Five Letters from an Eastern Empire about the poet as totalitarian state bureaucrat.
Logopandocy about the poet as Scots Renaissance aristocrat.
Prometheus about the poet as French 1960s democrat.
The End of the Axletree about the downfall of greedy civilizations.
Canongate had arranged to publish Lanark jointly in the USA with Lipincot, an old, well established American firm. But before publication Lipincot was swallowed by Harper and Roe, an equally old well established firm, which slowed publication. Lanark was printed in 1981 after a four-year delay enabling me to enlarge the Epilogue, add a verse to the end, and design the book jacket and five interior title pages. It sold so well that Canongate gladly agreed to publish my second book, Unlikely Stories, Mostly. This would also contain: A Report to the Trustees, a true account of how I had used a travelling scholarship between the years 1957 and 1958; Portrait of a Painter, about my friend Alasdair Taylor; Portrait of a Playwright, about my friend Joan Ure; and The Story of a Recluse, a speculative completion of a story Robert Louis Stevenson left unfinished. In 1982 all these had been written. I had only one more story to add, a realistic one.
I scribbled the opening and closing sentences when, as a University extra-mural lecturer, I had often visited Paisley, Dumfries and Moffat. The tale would be the monologue of a tradesman whose job took him all over Scotland, working automatically in an almost continual alcoholic stupor because he hated himself. The main inspiration was the story by Dostoevsky whose title in one translation is Notes From Underground, and in another Confessions of a Cellar Rat. I first happened upon this story on a ship going to Gibraltar in 1958, and found it so upsetting that I never read it to the end nor looked into it since. I knew such men existed because I was sometimes one, and thought I could make this unattractive chap interesting for a page or two. But on setting out to complete this tale I had postponed writing for nearly twenty years I saw my man’s sex life must have shrunk to mere masturbatory fantasies, and decided to spice his tale with bits of my failed pornographic novel of four years earlier. James Joyce wrote that a true work of art makes in the reader or viewer an attentive trance — makes us conceive it so completely that (as Milton said of Shakespeare’s plays) it bereaves our fancy. Only improper arts, pornography and propaganda, excite movement in beholders, said Joyce. I agreed with him, and was astonished to find my imagination accelerating and expanding a story containing not just pornography but also my outrage at the way Britain is now governed. It also used many real and moving events that had befallen me and folk I loved — materials which had not gone into Lanark. I had meant Lanark to be my only novel, and was now writing another! The story had to be divided into chapters and whenever one was finished I believed there was only one more to go, but found I was wrong. I had never written so quickly before, yet after ten chapters I ran out of money and had to stop, being no longer a writer-in-residence. But I was sure 1982 Janine (so called because it was begun and half written that year) would be in many ways a better novel than Lanark.
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.