Lanark_ a life in 4 books - Alasdair Gray [291]
That large change came about because in 1961 I married and, in September 1963 became a father. The most significant part of my life no longer seemed my eccentrically frustrated youth. The toils of later life which I shared with many other folk now looked as important.
Q Are you telling me that the fantastic and grotesque events in books 3 and 4 are also autobiographical? How can they be? Lanark becomes Lord Provost of Unthank. You were never a figure in the local politics of Glasgow.
A I know, but experience allowed me to generalise. A writer whose play has been chosen for a TV production is very like a politician chosen for an important position because he has made a speech that appeals to widespread sentiment. He then discovers he depends on a host of directors, producers, dramaturges and technicians to whom he is a temporary creature, of use in assisting their work if he does not tamper with the notions it suggests to them. The writer of what was once his script may feel good if the production is finally applauded: will certainly be blamed if it is not, but his part in the business may strike him as one that could have been done as well or better by someone with less or very different ideas. TV production taught me all about politics.
Q In what sort of order were the parts of the book completed?
A Book One was completed in its present form before my son was born. My wife and I were living on Social Security money then so I sent the completed part to Spenser Curtis Brown s literary agency because I felt the book good enough to stand alone, though I would have preferred to complete it in the big way I had planned. But Mr Curtis Brown rejected it so I did complete it as planned. By the mid-1970s I had completed book Three and linked it to Book One with my Oracles Prologue. I had a good agent who liked my work by that time, Frances Head, a London lady. She showed it to three London publishers, who tried to persuade me to split the Thaw and Lanark narratives in two and make separate books of them. They said it would be dangerously expensive for them to risk publishing so big a first book by an unknown novelist. But my first marriage had collapsed in an amicable way, I had no need of money and was greedy for fame instead, so I refused them.
Books Two and Four were written side by side – I moved from completing a chapter in one to a chapter in the other with an increasing sense of running downhill. In 1975 and ’76 I was carrying manuscripts around and working on them in all kinds of places. I remember waking up on the livingroom floor of my friend Angela Mullane’s house after a party where I had fallen asleep for a usual Scottish reason, and resuming work there and then because it was a quiet morning and none of the other bodies on the floor were awake. I couldn’t do that now. I was then a young fellow of forty or thereabouts.
At the end of July 1976 the whole book was completed, typed and posted to Quartet Ltd, the only London publisher Frances Head had been able to interest in it. She, alas, had died of lung cancer. Quartet books turned it down for the usual reason – it was too long for them to risk the high cost of printing. I sulked for half a year then posted it to Canongate, the only Scottish publishing firm I knew. Five or six months passed before I got an enthusiastic letter from Charles Wilde, the Canongate reader, saying the Scottish Arts Council would probably