My third of this book contained the writings excluded from Unlikely Stories, Mostly, plus a new a six-page story, The Grumbler, suggested by a manic phase following the publication of Lanark; also a three-page story I Own Nothing, I Owe Nothing, given me in a dream; and a one-page story, Decision, about a girl discovering too late the connection between sexual intercourse and pregnancy — a true tale told me by my lawyer friend, Angela Mullane. By adding a handful of tales that were even shorter I nearly made my number of pages close to those of Jim and Agnes. The last one, Ending, was a single sentence. I have now made this the last story in this book. The Quartet editor dealing with Lean Tales was not Jennie Erdal. She liked all my co-authors’ stories and most of mine, but thought Portrait of a Painter and Portrait of a Playwright unsuitable because they could not be read as fiction. I understood why she did not want them, but having nothing to replace them with I asked Liz Calder if Cape would publish Lean Tales as I wished. Cape did. Here is the blurb I wrote for it.
The three writers of this book live in a British region containing the world’s largest number of unemployed Scots, the biggest store of nuclear weapons in Europe, and lovely great tracts of depopulated wilderness. Lean Tales brings together a fine selection of short stories by James Kelman, Agnes Owens and Alasdair Gray who all write as if poverty is normal, but poverty is no more their theme than a fixed income is Jane Austen’s. What else they have in common readers may discover and enjoy for themselves.
Lean Tales sold well enough to be reissued twice as a paperback, and I think would have stayed in print and been popular if ordered for use in Scottish secondary schools. The stories of Jim and Agnes are not in this book, being reprinted a few years ago in other collections of their tales. I have removed the two Portrait appreciations and my Report to the Trustees because they will be better in a book of essays. To stop this Lean Tales section being absurdly thin I have fattened it with four stories from a book that is wholly out of print (Mavis Belfrage, A Romantic Novel with Shorter Tales, Bloomsbury 1996). I have also added four tales from later collections in this book whose absence will not be noticed. I will only comment on two of them here. The Marriage Feast was written as a counterblast to Kingsley Amis’ unfairly dismissive remarks about Dylan Thomas. A Reality Show is also a tribute to Danish democracy, because the Royal Family there supports public education by sending their children to state schools instead of those rich private ones falsely called Public in Britain.
WHEN AND WHERE FIRST PRINTED
The Grumbler — The Fiction Magazine, 1984.
The Marriage Feast (entitled Jesus Christ) — The Sunday Independent, 1991.
Fictional Exits — Ten Tales Tall and True, 1993.
Money — Scotlands, 1994.
Edison’s Tractatus — New Novel Review, 1995.
Mister Goodchild — Mavis Belfrage with Five Shorter Tales, 1996.
The Shortest Tale — Madam X, 1996
Inches In a Column — Unlikely Stories, Mostly, Canongate Classics Edition, 2001.
Moral Philosophy Exam — The Ends of Our Tethers, 2003.
GLASWEGIANS
Between the publication of 1982 Janine and Lean Tales Scottish newspapers occasionally mentioned that Alasdair Gray had abandoned Canongate, the small Scottish firm that had made him famous by publishing his first two books, and was now enriching by his talents Jonathan Cape of London. That was not the exact truth but it seemed true enough to worry me. Having no ideas for another novel I thought of turning my first television play into one and giving that to Stephanie Wolfe Murray. I did so and Canongate published The Fall of Kelvin Walker in 1985. This example was useful to me later.
In 1986 I told the American author, Kathy Acker, that I was unlikely to write another story, because I had noticed that all mine described men who found life a task they never doubted until an unexpected collision opened their eyes and changed their habits. The collision was usually with a woman, involved swallowing alcohol or worse, and happened in the valley of the shadow of death. My novels and stories so far had been made in the faith that each was an adventurous new world. I now saw the same pattern in them all — Lanark used it thrice. Having discovered how my talent worked it was almost certainly defunct. Imagination will not employ whom it cannot surprise. Kathy Acker asked if I had thought of writing a story about a woman. No, I said, that was impossible, as I could not imagine how a woman felt when by herself.
The announcement that I did not expect to write more fiction was truthful but not wholly honest. I hoped my talent was only as dead as Finnegan, and would leap from the coffin and dance a new jig if the wake got loud enough. Meanwhile I arranged a show of paintings, began collection of English vernacular prologues, worked with Sandy Johnson to make a film script of Lanark (so ambitious that no financier would look at it) and came to owe my bank a sum oscillating between a few hundred and a few thousand pounds. This was not poverty. Most professional folk live in debt nowadays. Banks and building societies encourage it because debts make them richer. My state only depressed me because my parents had been working class folk who, though not religious, avoided debt like the devil. I too could have avoided it by renting a smaller flat, using public transport instead of taxis, eating at home instead of restaurants, drinking alcohol four or five times year instead of nearly every day. Alas, I felt nostalgia but no desire for the decent carefulness which had bred and educated me. I wanted to be middle-class waster, but a solvent one.
In Queen Street station one morning I glimpsed a girl stepping jauntily through the crowd in high heels and a leather suit which fitted her so snugly in some places, and left her so naked in others that it seemed a preliminary to lovemaking. Soon after or soon before I began imagining how a woman might feel when alone. This came from accompanying a friend on a shopping expedition. Some women — even women who know what looks best on them — enjoy a man’s company when buying clothes, though the man stops being a distinct character to them. He becomes an audience, or rather, a small part of a vaster, more satisfying audience in their heads. I penetrated What Every Woman Wants, The House of Fraser, and Chelsea Girl with the guilty reverence I would feel in a mosque, Catholic chapel or synagogue, yet the odour was familiar and friendly. I had sniffed it as a small boy in my mother’s wardrobe. I was fascinated by women pondering sombre or vivid or subtly pale colours, fingering husky or frail or soft or sleek fabrics, holding loosely or crisply or tightly tailored second skins to their bodies. I felt a long slow sexual ache in these shops, a sad ache because no earthly coitus could satisfy all the desires and possibilities suggested by the many garments. The ache, of course, was mine, but I was sure many women felt it too and perhaps felt it stronger. Most women have fewer devices than men to divert them from affection. I imagined a woman whose world was full of that ache, whose life was years of ordinary frustrations patiently endured before a chance suggestion led her further and further away from the familiar things she normally clung to. The woman need not have been beautiful or her adventure perverse, but these notions brought my imagination to life again. While writing the first chapter of this book I enjoyed a prolonged, cold-blooded sexual thrill of a sort common among some writers and (I suspect) all lizards.