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By Root 1437 0

with the prostitute, by the way, was sheer invention. It struck me as the sort of thing that would likely happen if I went with a prostitute. So I never did. In 1954 I was so sure of my Thaw story that, instead of taking a summer holiday job like most art students, I got dad s permission to stay at home and write it. Having rapidly filled notebooks with ideas and descriptions I felt able to finish a novel in ten weeks. At the end of that time I had written what is now chapter 12, The War Begins, and the hallucinatory episode ending chapter 29, The Way Out. I had found I did not want to write in the gushing emotional voice of a diary, but in a calm unemphatic voice readers would trust. This is not my normal reading voice. To make it a normal written voice I had to continually revise

Q But where did Lanark come from?

A From Franz Kafka. I had read The Trial and The Castle and Amerika by then, and an introduction by Edwin Muir explaining these books were like modern Pilgrim’s Progresses. The cities in them seemed very like 1950s Glasgow, an old industrial city with a smoke-laden grey sky that often seemed to rest like a lid on the north and south ranges of hills and shut out the stars at night. I imagined a stranger arriving, making enquiries and slowly finding he is in hell. I made notes for that book. I wrote a description of a stranger arriving in a dark city, in a train on which he is the only passenger. But the Thaw novel had to be finished, I thought.

Then one day in Dennistoun public library I found Tillyard’s The English Epic and its Background, which I will not attempt to describe in detail, but the lesson I took from it was this. The epic genre can be prose as well as poetry and can combine all other genres – convincing accounts of how men and women act in common and uncommon domestic, political, legendary and fabulous circumstances. Nothing less than an epic, I decided, was worth writing, and was helped to the decision by remembering how much I enjoyed works that mingled different genres; childhood pantomime, The Wizard of Oz film, Hans Andersen’s stories, Amos Tutuola’s Palm-Wine Drunkard, Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner, Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, Kingsley’s Water Babies, Goethe’s Faust, Moby Dick, Shaw’s Adventures of the Black Girl in Search of God, classical myths and some books of the bible. All these mingle everyday doings with supernatural ones.

I now planned to put my journey through hell in the middle of my Portrait of the Artist as a Frustrated Young Glaswegian. In some chapter before Thaw went mad he would attend a drunken party and meet an elderly gent like himself but thirty or forty years older who would tell him a queer fantastic story, enjoyable for its own sake. Only when the readers reached the end of Thaw would they see the interior narrative was a continuation of it. The design of the book now hung in my mind like a scaffolding put up for the erection of a large castle, with a few towers (that is, chapters) completed or partly complete. Most of what happened to me before the novel was finished provided me with building materials that I stored in notebooks until I could construct the other towers and connecting walls.

For example, chapters 7 to 11 describe an institute, a province of hell in which modern professional middle-class folk are the devils. This derives from both other writers and my own experience. The architecture of the place partly derives from H. G. Wells ‘s Selenite empire in The First Men on the Moon and 21st-century London in The Sleeper Awakes, but mostly from the afterlife hell in Wyndham Lewis’s Malign Fiesta. This was part of a trilogy, The Human Age, later published as novels, but the last two books were first written as plays for the BBC Third Programme and broadcast several times around 1955. I heard one such broadcast while in Stobhill hospital then, an experience that also gave me material for chapter 26 – Chaos – which describes the experience from a patient’s point of view. I had been sent there with what our family doctor called ‘stasis asthmaticus’, and which