Which shows I was in tune with Edgar Allan’s weird verbal magic — and was a good reader. Though keen to be an author I gladly submitted to the power of others, which is how best to learn authorship. Milton describes the process in rhyming epitaph to Shakespeare, where he tells the playwright that his impressive lines: … our fancy of it self bereaving
dost make us Marble with too much conceiving
— meaning Shakespeare’s words can make us briefly more like statues of Hamlet, Falstaff or Cleopatra than like ourselves. This loss of our person in another author’s character strengthens our critical power if we read closely and widely. For years my critical powers stopped me writing every fiction I started after two or three pages. Despite good marks for school essays, despite filling notebooks with details and ideas, I saw that each false start was obviously in the voice of a child or (later) of a self-obsessed adolescent. But before leaving secondary school I started identifying most strongly with potential writers or artists in fictional worlds more like mine — David Copperfield’s Victorian England, Paul Morel’s Nottingham, Stephen Dedalus’s Dublin, and the 1938 Bankside, London, of Gulley Jimson, the disreputable old mural painter in Joyce Carey’s The Horse’s Mouth.
UNLIKELY STORIES, MOSTLY
The first story in this book was written in the last summer holiday with both my parents on the island of Arran. This has been called Scotland in miniature, having a jaggedly mountainous north and to the south lower hills, some farms and sheltered woody hollows. The villages and houses nearly all face the sea across a coastal road. For two or three years our holiday home was the last house in Pirnmill, a row of houses with primary school and post office on the quietest side of Arran. In long summer holidays there I often regretted having no friend of my own age and sex, yet enjoyed long walks accompanied by my imagination. On the three or four miles of road between Pirnmill and Lochranza the only houses are a low white terrace nicknamed the Twelve Apostles on Catacol Bay. Just before Catacol the coast road is pinched between the sea cliff and a boulder bigger than a house, steep sided but easily climbable by any boy who likes feeling king of a castle. The top had bushes and turf where I lay one sunny afternoon feeling elevated and private, and here I imagined The Star in a gust of what seemed inspiration.
The critic Leavis suggests that inspiration is unconscious memory, because well made phrases only come without effort when authors intuitively adapt words by earlier writers. At least twenty years passed before I noticed that The Star was inspired by H.G. Wells’ story The Crystal Egg, in which the hen-pecked owner of a grubby curio shop finds consolation in a lens through which he glimpses life on another planet. He dies while hiding it from a potential customer and his rapacious wife. The Crystal Egg is about a dozen pages long; my tale of a young boy dying to keep a magic gift is barely two. I did not know the end before describing the teacher demanding the gift, which resembled one of those coloured glass balls Scots children call bools, jorries or jinkies — English children call them marbles. I did not want the reader to think it was just a cheap glass toy made magic by the fancy of a deluded child. I disliked stories equating imaginary worlds with delusion, which the Alice books miraculously avoid, despite their stories being dreams. I was pleased and astonished at finding three last sentences that left the star a reality.
Four years or more passed before I wrote four stories following The Star. The Spread of Ian Nicol and The Cause of Recent Changes were stimulated by a chance of publication in Ygorra, a facetious magazine published annually by Glasgow University students and sold for charity. For two years the editor was Alan Fletcher, a Glasgow School of Art student whose talent and intelligence led him to design the covers, give it cartoons, print articles and work by Frank Bowles, Reid Moffat, Malcolm Hood and me, his fellow art students. My illustrations to two stories, slightly improved, are now on pages 10–11 and 17 of this book. I also wrote The Comedy of the White Dog at art school, but the climax is bestial sex so could not be published before the permissive 1960s. A Unique Case was written for Cleg, an art school magazine of which the only edition was conceived and edited by my friend James Spence.
I was a student supported by my parents and the British Welfare State education grants when I wrote these early fables. Then came two years of part time uncertificated teaching, as little of it as possible while I tried and failed to earn money by my visual arts. With another education grant I then trained as a full time teacher; the only short story written in this glum period was The Answer, a likely story which, though told in the third person, tells how another trainee teacher, without fuss or harsh words, showed she was tired of me. James Joyce had shown me how everyday happenings could be as much the stuff of fiction as miraculous fables. For many years after that I was too busy combining the familiar and fabulous in a novel to write anything shorter, apart from a spoof lecture, The Crank that Made the Revolution. To tell how more unlikely stories came to be written I must speak of that novel, Lanark.
When half finished in 1970 an excellent English literary agent, Frances Head, showed Lanark to three London publishers who agreed it might become something saleable, but as it would be very long, and eccentric, and the author was unknown, it might be a very expensive flop. Each was willing to publish it as two books of average length, which could easily have been done because it combined two narratives — one of them fabulous, a modern Pilgrim’s Progress greatly influenced by Kafka, one a Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man set in Glasgow instead of Dublin. I refused that offer but one of these publishers, Quartet Books, offered £90 for the right to accept or refuse it on completion. I gladly accepted that money from Quartet, which was then worth at least five times what £90 buys now, forty-two years later. I continued writing the novel, confident that Frances Head would find a good publisher for it on completion, even if it was finally rejected by Quartet. But Frances Head died of lung cancer shortly before the novel was completed in 1977, and Quartet Books rejected it because of the length. Without much hope I sent it off to Canongate Books in Edinburgh, a Scottish publishing house so small that I doubted if Lanark would ever be published. My income had largely come from television plays commissioned through Frances. These stopped. I failed in a miserable effort to teach again. Thoroughly depressed, I decided to waste my talent by writing a book that would make money, a pornographic novel full of fantasies I had been suppressing since the age of four or five. But despite trying to write it for weeks, I was so unlike the Marquis de Sade that I kept losing interest.