In 1992 Xandra Hardie was my English literary agent. I sent her some short stories made by turning short plays not used in Something Leather — correction! In Glaswegians — suggesting these would be the core of a new short story book if she could get me an advance for it from Jonathan Cape. She was slow in doing so because Tom Maschler, whose enthusiasm had inspired my last book, had left Cape and been replaced by David Godwin. Then a number of English publishers came to Glasgow and gave a party for their Scottish authors, since they now had several of these. Here I met David Godwin. He said he believed his firm was considering a new book of my short stories. I told him I needed an advance on it as soon as possible in order to complete my Anthology of Prefaces. He asked about that book. I told him about it. He said, “Are we getting it?” meaning Cape. I explained that it was going to Canongate, because I had to alternate my books between my Edinburgh and London publishers, to not seem ungrateful to the Scottish firm that had made my first books well known, while keeping an English publisher that could pay me what I was owed. David Godwin seemed to accept that explanation.
Next day Xandra Hardie phoned and said brightly, “Alasdair, I think it would be a good idea if we offered your new book of stories to Bloomsbury. Liz Calder is in charge there now, and she likes your work.” I said that seemed a good idea, because I regarded Liz as a friend. Xandra said, “But please don’t tell Liz that you want the advance in order to finish your anthology for Canongate. I had David Godwin on the phone this morning saying he didn’t see why he should give a f****** advance for a book of stories to a f****** writer who needed the money to write another f****** book for a different f****** publisher.” I told her I was surprised at Godwin’s childish attitude, and knowing Liz Calder was thoroughly adult, amused her by telling her the whole story. Bloomsbury has been my London publisher from then onward. But I dedicated Ten Tales Tall and True to Tom Maschler, Xandra Hardie and Morag McAlpine (whom I had recently married) because I felt they were all partly responsible for the book.
Not all the tales derived from my early plays. You came from the anecdote told to me by Joe Mulholland, former journalist and antique dealer, about a late meal bought for him in Glasgow’s Central Station Hotel by a rich and powerful man, though I changed the sex of his guest. Internal Memorandum was based on an internal memorandum my wife sent to one of her bosses when she worked for a Glasgow bookselling firm, founded in the late 18th century, which mostly expired in the early 21st. Are You a Lesbian? derives from a question she was asked in a local pub, though the woman I describe reacting to that question — daughter of a Church of Scotland minister — is nothing like Morag, and the original question was “Are you a fucking dyke?” The Trendelenburg Position was first written for an English film-making firm who wanted a talking-head monologue of the sort Alan Bennett had written for the BBC. I had greatly admired a couple of these, not least because his speakers were talking to the world at large — to nobody in particular. Unable to imagine anyone like that, I thought of a garrulous dentist working on a helpless patient. My own dentist, Mr White, is not garrulous, but when asked for information to help my monologue, said dentists’ chairs were designed to support patients in the Trendelenburg position. Freidrich Trendelenburg, a German surgeon, had devised the position to support bodies with the least possible physical strain.
But when working on these stories I had a dream which I have spoken of so often, and written about at least once (though I forget where) that I will not describe it. Believing the strange atmosphere of the dream might be put into a story of two or three pages I started what once again grew quickly into a big novel, Poor Things, which some have found my most enjoyable. This is perhaps because the three main characters are all good natured without being bores. This novel grew so quickly that Liz Calder published it a year before Ten Tales Tall and True.
WHEN AND WHERE FIRST PRINTED
Homeward Bound — New Writing, Spring 1992.
Loss of the Golden Silence — Bete Noir, Christmas 1992.
You — Casablanca, May 1993.
Houses and Small Labour Parties — Living Issues, August 1993.
Time Travel — The Review of Contemporary Fiction, USA, 1993.
THE ENDS OF OUR TETHERS
The Book of Prefaces I had promised Canongate gained me an advance that was spent long before I completed the Chaucerian period of this History of the English Language by Those Who Wrote It Best. It was a complex editorial job that I could only do properly while sitting with the typesetter. My efforts to get the job done drew in my friend Angel Mullane. She financed Dog and Bone, a new wee Glasgow publishing house which would typeset the book for Canongate. Her husband Chris Boyce supplied the laptop technology and a friend was our typesetter. A good start was made. The typesetter left us without warning. Dog and Bone became impossible. I offered Canongate a new novel if they would release me from my Book of Prefaces contract. They thankfully agreed. I gave them The History Maker, a futuristic science fiction tale made from a rejected 1960s television play. I then signed a contract with Bloomsbury for an advance of £1,000 a month for three years, and a different monthly payment to my part-time secretary and eventual typesetter. The complete text was to be delivered in 1998, with illustrations. I delivered it in1999. This did not surprise the editor, Liz Calder, who said it had been worth waiting for.
On publication in 2000 it was splendidly reviewed. By this time royalties for two of my early books that were still in print had overcome their original advances. Some were occasionally translated into other languages, so once a year I received cheques from Canongate and Bloomsbury. This steady income was not enough to stop my wife Morag (no longer a wage earner) fearing she might have to save us from poverty by selling her home (which was now mine) if I fell ill. Luckily my friend Bernard MacLaverty suggested I apply for a Royal Literary Fund pension. I did, and was granted it. A year later I got a steady income from being Professor of Creative Writing at Glasgow University, a job shared with Tom Leonard and James Kelman. The three of us resigned from it in 2003 for academic reasons too complex to mention here, but during that time most of the stories in this collection occurred to me, nearly all of them about folk with not much left to live for. This had increasingly been the theme of earlier stories, yet I was not miserable when writing them. Tragedies would not be popular if there was no exhilaration in facing the worst.
No Bluebeard sprang from ideas about marriage derived from women I have known, but none I ever married. The non Bluebeard who tells it, like all my narrators, is a form of myself but in many ways different, I hope. The story Aiblins was certainly suggested by being a creative writing teacher, though I met nobody like Aiblins when I was a professor. I gave him three of my own poems. Proem and Outing were written in my teens and luckily never published before I saw how bad they were. My Ex Husband, Sinkings and Property are based on real occurrences told to me by friends, and which nagged me ever since until I made short fictions from them. Job’s Skin Game was conceived as a monologue when eczema recurred to me after an abeyance of nearly forty years. I connected that with the Book of Job when Lu Kemp, a Scottish BBC radio director, commissioned a story from me derived from a book in the Bible. It was broadcast in January 2003. Well Being derives from a nightmare I had about the future of Scotland when writing a pamphlet.