Every Short Story by Alasdair Gray 1951-2012

by Gray, Alasdair

  I gave a copy of the first half to Stephanie Wolfe Murray, owner and director of Canongate, asking if the firm could give me £1,000 advance against royalties to write the end, but Canongate was too poor to do that. She sent the copy to Harper and Roe in the United States hoping to raise money by selling the foreign rights but that firm’s reader rejected it. Meanwhile we worked to complete Unlikely Stories, Mostly.

  Stephanie suggested that Unlikely Stories, Mostly would be more harmonious without the realistic prose which might become the nucleus of a later book. Agreeing to this I designed it as a compact pocketable volume with the print sufficiently big, with broad margins and many illustrations. Many were needed to make the book enjoyable throughout, since the contortuplicate 16th-century prose of Sir Thomas Urquhart would bore most readers unless the appearance of the pages amused them. To make pictures and text fit each other perfectly, I worked for many days with Jim Hutcheson, excellent typographer and designer, in his Edinburgh office. Relaxing one afternoon with our work almost finished, I lamented that Unlikely Stories, Mostly must now lose its third word, leaving the first two lame and alone. We then talked of personal matters. Jim mentioned that a woman he loved had recently rejected him in a perfectly friendly way, answering his plea that their relationship should continue by saying, “Jings, you take everything very seriously”. This gave me the idea for two last realistic stories, each five lines of dialogue long, with a picture to preserve the book’s original name.

  Unlikely Stories, Mostly was as successful a book as Lanark, having been translated into almost as many foreign languages. A Unique Case and The Answer were not in earlier editions because I had forgotten writing the first, and had excluded the second for its realism. I remembered the first when a friend found Cleg (that rarest of magazines) in a second hand book stall. By including them here, all my short fictions from 1951–1983 are now printed in their order of writing, with the exception of The Problem. Its short length made it fit better among the shortest early stories.

  WHEN AND WHERE FIRST PRINTED

  The Star in the May edition of Collins Magazine for Boys and Girls, 1951.

  The Spread of Ian Nichol – Ygorra, 1956.

  The Cause of Recent Changes – Ygorra, 1957.

  An Exceptional Case – Glasgow Art School magazine, Cleg, 1957.

  The Comedy of the White Dog had the first half in Scottish International, 1969, the whole of it in Glasgow University Magazine, 1970.

  The Crank That Made the Revolution – The Scottish Field, 1971.

  The Origin of the Axeltree – Collins Scottish Short Stories, 1979.

  Five Letters From an Eastern Empire – Words Magazine, 1979.

  The Answer – Words Magazine, 1980.

  LEAN TALES

  In 1983 Liz Calder of Jonathan Cape advanced the £1,000 I needed to finish writing 1982 Janine. Before publication in 1984 I gave a reading to students of St. Andrews University, staying overnight in the home of the lecturer who had invited me. I thus met his wife, Jennie Erdal, who worked for Quartet Books. She said that since the success of Lanark Quartet regretted having refused it, and asked if I had ideas for another book. I told her of the writings Stephanie Wolfe Murray had thought might be the nucleus of a new book, but I was sure could never be, as I had no ideas for more stories so I could never fill another book. She asked if I would consider putting what I had into a collection with other writers. “Certainly!” said I, expecting her to suggest the others, but she asked what other writers I would like. “James Kelman and Agnes Owens,” I said, these being excellent Scottish authors and friends of mine, whose first novels had just appeared. That is how Lean Tales came to be published in 1985, though not by Quartet.

  My third of this book contained the writings excluded from Unlikely Stories, Mostly, plus a new a six-page story, The Grumbler, suggested by a manic phase following the publication of Lanark; also a three-page story I Own Nothing, I Owe Nothing, given me in a dream; and a one-page story, Decision, about a girl discovering too late the connection between sexual intercourse and pregnancy – a true tale told me by my lawyer friend, Angela Mullane. By adding a handful of tales that were even shorter I nearly made my number of pages close to those of Jim and Agnes. The last one, Ending, was a single sentence. I have now made this the last story in this book. The Quartet editor dealing with Lean Tales was not Jennie Erdal. She liked all my co-authors’ stories and most of mine, but thought Portrait of a Painter and Portrait of a Playwright unsuitable because they could not be read as fiction. I understood why she did not want them, but having nothing to replace them with I asked Liz Calder if Cape would publish Lean Tales as I wished. Cape did. Here is the blurb I wrote for it.

  The three writers of this book live in a British region containing the world’s largest number of unemployed Scots, the biggest store of nuclear weapons in Europe, and lovely great tracts of depopulated wilderness. Lean Tales brings together a fine selection of short stories by James Kelman, Agnes Owens and Alasdair Gray who all write as if poverty is normal, but poverty is no more their theme than a fixed income is Jane Austen’s. What else they have in common readers may discover and enjoy for themselves.

  Lean Tales sold well enough to be reissued twice as a paperback, and I think would have stayed in print and been popular if ordered for use in Scottish secondary schools. The stories of Jim and Agnes are not in this book, being reprinted a few years ago in other collections of their tales. I have removed the two Portrait appreciations and my Report to the Trustees because they will be better in a book of essays. To stop this Lean Tales section being absurdly thin I have fattened it with four stories from a book that is wholly out of print (Mavis Belfrage, A Romantic Novel with Shorter Tales, Bloomsbury 1996). I have also added four tales from later collections in this book whose absence will not be noticed. I will only comment on two of them here. The Marriage Feast was written as a counterblast to Kingsley Amis’ unfairly dismissive remarks about Dylan Thomas. A Reality Show is also a tribute to Danish democracy, because the Royal Family there supports public education by sending their children to state schools instead of those rich private ones falsely called Public in Britain.

  WHEN AND WHERE FIRST PRINTED

  The Grumbler – The Fiction Magazine, 1984.

  The Marriage Feast (entitled Jesus Christ) – The Sunday Independent, 1991.

  Fictional Exits – Ten Tales Tall and True, 1993.

  Money – Scotlands, 1994.

  Edison’s Tractatus – New Novel Review, 1995.

  Mister Goodchild – Mavis Belfrage with Five Shorter Tales, 1996.

  The Shortest Tale – Madam X, 1996

  Inches In a Column – Unlikely Stories, Mostly, Canongate Classics Edition, 2001.

  Moral Philosophy Exam – The Ends of Our Tethers, 2003.

  GLASWEGIANS

  Between the publication of 1982 Janine and Lean Tales Scottish newspapers occasionally mentioned that Alasdair Gray had abandoned Canongate, the small Scottish firm that had made him famous by publishing his first two books, and was now enriching by his talents Jonathan Cape of London. That was not the exact truth but it seemed true enough to worry me. Having no ideas for another novel I thought of turning my first television play into one and giving that to Stephanie Wolfe Murray. I did so and Canongate published The Fall of Kelvin Walker in 1985. This example was useful to me later.

  In 1986 I told the American author, Kathy Acker, that I was unlikely to write another story, because I had noticed that all mine described men who found life a task they never doubted until an unexpected collision opened their eyes and changed their habits. The collision was usually with a woman, involved swallowing alcohol or worse, and happened in the valley of the shadow of death. My novels and stories so far had been made in the faith that each was an adventurous new world. I now saw the same pattern in them all – Lanark used it thrice. Having discovered how my talent worked it was almost certainly defunct. Imagination will not employ whom it cannot surprise. Kathy Acker asked if I had
thought of writing a story about a woman. No, I said, that was impossible, as I could not imagine how a woman felt when by herself.

  The announcement that I did not expect to write more fiction was truthful but not wholly honest. I hoped my talent was only as dead as Finnegan, and would leap from the coffin and dance a new jig if the wake got loud enough. Meanwhile I arranged a show of paintings, began collection of English vernacular prologues, worked with Sandy Johnson to make a film script of Lanark (so ambitious that no financier would look at it) and came to owe my bank a sum oscillating between a few hundred and a few thousand pounds. This was not poverty. Most professional folk live in debt nowadays. Banks and building societies encourage it because debts make them richer. My state only depressed me because my parents had been working class folk who, though not religious, avoided debt like the devil. I too could have avoided it by renting a smaller flat, using public transport instead of taxis, eating at home instead of restaurants, drinking alcohol four or five times year instead of nearly every day. Alas, I felt nostalgia but no desire for the decent carefulness which had bred and educated me. I wanted to be middle-class waster, but a solvent one.

  In Queen Street station one morning I glimpsed a girl stepping jauntily through the crowd in high heels and a leather suit which fitted her so snugly in some places, and left her so naked in others that it seemed a preliminary to lovemaking. Soon after or soon before I began imagining how a woman might feel when alone. This came from accompanying a friend on a shopping expedition. Some women – even women who know what looks best on them – enjoy a man’s company when buying clothes, though the man stops being a distinct character to them. He becomes an audience, or rather, a small part of a vaster, more satisfying audience in their heads. I penetrated What Every Woman Wants, The House of Fraser, and Chelsea Girl with the guilty reverence I would feel in a mosque, Catholic chapel or synagogue, yet the odour was familiar and friendly. I had sniffed it as a small boy in my mother’s wardrobe. I was fascinated by women pondering sombre or vivid or subtly pale colours, fingering husky or frail or soft or sleek fabrics, holding loosely or crisply or tightly tailored second skins to their bodies. I felt a long slow sexual ache in these shops, a sad ache because no earthly coitus could satisfy all the desires and possibilities suggested by the many garments. The ache, of course, was mine, but I was sure many women felt it too and perhaps felt it stronger. Most women have fewer devices than men to divert them from affection. I imagined a woman whose world was full of that ache, whose life was years of ordinary frustrations patiently endured before a chance suggestion led her further and further away from the familiar things she normally clung to. The woman need not have been beautiful or her adventure perverse, but these notions brought my imagination to life again. While writing the first chapter of this book I enjoyed a prolonged, cold-blooded sexual thrill of a sort common among some writers and (I suspect) all lizards.

  At that time I thought One for the Album (then called Something Leather) a short story. On completing it I imagined more adventures for June, but the first episode had internal order and was a thriller of The Pit and the Pendulum sort, ending when the reader was likely to be most intrigued. Believing it could be popular I sent it to a famous London literary agency, suggesting they try selling it to an expensive glossy magazine with a transatlantic circulation: Vogue or Esquire or better still The New Yorker. After a few weeks I learned it had been sent to a couple of British literary magazines whose editors, though friendly acquaintances of mine, had not embraced it with cries of “yes please”.

  In 1987 Tom Maschler, Chairman of Jonathan Cape Ltd, asked if I had ideas for a new novel, a question he had asked me more than once since Cape had published my second novel three years earlier. I was in danger of mounting a literary treadmill. Most writers of saleable books can get money from publishers to write another as an advance against future royalties. Years of reprinting in paperback and foreign translations may pass before writers get money from royalties. I had not yet received royalties for earlier books because, though critical successes, they were not bestsellers. Critical successes are reviewed at length in literary magazines and lectured upon in universities. This hardly ever happens to bestsellers. Conscious of the economic treadmill ahead I sent Tom Maschler my story, suggesting it might be the first chapter of a novel for which, had I been truthful, I would have said I had not enough ideas. He replied with the enthusiasm of a publisher who suspects he may be about to get a bestseller from a critically successful author. I had never haggled with a publisher for money and did not do so now. Publisher’s contracts usually offer the writer a third of the advance on signing the contract, a third on their receipt for the book and the last third on publication. I asked for an advance of £40,000, over four times any of my earlier advances. Some days earlier that sum had come up in a discussion of money worries with my friend Bernard MacLaverty, who said a good publishing house should give me £40,000 a year to write for them anything I liked. I asked Cape to give me £20,000 on signing the contract and the other half on receiving the full text, if they received it not later than two years after signature. This agreement gave me nearly three years of financial comfort with only one problem: making a lightly pornographic short story into a novel.

  Lanark had been planned as an epic and written carefully over many years; 1982 Janine was a sudden inspiration, and if not delayed by poverty would have completed in 1982 when it was started. I easily imagined a lesbian pseudo-masochistic orgy following One for the Album – such fancies come easily to me, but I cannot take them seriously for long having employed so many in my second novel. The story had now three main characters – June, Senga and Donalda (Harry had not yet occurred to me). I imagined June’s seduction giving her an aggressive social confidence she had hitherto lacked, and using her work in a local government office to seduce, entangle and corrupt (with the help of Senga and Donalda) Scottish legislators. I wrote nearly a chapter along these lines but stopped on the verge of being unconvincing. Powerless to imagine a way of carrying the plot forward I thought of using that meaningless label, POST-MODERNISM, to enlarge the book in any way possible, and looked at old television and radio plays that had once been my livelihood. In the 1970’s Dialogue was a half hour play broadcast by Scottish BBC radio, then networked on television by Granada, then performed in theatres by the short-lived Scottish Stage Company. I prosed it into the present tense, called it A Free Man with a Pipe, and easily believed my free man was June’s unsatisfactory ex-husband, trying to forget her by failing to seduce someone else, with her voice on the telephone at the end finally demolishing him. This suggested a new form for the book.

  Having shown Senga and Donalda seducing June in the late 1980s (the fashions in the streets give the date) each chapter would show in earlier years one of the women involved with men who failed them, starting with Senga’s schooldays. While recycling these past dramas I began wanting to show more than the local Scots who compose today’s Britain. My first and longest book had tried to do that, but lacking the knowledge to show (as Dickens had in Little Dorrit) Britain’s oligarchs in a plot involving slums and slum landlords, the jailors and the jailed, I had hidden my ignorance in Lanark with fabulous metaphors. But a book of episodes showing the lives of three women converging over twenty-five years might describe, without fantasy, shifts and dependencies between many believable people. How could I bring a representative English oligarch to Scotland? In 1990 it was the turn of a British city to be the culture capital of Europe. Margaret Thatcher’s government gave the job to Glasgow, which suggested a richer past for Harry.

  I had invented her for the Class Party chapter, because a quartette allowed more permutations than a trio, but she said little because I had no idea where she came from or what job she did when not playing perverse games. I knew she was a rarer social type than my other women. It helped the plot for her to be rich, and it was a useful economy to make her almost speechless. I did not bother imagining a past for her, except to think she
might have been made administrator of a large hospital with the job of closing it down. I had often thought about what makes rich people different from others, especially the rich whose wealth is a habit of mind due to a big unearned income. I had met a few and got on well with them because they had not been snobs – Francis Head had been one – but occasional remarks had astonished by showing how foreign to me they were. The owner of a big private garden told me how he had devoted it wholly to trees and shrubs because plots of flowers gave his gardener too much work. I asked if he grew vegetables. He said, “Once I did but it wasn’t worth the trouble. You can get them in a shop for a few shillings.”

  I had also known a young woman who disliked everyone her parents knew, saying she preferred “ordinary people”. She sulked when expected to make a cup of Nescafé for herself, explaining that she could not possibly do that, and proved it by floating a spoonful of the powder in a mug of lukewarm water. These people were individuals, not types, but as Scott Fitzgerald said at the start of his story The Rich Boy, “Describe an individual and you may end with a type; describe a type and you are likely to end with – nothing.” It occurred to me that perhaps the very rich, after leaving boarding school, found it hard to take others seriously because they could easily replace or escape from whomever they did not like. That might explain why some were astonishingly unaffectionate towards their young. Brooding on this I suddenly imagined Harry’s mother saying at her birth, “Oh God a fucking little gel,” and began conceiving my distant cousin of a queen. The speech rhythms of this class (devoid of swearwords) had resounded through all the homes where I lived from babyhood. The BBC had been created by Lord Reith, a Glasgow minister’s son, but most broadcasters had the dialect of posh English boarding schools. I had also met that class in the pages of Wilde, Firbank, Hemingway’s Fiesta, Denton Welsh and Evelyn Waugh.