Very few authors, even good ones, can live by their writing, a fact that has driven some to suicide. B.S. Johnson was infuriated by publishers earning good money by selling the work of authors who had to feed themselves by teaching or some other distraction. The British Welfare State tackled that problem by creating Arts Councils, and the Councils made life easier for some authors by paying universities to take them as Writers in Residence. University literature departments in those days taught nothing but criticism. For two years a resident author could receive a good salary to help the few students trying to write fiction, poems or plays for themselves. The authors chose their hours for this work and otherwise did as they pleased. I applied to become Glasgow University’s third resident writer, on the basis of my radio and television plays. The selection committee was headed by Professor Peter Butter, a Shelley specialist. When he asked what I would write if I got the job, I said a modern version of Prometheus Unbound, the lost play by Aeschylus that Shelley had attempted, unsuccessfully, I thought. With time for research I hoped to do better. That my friend Philip Hobsbaum was also on the selection committee may also have helped me get the job.
From 1977 to 1979 I earned my first steady wage for enjoyable work. My office, in the top-floor south-west corner of Glasgow University, had a big desk, two padded chairs, a bookcase and, through the window, a downward view through treetops of the river Kelvin and beyond them the towers of our art galleries and museum beyond. Here for two and a half days a week I easily helped willing people with their writings in one-to-one tutorials, and otherwise was my own master. Prometheus Unbound proved an impossible play to finish. I had no ideas for writing anything else. Deciding to further my education by more reading I bought The Road to Xanadu by Livingston Lowes, and a thick book of all Ezra Pound’s Cantos.
The Road to Xanadu surveys the old travel and history books that inspired Coleridge’s fragmentary Kubla Khan poem and his Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner. It excited me by recalling every book about lost or hidden worlds I had enjoyed in adolescence. Ezra Pound’s verses about good and bad monetary states confused me with their farfetched, detailed quotations until an unexpected line from his Chinese Cantos made excellent sense:
Moping around the Emperor’s court, waiting for the order-to-write.
Order-to-write was hyphenated because (I thought) it translated one ideogram — one Chinese letter that was also one word. I suddenly imagined a man being trained from infancy to be a great poet, yet prevented from writing anything until the government told him what it wanted. Thinking this travesty of my university job might fill an amusing page or two I wrote –
Dear mother, dear father, I like the new palace. It is all squares like a chessboard. The red squares are buildings, the white squares are gardens…
— and started inventing a world of my own. Livingston Lowes’ account of what went into Coleridge’s Kubla Khan — the artificial paradise of assassins in the Atlas Mountains, the happy valley where Abyssinian kings grew up, a source of the Nile described by the Scots explorer James Bruce — went into Five Letters from an Eastern Empire, my best and longest short story, quickly written in two or three weeks. Years later an Irish friend told me he had heard a Chinese and a Japanese scholar discuss which of their nations my empire most resembled. Some hints of the real Orient may have come from my early reading of a Chinese anthology and the comic Monkey epic in Arthur Waley translations, but I think my empire resembles Britain today as much as any other land.
Several months had passed since I posted my novel to Canongate. Shortly after writing the Five Letters from
an Eastern Empire a letter came from Canongate’s reader, Charles Wilde, saying he was only partly through reading Lanark but was already determined to see it published, despite its great length. He thought the Scottish Arts Council would help Canongate by subsidizing the printing. This greatly revived my confidence and an old plan for a second book containing all the short prose I had written, both fabulous and realistic. Apart from the Five Letters my fables were short and few, but for years I had scribbled down ideas for others and now had time to write them.
The Axletree tales were inspired by a reproduction of Bruegel’s great Tower of Babel painting in the head art teacher’s room of Whitehill School 25 years earlier. It had looked so capable of reaching heaven that God’s desire to prevent that by disuniting the human race seemed quite natural. Like other trainee teachers at Jordanhill College I had been told to deliver a monologue, and gave a spoof lecture suggesting the Tower of Babel provoked the Deluge. In Genesis Babel was built after, not before Noah’s flood, but I did not mind revising Genesis. My lecture had none of the political and historical details that came to me when a Resident Writer. I had also imagined inventing the diary of an aristocratic scholar who never doubts the eccentric theories he promotes, and which might be made entertaining for their own sake, like de Selby’s theories in Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman. In Glasgow University Library I found Sir Thomas Urquhart of Cromarty’s pamphlets reprinted by the Roxburgh Society and knew HE was the aristocrat I wanted. I invented his diary by rewriting much of the story in his own words, edited with additions of my own. I used my failure to write a modern Prometheus Unbound by giving the poetic fragments I had achieved to a highly intellectual French dwarf. He too (I imagined) could not complete them, being frustrated by his inability to seduce a woman activist during the 1968 failure of the student revolt. This story drew much from my own failure to seduce (by letter!! by letter!) a feminist met only once through my friend Joan Ure. Altogether I now had five new fables: The Start of the Axletree about civilization’s imperial and religious origins.