At that time I thought One for the Album (then called Something Leather) a short story. On completing it I imagined more adventures for June, but the first episode had internal order and was a thriller of The Pit and the Pendulum sort, ending when the reader was likely to be most intrigued. Believing it could be popular I sent it to a famous London literary agency, suggesting they try selling it to an expensive glossy magazine with a transatlantic circulation: Vogue or Esquire or better still The New Yorker. After a few weeks I learned it had been sent to a couple of British literary magazines whose editors, though friendly acquaintances of mine, had not embraced it with cries of “yes please”.
In 1987 Tom Maschler, Chairman of Jonathan Cape Ltd, asked if I had ideas for a new novel, a question he had asked me more than once since Cape had published my second novel three years earlier. I was in danger of mounting a literary treadmill. Most writers of saleable books can get money from publishers to write another as an advance against future royalties. Years of reprinting in paperback and foreign translations may pass before writers get money from royalties. I had not yet received royalties for earlier books because, though critical successes, they were not bestsellers. Critical successes are reviewed at length in literary magazines and lectured upon in universities. This hardly ever happens to bestsellers. Conscious of the economic treadmill ahead I sent Tom Maschler my story, suggesting it might be the first chapter of a novel for which, had I been truthful, I would have said I had not enough ideas. He replied with the enthusiasm of a publisher who suspects he may be about to get a bestseller from a critically successful author. I had never haggled with a publisher for money and did not do so now. Publisher’s contracts usually offer the writer a third of the advance on signing the contract, a third on their receipt for the book and the last third on publication. I asked for an advance of £40,000, over four times any of my earlier advances. Some days earlier that sum had come up in a discussion of money worries with my friend Bernard MacLaverty, who said a good publishing house should give me £40,000 a year to write for them anything I liked. I asked Cape to give me £20,000 on signing the contract and the other half on receiving the full text, if they received it not later than two years after signature. This agreement gave me nearly three years of financial comfort with only one problem: making a lightly pornographic short story into a novel.
Lanark had been planned as an epic and written carefully over many years; 1982 Janine was a sudden inspiration, and if not delayed by poverty would have completed in 1982 when it was started. I easily imagined a lesbian pseudo-masochistic orgy following One for the Album — such fancies come easily to me, but I cannot take them seriously for long having employed so many in my second novel. The story had now three main characters — June, Senga and Donalda (Harry had not yet occurred to me). I imagined June’s seduction giving her an aggressive social confidence she had hitherto lacked, and using her work in a local government office to seduce, entangle and corrupt (with the help of Senga and Donalda) Scottish legislators. I wrote nearly a chapter along these lines but stopped on the verge of being unconvincing. Powerless to imagine a way of carrying the plot forward I thought of using that meaningless label, POST-MODERNISM, to enlarge the book in any way possible, and looked at old television and radio plays that had once been my livelihood. In the 1970’s Dialogue was a half hour play broadcast by Scottish BBC radio, then networked on television by Granada, then performed in theatres by the short-lived Scottish Stage Company. I prosed it into the present tense, called it A Free Man with a Pipe, and easily believed my free man was June’s unsatisfactory ex-husband, trying to forget her by failing to seduce someone else, with her voice on the telephone at the end finally demolishing him. This suggested a new form for the book.
Having shown Senga and Donalda seducing June in the late 1980s (the fashions in the streets give the date) each chapter would show in earlier years one of the women involved with men who failed them, starting with Senga’s schooldays. While recycling these past dramas I began wanting to show more than the local Scots who compose today’s Britain. My first and longest book had tried to do that, but lacking the knowledge to show (as Dickens had in Little Dorrit) Britain’s oligarchs in a plot involving slums and slum landlords, the jailors and the jailed, I had hidden my ignorance in Lanark with fabulous metaphors. But a book of episodes showing the lives of three women converging over twenty-five years might describe, without fantasy, shifts and dependencies between many believable people. How could I bring a representative English oligarch to Scotland? In 1990 it was the turn of a British city to be the culture capital of Europe. Margaret Thatcher’s government gave the job to Glasgow, which suggested a richer past for Harry.
I had invented her for the Class Party chapter, because a quartette allowed more permutations than a trio, but she said little because I had no idea where she came from or what job she did when not playing perverse games. I knew she was a rarer social type than my other women. It helped the plot for her to be rich, and it was a useful economy to make her almost speechless. I did not bother imagining a past for her, except to think she might have been made administrator of a large hospital with the job of closing it down. I had often thought about what makes rich people different from others, especially the rich whose wealth is a habit of mind due to a big unearned income. I had met a few and got on well with them because they had not been snobs — Francis Head had been one — but occasional remarks had astonished by showing how foreign to me they were. The owner of a big private garden told me how he had devoted it wholly to trees and shrubs because plots of flowers gave his gardener too much work. I asked if he grew vegetables. He said, “Once I did but it wasn’t worth the trouble. You can get them in a shop for a few shillings.”
I had also known a young woman who disliked everyone her parents knew, saying she preferred “ordinary people”. She sulked when expected to make a cup of Nescafé for herself, explaining that she could not possibly do that, and proved it by floating a spoonful of the powder in a mug of lukewarm water. These people were individuals, not types, but as Scott Fitzgerald said at the start of his story The Rich Boy, “Describe an individual and you may end with a type; describe a type and you are likely to end with — nothing.” It occurred to me that perhaps the very rich, after leaving boarding school, found it hard to take others seriously because they could easily replace or escape from whomever they did not like. That might explain why some were astonishingly unaffectionate towards their young. Brooding on this I suddenly imagined Harry’s mother saying at her birth, “Oh God a fucking little gel,” and began conceiving my distant cousin of a queen. The speech rhythms of this class (devoid of swearwords) had resounded through all the homes where I lived from babyhood. The BBC had been created by Lord Reith, a Glasgow minister’s son, but most broadcasters had the dialect of posh English boarding schools. I had also met that class in the pages of Wilde, Firbank, Hemingway’s Fiesta, Denton Welsh and Evelyn Waugh.