I did not expect to write much about Harry at first. I planned to shift her in one chapter from her nasty Scottish nanny and chilling mother to a boarding school, thence to the Warburg or Courtauld Institute, thence to being an arts administrator in Scotland. But the boarding school acquired a distinct geography where small details developed active bodies to support them. Amanda’s kid and new money had been phrases I invented to show what a snob Harry’s mother was. In the shrubbery the two phrases became Hjordis with The Fortress, Linda with the speech and character she is evicted from. I grew so attached to Harry that I made her an artist and took three chapters to move her north. From the gnat in Alice Through the Looking Glass I got the idea that the almost speechless Harry, after finding her voice in Glasgow, would talk in a smaller typeface than other people.
This list gives the dates of my women’s adventures between the early 1960s and 1990.
CHAPTERS
YEARS
HEROINES
One for the Album
1989
June, Senga, Donalda
A Distant Cousin etc
1963
Harry
The Proposal
1965
Senga
The Man Who Knew etc.
1967
Donalda
Mr Lang and Ms Tain
1973
June
In the Boiler Room
1977
Senga
Quiet People
1971
Donalda
The Bum Garden
1963–1989
Harry
A Free Man etc.
1989
June (off stage)
Culture Capitalism
1989
Harry, Senga
Dad’s Story
1989
Donalda, Harry
Class Party
1989
June, Donalda, Senga, Harry
New June
1989
June, Harry, Donalda, Senga
When June returned to the leatherwear shop where the novel started I realized my book had reached its natural conclusion, which is how I have left it in the foregoing short story collection.
It was published as a novel entitled Something Leather in 1990. Most blurbs I write for my books are tampered with by editors who believe that unstinting praise of their publications is needed to sell it. The following blurb I wrote for Something Leather was printed as I wished:
SOMETHING LEATHER is about the love lives of June, Senga, Donalda and a distant cousin of the queen from 1963 to 1990. Also in it are unhappy children, a dangerously liberal headmistress, a tobacconist’s family, a student, night watchman, pimp, businessman, boilerman, policeman, ex-serviceman, quiet couple, tinker, nurse, commercial traveller, arts administrator, former Lord Provast, Glasgow comedian, worried civil servant, brilliant but unstable politician. This is the first British fiction since THE CANTERBURY TALES to show such a wide social range in such embarrassing sexual detail, yet no characters are based on real people, not even the Glasgow comedian. The inefficient Scottish Office department in the Epilogue never existed – since 1967 its work has been efficiently done by the office of the ombudsman. The story starts near the end, has ten earlier starts, a crisis, a catastrophe and a moral. Unlike Alasdair Gray’s earlier books, SOMETHING LEATHER has no fantasy and combines the amenities of a novel with the varieties of a short-story collection.
The book was dedicated to Flo Allen, who had typed all my publications from the last chapters of Lanark onward. I knew she would not be shocked by my pornographic passages, of which I was slightly ashamed, with good reason. Most critics have agreed that Something Leather is my worst novel. Since chapters 1 and 12 are exploitive sex fantasy they have not noticed the very different writing between these. Despite exciting publicity this book did not become the bestseller Tom Maschler expected and Jonathan Cape never recovered my unusually big advance against royalties. I believe 9 to 11 inclusive are among my best stories in the realistic genre established by great German, Russian, Irish and American authors, French Maupassant, English Kipling and V.S. Pritchett, most of Chekhov and Joyce’s Dubliners. That is why Something Leather has here been retitled. Anyone curious to read the sexual fantasies removed from Class Party may buy a first-edition hardback of Something Leather (in which it is printed uncensored as Chapter 12) from Morag McAlpine’s online bookshop for £12.95. The rarity of this book is maintained by the only acceptable payment being in Sterling cheques.
WHEN AND WHERE FIRST PRINTED
One for the Album appeared in The Fiction Magazine, a brave attempt at a new Scottish quarterly launched in 1988, which expired after two or three issues.
With slight changes it was printed with the others in Something Leather, 1990.
TEN TALES TALL AND TRUE
This collection of stories was printed in 1993 by Bloomsbury instead of Cape, for complicated reasons starting years earlier.
William Smellie was a publisher who belonged to what has since been called the Scottish Enlightenment. One of the first to print Robert Burns’ poetry, he also conceived and mainly collated the first edition of The Encyclopaedia Britannica, which he called “a scissors and paste job”. He also wrote A Philosophy of Natural History, published in Edinburgh in 1790. Early in the 1980s a descendant of Smellie – the surgeon Campbell Semple – lent me that book. The preface to it began with these words: Every preface, beside occasional and explanatory remarks, should contain not only the general design of the work but the motives and circumstances which lead the author to write on that particular subject. If this plan had been universally observed, a collection of prefaces would have exhibited a short, but curious and useful history both of literature and authors. This suggested a history of literature made by arranging prefaces by their authors to great poems, plays, novels etc in chronological order. The result would be a history of English literature by those who had made it best, and seemed such a simple job that I was amazed to think nobody had yet done it, and I signed a contract for the book with Canongate. I started work on it and in less than a year had spent the publisher’s advance against royalties, and found the work looked like taking almost as long to write as Lanark. It would have to be subsidized by other writing.
In 1992 Xandra Hardie was my English literary agent. I sent her some short stories made by turning short plays not used in Something Leather – correction! In Glaswegians – suggesting these would be the core of a new short story book if she could get me an advance for it from Jonathan Cape. She was slow in doing so because Tom Maschler, whose enthusiasm had inspired my last book, had left Cape and been replaced by David Godwin. Then a number of English publishers came to Glasgow and gave a party for their Scottish authors, since they now had several of these. Here I met David Godwin. He said he believed his firm was considering a new book of my short stories. I told him I needed an advance on it as soon as possible in order to complete my Anthology of Prefaces. He asked about that book. I told him about it. He said, “Are we getting it?” meaning Cape. I explained that it was going to Canongate, because I had to alternate my books between my Edinburgh and London publishers, to not seem ungrateful to the Scottish firm that had made my first books well known, while keeping an English publisher that could pay me what I was owed. David Godwin seemed to accept that explanation.
Next day Xandra Hardie phoned and said brightly, “Alasdair, I think it would be a good idea if we offered your new book of stories to Bloomsbury. Liz Calder is in charge there now, and she likes your work.” I said that seemed a good idea, because I regarded Liz as a friend. Xandra said, “But please don’t tell Liz that you want the advance in order to finish your anthology for Canongate. I had David Godwin on the phone this morning saying he didn’t see why he should give a f****** advance for a book of stories to a f****** writer who needed the money to write another f****** book for a different f****** publisher.” I told her I was surprised at Godwin’s childish attitude
, and knowing Liz Calder was thoroughly adult, amused her by telling her the whole story. Bloomsbury has been my London publisher from then onward. But I dedicated Ten Tales Tall and True to Tom Maschler, Xandra Hardie and Morag McAlpine (whom I had recently married) because I felt they were all partly responsible for the book.
Not all the tales derived from my early plays. You came from the anecdote told to me by Joe Mulholland, former journalist and antique dealer, about a late meal bought for him in Glasgow’s Central Station Hotel by a rich and powerful man, though I changed the sex of his guest. Internal Memorandum was based on an internal memorandum my wife sent to one of her bosses when she worked for a Glasgow bookselling firm, founded in the late 18th century, which mostly expired in the early 21st. Are You a Lesbian? derives from a question she was asked in a local pub, though the woman I describe reacting to that question – daughter of a Church of Scotland minister – is nothing like Morag, and the original question was “Are you a fucking dyke?” The Trendelenburg Position was first written for an English film-making firm who wanted a talking-head monologue of the sort Alan Bennett had written for the BBC. I had greatly admired a couple of these, not least because his speakers were talking to the world at large – to nobody in particular. Unable to imagine anyone like that, I thought of a garrulous dentist working on a helpless patient. My own dentist, Mr White, is not garrulous, but when asked for information to help my monologue, said dentists’ chairs were designed to support patients in the Trendelenburg position. Freidrich Trendelenburg, a German surgeon, had devised the position to support bodies with the least possible physical strain.
But when working on these stories I had a dream which I have spoken of so often, and written about at least once (though I forget where) that I will not describe it. Believing the strange atmosphere of the dream might be put into a story of two or three pages I started what once again grew quickly into a big novel, Poor Things, which some have found my most enjoyable. This is perhaps because the three main characters are all good natured without being bores. This novel grew so quickly that Liz Calder published it a year before Ten Tales Tall and True.
WHEN AND WHERE FIRST PRINTED
Homeward Bound – New Writing, Spring 1992.
Loss of the Golden Silence – Bete Noir, Christmas 1992.
You – Casablanca, May 1993.
Houses and Small Labour Parties – Living Issues, August 1993.
Time Travel – The Review of Contemporary Fiction, USA, 1993.
THE ENDS OF OUR TETHERS
The Book of Prefaces I had promised Canongate gained me an advance that was spent long before I completed the Chaucerian period of this History of the English Language by Those Who Wrote It Best. It was a complex editorial job that I could only do properly while sitting with the typesetter. My efforts to get the job done drew in my friend Angel Mullane. She financed Dog and Bone, a new wee Glasgow publishing house which would typeset the book for Canongate. Her husband Chris Boyce supplied the laptop technology and a friend was our typesetter. A good start was made. The typesetter left us without warning. Dog and Bone became impossible. I offered Canongate a new novel if they would release me from my Book of Prefaces contract. They thankfully agreed. I gave them The History Maker, a futuristic science fiction tale made from a rejected 1960s television play. I then signed a contract with Bloomsbury for an advance of £1,000 a month for three years, and a different monthly payment to my part-time secretary and eventual typesetter. The complete text was to be delivered in 1998, with illustrations. I delivered it in1999. This did not surprise the editor, Liz Calder, who said it had been worth waiting for.
On publication in 2000 it was splendidly reviewed. By this time royalties for two of my early books that were still in print had overcome their original advances. Some were occasionally translated into other languages, so once a year I received cheques from Canongate and Bloomsbury. This steady income was not enough to stop my wife Morag (no longer a wage earner) fearing she might have to save us from poverty by selling her home (which was now mine) if I fell ill. Luckily my friend Bernard MacLaverty suggested I apply for a Royal Literary Fund pension. I did, and was granted it. A year later I got a steady income from being Professor of Creative Writing at Glasgow University, a job shared with Tom Leonard and James Kelman. The three of us resigned from it in 2003 for academic reasons too complex to mention here, but during that time most of the stories in this collection occurred to me, nearly all of them about folk with not much left to live for. This had increasingly been the theme of earlier stories, yet I was not miserable when writing them. Tragedies would not be popular if there was no exhilaration in facing the worst.
No Bluebeard sprang from ideas about marriage derived from women I have known, but none I ever married. The non Bluebeard who tells it, like all my narrators, is a form of myself but in many ways different, I hope. The story Aiblins was certainly suggested by being a creative writing teacher, though I met nobody like Aiblins when I was a professor. I gave him three of my own poems. Proem and Outing were written in my teens and luckily never published before I saw how bad they were. My Ex Husband, Sinkings and Property are based on real occurrences told to me by friends, and which nagged me ever since until I made short fictions from them. Job’s Skin Game was conceived as a monologue when eczema recurred to me after an abeyance of nearly forty years. I connected that with the Book of Job when Lu Kemp, a Scottish BBC radio director, commissioned a story from me derived from a book in the Bible. It was broadcast in January 2003. Well Being derives from a nightmare I had about the future of Scotland when writing a pamphlet.
WHEN AND WHERE FIRST PRINTED
Well Being – Why Scots Should Rule Scotland (a political pamphlet), 1997.
Big Pockets with Buttoned Flaps – New Writings 9, 2000.
Job’s Skin Game – Prospect Magazine, 2003.
TALES DROLL AND PLAUSIBLE
Once again after completing a book – The Ends of Our Tethers – I had no intention of writing more fiction and felt another publisher’s advance need never again attract me. In 2003 I began a job I had wanted since my art school days: painting the ceiling and walls of a great building with no deadlines and sufficient payment. The job would last for years (it is not finished yet) but while working on it I would always earn a good weekly wage. Colin Beattie, the Glasgow pub owner, was converting the former Kelvin and Botanic Free Church (derelict for years) into an arts and entertainment centre called the Óran Mór – Gaelic words meaning the Great Music. I decorated the ceiling of the auditorium before the Óran Mór opened to the public, then decorated lower auditorium walls when this did not interrupt the concerts, banquets and conferences which were the hall’s main source of income.
In the autumn of 2004 the Óran Mór’s lunch hour theatre, A Play, A Pie and A Pint, occupied the auditorium floor on most days between 12.30 and 2 p.m. I was then painting walls of the gallery behind and above the audience’s back, so had no need to stop work, and thus heard several times several performances of new one-act plays commissioned from Scottish authors by Dave McLennan. With no funding but Colin Beattie’s support, Dave still directs this small, successful theatre. Eight years later, in 2012, he has commissioned 38 new plays, thus encouraging more new authors in a year than any other theatre, even those with the support of Creative Scotland (formerly the Scottish Arts Council) and more than all of Scotland’s broadcasting networks joined together. A Play, A Pie, A Pint revived my interest in playwriting, as it also offered a chance of production. From 2006 to 2008 it staged: Goodbye Jimmy, Midgieburgers, The Pipes! The Pipes! and Voices in the Dark. I gave these a longer life by turning them into stories, only changing the title of The Pipes! The Pipes! to Whisky and Water. I then added them to other new stories that had accumulated when I was not painting. The Offer, Misogynist and The Third Mr Glasgow were written as entries for competitions suggested by Canongate Books or my London agent (they did not win.) The Magic Terminus was commissioned by Tot Taylor of London’s Riflemaker Galler
y, Soho, to accompany his show of Francesca Lowe’s richly fanciful paintings. Six stories were written in the year it was published.
Every Short Story by Alasdair Gray 1951-2012 Page 83