I did not expect to write much about Harry at first. I planned to shift her in one chapter from her nasty Scottish nanny and chilling mother to a boarding school, thence to the Warburg or Courtauld Institute, thence to being an arts administrator in Scotland. But the boarding school acquired a distinct geography where small details developed active bodies to support them. Amanda’s kid and new money had been phrases I invented to show what a snob Harry’s mother was. In the shrubbery the two phrases became Hjordis with The Fortress, Linda with the speech and character she is evicted from. I grew so attached to Harry that I made her an artist and took three chapters to move her north. From the gnat in Alice Through the Looking Glass I got the idea that the almost speechless Harry, after finding her voice in Glasgow, would talk in a smaller typeface than other people.
This list gives the dates of my women’s adventures between the early 1960s and 1990.
CHAPTERS
YEARS
HEROINES
One for the Album
1989
June, Senga, Donalda
A Distant Cousin etc
1963
Harry
The Proposal
1965
Senga
The Man Who Knew etc.
1967
Donalda
Mr Lang and Ms Tain
1973
June
In the Boiler Room
1977
Senga
Quiet People
1971
Donalda
The Bum Garden
1963–1989
Harry
A Free Man etc.
1989
June (off stage)
Culture Capitalism
1989
Harry, Senga
Dad’s Story
1989
Donalda, Harry
Class Party
1989
June, Donalda, Senga, Harry
New June
1989
June, Harry, Donalda, Senga
When June returned to the leatherwear shop where the novel started I realized my book had reached its natural conclusion, which is how I have left it in the foregoing short story collection.
It was published as a novel entitled Something Leather in 1990. Most blurbs I write for my books are tampered with by editors who believe that unstinting praise of their publications is needed to sell it. The following blurb I wrote for Something Leather was printed as I wished:
SOMETHING LEATHER is about the love lives of June, Senga, Donalda and a distant cousin of the queen from 1963 to 1990. Also in it are unhappy children, a dangerously liberal headmistress, a tobacconist’s family, a student, night watchman, pimp, businessman, boilerman, policeman, ex-serviceman, quiet couple, tinker, nurse, commercial traveller, arts administrator, former Lord Provast, Glasgow comedian, worried civil servant, brilliant but unstable politician. This is the first British fiction since THE CANTERBURY TALES to show such a wide social range in such embarrassing sexual detail, yet no characters are based on real people, not even the Glasgow comedian. The inefficient Scottish Office department in the Epilogue never existed — since 1967 its work has been efficiently done by the office of the ombudsman. The story starts near the end, has ten earlier starts, a crisis, a catastrophe and a moral. Unlike Alasdair Gray’s earlier books, SOMETHING LEATHER has no fantasy and combines the amenities of a novel with the varieties of a short-story collection.
The book was dedicated to Flo Allen, who had typed all my publications from the last chapters of Lanark onward. I knew she would not be shocked by my pornographic passages, of which I was slightly ashamed, with good reason. Most critics have agreed that Something Leather is my worst novel. Since chapters 1 and 12 are exploitive sex fantasy they have not noticed the very different writing between these. Despite exciting publicity this book did not become the bestseller Tom Maschler expected and Jonathan Cape never recovered my unusually big advance against royalties. I believe 9 to 11 inclusive are among my best stories in the realistic genre established by great German, Russian, Irish and American authors, French Maupassant, English Kipling and V.S. Pritchett, most of Chekhov and Joyce’s Dubliners. That is why Something Leather has here been retitled. Anyone curious to read the sexual fantasies removed from Class Party may buy a first-edition hardback of Something Leather (in which it is printed uncensored as Chapter 12) from Morag McAlpine’s online bookshop for £12.95. The rarity of this book is maintained by the only acceptable payment being in Sterling cheques.
WHEN AND WHERE FIRST PRINTED
One for the Album appeared in The Fiction Magazine, a brave attempt at a new Scottish quarterly launched in 1988, which expired after two or three issues.
With slight changes it was printed with the others in Something Leather, 1990.
TEN TALES TALL AND TRUE
This collection of stories was printed in 1993 by Bloomsbury instead of Cape, for complicated reasons starting years earlier.
William Smellie was a publisher who belonged to what has since been called the Scottish Enlightenment. One of the first to print Robert Burns’ poetry, he also conceived and mainly collated the first edition of The Encyclopaedia Britannica, which he called “a scissors and paste job”. He also wrote A Philosophy of Natural History, published in Edinburgh in 1790. Early in the 1980s a descendant of Smellie — the surgeon Campbell Semple — lent me that book. The preface to it began with these words: Every preface, beside occasional and explanatory remarks, should contain not only the general design of the work but the motives and circumstances which lead the author to write on that particular subject. If this plan had been universally observed, a collection of prefaces would have exhibited a short, but curious and useful history both of literature and authors. This suggested a history of literature made by arranging prefaces by their authors to great poems, plays, novels etc in chronological order. The result would be a history of English literature by those who had made it best, and seemed such a simple job that I was amazed to think nobody had yet done it, and I signed a contract for the book with Canongate. I started work on it and in less than a year had spent the publisher’s advance against royalties, and found the work looked like taking almost as long to write as Lanark. It would have to be subsidized by other writing.