets the job through connections and gets sacked by those who think he is getting too big for his working-class boots. If Kelvin thinks that “…energy, intelligence and integrity” will secure him what he needs from life, then this hasn’t stopped him using McKellar’s name to kickstart it. But while Kelvin believes he only requires it so that he can reveal his singular qualities, Gray shows that the name matters but not quite in the way Kelvin assumes. On the one hand, this is a story about a young man who promptly rises to the top when given the opportunity to interview the prime minister, but not before a few tests where he interviews fictional creations to see how he would handle a cabinet minister, a housewife and a bishop. McKellar reckons Kelvin Walker is the right man because the interview will offer a nice contrast between the Welsh trade unionist now heading the government and the Scottish interviewer: “McKellar believed that a collision between a Scottish and a Welsh accent would greatly amuse the English viewers and make his newest employee a national celebrity." McKellar reckons such occasions are an alternative to revolution: if he brings members of the working class into the establishment, it might appear there is no establishment at all. “But unluckily it is becoming hard to find people who talk their local dialect with any confidence. I blame the educational system”, McKellar says. “It destroys the confidence of ordinary folk and channels the smart ones into universities from which they emerge as unlike their parents as possible.”
      Kelvin gets his opportunity and takes it well. The interview with Jones is smooth without being soft, and Jones admits that he faced some tough questions but believed he weathered them. When Jones notes that Walker is a new name, he asks him where he worked before, and Kelvin says his father’s grocery store. Jones raises his eyebrow as though class progression is moving faster than even he might have wished. Jones at least had a middle-class father, his union was white-collar, and it is chiefly his Welsh accent that gives the impression of working-class origins. From the outside, it looks as though Walker can regard himself as very lucky indeed. But from the inside, Kelvin would insist this is what happens when someone with pure will can shape their destiny. He is a Nietzchean man, someone who announces early on to Jake that he discovered the German philosopher in the local library. Nietzsche “…showed that since there is no longer a God to give shape and purpose in life it was necessary for the few who could face this fact to take the responsibility themselves. So yesterday, without telling a soul, I lifted my savings and came here.”  
There are many merits to Nietzsche’s thinking, yet one of the weaknesses may be that a young man might believe willpower is enough: he needn’t assume any victory is socially wind-assisted. When Gray speaks of seeing himself as a product of a post-war welfare state, he acknowledges that he is less Nietzsche than nurture, a figure whose personal progression cannot be separated from the soil of Scotland, the United Kingdom’s post-war, Keynesian consensus politics, and having the good luck to get into the Glasgow School of Art. In Gray’s story (about Alasdair Taylor), 'Portrait of a Painter', the narrator says, “one rare strong person who loves and supports your talent can outweigh a society which does not give a damn about you”, but it helps if society is there too, even if it doesn’t give a damn about the work. However, whether it is the love of someone dear, or the indifferent yet benign presence of the state, the sort of self-progression Kelvin pursues was never something Gray was going to take too seriously, and especially in a young man who might have believed God was as dead, as Nietzsche claimed, but hardly likely when a product of so theological an upbringing.  (Nietzsche was the son of a Lutheran minister himself.) Society has always mattered more than God to Gray, and the following remarks from Poor Things might sum up the writer’s beliefs: “Only folk whose heads are muddled by expensive educations think truth, beauty, goodness are rare private properties. Nature is more liberal. The universe keeps nothing essential from us — it is all present, all gift. God is the universe plus mind. Those who say God, or the universe, or nature is mysterious, are like those who call these things jealous or angry. They are announcing the state of their lonely, muddled minds.”  
         This doesn’t mean The Fall of Kelvin Walker is an attack on Nietzsche; more an ironic account of someone who takes him too seriously without having read him seriously enough. Few more than Nietzsche have so many oversimplifying admirers. The work’s often aphoristic and superficially ambiguous statements can lead people to read him any way they want, rather than viewing him within the history of philosophy and his determination to address certain assumptions evident in Scoratic thinking, Kantian ethics, scientific progress and Christian belief. That would require a lot of unpacking, but two comments will perhaps suffice. In The Gay Science, Nietzsche asks whether we want a ‘world of truth’, one that we master “completely and forever with the aid of our square little reason…Do we really want to permit existence to be degraded for us like this - reduced to a mere exercise for a calculator and an indoor diversion for mathematics?”  In The Anti-Christ, he says, Christianity “…has waged a war to the death against this higher type of man, it has excommunicated all the fundamental instincts of this type….Christianity has taken the side of everything weak, base, ill-constituted.” (117) The latter claim especially might have appealed to young Kelvin, taking it as a sign he should reject his community and his faith and find point and purpose in sixties London.  
   But if Gray is often an ironic novelist, in The Fall of Kelvin Walker, it rests on a man determined to reject faith and background, and who must instead rely on more direct helping hands, even if he thinks he is fulfilling his Nietzschean dream of self-reliance. Yet his job comes from using the name of a fellow Glaik man, as Mr Brown then arranges for McKellar and Walker to meet (rather than having Walker arrested), and McKellar then notes Walker has some useful qualities that can be taken advantage of as long as Kelvin knows his place. Even his affair with Jill comes from almost a complete absence of the will to power. Near the end of the book, when she tells Jake she won’t be marrying Kelvin, he asks why not, and she says: “Hasn’t it struck you that I’m the first girl he spoke to in London…”   Kelvin may see himself as a man with ambitions his will-power allows him to fulfil; others can see a character who finds himself, thanks to Gray’s absurd puppeteering, less the master of his destiny than a product of a narrator’s ability to do whatever he likes.
    If Gray fits neatly into enough postmodern preoccupations partly premised on the time in which he was writing, it also rests on his use of irony and narrative control. There we have a young man on the make, unaware that he is the process of being made by Gray’s wit and wisdom, with the wisdom accounting for much of the wit. Wit is Gray’s way of offering wisdom, as though he sees in the determination of his statements the provocative contained by the predictable. He wants the statement to be categorical rather than suppositional, but the wit allows wriggle room for the assertiveness of the claim. Here are some examples, whether offered as dialogue or narration. McKellar says to Kelvin: “…the BBC just now is suffering from a dangerous personality deficiency, particularly in the field of regional dialect. As you perhaps know, the English upper classes have an educational system which prepares them for public life by depriving them, during several crucial years, of all privacy whatsoever. This forces them to develop an effective public manner and very clear accents, but it also produces a sameness of tone…”  Kelvin says to Jake: “What we love is what we spend money on, and how we love is shown by how we spend it. If a man spends all his spare cash on clothes and none on books then he loves his appearance completely and learning not at all.” Kevin’s father announces to McKellar that “power can be used well by men with faith. Understand me, I am not a bigot. Their faith need not be my faith. They can have faith in passing a law or abolishing a law, in fighting an opponent or making an ally, in getting money or spending money, but if they have faith in something outside themselves they will only do the world the normal amount of harm.”  He reckons his son has nothing but faith in his own desires.
       If Gray can seem both modern and old-fashioned, both of his time and somehow quite distinct from it, it rests on his belief in the verities and his refusal to present them in a voice that means we ought to take the teller less than seriously, or rather that the teller is serious in his claims but not so serious in determining that we should take the claim straight. We should accept the claim but not assume the authority of the teller, as if this would be a variation of the father’s remark when he says his son believes in nothing outside himself. It is often held that postmodernism undermines truth, and it is a common enough one for philosophers like Daniel Dennett to remark: “I think what the postmodernists did was truly evil. They are responsible for the intellectual fad that made it respectable to be cynical about truth and facts.” (Guardian) However, while postmodernism is many things and only in the most pop-cultural way close to Dennett’s assertion, what we can see is that the philosopher's remark is antithetical to the various ones Gray offers in The Fall of Kelvin Walker and his other work. Gray shows that truth needn’t be undermined even if the book can seem like it isn’t taking truth seriously. What Gray does is offer a double manoeuvre: he puts the inverted commas into inverted commas, if you like. In other words, he refuses to make statements like Dennett’s that offer personal opinion as fact, and replaces them with impertinent opinion as truth. In Dennett’s remark, the philosopher shows that he doesn’t only fail to understand postmodernism. He doesn’t even understand why there is a need for it, and central to the conception of that need can be found in Nietzsche. As the German philosopher notes: “What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions.” (On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense)
    Nietzsche understood that while truth wasn’t homogeneous, this didn’t mean there weren't any. It is the difference between perspectivism and relativism. In the former as Nietzsche notes, “…to want to see differently, is no small discipline and preparation of the intellect for its future “objectivity”—the latter understood not as “disinterested contemplation” (which is a non-concept and absurdity), but rather as the capacity to have one’s Pro and Contra in one’s power, and to shift them in and out, so that one knows how to make precisely the difference in perspectives and affective interpretations useful for knowledge.” (On the Genealogy of Morality) In contrast, “what justifies the appellation ‘relativist’, rather than ‘skeptic’, is not only these philosophers’ (Richard Rorty; Jacques Derrida] suspicion of the possibility of objectivity but their insistence on the role of socio-historical, psychological and textual contexts in accounts of ‘truth’ and ‘knowledge’ claims.” (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) It would be relativism which Dennett seems to attack, and this would require an understanding of thinkers as distinct as Rorty and Derrida, which a catch-all use of postmodernism is likely to dilute.
    To explain why would be for another essay, but what is important in the context of Gray’s work as a postmodernist (if such a label be applied), is that he is more perspectivist than relativist. He is keen to say truth is not simply a matter of opinion, but that if an opinion is expressed, how it is expressed and what underpins its expression, is equally important. When Nietzsche “thought that past philosophers had largely ignored the influence of their own perspectives on their work, and had therefore failed to control those perspectival effects…” (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy), it seems that this hasn’t stopped some contemporary philosophers from making the broadest of claims. However, it might at least have helped writers view their own with amusing self-recognition. If that makes Gray postmodern, then so be it.
         The Fall of Kelvin Walker concludes with “Jake and Jill neither married nor separated” as the narrator tells us that, though Jake was a bad painter, he became a good teacher. They’ve had one child (semi-accidentally) and adopted another from a friend who had theirs wholly accidentally. “These children are often happy. It is easier for them. They are English.” This ending is the closest Gray gets to typographical playfulness as he gives each sentence its own line, forming a triangular look in the middle of the page. But it is also a provocation, of course, as the narrator claims that their lives will be happier than Kelvin Walker’s because they have the advantage of having been saved from a Scottish childhood and, by implication, a Presbyterian one. Gray might be right, but this is a generalization from the particular, containing a particular from the generalization. Kelvin Walker may have thought that with the aid of Nietzsche, he had managed a transfiguration of values, but you might be able to take the Presbyterian out of the church, yet that doesn’t mean you can take the church out of the Presbyterian. The Fall of Kelvin Walker is nicely paradoxical — Walker finds God the moment he has potentially most clearly escaped His Glaik presence. He starts to credit his prompt rise to the Lord, saying to Jill: “…did I manage to get all these [fame, money, power] in a few weeks through the strength of my own unaided will? The answer is clearly no.” Needing to spread the word leads to his downfall as McKellar interviews him on TV, all the better to bring him back down to earth and societal demand. His job was to undermine the bigwigs, not to become a bigger wig himself. As McKellar says, while Walker’s viewing figures might be great, this isn’t what the Consensus seeks: Walker should be changing nothing. And so McKellar engineers his downfall partly by presenting his father on the show, and Gray tells us that Kelvin returned to Scotland, became a minister and was often heard and seen on television and radio sermonizing. His fall is his grace, and whether we should see it that way is another story, or rather the ironic one Gray tells contains within it the simultaneous undermining of blind ambition and blind faith. Gray knows what truth looks like, but that doesn’t mean he wishes to present it straight. Like much of his work, The Fall of Kelvin Walker perspectives it all the better to undermine truth with a capital T and allow a few truths to appear as witticisms, which needn't be seen as empty, even if never quite full.

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

The Fall of Kelvin Walker

Nietzsche or Nurture

In Chapter 3 of Alasdair Gray’s The Fall of Kelvin Walker, the titular character from a Scottish village is in London trying to make something of himself and has thus far only succeeded in making a modest hash of his personal finances. He has taken a woman he met in a cafe out for an expensive meal and discovers that when the bill comes, he doesn’t have the cash to cover it. Jill finds a way to pay the difference and takes him back to the flat she shares with her painter boyfriend. Looking at paintings on the wall and a work on the easel, Kelvin says to Jake,   “I cannot understand how a man capable of painting these should waste his time on that.” Jake replies, saying, “the first two are reproductions. The one on the easel is mine.” Jake might be inept, but he is undeniably modern, evident when Kelvin asks what his painting is about and Jake says, “It’s about black and white.”
He is an abstract painter who isn’t interested in content but form, and we could see Alasdair Gray, in both painting and literature, wishes to straddle old-fashioned forms with new-fangled methods. Just as his paintings are neither quite modern nor old-fashioned, one can say the same about his fiction: Lanark, Poor Things, Something Leather, Unlikely Stories, Mostly. Speaking of the art, Margery Palmer McCulloch says, “...one can see from the illustrations in A Life In Pictures, Gray’s visual art does not conform either to what he considered the old-fashioned conventions of his teachers or to the early twentieth-century formal innovations of European artists such as Picasso, Braque, Matisse or the Scottish J. D. Fergusson.” (The Bottle Imp)
The fiction also doesn’t quite conform to the modern, but is far from 19th-century realism either. It instead seeks to find in tone the need to tell a story well, and a reflexive awareness that he is telling it far too simply. In other books, this voice becomes part of its material form, with both Unlikely Stories, Mostly and Poor Things making much of Gray’s artwork in the book’s design. In both these works, he also makes much use of different fonts, italics and bold. They are fine examples of what Cairns Craig has called the typographic muse. In The Fall of Kelvin Walker Gray offers typographical sobriety, perhaps partly because the work originated as a theatre production filmed in 1968, with Harry H Corbett as Jake. But that doesn’t mean it is any different from other Gray books when it comes to his most important contribution to contemporary literature: a voice that manages to create the smoothest of narratives within the most facetious of tones. It is as though the story is there to illustrate a thesis the writer himself isn’t sure he believes in but insists he must offer nonetheless. The voice is the opposite of hectoring, while it possesses a paradoxical assertiveness. It is there when the narrator says, “London was wealthy. Other British cities, Glasgow for example (he had seen Glasgow) had been built by money and still contained large amounts of it, but money seemed a slower substance in the north — a powerful substance, certainly, but stolid.” It is the generalization within the perceptually specific, even more evident when the narrator says that those in the north had not been liberated by money: “Their faces were as severe, their mouths as grimly clenched as those without. But here in London — had it happened a year ago or a century or many centuries? — money had accumulated to a point where it had flashed into wealth, and wealth was free, swift, reckless, mercuric.” That question mark undermines the authority of the generalization and leaves us with an omniscient narrator who suddenly doesn’t seem so omniscient after all.
        Speaking of the work in a 1995 interview with Mark Axelrod, Gray said, “as to my political reasons for writing it—I had none at all. The politics of any story I tell are the politics of the country where I live.” He offers a political position as a pun on position, finally less about a stance than a socio-political reality. “I see myself as another Scottish writer nurtured by the postwar welfare state”,  he notes, and adds that the idea for the project initially came to him in 1964. “I got a telegram from a friend in the London BBC, telling me to phone him, reversing the charges. I had no telephone then, was living on the social security dole with my wife and our one-year-old son…He [friend and documentary filmmaker Bob Kitts] arranged for me to leave the Sauchiehall Street labor exchange (where I had to sign in punctually once a week), go by taxi to Glasgow airport, collect my tickets at the B.E.A. desk, fly to London, and be met by a glossy Daimler, which drove me at once to the headquarters of BBC television…” (The Review of Contemporary Fiction)
          Gray tells it as he would in his fiction, as a world of absurd contrasts (the dole and the Daimler) that can coexist in reality and must inevitably coexist on the page. The contrasts often register a baffled innocence that in another narrator might be conveyed by registering, condescendingly, characterisational ignorance. Far into the book and long after Jill has left the aggressive yet materially docile Jake, for the docile but materially aggressive Kelvin, she sits thinking about her time. The narrator compares her being with Jake and with Kelvin, saying, “she wondered why when the days she had no housework and hung about waiting for Jake had been more interesting. She decided that the interest came from uncertainty about time. When waiting for Jake her reading might continue for ten minutes or an hour or six hours. With Kelvin she had four vacant hours at least five days a week.” The narrator proposes that she was more herself waiting for an unreliable man than waiting for a reliable one, and by the end of the book, she will be back with Jake, who has a proper job and is no longer domestically violent. When Jake and Jill initially split up, the narrator tells us that “Jake had an uncanny sensation of being part of a world he could not control. Even when smashing furniture in the heat of wrath he was doing what he liked, but now he felt reality was being pulled like a rug from under his feet by forces he could not recognise, though Kelvin, standing still and wooden, seemed to be the centre of them.” As for Kelvin, after his fall, after his brief and brilliant career as a TV interviewer is over, and after his father has condemned him on live television, “Kelvin had tied his body in a knot for two reasons, One was to shield him from the falling glances of the studio audience and those three extra millions who were surveying him through the cameras…the other was to protect him from the shattering contempt of his [minister] father.”
   In each instance, characters are somehow beside themselves; in the sense that they aren’t quite father to their thoughts — more like second cousins as the narrator takes over their minds, all the better to comprehend them since the characters can’t quite do so themselves. Yet if we accept this approach, it is perhaps for two reasons: the first is a jovial assumption that nobody knows themselves very well, and we could all benefit from a benign narrator capable of determining what our thoughts and feelings really might be. The second is that Gray’s narrational voice insists this is a work that isn’t to be taken too seriously and that the characters are one-dimensional figures, given three-dimensionality by the facetiousness of Gray’s thesis. If characters hardly know what they think and feel, and success looks as though it is predicated on absurd luck and idiotic ambition, then a character like Kelvin Walker can rise and fall within a period of months. Equally, Jill can accept getting knocked about by Jake, and Jake can realize that his abusive behaviour masks a deep tenderness. Whatever the potential suspect sexual politics one might see in the Jake and Jill relationship, Gray wants to extract from it an affection for his characters. Gray might have little interest in realism, but he could well have had in mind an interview the most famous Scot of his era (and a near contemporary) offered when, in the very year Gary wrote the play, Sean Connery said in Playboy magazine: “I don't think there is anything particularly wrong about hitting a woman - although I don't recommend doing it in the same way that you'd hit a man. An open-handed slap is justified - if all other alternatives fail and there has been plenty of warning. If a woman is a bitch, or hysterical, or bloody-minded continually, then I'd do it.”  
  Of course, we have no idea if Gray read the interview or not - that isn’t the point; it is only to say that attitudes like Jake’s were not unusual and could be expressed by a famous actor in the mid-sixties without fearing it would end his career. Jake and Jill are devoted to each other in their way, and Gray proposes that they just need to grow up a bit, with Jake needing to realize the affection is far from one-sided. When earlier in the book Jake returns with a bouquet of red roses, he still can’t quite match his hope with his expectation, and Gary inevitably fills in for him. “For half an hour Jake, moved by that self-denying impulse which surfaces in most people when they are absolutely certain of getting what they want, argued on Kelvin’s behalf.” Gray proposes that Jake only wants to argue Kelvin’s case because it is a lost one, but he argues for it nevertheless, and Gray draws out the humour of someone who might be feeling that he has found a way back into Jill’s affections, even if he is arguing another man’s case. It is funny because the narrator knows better than he does exactly what he is doing.
          “I do not need to approach the notion of audience, since I write a language which, if purged of repetition, pompous cliche, and needlessly long words, makes sense to most people”, Gray says. “If an American reader finds my Scottish references and idioms more confusing than the Wessex ones of Hardy and the Irish ones of Joyce, it is because I am an inferior writer, not because I write with a narrower audience in mind.” (Dalkey Archive)  He also reckons that the problem might be one of labelling: “I still meet decent, intelligent folk who say they feel they ought to buy a book of mine but fear it will be too clever for them…That is what comes of being praised or condemned as a postmodernist.” (Dalkey Archive)  The term is often more intimidating than the results, and in Gray’s hands needn’t usually cause a reader many difficulties since the purpose isn’t to make the story more convoluted, but to insist on a tone that makes the narrative stupendously straightforward. A combination of Rastignac and Dick Whittington, Walker is a 1960s version of the man making good at a time when working-class figures in the arts and elsewhere were beginning to do alright for themselves (including, of course, Mr Connery). Kelvin’s prompt rise to the top may be narratively improbable, but it would have been socially conceivable, just as seventy years earlier, no matter how vivid Thomas Hardy’s Jude The Obscure is, as it covers hundreds of pages in the life of its titular character, Jude’s attempts to rise educationally are seen as impossible. The energy of Gray’s novella comes from the combination of social possibility meeting narrative absurdity, and the postmodern in Gray’s hands is, in some ways, a product of societal changes as readily as literary ones. It is as if he knows he can get away with the most fast-paced of tales because post-war Britain offered social change at a velocity that was not so very different. After all, the person he relies on to give him a leg up is Hector McKellar, a man also from the same village as Kelvin: Glaik. He first hopes to use McKellar’s name in a vain attempt at getting a foot in various doors that he knows would remain unopened were he to use his own nomenclature. Later at an interview, he discovers that a Mr Brown knows that he isn’t who Walker claims to be, as he knows McKellar very well — they were at Edinburgh University together.  If Walker keeps insisting he is McKellar, Brown will have no choice but to inform the police. But he also says: “give me your address. If I can recommend you to a position of power without suffering the consequences I’ll get in touch.”
      Yet what Gray captures too is a lethargy within the pace of change, and the ongoing presence of a class system that indicates, despite the surface opportunities for those on the make, many are still clearly a product of their background. These may be paradoxes, perhaps, but Gray has never been shy of those. Jake admits that when saying people who know little take for granted positions of power, he is well aware why. “I know what I’m talking about. My parents are rich. I’ve been to public school. I’m a member of the ruling classes all right but thank God I’m a decadent member.” He might bully Jill a bit, but that is only because he is in a bad mood; nothing so grand as seeking power. He sees Kelvin as a young man who hasn’t had his confidence bought and paid for, a prosthetic assurance financed by parents belonging to a class that they insistently make sure will be their children’s lot as well. It might seem there are contradictions in the book, but Gray would probably say these are less of his making than the consequences of a post-war Britain, one that has kept in place many aspects of British society, welded onto them a post-war welfare state, and this leaves in place many with the privileges they have to come to expect, over several generations, while most will remain within their working class confines, now given architectural clarity in the high rise housing estates peppering the skylines of numerous cities, including of course Gray’’s own: Glasgow. But out of them, and also from small villages and towns throughout Britain, will appear people like Kelvin Walker, as though formed from an assumption of post-war hope which proposed that while people like Kelvin may not be running the country, they can certainly get on if they have ambition, energy and glaik.
     Glaik, after all,  isn’t only the fictional village Kelvin Walker comes from; it is also a Scots word for deception and a fool. It is a combination that can work well even if it isn’t very sustainable, especially when Kelvin thinks he might be able to have a proper say in things. When early in the book he announces to Jill why he has no interest in starting at the bottom as she suggests, he says, "nowadays the ladders are so long that the folks who start at the bottom have to retire before reaching the middle. Nearly all the people at the top started climbing a few rungs under it. Furthermore, the nearer the top you are the less real qualifications matter.” What matters is “…total self-confidence and the ability to see when the folk under you are doing their jobs, and you can usually see that by the expression on their faces.” If these are the requisite skills and Walker possesses them, then why should his background hamper him from such positions?
             This doesn’t mean we have a functioning society, but it does allow for a class system to seem more mobile than it is, and Kelvin manages, through McKellar, to get a job interviewing various people in politics. Out of the paradox that proposes Britain is changing quickly and hardly changing at all, Kelvin comes along and proves both claims simultaneously true. He gets the job through connections and gets sacked by those who think he is getting too big for his working-class boots. If Kelvin thinks that “…energy, intelligence and integrity” will secure him what he needs from life, then this hasn’t stopped him using McKellar’s name to kickstart it. But while Kelvin believes he only requires it so that he can reveal his singular qualities, Gray shows that the name matters but not quite in the way Kelvin assumes. On the one hand, this is a story about a young man who promptly rises to the top when given the opportunity to interview the prime minister, but not before a few tests where he interviews fictional creations to see how he would handle a cabinet minister, a housewife and a bishop. McKellar reckons Kelvin Walker is the right man because the interview will offer a nice contrast between the Welsh trade unionist now heading the government and the Scottish interviewer: “McKellar believed that a collision between a Scottish and a Welsh accent would greatly amuse the English viewers and make his newest employee a national celebrity." McKellar reckons such occasions are an alternative to revolution: if he brings members of the working class into the establishment, it might appear there is no establishment at all. “But unluckily it is becoming hard to find people who talk their local dialect with any confidence. I blame the educational system”, McKellar says. “It destroys the confidence of ordinary folk and channels the smart ones into universities from which they emerge as unlike their parents as possible.”
      Kelvin gets his opportunity and takes it well. The interview with Jones is smooth without being soft, and Jones admits that he faced some tough questions but believed he weathered them. When Jones notes that Walker is a new name, he asks him where he worked before, and Kelvin says his father’s grocery store. Jones raises his eyebrow as though class progression is moving faster than even he might have wished. Jones at least had a middle-class father, his union was white-collar, and it is chiefly his Welsh accent that gives the impression of working-class origins. From the outside, it looks as though Walker can regard himself as very lucky indeed. But from the inside, Kelvin would insist this is what happens when someone with pure will can shape their destiny. He is a Nietzchean man, someone who announces early on to Jake that he discovered the German philosopher in the local library. Nietzsche “…showed that since there is no longer a God to give shape and purpose in life it was necessary for the few who could face this fact to take the responsibility themselves. So yesterday, without telling a soul, I lifted my savings and came here.”  
There are many merits to Nietzsche’s thinking, yet one of the weaknesses may be that a young man might believe willpower is enough: he needn’t assume any victory is socially wind-assisted. When Gray speaks of seeing himself as a product of a post-war welfare state, he acknowledges that he is less Nietzsche than nurture, a figure whose personal progression cannot be separated from the soil of Scotland, the United Kingdom’s post-war, Keynesian consensus politics, and having the good luck to get into the Glasgow School of Art. In Gray’s story (about Alasdair Taylor), 'Portrait of a Painter', the narrator says, “one rare strong person who loves and supports your talent can outweigh a society which does not give a damn about you”, but it helps if society is there too, even if it doesn’t give a damn about the work. However, whether it is the love of someone dear, or the indifferent yet benign presence of the state, the sort of self-progression Kelvin pursues was never something Gray was going to take too seriously, and especially in a young man who might have believed God was as dead, as Nietzsche claimed, but hardly likely when a product of so theological an upbringing.  (Nietzsche was the son of a Lutheran minister himself.) Society has always mattered more than God to Gray, and the following remarks from Poor Things might sum up the writer’s beliefs: “Only folk whose heads are muddled by expensive educations think truth, beauty, goodness are rare private properties. Nature is more liberal. The universe keeps nothing essential from us — it is all present, all gift. God is the universe plus mind. Those who say God, or the universe, or nature is mysterious, are like those who call these things jealous or angry. They are announcing the state of their lonely, muddled minds.”  
         This doesn’t mean The Fall of Kelvin Walker is an attack on Nietzsche; more an ironic account of someone who takes him too seriously without having read him seriously enough. Few more than Nietzsche have so many oversimplifying admirers. The work’s often aphoristic and superficially ambiguous statements can lead people to read him any way they want, rather than viewing him within the history of philosophy and his determination to address certain assumptions evident in Scoratic thinking, Kantian ethics, scientific progress and Christian belief. That would require a lot of unpacking, but two comments will perhaps suffice. In The Gay Science, Nietzsche asks whether we want a ‘world of truth’, one that we master “completely and forever with the aid of our square little reason…Do we really want to permit existence to be degraded for us like this - reduced to a mere exercise for a calculator and an indoor diversion for mathematics?”  In The Anti-Christ, he says, Christianity “…has waged a war to the death against this higher type of man, it has excommunicated all the fundamental instincts of this type….Christianity has taken the side of everything weak, base, ill-constituted.” (117) The latter claim especially might have appealed to young Kelvin, taking it as a sign he should reject his community and his faith and find point and purpose in sixties London.  
   But if Gray is often an ironic novelist, in The Fall of Kelvin Walker, it rests on a man determined to reject faith and background, and who must instead rely on more direct helping hands, even if he thinks he is fulfilling his Nietzschean dream of self-reliance. Yet his job comes from using the name of a fellow Glaik man, as Mr Brown then arranges for McKellar and Walker to meet (rather than having Walker arrested), and McKellar then notes Walker has some useful qualities that can be taken advantage of as long as Kelvin knows his place. Even his affair with Jill comes from almost a complete absence of the will to power. Near the end of the book, when she tells Jake she won’t be marrying Kelvin, he asks why not, and she says: “Hasn’t it struck you that I’m the first girl he spoke to in London…”   Kelvin may see himself as a man with ambitions his will-power allows him to fulfil; others can see a character who finds himself, thanks to Gray’s absurd puppeteering, less the master of his destiny than a product of a narrator’s ability to do whatever he likes.
    If Gray fits neatly into enough postmodern preoccupations partly premised on the time in which he was writing, it also rests on his use of irony and narrative control. There we have a young man on the make, unaware that he is the process of being made by Gray’s wit and wisdom, with the wisdom accounting for much of the wit. Wit is Gray’s way of offering wisdom, as though he sees in the determination of his statements the provocative contained by the predictable. He wants the statement to be categorical rather than suppositional, but the wit allows wriggle room for the assertiveness of the claim. Here are some examples, whether offered as dialogue or narration. McKellar says to Kelvin: “…the BBC just now is suffering from a dangerous personality deficiency, particularly in the field of regional dialect. As you perhaps know, the English upper classes have an educational system which prepares them for public life by depriving them, during several crucial years, of all privacy whatsoever. This forces them to develop an effective public manner and very clear accents, but it also produces a sameness of tone…”  Kelvin says to Jake: “What we love is what we spend money on, and how we love is shown by how we spend it. If a man spends all his spare cash on clothes and none on books then he loves his appearance completely and learning not at all.” Kevin’s father announces to McKellar that “power can be used well by men with faith. Understand me, I am not a bigot. Their faith need not be my faith. They can have faith in passing a law or abolishing a law, in fighting an opponent or making an ally, in getting money or spending money, but if they have faith in something outside themselves they will only do the world the normal amount of harm.”  He reckons his son has nothing but faith in his own desires.
       If Gray can seem both modern and old-fashioned, both of his time and somehow quite distinct from it, it rests on his belief in the verities and his refusal to present them in a voice that means we ought to take the teller less than seriously, or rather that the teller is serious in his claims but not so serious in determining that we should take the claim straight. We should accept the claim but not assume the authority of the teller, as if this would be a variation of the father’s remark when he says his son believes in nothing outside himself. It is often held that postmodernism undermines truth, and it is a common enough one for philosophers like Daniel Dennett to remark: “I think what the postmodernists did was truly evil. They are responsible for the intellectual fad that made it respectable to be cynical about truth and facts.” (Guardian) However, while postmodernism is many things and only in the most pop-cultural way close to Dennett’s assertion, what we can see is that the philosopher's remark is antithetical to the various ones Gray offers in The Fall of Kelvin Walker and his other work. Gray shows that truth needn’t be undermined even if the book can seem like it isn’t taking truth seriously. What Gray does is offer a double manoeuvre: he puts the inverted commas into inverted commas, if you like. In other words, he refuses to make statements like Dennett’s that offer personal opinion as fact, and replaces them with impertinent opinion as truth. In Dennett’s remark, the philosopher shows that he doesn’t only fail to understand postmodernism. He doesn’t even understand why there is a need for it, and central to the conception of that need can be found in Nietzsche. As the German philosopher notes: “What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions.” (On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense)
    Nietzsche understood that while truth wasn’t homogeneous, this didn’t mean there weren't any. It is the difference between perspectivism and relativism. In the former as Nietzsche notes, “…to want to see differently, is no small discipline and preparation of the intellect for its future “objectivity”—the latter understood not as “disinterested contemplation” (which is a non-concept and absurdity), but rather as the capacity to have one’s Pro and Contra in one’s power, and to shift them in and out, so that one knows how to make precisely the difference in perspectives and affective interpretations useful for knowledge.” (On the Genealogy of Morality) In contrast, “what justifies the appellation ‘relativist’, rather than ‘skeptic’, is not only these philosophers’ (Richard Rorty; Jacques Derrida] suspicion of the possibility of objectivity but their insistence on the role of socio-historical, psychological and textual contexts in accounts of ‘truth’ and ‘knowledge’ claims.” (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) It would be relativism which Dennett seems to attack, and this would require an understanding of thinkers as distinct as Rorty and Derrida, which a catch-all use of postmodernism is likely to dilute.
    To explain why would be for another essay, but what is important in the context of Gray’s work as a postmodernist (if such a label be applied), is that he is more perspectivist than relativist. He is keen to say truth is not simply a matter of opinion, but that if an opinion is expressed, how it is expressed and what underpins its expression, is equally important. When Nietzsche “thought that past philosophers had largely ignored the influence of their own perspectives on their work, and had therefore failed to control those perspectival effects…” (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy), it seems that this hasn’t stopped some contemporary philosophers from making the broadest of claims. However, it might at least have helped writers view their own with amusing self-recognition. If that makes Gray postmodern, then so be it.
         The Fall of Kelvin Walker concludes with “Jake and Jill neither married nor separated” as the narrator tells us that, though Jake was a bad painter, he became a good teacher. They’ve had one child (semi-accidentally) and adopted another from a friend who had theirs wholly accidentally. “These children are often happy. It is easier for them. They are English.” This ending is the closest Gray gets to typographical playfulness as he gives each sentence its own line, forming a triangular look in the middle of the page. But it is also a provocation, of course, as the narrator claims that their lives will be happier than Kelvin Walker’s because they have the advantage of having been saved from a Scottish childhood and, by implication, a Presbyterian one. Gray might be right, but this is a generalization from the particular, containing a particular from the generalization. Kelvin Walker may have thought that with the aid of Nietzsche, he had managed a transfiguration of values, but you might be able to take the Presbyterian out of the church, yet that doesn’t mean you can take the church out of the Presbyterian. The Fall of Kelvin Walker is nicely paradoxical — Walker finds God the moment he has potentially most clearly escaped His Glaik presence. He starts to credit his prompt rise to the Lord, saying to Jill: “…did I manage to get all these [fame, money, power] in a few weeks through the strength of my own unaided will? The answer is clearly no.” Needing to spread the word leads to his downfall as McKellar interviews him on TV, all the better to bring him back down to earth and societal demand. His job was to undermine the bigwigs, not to become a bigger wig himself. As McKellar says, while Walker’s viewing figures might be great, this isn’t what the Consensus seeks: Walker should be changing nothing. And so McKellar engineers his downfall partly by presenting his father on the show, and Gray tells us that Kelvin returned to Scotland, became a minister and was often heard and seen on television and radio sermonizing. His fall is his grace, and whether we should see it that way is another story, or rather the ironic one Gray tells contains within it the simultaneous undermining of blind ambition and blind faith. Gray knows what truth looks like, but that doesn’t mean he wishes to present it straight. Like much of his work, The Fall of Kelvin Walker perspectives it all the better to undermine truth with a capital T and allow a few truths to appear as witticisms, which needn't be seen as empty, even if never quite full.

© Tony McKibbin