Every Short Story by Alasdair Gray 1951-2012
Page 84
Gumbler’s Sheaf came from a folder of annoying letters received over several years but never before got round to counterblasting. Eustace happened because in April 2012 Dan Kitts MBE sent me a copy of his new publication, Military, Naval and Civil Airships Since 1783. Here I read that in October 1916 the last Zeppelin destroyed over England had been shot down by Second Flight Lieutenant Wulfstan Tempest. He at once joined two splendid names I had been unable to forget or use for years: Knatchbull Hugeson, an obscure Victorian literary gent, and the sculptor Scipio Tadolini. I invented a vaunting speech to combine that trio, and a love of anticlimax led to the sad state of Eustace McNulty. I thought that a good way to start these late tales. Working with Giants came from words I heard – or misheard – spoken by a man opposite me on a London underground train when I visited that city to see the big Hockney exhibition in May. Late Dinner also came from eavesdropping on a train, sometime in 2011. I heard a man pontificate about his work in such empty clichés, that I had to invent bullying Mr Big and to give his vacant words a context. Maisie and Henry used some of my wife Morag’s experiences when young, with later memories that we now hold in common. The longer we live together the more her past haunts me. Maisie is therefore slightly like Morag, but also as different as I am from Henry, that efficient gardener. The Patient, however is almost purely autobiographical.
The four drollest tales near the end of this book derive from four short plays I wrote this century; but droll or plausible all of them are class bound. Though not about comfortable folk, they are nearly all folk with enough money. So Billy Semple is my concluding tale, if not the ending. I had met him in Studio One, a mildly sleazy local pub in the early 21st century, since gentrified out of existence. I described that meeting soon after it happened because (A) it reminded me that nobody can be sure of their end and (B) it mentioned social changes for the worse that surprised me when they happened, and which many younger folk take for granted. This I now see is the theme of all my later tales.
WHEN AND WHERE FIRST PRINTED
The Third Mr Glasgow – Prospect, 2007.
Magic Terminus – Riflemaker Gallery Catalogue, 2010.
Midgieburgers – New Writing Scotland 30, 2012.
Billy Semple – The One O’Clock Gun, 2012.
THE ILLUSTRATIONS
Pictures in Unlikely Stories, Mostly had some details copied from work by Paul Klee, Michelangelo, Raphael, Piranesi, G. Glover, W. Blake, E.H. Shepherd and a Japanese artist whose name has no phonetic equivalent in Roman type I am aware of. Drawing is a way of keeping the appearance of folk I know. The last page of my first Unlikely Story shows the face of my son in his teens and the last two Likely Stories show Doreen and Russell Logan when I first knew them. I will not name other friends used in that book. The original Lean Tales by James Kelman, Agnes Owens and me had a picture of each author before their part of the book, so now it has only mine as I was in 1985. The vignettes of merry or glum horned heads are a recent addition. In Glaswegians the initial capitals contain portrait drawings (not wholly in the following order) of May Hooper, Morag McAlpine, John Purser, Eddie Linden, Agnes Owens, Bethsy Gray and Carole Rhodes. A childish pun suggested the illustrative scheme in Ten Tales Tall and True. The frontispiece to The Ends of Our Tethers is based on its 2003 jacket design. The horned skulls were also in that. Other work left me no time to illustrate Tales Droll and Plausible so I enriched them with vignettes scanned from a book of plays by Philip Massinger published by Ernest Benn Ltd, London, and Charles Scribner, New York. Though undated it is obviously late Victorian, and though the artist who designed the vignettes is not named, their style belongs to an even earlier century. Most surviving art is by forgotten artists.
Endnotes
1. M. Pollard clearly wishes to consign to oblivion his translation of Carlyle’s French Revolution into heroic Alexandrines, published privately at Dijon in 1927.
2. An insult to the home of the Academic Francaise.
3. Charles de Gaulle, with no declared political programme, was ruler of France.
4. The title was chosen by her dealer, who names all Judy’s work. Most illustrated histories of modern British art show a photograph of Four Sisters, ascribing it to the Pop or Surrealist school. Ms Paulina Cameron, topiary adviser to the National Trust, is supervising the cultivation of a hedge shaped like Four Sisters for the Melcombe Priory National Heritage Museum. Visitors will be able to walk under the arches of the insteps.
5. A gophor is a fetcher and carrier in the film and other entertainment industries. It is unconnected with gopher, a burrowing pouched rodent or ground squirrel of the spermophil genus: unconnected with gopher, a miner who digs without hope of lasting achievement. (See Shorter O.E.D.)