Duncan Jones

CORBETT, John, ‘The Stalking Cure: John Buchan, Andrew Greig and John Macnab’

12 September 2021 by Duncan Jones

ScotLit 30, Spring 2004 |

Seivintie-ane yeir separates twa buiks that hae the selsame character, a composite pauchler, or poacher, at thair hert: John Buchan’s John Macnabwis publish’t i 1925 an Andrew Greig’s The Return of John Macnab i 1996. Baith are warks o thair time, set i the contemporarie Hielans; baith are rattlin guid yarns; the saicont, houever, casts a late 20^th centurie licht on the first, shawin hou men, wummen, laund awnership, Scotland – an storytellin itsel – haes aw chynged i twa-three generation.

The plot
The plot o ilka buik is awmaist identical. I John Macnab, thrie cronies i thair mid-forties are deein o ennui, a rare seikness that anelie seems tae afflick men wha’ve been ower successfu, ower airlie. This ennui dings doun, first o aw, Sir Edward Leithen, lawer, Tory MP, and ex-Attorney General forby; saicontlie, Mr John Palliser-Yeates, heid o an eminent bank, aw-roun sportsman an man o business; an thirdly, Lord Charles Lamancha, ane-time adventurer an nou Tory Cabinet Meenister. Tae heize thair speerits, this trio turn tae poachin, unner the collective hannle o ‘John Macnab’, set up a den i the Hielan kintra hame o Sir Archie Roylance, a game-leggit war hero that ettles tae be a Conservative MP.

They pit oot a henner, or challenge, tae thrie o Roylance’s neebours: first the Radens, auld bluid, about tae dee out; next, they the Claybodys, vulgur, bekilted nouveaux riches; an hinnermaist, the Bandicotts: a veesitin American archaeologist an his son, wha’re rentin a grand estate for the simmer. The henner forewarns Roylance’s neebours that ‘John Macnab’ will thieve a saumon, a stag, or siclike, frae their launds. The outcome is that the ennui is duly skail’t tae the fower wunds, the weel-heel’t pauchlers gain an entourage o helpers (includin hameless waif, ‘Fish Benjie’ and an athletic journalist, caw’d Crossby), an chinless wunner Archie Roylance mairries Janet Raden, saicont dochter o the landed grandee.

The Return of John Macnab reives freely frae the plot o the first novel: thrie cast-doun cronies (a copywriter whase wife has dee’d o a sudden on a plane flicht; an ex-Special Forces sodger in a marital crisis; and a jaundiced left-wing jyner) decide tae revive the henner o Buchan’s novel, this time agin ane estate awned bi a Moroccan Arab, anither estate rented bi a Dutch corporation, an a third cried Balmoral. Insteid o haein a Fish Benjie or Crossby the journalist giein hauners, the modren-day Macnabs fin thairsels hijack’t bi a gallus quine and a sonsie, Kirsty Fowler, wha aw but taks ower the haill jing-bang. Kirsty is a hard-livin, hard-luvin, hard-bevvyin thirtie-yeir-auld reporter an sangster, wi a mirky past and an ee for a bonnie lad. Aince mair, the fower Macnabs tine thair boredom, and eftir mony ups and douns Kirsty and the bereaved copywriter dowe intae the sunset thegither.

Politics
Ane o the maist unco things about readin the original John Macnab is that the fower heroes is Tories. The’r nae great shock about this, John Buchan bein Conservative MP for the Scottish Universities frae 1927-35, but for an upstert scallywag o my generation it isnae a canny experience bein pit intae a readin poseetion that speirs ye tae gree wi a class formation an ideology that’s sae lang been out o fashion. Yet Buchan sweeps ye alang wi the auld-farrant verve o his screivin, an eftir aw, it’s a gey idiosyncratic vairsion o Toryism he’s espousin. Buchan’s politics gets aired bi Archie Roylance durin an improvised screed at a hustings he attends wi Lord Lamancha:

He preached the doctrine of Challenge; of no privilege without responsibility, of only one right of man – the right to do his duty; of all power and property held on sufferance.

‘John Macnab’ gies the jaded aristos and social-sclimmin upsterts o the chyngin Hielans thair challenge – the collective pauchler micht be ayont the law but he bides aye within the honourable code o sportsmanship. ‘Macnab’ challenges the richts o the property awners an gars thaim fend thair gear in an immediate an direck wey – an i daein sae, ironically eneuch, he ratifies thair claim tae whit they awn. Janet Raden, Archie’s boyish muse, maks the connection atween the land awners an her ain forefolk, includin the Viking, Harald Blacktooth, whase banes an orrals are bein socht bi the auld American archaeologist:

There was a Raden with Robert the Bruce – he fell with Douglas in the pilgrimage to the Holy Sepulchre – and a Raden died beside the King at Flodden – and Radens were in everything that happened in the old days in Scotland and France. But civilisation killed them – they couldn’t adapt themselves to it.

This is Buchan’s political veesion, pit simply: gear is tae be held bi men – or wummen – that haes borne the gree agin challengers an sae won the privilege o property.

The political colour o The Return of John Macnab is muckle pinker. The wager o the latter-day Macnabs caws for the faw o the Conservative government, an tho ane o the Macnabs – Alastair Sutherland, the ex-sodger – is a self-parody o a Tory squaddie, at least ane ither haes a profile that wid nivver fit a Buchan hero. Trotskyite Murray, the jyner, is the political hert o the modren Macnabs, the ane that kythes tae the ploy i the howp that it’ll heize up publicity for laund access richts out-throu the grouse shootin season. His co-conspirators are there for ither reasons.

The sympathies o Greig’s readers, then, is planked ithergates frae thon o Buchan’s readers. Readers nouadays cannae be expeckit tae haud wi the notion o a hierarchical societie, led bi naitrul leaders wha pruive thairsels endlesslie; and the ethos o Greig’s novel pynts mair towards social inclusion an access for aw. It turns out that the new Macnabs are e’en anti-bluid sports: they ettle tae tranquilise, no kill, thair stag.

Yet an aw, some things dinnae chynge. Archie Roylance’s speak anent the chyngin Hielans is pruived prophetic. Greig’s new land awners are – in a slee reversal o Buchan’s imperial ethos – an Arab aristocrat an a Dutch consortium. Tae cock a snook at the stereotypes o Buchanite ‘shockers’, the dusky Moroccan e’en maks aff wi the female lead, at least for a whilie, afore he jynes the Macnab entourage as weel.

Christopher Harvie richtly says Buchan yaises his novel tae bandy about whit i the 18^th century wid hae been cried ‘notions’ – braid social and philosophical ideas about class and privilege, richts and responsibilities. Greig alswa pleys about wi single-issue politics an issues o laund awnership an access, but politics is no whit drives the twa buiks.

Bendin gender
Kirsty says i Greig’s buik, “There is no sex in John Macnab” – but o course there is. The chief – leastweys nominal – heterosexual relationship i John Macnab is that atween Archie Roylance an Janet Raden: war hero suin-tae-be MP and auld bluid heiress. The new Macnabs hae a guid deal o fun at Roylance’s expense, i parteeticular the wey the reader keeks at Janet thro his een:

Her bright hair, dabbled with raindrops, was battened down under an ancient felt hat. She looked, thought Sir Archie, like an adorable boy.

At least ane modren Macnab puzzles on thir kittle passages, namely Neil, that luiks at Kirsty wi different een:

She was unknown yet deeply familiar. A pal. Not exactly slim, graceful and boylike in the manner of Buchan’s women who were always fast on the hill, terrific with a rod and hated jazz and anything modern and over-sensitive. Chaps, really.

Elsewhaur i the novel, tho, e’en Kirsty adopts the guise o ‘principal boy’ i this modren pantomime. The new-mintit Macnabs’ snicherin nochtwithstandin, Buchan clearly didnae want guile anent sexual maitters. Christopher Harvie notes that durin Warld War I, in his role as heid-bummer o British propaganda, he speired out German nationality bi readin German psychoanalysis. Catherine Carswell screive’t that Buchan had ‘mastered all the standard texts ‘with attention and respect’, an Harvie concludes frae this that Buchan kent the wark o Freud an Jung. Harvie than gaes on tae moot that Buchan wis mair disposed tae Jung’s theories nor Freud’s an says that ‘Freudian traces in Buchan are pretty limited, although the distinguished Scots psychoanalyst Jock Sutherland argued that his relationship to his mother might repay study’.

I’d argie that the’r still a muckle i John Macnab, that’s weel Freudian, conscious or no – an I jalouse a lot o it’s conscious. As awbodie weel kens, the basis o Freud’s theory o the unconscious is that the adult sel – or ego – sinders itsel fae the id, thon ‘reservoir of the libido’ bi divers intimmers, or mechanisms, o repression. Freud’s grand discoverie wis that this process o repression is a naitrul ane: we aw gang throu a phase whaurby we damp doun wur sauvage desires for tae integrate intae societie, tae jyne the bodie o the kirk, sae tae speak. Buchan is licht in tone an sceptical anent psychoanalysis, baith here an elsewhaur, but the speerit o Sigmund Freud infuses John Macnab juist as the ghaist o Harald Blacktooth haunts the glens. Picter the verra first scene i Buchan’s John Macnab: an unkent patient, a man on the wrang side o fortie, is sprawled out on an easy chair afore a ‘great doctor’. It’s near the teepical Freudian scenario, a psychoanalyst bi the windae, an the patient on the sofa. The patient, o course, is Leithen an his seikness isnae physical: as the doacter says,‘it’s a mind disease, to which I don’t propose to minister.’ Acton Croke, the English physician, is nae Sigmund Freud, tho his neist patient will turn out tae be Palliser-Yeates, wha exheebits the selsame symptoms o neurosis. Croke’s remedy isnae Freudian either – he advises baith his patients tae haud aff, an reive a cuddie, in a kintra whaur reivers are hingit. This is the English repone tae German psychoanalysis: acks, no wards, cures the mind that’s seik.

I his Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, Freud sterts aff on his explore o the indiveedual’s relations wi ceevilisation. I Freud’s opeenion, the ack o kythin tae ceevilised societie necessitates the repression o sindrie preemitive ettles or wants. Aw Buchan’s heroes is the epitome o civileesed men, ilkane at the heicht o his pooer an influence, an ilkane maun therefore hae dune a muckle amount o repressin tae get whaur he is. Ilkane is a bachelor, forby. Nou, the maist pouerfu o wur instincts is, of course, libidinal impulses that are replanked toward goals that are ‘socially higher and no longer sexual’. I the First o the Introductory Lectures, Freud says, ‘we believe that civilization is to a large extent being constantly created anew, since each individual who makes a fresh entry into human society repeats this sacrifice of instinctual satisfaction for the benefit of the whole community’. Houever, the individual whiles suffers a ‘retour o’ the repress’t’ an sae displays neurotic symptoms, for ensample, ye micht be as restless as a hen on a het girdle, or shaw symptoms o hysteria or anxeeitie. I the case o Buchan’s thrie Macnabs, neurosis is manifestit as ennui. Ceevilisation canna mend this ‘mind disease’ if anelie because it is ceevilisation. As Janet Raden moots, ‘Civilisation kills us’ – a gey subversive thocht for a guid Tory, mair subversive nor Bolshevism, richt eneuch. But, as Janet gaes on tae say, ‘That’s not politics, it’s the way nature works.’

Ennui is amang the narcissistic neuroses, gey kittle tae sort bi Freud’s ‘bletherin cure’ sin the patient haes sterted tae withdraw frae ither fowk. The John Macnab challenge acks as a kin o displacement, allouin the neurotics tae replank thair atavistic desires intil a ploy that, houever sportsmanlik, taks thaim outwith the law, outwith ceevilisation an its discontents – that allous thaim tae hunt, shoot an fish for real, kennin that they’ll get mair nor thair heid in thair hauns tae play wi, gin they’re catch’t.

The ither characters i John Macnab faw intil Freudian archetypes in ane wey or anither. Fish Benjie, the atavistic urchin, is part beast, part human, an represents the inner wean that aw the Macnabs maun address an sublimate, gin they are tae cantle up an win free frae thair debilitatin neurosis. Fish Benjie lives roch, athout faither nor mither (faither deid, mither ill an needin Benjie’s care – but let’s no get ower Oedipal about this), outwith the constraints o ceevilisation, an he disnae haud e’en wi the rules o sportsmanship laid doun bi the adult Macnabs. He is the ur-Macnab, an the hinnermaist phrase in the novel is his richt name: Benjamin Bogle. A ‘bogle’, mind, is a supernaitrul trickster, an can be read as a symbol o the id. The Viking Harald Blacktooth is an unceevilised warlord, anither symbol and e’en an incarnation o the primal id. John Macnab, the composite pauchler, is Blacktooth’s verra reincarnation – a Benjamin Bogle in adult claes – the site on whilk the thrie bourgeoises and aristos can projeck thair ain repressed impulses.

At first, Archie Roylance disnae quite fit this picter. He’s ower young an no successfu eneuch tae be tholin the neurotic ennui o the ithers. An indeed, his neurosis is different – a trauma neurosis o the kind that Freud got parteecularly interestit in as an affcome o the First Warld War. Altho Archie awns at ane pynt tae quite enjoyin the War, he has been boadilie woundit an, lik his thrie pauchlin cronies, his sex drive haes been – comically – divertit. Buchan does mak affectionate fun o Archie, and psychoanalysis, i Archie’s thochts anent Janet:

He did not think of nymphs and goddesses or of linnets in spring; still less did he plunge into the depths of a subconscious self which he was not aware of possessing. The unromantic epithet which rose to his lips was ‘jolly’.

Tho Archie is unawaur o possessin an unconscious self, a practisin psychoanalyst micht say his double trauma – leg smashed twa times, aince i the war and again whilst racin cuddies – accounts for a latent homosexuality that is ‘ceevilised’, that is, transferr’t intil a socially-acceptable form, bi his luve for the boyish Janet Raden. She, mind, is nocht anelie the heiress o an auld faimly but alswa the advocate o the weys o Harald Blacktooth, ane o wur symbols o the primeval id. The consummation o Archie and Janet’s passion, at the hinner end o the buik, wi aw the Macnabs in attendance (includin Fish Benjie) gies closure tae this Freudian narrative o neuroses sublimated an sorted, no bi a ‘bletherin cure’ but whit micht be cried a ‘stalkin cure’. ‘John Macnab’ haes gien the narcissists a means o satisfeein thair repress’t instincts: in the course o the thrie ploys, lawers and bankers haes turn’t pauchlers, Etonians haes turn’t tramps, adults haes turn’t bairns, and Cabinet Meenisters haes turn’t Vikings. The mairraige at the climax symbolises that aince mair the libido haes been successfully repress’t and ceevilised institutions haes been reassertit.

O course, the institutions haes nivver raellie bin disruptit – in a richt honest exchange late i the buik, it’s pyntit out tae the Macnabs that thair reputations haes nivver ackwallie bin unsiccar – gin they wis catch’t, thair class wid hae steek’t ranks around thaim, an kep thair rid faces dern an hidlin. But – as Freud wid later say o releegion – it’s the illusion that maitters.

The ‘stalkin cure’ is whit alswa drives the narrative o Andrew Greig’s The Return of John Macnab. Greig is weel awaur o the therapeutic value o a guid challenge. The couple at the core o his buik, Neil an Kirsty, hae baith luivit and tint, and baith hae commitment issues. The squaddie, Alasdair, haes a wife that’s havin an affair wi her hang-glidin instructor i Chamonix (a locale that’s alswa mention’t i passin i John Macnab). They hae communication issues – whit’s mair, Alasdair, lik Erica Jong, haes a byordinar fear o fleein. Thair issues gets resolve’t in a maist Freudian wey, whan, makin a jynt getaway involvin a hanglider an a brace o grouse, Alasdair owercomes his phobia, an the couple crash-launds amangst the trees. Awmaist direckly, conjugal relations is resume’t.

The fourth modren Macnab, Murray, is blithlie mairriet on the surface, but comes tae the knawledge that he’s been ‘anaesthetized wi politics’. The auld pauchler, John Macnab, aince mair gies the fower main modren characters space tae wark out thair proablems, mair or less. As the narrator concludes, ‘Four incomplete people came together and for a while made a nearly unstoppable whole’.

The stakes micht no be sae heich i this novel – eftir aw, a copywriter, saloon singer, squaddie and jyner dinnae represent the acme o ceevilisation i the wey Buchan’s characters dae – but Greig compensates bi uppin the ante an makin the hinnermaist wager agin a rael-life character, HRH Prince Charles hissel, aw happit up in his kilt an directin his gillies while Special Forces chiels hotter an bizz about, airm’t tae the teeth, ettlin tae tak out suspeckit terrorists. Unlike the first Macnab – the saicont ane is in rael danger o haein his life, nivver mind his reputation, taen awa. Still, gin The Return of John Macnab doesnae feenish wi a mairrage symbolisin the renew’t sublimation o repress’t instincts, it at least feenishes wi howp for a blithe heterosexual relationship (its 90s social inclusiveness agenda graunts howp, via a subplot, for a blithe homosexual relationship atween the barmaid an her pairtner anaw). The blitheness o the relationship lippens on ane o thaim stertin up a new ploy, unkent at the endin, but aiblins that’s the moral o the twa novels, and o Freud – ceevilisation kills us aw, an tae be fulfill’t, we need whiles tae fin means o jinkin an joukin its yoke, or we’ll end up a dysfunctional, neurotic midden.

The Uisses o Leiterature
Anither wey tae tak a Freudian sklent at leiterature is tae speir out its role i the sublimation o wur ain neuroses, for, as Freud said, we aw huv thaim. We cannae aw gang out an stalk a deer, shoot a brace o grouse or e’en fush a saumon tae damp doun wur ain ilkaday neuroses. Whit we can dae in thir situations is read a buik about stalkin a deer, shootin grouse or fushin saumon. We can identifie wi ane or mair o the characters, and ack out imaginatively the retour o the repress’t. Freud includit leiterature alangsides wi dreams, jokes an e’en sklytes o the tongue as outlets for wur normal atavistic impulses. In sae faur as it helps us sublimate wur neuroses, popular leiterature is a ceevilisin force, or – as George Orwell mootit in 1984 – it micht be seen as a mechanism o repression.

Thocht o this wey, John Macnab can be related tae a haill genre o popular fiction that ettle’t tae ceevilise the callants o Empire. The maist kenspeckle ensample o this is the Boys’ Own Paper, the comic that cam out ilka wick frae the 1880s, whan Buchan wis but a bairn, til the 1950s, weel eftir he wis deid. A lot has been screive’t about the Boys’ Own Paper an hou it learnt British weans hou tae be guid imperialists bi engrainin intil thaim a code o values, shawin thaim man-bodies tae emulate, an giein thaim uissfu knawledge tae cairry til Africa an India an the ither outposts. John Macnab links intae this genre o bairns’ fiction bi sairvin up an adult fable o whit the affspring o Empire micht dae gin they’ve borne the gree, an fun that it saurs o ass. Buchan’s novel hauds wi a veesion o popular leiterature that haes it sublimatin the readers’sexual and atavistic instincts i the grand cause o Empire. Buchan’s disillusion’t neurotics maun reive a cuddie whaur reivers are hingit – or come tae Scotland and pauchle a saumon – afore duly reaffirmin the institutions o imperial ceevilisation.

Andrew Greig is likely auld eneuch tae hae seen a puckle o yallowin Boys’ Own Papers, or Annuals leein aroun; an lik mony a BOP hero, Greig is an out-o-doors type, haen screiv’t anent his mountaineerin ploys afore turnin tae novels. Yet his John Macnab nae langer bides in a Scotland that is pairt an paircel o Empire. The Return of John Macnab haes mair ‘ordinar’ fowk as heroes and heroine (altho they’re aw still infuriatinly guid at awthin they’re caw’d tae dae, frae abseilin tae playin the electric organ). Greig’s novel doesnae pit its readers in the poseetion o sublimatin their neuroses tae reaffirm the institutions o Empire (altho he does spell ‘radge’ as ‘raj’!) – insteid he yaises the ‘stalkin cure’ tae recover the key emotion o ‘trust’ that, for ane reason or anither, has been tint by his characters.

Like Freud, an mair nor Buchan, Greig blurs the bounds atween reality and imagination: as notit abune, Prince Charles is a minor character. I the style o late 20^th century novels, Greig’s narrative perspective sclithers this gate and that, and he plays gemms wi fack an fiction. Kirsty scaulds Murray whan he yaises a fower-letter ward bi luikin up frae her Sunday Post an sayin, ‘Here, you’re not in a Jim Kelman novel now’. The Return of John Macnab is maistly about helpin readers sublimate their neuroses juist tae get oan better wi their chosen maik. Yet Greig kens the leemited pouer o fiction tae ackwallie fulfil the wushes it steers up, and wycelie, he deleevers ‘nothing so clean cut as an ending’. The twa novels atween thaim gie an endless opportunity tae discourse on politics, gender, an the indiveedual’s unchancy relationship wi ceevilised societie.

Background Reading

Buchan, John, 1925, John Macnab, colleckit in The Leithen Stories, wi an introduction bi Christopher Harvie, Canongate edn, 2000.
Edwards, Owen Dudley (1999) ‘John Buchan’s Lost Horizon: An Edinburgh Celebration of Glasgow University’ in EJ Cowan and D Gifford (eds) The Polar Twins, John Donald, pp 215-253
Felluga, Dino, 2003, ‘Modules on Freud’ Introductory Guide to Critical Theory, Purdue University, Access’t August 6, 2003
Freud, Sigmund, 1915-17, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, trans J. Strachey, Liveright edn, 1989.
Freud, Sigmund, 1930, Civilisation and its Discontents, trans and ed by J. Strachey and P. Gay, Norton edn, 1989.
Greig, Andrew, 1996, The Return of John Macnab, Faber & Faber edn, 2002

DICKSON, Beth, ‘William McIlvanney’s Laidlaw Novels’

12 September 2021 by Duncan Jones

Laverock 2, 1996 |

William McIlvanney has written three detective stories featuring the same main character: Detective Inspector Jack Laidlaw. The novels are Laidlaw (1977); The Papers of Tony Veitch (1983) and Strange Loyalties(1991). These detective stories have been influenced by the American detective fiction of Raymond Chandler. This influence can be seen in their air of gritty reality, their doubting and often unhappy hero and their use of fast, witty dialogue. They are quite unlike the English tradition of detective fiction where an intelligent, eccentric and sometimes aristocratic hero solves a murder as someone would solve a puzzle: Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple is an example of this sort of detective. Lady Antonia Fraser, the writer of the Jemima Shore mysteries, is a Scottish writer influenced by the English tradition. Other Scottish writers have also written detective fiction: Ian Rankin has written a series of Inspector Rebus stories of which The Black Book is one. There are also a number of thrillers which have elements of the detective story in them such as Hugh C. Rae’s Skinner based on a number of real-life murders; Frederick Lindsay’s Brond and Iain Banks’s Complicity.

Laidlaw (1977)

In this novel McIlvanney introduced the central character we are to follow through several books. In some ways, Laidlaw seems an unlikely hero. Whose side is he on? Sometimes he seems more on the side of the criminals than the police. He tries to sympathise with Bud Lawson when Bud reports his daughter’s failure to return home. He ends the book by almost assaulting his colleague, Detective Inspector Ernie Milligan because Laidlaw feels he is not treating the murderer with due respect. It is important to recognise that Laidlaw’s antiauthoritarian stance is a feature of much American detective fiction where detectives are in conflict with their superiors, continually defying the orders of a boss who seems blind to the realities of a case. This emphasis on the individual who is so talented he must ‘‘go it alone’ is a motif which recurs widely in American fiction and is one which McIlvanney easily transfers into a Scottish context. However Laidlaw’s ambivalent feelings towards criminals and the police highlight one of the most important questions the novel raises which is not ‘Whose side is Laidlaw on?’ but ‘Who are the criminals?’ The plot follows the investigation of the murder of a teenage girl, whose murderer is successfully arrested. Laidlaw, however, feels that most of the characters in the story are somehow implicated in the murder. When his junior detective, Brian Harkness, asks him if he really believes that, he answers, ‘I don’t know. But what I do know is that more folk than two were present at that murder.’ (ch.47 p.219) Laidlaw even includes himself and Harkness as being somehow guilty:

Then there’s you with your deodorised attitudes. And me. Hiding in suburbia. What’s so clever about any of us that we can afford to be flip about other people? (ch.47 p.220)

Laidlaw is an unusual policeman. Colleagues find his habit of walking the streets of Glasgow in order to sensitise himself to the city atmosphere instead of using police cars somewhat extreme. Yet the author vindicates his choice as being the most effective response as the chase to get the murderer before the vigilantes do could only be conducted on foot through a network of streets and closes too narrow for cars. These unusual qualities in Laidlaw’s character are further developed by the themes of the novel with its questioning of who is truly guilty and who is truly innocent. Such an emphasis is common to much detective fiction, American, English or Scottish, enabling readers to think about serious issues while enjoying other aspects of the fiction.

The Papers of Tony Veitch (1983)

Much of the enjoyment of McIlvanney’s fiction comes from his creation of a diverse array of criminal characters. The Papers of Tony Veitch is the story of a university student murdered in mysterious circumstances. This novel has a number of exotic characters. There are the ‘big bosses’ such as Cam Colvin; the ‘fixers’ like Micky Ballater and others who are often comically named, like ‘Panda Paterson’. These nicknames suggest the underworld culture where a rough camaraderie exists alongside brutal violence and lucrative crime. Among the crooks McIlvanney distinguishes between those such as John Rhodes who retain a somewhat warped sense of honour and those like Cam Colvin who want to make money out of crime and live the high life. This distinction is similar to the one he draws between characters like Laidlaw who though they have got on in life try to do what they think is right and treat all people with similar respect and other members of the middle-classes such as Milton Veitch, Tony Veitch’s father, whose money seems to make him feel free of any obligations of ordinary humanity to those to whom they feel superior.

There is also much enjoyment to be derived from the dialogue of the novel. Sometimes a quick-witted response can avert violence. When the two ‘bosses’, Colvin and Rhodes meet, Rhodes punches Panda Paterson who stumbles backward and falls over.

‘You’ll need to work on your fishtail, Panda,’ [Colvin] said. ‘It’s rubbish.’ (ch.11 p.64)

Not only do the characters speak in this way, the narration is often racy and funny. When Panda begins to tell his story, both bosses want him to give them the facts as quickly as possible, not use the time as an opportunity for self-advertisement.

Panda was like a banana republic threatened by two contending major powers who don’t want direct conflict. (ch.11 p.66)

Laidlaw takes as much pleasure in the ordinary street life of Glasgow and of the dignity of people such as Eck Adamson’s sister who lives a decent life against the economic odds. This indomitable spirit is captured in the last action of the book where Laidlaw after an evening’s drinking, dances outside Central Station with an old woman who had been standing in a queue. ‘Son,’ she said, ‘This is the best queue I’ve ever been in in my life.’ (p.254)

Strange Loyalties (1991)

In this novel the logic of McIlvanney’s characterisation of Laidlaw and his overarching theme about the identity of the guilty come together in a satisfying way. Laidlaw doesn’t investigate a crime as such, but the accidental death of his own brother, Scott. In a change from the previous books, the narrative is written in the first person giving a direct insight into Laidlaw’s attitudes. During his search for the truth he finds out that his brother and some friend had been involved in a hit-and-run accident just as they were about to graduate. As they had careers in front of them, they did not give themselves up. However, the guilt haunts all of them, except Dave Lyons who will not admit any blame. The others come to terms with it in their own ways but acknowledge that tying Scott into that central act of dishonesty destroyed him just as it destroyed the man whom they had knocked down. Laidlaw is left knowing these things and trying to live decently among the ruins of his ideals for society and for himself.

The Laidlaw novels present a number of avenues of literary study: Laidlaw’s complex character, the significance of other characters; the importance of the Glasgow setting; the use of narrative technique; the treatment of the themes of guilt and innocence. Any of these areas would repay study and would be a sound basis for an RPR or SYS dissertation.

DUNCAN, Ian, ‘On the Study of Scottish Literature’

12 September 2021 by Duncan Jones

ScotLit 28, Spring 2003 |

As someone who teaches and researches topics in Scottish literature in an English department at a North American university, I’ve been asked to provide an ‘outside view’ of the subject in the context of current debates over its status and value in the school curriculum. It seems bizarre to me that the study of Scottish literature should require a defence in Scotland in this day and age, although I know from experience that the case needs to be made elsewhere.

I came quite late to the study of Scottish literature, through reading Scott, who would play a far more prominent part in my professional life than I ever expected. Scott confronted me as an anomaly in the development of the ‘English novel’ – a force of influence (to be sure) but of an oddly inconsequential kind; a cloudy distraction from the true path of a morally serious domestic realism, a ghost in the house of fiction. At an early stage of working on my doctoral dissertation I had the good fortune to meet Tom Crawford, who was visiting the James Boswell archive at Yale, and I asked him if he thought it made sense to think about Scott in the light of a Scottish – as distinct from an English or British – literary tradition. With what I now recognize to have been heroic forbearance, he replied that such a point of view might indeed prove quite fruitful. Mine was a symptomatic ignorance. As a category, Scottish literature did not exist at the leading centres of ‘English’ where I was a student in the mid-1970s and 1980s. My first-year supervisor at Cambridge, Helena Shire, had insisted I read Dunbar, Henryson and Gavin Douglas alongside Chaucer and other English poets in the medieval syllabus of the undergraduate English tripos. But that was an exception. There was no sign of Burns on the Cambridge curriculum, none of Scott, apart from a one-off visiting lecture by David Daiches, who (however) did manage to convince some of his audience that there might be more to the Waverley novels than tartan and tushery. At Yale, too, British literature remained resolutely English (some eminent Irish authors excepted), even though the Yale university library holdings in Scottish literature must be the richest in North America, with major caches of Hogg, Stevenson and Barrie alongside Boswell. (It’s pleasant to imagine these archives providing the basis for a future programme in Scottish studies at Yale …)

This state of affairs still prevails, by and large, at university English departments in England and the United States, although changes are beginning to occur locally. (Canada is a somewhat different case). I do not think that the neglect of Scottish literature can very plausibly be blamed on a residual anti-Scots prejudice, or anglophiliac conspiracy, although influential acts of exclusion have certainly shaped the growth of the modern tradition of English literature: Samuel Johnson’s denunciation of Ossian in the 1770s, Matthew Arnold’s mid-Victorian complaint that Burns could not be a great poet because he lacked ‘high seriousness’, F. R. Leavis’s dismissal of Scott from the great tradition of the English novel on the grounds that he was ‘an inspired folklorist’. The problem, which is structural rather than intentional, follows from the ways we go about constructing a national narrative of cultural history. Like any narrative, it has its arcs of development, its turning points, its rhythms of greater and lesser intensity. And while the modern national histories of England and Scotland may be bound by a shared political destiny, their literary-historical contours do not match. The arcs and turning-points, the peaks and valleys, do not coincide, or if they do, they mean different things. This lack of synchrony is more visible in the centuries preceding the Union of Crowns, when the national histories are still formally separate. The high points of early modern English literature – the Age of Chaucer, of Spenser and Shakespeare – these have no corresponding achievements in contemporary Scotland. (Although Shakespeare did briefly turn into a Scottish playwright after 1604 …) The attempt to fit the two histories together casts the dominant model, the English, as the norm, and reduces the other to its shadow. The makars, inserted into an English chronology, become ‘Scottish Chaucerians’ – mere followers.

The situation gets more complicated, of course, after 1707. Scotland’s political absorption is followed on the one hand by a brilliant epoch of intellectual modernization, the so-called Scottish Enlightenment, and on the other by processes of economic and cultural integration that support the single narrative of a unified British history – one in which, all but inevitably, English developments set the pace. Recent scholarship has shown how eighteenth-century Scottish historians subordinated their own national history to the English model, while a contemporaneous ‘Scottish invention of English literature’ brought a tactical acceptance of English linguistic and aesthetic standards, at least in Edinburgh. A golden age of modern Scottish letters – the century from David Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature (1739) to Thomas Carlyle’s The French Revolution (1837) – remains sunk out of sight in most standard British literary histories, submerged by that most problematic of all period categories, ‘Romanticism’. Since this is the period I work on, I’ll use it as my main example.

That century saw Lowland Scotland become one of the generative centres of European and North Atlantic literary culture. In the balance of a new, British imperial world order, Scottish innovations in moral philosophy, the social sciences, history, rhetoric, poetry, periodical journalism and the novel matched or outweighed their English counterparts. Hume, Adam Smith, and other Enlightenment philosophers developed a comprehensive account of human nature, social organization and historical process; poets and scholars invoked the national past and regional popular traditions in a series of attempts to reimagine Scottish identity in a post-national age. James Macpherson’s collections of ‘Poems of Ossian’ founded European Romanticism on a scandalous invention of lost cultural origins; Robert Burns fashioned the first modern vernacular style in British poetry; Scott’s historical novels combined those distinctively Scottish inventions, a universal modernity and a national past, to define the governing form of Western narrative for the next hundred years. At the same time, a succession of Edinburgh periodicals – The Edinburgh Review (1802),Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (1817), Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal(1832) – established the main medium of nineteenth-century public discussion. And to name these highlights is to overlook a long list of strikingly original achievements: Smollett’s novels, Fergusson’s urban eclogues, Joanna Baillie’s theatre of the passions, the experimental fiction of James Hogg and John Galt.

Once more, though, these developments don’t fit the English narrative, in which ‘Romanticism’ bursts from the shell of a dried-up neoclassicism, cracked by the shockwave of revolution in France. The later eighteenth century is (or was, until recently) a strange twilight zone of English literary history, an ‘Age of Sensibility’ or ‘Pre-Romanticism’, its poets groping hesitantly towards the radical horizon of Lyrical Ballads and Songs of Innocence and Experience. In Scotland, though, ‘Classical’ and ‘Romantic’ cultural forms occupy the same moment, rather than defining successive stages or periods; Macpherson’s Fingal is not just contemporary with the scientific projects of Enlightenment but is one of its characteristic products – as well as being the founding document of a global Romanticism. The French Revolution brings a change in Scottish cultural history, but one with different dynamics from the English case, characterized by intellectual continuity rather than rupture. As the counter-revolutionary regime of Pitt and Dundas tightens its grip over Scottish patronage, the projects of Enlightenment shift their institutional base, from the university curriculum to an industrializing literary marketplace, so that after 1800 Edinburgh becomes the British centre for innovative publishing in periodicals and fiction. A ‘Romantic’ aesthetic ideology does not formally take hold in Scotland until 1817, when Blackwood’s Magazine sets itself up as the Tory scourge of a Whig post-Enlightenment (exemplified by the Edinburgh Review) in the national struggle over electoral reform.

All of this scarcely registers in the standard literary history, which casts British Romanticism as English, a mighty handful of lyric poets grappling with a Kantian (later Heideggerian) problematic of the transcendental imagination. Never mind that this version of Romanticism is a late invention, consolidated in the North American academy after World War II. Scotland, neither English nor foreign, comes to stand for an inauthenticRomanticism: its poets and novelists manufacture nostalgic simulations, a theme-park Highland heritage, while ‘Scotch reviewers’ bully Keats and Wordsworth. Rather than being a site of Romantic production, it is Scotland’s fate to have become a Romantic object or commodity: glamorous scenery for Queen Victoria and industrial tourism; a series of kitsch, fake, sentimental ‘inventions of tradition’, from Ossian and Waverley to Fiona MacLeod, Brigadoon and Braveheart.

Nor, unfortunately, is this simply an English (or Anglo-American) story. In the early decades of the last century, Scottish critics devised their own compelling variant, denouncing the post-Union literary tradition as inorganic, self-divided, alienated from its vital sources – the proof of that alienation being Scotland’s lack of a genuine Romantic movement. Gregory Smith’s exotic phrase for an internally-conflicted national character, the ‘Caledonian Antisyzygy’ (in Scottish Literature: Character and Influence, 1919), supplied Hugh MacDiarmid and Edwin Muir with critical ammunition in their revolt (de rigueur among Modernists) against Victorian forefathers: a revolt charged with nationalist energy by, among other things, the burden of Scotland’s participation in nineteenth-century world empire. MacDiarmid and co. were taking aim at the Victorian sentimental cult of Burns and Scott, it can be argued, more than at those writers themselves. Nevertheless, critics and historians in their wake took the ‘Antisyzygy’ diagnosis literally, and made it into a routine: branding some Scottish authors as more Scottish than others, carving up individual oeuvres into authentic and inauthentic tendencies, usually along linguistic lines – so that few readers, for example, now bother with the English poetry of Fergusson or Burns.

This summary is a caricature, I know, and it overlooks all sorts of crucial factors, not least the political contexts that this nationalism spoke to. Recent commentary has clarified its account of national tradition, if not always consistently. Tom Nairn, rescuing the Scottish Enlightenment from Antisyzygy proscription in The Break-Up of Britain (1981), develops the nationalist account of Scotland’s lack of a Romantic movement – finding what Muir (in Scott and Scotland, 1936) had found in Scott’s Edinburgh, ‘a very curious emptiness’. Yet this analysis ultimately derives from Scottish Romanticism: the first clear statement of the ‘Antisyzygy’, as diagnosis of a national cultural pathology, can be found, one hundred years before Gregory Smith, in John Gibson Lockhart’s (Tory, Unionist) semi-fictional anatomy of Scottish culture, Peter’s Letters to his Kinsfolk (1819). Cairns Craig has shown (in Out of History, 1996) how the model of a divided, deficient Scottish tradition relies on the assumption of an English ‘organic’ standard: Muir adapts T. S. Eliot’s critique of a ‘dissociation of sensibility’ in modern English poetry, while David Craig (in Scottish Literature and the Scottish People, 1961) invokes the Leavisite model of a ‘Great Tradition’.

Scott’s reputation was perhaps the most spectacular casualty of Antisyzygy nationalism, which cast the author of Waverley as chief Unionist collaborator, a Wicked Wizard of the North who enchanted an entire tradition into a moth-eaten museum-piece. Far from helping people to read Scott’s poems and novels, such an analysis became a means of not reading them. Recent historical developments have helped make Scott look interesting again, with initiatives such as the new Edinburgh Edition of the Waverley Novels encouraging a fresh approach, although bad habits of reading, or rather failures of reading, linger here and there. Scott, for sure, was a key figure in the ‘invention of Scotland’ that has been analysed by Murray Pittock and less subtle scholars; but the novels themselves are far from exhausted by the uses to which they have been put – an instrumentality that may have little or nothing to do with what an attentive reading can find out. We need to remind ourselves of what, once upon a time, was obvious: the imaginative vitality and intellectual wealth of these astonishing works (not just The Heart of Mid-Lothian and Redgauntlet but, say, Woodstock), appreciation of which should enhance, rather than obscure, the rival brilliancies of Scott’s contemporaries – Galt’s The Entail, Hogg’s Private Memoirs and Confessions of Justified Sinner, as well as their other works, and works by other hands. (The best Romantic-era Scottish novel not by Hogg, Scott or Galt? Christian Johnstone’s Elizabeth de Bruce, 1827.)

So there are at least two good reasons for recognizing the distinctiveness of a Scottish literary tradition. One, simply put, is that tradition’s internal strength – the originality and excellence of its constituent works, from the makars through the Romantic Enlightenment (whatever we want to call it) to the current, turn-of-the-millennium crop of rising poets and novelists, and everything and everyone else before and besides: Robert Louis Stevenson, for instance, whose gifts an English literary history has been no more successful in defining than it has Burns’s; or Margaret Oliphant, whose return to currency as an English novelist (the author of Miss Marjoribanks) exceeds, for the moment, the rise of interest in her as a Scottish woman writer – one who, like Joanna Baillie, made her career in the south. We need to be able to read these authors: which means, in the first place, having their books available, and also, in many instances, learning how to read them, since reading habits and terms of reference change. The Edinburgh Scott, with its Penguin Classics offshoot, can serve as a model for the joint issue of high-quality scholarly and popular editions. There are, fortunately, a host of analogous projects, keeping our literary universe open: the Stirling-South Carolina edition of Hogg (also in paperback!), bringing to light works which in some cases have never been available in their original versions, and reprint series such as Canongate Classics and the ASLS’s own Annual Volumes. Literary criticism too can perform a public service in extending our reading skills – whether developing terms for a better understanding of famous authors, such as Burns and Scott, whose achievements have been distorted by an alien aesthetic standard, or recovering less familiar or downright obscure writers and movements, overlooked because of their class or gender or other contingent reasons.

Reading, we accustom ourselves to the rhythms of change and continuity that make up a Scottish literary history, its successions and combinations of models, forms and topics. We find surprising illuminations along the way. Humean empiricism, Cairns Craig has argued, generates a socially constructive model of the imagination that is quite different from the transcendental model associated with English Romanticism, and no less consequential, since it provides a philosophical matrix for the nineteenth-century novel – not just Scott’s historical fiction but, through that, the ‘English’ realist form. We learn, too, that a national tradition is multiple rather than singular, an often turbulent play of crosscurrents rather than a broad mainstream – for example through Murray Pittock’s studies of a Jacobite tradition far more complex and polyvalent than we had thought, or the reclamations of women’s writing undertaken in the recent History of Scottish Women’s Writing edited by Douglas Gifford and Dorothy McMillan, the electronic archive of Scottish Women Poets edited by Stephen Behrendt and Nancy Kushigian, and like projects. Perhaps the last thing Scottish literature needs is the unifying forcefield of a ‘Great Tradition’.

Which brings us to the second good reason for affirming a Scottish literature: its importance and influence outside the borders of Scotland. Scottish writers from the century of Enlightenment and Romanticism – Hume and Smith, ‘Ossian’, Burns and Scott – enjoyed a huge international popularity and prestige, across continental Europe and North America and other European colonies, defining the intellectual and literary genres of modernization throughout (at least) the nineteenth century, from political economy to national epic and historical novel. In the light of this world-scale reception, it is the English tradition (Johnson, Wordsworth, Austen, Keats …) that begins to look provincial. (Byron belongs to both!) Merely to reverse the charge of national inferiority, though, is just as unhelpful – replacing one imperialist boast with another. The splendours of the English tradition need no defence. It is important, rather, to recognize the complex networks of affiliation that bind Scottish literature (sometimes painfully) to other literatures and cultures. Scottish writing helps constitute the literatures of continental Europe, North America and the British and European colonies, in complicity with other, often less benign institutional conduits of ‘influence’, just as it is in turn constituted through and by other literatures. Scholars who have recently been drawing the map of Scottish literature’s global interrelations, such as Robert Crawford and Susan Manning, are building upon a solid scholarly foundation (in the work of R. S. Jack, Andrew Hook and others).

These networks of reciprocal making bind together, not least, Scottish with English writing (the work of North American scholars such as Leith Davis and Janet Sorensen is helpful here). Thus, we need to understand Scott in the light of Scottish traditions of moral philosophy, historicism and antiquarianism, poetry and ballad revival – and also of English and Irish, as well as continental, traditions of the drama and novel and romance, and a great deal else. Victorian Scottish authors in particular, like Carlyle and Oliphant, did not simply write and publish in London, but shaped ‘English’ styles and genres, as Robert Crawford and others have insisted. It makes as little sense to tear them out of their English context, in a mistaken bid for purity, as it does to read them as English authors without regard for their Scottish roots and associations. English needs to be an essential component of the study of Scottish literature – just as Scottish literature needs to play no less vital a part in English studies, in England and elsewhere. So: let’s not submerge Scottish literature, once again, under the surface of ‘English’; but let’s not cut it off from English either. Scotland’s literary and linguistic bond with English, far from being a shackle, can enhance our understanding of how national cultures develop – not in splendid isolation but in complex engagement with the world.

ELPHINSTONE, Margaret, ‘Fantasising Texts’

12 September 2021 by Duncan Jones

The Shape of Texts to Come: writing a new Scotland, 13–14 May 2000
References are given at the end of the document. |

Scottish Fantasy Today

The question that arises, when one is asked to talk about Scottish fantasy today, is whether this simply means fantasy texts that come out of Scotland, or whether there is currently a genre that might be labelled ‘Scottish fantasy’ which is significantly different from fantasy that comes from anywhere else. The unique status of Scottish fantasy has been a well-established tenet of Scottish literature and criticism, but the dominant genre at the end of the twentieth century is contemporary, urban and realistic. Can we still assert that there is a distinctively Scottish fantasy genre, which is neither retrospective nor nostalgic, but which uses traditional elements to produce texts relevant to the modern world? I have a vested interest in saying ‘yes’, a claim I’ll now attempt to substantiate.

Gregory Smith suggested, back in 1919¹, that Scottish fantasy had unique features, and set up the model of the Caledonian anti-syzygy that has been extended, re-designed and deconstructed ever since. I gave a paper in 1991² in which I looked at fantasy texts by women in the light of Gregory Smith’s model, and concluded that they did indeed set up an ironic juxtaposition between the real and the fantastic. I later rejected Smith’s model for what seemed to me a more anarchic and less hierarchical pluralism. Probably the only recent critic bold enough to assert that Scottish fantasy is categorically different from, say, English fantasy is Colin Manlove, in his introduction to An Anthology of Scottish Fantasy Literature (1996)³. Interestingly, he is less definite on this point in his 1994 volume Scottish Fantasy Literature: A Critical Survey⁴, which considers the ambiguity of the adjective ‘Scottish’ in relation to identifying motifs found in fantasy texts. Today I am inclined to re-visit the Caledonian anti-syzygy, very cautiously, and see if it still has anything to offer when reading contemporary texts. I also intend to test some of Manlove’s assertions against new texts coming out of Scotland.

Manlove emphasises the relationship between fantasy fiction and a living tradition of folk and fairy tale, which he asserts has survived more strongly in modern Scotland than it has done in England. Smith, in a similar argument, cited a strongly surviving ballad tradition as a major influence on Scottish fantasy writing. Both critics also consider fantasy as a method of delineating a psychological state, and the citation of Hogg and Stevenson in this context has become a critical cliché in the study of Scottish literature. In reading fantasy as an image of a psychic state, we are also indebted to a mode of thought probably first expressed by the Muirs, both Edwin and Willa, in a variety of genres, in which fantasy is understood as an image of the subconscious or dream world, a fragmented reflection of lost wholeness. A psychoanalytical model, in which fantasy becomes an image of a psychic state that cannot be apprehended through rational or conscious discourse, complements the connection between modern fantasy and the supernatural in folk tradition. Both strategies alert the reader to the use of archetypal or traditional motifs, even in the most contemporary of settings.

These strategies for reading present-day Scottish fantasy can, I suggest, be taken a step further than either the early twentieth century critics or Manlove have done. Smith and Manlove both draw attention to the way that Scottish fantasy locates the supernatural in the heart of contemporary realism. The implication is that fantasy subverts the assumptions of that world. I think it does more: in a post-structuralist world it destabilises contemporary notions of what is ‘real’, drawing upon past traditions, dreams, subconscious hopes and fears about the supernatural, and giving them a validity which is at least equal to, and often stronger than, the rational laws that supposedly govern the external world. My reading of Scottish fantasy suggests to me not so much a binary opposition: real/fantastic, as a demolishing of the boundary that divides the real from the supernatural. Therefore I still have to take issue with the notion of anti-syzygy. In this re-location the borderlands become central, the liminal place where action takes place, and, in the text, where the plot can start to happen.

Manlove rightly suggests that Scottish fantasy tends to locate the workings of the supernatural, or irrational, at the heart of the world we inhabit, rather than to construct a parallel world, which is the pre-dominant theme in most English (and I think, American) fantasy. Where there is a parallel world, Scottish texts often link it to a realistic dimension by using dual or multiple narratives (Gray’s Lanark and Banks’ The Bridge are obvious examples), but this is by no means a uniquely Scottish device. The disruptive element in much Scottish fantasy (and here Manlove aligns it with a European tradition) is that it is not a reflection of our own world, but an alarming dislocation of where we assume our world to be. The metaphor of location is very relevant here, as – and this is a fundamental aspect of Manlove’s thesis – the location of the fantastic in the real world is often tied in with a precise topography of the Scottish landscape. I think this is a peculiarly Scottish feature: nowhere else do I find, in the middle of reading fantasy, that I have to follow it, literally, on the map. The fantastic is not located in a different dimension; as readers we experience it as part of a seamless whole, which is the reality the text presents. Fantasy, as a reflection both of the individual subconscious and a collective past tradition, is central to how this world operates. That’s frightening because it cannot be consciously apprehended or controlled. Reading good Scottish fantasy is a sinister, disorientating experience because it overthrows the comfortable post-Enlightenment rationale which allows us to make a difference between the dream and the reality, and to think that we escape from the dream and become rational beings again when we wake up, or stop reading.

My remit today is to consider how Scottish fantasy is developing, in the context of this conference title ‘The Shape of Texts to Come”. Maybe I was picked for the job because I have written texts that speculate about possible futures. Outside fiction, however, I must admit to having no idea what anyone, except myself, is planning to write next, and even in my own case I can’t be categorical. This is why new fiction is exciting: writers do not and should not try to conform to academic speculation. I believe the only reliable approach to possible development is to look at what young writers are attempting in Scottish fantasy now. Instead of indulging in prediction, therefore, I shall look at an actual story from a real writer of the next generation, and use it to test the characteristics of Scottish fantasy I’ve discussed:

the use of folk tradition in a contemporary setting;
a way of exploring the psyche, using dream images or archetypes;
a means of breaking down the boundaries that apparently separate the real from the supernatural or illusory, which
destabilises what we think of as the ‘real’ external world.

This is not to say that all current Scottish fantasy necessarily fits all these criteria, but to assert that there is a continuum in the Scottish tradition that does do so. It may not be the most acclaimed form of Scottish writing at the beginning of the twenty-first century, but it is still a vital part of the tradition.

“The Wall” is a short story by Rebecca Leach, shortly to be published as the first prizewinner in The Pushkin Prizes in Scotland⁵ the anthology of the selected entries for a literary prize for second and third year pupils in Scottish secondary schools. This is an extraordinary story from a very young writer. She takes images, which are ordinary objects in realistic terms, but which also occur as highly charged motifs in folk tale and literary tradition, and she causes them to change shape and meaning with a skill rendered unobtrusive by a deceptively simple style. This is how the story begins:

Tom held his breath and looked over the edge of the wall. He let it go and watched as it climbed the air like a Chinese dragon. Down below on the grass and rocks, a weasel was eating the remains of a fieldmouse. Tom had seen it killed by a hawk that morning when the sun rose over the grey hills. It was discarded for a larger prey soon after it was caught.
Among the trees something was moving. A shadow without anything to block the sun. A dense darkness that could be seen even though there was no sunlight to block it up … The darkness crept up to the wall but fluttered back when it got to within a few metres of it as if warded off by some invisible force.
The wall had been there forever. Since the glaciers shaped the land. Or maybe it was a glacier, caught in time and frozen in a ribbon, which gradually turned to stone and moss.

We have here some typical motifs of Scottish fantasy writing. First of all, we are in Scotland. These are Scottish hills, with grass and rocks, and the precise detail of a weasel eating a fieldmouse that had been previously killed by a hawk. Our narrator is a sharp observer, with a precise knowledge of what she describes. But even as the landscape is revealed to us, it keeps turning into something else. The inexplicable is an integral part of the world we are shown. The fieldmouse, the natural victim of a natural cycle, foreshadows the helpless victim of the plot which is still to unfold. What happens to the girl who appears later isn’t different in kind from what has already been happening, always, in the natural world.

So we’re not looking away from the real world, we’re looking very hard into it. And as we watch, every ordinary thing turns into something else, or, paradoxically, reveals more of its true nature. The simile in the second sentence sets the pattern. Tom’s breath ‘climbs the air like a Chinese dragon’. The wall, too, the central image which gives the story its title, becomes something else as soon as the narrator begins to describe it: ‘maybe it was a glacier, caught in time and frozen in a ribbon, which gradually turned to stone and moss’. The narrator here sees the wall in terms of the past history of the landscape. It represents the thing that has been here ‘forever’, which, in terms of folk memory, means back to the time of the glaciers. The glaciers are still there, their effects written on the landscape, buried in folk memory, and also a hidden part of the substance of the wall. The wall now is ‘caught in time and frozen in a ribbon’. ‘Frozen in a ribbon’ suggests a whole linear history, a narrative of the past preserved and encapsulated in the wall. But a ribbon is a also a cheerful form of adornment, more fun than a piece of string, for example. Maybe there are connotations here that the wall transforms the stuff that it is made of. But it still belongs to the land. The ribbon ‘gradually turned to stone and moss’. As with the fieldmouse, the weasel and the hawk, we are invited to see objects in terms of a natural cycle.

So what is this wall? Fantasy is not allegory. The wall changes as images in a dream change, and no fixed meaning can be assigned to it. But it is clearly a boundary: that’s what walls are for. It also has the power to transform itself into other things. Moreover, the patch of ‘dense darkness’ the ‘shadow without anything to block the sun’ can come out of the forest to within a few metres of the wall, but then it can’t pass, and it has to ‘flutter’ back. The wall, then, keeps something that comes out of the wild landscape away from what lies on the other side – presumably the human world from which Tom has come, when we first find him looking over the edge of the wall into the other landscape. At this point there seems to be a very clear boundary between nature/culture, wild/tame, supernatural/real, and perhaps subconscious/conscious. We seem to be set up for an anti-syzygy in a thoroughly Caledonian setting.

But that changes. The focus shifts so that we are no longer looking over the wall with Tom, but at the wall itself. The wall is where the action happens, on the borderline between the two worlds. The two join together seamlessly into a terrifying incident which is as much about Tom’s fear, guilt and self-justification as it is about an external supernatural force. Can Rebecca Leach have read Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner yet?

Tom was deep in his thoughts. He was looking at Katie’s Hole. He had named that particular spot Katie’s Hole after an accident some time ago. A family came – from America, Tom thought but he wasn’t sure – on holiday to the Borders. Tom hadn’t liked them much.

We have shifted to the other side of the wall, to the external social world, without any break in the narrative, and in this context we have the first reference to the central incident ‘an accident some time ago’. Only gradually do we realise the specious nature of Tom’s non-involvement. The narrator, echoing Tom’s post hoc rationale, places the incident safely in a past that is over and distances it ‘an accident’ a mistake that happened to somebody else. But the wall has already told us that time doesn’t make things go away. The past is still there, contained and transmuted within the wall. And things are not distanced: they all connect, as the hawk, the fieldmouse and the weasel are connected in the first paragraph.

As the incident is gradually revealed, the irony of Tom’s efforts to distance himself, and to be the rational observer become apparent. Like the Editor in Memoirs and Confessions, he places himself as the objective outsider, and the third person narrator makes no comment, only allows what Tom would no doubt call ‘the facts’ to speak for themselves:

Tom watched her climb up the wall … He watched her as she reached the top and hoisted her fat little body on to it. She grunted and snapped a few times as if blaming the wall for all the grazes she got on her bare legs … She was now opening the little pink bag she had brought up with her. She pulled out lots of stones from it and started chucking them off the edge. After she had disposed of thirteen – Tom had counted – she got bored and looked for other things to do with them. She found that she could stick them in the gaps of the stone of the wall. She smirked as she continued to do so.

Tom, as the hidden observer watching the stranger in his country, appears to position himself as the objective onlooker. But the narrative indicates something rather different. Tom belongs here. He is hidden further along the wall, camouflaged within the landscape. The American girl, with her fat little body and ‘little pink bag’ is the obtrusive stranger. For her, but not for Tom, the wall is inimical; it’s an effort to climb it, it grazes her bare legs. Tom, on the contrary, is at home with the wall, almost part of it. The irony is that while he positions himself as the observer from the rational world, he is actually seen to be aligned with the border country the wall represents. As far as the girl’s fate is concerned, he is the shadow without substance, the dense darkness, that we saw at the beginning. If she is the human victim, he has become diabolical.

She had taken a large stone and was cramming it into the wall when the wall started shaking. The bit Tom was on wasn’t shaking though; it was just where the girl was sitting. It was more rippling than shaking as if it were a snake waving its middle and trying to flick something off its back. Tom looked at the base of the wall where it was shaking. There was a hole there that hadn’t been there before. A black hole that looked as if it would never end. Then Tom saw Katie fall.

The wall changes its nature again: it’s been a glacier and a ribbon, now it’s a snake. One is reminded of the three transformations in Tam Lin, but the roles here are reversed. Tom is aligned with the Faerie world, where ironically we see that he belongs, but he has no love for the human girl ‘The child in the family wasn’t particularly nice’ is his opinion. He is the coldhearted observer who does nothing, and that turns out to be far more lethal than seduction and the demands that follow. It’s the wall, which contains all past tradition and separates one kind of reality from another, that shifts its shape. As a boundary it is seen to be alive, moving, dangerous and untrustworthy. But Tom has no desire to escape its spell. He’s back at the same place, a year later, still watching the dense darkness on the other side. And the girl – no one invites her into the story. She intrudes, she thrusts stones into the crevices of the wall; she appears to have no notion where she is, or what she is doing there, and as a result the wall swallows her up. Tom watches this with an indifference that belongs not to Enlightenment rationality, but to the callousness traditionally attributed to the fairy world.

But Tom is human, and suffers an aftermath of guilt and self justification, as he has to continue to exist in a world that has no knowledge of his collusion:

No one found out what happened to her. Tom never told anyone. The police and the people from the village had searched for months but they found nothing. Tom didn’t tell them because he didn’t want to. He felt as if it were none of his business. There was something stopping him but he didn’t know what.

This opens up the possible reading that Tom himself invented the story of the wall, as an absolving metaphor for a realistic and sordid crime. There are details that support this, for example when Tom looks down ‘to where a solitary bright pink bag sat discarded, the small stones lay all around it like a memorial for its owner.’ Katie has gone, and there is Tom, alone at the scene of the crime with the incriminating evidence. What did he do with the bright pink bag? Why did the police and the villagers never find it? It’s like the basket left behind by Miss Julie Logan in Barrie’s story of that name. Was there really a basket there? If so, what did the narrator do with it? Or was there no basket? So is he mad? Certainly, by the end of this story, if there is a rational explanation, it has to include the assumption that Tom has gone mad:

He sat there listening for ages, for the sound of a girl hitting the rock at the end of the hole, if there was an end.

Katie’s disappearance down an endless hole in the earth could either be attributed to an image arising from Tom’s disordered psyche, or to the magic of the wall. Either way, it’s an image with a wealth of connotation from traditional tale. Not only does it recall the many Scottish stories of abduction into the underground, fairy world, but also it goes further back, to the universal myths of descent into the underworld. But Tom is no Orpheus, any more than he is Tam Lin. He disassociates himself, and does nothing. It’s the girl, who doesn’t understand Tom’s country, who is absorbed into the landscape, and in the end it is Tom who is left outside, wondering. In terms of the descent into the underworld, however, the sacrificial aspect of Katie’s abduction is left in no doubt at the end of the story. The narrator resists any kind of reductive closure, but she brings her images full circle, indicating that Katie’s fall was part of an inevitable, timeless, cyclical process. She has become part of the blood sacrifice that makes it possible for nature to go on. Katie takes on the role of fieldmouse. Tom did not kill her, as the hawk did. It is the weasel who reaps the reward of that small sacrifice, so it seems that in some oblique and sinister fashion Tom too has had his reward:

The stones that the American girl had played with, he had built up into a cairn on the crack that remained in the rock after the hole had closed up. He watched as the weasel dragged the remains of the mouse on to the pile of stones with its teeth before running off. As the sun set on the hills making them no darker than they were before, Tom saw the blood from the mouse slowly and very slightly flow down the stones and wondered whether the snow would come again next month.

So Tom is party to the sacrifice. He erects a memorial to it in a manner used since history began in the landscape to which he belongs. The mouse’s blood is spilt on the memorial, and Tom watches. Tom is left wondering at the end about the continuance of the seasons. We can read him partly as a universal figure. His name suggests this – he is Tom, in the country which produced Tam Lin, Thomas the Rhymer, and where Tom is a likely candidate for the name of the Common Man. The suggestion is that he does what has always been done here, on the wall which is the frightening, shifting boundary between the daytime and nighttime worlds. On the other hand, he is a specific character who struggles with his own conscience and fears in the context of a contemporary world, where American tourists come to stay, and Tom can despise them for wearing the wrong clothes. Little girls carry bright pink bags with pebbles in them, and Tom is an ordinary boy who thinks this is pretty weak. But if we allow the realistic interpretation to predominate, Tom is an even more sinister character. In a reading which insists on excluding the supernatural, he knows what really happened to Katie, and he isn’t telling. Whether you take the fantasy as metaphor or as fact, what it says in this story is that the depth of the psyche is a fairly unsettling place.

I have taken The Wall as exemplary, but it is not an isolated example. We may or may not hear of Rebecca Leach again. But this conference invites us to come to the very edge of the time we know and look beyond it. When I was asked to write this paper I thought first of late twentieth century Scottish fantasy texts that I admire, which have been shaped by a tradition whose roots are arguably older than the idea of a Scottish nation. I considered discussing texts by Alasdair Gray, Ian Banks, Liz Lochhead, Sian Hayton, James Meek or Christopher Whyte. I hope to be around for a long time to come to read innovative new works by these established writers. However, there are others whose first books I look forward to with almost equal anticipation.: Matthew Fitt, for example, who has written “the first science fiction novel all in Scots”, But and Ben a Go Go, to be published this year by Luath Press; or Zoe Strachan, whose unnerving witch-like character Leonora exercises strange powers in contemporary Glasgow (Strachan’s first book will be published in 2001); or Anne Donavan, whose short story The Ice Horse (to be included in her first published collection next year) startlingly fulfils every one of the criteria I suggested. Watch this space …

I took Rebecca Leach’s story as one of the many coming texts which are exemplary of a strand of Scottish writing that may be muted at present, while urban realism tends to remain the dominant genre, but which is definitely alive and well. Traditional material is still being used to construct fantasies which are by no means retrospective or sentimental, but are firmly set in the contemporary world. The fantastic elements are used to explore psychic states, and reiterate, as this genre has always done, that the inexplicable and the elusive remains at the heart of human experience, and that in justice to realism it cannot be marginalised or left out. Leach’s story is ambiguous about the significance of the supernatural, and the fluidity of its images, in a manner which shows her clearly to be heir to a Scottish fantasy tradition. She is not alone. While we have writers who are producing texts like this, the Scottish fantasy tradition will continue to shape the texts that are to come.

As a fantasy writer myself, I like to imagine a person, say, a hundred years from now, reading a book, and what that experience will be like for them. I’d therefore like to conclude with a short piece of Scottish fantasy which addresses the possible nature of future texts, and what it will be like to read them. This poem arrived through my door on a postcard; I don’t know if it’s in book form yet. It’s by Tessa Ransford, and it’s about the form of future texts, whereas I have been discussing content, but it too addresses the question of inheriting a tradition. Moreover, it focusses upon the experience of the future reader, who is a mysterious figure, as yet unknown to us, who responds to the past tradition that we are making now. It also empowers us as present-day readers to make our mark on the texts that are being produced now, and to pass them on by claiming them as our own. This is a topic that seems to me to provide a sufficiently open ending for this paper:

One day in the future
a child may come across a book
and say ‘Imagine being able to hold
in your hand what you read, to carry it with you and wear it out
with your life; to pass it on
bearing your marks, your name,
written in ink, your signature:
your wave-length in letters.’

Notes

¹ G. Gregory Smith, Scottish Literature Macmillan 1919

² Margaret Elphinstone, ‘Contemporary Feminist Fantasy in the Scottish Literary Tradition’ in Caroline Gonda (ed) Tea and Leg-Irons Open Letters Press 1992 and in Robert A. Latham and Robert A. Collins (eds) Modes of the Fantastic: Selected Papers from the Twelfth International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts Greenwood Press 1995

³ Colin Manlove (ed), An Anthology of Scottish Fantasy Literature Polygon 1996

⁴ Colin Manlove, Scottish Fantasy Literature: A Critical Survey Canongate 1994

⁵ Rebecca Leach, ‘The Wall’ in The Pushkin Press

FLEMING, Morna, ‘Teaching Henryson’

11 September 2021 by Duncan Jones

ScotLit 33, Autumn 2005 |

When writing the February Newsletter for The Robert Henryson Society, I noted that 2005 was the 500th anniversary of Dunbar’s poem ‘Lament for the Makars’, which makes mention of Robert Henryson:

In Dunfermelyne he [Death] has done rovne
With maister Robert Henrisoun

and felt again the frustration that too many pupils in Dunfermline, in Fife, never mind in Scotland, go through their entire school careers without ever hearing about one of the greatest poets that Scotland has produced.

The Robert Henryson Society was formed in Dunfermline in 1993 ‘to encourage a wider appreciation of his work among the public at large’ through newsletters, evening lectures and an annual conference. Since the outset, schools and teachers have been seen as one of the most important fora for widening knowledge of the poet’s work, and the Society has actively encouraged a number of initiatives over the years.

One of the first practitioners to teach Henryson successfully in school was Gerald Baird of Grove Academy in Dundee, who taught the Fables and The Testament of Cresseid to pupils at different stages of secondary. He was commissioned by ASLS to write the definitive Scotnote on the poet, a book which is of great help to teachers who have not had the benefit of courses in medieval Scots literature like those offered by Glasgow University. (Many of the teachers mentioned in this article are alumni of those courses.)

I myself have taught the Fables over a number of years to junior secondary pupils, and a selection of Fables and The Testament to Certificate of Sixth Year Studies pupils at Beath High School in Cowdenbeath. I gave an account of these experiences at the 7th International Conference on Medieval and Renaissance Scottish Language and Literature held at Strathclyde University and published in The European Sun (2001). Unaccountably, Henryson was dropped from the list of prescribed texts for Advanced Higher.

The Robert Henryson Society has made a number of attempts to get Henryson into the Dunfermline area schools, firstly through a pack sponsored by Dunfermline Building Society which included ‘The Prologue’ to the Moral Fables and ‘The Cock and the Jasp’ in three different versions: the original Middle Scots, a modern Scots version by Bob Smith, and an English version by Barbara Rasmusen. This was accompanied by classroom worksheets based on the work that Gerry Baird had publicised some years before, and a tape of the two poems produced by Scotsoun.

It is difficult to overemphasise the importance of Scotsoun, and indeed George Philp, in the development of The Robert Henryson Society. It was George who was the prime mover in the founding of the Society in 1993, and without the Scotsoun tapes of the Fables, the poetry would remain inaccessible to many teachers as well as pupils.

The most recent success for the Society in schools was the competition for primary pupils to design a stained glass window based on the fable of ‘The Two Mice’. This was won by pupils from Lynburn Primary School, under the Depute Headteacher, Margaret Whetton, who produced very imaginative designs which were translated into stained glass by Liz Rowley. The glass should be installed in the school very soon and will be unveiled with as much publicity as can be mustered.

However, these are all small-scale projects, depending on the passion of a small number of individual teachers. Fear of the unknown, ignorance, or initiative overload seem to inhibit many teachers from embarking into the new world of medieval literature. It may be that the Britain in Print project will see Henryson finally entering the 21st century as a writer for schools.

The initial project was set up by the members of CURL (Consortium of University Research Libraries) to catalogue pre-1701 British manuscripts and with the help of Heritage Lottery Funding, promote the collections and the materials to a general audience, via a web-site. Lesley Porter, then head of English at Queen Anne High School in Dunfermline, was approached to join the project, and suggested that Henryson be the focus, as he had the Dunfermline, Fife, Scottish and national contexts. And, more importantly, The Testament of Cresseid provided the link to Chaucer and the canon of English literature.

It was decided in early meetings that material would be drawn from early printed editions of major Scottish literature of the 15th Century and, as such would:

meet key curriculum needs within Scottish school-age learning
be of practical benefit to support teachers by filling a gap in the e-learning content already available
link to the Chaucerian tradition and therefore have wider relevance to a UK schools’ audience

With the criteria in mind, literary material would be complemented with content designed to place the literature in its historical context, and would also include material which provided a comparison with literary movements in England and indeed Europe. The contextual material would be embedded in the ‘timeline’, a feature of the website. The poet and scholar, Robert Henryson, was identified as ‘meeting the criteria’ in his Testament of Cresseid. For Lesley, however, a major consideration in determining our choice was the fact that Scottish schoolchildren, many of whom leave school with little or no experience of our Scottish literary heritage other than perhaps, Robert Burns, should have at Higher and Advanced Higher level some experience of the Scottish canon.

The Britain in Print project team, led by Richard Ovenden – Director of Special Collections at Edinburgh University Library and the Project Director for Britain in Print and Norman Rodger, Project Developer, would seek advice from the Heritage Lottery Fund, from the National Grid for Learning Scotland, who provided curriculum-content related advice; from Humanities Advanced Technology Information Institute (at the University of Glasgow); and from Lesley, in providing the educational link and developer of the materials and resources at Queen Anne High School. And more importantly, for the Queen Anne pupils who would pilot the material, whilst at the same time, learn something of their literary heritage and culture.

As far as the school’s involvement, the project provided an exciting prospect for Lesley as a teacher in terms of development work and providing a stimulating text to teach. The ‘old standard’ Higher texts: Othello, War Poetry, Edwin Morgan’s poetry, Romeo and Juliet, The Devil’s Disciple, The Crucible, Consider the Lilies, whilst not detracting from their ‘greatness’, are ubiquitous in the extreme in exam papers, as any SQA marker can testify. More importantly, however, it gave senior pupils the opportunity to study a more challenging text, medieval Scottish poetry, than perhaps they might have done for their Higher English course. By opening up the breadth of the Scottish literary canon to them, the project also provided pupils with, and access to, a context in which to place the work as part of local, Scottish, British, and European, heritage.

The website Unit of work had to provide S5/6 Higher and Advanced Higher with an in-depth study and analysis of the language and ideas used by Henryson whilst at the same time, be ‘website friendly’ and provide the links to the other aspects on the website, e.g. the historical context etc. In addition to the question and answer format, the worksheets also had to provide opportunities for class and/or paired discussion. Pupils also had to have the opportunity of preparing critical essays – titles given – and multiple choice questions. It also had to be flexible enough to allow individual teachers a level of teacher-input, depending on the range of pupil abilities which exist even within Higher classrooms. And given that many of our ‘English’ teachers in Scottish secondary schools have little or no knowledge of medieval Scottish literature, the material had also to be ‘teacher-friendly’.

The Unit, although it can be used as a stand-alone resource, is designed to work in conjunction with the website and this is where it works best. It can be found on www.britaininprint.net [note: website no longer active], which will be found to be a very easily-used website. The analysis of the text by the pupils through the worksheets is enhanced by the knowledge gained through e-learning. The activities provide pupils with a means to access information from the web and therefore, enhance their classroom learning.

The aims of the Unit were:

To provide pupils with a framework to the study of 15th century Scottish literature
To provide pupils with a degree of online visual content
To enhance pupils’ independent study of 15th century Scottish literature
To prepare pupils for external examinations as part of SQA Higher and Advanced Higher English

On a wider level, the Unit enhances learning and prepares pupils for Higher Education and research as they move on to University.

Initially, Lesley developed a unit of work to be used in conjunction with the project’s e-learning tool. This provided the manageable sections for study of the poem and is used on the website to provide the analytical framework. As The Testament is a fairly long text and given the degree of difficulty of language for pupils, she divided the analysis of poem into nine different sections: Introduction (Stanzas 1-10), Narrative Episode: Section 2 – Cresseid’s rejections, return home and prayer (Stanzas 11-20); Section 3 – Cresseid’s dream (Stanzas 21-38); Section 4 – Cresseid’s dream: the debate and judgement of the Gods; Section 5 (Stanzas 50-58), Narrative Episode :Cresseid’s leprosy; Section 6 (Stanzas 59-66) the Complaint of Cresseid; Section 7 (Stanzas 66-76) Cresseid, the lepers and Troilus; Section 8 (Stanzas 77-86) the Testament and Death of Cresseid; and Section 9 (Stanza 86) the Moralitas.

The Unit is interspersed with biographical details, literary background, critical essay questions, activities and of course, the text and the modern audience, all of which were designed to promote discussion and pupil engagement in the text. And, built in to the learning structure are the literary conventions: nine-line stanza structure, formal rhetoric, ubi suntconvention, complaint, moralitas, courtly associations of the imagery, allegorical dream and spiritual recovery. The Charteris edition was used, for no reason other than this was the edition I used when studying the text at university.

The website itself was designed with the structure of the unit in mind, divided into the nine sections and containing, teaching notes, summaries of the various sections, notes on the poem, study tools, background to printing, geographical mapping (both Scotland, Britain and European), academic background, time-lines, page-view, glossaries and audio recordings of the text The site itself is user-friendly and would be of benefit to everyone including those ‘A’ Level students studying Chaucer, the general public, history teachers who would find it beneficial in the use of printing and time-lines, undergraduates, European history/literature students and of course, members of the Henryson Society!

For Lesley as a teacher, the e-learning tool was a welcome addition to classroom resources, but for the pupils, the website provided an important enhancement in terms of their learning. Accessing the website for textual information or historical background, e-homework, participating in the multiple-choice quiz, support for critical essays, together with teacher-led classroom analysis, pupil and group presentations enhanced the teaching and learning for Higher English.

The production of a reading of the text which I took part in with Colin Donati gave a valuable audio resource which can be accessed on the website as the poem is studied stanza by stanza. Norman Rodger also set up an on-line question and answer session with academics which was fairly successful, although perhaps the questions were coming too quickly for the academics! The edited version on the website gives a sense of the kinds of questions which pupils were asking, clearly showing their involvement not only in the text itself but in its literary and cultural contexts.

Lesley is convinced that what the pupils gained out of their study of The Testament of Cresseid was infinitely more exciting and unusual both in the delivery, resourcing and material in the ‘website’ learning component of the course and perhaps more in keeping with 21st Century learning – the use of information technology to enhance the teaching of English. However, far more that that and from our perspectives as Scottish teachers in Scottish secondary schools, teaching Scottish pupils, the value and worth of teaching a text which gives our youngsters a knowledge and understanding of a major Scottish poet who is rightfully at the heart of the Scottish literary canon cannot be underestimated. The uniqueness of the project served to enhance the learning of our youngsters.

GIFFORD, Douglas, ‘Making Them Bold and Breaking the Mould: Rona Munro’s Bold Girls’

11 September 2021 by Duncan Jones

Laverock 2, 1996 |

My Mummy taught me how to raise my family, how to love them, how to spoil them. Spoil the wee girls with housework and reproaches, the length of their skirts and the colour of their lips: how they sit, how they slouch, how they don’t give their fathers peace, how they talk, how they talk back, how they’ll come to no good if they carry on like that. They’re bold and bad and broken at fourteen, but you love them as much as you love yourself … that’s why you hurt them so much … Ruin the boys, tell them they’re noisy and big and bold, and their boots are too muddy, ‘Clear that mess up for me, Cassie.’ Tell them to leave their fathers in peace, and come to their mother for a cuddle, tell them they’ll always be your own wee man, always your own bold wee man and you love them better than you love their daddy, you love them best of all – that’s why they hurt you so much.’
(Cassie, scene two, Bold Girls)

This is a bold play for a young Scottish playwright. It draws on many traditions and types of drama, from Celtic myth and legend, and plays of the Irish Revival from Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World to O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock, and from modern work like Pam Gem’s Dead Fish or Liz Lochhead’s Quelques Fleurs, as well as evoking something of the mood of Bernard McLaverty’s novel Cal. But its running references to popular culture, to game shows and horror videos, to supermarket brands and contemporary pub-and-bingo ritual, separate it from all these, and identify Munro’s main theme as a satire on the way ordinary people live now – not just in Northern Ireland, but in the West, and indeed in any culture which imbalances the sexes in their social roles, encouraging stereotyping of male dominance and social privilege and female subservience to that behaviour.

Bold Girls is in four scenes of unequal length, moving from Marie’s house (22 pages of 52) via the social club (13 pages), and outside the club (3 pages) back to Marie’s house (14 pages). Marie’s house is thus established as the base of the action, revelation – and, as it turns out, of the play’s positive values and its possible optimism concerning her own future, as well as the future of Deirdre, and probably of her friends Nora and daughter Cassie too. Marie’s house is in a sense the House of Women, of their sorrows and successes, their failures and – most importantly – in its charity and forgiveness, the House in which hope lies for the future, for the breaking of the mould which has made the Bold Girls we will meet, and their bold men, standing in the shadows beyond the play.

My treatment begins with a summary of the action and its implications. Thereafter it moves to consider central features of Munro’s dramatic presentation, including her use of the stage; her revelation of character through what seems like conversation, but is often separate monologue, with characters talking across each other; her use of imagery and symbolism; followed by discussion of Munro’s examination of the dreams and values of contemporary society through her characters; her view of the politics of the Troubles and ‘the Brits’, those controversial figures of authority placed amidst a society often deeply hostile to them; the emerging picture of a lost community; and the play’s conclusions regarding the relations of women and men, and the future of these relations; and a final examination of the quotation from angry Cassie which opens this essay.

Play Summary
Scene 1: Marie’s House

The play is set in a world of Belfast drizzle and dreichness; the almost poetic scene directions capture this for the director; ‘it is irons and ironing boards and piles of clothes … socks and pegs and damp sheets …’ Toys everywhere tell us of children, pots and pans of domesticity and the ordinariness and clutter. Two images set out the play’s concerns – the picture of the virgin (and this will go far beyond merely Catholic symbolism), and the bigger and ‘blown-up’ photograph of the as yet unidentified Michael, Marie’s husband … And then there’s Deirdre, crouching outside the room, but outside in further senses, in that she’s meant to be in the darkness of the Belfast streets, but also in the darkness of her hopelessness and of her sorrows. We don’t know who she is; as yet she’s only the wary, young face, speaking a ferocious drama-poetry. Her appearance establishes the next layer of the drama beyond Marie’s affirmative presence; and tells us that the rules of naturalism will sometimes be suspended, and reminders given of an older, stranger Ireland or a newer, nastier world of terrorism. Like the folk-music in Calwhich hauntingly spoke of a lost and dear green place, an Ireland of green hills and community, Deirdre remembers the hills, and singing birds, but can’t see or hear them; the modern streets and the helicopter overhead have come between. Munro won’t attempt to join such sudden surrealism with the main action; it simply happens, then gives way to the main narrative.

And Marie comes before us with sheer vigour and integrity. Her children are there – but not allowed to appear, or to diminish our attention to her. Children and men are significantly not allowed to appear at all. Nora appears, with Marie’s towels – and two slight, but important points are made. Wee Michael was supposed to get them, but didn’t; and Nora covers up for his domestic failure – as she always does for men. Cassie shows her sharpness, her earthy sexuality revealing itself in the knickers episode – it doesn’t matter that they are Marie’s, with wee black cats on them saying Hug me, I’m cuddly; it’s Cassie who has foregrounded them. All the Bold Girls have appeared, and already the menace of Deirdre, the outsider, should contrast with the apparent normality and friendly banter of the women, centred around Marie, with mother and daughter Nora and Cassie not listening to each other, but revealing their key characteristics – Nora’s harassed and male-dominated domesticity, Cassie’s sharp rejection of it.

Munro leaves Deirdre outside; and scene one is ordinary enough, on the surface – kids, washing, fags, whether to go to the club; the topics are mundane, although perhaps a clue to darker issues is given in the mention of the video, The Accused; note Nora’s verdict, and her disagreement with Marie, whose instinctive ‘no woman deserves’ in regard to Jodie Foster’s trauma is unfinished – or simply seen as irrelevant by Nora. They seem harmless enough Bold Girls, their worst excesses being to do with having too much to drink, or chatting up taxi drivers. Is Nora maybe a bit obsessive about her house and her peach fabric? And where are the menfolk?

Clues begin to emerge; ‘Michael’s been dead three and half years’, cries Cassie, urging Marie out, and shocking her mother. Cassie seems unduly nervous of Marie’s ghost-talk of Michael, though significantly none of them are unduly bothered by explosions outside. And what hidden depths to Cassie are revealed in her planting of money behind Michael’s photograph?

A major connection is established between Deirdre and Marie with the lighting change which, we’ll come to know, changes the play’s mode from realism to expressionism; first Deirdre, outside, developing her association with greyness, violence, loneliness; then a monologue from Marie, filling us in about her innocence, goodness, and childish optimism in the days when she was first married. We now know that Michael is/was her husband, if little else than that he was charismatic, a bold boy. Munro allows attitudes regarding the Brits, the soldiers who are everywhere, to emerge; cleverly, they are shown early in a good light, so that we don’t get tempted into stereotyping. This set against the ‘thunderous knocking’ at the door which follows the sound of gunshots; although it transpires that this time it’s not the brutal entry of troops, but the unexpected opposite; Deirdre, dirty, battered, looking like fifteen, though eyes heavily made up; second-nameless, unplaceable to the curious women. Again, questions force themselves on us; who on earth is she, with her unnatural toughness and vulnerability? Has she some connection with the violence? Is she a terrorist? She stonewalls all attempts to find her identity – and her fierce knife monologue raises more questions than it reveals. Why is she so bitter? What kind of truth is it she’s after? How has she been able to see the street-violence she clearly knows too well, when, at her age, she should be home with a family? And, once again, where are the men?

And at last we begin to hear what’s happened to them. Nora’s Sean is dead (Cassie nostalgic about her father’s gentleness to her), her son Martin and Cassie’s husband Joe are in Long Kesh Terrorist prison. (Isn’t there something odd in the curiously slapstick way Nora and Cassie do a double act about the night Cassie’s husband Joe was arrested? How can they laugh at this horrific treatment of women?) And Marie’s brother Davey seems to be in jail too; while her husband Michael has had his head blown off. Scene one has saved the most horrific revelation for the end; but there are still so many unanswered questions – such as how Michael met his death, who killed him, or why Cassie so misses her father.

Marie and Deirdre end the scene; Marie with her moving lullaby to Brendan, rocking him to sleep with her praise of Michael in heaven (but we note Cassie’s unease; why is she suddenly so keen to be out of Belfast?), and her praise of the bold men, ‘all men you’d look at twice’, remembered for their card-playing, drinking, sentimental party singing. It’s intriguing that this mood of elegy is capped with the final appearance of Deidre. Why is she so changed? How does she know where the hidden money is? And why has Munro chosen to let her steal the scene with this sharply jarring action? We’re left with a final impression of three (or four, if we count Deirdre) separate lines of thought developing. The girls may seem to communicate, but they don’t really listen to each other; there are private selves, motives, and agendas behind the apparent neighbourliness.

Scene 2: The Club

Again, stage directions are vivid and atmospheric; it’s worth briefly assessing just how significant they are, and just how much they help fix our responses to what follows. (That said, it should also be remembered that, in performance, they won’t be there; so what is their status as text?)

There’s a clever opening here, in which we as audience have to find our feet as regards what’s going on. Who’s being talked about? Why are they standing? It’s an effective way of underlining the repetitiveness of the violence – this has happened many times. And it reminds Marie of coffins – and Michael?

The club, with its garish decor and its get-rich-quick games, is an appropriate place for the girls to recall their men and the famous wall-and-dog story, and by now sensitive response to the play is questioning whether these memories can be taken at face value. After all, Nora’s husband cheated in betting, and Michael lost his car. Isn’t there something a bit strained about the brave face memory puts on? Isn’t Cassie showing more and more that she’s hardly got sorrowful feelings about ‘the dear departed’?

And isn’t something a bit strained about the toast to the bold girls by themselves? Again, we note the three simultaneous lines of topic; ‘Guess the Price’, Nora and Cassie’s sniping, the discussions of Deirdre’s boldness in Marie’s clothes all run together, intermingled. It’s a clever way of mingling themes. The materialism which defines Nora and Cassie emerges in the first (‘Oh Mummy! She’s won the magi-mix!’ shows that the world of prizes and things can bring them to agreement); in the second, we learn more of Nora’s survival toughness from her strange treatment of the past in her anecdotes (which are almost monologues – serving what purpose?), and of Cassie’s bitterness, with its crucial and central statement (quoted at the beginning of this study) from Cassie about how boys and girls are conditioned in Northern Irish – and Western? – society. What is Cassie’s brazen dance really saying? And, in the third line, after the raid which freezes time and the club, releasing Marie and Deirdre into a kind of shared, stylised dialogue, we ask more questions about what’s making Deirdre the utterly unfeeling and amoral person she seems to be.

It’s becoming clear now that Cassie’s dislike of Deirdre has deeper undertones to it than simple loyalty to her friend. The past is here too, in Marie’s uncanny feeling of having seen Deirdre before. Is Deirdre here to have something out? With Marie or Cassie? Why does she not defend herself against Cassie’s final attack?

And why does the scene end, not with the drama we’ve been witnessing, but with an oddly placed stylised monologue from Nora deriding the use of talk, and leaving us with her obsessive yearning for fifteen yards of pale peach polyester fabric?

Scene 3: Outside the Club

This short scene, three pages of dialogue between Marie and Cassie, with a typically wordless, brief and nasty contribution from Deirdre at the end, poses questions. Just why is it so unbalanced with the rest of the play, so disproportionate in size? Why change from interior setting of house and club to wasteland and moonlight? Is there significant and symbolic connection with what’s happening between Marie and Cassie (and with all the bold girls) in the fact that there’s an eclipse of the moon – ‘our very own shadow swallowing up all the light’? A simple enough answer to the first question regarding length might suggest that staging considerations call for time to allow the resetting of Marie’s house for scene 4; that said, Munro is far too skilful a dramatist to allow mere stage necessity to dominate. Marie and Cassie here show their closeness; there is a great strength in this bonding, a strength which has supported all of them in hard times. But there is a crack in this togetherness; and this wedge of a scene drives home the first real division between them all, a knife-point which will come close to destroying them all by the end. Cassie’s ‘Aw Jesus I hate this place!’ as she kicks the very ground she lives on, her agonised desire to leave, and Marie’s reminder of the claims of children, reinforce our awareness of Cassie’s tortured heart and Marie’s (self-deceiving?) goodness. Do all the bold girls have some kind of self-deluding dream? In The Wild Duck Ibsen called this ‘the saving lie’, and suggested that all human beings console themselves with some kind of self-delusion. Don’t Marie, Nora, Cassie – and even Deirdre – all in the end reveal that they are holding on to some kind of consoling dream of past or future? Certainly Deirdre, stealer of purses, seems more of a straightforward destroyer as she finds her longed-for knife and slashes at Nora’s dream-fabric. But, looking deeper, can’t we see that she too is following a kind of distorted dream?

Scene 4: Marie’s House

Our impression of Marie’s steady goodness is reinforced by the picture of her feeding birds in the pitch blackness, while Nora and Cassie continue to drink. (Do you think that Munro means us to see drink as one of the major problems in this play?) A latent hostility between Nora and Cassie comes to a head in this scene of many climaxes, as memories of the menfolk – and a new ugliness, that of wife-beating – surfaces through the alcoholic haze. With the discovery that her hidden money, the dream-of-escape-money, is gone, the antagonism (is it indeed hatred?) between mother and daughter explodes, and we see the resentment of years, with Cassie’s comment that her mother’s heart is made of steel, a condemnation oddly qualified with understanding – ‘she had to grow it that way’.

Have we been prepared for the horrific admissions from Cassie which follow? Has Munro planted enough clues to suggest to us that deep down we aren’t surprised? Remember, however, when considering Cassie’s betrayal of Marie, what Deirdre will say about Cassie’s appearance when making love with Michael; ‘she looked like my grandmother, old and tired and like she didn’t care about anything at all anymore …’. Does this help us to understand Cassie’s betrayal of her best friend?

Unusually, the play has yet another denouement; perhaps more important than the revelation of Cassie’s affair with Michael. Deirdre comes back from what may have been an attempt to rape her, after the club closed. She brings back most of the stolen money – and her knife. She seems poised between attacking Marie and talking to her – poised, perhaps, between two different kinds of ‘hard truth’? Her choice has to wait; after revealing to Marie that Michael is her father, she wants some kind of confirmation from her. But can Marie ever give Deirdre the ‘truth’ she’s after? She can destroy Michael’s photograph, and her own and Deirdre’s remaining illusions, she can tell her that she does look like Michael, and what Michael had for tea, and that someone – Provos, enemies, does it ultimately matter? – ‘took the lying head off him’; but the truth about Michael, and Cassie’s father, and all the other men implicated in their lives, will surely remain elusive, as Marie’s last big speech about ‘all the daddys’ admits. All that can be hoped is that ‘we learn some way to change’, in our dealings with each other, women to women, men to men, and women and men to each other.

How far does Marie reveal in these closing stages that she isn’t and has never really been the trusting innocent, the feeder of birds? How far – and why – has she been living a lie? And how far can we read the end, with its partial reconciliation of Deirdre and her sorrows with Marie and hers, as optimistic? What is the significance of the play’s closing actions, the return to ordinary domesticity and the feeding of the birds?

Dramatic Presentation
Stage Use

Munro uses the stage with a strong sense of patterning – a patterning designed to reinforce the arrangement of characters and the balancing of ideas within the play. For example the overall sense of what happens onstage works out as a Marie-Club-Wasteland-Marie movement. Doesn’t this echo the movements in Marie’s mind, from a kind of tired security to doubt and despair, returning to what can be seen as a better kind of honesty? And for the other characters, the play begins with Marie, then moving into materialism, bitter quarrelling, darkness and separation. And yet, isn’t there the implication that forgiveness and a kind of community will once again be found with Marie? It’s worth thinking of the ways in which the play arranges the bold girls in a kind of dramatic choreography which continually changes to represent the action in spatial terms.

Probably the most striking examples of stage use occur in the brief, but startlingly effective non-naturalistic moments when the dramatic narrative is suspended, and characters speak directly to the audience as though revealing their innermost thoughts. The opening appearance of Deirdre is the outstanding example of this. The play may open with Marie’s disorderly domesticity, but the stage use challenges us with its almost immediate revelation of Deirdre outside the room. If this and other similar scenes are considered with the effects made through differences of lighting and focus, Munro’s clever integration of stage effects becomes clear. (The Lighting Plot and the Effects Plot are appended to the play; examination of the connections between the twenty lighting cues and their dramatic action, together with the thirteen cues for effect, is a most revealing exercise). And it’s not just Deirdre who is starkly revealed in her loneliness, her association with terrorism and violence, through this method. Cassie and Nora have their direct say (witness, for example, Cassie’s monologue given at the opening of this essay), which reveals their anger and bitterness respectively; and Marie will use this mode several times, culminating in her speech of forgiveness at the end. What rules can be seen governing Munro’s use of this mode of presentation? Is there a way in which her timing of these moments contributes towards the patterning and development of the play’s themes? In the case of Deirdre’s actions in this mode, are there other points being made about issues beyond the lives of the bold girls, such as Belfast violence – and perhaps even of ancient Irish sorrows in legend and myth, seen dimly in this contemporary Deirdre of the Sorrows? And isn’t she used at times as a kind of bleak chorus to the Troubles?

And Munro exploits techniques which suggest off-stage presence with great skill. Notice how cleverly the on-stage action links up with children who are never seen, but who are talked to, given to, comforted. Doesn’t this ‘absent presence’ echo the absent presence of the menfolk of the bold girls? Positioning is paramount; for example, when Marie, at the Club, is disengaged from Cassie and Nora to stand at the podium, their bitter wrangling breaks out worse than ever, or when Deirdre intrudes, as she often does, into the threesome, distancing them from each other. This divisive positioning links directly to the next issue.

Monologues and Crosstalk

Some of the most striking features of the way the bold girls talk are connected to their essential loneliness, despite the appearance of communal living and sharing of washing, shopping, socialising.

Rona and Cassie frequently talk without listening to what the other is saying, and even Marie will reminisce without noticing if anyone is paying attention. The effect is at first humorous – for examples, the opening discussion between Cassie and Marie regarding the red knickers, which is interspersed with Nora’s unheeded reminders about the washing machine boiling over, or the way in which shortly after, with distant explosions and troops coming up the road, Marie and Cassie talk about computer games and heaters while Nora laments her nasturtiums. Munro is, of course, making the point that all of them are so hardened to this backdrop of the Troubles that explosions no longer merit more than a moment’s concern; but isn’t she also showing a habit which in the end reveals that all of them have taken refuge in humdrum domestic chat which really doesn’t communicate, but which papers over the real and tragic difficulties and distances in their lives? A good example for analysis occurs in scene one when Deirdre has arrived; Nora and Cassie casually have one eye on the TV, the other, distrustfully, on Deirdre. Munro adds another comment here; that modern absorption with the trivia of TV puts distances between real life and media-imagined life; they are watching Blind Date, and Munro slyly suggests ironic contrasts between the lives of the bold girls and the dream world of the TV show.

The idea of breakdown of communication deepens as the play goes on. Notice the random disconnectedness of what the girls say at the one-minute silence for the latest casualty of the Troubles; significantly, the opening is ‘I didn’t know him’, echoing the play’s main theme of loneliness. Marie, typically, shows sorrow – Nora talks of her cramp, Cassie of her sore feet. This is even more pronounced during Marie’s spell at the lectern. Guessing prices for tea-sets and computer games; Cassie and Nora really begin to dig each other up – yet manage to switch back continually to the price game, in between insults. What began as strategic deafness and non-listening goes on to become serious evasion of reality and home truths; for example, the scene three eclipse exchanges between Marie and Cassie, where increasingly Cassie finds she can’t reveal the truth about Michael to Marie. We should remember that Marie herself, with her protective sentiments about brave Michael the Good Daddy in Heaven, probably doesn’t want to hear either.

Doesn’t all this prepare us for the realisation that it is society itself, and local community, which has broken down in terms of communication and truth? Direct, honest face-to-face talking and listening only comes at the end of the play – and by then it is perhaps communication too late for reconciliation.

It’s worth, too, looking at Nora’s almost ritual self-deception and self-celebration. No-one else has ever appreciated her, so her habit is to ‘frame’ the past, violent or happy, into set pieces which give her a sense of importance. These arranged and edited memories have presumably been heard by the others many times. ‘The Night They Took Joe’, ‘Sheila’s Kids and the Magnolia Paint’ – Nora has several pieces in her repertoire which serve to buffer her from harsh truth. She turns things like the brutality of the British troops to women into comic episodes – the alternative, facing the truth, being impossible.

As noted under Stage Use, the play has striking expressive monologues. Deirdre has four (1, 8, 16, 32); Marie three (8, 21, 33); Cassie three (20, 29, 47) and Nora one (36). In terms of the play’s theme of the breakdown of communication, these reinforce the idea that central truths are being avoided, since the honesty of these direct, almost surreal moments cuts right across the grain of evasion and mutual deception which is typical of the Bold Girls. It’s significant that Deirdre and Marie – the two characters seen to be at least partly redeemed in the end – break out of expressionist and surreal monologue to talk frankly to each other in a way which brings catharsis, the purging of hatred and distrust, and a willingness to go forward.

Image and Symbol

The play’s title has open-ended symbolic suggestions; in that it points to several meanings of ‘bold’ (and even some different meanings of ‘girls’?). Boldness can be a term for bravery; for brash self-assertion, even for selfish arrogance. Used with ‘girls’, it can carry sexual implications – and when we see that ,girls’ spans young teenagers to elderly women, the symbolic overtones and ironies increase. There’s also the idea of some kind of sisterhood – backed up by the central toast the three make to themselves in the Club. Doesn’t the title also challenge, symbolically, with its use of ‘bold’ for women, when conventionally it would be used, especially in Irish culture and drama, in regard to ‘boys’ and men? Perhaps from that very title we are supposed to be asking why it’s not men who are the bold ones – so where are they?

An interesting characteristic of Munro’s use of image and symbol is the way she lets very ordinary items and objects slowly gather their symbolic significance through repetition, using them almost as leit-motifs. Her approach in this respect is much closer to that of Ibsen or Miller than to that of Becket or Pinter. Her use of bird-imagery, of the pictures of Michael and the Virgin, of Deirdre’s knife, of course carry expectations of freedom (and captivity), secular and spiritual obligations, and violence respectively. More unusual is the way she makes more mundane objects such as Mickey’s raspberry ice-cream syrup, or Nora’s peach-coloured polyester fabric, or innumerable references to current TV shows and films (including The Accused, Nightmare on Elm Street, Blind Date, The Hulk, Home and Away) into a running symbolism indicating the cheapness of modern materialism and culture. She effects this so cleverly that the most casual reference – say, to the Black-and-Decker drill of the club game – becomes part of a web of symbolic undercutting. This is what Irish culture has come to in contemporary Belfast, and perhaps what culture has come to in the Western World.

In a sense Munro makes everything symbolic – the children out of sight, the ignored explosions, the Brits trampling flowers, the continual reference to absent men. It’s a measure of her creative and poetic richness that, the more the play is considered, the more its situations and its contrasts of light and dark begin to stand out, however; the use of the eclipse of the moon in scene three, and the use of the name ‘Deirdre’ for the lost youngster of Belfast.

The eclipse occurs at the play’s lowest point. Yes, scene four will bring horrific home truths into the open, but this can be seen as positive, in that at least what’s been festering has broken out. It’s important, too, that the eclipse darkens the wasteground on which Cassie once again evades telling the truth to Marie; the darkened moon and the wasted ground joining together as powerful correlatives for the darkened and wasted lives and situations of all the women. The lack of sun and freedom we’ve already observed; now, with Deirdre’s destruction of Nora’s dreams, with Cassie’s continual deception, of herself as well as Marie and her mother, and Marie about to have her last saving lie shattered, even the residual moonlight of their wasted lives is going to vanish – our very own shadow swallowing up all the light of the moon’, says Marie, more truly than she knows.

Munro has stated that she wasn’t conscious of having picked the name ‘Deirdre’ as an echo of the famous tragic heroine of Irish and Scottish mythology, Deirdre of the Sorrows. She has also said that her Deirdre isn’t all that similar to the legendary Deirdre, though she sees that her ‘desperate love and terrible grief’ echoes that of the ancient Irish story. Authors, we know, work at levels of imagination of which they are not always conscious; and, whether brought about consciously or unconsciously, one of the great achievements of the play lies in the way the youngster Deirdre carries with her, like the older Mrs Boyle in Juno and the Paycock, a burden of Irish history, its agonies and its dreams. She has dim memories of a greener, older Ireland; she is a lost generation; and, though her story lacks the magnificence of the older Deirdre’s tragic involvement with great lovers and heroic kings, isn’t there almost a supernatural feel to her waif-like appearances, suggesting that in a way she embodies suffering Ireland, come down from ancient glory to modern tragedy and bathos? And isn’t the implication of the ending that ‘it’s nearly morning’, that she may yet find birds, sunshine, freedom? And is there perhaps associated with this a last representation of Marie, generous to birds and children and friends, protector of lame ducks, as an ironic but kindly comment that the real saints are closer to home?

The Dreams and Values of Contemporary Society

Deirdre opened the play with her dream of a lost Ireland which had become a grey nightmare; There’s hills at the back there, green, I can’t hardly see them because – the street is grey. Somewhere a bird is singing – ‘ – and the play will close with a return, if not to a lost green Ireland, to Marie’s feeding of the birds, perhaps the only surviving dream, after the disintegration of the saving lies and illusions of the Bold Girls.

The play strips away not just their dreams, and not just some of the illusions and false hopes of modern Ireland, but many of the central desires and dreams of Western society. Marie’s life – and Cassie’s and Nora’s – is based on television, its game shows, its films, its values. Their children are placated with horror films, computer games and endless toys. Munro has the girls constantly watching and referring to familiar shows like Blind Date (O look! – and they’ve got a weekend in the Caribbean’) and Home and Away – and their behaviour is shaped by what they watch. Cassie asks how many calories there are in a gin and lime, revealing she’s dreaming of herself in a bikini on a golden beach with a toyboy; Nora, closer to home, is caught up in her peach fabric; ‘that’ll be my front room just a wee dream again’. These two, in different ways, are now trapped in a materialistic yearning which the play shows as empty and doomed. And even the memories they trot out at the beginning of the play, showing their apparent resilience and suggesting at first some kind of depth to their family lives, is shown increasingly to be a saving lie, a pretence that daddies and brothers were strong and lovable. Isn’t a large part of Munro’s success and power in this play to be found in the account of just how shallow Cassie and Nora have become? Scene two, with its portrayal of Cassie’s almost desperate dream of escape through drink and dancing (‘This is going to be the wildest of wild nights’), its shoddy setting of the warehouse with glitterballs and its imitation of TV prize games, marks the point where Nora and Cassie’s self-delusion and materialism is both at its highest – at the toast to the Bold Girls in the club – and about to collapse, as the raid brings a harshly lit realism into the night of their escape, and as their pent-up hostility and repressed bitterness begins to spill over. Cassie will still cherish her private dream of escape, via the money she’s stolen from Nora; but it’s a measure of how hopeless her predicament is that we know with Marie – and Cassie in her heart knows too – that she’s stuck, in what has become a nightmare. Dreams, whether on television or from memory, of escape or change are just dreams. And perhaps it’s Cassie’s desperation, her incredible yearning for something different, some kind of way out, which has led her to the affair with Marie’s Michael?

If Cassie and Nora dream false dreams, Marie and Deirdre are different. It might be argued that Marie deludes herself about her memories of Michael just as much as Nora and Cassie pretend about their men. But isn’t there a quality of innocence in Marie’s dreaming of Michael in heaven, or of their wedding-day, or in her bird feeding? That’s not to say she doesn’t, in the end, reveal that she’s guessed all along that Michael is duplicitous to her and his cause; but her self delusion is designed to create a cleaner world in which she and her children can live. Marie perhaps grows and develops through the destruction of her illusions, where Cassie and Nora can’t. She’s never as materialistic as the other two; she’s clumsy and inept at guessing prices as well as dancing in the social club. And Deirdre’s dreams – of violence, of having a little bit of truth in a knife – are shown to be typically destructive coverings for, strangely, another kind of innocence, the very natural yearning of a child for parents, for recognition, and the security with Marie which perhaps will be the miracle of this play, the only dream to be fulfilled.

Contemporary Western Society

In all this Munro is being deeply satirical about where post-war Western society has got to, in terms of its values and ideology. Marie’s aren’t the only children in Europe being fed on convenience food and placated with television; Cassie and Nora aren’t the only women smoking too much because of stress; they aren’t the only people singing commercial jingles or weaving catch-phrases from shows into their domestic life; Belfast’s social clubs aren’t the only places where drink-and-glitter offer quick escape and romance; and Belfast isn’t the only place where values and beliefs have met in head-on confrontation.

It would have been easy for Munro to set her play more simply amidst the clash of ‘Brits’ and Catholics. Her aim, however, is much more subtle and important. By exposing the cheapness of media participation in our lives, and the way it endorses ancient patterns of male-female relationships, in which men are men and women are women, and by showing how films and adverts create expectations or reinforce prejudices or legitimise violence, Munro traces back the roots of conflict far beyond simple issues of religious difference, to male-and-materialism dominated culture generally. These Bold Girls have been made so, by bold men and bad society, which sees them as servers and attenders, to be sexually exploited and lied to, and – as in Nora’s case – occasionally beaten. Is it any wonder, asks Munro, that Cassie should be bitter, chained as she is to self-indulgent, unattractive men who think they’re the centre of the universe and who think that drunken gambling and conning each other is the height of social achievement? Is it any wonder that Nora turns obsessively to dreams of living rooms and curtains, with drink and cigarettes as fuel for the dreams? Is it any wonder, in a world of transient fathers and such twilight values, that Deirdre has turned to violence – perhaps to terrorism? The wonder is, of course, that Marie is as unspoiled as she manages to be. Munro’s view of humanity is finally hopeful, rather than pessimistic. Marie, feeder of birds and naturally kind, most likely in the end to forgive Cassie and Nora, since they need her too much, and widening her family to include Deirdre with her sorrows, is no Bold Girl, but simply a redemptive woman who instinctively senses what’s wrong with modern materialism.

Political and Religious Issues

If Munro is looking deeper than topical Irish issues, why does she set her play in Belfast during the troubles? Certainly there’s very little religious debate, although Catholic imagery and reference pervade the play. It’s never significant, however – rather a kind of ‘wallpaper’ which gives away character and taste. It’s worth while asking how far Munro regards religion as important at all in this play, other than as a kind of conditioning which, like television and media generally, creates responses which are often self-destructive and destructive of others. Is there a possible weakness here, in that the apparent principal cause of the Troubles is ignored, other than in casual reference? Or has Munro a deeper purpose?

Similarly, Munro’s treatment of the issue of British troops in Northern Ireland avoids locating it in any central way, instead keeping their undoubtedly formidable presence offstage – and ‘offstage’, as it were, in the mind of the girls, as they respond without bitterness to invasion of their houses, explosions, raids in their social lives, with an almost abstracted air, as if they’ve got more serious things on their minds. Marie will tell us of how the Brits helped her to get to her wedding – although she has no illusions concerning their future behaviour; all the girls have learned that the Brits can be brutal. Munro allows them admirable resilience here, so that they turn serious personal disruption into wryly remembered farce (or is this perhaps another example of evasion of reality?). In the end, the Brits seem somehow irrelevant, a sometimes harmless, clumsy, nuisance in their lives. Nora’s account in scene two of the difference between the way a soldier and a local boy run through her front room (‘Sorry Mrs’, says the local boy) sums up a general sense that there are home problems which are their own, not to be solved by lumbering intrusion.

The net result of this de-centring of major issues is to suggest that they may not be quite as central to the lives of these – and all? – women as they are usually considered to be. Munro suggests that the central problems are located closer to home – and lie in the history of community, and how traditional community values have eroded under sectarian division, or, even more importantly, failed to adapt to cope with contemporary social pressures.

Failure of Community?

Rona Munro comes originally from Stonehaven, the same part of Scotland as Lewis Grassic Gibbon, whose Sunset Song (1932) was in part a lament for the passing of an older and kindlier way of life in a rural community. It is perhaps Munro’s Scottish background which lends her play – otherwise so different from Gibbon’s work – something of his sense of loss of mutual respect and value in the community. Scottish fiction in particular is full of this yearning for a lost but dear green place, a memory of green hills (and a simpler way of life) seen beyond grey cities, together with a recognition that that older community is permanently lost, that there’s no going back. Bernard McLaverty’s Cal (1983), and the fine film made of it, showed how echoes of a better, simpler, rural-based community past haunted the nightmare of the present; and McLaverty’s novel suggests that there may be something innately Celtic in this benign, almost tribal memory.

For the signs are all through the play that there were better community times, and that people used to behave with more respect and decency. From the apologising boy, running from the Brits through Nora’s room, to the minute’s silence in the club for the most recent victim of the Troubles, there are reminders that this wasn’t always a world of dispirited or unemployed men; Marie, particularly, show Michael, Davey, Martin and Joe in ways which, for all we know she sees through rose-coloured glasses, shows real human beings at their best, in a community. And doesn’t Munro stress how, despite the tribulations, the women bond together to pool resources, chores, leisure? Isn’t the use of ‘our’ in their references to their menfolk (‘our Michael’, ‘our Davey’) indicative of a habit of bonding? Don’t the women tell stories – about the Brits, about nasty recent events, and about menfolk who have beaten them and gambled away cars and money – in an almost traditional way which distances the pain and lends humour and acceptability to modern horror? The story of how Michael lost the family car in a bet about a dog that could jump a ten-foot wall is told with an affection which hides the reality of drunken irresponsibility, of sharp practice and deceitful friends; again, much as in Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World, pointing up the tension between a positive closeness of community and a negative community-self-destructiveness. Synge identified the darker side of community which had become too narrow and too introspective, and Munro finds something of the same gallus indulgence in a present day Ireland, a false swagger and defiance on the part of originally decent men and women which has made them into Bold Girls and Bold Boys.

Bold Girls and Bold Boys

Who are the Bold Boys? How does the play present them? They are offstage, in jail, in the past; they are always the first to be fed, deferred to, indulged in their drinking and gambling, forgiven. They are brutal, unfaithful, foul-smelling, secretive in their Provo-macho-politics. They are fathers, husbands, brothers, unreliable lovers, and sons (for the present children are brought up no differently), and the play analyses their effect at each of those levels.

As an example of the effect of the father and the husband, the relationship of Nora and Cassie is central. It’s so important to Cassie that one of Munro’s occasional non-naturalistic monologues, at the end of scene one, is given to Cassie’s dream-like sentimentalisation of her daddy in a way which gives her the love she’s otherwise denied throughout the play; ‘Oh my daddy was a lovely man … my daddy said I was the best girl … My daddy never lied to me so it must have been me that lied to him’. Isn’t it significant that Cassie can’t blame a man who clearly deserves some criticism at the very least, and that she’s turned her feelings for her father into yet more self-hatred? Cassie’s father is seen very differently by Nora, with bitter hatred and irony (‘I shouldn’t have thrown myself in the way of his fists’) and one of the most powerful moments in the play comes in scene four with the showdown between them, a confrontation which reveals just how protective each woman has been in covering for the obvious faults of the husband and father in different ways.

And poor Cassie is poisoned at each of the other levels of husband, brother and lover relationships too. Her revulsion to her slobbish husband Joe is patently honest and convincing; (‘I can’t stand the smell of him. The greasy, grinning, beer bellied smell of him, and he’s winking away about all he’s been dreaming of, wriggling his fat fingers over me like I’m a poke of chips. I don’t want him in my house, in my bed–’ Are we to blame her for this revulsion? Has Joe perhaps degenerated so much that Cassie is entitled to her disgust? Her brothers are hypocrites, reproaching her for promiscuity when clearly they are no better, perhaps worse (Martin, it would seem, has fathered a child on ‘the wee girl in Turf Lodge’), but defended fiercely by their mother. Cassie probably isn’t all that promiscuous, but there’s surely more defiance of her allotted roles than commitment in her affairs? As she tells Marie in scene three, it’s ‘grabbing on to some man because he smells like excitement, he smells like escape’, and it’s worth recalling again how Deirdre told us of the terrible look on her face as she made love to Michael.

And it’s worth making the effort of imagination which Munro’s play calls for, in recreating the world of the lost men. It’s a world of nudges and winks, of gallus stories and swagger, of double-dealing from family to politics. (What was Michael killed for, and who killed him?) In this world it’s a point of honour among men to pay up on drunken bets, even although the bets are based on cheating and deception, even although it means losing the family car. It’s a world where wife-beating is ignored, where sons learn from fathers that getting girls pregnant isn’t something to feel too guilty about – perhaps it’s even something to feel bold about. And, day to day, it’s a world where mothers and wives take a back seat, where male whims are obeyed, and where, as Cassie so tragically shows, daughters eventually assert themselves through deceit and betrayal of their fellow women.

Marie and Deirdre are more simply betrayed. Deirdre is example of a kind of basic or primary betrayal by men – she could be the child of the wee girl from Turf Lodge, though it is virtually certain she’s Michael’s daughter. And Marie has suffered a similar basic betrayal – several times, it would seem, in Michael’s complex, charismatic, treacherous and foreshortened life. Theirs may seem dark predicaments, but isn’t there a deep irony in the fact that Nora and Cassie are in the end more deeply poisoned and less hopeful of working out some kind of affirmative future?

Doesn’t Munro argue through all this for a kind of honest reappraisal of the way human beings, male and female, relate to each other? Isn’t her point, about Marie and Deirdre as opposed to Nora and Cassie, that bringing painful secrets out into the open can be regenerative for some, but catastrophic for others, depending on the essential nature of the people involved? Cassie and Nora have been poisoned too far; Marie’s strength and unselfishness, and Deirdre’s direct youth, should allow them to survive.

Munro is, however, never simplistic in allocating blame to men or women. Like Liz Lochhead, her fellow-dramatist and poet, her feminism is low-key and humane, seeing the roots of sexual confrontation and deceit in the way women have treated men as well as the way men have subordinated women. In the end we realise that ‘bold’ has moved from being a term of admiration, denoting vital resilience and character, to being an ironic, sad commentary on men and women, on their foolish exaggeration of destructively lop-sided aspects of sexuality.

These Bold Girls have been moulded by a bad system, a distorted society, argues Munro. Marie and Deirdre recognise that it’s time to break that mould, and to let kindness, honesty and communication into family life. Munro has no illusions that this will happen easily or soon – which is the point of the final scenes, in which Marie feeds the birds. Her act won’t change much, she knows, but it’s still important; ‘It’s easy enough to build a great wee nest when you’ve a forest to fly in, but you’d need to be someone special to build one round the Falls. Someone should feed them …’.

The Opening Quotation; Making them Bold and Breaking the Mould

We return to the opening quotation, with Cassie’s perceptive, bitter description of how her mother moulded her, and how, while the wee girls got real love from their mothers, it’s the disillusioned realism of that love which makes the mothers hard on them. The boys get fantasy love, the disappointed love taken from the failed fathers and transposed to them, and therefore a love which spoils and indulges – and moulds boys into men who are excessively macho and self-centred. Cassie sees it all, although she’s powerless to change anything in her family or herself. She sees where the terrible hurt and hostility between Nora and herself comes from; it comes from warped love. And she sees how the men hurt the women so much; that, too, comes from a different kind of warped love.

Bold Girls is thus a cry of pain, anger, and yet of hope. Above all, it is a cry from the heart that it is time to break the moulds which create the distorted women and men whose only refuge is that shallow boldness which, in the end, is more dangerous to modern society than differences of religion and politics, lying as it does so much deeper in their upbringing and in their unconscious. As Marie concludes, as she forgives all the men; and so it goes on and so it goes on and so it always will go on, till we learn some way to change – because this place is no different to anywhere else.

GORDON, Katherine, ‘Writing the ‘Spirit of Place’: the Poetry of Violet Jacob and Marion Angus’

11 September 2021 by Duncan Jones

ScotLit 34, 2006 |

In a speech given to members of the Scottish Association for the Speaking of Verse in the late 1920s, Scottish poet Marion Angus (1865–1946) surveyed the state of modern Scottish poetry and then spelled out a challenge for herself as a writer:

I myself would like to be the one (unfortunately I am not) to write a great poem on the spirit of place, producing something born of myself and of the place, which would be neither the one nor the other, but something very strange and beautiful. I should like to write […] of the elusive glamour of the universe; and, above all, I would fain give voice to Scotland’s great adventure of the soul.

This suggests that ‘Scotland’s great adventure of the soul’ had not yet been expressed. Angus was being modest; she and fellow poet Violet Jacob (1863–1946) produced numerous poems that explored the ‘spirit’ of North East Scotland, revealing the ‘elusive glamour’ of its landscape. Their poetry, read together, reveals the richness of their individual poetic careers and sheds light upon an important period of Scottish literary history. Writing mainly in the interwar years in both Scots and English, they looked forwards in their psychological portraits of people in conflict; they also were keenly aware of the rich tradition of Scots-language literature, integrating folk traditions and the language and imagery of the Scottish ballads into their poems.

Angus and Jacob’s poems on ‘the spirit of place’ first drew me to their writing when I was still an undergraduate at Stanford University. When I began researching their life and work in the mid-1990s, I could find few resources: scattered publications by Hugh MacDiarmid, some anthologies of Scots-language literature, and an occasional edition of Neil Gunn or Edwin Muir’s work. Stanford’s library held a copy of Helen Cruickshank’s Up The Noran Water (1934) but the pages were still uncut – I had to ask reference librarians to separate the pages so I could read the book. When I arrived in Glasgow to begin my Ph.D. in Scottish Literature, I had better luck; I discovered that a handful of scholars had written perceptive articles about Angus and Jacob’s work. Despite these, however, there were still obstacles: no full-length study of their work was available; in addition, neither poet had a collected poetry volume, neither has extensive correspondence available in public libraries, neither kept particularly careful records of their publications, whereabouts, or even addresses. Even tracking down the poets’ individual publications could be a challenge. None of their volumes are still in print.

But the poems I could find compelled me with their beauty and their strangeness. Angus’s ‘The Eerie Hoose’, with its ‘chaumers braid and blue’, its locked door, and secret, forbidden word intrigued me. What was that word her speaker ‘daurna say’? What could be behind the ‘steekit’ door? So too does her poem ‘Waater o’ Dye’, with its depiction of the ‘lang-deid wumman’ who haunts the speaker, granting her a terrible kind of second sight:

The sea-gaun bird forebodes me grief,
I moorn at sicht o’ fa’in’ leaf;
Intil the clood I luik, bricht-e’ed,
For wings o’ Deith abune ma heid.

Jacob’s poems, similarly, ring through one’s head with their powerful rhythms and descriptions of rural women. In ‘The End O’t’, for example, she describes the quandary of a poor, rural woman who realises she is pregnant:

There’s little love for a lass to seek
When the coortin’s through an’ the price is paid.
Oh, aince forgotten’s forgotten fairly,
An’ heavy endit what’s licht begun.

Her exile poem ‘The Wild Geese’ also stays with one. Her description of the ‘lang, lang skein o’ beatin’ wings, wi’ their heids towards the sea’ captures in its language and sound the evocative noise of the migrating birds and all their symbolic freight for the exile longing for home. An excerpt of this poem is engraved on a stone in Edinburgh’s Makar’s Court, located outside the Writers’ Museum.

These poems and many others have stayed with me throughout the research process. Often, collecting the poems for the book felt like something out of a detective novel: armed with a few references from books, a sandwich, and a laptop computer, I would arrive at a library – usually the National Library of Scotland, but many others, as well – and spend the day looking through letters, poem drafts, and journals from the 1930s, searching for publications by Angus and Jacob or reading through letters in their crabbed, cryptic handwriting for information. In the process there were red herrings (missing papers, references to no-longer-extant volumes) but there were also plenty of leads. I would stay as long as I could, slipping out only to down cups of tea so stout my teeth would ache. The research strengthened my original conviction that both poets have indeed ‘give[n] voice’ to the ‘great adventure of the soul.’

What both poets have in common, in addition to their roughly similar life span and their connection to the North East, is their varied writing careers. They wrote across genres: Angus began her publishing career as a short story writer and journalist, and when not writing poetry also published travel writing (Round About Geneva), family history (Sheriff Watson of Aberdeen: The Story of His Life, and His Work for the Young), and essays. In addition, she recorded radio broadcasts on a range of writing-related topics for the BBC in the 1930s. Jacob is perhaps more commonly remembered as a novelist, author of many great works such as Flemington (republished by ASLS and Canongate, both in the mid-1990s), but she also wrote family history (The Lairds of Dun), fairy tales (The Golden Heart and Other Fairy Stories), and essays (mainly published in Country Life and as yet uncollected). Both writers wrote out a deep engagement with traditional Scottish literature; both wrote passionately about landscape and a feeling of connectedness to the natural world. Most significantly, both were part of the Scottish Literary Renaissance, contributing poems to important interwar publications such as Scottish Chapbook.

Their lives and works are distinct, however. An overview of their lives gives some insight into the individual motivations and inspirations behind their poems. Angus was born in Sunderland, England in 1865, the eldest daughter in a large family of that included five siblings: two older brothers and three younger sisters. Her father, and his father before him, were respected clergymen whose sermons are preserved in several libraries in Scotland. Her mother was the daughter of the social reformer William Watson, whose life Angus explored in a biographical study. They moved to Arbroath, Scotland, when Angus was still a child and thereafter she lived in and around the North East; the North-Eastern landscape appears repeatedly in Angus’s poetry. Nan Shepherd, her friend and fellow writer, called the landscape of Angus’s poems ‘a dark land, harsh and haunted; yet with its rare felicities’ that grant it ‘a sort of grace’.

Tracing Angus’s life and her writing about what she later called her ‘lost country’ is difficult, in part because relatively few of her letters and papers are preserved in public archives. Those that do exist can be oblique, offering hints of her life beyond the page but not confirming anything. She never married and many have wondered about the identity of the subject of her numerous love poems. Even discovering where she lived required a bit of detective work. During the late 1990s I gathered up all the references available to Zoar, what she called her ‘house of happiness’ located ‘just on the edge of town’ in Aberdeen. Angus lived there with her sister Ethel for several years during the 1920s and it is there that she completed her finest volumes of poetry: The Tinker’s Road and Other Verses (1924), Sun and Candlelight (1927), and The Singin’ Lass (1929). After hiking for a few miles I found the house, looking just as I had imagined: a small two-storey cottage with a lush back garden. The owner – at that time only the second owner since Angus sold it – kindly gave me a tour; the sunny upstairs room with the circular window, one can imagine, could be where Angus wrote. When Ethel had a breakdown in the early 1930s, Angus had to sell Zoar and in so doing, she dispersed many of her belongings including her books and papers. This makes finding out what happened in the last fifteen years of her life difficult as one has little with which to work. Nevertheless, her final volume, Lost Country and Other Verses (1937), reveals that despite her peripatetic lifestyle she had not lost the ability to craft moving, enigmatic poems. Her dedication to what she called the ‘elusive glamour of the universe’ is evident on every page. Throughout her career, her depictions of this ‘universe’, half-similar to the North-Eastern landscape, half-rooted in the shadowy world of the ballads, are inflected with what Nan Shepherd called her ‘elfin quality’. These poems are often enigmatic, drawing their strength from folk belief and the supernatural tales she so appreciated.

The life and career of Violet Jacob proved easier subjects to research because she hails from a landed family whose long history is not only preserved in her own family biography but also in numerous public records, including the National Records Office. Born Violet Kennedy-Erskine at the House of Dun outside Montrose, Scotland, she grew up balancing between two worlds: the rural Scots-speaking environment of the estate, where she took an active interest in the lives of its hired labourers, and the privileged world of the upper class with all the expectations associated with wealth and family history. A visit to the House of Dun, now property of the National Trust for Scotland, gives one a sense of the scale and breadth of that history. Nevertheless, despite her historical roots, Jacob is still elusive. She was an intensely private woman; her reticence makes discovering a clear timeline of her work more difficult. There are brief moments of insight: her diaries and letters from India, for example, give a fascinating portrait of her life during the last few years of the nineteenth century when she lived with her soldier husband and their child in Mhow, a British military cantonment outside Indore. A few of her personal essays in Country Life, similarly, reveal her sparkling sense of humour and her appreciation for what she called in one essay ‘corners dark enough for mystery’.

Jacob’s interests in the ‘Angus straths’ and those who are ‘dee’in’ to be back home there dominate her poetry, even in her earliest publications. From her first book, a comic poem she co-authored in 1891, The Bailie McPhee, her poetry expresses an interest in the exile’s relationship to ‘hame’. Her poetry volumes came in short succession after Songs of Angus appeared in 1915: More Songs of Angus and Others (1918), Bonnie Joann and Other Poems (1921), The Northern Lights and Other Poems (1927), and finally, her selected edition, The Scottish Poems of Violet Jacob (1944). Her poetry reflects her abiding interest in the Scottish landscape, her grief over the death of her only son in the Great War, and her awareness of the great inequality between men and women in rural Scottish society.

I have spent the past decade researching both Angus and Jacob’s life and work. Their poetry has accompanied me through eight moves, three countries, four years of post-graduate work, and eight years of teaching. Their work continues to offer insights into human behaviour. It challenges and surprises; reading each poet’s individual poems in the context of her entire poetic output reveals a rich network of repeated imagery, motifs, and symbolic language stretching across her collected work. These characteristics keep me returning to these poems and, in turn, make me eager to share them with other people. It was with great excitement, therefore, that I approached editing a volume of the poets’ selected poems. In 2006, the sixtieth anniversary of their deaths, their poetry finally will be available in a joint selected edition. I’ve put together the volume I wish I could have had at the start of my doctoral studies. I hope those who read it will find it useful. Most of all, I hope readers will discover, as I have, the many poems about the ‘great adventure of the soul’ Angus and Jacob crafted in their varied and long careers.

HODGART, John, ‘Language Issues in Studying Burns for Revised Higher: Bard tae Waur?’

11 September 2021 by Duncan Jones

Laverock 3, 1997 |

“Burns is really much too difficult for our children. They prefer Shakespeare.”
(a former P.T. English in Ayrshire, noo retired, an T.G.F.T.!)

In spite o the annual ootburst o Bardolatry ilka Januar, Burns’ work isnae as weel kent as it deserves to be and no as well taucht in oor schuils as it shid be. Altho he is noo an option in the Revised Higher English Exam, the study o the set 13 Burns’ texts is mair the exception rether than the rule for maist young Scots, even in the Burns hameland o Ayrshire an Dumfries. It wid seem that monie teachers feel a lot less enthusiastic aboot him bein on the syllabus than the poet felt when welcomin his “Bastard Wean”. In fact for some Scottish teachers mibbe Burns himsel has become somethin o a love forgotten child, if no a bastard wean!

For oor students, studyin Burns’ work shid be lik enterin a treisure hoose o linguistic an imaginative delicht, but it seems that the feck o them arnae offert this experience at Higher level as maist Scottish teachers seem tae prefer the Bard of Avon or the dreich modern meditations o Philip Larkin. Somehow it seems tae be worth the effort tae teach Shakespeare tae oor Higher students, but no Burns. Nae doot the curriculum has tae be covert an time is ticht, wi poetry aften relegatit tae the stock exam-answer piece, such as “Dulce et Decorum Est” etc. Furthermair, their problems wi the set Burns set text selection, for some o them are gey leng, there seems an awful lot o them, and mibbie there’s an awful lot tae explain aboot 18th century Scotland? It can seen gey dauntin.

But shairly Shakspeare is even mair difficult, sae why this resistance or reluctance tae tak Burns work seriously? Is it jist the fact that monie teachers lack confidence in haunlin his language, or a maitter o educational snobbery an ignorance amang maist teachers that hiv been educatit in English or American literature, but no in the native languages an literature o Scotland? If that is whit their ain education has equippt them tae cope wi, can we really grummle when they often cannae see the pynt o takin Burns seriously at this level? Yet is his language really sae hard tae unnerstaun or owre auld farrant for oor ain young folk tae appreciate?

Possibly ane o the maist ironic aspects o the ABC o Scottish education (the annual Burns Competition) is the fact that for maist young Scots this has aye been the ane time o year when it was aw richt tae yaise the Scots tung in the classroom, because ti wis poetry an seen as the language o the past, but onie young Scot wha brocht real modern Scots intae the classroom, especially the urban varieties, wid suin ken how the “wee sleekit, cowerin, tim’rous beastie” felt when it saw the ploughman,s “Murderin pattle!”

I think the ironies o this wid in fact hae been gey familiar to Burns, as it’s part o the same process o cultural condeetionin that he suffert fae himself: bein made tae feel that the native speech o Lowland Scotland is somehow “incorrect” or “inferior” tae Southern Standard English, rether than a series o closely relatit dialects or even as a kizzen language tae English, rether like Portugese an Spanish or Norwegian an Danish. Thus nearly aw the distinctive features o Scottish speech hae buin seen at best as quaint an couthie or at worst as the language o the sheuch, no fit for intelligent, educatit folk: a malign social an cultural cancer that is deeply rootit in oor education system, perpetuatin negative attitudes an ignorance aboot oor native language, an turnin Scotland into a linguistic minefield o snobbery an prejudice.

Nae wunner generations o Scottish weans hae buin made tae feel that they maun only speak “good” English an avoid nearly aw forms o Scots lik the plague, as if the “dinnae say ay” mentality wis implantit in their brains lik a genetic tumour. Nae wunner oor teachers see Burns as ower difficult an monie young Scots leuk on his language nearly as a foreign tung, an nae wunner the hail range o Scottish poetry is gey sair neglectit in oor schuils, never mind Burns.

Yet shairly it’s noo time tae see the inherent bi-lingualism o Scotland as a great cultural advantage, no as a handicap, valuin oor ability tae yaise some form o Scots as weel as Scottish Standard English. Furthermair I wid argue that until we stert teachin oor weans tae be confident, expressive an literate in baith (in fact whit 5–14 or Effective Learnin an Teachin baith imply) we will continue betrayin oor ain culture bi ignorin the very thing that made Burns a great poet: his expressive uiss o Scots that English cannae match, plus his linguistic brilliance in contrastin or combinin it wi English, or tae be mair precise, English as spoken bi a Scot, a skill he yaised tae great effect in his best work.

This neglect or ignorance o Burns an his language is really maist bamboozlin for a country that honours him as its “national bard”. It is gey sad tae, for in spite o aw the bardolisin boak we sometimes hae tae thole, Burns is in fact a great poet: a brilliant satirist, a skeely letter writer in verse an prose, but abuin aw possibly ane o the greatest sang scrievers o aw time. Shairly we hae a duty as Scottish teachers tae try an bring the warmth, humour and virr o his words alive tae oor ain young folk, an tae let them discover that his work is still fu o life an relevant tae their world.

Nae doot we first need tae convince the teachers o aw this, but even if they are, how can we convince them that Burns is a realistic option as a set text etc at Higher? The first bit o advice is tae get haud o a daicent study guide, an while there are twa three on the market, ane advantage o the ASLS Scotnote is that it tries tae get roon the time problem bi coverin aw the skills an options for Revised Higher via the Burns poems, tho it can equally be yaised jist tae study ane or twa poems for the critical essay, as there are short notes an questions on each poem.

Afore actually readin the poems it’s important tae first mak the pupils better acquent wi Burns an his times an the ASLS guide tries tae dae this via a close readin exercise an a report on twa Burns articles bi David Daiches. Saicondly it’s essential that they hear a guid readin or tape o the poems (e.g. Scotsoun tapes or folk singers like Jean Redpath or Dougie MacLean etc) afore studyin them in onie depth, sae that their lugs gradually tune intae the soun o Burns language, afore gaun on tae read an study it for theirsels wi the help o a glossary, sae that bi the time they actually try tacklin the questions, they hae gradually owercome onie language problems, ane step at a time. Fae ma ain experience I prefer daein the poems first, owre a concentratit period o the first term, but leain the sangs tae twa or three sessions spread across the year, especially Januar, tae gie it a bit mair variety.

Tae help oor pupils relate Burns work tae Scottish culture o their ain day, an tae their ain linguistic development, we should try tae explain that, like maist writers, no everything he wrote wis great and this wisnae because he lacked skill or education. Like monie Scots he wis a product o a split culture, often torn atween his Scots identity an his “educated” English identity that taucht him the “proper” wey a gentleman an scholar shid speak an write (echoes o Chris in Sunset Song). In his desire tae be acceptit as a “man of letters” bi the gentry an posh Edinburgh critics o his age (the “literati”) he often wrote in the rether flooery sentimental style that wis fashionable in English literature at the time, posing as the “man of feeling” for the benefit o “polite” society.

Indeed the Edinburgh literati advised him tae imitate the maist polished English poets o their age an tae avoid sae monie “Scotticisms” in his work as they saw their native tung as gey reuch an coorse, no fit for educated discourse. Ironically when Burns follaed their advice, the results are noo maistly unreadable, as is the work o ither Scottish poets o the time, no simply because it is aften written in gey posh English, but because it’s lang-windit, fu-breekit, gey fantoosh an fushionless. (No unlike some o the creative writin we aften see at H/S.Y.S. level?) As shuin as he sterts whit I wid caw his “all hailing” style, we ken no tae expect Burns at his maist leal-hertit. Furthermair, if he had aye follaed their advice, there’s nae wey we wid be celebratin him as oor national poet or as a symbol o oor identity.

Hooever the English influence wisnae aw negative, faur fae it, for at the same time he assimilatit monie positive features fae English literature (Pope an co.) that he was able to yaise creatively for his ain purposes, in fact mainly yaisin a mixture o plain English an Scots in his best work, wi ane complementin the ither rether than conflictin wi it, or sometimes yaisin a mair formal English for contrastin purposes, especially in his satires. Abuin aw, because o the conflictin cultural pressures he wrassled wi, he learnt tae play monie roles, wear monie masks as a writer, an developt muckle skill in exploitin an manipulatin different linguistic registers for different effects in his work.

Yet as Scots we shid aye be gratefu that Burns steyed true tae his ruits an trustit his ain instincts tae write aboot the world he kent best, in the language o his ain folk, drawin on the poetic pooer an smeddum o their tung, an especially their sangs. Fair kittled up bi the Scottish folk tradition he inheritit fae earlier Scottish makars an sangwriters, especially Ramsay, Fergusson an the great Anonymous, he wrote aboot the social an political realities o 18th century Scotland in a memorable wey an produced ane o the greatest bodies o folk sang in world literature, enablin him tae speak in a universal vyce tae the hail human race, as baith a great Scottish scriever an a great world writer at the same time. Thus we can mibbie begin tae relate Burns’ cultural divisions tae contemporary issues aboot language, culture an identity, that are still relevant tae Scotland the day.

In maist o these great poems, Burns unites the art an folk traditions of Scotland, but yaises a flexible mixture o Scots an English: earthy expressive Scots, as in Kate’s flytin, English as yaised by a Scot, includin a lot o Scots idioms, as weel as a mair elevatit English (e.g.the poet’s asides in Tam) tae create contrastin or distancin effects. These linguistic contrasts are in fact a key feature o his satirical technique, aften switchin fae a mair elevatit style back doon tae earthy or hamely Scots (e.g. To a Louse, Address to the Deil, Holy Willie) tae bring pride an pretension doon tae earth, or tae expose the truth. Indeed he often seems tae switch fae Scots tae English, or the ither wey roon, sae that the ane complements or adds tae the ither: e.g.we can see this in the skeely wey he switches fae hamely Scots tae abstract English in To a Mouse, but combines folk idioms an mair elevatit English in summin up his vision o life at the end.

Thus he exploits a hail double vocabulary an soun system, sometimes yaisin an English word for a rhyme, but mair aften Scots or a Scottish version o an English word (e.g. wuids an floods in Tam o Shanter) an tho at times it seems tae be optional, ye often hae tae ignore the spellin e.g.”deep drowned in Doon”, but drooned keeps the internal rhyme that is lost wi “drowned” or “that night a child might understand”, whaur ye really need tae say it in Scots, for there is a world o difference in tone or mood atween ane an the ither.

Generally speakin his sangs seem tae yaise less Scots than his poetry, but in actual fact they often yaise mair Scots than it seems on the page, judgin bi the English spellin conventions that they are set doon in. While Scottish writers o the 17th–18th centuries were bein forced tae copy English spellin, if they wantit their work printit, we can often tell fae their rhymes etc that they said the word gey different fae how the spellt it. At the same time George Thomson, the editor o Select Scottish Airs wha thocht o himsel as a man o superior taste, wis aye tryin tae “improve” Burns’ songs, baith musically an verbally, as he considert some o Burns’ expressions ower reuch for polite lugs. Yet Burns’ replies tae him gie us a great insicht intae his art an feelins aboot language :

“I have not command of the language that I have in my native tongue – in fact I think that my ideas are more barren in English than in Scotish.”

Altho Burns wis flexible aboot mixin Scots an English, often switching fae Scots tae English or vice versa, for the sake o the rhyme etc or sometimes jist yaisin “a sprinklin” o Scots tae mak it soon authentic, we oftenhae tae ignore spellin aw thegither. Indeed it fairly gars me grue tae hear words bein pronounct in English, whaur the rhyme scheme or ither soun patterns, e.g. vowel stress/repetition, show that they shid be said in Scots.

For example in Comin thro the Rye, if “body” is said in English it fairly chynges the meanin (a dead body?), as opposed tae the Scots “buddy”; or in Scots Wha Hae, whaur the rhyme scheme tells us that the last line has tae be “let us do or dee” (an no “die” as it is spellt); or in John Anderson “sleep thegither at the foot” is whit it says, but “foot” breks the vowel repetition o “ane anither … thegither”, sae “fit” fits better! Sometimes we can see fae the surroundin words that the English soun jist disnae fit, as in A Parcel o Rogues whaur “my auld grey head” really has tae be “heid”, baith for the sake o the assonance, an the Scottish idiom “auld Heid”.

Even whaur the pronunciation seems optional e.g. in Of a the Airts, “wild woods grow, and rivers row” is often rhymed as in the English row the boat, but the Scots word for the verb to roll is “rowe” (as in English row between people), sae it really has tae be “growe an rowe”, fittin in wi “monie” in the next line, while if we say “woods” as in English, the internal rhyme o “wild wuids” is lost, as weel as the vowel repetition wi “rivers”. At the same time “night” an “flight” in the followin line jist disnae match the alliteration o “day an nicht my fancy’s flicht”, an this is generally true o maist “ght” words, lik “right” etc, that shid be pronounct “richt” etc, as in German.

Altho he sometimes jist yaises “a sprinklin o Scots”, these few words often haud the key tae the mood an spirit o the sang, as we can see if we try tae pit some o the words intae English, for even jist ane or twa words can mak aw the difference: “One Fond Kiss” jist disnae soun richt, as it draps the lang vowel stress o “ae”, while “You are not Mary Morison” chynges the tone an depth o feelin aw thegither. Nae wunner Hugh MacDiarmid said “Ye are na Mary Morison” were his favourite lines, for altho they are gey simple, in the context o the sang they speak volumes.

These differences are simply the differences atween ane language an anither, an the difficulties o translatin fae ane tae the ither, even when they are as closely relatit as Scots an English, for the life blood o the sang is often drained awa if they are pit intae English. The great English poet John Keats said that he sometimes needit six lines tae say whit Burns could say in ane, an a lot o this is due tae his brilliant uiss o the Scots tung: a concision an clarity via simple, but often subtle language, vivid concrete imagery an expressive folk idioms (key features in Scottish poetry). This verbal magic, combined wi musical genius, is whit gies his sangs their power, an their universal appeal. (see note on Auld Lang Syne in Scotnote: Robert Burns, p.25–26)

The great Medieval Scottish poet, Gavin Douglas, wrote that he wis happy tae yaise some Latin, French or English, “when scant wis his Scottis” an in some weys Burns carries on this tradition, yaisin a wide range o Scots, no only fae Ayrshire, but “fae aa the airts,” plus some aulder Scots he learnt fae earlier writers, in effect a sort o “synthetic” Scots, in the sense o drawing thegither diverse elements.

In fact in his great poems an sangs, Burns yaises the hail range o language at his disposal: expressive Scots that can say things English cannae [ruitit in his ain Ayrshire tung, but extendit via the influence o his faither’s Nor East Doric, an fae his trevels an his readin, sometimes throwin in aulder Scots words learnt fae books or sangs]; his clear yaisage o English as spoken bi a Scot, an his ability tae combine it wi Scots, sae that his English contains Scots or sometimes vice versa, an the resultin mixture sometimes transforms baith wi a brilliant bi-lingual skill; or he can even fling in the odd Classical term or French word tae gie his language a scint o “bon ton” whaur he thocht fit.

Thus he yaised jist aboot as wide a spectrum o language as onie educatit Scot has ever yaised (apairt fae the Medieval Makars): naethin short o a linguistic triumph, considerin aw the cultural forces ranged agin him. Is this great linguistic achievement somethin we can afford tae neglect in oor schuils an is it really sae difficult tae unnerstaun?

Since Scots an English are really linguistic kizzens, wi aboot 90% compatability (or in ither words wi aboot 90% o the words we yaise common tae baith) a reuch estimate wid be that on average, (tho the amount varies a lot fae poem tae poem) aboot 90% o Burns poetry is written in “English” or Scottish forms o English words like “cannae”etc. Probably only aboot 10% are Scots idioms, an mibbie only aboot 5% o that needs a glossary, for the mair archaic or obscure words – in fact a lot less than Shakespeare. I suspect tae that the average student willnae hae tae leuk up a dictionar, whither Scots or English, onie mair for Burns than they will for onie ither great writer, an maist editions o Burns come wi a guid glossary. Naw the problem isnae really the language, but whit is (or isnae) inside some teachers’ heids!

Thus we hae a poet wha can still speak tae young Scots in a language that isnae really sae auld-farrant or difficult as it micht at first seem, an altho he deed nearly 200 year syne, he can still appeal tae youngsters the day. Yince they’ve got ower the 18th century backgruin, or difficult words, they’ll fin a writer wha cared deeply aboot monie o the things that young folk the day are fashed aboot: justice, freedom, human richts, luve in its widest (an sometimes wildest) sense, a concern for aw craiturs sharin oor wee planet, a maist warm-hertit luve o life an the joys o bein alive, haun in haun wi a deep compassion, tolerance, an hatred o everythin that is life denyin or demeanin, such as puirtith, grippieness, nerra-nebbitness, heepocrisy an fanaticism, qualities the world isnae likely tae rin oot o at the back en o this or onie ither century.

Altho there are still muckle problems tae be owercome in terms o teachers’ attitudes, there are at least hopeful signs on the horizon o a real chynge beginnin tae tak place, an it is noo Scottish Office policy tae support the study o Scottish language an culture at the 5-14 level, e.g. The Kist etc. Yet unless Scottish teachers learn tae value the language o aw Scottish weans as muckle as Burns did himsel, Scottish education will continue peyin lip service tae oor great national poet, an his “immortal memory” will become (if it hasnae awready) jist an archaic folk festival, insteid o a national treisure tae pass on tae the next generation. If we cuid manage tae bring that aboot, mibbie Robin wid be as prood o us, as we claim tae be o him. I can think o nae better wey tae mak his memory immortal amang his ain folk.

See also the ASLS Scotnote on Robert Burns.

HUBBARD, Tom, ‘1800: Scottish Literature’s Grand Tour’

11 September 2021 by Duncan Jones

1000 Years of Scottish Literature, 18 November 2000 |

The décor of the opening scene showed a wild and lonely loch in the Highlands of Scotland, upon whose waters, the Lady of the Lake, faithful to her name, was seen gliding gracefully along, upright beside the helm of a small boat. This set was a masterpiece of the art of stage-design. The mind turned instantly towards Scotland, and waited expectantly for the magic of some Ossianic adventure.

That was the great 19th century French novelist Stendhal (1783*–1842), enraptured by a performance at the Teatro San Carlo, Naples, in 1819. He was covering the première of Rossini’s opera La Donna del Lago, based on Sir Walter Scott’s narrative poem The Lady of the Lake.

By the beginning of the century, Scotland – culturally speaking – had been taking mainland Europe by storm, and the process was continuing. The year 1800 is a point of both arrival and departure.

The 18th century philosophers and historians of the Scottish Enlightenment, with David Hume and Adam Smith as the foremost figures, were widely translated and respected overseas – even in perhaps unexpected corners. For example, Smith’s The Wealth of Nations appeared in a Portuguese translation of 1811–1812. It is often remarked that the date of the original’s first edition (1776) is that of the American Declaration of Independence: Smith provided the intellectual weight behind the economics of the ‘free’market. However, Smith had a dry Scots wit that somewhat counterpoints America’s self–appointed status as the best of all possible worlds: “The late resolution of the Quakers in Pennsylvania to set at liberty all their Negro slaves may satisfy us that their number cannot be very great.”

France and Germany, in particular, responded to the intellectual rigour of the Scottish Enlightenment. However, there existed also a very different overseas interest in Scottish culture. One might well have said, in 1800, that Europe ain’t seen nothing yet; it had actually seen quite a lot, but the scale of Scotland’s impact on the mainland was to become nothing less than phenomenal during the early decades of the 19th century. Europe, and for that matter America, had received the works of these sober, neoclassical savants of Edinburgh and Glasgow, but overseas readers were also delighting in Scottish products that were anything but sober and neoclassical.

The scene is Strassburg – currently rendered as Strasbourg, now the locus of pan-European deliberations which are not generally noted for their intellectual elegance. In the late 18th century it was a German city, and it was there, during the winter of 1770–71, that the friendship grew between Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Johann Gottfried von Herder.

Herder (1744–1803) believed in the uniqueness of each country’s literature, having regard to its very particular social, cultural and economic contexts. He saw European literature, by the late 18th century, as afflicted by stuffiness, artificiality, abstraction; he questioned the inhibiting effect of bland neoclassical models that had been assumed to possess universal primacy. He proposed that Europe could learn from its relatively uncultivated margins, such as Scotland. The German love of Scottish folk song and ballad was reinforced by Herder; it had already been nurtured by the vogue for Bishop Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765). Herder translated Burns; his version of ‘John Anderson, My Jo’ goes by the rather boring title of ‘Die goldne Hochzeit’. Burns’s impact on continental Europe cannot be underestimated, and one certainly can’t do it justice in a short general paper like this one. It should, however, prompt us to consider how far this interest extended to the anonymous folk material from which Burns derives. Herder also translated Scottish ballads such as ‘Edward’; later, at Heidelberg, in1813, there appeared a slim volume called Drei altschottische Lieder compiled by Wilhelm of the brothers Grimm: the three ‘Lieder’ in question are actually ballads, printed in Grimm’s German versions, facing the original texts. Beethoven and Haydn, no less, produced settings of Burns and Scottish folk songs.

For his part, Goethe encouraged Herder’s interest in the work of James Macpherson, the translator (so claimed) of the ancient Gaelic ballads supposedly composed by the 3rd century bard Ossian. Macpherson’s first cycle of Ossianic poems had appeared as far back as 1760. Goethe’s German versions of Ossian’s ‘Songs of Selma’ occupy several pages of his The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), which became the cult novel of the day. Throughout Europe and as far as Russia, Macpherson’s Ossian was all the rage – it created the overseas image of Scotland as a wild, heroic, romantic place uncorrupted by 18th century over-sophistication. These ancient Gaelic warriors were as magnanimous in battle as they were bold: no macho swaggerers, but noble savages.

Ossian/Macpherson hardly appeals to present-day tastes. There are genuinely eloquent passages addressed to the sun and the moon; our decades of space exploration can hardly obliterate that sense of our transitoriness which poetry evokes when it sets our comings and goings against those of the planets. However, much if not most of Ossian is bombastic, even turgid; often both. We could be forgiven for wincing when we hear that Napoleon carried a copy of Ossian with him on his campaigns; at the end of the twentieth century we know too much about the alliance of romanticism and authoritarianism. Still, we can’t blame Ossian for every excess of Ossianism, and there is something gently resonant in those laments of aged patriarchs whose offspring have perished on the battlefield. It’s well summed up, in effect, by the writer who observed that whereas in peacetime the sons bury the fathers, in wartime the fathers bury the sons.

Burns, Macpherson: primitive, unspoiled Scotland for a continental audience. The third big name here is Sir Walter Scott, who would continue to feed this new European sensibility and in the process create Scotland’s tourist industry.

In a real sense, Scott was repaying a debt to mainland Europe. Re-enter Goethe. In 1799 Scott translated Goethe’s play Götz von Berlichingen, the tale of a chivalrous mediaeval German knight. This was the point of departure for Scott’s own series of narrative poems, historical novels and mediaeval pastiche-romances. Three years earlier, right at the start of his literary career, Scott had made his own versions of German ballads, which (to go farther back) had taken their cue from the border ballads of England and Scotland – thanks, again, to the impact of Percy’s collection. It all amounts to a vigorous to-ing and fro-ing of cultural traffic between Scotland and Germany – a true dialogue, and a sustained one at that.

But we’re not just talking about German reception. Without the example of Scott, the historical novels of Balzac, Dumas and even Tolstoy would not have been written in the same way, if at all. Pushkin, arguably the father of Russian literature, revered Scott – and, by the way, made a Russian version of the ballad ‘The Twa Corbies’, based on a French translation of that poem as included in Scott’s annotated anthology The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802). Scott’s influence on music, especially opera, was noted at the beginning; much more celebrated than Rossini’s La Donna del Lago is Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor (1835). That great French Romantic, Berlioz, confessed in his memoirs that as a boy his head “was full of Walter Scott”; his Rob Roy overture rivals Bruch’s Scottish Fantasia in its deployment of the tune ‘Scots wha hae’.

At the Bibliography of Scottish Literature in Translation (acronym: BOSLIT), we count Byron as a Scottish author. He grew up in Aberdeen, and it was there that he absorbed the Calvinistic theology and the folk culture of Scotland – specifically the folk culture of the North-east. In Don Juan he declared that he was “half a Scot by birth, and bred/ A whole one”; elsewhere he renounces the “smooth-flowing fountains” of the English south in favour of “the valley of dark Loch na Garr.” Like Scott, Byron favoured the long narrative poem. In the likes of Childe Harold and Manfred we have doomed heroes, wandering across the Alps and along the Mediterranean, nursing a Calvinistic sense of guilt and damnation. Via Pushkin in Eugene Onegin and Lermontov in A Hero of Our Time, the Byronic hero (anti-hero?) influences the Russian literary archetype of the Superfluous Man, that oversensitive and often languid soul who doesn’t fit in anywhere.

The long narrative poem, then, is favoured by three of our poets around this time – Burns (in Tam O’Shanter), Scott, and Byron. How different from Scottish poetry in more recent times, except in such deplorably neglected talents as Rayne MacKinnon (b. 1937) (The Blasting of Billy P., 1978).

Lastly and importantly, there is the behind-the-scenes contribution of Gaelic poets and women poets. Those mandarins who dictate the Scottish ‘canon’ usually get it wrong; our cultural establishment, historically, has consistently exalted fashionable mediocrity above solid worth. Anthologies purporting to represent Scottish poetry can somehow exclude the likes of George Bruce and Tom Scott in favour of their editors’ current sidekicks. There’s nothing new about this. Macpherson’s effusions were accepted by an 18th century Edinburgh literati complacently insouciant towards genuine Gaelic work such as that of the Duncan Ban MacIntyre (1724–1812). This man lived and worked in their city, as a member of the City Guard! Not quite the type to be invited to a salon, but one would have thought that his magnificent poem, ‘The Praise of Ben Dorain’ (1768), in its detailed evocations of the landscape, might have appealed to the emerging (pre–)Romantic sensibility. So far I’ve found no German translations of his work. No wonder: the lowland Scottish intelligentsia were not interested in mediating authentic Gaelic poetry to the Germans. (It remains curious, however, that the Germans – so markedly interested in philology – managed for so long to bypass the Gaelic tradition).

Of course, they could be subversive, even treasonable fellows, these Gaels. Around 1800, we’re in the thick of the Highland Clearances. In a poem dated somewhere between 1798 and 1800, Allan MacDougall addresses a ‘Song to the Lowland Shepherds’, who had come up from the south as the Highland crofters were being evicted. The tone is: we have no food, clothes, shelter, but we’re surrounded by sheep and these bloody Lowlanders. MacDougall doesn’t share Walter Scott’s fear of the French revolutionaries. No, rather “We would love the French to come/ to guillotine the Lowlanders”. As good post-devolutionary, post-millenopausal Scots, we might be forgiven a little frisson there, some relief from our seemingly terminal political correctness. Even if we are ourselves Lowlanders.

Circa 1800, the Honourable Henry Erskine wrote a poem called The Emigrant:

Go where I may, nor billows, rocks nor wind,
Can add of horror to my tortur’d mind;
On whatsoever coast I may be thrown,
No lord can use me harder than my own.

The moral-political indignation is not unmixed with gentler, more sensuous, concerns: in a poem composed between 1782 and 1791, the Gaelic poet William Ross (1762–c.1791) tells of a ball in Stornoway. It is there that he falls in love – at first sight, of course – with one of the guests. She is utterly ravishing, all the more so because she belongs to a clan which has fought against the hated king from the south (‘Feasgar Luain/Monday Evening’).

Examine Catherine Kerrigan’s superb An Anthology of Scottish Women Poets (1991), and you will find many turn-of-the-century figures whose lines are better known than their names. We’re familiar with ‘Ca’ the Yowes to the Knowes’, but not with its author, Isobel Pagan (1741–1821). ‘My Mother Bids Me Bind My Hair’ – that’s by Anne Hunter (1742–1821), whose lyrics were set to music by Haydn. Other luminaries revived by Dr Kerrigan include Anne Grant (1755–1838) (‘O where, tell me where, is your Highland laddie gone’), and Lady Nairne of ‘The Rowan Tree’ and ‘Will Ye No Come Back Again?’.

We should celebrate, too, Anna Gordon, aka Mrs Brown of Falkland, without whom Scott’s Minstrelsy could not have proved such a pioneering anthology of ballad and folk poetry: she was one of its major sources of such essentially oral material. Women are traditionally the sources of folk songs or poems that sound like folk songs, which may explain how Anne Hunter’s work found its way to Haydn. That may sound as if I am validating the women’s work by reference to famous men. Not so: it was simply the reality that the mediation was effected by the latter. The two major women novelistsof the time are Mary Brunton (1778–1818) (Self–Control, 1811) and Susan Ferrier (1782–1854) (Marriage, 1818). It is pleasing to report that soon after the appearance of their works, they were translated into French. It no doubt helped that Ferrier was admired by Sir Walter Scott; his own translator, Defauconpret, introduced her work to French readers.

When one turns from the mainstream, so perceived, of Scottish literature, one may be lucky enough to encounter the dammed–up tributaries. Here and there, a trickle gets through.

JACK, R. D. S., ‘1000 Years of Scottish Literature: 1600’

11 September 2021 by Duncan Jones

1000 Years of Scottish Literature, 18 November 2000 |

I shall begin with two oddities. 1600 represents the High Renaissance in Northern Europe. Yet, in Scotland we are so proud of our culture in that Golden Age of humanism that we practically delete it from our literary histories. The Renaissance may mean Shakespeare to England, it means MacDiarmid and the 20th century in Scotland. Secondly, the more Scottish Literature develops as a discipline, the less the chronological Renaissance flourishes. Why does this state of affairs exist? Most basically, comparisons are particularly ‘odorous’ for Scottish writing in the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Against either the earlier, domestic measure of the medieval makars, Henryson and Dunbar or the contemporary rivalry of Shakespeare and Jonson, the quality of Alexander Scott, Alexander Montgomerie and William Drummond pales. Additionally, a severely political Scottish paradigm – emphasising differences from English practice – still governs critical thinking and guarantees that this period of linguistic amalgamation within the broad parameters of shared European artifice gains scant attention. But I have spent a good part of my academic time lamenting the sad effects of this situation, where many modernists feel they can use Henryson and Dunbar as keystones for everything prior to Ramsay and some eighteenth century scholars still believe that study of the preceding hundred and fifty years may be omitted with impunity. To-day, my simpler and more upbeat purpose is to show you what literary joys are omitted by those who excise in this way. My central focus will be the Castalian Band of court poets, whose period of popularity spans the 1580s and early 1590s. In this context I am concerned to question Hugh MacDiarmid’s odd claim. In Lucky Poet, that there was no Scottish Renaissance at all:

At that time, Scottish culture was still vigorously but hopelessly without direction and becoming increasingly divorced from the real national situation. Owing to the difficulty of initiating what ought to have been the task before the age in Scotland as it was elsewhere in Europe – namely the evolution of renaissance literature in the vernacular, incorporating the lessons learned from the Humanists….the literature becomes royalist and episcopalian as well as circumscribed in outlook. ¹

There are four questions here, each of which I shall answer. Is there a Scottish Renaissance? Does it have a Scottish direction? Is it inexorably opposed to a performance culture? Does it shun all contact with the folk movement? In the second part of the paper, I shall simply use quotations to show that a polymathic approach to the seventeenth century rather than that seeking ‘Scots alone’ may reveal literary excellence and variety of a kind seldom claimed by the Scottish literati.

Who is this, then, opening his rhetorical treatise of 1585?

The cause why (docile reader) I have not dedicat this short treatise to any particular personis (as commounly workis usis to be) is that I esteme all thais quha hes already some beginning of knawledge, with ane earnest desyre to atteyne to farther, alyke meit for the reading of this worke, or any uther, quhilk may help thame to the atteining to thair foirsaid desyre. Bot, as to this work, quhilk isintitulito The Reulis and Cautelis to be observit and eschewit in Scottis Poesie, ye may marvell paraventure, quhairfore I sould have writtin in that mater, sen sa mony learnit men, baith of auld and of late, hes already written thairof in dyvers and sindrie languages. ²

It is, of course, no other than the young king, James VI, adding his own quidelines for modern practice to those of Ascham and Du Bellay, though opting for the introductory approach of Gascoigne’s Certayne Notes of Instruction. So, there was not only a Renaissance but an analytically planned one in which the young King played the roles of Apollo and David but Maecenas too. Yes, but surely it was all courtly and academic and Calvinistic, frowning upon performance and despising links with the folk. While not denying that these forces were present, especially as they affected the theatre, the first reason proposed in the Reulis, challenges this stereotype in its black and white form:

I answer that, nochtwithstanding, I have lykewayis writtin of it, for twa caussis. The ane is, as for them that wrait of auld, lyke as the tyme is changeit sensyne, sa is the ordour of poesie changeit. Forthen they observit not flowing, nor eschewit not ryming in termes, besydes sindrie uther thingis, quhilk now we observe and eschew and dois weil in sa doing, because that now, quhen the warld is waxit auld, we have all their opinionis in writ, quhilk were learned before our tyme, besydes our awin ingynis, quhair as they then did it onelie be thair awin ingynis but help of any uther. Thairfore, quhat I speik of poesie now, I speik of it as being come to mannis age and perfectioun, quhair as then it was bot in the infancie and chyldheid.²

It takes an English critic, C S Lewis, to sees the musical side of the performance equation. Referring to the master poet of the Castalian band, he notes – ‘In Montgomerie we seem to hear the scrape of the fiddle and the beat of dancing on the turf.’ ³

True, the Musical revival was concentrated in the court. True, ‘musick fyne’ dominated. True, Calvinism was chary about theatrical presentations. But this was also a period of aurality and therefore oratory. Not only the court but the richer merchants had musicians. Entertainments and Courtly Processions often took place in the streets while James VI energetically reformed and encouraged the sang sculis.⁴ And sometimes the beat of popular music can infiltrate song – religious as well as secular. [The folk-style setting of Montgomerie’s ‘Come my children dere, drau neir me – Dorian Recordings 90139 was played at this point.] Yes, but this was also the period of linguistic treachery was it not? Are we not, concerned with that arch-angliciser James VI? Well, if the Reulis are to be believed, not in the early Castalian period anyway:

The uther cause is that, as for thame that hes written of late, there hes never ane of thame written in our language. For albeit sindrie hes written of it in English, quhilk is lykest to our language, yit we differ from thame in sindrie Reulis of poesie, as ye will find be experience. ²

In fact, the first Scottish writer to turn MacDiarmid’s own modern, defensive, nationalist view was first anticipated as a full policy statement by James VI. To illustrate the broad lines along which the distinctive Scottishness of the Castalian programme was conducted, here is Montgomerie again – this time in sonnet form.

So swete a kis yistrene fra thee I reft
In bouing doun thy body on the bed,
That evin my lyfe within thy lippis I left.
Sensyne from thee my spreits wald never shed;
To folow thee it from my body fled
And left my corps als cold as ony kie.
Bot when the danger of my death I dred,
To seik my spreit I sent my harte to thee;
Bot it wes so inamored with thyn ee,
With thee it myndit lykwyse to remane;
So thou hes keepit captive all the thrie,
More glaid to byde then to returne agane.
Except thy breath thare places had suppleit,
Even in thyn armes thair, doutles, had I deit. ⁵

How does this sonnet align with the Scottishness of the programme?

Formally it has the interlacing scheme which marked out the Scottish sonnet per se. ABABBCBCCDCDEE – the so-called Spenserean scheme before Spenser.
It is a translation – part indeed of a conscious translation policy within the court. This saw Castalians translating a wide range of European authors on the principle that foreign words and ideas as well as lands could be colonised.
It is a French translation, the influence of the Pleiade was highlighted in contrast to English Petrarchism.
Montgomerie was at least aware of Ronsard’s argument for setting sonnets to music. But was this not the King who practically ordered his poets to anglicise after 1603?

Again true, but there are two relevant definitions of the function and nature of Scots at this time. One – the nationalist one, Scots alone, arrived late on the scene and was first voiced, in Douglas’s Eneados – that is in the most nationalistically focussed mode of all – translation. But the Reulis is a rhetorical treatise which is very strong on decorum. And the older view of Scots, as advocated by Dunbar, is that we are lucky to have a polymathic inheritance. Within the rhetorical/historical view the Scots dialect has no claim to be the original national tongue. That claim more properly pertains to Gaelic, ‘which, was driven back to (virtually) the present highland line’ as part of a conscious attempt at political appeasement by Malcolm Canmore and David I in the thirteenth century. ⁶

This polymathic heritage was welcomed on decorous grounds by the medieval Scottish makars, because it gave them a varied range of linguistic registers. James’s Reulis pleads the Horatian case for decorum very thoroughly indeed, stressing that propriety of this kind should extend to the manner in which arguments are presented as well – that is, to dialectic as well as rhetoric. Those literary critics who condescend to the anglicising period after James VI’s Renaissance in the 1580s, would do well to remember this rather than anachronistically employing the modern equation between use of Scots and national self-consciousness as their criterion for literary judgement. But, as I promised, my own aim to-day is celebratory rather than defensively analytic. I therefore end with those joys you will miss if you ignore the wealth of Latin and Anglo-Scots in the seventeenth century concentrating only on the Scottish line. This does not mean that Scots ceased. Aurally, the seventeenth century was a highpoint fot the ballad form. Spoiled for choice, I take my first brief ‘tasting in variety’ from ‘Lord Maxwell’s Last Farewell,’ the versified account of an early seventeenth feud between that family and the Johnstones. The extract chosen records Maxwell’s farewell to family and supporters before leaving the country:

Adiew, Lochmaben’s gate so fair,
The Langholm-shank, where birks they be!
Adiew, my ladye and only joy!
And, trust me, I maunna stay with thee.

Adiew, fair Eskdale,o up and down,
Where my poor friends do dwell!
The bangisters will ding them down,
And will them sore compel.

As his return will be marked by treachery and murder, this is not the cheeriest of poems. Written Scots provides a wittier, if nonetheless poignant attitude to death – canine however!

On former days, when I reflect!
I was a dog much in respect
For doughty deed:
But now I must hing by the neck
Without remeed.

O fy, sirs, for black burning shame,
Ye’ll bring a blunder on your name!
Pray tell me, wherein I’m to blame?
Is’t in effect
Because I’m cripple, auld and lame?’
Quo’ bony Heck.

Most of you will, I am sure, have recognised the pen of Hamilton of Gilbertfield and ‘The Last Dying Words of Bonny Heck, A Famous Grey-Hound in the Shire of Fife.’

Having checked to find that Scots is not dead, let us extend our linguistic focus to Latin. The Scottish Renaissance not only produced in George Buchanan, the foremost Latin writer in Europe, the continued energy of the Scottish Neo-Latinists is well documented in two bulky volumes published in Holland in 1637 under the title Delitiae Poetarum Scotorum Huius Aevi Illustrium. My choice here is influenced by the misleading general belief that all Latin verse is hyper-serious. Not so! Here is the editor of the collection, Arthur Johnston, satirising the possessor of one with ‘the largest of all noses’ in ‘De naso Nasonis cuiusdam nasutissimi.’

Conditur hoc tumulo nasorum maximus, orbem
Flere decet; nil non hoc pereunte perit.
Hic poterat vel more tubae fera bella ciere,
Scindere vel patriam vomeris instar humum.
Non alium fornax optasset Lemnia follem;
Nec magis incudi malleus aptus erat.

[In this grave the largest of noses is laid to rest; the world should
weep. Everything perishes if it perishes. Like a trumpet it could call up
savage wars or cut through its native land like a ploughshare. Vulcan
could not have wished for a better pair of bellows for his furnace, nor
was any great mallet forged more fittingly.]

The Gaelic voice was also strong. Here too, classical and popular strains vied for attention. I have chosen a representative of the latter class here. And although the fact that she is a woman redounds to the credit of the Gaels, Mary Macleod’s exile to Scarba, as retold in her own ‘Luinneag Mhic Leoid’ ⁷ makes one wonder whether the hierarchy of the day had much enthusiasm for such novelties. The extract is frome the opening of the lilt:

Is mi am shuidhe air an tulaich fo mhulad ‘s fo imcheist,
Is mi ag coimhead air Ile, is ann de m’ iongnadh ‘s an am so;
Bha mi uair nach do shaoil mi, gus an do chaochail air m’aimsir,
Gun tiginn an taobh so dh’amharc Dhiuraidh a Sgarbaidh.

[Sitting here on the knoll, forlorn and unquiet, I gaze upon Islay and marvel the while; there was a time I never thought – till my circumstances changed – that I should come hither to view Jura from Scarba.]

Gun tiginn an taobh so dh’amharc Dhiuraidh a Sgarbaidh!
Beir mo shoraidh do’n duthaichtha fo dhubhar nan garbhbheann,
Gu Sir Tormod ur allail fhuair ceannas air armailt,
Is gun cainte anns gach fearann gum b’airidh fear t’ainm air.

[To come hither and view Jura from Scarba! Carry my greetings to the land which lies shadowed by the rugged peaks, to the young, renowned Sir Norman, who has won headship over an armed host – for it is said in every land, that one of his name would be worthy thereof.]

Student reaction, certainly in my Scottish Literature classes is, however reserved for what is seen as effete anclicisation. The pastoral in particular is seen as woolly, literally and metaphorically despite its high standing in Renaissance theory and obvious use of fantasy for serious idealogical comment. That it may easily be adapted to patriotic and political purposes within ceremonials open to the public, is easily illustrated. Here is Drummond of Hawthornden combining eulogy with criticism in welcoming James VI’s trady return to his native shores as James I:

Is not thy Forth, as well as Isis, thine?
Though Isis vaunt shee hath more wealth in store,
Let it suffice thy Forth doth love Thee more.
Though shee, for beautie, may compare with Seine,
For swannes and sea-nymphes with imperiall Rhene,
Yet, in the title may bee claim’d in thee,
Nor shee, nor all the world can match with mee.

Taking the voice of the Scottish rivers against their English equivalents may distance him somewhat. But the point is clearly made! I end with prose. Late in fictive development and anglicised practically from the outset, it is exuberantly employed in the mid seventeenth century by the idiosyncratic Sir Thomas Urquhart of Cromarty – that ingenious Royalist who sought to escape Cromwellian captivity by giving the Protector a copy of his Universal Language and who is said to have died of a fit of laughter on hearing of the reinstatement of Charles II. There is no better celebratory ending surely than this passage of parodic Euphues from his patriotic Romance, The Jewel. Here, that ‘type’ of Scottish heroism, the Admirable Crichton, proves that his many skills extend to the bedroom. What follows could be briefly glossed as: ‘And so they made love.’ But Urquhart’s logofascination does not allow him to use five words when 220 may be lavished!

Thus for a while their eloquence was mute and all they spoke was but with the eye and hand, yet so persuasively, by vertue of the intermutual unlimitedness of their visotactilo sensation, that each part and portion of the persons of either was obvious to the sight and touch of the persons of both. The visuriencyo of either, by ushering the tacturiencyo of both, made the attrectationo of both consequent to the inspection of either. Here was it that passion was active and action passive, they both being overcome by other and each the conquerour. To speak of her hirquitalliencyo at the elevation of the pole of his microcosme or of his luxuriousnesso to erect a gnomon on her horizontal dyal, will perhaps be held by some to be expressions full of obscoeness and offensive to the purity of chaste ears; yet seeing she was to be his wife and that she could not be such without consummation of marriage – which signifieth the same thing in effect – it may be thought, as definitiones logicae verificantur in rebus, if the exerced acto be lawful, that the diction which supponeso it can be of no great transgression, unless you would call it a solaecisme, or that vice in grammar which imports the copulating of the masculine with the feminine gender.

If this talk encourages you to believe my modest proposal that there was a first Scottish Renaissance and that the death of the polymathic seventeenth century has been ‘greatly exaggerated,’ then I am well content.

Notes

¹ Hugh MacDiarmid, Lucky Poet (London, 1936) p.206.
² For convenience of reference, all texts are taken from The Mercat Anthology of Early Scottish Literature, ed. R.D.S. Jack and P.A.T. Rozendaal (Edinburgh, 1997).
³ C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love (Oxford, 1936) p. 259
⁴ See Michael Lynch, ‘Court Ceremony and Ritual during the personal reign of James VI’, pp. 71-92, in The Reign of James VI, ed. Julian Goodare and Michael Lynch (East Linton, 2000); Theo van Heijnsbergen, ‘The Scottish Chapel Royal as Cultural Intermediary,’ in Centres of Learning: ed. Jan Willem Drijvers and A.A.MacDonald (Leiden, 1995) pp. 299-313.
⁵ One of Montgomerie’s free Ronsardian translations. The source is ‘Hier soir Marie, en prenant maugre toy.’
⁶ Janet M. Templeton, ‘Scots: An Outline History,’ in Occasional Papers(Association for Scottish Literary Studies) ed. A J Aitken (Glasgow, 1973), pp.4 -11.
⁷ ‘Luinneag’ means a ‘lilt;’ that is – an informal and ‘feminine’ tune. When defending herself for entering the male realms of the bard, Mary noted that she only composed lilts of this sort.

Duncan Jones

Footer

Archives