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McCLURE, J. Derrick, ‘Scottish Literature in 1400’

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1000 Years of Scottish Literature, 18 November 2000 |

The history of Scotland for most of the fourteenth century had been of foreign warfare and civil disorder ineffectually countered by the efforts of feeble kings; but by 1400 the exhausted and strife-torn kingdom was struggling towards recovery.

The nation’s victory, won under the great Robert Bruce, in its struggle for independence had been almost undone in the minority of his son and successor David II; and even in his maturity he proved a far lesser king than his heroic father. His nephew Robert II succeeded as an ageing man whose vigorous part in the wars of David’s minority was long past; and his son Robert III, though still nominally king in 1400, had been tactfully removed from power “for seknes of his persone” after trying helplessly to wield the sceptre since 1390. Yet the reigns of the first two Stewart kings, though perhaps the most inglorious period in the history of the Scottish monarchy, saw the first literary expressions of a new spirit of Scottish national identity, and the first stages in the deliberate creation of a national self-image to sustain it.

A seminal contribution to this development was made by John of Fordun (his birthplace was probably Fordoun in Kincardineshire) in his Chronica Gentis Scotorum. Fordun was a priest in the Cathedral of Aberdeen, where he died in 1385 after years of careful research for the material of his book, including visits to monasteries in England and Ireland as well as Scotland. His sources include the sixth-century Welsh monk Gildas, from whose writings he quotes Merlin’s prophecy of the ultimate victory to be won by the Celts over the Saxons, and the great chroniclers William of Malmesbury and Geoffrey of Monmouth, renowned for their contribution to the growth of the Arthurian legend. The Introductio brevis to the Chronicaplaces Scotland in its geographical setting. Fordun quotes Julius Caesar, Ptolemy and others in their description of the island of Britain, and Gildas and Bede on its earliest inhabitants. In a rapid summary, he outlines the origins and history of the Britons, Scots, Picts, Saxons and Normans; and takes the story to his own time with a condemnation of Edward Langshanks, determined fraudulenter per fas aut nefas to subjugate Scotland, and a salute to Philip IV as Scotland’s ally. 

His Chronica proper begins with an account of the lands in the four directions of the globe, and the distribution of the descendants of Noah. The purpose of this is to give Scotland’s story its place as an integral part of the history of the world. Going on to the tale of Gathelus and Scota (a lieutenant of Moses during the Exodus and his bride, the Pharaoh’s daughter: the legendary founders of the Scottish kingdom), he ends his first book with the Picts and Scots in possession of the land of Albion. In the course of his story, semi-legendary figures from Scotland’s distant past are placed chronologically by relating them to characters and events in Biblical and classical history. As he reaches authentic historical records, Kenneth MacAlpin appears, so does Macbeth; though there is no mention of witches, and indeed more emphasis is placed on the acts of Duncan’s sons in exile than on Macbeth’s reign in Scotland. Fordun devotes six full chapters to the mutual testing of Malcolm and Macduff (the source of the first part of Shakespeare’s Act IV scene iii): a scene which, far more explicitly in Fordun than in Shakespeare, explores the duties and responsibilities of a king, probably with pointed reference to the weak kings of his own time. The admonitory force of his writing becomes even more forceful in his presentation of the genealogy of David I, which he traces through more than a hundred generations to Noah:

“that it may be known to you, kings of these days, and to all readers, of how old, how noble, how strong and invincible a stock of kings he came, (whereof ye also are come) – kings who have, until now, through the blessed King Most High, been keeping the kingly dignity unspotted for a longer time, with freer service, and, what is more glorious, with a stronger hold of the Catholic faith than all other kings, save only a few, if any.”

Fordun died before bringing his history down to his own time, though in the 1440s Walter Bower incorporated the Chronica into his Scotichronicon, in which he continued the story to the murder of James I. Fordun’s work, however, is of fundamental importance in placing Scotland’s story among those of the nations of the earth, and emphasising the antiquity of the kingdom and the glory of its leaders and people: in other words, giving a literary embodiment to the confident patriotic pride with which the nation had come to regard itself.

At the same time as Fordun was compiling his Chronica, a revolutionary development in Scottish literature was effected by his colleague in the Cathedral of Aberdeen. The Brus by John Barbour, Archdeacon of Aberdeen, an epic poem of King Robert I and his leadership of Scotland’s successful fight for independence, was completed in 1375. It is sufficiently well-known to require no more than a brief description here; but one of its most significant aspects is easy to overlook. Barbour relates, with outstanding narrative skill and descriptive realism, the struggles of Bruce and his followers; he provides an account of the period remarkable for its accuracy and careful reliance on authentic detail; he emphasises the justice of the Scottish resistance to English aggression, while recognising courage and chivalry among the English where it is to be found; he evokes Bruce’s care for his common followers and subjects and the part played by them in Scotland’s ultimate victory; and importantly, he does all this in Scots. Fordun’s Latin was the unquestioned medium for historical narrative (even Bower, decades later, continued his work in the same language); and though the genre of quasi-historical narrative poetry in the vernacular was long established in France and England, the subjects of those poems were generally figures from the distant and semi-legendary past rather than men whose lifetimes overlapped the writers’ own. Barbour’s confident use of Scots (though over a century was to pass before it came to be called Scots) can readily be seen as a gesture of pride in his native kingdom and the mother tongue of its people; and assuredly, the Scots tongue could hardly have made a more dramatic entrance to the company of Europe’s literary languages than in this stirring patriotic epic. 

Like Fordun, Barbour writes from strongly patriotic motives. He is concerned to uphold the God-given right of the Scottish nation to defend itself against outside aggression. He does not hesitate to incorporate reminders to his own king of his duty to uphold the standards of his great predecessor; and to the nobility and commons of his time to show the same loyalty to their king and nation that Bruce had found in his own subjects. Barbour, that is, writes with the noble aim of recalling the Scottish king and people to the nation’s glorious past and their responsibility to prove themselves worthy of it.

Barbour wrote, as well as the Brus, a poem on Brutus of Troy and a genealogy of the Stewarts; but those do not survive. However, the practice which he established of using the vernacular for narrative verse was soon adopted by others. A notable anonymous collection of saints’ lives, based on Latin originals but rendered in Scots octosyllabic couplets, can be dated to approximately 1400. A more important contribution to the national literature was made by Andrew of Wyntoun, a Prior of St Serf’s in Lochleven who died in 1420, with his Oryginall Cronykil of Scotland. Like Fordun’s Chronica, this is a history of Scotland which places the nation’s story in a universal context, beginning with the Biblical account of the Creation and concluding with the events of the author’s own lifetime. Wyntoun lacks Barbour’s gift for exciting narrative, but is a worthy successor of his as a conscientious and patriotic historian: his work is one of the principal historical sources for the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Many interesting details can be found in his story: as one example, he is the first writer to introduce a supernatural element to the story of Macbeth, making him dream that he hears his future greatness prophesied by the three Fates (the sisters of wyrd or “fate”, a word which Shakespeare did not know and on which his wholly individual transmutation of the episode has bestowed a completely inauthentic meaning). Courteously referring his readers to Barbour for the story of Bruce, Wyntoun relates in some detail the achievements of Wallace, whom Barbour never mentions. The principal significance of his entire massive opus, however, is its contribution to the national ethos: the picture of an anciently-established and proudly independent kingdom, defended since time immemorial by an unbroken line of monarchs.

The development of the Lowland tongue in the hands of Barbour and his successors is as spectacular as could be wished; but the history of the other language of the kingdom in this period is rather more obscure. Gaelic had been established in Scotland from long before the arrival of the Anglo-Saxon language which was to become Scots; but whereas Barbour’s Scots is already visibly distinct from the language of his contemporaries Chaucer in London and even Richard Rolle in York, Gaelic Scotland and Ireland still shared a common culture and a literary language which as yet showed no significant divergence between the two countries. The poetry of this period was produced by highly-trained aristocratic bards, respected and privileged members of the households of chieftains; and their carefully-wrought verses in traditional styles and metrical forms dealt mostly with family history, genealogies, celebration of their chiefs’ achievements in battle, commemoration of births, marriages and deaths in their families, and denigration of their enemies and rivals. It is revealing of the status of the bards that the founder of one of Scotland’s notable bardic families, the MacMhuirichs, fled to Scotland from Ireland in 1213 after killing his chief’s steward who had come to collect his taxes, and later wrote an indignant poem to the chief complaining that he had been driven into exile for killing a mere vassal! Besides poetry, Gaelic in this period was the vehicle for works of high and distinguished scholarship in such fields as theology, philosophy and medicine.

The Scottish bardic poetry which survives is mostly somewhat later than 1400: an important source is the Book of the Dean of Lismore, a sixteenth-century collection particularly rich in poetry from Argyllshire and Perthshire. One remarkable poem, however, preserved not in the Dean’s Book but in a much later manuscript called the Red Book of Clanranald, is by another MacMhuirich called Lachlann Mór, and dates from 1411. This is a brosnachadh (i.e. poem of incitement to battle) calling on the men of Clan Donald to give of their best in the forthcoming fight: the one remembered in the Gaeltacht as Catha Chath Gairbheach and in the Lowlands – though the Scots ballad which commemorates it cannot be traced before the eighteenth century – as the Red Harlaw. This battle, one of the fiercest ever fought on Scottish soil, was occasioned by the claim of Donald, Lord of the Isles, to the earldom of Ross: a claim vigorously contested by the Earl of Mar, whose uncle the Duke of Albany, brother of the late Robert III, was ruling as regent for the imprisoned James I. The poem begins 

A Chlanna Chuinn, cuimhnichibh 
Cruas an am na h-iorghaile – 

“Children of Conn, remember hardihood in time of battle – ” (addressing Clan Donald with reference to their putative descent from Conn of the Hundred Battles, a heroic king of Irish tradition); and proceeds to exhort the clansmen to display a long list of qualities befitting warriors in battle. This was a familiar theme for bardic poetry; but what makes this poem such a remarkable tour de force is its format: each line contains two epithets, and the four in each successive pair of lines all begin with the same letter. Alliteration has always been a frequent device in Gaelic poetry, but MacMhuirich takes it much further: he works through the entire alphabet in sequence, thus setting himself the task of finding four semantically apt words for each successive letter and making them fit into his seven-syllable lines. Poems using the alphabet as a structural device were known in mediaeval Latin; and an elaborate example from further afield is Psalm 119, where each section consists of eight short verses each beginning with the same Hebrew letter;1 but this alphabetic poem is virtually unique in Gaelic. The poem as preserved may show some textual corruption (not all the sets of four words for each letter are complete); but the survival of fifteenth-century forms in the eighteenth-century text is evidence that it is well preserved. The language suggests a more vernacular register than the classical literary Gaelic of the period: if so, this may be the first surviving poem written in the Gaelic language as it was developing in Scotland; and the technical virtuosity which it displays, inherited from the ancient bardic tradition, was to continue undimmed in subsquent poetry in Scottish Gaelic. It is of passing interest, too, that the Harlaw Brosnachadh, though not remotely comparable to the first major Scots poem in scale or in historic importance, was like it inspired by an armed struggle!

Scotland’s literary achievement in three languages during the years around 1400, that is, showed a pride and confidence in startling contrast to the nation’s recent undistinguished record. And shortly afterwards, when the assumption of active rule by James I began a new and much more dynamic era, all three (and particularly Scots) were poised to participate in one of the greatest literary periods in Scottish history.

1 The Authorised Version and later English translations do not attempt to reproduce this; but P. Hately Waddell does, though not with unmixed success, in his Scots translation of 1871.

Copyright © J. Derrick McClure, 2000

McCULLOCH, Margery Palmer, ‘Fantasy, Reality and the Woman Question: a re-reading of William Black’s fiction’

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ScotLit 29, Autumn 2003 |

An invitation earlier this year to talk on the gothic element in William Black’s fiction led me into unexpected territory. For what I found in my three selected novels – A Daughter of Heth (1871), A Princess of Thule (1873) and Macleod of Dare (1878) – was not the exploitation of Highland landscape and history for the purposes of gothic or romance scenarios attacked by many previous critics of Black’s work, but a preoccupation, in these three novels at least, with themes involving the need to distinguish between fantasy and reality in human relationships.

William Black was born in Glasgow in 1841. He began adult life as an art student, but then turned his attention to writing and, like many writers and artists in the later nineteenth century, he moved to the publishing and artistic metropolis of London. There he worked as a journalist, being assistant editor of the Daily News for several years. He was also a war correspondent during the Franco-Prussian War of 1866. He became an extremely popular novelist, able to resign from his editorial post in 1874 to concentrate on fiction writing. In the nineteenth-century volume of the History of Scottish Literature (1988), Douglas Gifford calls him the ‘darling of the lending libraries’, while, earlier in the century, George Blake criticised him for ‘exploiting the romantic-sentimental aspects of his native country’ in his craving for popularity. Blake adds that ‘out of his American royalties [he] could afford to drive up and down the front at Brighton in a horse-carriage of his own’. From my recent reading, however, it seems to me that Black has perhaps been unfairly judged by his critics and that it might be time to look at his fiction in a different context.

The first thing that strikes me is that it does not seem particularly helpful to try to fit Black into any recognised canon of the Scottish novel. There is no nationalist agenda in Black as there is in Walter Scott’s reconciliation themes or Neil Gunn’s regenerative ones. And while one could argue that in some of his fiction he holds up the Highlands as an exemplar of the simple, uncorrupted life, the many qualifications needed in such a reading make it only partly sustainable. 

Nor do Black’s scenarios fit satisfactorily with the gothic novel. There are certainly vivid evocations of sea storms and wild, threatening Highland mountain landscapes in his books, and in Macleod of Dare these combine with the melodramatic story of a young Highland chieftain’s obsessive love for a woman who will not love him, bringing this novel close to gothic themes in the wild drama of the deliberate ‘accidental’ drowning of both partners in its storm-tossed ending. Yet rather than a concern with such motifs for their own sake, what characterises Black’s plotting is an investigation of the distinction between fantasy and reality, a journey of discovery undertaken with difficulty and sometimes without success by his male characters in particular; and an exposure, perhaps unwittingly, of the ‘woman question’ which so perplexed late Victorian society. Black’s novels seem to me to be situated, therefore, not in any recognisable tradition of Scottish fiction writing, but in the social and moral framework of late Victorian Britain. Black himself appears to be at home in the identity of a North Briton who has successfully migrated to the metropolis of London to play his part in the life of that city and shows nothing of the sense communicated in John Davidson’s poetry of being caught between cultures. 

While the popularity of Black’s novels in the lending libraries testifies to the success of his British role, what we have in him also is a late Victorian moralist, even if the morality is at times ‘tipped’ with Scotch features. Idleness is not condoned; a secular version of laborare est orareunderpins his actions, whether this appears in the guise of cooperative work between laird and crofters in the Highlands, or disapproval of the dilettante life of the upper classes in the metropolis. Improvement of the lower classes, metropolitan and Highland, is also a recurring motif, while descriptions of Highland landscapes and seascapes in both A Princess of Thule and Macleod of Dare reflect not only the Romantic and post-Romantic fascination with the ‘sublimity’ of such wild places, but also the late Victorian belief in art as a moral force. However, the area of late Victorian morality and social philosophy which I find most interesting as it is reflected in Black’s fiction, is the ‘woman question’ which was increasingly preoccupying Victorian society in the late nineteenth century. In saying this, I do not mean to suggest that Black’s narratives explicitlyinterrogate this theme, but that they have implicitly within them the Victorian preoccupation with relationships between the sexes and with the changing role of women. 

After this general setting out of my stall in relation to my view of William Black’s fiction, I’d like now in this short article to pursue some of these ideas through a consideration of A Daughter of Heth, one of the most Scottish of Black’s novels with regard to setting and one which deserves reprinting. The book is set, not in the Highlands or in London, but in Lowland Ayrshire. Glasgow, where Black was born, is an additional minor setting, but from the sharply observed depictions of the Ayrshire manse, with its views of the island of Arran, the coastal town of Saltcoats and the surrounding countryside, it would appear that boyhood expeditions before his departure for London must have engendered familiarity with the Ayrshire coast which is very convincingly depicted here. This early book is also a strongly Scottish work in relation to the religious connotations of its manse setting and its title, and in the considerable amount of Scots language used in the speech of its characters. Here, the Gaelic Highlands, which more usually represent Scotland in Black’s work, are represented only in the minor character of the fiddler Neil, with his Highland English speech. 

The book’s title, A Daughter of Heth, refers to the Genesis story of Abraham who, an outsider, was given land by the sons of Heth in order to enable him to bury his wife Sarah. Later in the family story , Rebecca, the mother of Jacob, sent her son away for safety to the land of the children of Heth in order to escape the wrath of his brother Esau, whom Jacob had cheated out of his inheritance. On this occasion, Rebecca fears to lose her son to the daughters of Heth. A daughter of Heth is therefore both a stranger to be feared but also one who can give help. In Black’s narrative, the strictly religious Cameronian servant, Andrew, is suspicious of the young French woman who comes to stay with her uncle at the manse, and is hostile to her later proposed marriage with the minister’s eldest son: ‘it was an ill day for him that she came to the Manse. […] Ay, indeed: when the young man turns away from his ain folk, Leezibeth, to marry ane o’ the daughters o’ Heth’. Yet as we see as the narrative unfolds, the young stranger brings warmth and vitality into the lives of her Scottish family and their acquaintances, although she herself suffers from the coldness of their repressive religion and its values. 

I suggested earlier that rather than glorying in romantic settings and plots for their own sake, Black constructs scenarios which lead his protagonists from the falsity of romance and myth to the reality of human relationships. Falsity in A Daughter of Heth is represented by the insular, superstitious responses of the Ayrshire Scots to the French girl who comes among them with her strange accent and unidiomatic English; her unusual clothes and manners; and, worst of all, her Catholic religion, which immediately categorises her as one of the damned in the minds of the most extreme Calvinists and troubles even her more moderate minister uncle. Gossip and superstition also surround the life of the young laird, Lord Earlshope, whose frequent absences from his castle, together with rumours about the private life he leads abroad, condition the locals against him. A Daughter of Heth, however, is not a didactic text which sets out an ideological position. It is, in its story-line, a tragic romance. Yet, in his presentation of the thought, speech and action of the orphaned French girl who has come at the end of her schooling to the household of her father’s only brother, Black reveals both the intolerance which can exist within Scottish Calvinism and the boorishness of the behaviour of her parochial male cousins – behaviour one might interpret psychologically as both a product of the inculcation of narrow, rigid beliefs and a reaction against the repression of their natural spirits. 

It is not at all easy to draw ‘good’ fictional characters – as we see even in the works of significant realist novelists such as Jane Austen and George Eliot – but Black is remarkably successful in his characterisation of Catherine, or Coquette, as she was playfully nicknamed in childhood: a name which in her new Scottish context takes on all the mythical associations of the flirtatious, immoral French as seen by unsophisticated foreigners. Coquette’s genuine delight and expertise in music, as opposed to her boorish cousins’ rejection of it – ‘we dinna learn music at the schule, ye gowk’ – and her distress at the way the ‘people groaned rather than sung’ the psalm tune in church; her reverence for the natural world and her surprise that her French God is not allowed to be the same God as that worshipped by her new Scottish acquaintances but is considered an anti-Christ, unforcedly draws the reader’s attention to the ignorance, bigotry and suppression of vitality in the dour Scottish religion which oppresses her. And this reader response is strengthened when we watch the girl’s own vitality gradually drain away as she is conditioned to believe that she is always in the wrong, that there is something essentially warped about her life, although she cannot understand what this can be. Although Coquette’s presence among them does in fact modify the repressive attitudes of her new family and servants and induces a happier atmosphere in the home, the impression remains of a deadness of spirit at the heart of the life of this fictional community which cannot open itself to the human need for love. The portrayal of Coquette here, with the girl’s memories of her French homeland and upbringing, reminds me very much of Liz Lochhead’s present-day portrayal of Mary Stuart in her play Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off, especially in her dealings with the religion of John Knox and her inability to understand the manners of her strange new country.

Black’s characterisation of Coquette and the difficulties of her situation brings forward also the Victorian ‘woman question’, the dependent status of women in society and the absence of opportunities open to them. When Coquette talks to Lord Earlshope of her unhappiness in Ayrshire, he sympathises with her, but can offer no solution. He comments: ‘If a man dislikes the people he is among, he has merely to go away. But a woman is very dependent on the temper and disposition of those around her’. Similarly, a woman of her time was very dependent upon a man’s choice in relation to marriage, even if her heart’s choice was elsewhere. Coquette has been brought up with the more explicit social contract implications of marriage prevalent in her French birthplace and she surprises the Glasgow-based Lady Drum who befriends her by the expression of her willingness to marry the man her parents – or in this case her uncle – should choose for her. Yet, despite Lady Drum’s insistence on the importance of choice in relation to romantic love (and perhaps a wealthy aristocrat such as herself was in a position to exercise choice), the girl’s understanding of her situation is more realistic. Having fallen in love with Lord Earlshope, with whom she can converse about music and other interests she holds dear, and who, instead of mocking her ‘unintelligible Babel o’ a tongue’, can actually converse with her in it, she cannot hope for an acceptable relationship with him, since he does not speak of marriage. On the other hand, her cousin Tom’s obsessive protestations of love and of his intention to marry her can be seen to wear down her disinclination to agree to such a union, especially when she knows her uncle would welcome it.

Although Earlshope ultimately lets Coquette know of his love for her and this sets in motion the tragedy of the plot, Black does not present the young man in a stereotypical way as a rakish nobleman, an exploiter of those less powerful than himself, but as someone who suffers from the social and religious rules concerning marriage. Having made an imprudent marriage in extreme youth, he is now – like Dickens’s character Stephen in Hard Times – bound to a woman who is a drunkard, who no longer loves him and who publicly abuses him wherever she finds him: hence his long absences from his Ayrshire home. During an excursion to the Western Isles on his yacht with Coquette and her uncle and friends, he brings up the question of marriage and divorce, although the latter word is not explicitly used. Speculating about the changes that can occur over the years in a relationship contracted in extreme youth, he asks: ‘Why should the old marriage bind these two new persons? […] they have outgrown it.’ Yet, like Dickens’s Stephen, Earlshope’s youthful mistake prevents him from ever making a new relationship. In the eyes of church and society, the love between him and Coquette is a sin, although a marriage for Coquette with someone she does not love would be considered acceptable. I think that one of the interesting outcomes of reading historical social novels – even those by the darlings of the lending libraries, perhaps especially those – is that one understands ever more clearly that so many human troubles and tragedies are caused, not by sinful behaviour in the people concerned, but by the social and religious mores of a given period which, ironically, can be overthrown in future times as society and its values change. This kind of tragic outcome is at the heart of Nancy Brysson Morrison’s historical novel The Gowk Storm, a prize-winning novel of the interwar Scottish literary revival; and it is also, of course, at the heart of Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga, published a few decades after the story of Coquette and serialised recently on television when I was reading Black’s novels.

A Daughter of Heth has its ‘gothic’ moments in the wild, threatening seascapes of Loch Coruisk and Loch Scavaig; and its episodes of tragic romance in the ill-fated, aborted elopement of Coquette and Earlshope, which ends in his death in a storm and her own death after marriage to her cousin who, ‘blinded by his exceeding happiness’, is not initially able to acknowledge the depth of unhappiness in his wife. Nevertheless, this book is, for me, primarily notable for its depiction of the reality of human relationships and human needs, and its exposure of a world conditioned by superstitious ignorance or romance. 

In his discussion of Black’s fiction in The Scottish Novel (1978), the American scholar Francis Hart remarks that ‘my suspicion [is] that Black’s genuine fictive impulses were tragic’ and adds that Black ‘had to defend himself against public protest at unhappy endings’. I would agree that Black is more successful in his tragedies, for in A Princess of Thule, published two years after A Daughter of Heth, the sudden character changes which facilitate the happy ending and the clichéd formula of the failed artist suddenly becoming the talk of the London metropolis ring falsely. In contrast, Black’s tragic endings do not arise out of some fated happenings beyond human control, but are the outcome both of human psychology and the social conventions put in place and kept in place by the actions and unquestioned beliefs of human beings. 

On the other hand, while A Princess of Thule is apparently so different from A Daughter of Heth in its happy ending, its dual Highland and sophisticated London settings and its involvement with the life of an artist – an unacceptable occupation to the Cameronians of Ayrshire – there are in fact some interesting similarities in the presentation of the young women in the novels. Both Coquette and Highland Sheila lose confidence in themselves when thrust into a society which can recognise no values and customs but its own. The French speech of Coquette and the Highland English of Sheila both arouse ridicule, although Sheila’s artist husband had initially been enchanted by her Highland way of pronouncing and structuring English. In A Daughter of Heth, the wearing down of Coquette’s confidence and vitality is depicted gradually, but in the later book, this transformation happens too quickly. It is difficult to reconcile the strong-spirited and physically strong Highland girl who could sail the boat and organise help for the crofters and villagers with the submissive and dutiful wife who sits alone in her new London home, unwilling to stand up for herself when her husband increasingly makes his social outings without her. Nevertheless, when we bring the portraits of these two heroines together, we see that the same forces of ignorance and rejection of the one who is different are at work. Caught in the fantasy world he himself had constructed, the artist Lavender had seen Sheila as ‘a beautiful wild seabird’. Back in the everyday ambience of the London he knows, ‘he did not wish to gain the reputation of having married an oddity’. Yet, as Lord Earlshope commented in the earlier book, while a man could walk away from uncongenial companions, a woman, and especially a wife, was entirely dependent on those close to her, oddities or not. 

Limitation of space has confined this re-reading of William Black’s fiction principally to A Daughter of Heth, and in its rich Lowland Scottish context this is probably the novel in which Black has most to offer late nineteenth-century Scottish fiction. Yet its playing out of the difference between fantasy and reality in human relationships is found even in such a different and apparently gothic romance as Macleod of Dare. Francis Hart comments that ‘for Black the substitution of a false reality is always destructive’. This, I believe, is the lasting message of his fiction, the best of which deserves to be re-presented to readers not as Scottish gothic romance but as part of the social and moral context of late Victorian Britain.

Copyright © Margery Palmer McCulloch 2003

McCULLOCH, Margery Palmer, ‘Ideology in Action: Modernism and Marxism in A Scots Quair’

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James Leslie Mitchell Centenary Conference, 9 June 2001 |

A revised and updated version of this paper, along with eleven other essays on Gibbon’s works, is available in A Flame in the Mearns, published June 2003 by ASLS.

Abbreviations are defined at the end of the document.

Despite its dialectical title, my paper is as much concerned with narrative form as it is with ideology. What interests me about A Scots Quair is the way in which this text of the later Modernist period dramatises and interrogates the politics and social history of its time through characterisation, setting and voice; and especially through the responses of its fictional characters to the events which overtake them and which some of them at least try actively to shape.

It seems to me important to keep in mind also the relative youth of Leslie Mitchell/Lewis Grassic Gibbon during the composition of the trilogy – 31 years old at the publication of Sunset Song in 1932, 33 when Grey Granite appeared. This author was a young man who was himself in the process of formation intellectually: absorbing and making responses to influences, rejecting what did not work for him , moving on to new investigations. It may be that critics have been too ready to pigeon-hole his philosphical position as Diffusionist or Marxist – to name the two most popular ascriptions – as if the trilogy were the product of historical hindsight and reflection as, say, George Eliot’s Middlemarch was the product of the distance in time between the events portrayed in her novel and the date of that portrayal. Mitchell’s interest in ancient history deriving from boyhood and his more recent involvement with Marxist theories of history are certainly present in the Quair, but I would suggest they are there in an explorative and interrogative way, rather than as settled philosophies. And in Cloud Howe and Grey Granite in particular, he is living through the events and ideological responses to them which are being portrayed. It is inevitable, therefore, that, like the formal ending of the trilogy itself, ideological certainties should be deferred, unresolved.

What is pertinent also in relation to Mitchell’s relationship with the Scottish Renaissance movement is the age difference between him and other principal writers such as MacDiarmid, Muir and Gunn. Like their contemporaries Eliot, Lawrence and Joyce, MacDiarmid, Muir and Gunn were born in the late 1880s or early 1890s and the influence of late Romanticism and the several cultural and philosophical crises of the Victorian age can be found in their work alongside the innovations and philosophical uncertainties of Modernism. Gibbon, on the other hand, was born in 1901, and while ten or twelve years may not seem sufficient to call a generational difference, these ten years came at a critical point in regard to the experiences which shaped him as adolescent and young adult. MacDiarmid, for example, served with the Royal Army Medical Corps in Salonika during the war, and for him, as for others of his generation, the war was an event which broke the continuity of past and present. As Edwin Muir described it in his Autobiography: ‘The generation to which I belong has survived an age, and the part of our life which is still immobilized there is like a sentence broken off before it could be completed; the future in which it would have written its last word was snatched away and a raw new present abruptly substituted’ (A 194). Leslie Mitchell, on the other hand, could be seen as closer to the Auden generation. He was a boy aged 13 at the outbreak of hostilities and tried on three occasions to enlist, although under age. Hypocrisy, jingoism, profiteering and injustice are the indictments against the war found in his later fiction and essays, not the philosophical awareness of a cataclysmic break with the past given expression in much art of the Modernist period. Similarly, the Russian Revolution of 1917 was of formative significance for Mitchell. In 1917, as a young reporter, he was attending the foundation meeting of an Aberdeen Soviet; and in 1919 he was becoming involved with Communist groups in Glasgow. In contrast, while Marxism was to become a major theme for MacDiarmid in his poems to Lenin in the fashionably political thirties, in the years immediately preceding and following the end of World War One, it was the regeneration of Scotland and a revolution in Scottish literary culture that preoccupied him, not Marxist politics. Such differences are important in any consideration of Gibbon’s place in the interwar Scottish literary revival movement, to which he was a late entrant. 

In relation to Modernism, it is frustrating that there would appear to be so little written specifically about literary matters in the essays and letters of Mitchell/Grassic Gibbon – and I think I should call him Grassic Gibbon from now onwards. The principal literary essay is, of course, ‘Literary Lights’ from Scottish Scene (LGGA 123-37), in which he demonstrates how few of the writers of the so-called Scottish Literary Renaissance can in his view actually be considered Scottish writers, as opposed to English writers from the county of Scotshire. His criterion for judgement here is language, whether Scots or Gaelic, and it is interesting that, like MacDiarmid and Muir in their unnecessary quarrel over Muir’s Scott and Scotland, Gibbon in this essay ignores the fact that Scottish English, even in the 1930s, is the medium of communication for a large number of Scots for everyday discourse as well as creative writing – Scottish English was then as it is now one of the three principal languages of Scotland, and had been so for a considerable time. The more significant section of the ‘Literary Lights’ essay, however, is where Gibbon discusses his own attempts to develop a specifically Scottish medium for his narrative in the books of the Scots Quair trilogy. Scots-language experimentation in Scottish Renaissance circles had been principally in the area of poetry with Neil Gunn, at that point the most promising novelist associated with the revival movement, writing in English (and being ironically characterised in the ‘Literary Lights’ essay as ‘a brilliant novelist from Scotshire’). Now, however, an experiment of a different order was under way: 

The technique of Lewis Grassic Gibbon in his trilogy A Scots Quair– of which only parts I and II, Sunset Song and Cloud Howe, have yet been published – is to mould the English language into the rhythms and cadences of Scots spoken speech, and to inject into the English vocabulary such minimum number of words from Braid Scots as that remodelling requires. His scene so far has been a comparatively uncrowded and simple one – the countryside village of modern Scotland. Whether his technique is adequate to compass and express the life of an industrialized Scots town in all its complexity is yet to be demonstrated. (LGGA 135)

So far as the Modernist dimension of the Quair is concerned, it’s significant that in his speculation as to whether this new medium can be used successfully when transferred from the rural to the city scene, Gibbon goes on to make comparison with James Joyce. For the free indirect style of the Sunset Song narrative, the blurring of the distinction between narrator and characters, has much in common with Joyce’s experiments with narrative voice, as it has also with Virginia Woolf’s approach in Mrs Dalloway. It’s interesting too that the negative noises Gibbon makes about Joyce’s later work must apply in this instance to Ulysses, for Finnegan’s Wake, usually cited as Joyce’s descent into incomprehensibility, was not published until 1939, four years after Gibbon’s death. And in Ulysses, Joyce, like Gibbon, transfers his earlier narrative experimentation to the city context of Dublin. 

There are two other references to Joyce in ‘Literary Lights’: one at the beginning of the essay linked also to Proust, where the writer speculates that among the many unread published books, there may well have been overlooked ‘a Scots Joyce, a Scots Proust’; and later where he again mentions a possible future Scots James Joyce who will ‘electrify’ the Scottish scene, this time in company with a future Scots Virginia Woolf who will ‘astound’ it (LGGA 124, 127). In addition, in the essay ‘The Land’, Gibbon talks of the pleasure he himself finds in the ‘manipulation of wordson a blank page’ (LGGA 84 my italics), not, one notices, the manipulation of ideas. These few comments, when brought together with the innovative narrative methodology in all three books of the Quair, provide reasonable evidence, in my view, for Gibbon’s interest in literary form and for his awareness of and interest in the experimental fiction of the modernist period. And what is so interesting about A Scots Quair itself is the way in which Gibbon marries a Modernistic fictional form with a Marxist exploration of contemporary and historical forces, an exploration more often conducted in fiction through socialist-realist methodology.

The opening of the ‘Ploughing’ section of Sunset Song offers a fine example of his approach, which includes also a bringing together of the oral and the literary. Beginning, apparently, with the voice of a traditional third person narrator, the narrative quickly modulates into the generic ‘you’ and then into the voice of Chris herself: ‘Folk said there hadn’t been such a drought since eighty-three and Long Rob of the Mill said you couldn’t blame this one on Gladstone, anyway, and everybody laughed except father, God knows why’ (SS 25). One senses immediately that this will be a story of lives told from the inside, where the reader will also be encouraged to ‘belong’ as opposed to observing from a distance. The passage is compelling not only for its innovative communication of the rhythms of the north-east speaking voice, but also for its linguistic vibrancy and colour – we have a Scottish Fauve landscape personified here: 

Below and around where Chris Guthrie lay the June moors whispered and rustled and shook their cloaks, yellow with broom and powdered faintly with purple, that was the heather but not the full passion of its colour yet. And in the east against the cobalt blue of the sky lay the shimmer of the North Sea. that was by Bervie … 

Each word chosen communicates in its different way a countryside throbbing with life: the wind ‘shook and played in the moors and went dandering up the sleeping Grampians, the rushes pecked and quivered about the loch when its hand was upon them’; the everyday and the erotic mingle in the imagery of the parks which lie like a mythical earth-goddess ‘fair parched, sucked dry, the red clay soil of Blawearie gaping open for the rain that seemed never-coming’. And then, at the end of this introductory descriptive passage there is the alien technological image of the motor-car ‘shooming through [the roads] like kettles under steam’ – a motor-car which intrudes into the life of the community and almost knocks down Chae Strachan’s son, a narrative detail which, with hindsight, points imagistically towards the technology which is even then beginning to undermine traditional ways of farming and points also to the ending of the book where technology in the form of the armaments of war brings the final disintegration of the community. With this small, almost unnoticed imagistic detail, followed by the economic characterisation of Chae Strachan and Long Rob in their responses to the motorist and Chae’s court fine, Gibbon unobtrusively introduces the ideological context of the novel alongside its modernistic descriptive prose and focalisation. This is very clever writing which has to be read in its entirety to be fully appreciated. (SS 25-6)

The section which follows, and which switches anachronistically to the story of Chris’s parents, is even more important for an understanding at this early stage of the narrative of the way in which the ideological discourse is communicated through voice and characterisation. The narrative begins with the voice of Chris remembering her mother and then modulates into the voice of the mother herself, into her own memories as she had perhaps retold them to the younger Chris:

[B]ut fine she’d liked it, she’d never forget the singing of the winds in those fields when she was young or the daft crying of the lambs she herded or the feel of the earth below her toes. Oh, Chris, my lass, there are better things than your books or studies or loving or bedding, there’s the countryside your own, you its, in the days when you’re neither bairn nor woman. (SS 27)

This is followed by the meeting between her and Chris’s father, John Guthrie, at a ploughing match in which it is clear that the ‘brave young childe with a red head and the swackest legs you ever saw’ would carry off the prize. And he carries off more than the ploughing prize:

‘For as he rode from the park on one horse he patted the back of the other and cried to Jean Murdoch with a glint from his dour, sharp eye Jump up if you like. And she cried back I like fine! and caught the horse by its mane and swung herself there till Guthrie’s hand caught her and set her steady on the back of the beast.’ (SS 28) 

What is captured here is the immediate attraction between two young people, their impetuosity and their willingness to risk putting their lives together. From an ideological perspective, the ensuing narrative shows, economically but forcibly, how this early joy in each other becomes warped and destroyed by external forces they are unable to control – the struggle to farm unrewarding land, repeated pregnancies, physically difficult for the mother, the continuing extra mouths to feed. In addition, it demonstrates the way in which our lives can be determined not only by factors outwith our control, but also by our own unwillingness to open our minds to change, by our refusal to question dominant ideologies. In his poem ‘London’ William Blake speaks of ‘mind-forg’d manacles’ – ‘In every voice, in every ban,/The mind-forg’d manacles I hear’ (WBSP 36) – and Gibbon’s narrative shows that we can put these manacles on our own minds, as well as have them imposed from outside. John Guthrie, for example, refuses to question his Old Testament religion. His cruelty to his wife – ‘We’ll have what God in His mercy may send to us, woman. See you to that’ – is patterned in his cruelty to his son when the boy calls to the new horse ‘Come over, Jehovah’, a name whose wonderful sound seems to the child to match the wonder the animal holds for him, but a use which Guthrie can interpret only as blasphemous (SS 28, 30). John Guthrie is to a large extent portrayed negatively and might easily be dismissed as a cruel, authoritarian husband and father. Yet that brief capturing of the early love between the two young people remains in the mind as a touchstone of what might have been and it conditions us to think about why he has become the man he has. This portrayal of the Guthrie marriage is paralleled in a passage from Gibbon’s essay ‘The Land’ in which he talks of the cyclical struggle of marriage and breeding and endless work, and he adds: 

[I]t was a perfect Spenglerian cycle. Yet it was waste effort, it was as foolish as the plod of an ass in a treadmill, innumerable generations of asses. If the clumsy fumblements of contraception have done no more than break the wheel and play of that ancient cycle they have done much. (LGGA 93)

Marx’s view of the historical process was two-fold: on the one hand, it was deterministic, sweeping human beings along with it; on the other he believed that human beings should be active in helping to shape that historical process. Gibbon, too, in his essay ‘Religion’ stresses that ‘men are not merely the victims, the hapless leaves storm-blown, of historic forces, but may guide if they cannot generate that storm’ (LGGA 166); and it is this conflict between those who attempt to guide or shape events and those who refuse to question, who obstinately or apathetically hold to old ways of thinking and behaviour which is played out in the three books of A Scots Quair. In Sunset Song, for example, Chris is notable for the way she makes choices with regard to her own life. In the end she chooses to stay on the land, to put aside the ‘English Chris’; she asks Ewan to share her life and the farm with her; she learns how to control her fertility, so that she will not follow on her mother’s road; and she never loses her sense of self-possession, even in the darkest days of the ironically named ‘harvest’ section of the book. As has often been noted, Sunset Song is both the song of a young woman growing to adulthood and simultaneously the end of an old song for a rural way of life that is dying; but Gibbon’s Marxist insight in this book is that although the historical process was working against that way of life, it did not need to work to its end in the way it did. People could have responded to events in a way that would have shaped them less harshly. 

The harshest event in the narrative is, of course, the intrusion of the Great War into the life of community. In this depiction we find the hypocrisy and self-seeking, the readiness to adhere unthinkingly to religious and political propaganda that are characteristic of many contemporaneous accounts of the home front in that war, and which are found also in Gibbon’s comments about the war in his essays. Chris and Long Rob are branded as pro-German because they dare question gossip and newspaper stories; Chae Strachan emotionally thrusts aside his Socialism and rushes off to fight – behaviour which patterns Gibbon’s Scottish Scene comment about H.G. Wells: ‘That unique internationalist, Mr HG Wells, erupted like an urgent geyser – “every sword drawn against Germany is a sword drawn for peace!”’ (LGGA 145). Ewan, who is not a thinker like his wife, also submits to the hysteria, enlists and is eventually shot as a deserter in France. All the horror of the war is brought alive by its enactment through these characters we have come to know, and by our realisation that, although the war itself was beyond their control, in the areas of life where they did have choice and the opportunity to use their minds to question and evaluate, the inhabitants of Kinraddie mostly did not use that choice, or, as in the case of the home-front profiteers, they used choice to their own advantage, and to the ultimate hastening of the end of the farming way of life, as in the cutting down for short-term profit of the trees which sheltered the farming lands.

Sunset Song is heartbreaking in the tragedy of its ending, but that ending also leaves open the possibility of something positive coming out of the disaster with the forthcoming marriage of Chris to the new Christian Socialist minister Robert Colquhoun, who has been gassed in the war and has come home with a mission to make Christ’s gospel relevant to the everyday lives of people here on earth, a mission interrogated in the second book. 

Cloud Howe is probably the least talked about book in Gibbon’s trilogy. Edwin Muir called it ‘an unusually bad novel’ in the Listener of 9 August 1933. I think this is unfair. Certainly, from a formal perspective, it is not so immediately stiking as either the first or final book, and with Chris no longer at the centre of events, her perspective cannot be so immediate or meaningful as it was in Sunset Song. Other ways have to be found to bring this more fragmented community to us while attempting to hold on to the innovative narrative voice developed previously. Nevertheless, while the formal, modernistic attributes of this second book may be less coherent, what is of much interest is its presentation of religion and politics. 

Gibbon’s presentation of religion in Sunset Song and his Scottish Scene essay is a negative one. In Sunset Song, religion and its Kinraddie minister come to us like ‘flat’ characters and very often also in the guise of stereotypical music-hall Scotch comics. There is no rounded characterisation, no positive side seen. Kinraddie’s minister is always presented as pompous, ludicrous, lecherous, gluttinous and self-serving while the religion he preaches is the harsh creed that has warped unthinking adherents such as John Guthrie. In Cloud Howe, on the other hand, it is as if Gibbon is giving religion a second chance to prove itself as an ideology which can help shape a new society. Religion is brought to the foreground of the narrative, at least in its earlier sections, and the portrayal of Robert’s attempt to make it meaningful to the lives of the inhabitants of Segget is sympathetic, his own characterisation rounded. Yet while Robert may seem to have taken over from Chris as the dominant perspective in many parts of the novel, Chris’s point of view is still important, even if communciated obliquely. At the end of the ‘Cirrus’ chapter, for example, Chris in on the hill at the Kaimes ruins, thinking of Robert and his dream of a new age:

Was his dream just a dream? Was there a new time coming to the earth, when nowhere a bairn would cry in the night, or a woman go bowed as her mother had done, or a man turn into a tormented beast, as her father, or into a bullet-torn corpse, as had Ewan? A time when those folk down there in Segget might be what Robert said all might be, companions with God on a terrible adventure? 

Then, breaking into her thoughts: 

Suddenly, far down and beyond the toun there came a screech as the morning grew, a screech like a hungered beast in pain. The hooters were blowing in the Segget Mills. (CH 34)

This harsh interruption to Chris’s uncertain questioning – reminding the reader, perhaps, of Dickens’s ‘melancholy, mad elephants’ in the Coketown factories of Hard Times – appears to suggest through its imagery of ‘screeching’ and ‘hungered beast in pain’ that Robert’s dream may well be illusory, as indeed it proves to be. For the Segget people are divided among themselves, between the gentry and the incomers, the spinners. Robert is trusted by neither group and attacked by the more conservative because he identifies with the workers and tries to improve their conditions. But these coarsely depicted, uneducated workers don’t trust him either, because, ironically, this is not the traditional role they expect of a churchman. Their contempt, as portrayed in the narrative, may well derive from Gibbon’s own contempt for institutionalised religion and his view that ‘religion is no more fundamental to the human character than cancer is fundamental to the human brain’ (LGGA 152). One could say, therefore, that the failure of Robert’s dream is as much pre-determined by his author’s views on religion as it is by the fictional conflicts of Segget, for even at its most sympathetic with regard to Robert, the narrative, through Gibbon’s characterisation of Chris’s response, is negatively directed: 

Then he started talking of the Miners, of Labour, of the coming struggle in the month of May, he hoped and believed that that was the beginning of the era of Man made free at last, Man who was God, Man splendid again. Christ meant . . . when He preached the Kingdom of Heaven – He meant it on Earth. Christ was no godlet, but a leader and hero -’ (CH 143)

And as Robert talks out his dream: 

‘He forgot Chris, striding up and down the slope, excitement kindled in his harsh, kind eyes. And Chris watched him, standing, her stick behind her, her arms looped about it, saying nothing to him but hearing and seeing him, him and the hills and the song that both made. And suddenly she felt quite feared . . . ’ 

The ‘Stratus’ chapter is the political heart of Cloud Howe where the presentation of the failure of the General Strike reminds one of the similar scenario in the symbolic ‘Ballad of the Crucified Rose’ or ‘Ballad of the General Strike’ in MacDiarmid’s long poem of 1926, A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle. In Gibbon’s novel, the failure marks the end of Robert’s dream, the betrayal of the workers, partly through their own in-fighting but also betrayal by their own leaders and politicians. As in MacDiarmid’s ballad:

The vices that defeat the dream 
Are in the plant itsel’, 
till they’re purged its virtues maun 
In pain and misery dwell. (CP 121)

Politics and political factions are the stereotypical ‘flat charaters’ in Cloud Howe, as religion was in Sunset Song, and their aggressive, unthinking, prejudice-ridden characterisation brings one again to realise the necessity of interrogating existing ideologies and attitudes, of being prepared to cast the manacles from our own minds as well as fighting against external forces. There are no ideological positives in this novel – all conventional political parties are scorned, religion is seen ultimately as providing no answers, nationalism is rejected. We are left with the continuing personal self-possession of Chris: ‘She had found in the moors and the sun and the sea her surety unshaken, lost maybe herself, but she followed no cloud, be it named or unnamed’ (CH 173 ). We are also left with the impersonal rationality of her son Ewan and his is the philosophy which takes us into Grey Granite and into the interrogation of yet another possible way forward, this time the hard, impersonal ideology of Marxism, which patterns the flint and granite images associated with the characterisation of Ewan who takes up work in a city metal foundry. In contrast to the epilogue and prologue which separated the first two books in the trilogy, the second and third books flow into each other without obstruction, a structural device which emphasises the connectedness of their ideological discourse.

While the retrospective narrative pattern and the structuring through symbolic section titles are less significant in this book, Gibbon seems to me to be remarkably successful in his creation of an urban setting and in his translation of the modernistic free-flowing narrative voice from the rural to the urban scene. As in the earlier books, it is Chris’s perspective which opens the Grey Granite scene as she pauses for breath, not this time on the hillside at the Kinraddie Standing Stones, or the Kaimes ruins in the countryside above Segget, but at a turn in the steep steps which lead up to Windmill Place in the city of Duncairn. Immediately we feel we are in a new environment with the quicker pulse of the city, its damp, dirty fog and swish of traffic, its more expansive, yet fragmented setting where there is no possibility of a cohesive community, not even of the limited community there was in Segget. In Duncairn there is the impersonality of city streets, the perception of a variety of occupations and classes with separate interests, of townspeople who are unlikely ever to meet up with one another, of areas of the city outwith their experience. Despite the continuing modernistic elements in Gibbon’s narrative form, this is not the modernist city of alienated but fascinated intellectuals and artists found at the beginning of the century, not the ‘unreal city’ of Eliot’s The Waste Land. This is a proletarian city, a city of slums, of class warfare, of economic injustice and protest: the kind of city which provided a setting for the Socialist and Marxist debates and action of the interwar period. Ewan and Chris are considered ‘toffs’ (GG 21,23) in this new world, despite the fact that Chris has to work long hours in her boarding-house to make any kind of living and Ewan himself has chosen to enter a factory. This classification would appear to derive from their conscious sense of self, from an independence of mind alien to the urban worker at the bottom of the heap and which marks them out as different. Chris doesn’t understand the word ‘keelie’(GG 26) which Ewan uses of his fellow workers, although she understands his derisive intonation – something she thinks should not be used towards working people, of whom she considers herself one. In the exchanges between Ewan and the apprentices at Gowans and Gloag we are shown the narrow perspectives of the workers, their petty enmities and rivalries, their unwillingness to unite in the attempt to better their situation. The employers seem firmly in control here and we get an insight into how generations of industrial working, poor living conditions and lack of education can sap initiative, so that there remains little belief in the possibility of escape from what seems a predestined place in life. 

Grey Granite is of interest not only for its continuing ideological exploration, but also in relation to that question raised by Gibbon in his ‘Literary Lights’ essay: would he be able to transfer from a rural to urban context the narrative methodology he had developed for Sunset Song – that modernistic free indirect narrative voice with its mixture of Scots and English vocabulary and rhythms of the north-east speaking voice. As we have seen, Duncairn’s population is fragmented and there is no possibility of an overarching community voice such as was found in Kinraddie and to a lesser extent in Segget. Chris, who in theory still tells the story, has been removed from the centre of the action of Grey Granite, but even had she been more involved in the central happenings, the social fragmentation of the setting and characters would not have allowed her to act as principal focaliser. 

Despite these obstacles, Gibbon is remarkably successful in adapting his methodology to the new context. After its Chris-centred opening, focalisation in this last book moves from character to character and from one particular group to another. Thus we have perspectives from the foundry workers, often with an anonymous yet insider industrial worker’s voice; sometimes there is a kind of ‘group’ voice, reminding one of the Kinraddie community voice, yet representative only of a section of the townspeople here; sometimes the maid Meg is the focaliser, sometimes Ewan’s girlfriend and co-socialist worker Ellen; perspectives come also from Chris and Ewan and from a whole range of one-dimensional characters such as the boarding-house inmates, the provost and labour leader, the chief of police, the minister and his housekeeper. Undeveloped as they are, these characters still appear to speak to us for and by themselves, as opposed to being spoken about by a conventional omniscient narrative voice. This is an unusual and important step forward in portraying a fragmented urban environment, anticipating in many ways the later urban narratives of James Kelman. The language used also anticipates Kelman’s practice. It is still the remodelling of English into the rhythms and cadences of spoken Scots speech as Gibbon described it in ‘Literary Lights’, but these are now urban rhythms and the lexis includes words such as ‘keelie’ which Chris did not understand. 

Gibbon’s methodology can be seen to good effect in passages such as the Paldy Parish narrative in the early stages of the novel and the later Socialist march to the town hall (LGGA 19, 53). In the evocation of a hot June night in the Paldy Parish slum, focalisation moves from the man to his wife to his daughter, each of them focussing on their hopes and realising the privations of their present situation with the smells and the heat and the lack of privacy. The parents’ despairing memories and the determination of their daughter to escape their fate are brought alive by the synaesthetic imagery and the speech rhythms of the language. The terrible irony of the human situation is brought out later in the plot when the girl Meg becomes pregnant by her boyfriend, and so the cycle of entrapment starts up all over again. The presentation of the Socialist march is equally powerful. The main focaliser here is an anonymous man on the march, but his perspective is also a group perspective for the class of workers to which he belongs. In addition, included within his voice is the perspective of his wife – and of all the wives – as he remembers what shethinks of protest activity; he remembers also his comrades, the ones who emigrated and the ones who were killed in the war, he remembers the war; and all the time we are overhearing his thoughts and memories, the narrative is simultaneously bringing to us the crowds lining the streets, the noise of the drum and the singing and the traffic. And then, the slowing of the march, the disbelief when it begins to be diverted away from the Town Hall, the angry breaking of the line and the charge of the police horses. This is a wonderful passage of narrative which demands to be read aloud, savoured. I know of nothing like its effect in Scottish writing, except, perhaps, the effect achieved by Walter Scott’s narrative of the townspeople and the Porteous riots in The Heart of Midlothian. 

Like Cloud Howe, Grey Granite is most often compared unfavourably with Sunset Song, perhaps because of its overt ideological plot and focus on the characterisation of Ewan with the inevitable marginalisation of Chris; and perhaps because of a perceived need by readers and critics to find out exactly what message Gibbon meant to convey in the book and how we should interpret its ending with regard to his ideological beliefs. My own view is that it is more profitable to focus on his narrative methodology and what he achieves by it, and that interpretative questions will then look after themselves. For this trilogy is an ideological investigation in process, not one resolved, and in all three books it is the work’s imaginative narrative method which encourages us to explore both the many beauties of the text and the philosophical and ideological questions it raises. 

The Socialist march to the Town Hall transfers the struggle to find a new order of society from Cloud Howe’s religious search to the political context, but the interrogation of political systems in this final book is hardly more optimistic than the blind antagonisms which destroyed Robert in its predecessor. A recurring theme in all three books of the trilogy is that we imprison ourselves by our unwillingness to examine dominant ideologies and conventional responses. In Duncairn, the workers reject parties and policies which are attempting to bring about change – as we see also in the Paldy Parish view of the danger of the ‘Communionists’ (GG 20). There is hatred of the upper classes and the better off, yet, paradoxically, the workers give their votes to the very people to whose advantage it is to maintain the status quo. Ewan is at the heart of the struggle with his adherence to Communism, but his characterisation is such that it does not encourage us to believe that the resolution of social ills will lie with his impersonal ideology and its rejection of human needs and commitments. While he is characterised successfully as the flint-like personality needed for the ruthless pursuit of political necessities, the question as to whether the system to which he is committed is really what a world in economic and social crisis needs is left open by his author. 

And what of Chris? Are we to believe, as Angus Calder has suggested, that ‘her peasant values drag her into regression, stasis and death’(UF112); or is her return to Cairndhu and the croft where she was born to be interpreted as a rejection of Ewan’s Marxist solution and a validation of some kind of watered-down Golden Age Diffusionist theory? I think Chris’s situation at the end of Grey Granite should be freed from both such inflexible interpretations and considered in relation to Gibbon’s characterisation of women throughout the trilogy. For, on the whole, the women in the trilogy hold true to a sense of human values. The outstanding example of this is Chris. She appears to go along with the flow of history, yet she acts to shape her life where she can, choosing what is life-giving as opposed to what is imprisoning. Ellen, too, opts for the human as opposed to the impersonal ideology of Ewan and Gibbon himself said: ‘I’m a jingo patriot of planet earth: Humanity right or wrong!’ (LGGA 95) If one has to find ‘meaning’ in the trilogy, then, for me it is this focus on humanity which is the principal message of the text, not the endorsement of any particular ideology, a humanity communicated so variously and vitally by Gibbon’s innovative and modernistic narrative method, something quite new in Scottish fiction.

Abbreviations used in the paper

A – Edwin Muir, An Autobiography (London: Hogarth Press, 1956)

CH – Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Cloud Howe in A Scots Quair, ed. and introd. by Tom Crawford (Edinburgh: Canongate, 1995)

CP – Complete Poems of Hugh MacDiarmid, ed. Michael Grieve and W.R. Aitken (London: Martin, Brian & O’Keeffe, 1978)

GG – Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Grey Granite in A Scots Quair (1995)

LGGA – Lewis Grassic Gibbon, A Lewis Grassic Gibbon Anthology, ed. Valentina Bold (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2001)

SS – Sunset Song in A Scots Quair (1995)

UF – Angus Calder, ‘A Mania for Self-Reliance: Grassic Gibbon’s Scots Quair’ in The Uses of Fiction ed. Douglas Jefferson and Graham Martin (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1982) 

WBSP – William Blake: Selected Poems, ed. P.H. Butter (London: Dent, 1982)

Copyright © Margery Palmer McCulloch 2001

McCULLOCH, Margery Palmer, ‘The Novels of Neil Gunn’

by

Laverock 1, 1995 |
(The text of a paper given to the ASLS Schools Conference in 1992.)

After Edwin Morgan’s talk on MacDiarmid and the poets of the Scottish Renaissance, I want to move on to one of the principal fiction writers of that Renaissance, the novelist Neil M. Gunn. Gunn was a Highlander from Caithness in the north-east of Scotland and, like Edwin Muir, he wrote in English. Lewis Grassic Gibbon, who was sceptical about the possibility of a fiction revival in the Scots language – and sceptical also about his own ability to carry further the innovative linguistic medium he had developed in Sunset Song – called Gunn somewhat ironically ‘a brilliant novelist from Scotshire’. 

Gunn, however, was very much part of that early twentieth century movement for Scottish literary and cultural renewal. Indeed, Kurt Wittig, in his 1958 study The Scottish Tradition in Literature, found that Gunn ‘more clearly even than C.M.Grieve … embodies the aims of the Scottish Renaissance’. The fact that Gunn wrote in English meant that the Scots language did not become a sticking point for him as it did for MacDiarmid, polemically at least if not always in his poetic practice. While Gunn believed that language was important for any nation’s identity and that for many nations it was the principal marker of identity, his understanding was that identity goes beyond language to shared cultural traditions and social patterns developed over long periods of time; to our relationship with our geographical, physical environment and to the complex of ideas about human life which has evolved from shared living experiences. On the other hand, he believed with MacDiarmid that a nation’s literature and art could not be divorced from its social, economic and political life and that lasting regeneration of the nation as a whole. As with all these writers of the early twentieth century revival, Gunn was not interested in antiquarianism. His approach to the traditions of his people was quite different from, say, that of nineteenth century novelists such as Scott and Galt. Both these novelists expressed the desire to capture ways of life that were fast vanishing so that there would be some record of them. Similarly Stevenson in the Scots poetry of Underwoods gave as his objective the wish to be a makar in his own Scots tongue before that finally ceased to be. Gunn’s attitude was quite different. He commented of Scott’s historical novels that while their history was not untrue, it ‘no longer enriched or influenced a living national tradition’, that these novels could not be stepping stones to present or future developments. His own emphasis was on ‘growing and blossoming from our own roots’ as he described it in the essay ‘Highland Games’ on the need to draw on our traditions in order to move forward, but also not to be surprised if tradition sometimes took an unexpected turning in its move into the future.

As novelist and essayist, Gunn’s principal concern was with the Highlands, but this does not mean that his books are limited to a local interest. The details of setting and day-to-day experience may be foreign to a city reader, as the daily life of a novel set in France or Russia or early nineteenth century England may be foreign to a late twentieth century Scottish reader. But as with all good novels, the questions that his books pose about ‘where we came from, where we are going and, since we are not alone, but members of a countless family, how we should live with one another’ are relevant to us all – Highlanders, foreigners and city-dwellers alike. The quotation I’ve just used – “Where we came from,where we are going and … how we should live with one another” comes, not from Gunn but from the poet Edwin Muir’s autobiography – a book which I would very much like to see on Higher and Sixth Year syllabuses, along, perhaps with his fine Glasgow novel Poor Tom. There is a close relationship between Muir and Gunn in their sense of the importance of the community, of a coming to self-knowledge and a sense of individuality through the security and co-operative traditions which a small community can offer. 

I’ve been asked to talk today about one or two Gunn books which might be usefully added to the Scottish literature texts studied in schools, with particular reference to the Higher and Sixth Year Studies areas. When I begin to think about this, I found myself making out a case in my mind for about ten out of Gunn’s twenty novels – something which wouldn’t be very helpful to you with the short preparation and teaching time at your disposal and which would extend this conference into next week at least! It does indicate, however, how many texts are awaiting discovery by Scottish students in the Gunn area alone. And this is even more the situation in relation to Scottish literature as a whole.

In the end, I decided to talk initially about two novels, Bloodhunt, Gunn’s penultimate novel, and Highland River, a very important pivotal work which won the James Tait Black Memorial Award and the Saltire Society’s first book award when it was published in 1937 and gave Gunn the confidence to give up his civil service employment and concentrate on his writing. First of all, then, Bloodhunt.

Bloodhunt was published in 1952, two years before Gunn’s final novel The Other Landscape. Gunn’s late books are on the whole preoccupied with what he found to be the destructiveness of modern life, with the shallow values engendered by urbanisation and an increasingly materialistic way of life, with the political cynicism, suspicion and fear of the Cold War period in the years immediately after the second World War. In addition, from his beginnings as a novelist Gunn’s books had a philosophical dimension, and in these late novels this becomes increasingly overt until in The Other Landscape, for example, a concern with the narrative form and convincing characterisation and incident seems to be jettisoned in favour of the pursuit of a philosophical search. Although they have their enthusiastic supporters, I don’t myself find these late novels among the best of Gunn’s books, and in particular I find that the Highland characters and attitudes which are used in them as counterbalances to destructive urban values are often sentimentalised, seen as if by the tourist from outside the culture, as opposed to being vitally dramatised from within as they were in the earlier Highland novels. 

Bloodhunt, on the other hand, is quite a different matter. This novel too is set in the post-war years of Cold War and nuclear menace – close to the date of Edwin Muir’s ‘The Horses’, and as in ‘The Horses’, its emphasis is on a new beginning, a putting behind of past treachery and a moving forward with human love and co-operation. It is set entirely in the Highlands and its perspective is an inside one. Although it has a philosophical subtext, this is not intrusive but grows out of the action of the narrative. Unlike the early Highland books, however, its principal character is not a young boy growing up in the Highlands, but an old sailor, Sandy, who has returned to his birthplace in the Highlands after a life at sea where he has experienced not only the rigours of that occupation but also the personal suffering and tragedy brought about by the war. Therefore, although he reminds one at times of Old Hector in the early books – and Gunn, it seems to me, is at his best when dealing with the extremes of the age spectrum, the young boy and the old man – unlike Hector, and in keeping with the wider settings and concerns of Gunn’s late books, Sandy is experienced in the world outside the Highlands as well as being rooted in the Highland culture, and this gives his portrait and his judgements an additional strength. 

I chose this novel because it is one of my own favourites and because it seemed to me that its starting scenario is one that would be readily understood by today’s senior school and college students: a fight by two young men over a girl, the ex-girlfriend of one of them who has been made pregnant and then abandoned by the other. In the fight the father of the girl’s child is killed and his killer takes to the wild country beyond the small town in an attempt to escape the law. There he is relentlessly pursued by the dead man’s brother, the local policeman, who turns what should be an objective search in order to arrest and bring a young man to justice into a menacingly cold yet impassioned, and in the end demented, blood hunt. The horror and tension in the plot are augmented by the fact that it is set in a time when hanging is still the ultimate punishment for murder. The fact that Allan has deliberately sought out his former girlfriend’s seducer leaves little hope for a plea of accidental killing. 

One of the striking elements in any Gunn novel is its opening setting of the scene, whether the stillness and space and light of the northern landscape in the ninth century Sun Circle, the atmospheric loneliness of the boy on the beach at ebb-tide in Morning Tide or the excitement of Kenn’s fight with the salmon in Highland River. Bloodhunt is no exception and its opening pages draw the reader immediately into the tension of the unfolding drama. As with Dark Mhairi in Butcher’s Broom, the brothers in the short story ‘The Dead Seaman’ and Jeems and his niece Maggie in the Grey Coast, Sandy lives on the periphery of the community. His croft is situated in the uplands above the town of Hilton where the tragedy has taken place, with only one or two scattered crofts for company. This positioning of Sandy outside the town creates both a spatial perspective in the action, where we have a sense of comings and goings between croft and town, and also a tension in that the central drama is played out in an enclosed theatre, on Sandy’s croft and the moorland surrounding it, cut off from the town and its everyday life. This physical separation also emphasises Sandy’s moral separation from the community. Sandy is a man who makes his own judgements, not according to any specific creed, religious or political, but according to his experience of men and women and human relationships in a long and eventful life.

The opening scene of the novel conveys an atmosphere of isolation and menace. In addition, and paradoxically, there is a potential for comedy of a kind here as more obviously elsewhere in the novel, a comedy which comes over through Sandy’s bewildered responses – and I seem to remember that the television film of Bloodhunt played up that potential. I think, on the other hand, that the scene has to be played straight. If there is any comedy, it’s the kind of involuntary comedy which heightens tension as opposed to being a relief from it, the shaky laugh which escapes from us unawares in a situation which we don’t quite know how to handle:

‘Your brother – murdered!’ So great was the shock that Sandy’s understanding seemed blinded by the darkness. ‘I can’t see you. Come in.’ 
     ‘I want to look in the barn first. Give me the key.’ 
     ‘The key? Wait till I get my boots on.’ 
     ‘Just give me the key.’ 
     Buvt Sandy had turned back and as he pulled on his boots wondered where on earth the key was. Certainly he had not locked the barn door that day, or yesterday, or any day his fumbling mind could think of. The menace of the policeman was about him, about the lads he had known so long, and he could not gather his wits.

In its economic way this scene sets up the oppositions in the action. Like Sandy we find ourselves recoiling from the cold, unfeeling menace in Nicol’s voice and actions, instinctively moving on to the other side despite his telling of the killing. Then, through Sandy’s responses, we find out something about the killer, Allan. Clearly he is one of the lads who have been in the habit of coming around Sandy’s croft, helping him with small tasks, hiding their poaching gear in his barn. There is a sense communicated of their vitality and warmth, the affection between them and Sandy; no warning of a killer mentality. From the outset, then, Gunn manages to put the reader, with Sandy, on Allan’s side, despite the seriousness of his crime. For Allan’s actions have come ultimately out of anger at the wrong done to his girlfriend. However misguided and however tragic the outcome, it could be argued that his fight was a fight for human values and against betrayal, while Nicol’s hunt for Allan is utterly devoid of humanity, utterly ruthless. And, of course, the situation is made unredeemable in view of the death penalty. Sandy’s shielding of the young man is not an ignoring or condoning of his action, but a response to the human spark which he knows from experience is in the boy:

Everything was very quiet and still, the bed, the dresser, the backs of the books on the second shelf … He came back thinking there was nothing in the books which could deal with this kind of moment; nothing at all to dispel what came out of it, the awfulness of this human act. 
     More than that and deeper; nothing to explain why he himself had, beyond thought, before its grip could get him, so instinctively shielded the murderer. All the time the policeman had been with him, he had refused to look beneath the surface, to ask himself what he was doing. Why? he asked himself now and out of his bleak misery answered, Goodness knows. 
     His thought became confused; brought up images from his past that swirled and vanished; a figure running along a quay in a foreign port, a revolver shot … 
     What had possessed Allan? Allan, of all the young men who had come about the place, the laughing face, the bright one. Sun on the grass. They said he could go through a pool like an otter. He had seen him grow from the age of fourteen, when he had left school. Good hands on him. He had worked in a garage in Hilton and done a repair for a passing motorist that got him a foreman’s job in a garage in Perth – about a year ago. He could hardly be twenty-five.
     Allan would never have had a knife on him. Just his hands.

From this opening you can see that there is the promise of a suspenseful, involving book, and this is a promise which is fulfilled as Sandy’s croft becomes the focus of the action, with this constant unannounced visits of Nicol the policeman, often in the dark of night; with Allan’s fleeting visits for food from his hiding place on the Crannog, his physical and nervous health increasingly declining with his ordeal; and finally the arrival of the pregnant Liz, fleeing her parents’ house and instinctively seeking out the old man she had heard Allan speak of in the past and who was known and sometimes made fun of in the community for his eccentric ways. With the birth of Liz’s child, Sandy finds his emotional allegiance gradually retreating from the doomed Allan – though he tries to help him to the end – and fixing itself on Liz and her child and the future they represent.

There are also many genuinely comic passages in the novel involving Sandy and his widow neighbour and his town acquaintances, and as always in Gunn, there are splendid descriptions of the natural landscape around Sandy’s croft which provide an unforced context for Sandy’s philosophical speculations as well as the visual immediacy of the hunt’s setting.

In addition, I think the ending of this book would provide material for discussion among pupils or students, and I would expect that interpretations and reactions in regard to this ending would be varied and perhaps even quite violent. What happens is that Sandy, who has become very busy and preoccupied with Liz and her baby, begins to worry about the non-appearance of Allan to collect the tweed suit he has left for him in the barn, and goes out one day with his dog and telescope into the hills around the croft. Through his telescope he sees the now mentally unhinged Nicol fighting with Allan in the land close to the crannog and dragging his body into a hollow. Sandy finds the place of the fight but is too late to save Allan who is dead. He cleans the body and carefully conceals it under a ledge so that the birds of prey will not get at it, then he returns to the croft. As he comes close to his home, he hears Liz singing an old lullaby to her child and this confirms him in his decision not to report what he has seen in the hills, but to leave Allan’s body to be found in time, if it ever is found, and therefore to allow people to believe that he had died from exposure or exhaustion, or in the event of its not being found, had escaped the hunt. 

The ending of the book is very moving and is entirely in keeping with the philosophy of the principal character, Sandy, whose own earlier harsh experiences had taught him the value of life and love, and it is in keeping too with Gunn’s philosophy in these late books which emphasises the potential for human love and new beginnings as opposed to an engagement with tragedy in human life. Liz’s child has been brought into the world in the darkest of circumstances and in the lowliest of places – Sandy’s barn – and, like the Christ-child, has been placed in a manger of hay in that barn. The boy is therefore, like that earlier Christ-child, a symbol of hope, of new life, of the fact that life must and will go on, and a symbol too of the love which enables human life to go on. In this interpretation, Sandy’s decision not to tell of the fight and killing of Allan but to go forward with the hope symbolised in Liz and her child is a fitting ending to the philosophical theme of the novel. (I would add a warning, however, that any association with the biblical Christ in this imagery is, I believe, symbolic and should not be forced. Gunn’s novels do not have a Christian context as Edwin Muir’s poetry does, and the suggestion of Jesus’ birth which is inevitably called to mind here has its place as one of the world’s great positive myths of hope as opposed to being a reference to a specific element of Christian doctrine or belief as held by the author.)

The ending, however, is also an open ending in that we are taken to the doorway, so to speak, of this new life, but we do not enter it and see it evolve. And this is where I myself find – and perhaps you and some of your students may also find – the ending ultimately unsatisfying, both artistically and psychologically. For, in addition to the human positives he has put forward in the person of Sandy, Liz and her child and the supportive relationships Sandy enjoys with his neighbours, Gunn has also painted a terrifying picture of human obsession and alienation in the person of the policeman Nicol. In his unannounced appearances on Sandy’s croft, his ruthless persistence in the hunt, even when ordered on leave in order to rest, in the comments by neighbours and townspeople about his loss of mental balance in relation to the hunt, the references to his mother’s equal obsessiveness with regard to her dead son and the search for his killer, we are presented with a deranged personality who seems to epitomise both the irrationality and machine-like impersonality of human evil, the kind of evil of the concentration camps, still near in memory to bloodhunt’s 1952 date, and the kind of evil we are seeing again today in the breakdown of civilisation in the former Yugoslavia. Nicol, therefore, seems to me the flaw in Gunn’s ending. For there can be little confidence that he will follow Sandy’s road and turn towards a new beginning with the newly born child. For this child is his brother Robert’s child and the child of the girl who has brought about that brother’s death. Will Nicol’s obsession allow him to leave these two unmolested? Will his mother’s obsession with her dead son allow her to leave in peace his illegitimate son and her grandson?

The only possible way forward for Sandy’s – and Gunn’s – ending, it seems to me, would be the death of Nicol as well as that of Allan, both deaths allowing the past to be quiet and the new beginning to unfold. Yet even here, it could be argued, there is an injustice to Allan. He has killed and has suffered for it and his name will remain besmirched by that killing. Yet he has also been killed, violently and outside the law, without the opportunity to plead in his defence, and his killer has been the authority whose job it should have been to uphold justice. The violence he has himself done lives on after him, but the violence and injustice done to him dies with him, while his killer lives on – a greater menace to society in his obsessive mental state than Allan himself would have been had he escaped the net put around him.

Although I have raised my own doubts about Gunn’s ending in this way, I would not see this as a negative response, but one which, if explored with students, should result in a much stronger involvement with the book and in fruitful discussions about violence and good and evil in society – and with particular relevance to the pressures put on young people trying to find their way to maturity in our contemporary society. One of the fruitful outcomes of the tide of theorizing which has swept over and at times nearly swamped literature and criticism in recent years is that we are now more likely to be aware of plurality of meaning in a text, less likely to feel we have to submit to one ‘true’ interpretation (something which was a negative legacy of early twentieth century New Criticism approaches). We can explore the silences of a text such as Bloodhunt, examine what the text says that it does not appear to say, and in doing this we can come to a deeper awareness of the issues it raises without distorting or simplifying these. It’s a fine book and I would very much recommend it for Higher and/or Sixth Year Studies. The fact that there is a video of the book available might be an added attraction, but here I would think one would have to use the film carefully. My memory of it is that it did tend to simplify the issues and at times try too hard for comedy. On the other hand it could provide useful material for a discussion of the relationship between book and film and of changes in emphasis as a result of change in medium.

I understand that the two Gunn texts prescribed for Sixth Year Studies at the present time are The Silver Darlings published in 1941, and Highland River of 1937. Neither is an ‘easy’ text, and both present student and teacher with quite different challenges. In The Silver Darlings the challenge is one of length in a tight curriculum and the stamina demanded of a reader over its 584 pages. On the other hand, the book has a number of advantages as a school or college text. Firstly, it is an heroic tale, an epic both in its entirety and in several of its various episodes. Its characters can at times be larger than life, as one finds in epic poetry or fiction, but they are also entirely convincing men and women, and so we do identify with them and take part in their adventures and journeys – the heroic journey undertaken by Catrine, for example, from Helmsdale over the ord of Caithness to the land-safety of Kirsty’s croft in Dunster or Dunbeath; the child Finn’s growth to boyhood and manhood; his journey to Watten to seek the cholera doctor during his mother’s illness and his sea journeys beyond the Pentland Firth first of all with Roddie, then alone with his own crew. Gunn’s novels as a whole tend to episodic structure, a feature perhaps inherited from oral tradition, and this structural pattern would allow one to concentrate on selected episodes for detailed study once students are familiar with the discourse of the novel as a whole. Despite its intimidating length, the novel must be read as a whole in order to grasp fully what it is about and how the author communicates its meaning to us. But once the overall pattern is taken in, then it does offer scope for concentration on selected areas and/or specific themes. The novel also offers the opportunity in a personal reading section to do background research into the Clearances, the impulse behind the book, and also into the growth of the herring fishing along the north-east Caithness coast. And if there should be opportunities for school trips, then the Caithness coast and hinterland is a marvellous area for exploration, with the remains of the Clearance village at Badbea, where both animals and children had to be tethered in case they wandered away and fell over the steep cliffside; the Whalligoe steps outside Wick where the fisherwomen carried the fish on their backs up approximately 365 steps hewn out of that same cliff; the splendid Fisheries Museum in Wick and the Crofting Museum just outside Dunbeath, Gunn’s home village; the beauty of the empty straths such as Dunbeath Strath and Strathnaver and the eerie experience of crawling inside the ancient burial mounds at Camster Cairns. A visit to Caithness is a marvellous journey into history.

Highland River is a text of much more manageable proportions – 256 pages in my 1937 edition. It also has some splendidly vital and immediate sections which deal with the boyhood of Kenn in the Strath of Dunbeath. Its challenge for pupils may well be in its overt philosophical nature, which in the early and closing sections of the novel can be very demanding; and in the way Gunn plays with the time in the novel, weaving backwards and forwards without preparation or explanation.

As with Bloodhunt, I am myself very fond of Gunn’s Highland River, and if my arm were to be twisted I would probably own it as my first choice among Gunn’s novels. It is, however, not so well known as The Silver Darlings, about which there is a fair amount of written comment. I think, therefore, that I should say something about it, as opposed to The Silver Darlings, in the hope that some of you will encourage your sixth year pupils to read it for their certificate studies.

Unlike Bloodhunt and The Silver Darlings there isn’t really a storyline in this novel, which is concerned with the adult Kenn’s search for his own identity and for the source of life, a search which he undertakes through a re-entering of his boyhood experiences in the Strath of Dunbeath and a following of his Highland river to its source in the moors beyond the Strath. I think, therefore, that the best way for me to talk about it to you here, is for me to bring out some of the themes and narrative patterns which you might want to explore with your pupils.

First of all we have, as we had in Bloodhunt a splendidly atmospheric and evocative opening section which sets the course for the novel as a whole and draws the reader into an intimacy and involvement with the principal character, the boy Kenn. Here is Kenn, on a cold morning, unexpectedly thrown into an epic struggle with his first salmon as he sleepily and reluctantly goes to the river pool for water for the breakfast tea.

Out of that noiseless world in the grey of the morning, all his ancestors came at him. They tapped his breast until the bird inside it fluttered madly; they drew a hand along his hair until the scalp crinkled; they made the blood within him tingle to a dance that had him leaping from boulder to boulder before he rightly knew to what desperate venture he was committed.

Against all the odds, Kenn lands the salmon and ‘from that day the river became the river of life for Kenn’. Although he was too young to realise it at the time, it was his first initiation into the traditions of his people and the beginning of his search for his own identity and his relationship to his community and its history. At this point, I should perhaps say that it did occur to me when re-reading this book with the response of today’s school pupils in mind, that the killing of the salmon might well arouse ‘animal rights’ and ‘anti-blood sport’ responses among city pupils in particular. I don’t know what one can do about this except encourage students to read on and hope that in the end what may well appear to us as a cruel killing of a trapped creature and an exultation in that killing, will be seen in the context of a way of life in which hunting is both one of the traditions of the people and a necessary activity for the provision of food in a fishing and crofting community where the economy is at a survival level only, and sometimes hardly even that. The way of life depicted is a very different way of life from that in our late twentieth century mechanised, materialistic, television culture, and we have to make an imaginative leap to enter into the experience it offers. On the other hand, it may well be that this will arouse no adverse comment at all.

One of the principal themes in the novel is identity, and how one’s sense of self and community is achieved. Gunn presents this theme in part through his view of the education system and the way in which this neglects the environment out of which the children come, forcing upon them instead an alien culture and detailed information which has no meaning and therefore no staying power in their minds. Instead of Kenn’s teacher using the illustration of the life cycle and spawning habits of the salmon to give the pupils a scientific awareness of the phenomenon which they saw happening before their eyes in their everyday lives, he beats Kenn sadistically because the boy is abstracted from his schoolwork in his wonder at his fight with the salmon and his achievement in capturing it. Education for these Highland pupils is ‘Leicester is famous for boots’, a meaningless piece of information which Kenn finds himself repeating when he regains consciousness many years later after a gas attack in the First World War. It is not the richness of the history and geography and animal and plant life in their crofting and fishing village:

It was remarkable how the races that had gone to his making had each left its signature on the river bank; often over and over, as children on gates and walls scrawl the names of those amongst them who are ‘courting’. 
     On one side of the harbour mouth the place-name was Gaelic, on the other side it was Norse. Where the lower valley broadened out to flat, fertile land the name was Norse, but the braes behind it were Gaelic. A mile up the river where the main stream was joined by its first real tributary, the promontory overlooking the meeting of the waters was crowned by the ruins of a broch that must have been the principal stronghold of the glen when the Picts, or perhaps some earlier people, were in their heyday. 
     And all these elements of race still existed along the banks of the river, not only visibly in the appearance of the folk themselves, but invisibly in the stones and earth … 
     A story could have been made of all this for the scholars, but in Kenn’s time no teacher ever attempted it. The Vikings were a people like the Celts or the Picts, concerning whom a few facts had to be memorised. But these facts were really very difficult to memorise, because they had no bearing on anything tangible. They were sounds in the empty spaces of history.

If one of the values of history, therefore, is the understanding of self and community which a study of our past can bring, this was something entirely lacking in the formal education of these Highland children – and still lacking, I’m afraid, in the schooling of too many of our Scottish children even today.

Another area of interest in this book, and one which could well make a useful topic for personal research and reading is this picture of a very specific but different environmental and social background which is communicated. We have the pattern of a life-style based on crofting and fishing, on equality in the community and co-operation among its members. Opposed to the sense of community among the people is the Estate with its factor, a force to be reckoned with on rent days and in the event of being caught poaching, but otherwise ignored by the people. There is a;so the sense of a chain of being in the natural world, a life system in which Kenn’s killing of the salmon and the trapping of rabbits have their place. There is an awareness of the rhythm of the seasons and the natural world which has been lost by town children, an awareness which is unconscious yet deeply felt by the children of the Strath. And the life-cycles of animal and plant worlds provide opportunities for initiation into the various stages of life for the boys who are themselves part of that animal world, again a contact with the primary manifestations of nature which has inevitably passed from our urban lives. I think we have to make an imaginative leap into this world which is in many ways foreign to us, but which in the end enriches our own experience through our imaginative involvement with it.

One principal feature of the organisation of the narrative of Highland Riveris the handling of time. The narrative is not structured chronologically. Nor does it operate by way of clearcut flashbacks from a specific point in the present and with an eventual return to the main narrative, as we have in Gunn’s The Serpent, for example. It doesn’t draw attention to its time shifts as Proust does in his A la recherche du temps perdu with his conscious use of verb tenses which we have to analyse to find out just where we are in the time spectrum of the story. Rather the narrative of Highland River slips backwards and forwards anachronistically without preparation or emphasis between time present, time past and time future. As I mentioned earlier Gunn’s novels are on the whole organised with an episodic structure and so we have brief episodes of childhood experience with the boy Kenn and his friend Beel, or with Kenn and his brother Angus, moving without pause or preparation into episodes of Kenn at war, Kenn at secondary school or university, Kenn returning to his Highland river in later life, and back again into childhood experience,and so on. Once we accept that there is no chronological pattern to the narrative, we move easily with it and what is created in the end is a sense that time is continually present, that we have within us time past, time present and future, existing simultaneously and interacting with each other to make us what we are. Time in this novel is therefore both an element in the formal organisation of the novel, and also a philosophical element in the novel. In a school study, I think it would be important to get students to be conscious of this narrative pattern and to investigate what its effect is both in the overall impact of the novel and at the various points in the narrative where these time shifts occurs, and how this compares with a more conventional pattern of chronological narrative. 

The first of these time shifts occurs in chapter 3 of the book, after Kenn’s epic fight with the salmon and his sadistic beating at the hands of the schoolmaster, a beating out of the spirit of innocence and joy in the child which is echoed in the shift forward to the First World War and Kenn’s service at the age of 17 as a gunner. I’ve always had difficulty with Gunn’s portrayal of Kenn’s war service, finding an almost Biggles-like exuberance and insouciance in Kenn’s attitude to danger and death, and a not altogether sympathetic treatment of the breakdown of Kenn’s older brother Angus as a result of what could only have been shell-shock in the trenches. It would be most interesting to read these passages with today’s young adults and receive their responses to the action here. On the other hand, re-reading them myself before writing this talk and after the passage of some time, I suppose I am more conscious now of the youthful inexperience of Kenn and the relationship between this and the similar naive, exuberant enthusiasm with which so many young men rushed into service in the First World War, to be caught up in a horror and tragedy which they could never have imagined. If using this book with fifth or sixth year pupils, it might be useful to introduce simultaneously some of the war poems from World War One from an anthology such as Up the Line to Death, for example, which reproduces both the early naive fervour and the disillusionment and tragedy and anger which so quickly followed.

What you might find most difficult about this book from a teaching point of view is how to deal with its philosophical ideology, both overt and implicit. The best way into this may be through a comparison with Wordsworth – If school pupils still read Wordsworth! – and the romantic period view of childhood as a period of innocence and essential at-one-ness with the natural world and the sources of life; and in particular Wordsworth’s view of Nature as a teacher, who leads her foster children to maturity through experiences of joy and fear. I’m thinking here, for example, of the boat-stealing or trap-setting episodes in the Prelude where, as in Kenn and Angus’s salmon poaching expeditions there is a distinction drawn between social fear and primal fear – social fear, the fear of the gamekeeper and of being caught which is Angus’s weakness, and primal fear, the sense of intruding into the natural world’s privacy which terrifies Wordsworth’s boy. As they mature, Kenn and Angus have no primal fear, being at home in their natural world, although they always respect that world’s identity and difference, whether in the woods of the Strath or in their delicate handling of and wonder at the fragile beauty of birds’ eggs. There is a sense conveyed that Kenn’s adult strength and his scientific mind have grown out of that childhood intimacy with the natural environment. Gunn, however, does not idealise this environment or suggest that it is an essential condition for maturity and self-determination in adult life. We are conscious of the decline of the fishing way of life and the emigration forced upon many of the young men of the community, including Angus. My previous unhappiness at what has seemed to me to be an unfair connection between Angus’s boyhood weakness in the face of the gamekeepers and his breakdown in the Normandy trenches may be Gunn’s way of pointing to the importance of individual temperament and psychology and an avoidance of a romantic period overstatement of the relationship between nature and the growing child. Nevertheless, in the vital accounts of Kenn’s boyhood one has the sense of a child discovering himself for himself, and without the imposition of an adult conception of life which is almost unavoidable in a late twentieth-century town or suburban life-style of television, concrete playgrounds and organised indoor activities. Despite their poverty, Kenn and his friends are privileged in the way they are able to keep what Gunn called in The Atom of Delight the circle of their second self unbroken and outside adult influence until they are ready for it.

As in all his books, Gunn in this novel consciously puts aside a view of life which engages with tragedy. In the later sections of the novel the adult Kenn converses with his scientific superior Radzyn, a European who is much more widely read in literature and philosophy than Kenn, an introspective, almost neurotic figure who cannot accept that the mystery of life is beyond our understanding and who cannot accept the religious explanations offered to us. Kenn – and his author also – does not accept religious explanations of life and how we should live it either, but he seems able to live with the mystery. And for him, tragedy in human life is just something which is part of the whole, about which nothing can be done but accept it. His emphasis is therefore, as in Bloodhunt also, on life itself, its potential and its continuation. When he tells Radzyn that he is going to search for the source of his Highland river, he says casually that he expects to find nothing when he gets to the end of his journey, no vision such as a religious traveller might expect to find. And when he does eventually make his way from the harbour up the river to the Broch pool, up the Strath to the moors behind and eventually to the rivers source, it at first seems as if his intuition was right. Somewhat to his chagrin the narrowed stream does suddenly disappear into the ground with no apparent resurfacing. As he walks on, however, he finds to his delight that it mysteriously resurfaces and flows into a deep pool with sparkling crushed quartz shingle shore. In the ending of the philosophical theme of this novel, therefore, we find an anticipation of Bloodhunt’s ending and Gunn’s recurring emphasis on the continuation of life, on its mystery and delight. I’m not myself convinced that this is a philosophy which is sustainable in view of the tragic history of the Scottish Highlands and indeed of human history world-wide, and in some of Gunn’s late novels it does lead to a too easy application of the happy ending of romance fiction. It is, on the other hand, a fitting ending for Highland River and combines the scientific investigation of the adult Kenn with the delight and acceptance of the natural world which derives from his childhood intimacy with the river and its strath.

I hope this comment on the philosophical motifs of Highland River has not been off-putting, for any difficulty they might present is in the end counterbalanced by the quality of Gunn’s descriptive writing in the book, in the way he can bring both the hardness of the sea coast and the richness of the river uplands before the reader; and in the way he draws us into the boy Kenn’s childhood experience so that the adult Kenn’s search in the end becomes our search also. It is a fine novel and one that deserves to be much better known.

Finally and briefly, I would like to draw your attention to The Man Who Came Back, an anthology of previously uncollected essays, short stories and descriptive pieces which I put together for the Gunn centenary year and which was published by Polygon in the autumn of 1991. I feel a bit hesitant about recommending this, because I wouldn’t like you to think I was trying to drum up sales! In fact I don’t need to drum up sales because it has proved a very popular addition to Gunn’s work in print and has been doing well. The collection, which is in paperback, contains a short introduction to Gunn and has place in early twentieth century literature, together with some comments on the pieces included, and you might well find this a useful way into Gunn for pupils and for yourselves if you are not familiar with his work. With the exception of one, the essays selected were for some reason omitted from Alistair McCleery’s more extensive collection Landscape and Light, but I have from my very first acquaintance with them been conscious of their significance for Gunn’s view of tradition and identity and the importance of growing and blossoming from our cultural roots. Essays such as ‘Highland Games’, ‘The Ferry of the Dead’, ‘Gentlemen – The Tourist’, ‘Preserving the Scottish Tongue: A Legacy and How to Use It’ all explore the nature of our traditions and how we can preserve these and yet develop from them. ‘Nationalism and Internationalism’ takes up the thorny question of nationalism, a risky question in the climate of the thirties, but still of relevance today as we see European countries moving one step forward to European unity and two backwards to national sovereignty and traditions. Gunn’s view, of much controversial relevance in the 1930s when international socialism was fashionable and fear of the jingoism which had brought about the First World War was still alive, was that true internationalism cannot be an abstract impersonal concept which irons out all differences and individual qualities. It must spring from a confidence in one’s own national identity and a readiness to welcome and respect the identities of others. For Gunn, ‘a nation’s traditions are the natural inspirations of its people … And it is only when a man is moved by the traditions and music and poetry of his own land that he is in a position to comprehend those of any other land, for already he has the eyes of sympathy and the ears of understanding.’

As well as several essays which are of relevance to the debates still being carried on today, there are others which describe some of the working traditions of the Highlands such as ‘At the Peats’ and ‘White Fishing on the Caithness Coast’. Others are more purely descriptive pieces such as ‘My Bit of Britain’ and ‘The Dunbeath Coast’ and demonstrate Gunn’s amazing ability to pull his reader into the landscape or seascape being described.

There are in addition several short stories which were not collected by Gunn, I think because he used them in a modified form in later novels. In my view some of these stories are much stronger in their original short story form and deserve recognition in their own right. ‘The Dead Seaman’ is a tense tale of human isolation in the midst of the pettiness and unthinking cruelty which one can find in small communities; ‘The Man Who Came Back’ explores the theme of the lad of pairts and the belief that to succeed one must go away from one’s small home community to success in the big city. ‘The Boat’ you will recognise as an early version of the opening of The Silver Darlings and pupils studying that novel might well want to consider how the story is changed by its incorporation into the larger novel. ‘Strath Ruins’, a poaching story, could be used to introduce younger Standard Grade pupils to Gunn, as, of course, could the essays ‘At the Peats’ and ‘White Fishing’ and the descriptive pieces, all of which could form the basis of lessons exploring the pupils’ own relationship to their home communities and their working life. All in all, it seems to me that this collection could be a useful companion to individual Gunn novels and contribute to the pupils’ research into the background which produced these novels.

This has been a somewhat restricted yet crowded introduction to Gunn, but I hope that I have said enough to persuade those of you who do not know his work that he is a writer worth adding to your Scottish literature texts. And for me, one of the most significant aspects of his writing is that it is dealing with questions which are still of primary relevance to us in the 1990s, not only in Scotland where the national identity and self-determination debate is still continuing, but also in Europe where a similar debate is being conducted, and in our attempts to deal with deprivation and loss of community and traditional living patterns in the Third World. He is very much a writer who fulfilled the forward-and outward-looking aims of the Scottish Renaissance.

Copyright © Margery Palmer McCulloch 1992

McGONIGAL, James, ‘Edwin Morgan Poems, National 5’

by

A paper given at the Schools Conference of the Association for Scottish Literary Studies, 3rd October, 2015

I want to offer a slightly different approach to the six poems of Edwin Morgan that are now set texts at National 5. Line-by-line analysis has been done elsewhere, both online and in classrooms, so it seems important to think about providing some fresh perspectives on poems that (we might feel) have already been analysed within an inch of their lives. I am thinking here mainly of three of the four poems of Glasgow life that feature in the list of six set poems: ‘In the Snack-Bar’, ‘Good Friday’ and ‘Trio’, which have been taught for many years. These can be looked at afresh, and set within an approach that includes the other poems, ‘Winter’, ‘Hyena’ and ‘Slate’. The National 5 examination in fact demands that students pay attention to the interconnections between poems, and so there clearly needs to be a wider perspective than line-by-line analysis.

Everyone looks for a starting point for analysing poetry, however, and I will refer to three useful resources for teachers and pupils. The first of these is Scottish Short Texts (Hodder Gibson, 2014) by Carolyn Cunningham and Willie McGuire, which can be highly recommended for its interactive classroom activities and practical examination focus, in addition to detailed textual analysis. Secondly, placing the set poems within a wider view of Morgan’s life and work, and also written at an accessible level, is the ASLS Scotnote, The Poetry of Edwin Morgan. This pays attention to the set poems, but also to the development of his writing and reputation, and it draws on my work as the poet’s biographer. It also provides useful guidance towards further audio and online resources. Finally there are the BBC Bitesize web pages on the set poems, which students might be directed to by parents or teachers. This I found somewhat basic and uninspiring, but it is thorough enough, and does offer a multiple-choice test after each poem has been analysed. This can be a quick and useful assessment technique, and could be adapted to be more challenging. 

I will be pointing out some errors of interpretation in all three of these resources, but the main intention here is not to pick holes or over-interrogate the obvious. Rather, it is to set the poems in a fuller context, so that they can be read, taught and written about more confidently. It is important to consider the dynamic in any poem between its line-by-line movement and its endpoint of completion or summation – in other words, to remember the journey of the reading mind, which is not a linear series of discrete steps but more like a dance movement, where the tempo and overarching musical theme work together with an enjoyment, or at least a deployment, of the technical skills. This holistic approach can get lost whenever we focus too anxiously on what each line or image ‘means’, and the whole point of the poetry vanishes into a sort of fussiness. 

The context of Morgan’s Glasgow poems

Four of the six set poems have Glasgow as a setting. Three of them date from the early 1960s: ‘In the Snack-bar’ (written in August 1964), ‘Trio’ (15 December 1963), and ‘Good Friday’ (May 1962). These poems seem very familiar now to many teachers, who might even have studied these texts themselves at school. But at the time of writing they were quite new, radical or even rebellious. In the early 1960s, Morgan was known mainly as a translator and critic, and as an experimental poet within the avant-garde and international movement of concrete poetry and sound poetry, pushing the typographic and the phonic elements of poetry to their extremes. But the other important Scottish concrete poet, Ian Hamilton Finlay, who was a good friend of Morgan, disliked these Glasgow poems, and said so. To him they lacked the verbal intricacy and sparkle of Morgan’s concrete poetry. And at the other extreme, Hugh MacDiarmid, who was the great precursor and a sort of poetic father-figure for Morgan, not only saw concrete poetry as trivial word-play, but he hated industrial Glasgow. For him it was an ‘arrida nutrix’, not a wet-nurse but a dry-nurse, a place that offered no poetic nourishment whatsoever. He also despised the Glaswegian dialect as a slovenly and bastard mixture, far from the ‘authentic’ Scots language which he had tried to re-invent and synthesise, and which was for him definitely a rural and mainly Borders and East-coast tongue. 

But Glasgow was Morgan’s birthplace and home. He identified with its technological inventiveness, its modernity and energy, and he felt solidarity with its people and concern for the modern city’s very visible social problems. He came from quite a well-off background. The family firm was Arnott, Young and Company, founded by his grandfather on his mother’s side, a significant ship-breaking and metal recycling business on Clydeside, with several yards. They were well-off, but his family did not own a car, and they travelled everywhere by tram or train, surrounded by Glaswegian voices. Morgan was an intelligent only child, often in adult company, and very alert to voices, and what accents and tones might mean. Travelling was always a sort of entertainment for him, and just being in Glasgow, he once said, was like being in a play. It was surprising, dramatic, comic or tragic – you never knew who would walk on-stage next. 

The idea of writing poetry about Glasgow came as a revelation to him. In the 1950s, his poetry had been interesting but anxious, tense, over-worked perhaps. This reflected tensions and uncertainty in his own life and work, including his own gay identity and the secret and illegal life that this entailed. Then, in the spring of 1962 he was on an educational cruise to St Kilda (he may have been giving lectures on literature, to work his passage) when suddenly he had a psychological break-through. It may have been because he was at sea, which he always loved; or because this was a former troop-ship, the Dunera, which would have brought to mind his former freedom as a young soldier sailing round the Cape of Good Hope to take part in the North Africa campaign, in the Royal Army Medical Corps. Suddenly the poem ‘Linoleum Chocolate’ came into his mind – a tiny incident in which he had seen ‘Two girls running, / running, laughing / laughing, lugging, / two rolls of linoleum / along London Road’ in Glasgow’s East End, near the Barras open-air market (Collected Poems[CP]: pp. 163–64). Suddenly a bar of chocolate flies out of the second girl’s pocket, a man picks it up for her, and the girls have a bite of it ‘to recruit the strength / of their giggling progress’. 

It was a trivial incident, but here is how Morgan describes it to a friend and fellow-editor, seven years later in March 1969: 

Never had I been able to write about two girls running down the street till that moment. It was as if – and I recognised the change immediately – I suddenly realised that I was able to be free, that the albatross had slipped off my neck into the Atlantic, that the everyday things that I had always had sympathy with but had never been able to write about were now in a new relation to me and could come into poetry as naturally as symbols of alienation had come in the past. My god, to be post-alienated! 
Edwin Morgan, The Midnight Letterbox: Selected Correspondence 1950–2010 ed. James McGonigal and John Coyle (Carcanet Press, 2015: p. 232)

These letters provide another useful background resource for Morgan’s poetry, in his own words. We might notice here how this Glasgow poem relates to ‘Trio’, in its atmosphere of laughter and generosity; or to ‘In the Snack-bar’ in its helpfulness from a stranger (the man who picks up the chocolate for them); or to the use of real settings, London Road, or Bath Street, in ‘Good Friday’, Buchanan Street in ‘Trio’ or Great Western Road in the other Glasgow poem, ‘Winter’. I should also say that Morgan’s letters, and the actual dates when he wrote particular poems, come from another place that is well worth visiting online: the Edwin Morgan Papersin the Department of Special Collections, University of Glasgow Library.

Can meaningful poetry come from small incidents?

We need to see where such local poems fit into the wider scheme of things. Scottish Short Texts and BBC Bitesize are fine on the surface detail and techniques line-by-line, but are perhaps not so good on the thematic structure of where that detail fits. So here I’ll offer three ways into dealing with all of the set poems and with the final comparison question in the National 5 examination. Scottish Short Texts has really good teaching ideas, such as the use of Venn diagrams to plot the similarities and differences between the set poems, but it also seems to me to get some things awry. For example, I don’t read the drunk man on the bus in ‘Good Friday’ necessarily as a character with whom we do not sympathise (which the authors warn students against trying to do – fair enough, they admit, it is possible, but just don’t try it in the exam). Sensible advice, perhaps, but I don’t want to follow it here. Nor do I see ‘alcoholism’ as a key theme of this poem. For BBC Bitesize, the drunk is unquestionably a Catholic. Again, that is not the only reading, nor the likely reading, nor the whole story. A better way of treating these poems may be to consider how they fit into a larger pattern, both in Morgan’s work and in terms of how they inter-relate and bear comparison with each other.

Here are three central themes in Morgan’s poetry:

  1. journeys in time and space (or the space-time continuum)
  2. isolation and social solidarity (the solitary seeks solidarity)
  3. voices for Scotland (tuning in to difference, beyond the single voice)

Journeys in time and space

We know that Edwin Morgan was really engaged by space exploration in the late 1950s and early 1960s, but he was even more puzzled by time, which remained ‘the great mystery’. As a boy he was very interested in science, and the evolutionary variety of human and animal life on earth fascinated him. He was also growing up in an age when the theory of relativity was reshaping the way human beings thought about time and the universe. One work that caught his attention in his late teens was Joseph Dunne’s An Experiment in Time (1927, 1934), which deals with relativity, alternative universes and parallel time zones, which become accessible through our dream states. I think this is the genesis of some of Morgan’s best-known science-fiction poems. But in his other poems the varieties of time are crucial too, and the theme of time is a way into reading them.

‘In the Snack-bar’ seems to slow down time. There is the moment-by-moment movement across the café floor, down the stairs to the toilet, with the poet assisting the old blind hunchback and adjusting to his pace: 

Inch by inch we drift towards the stairs. 
A few yards of floor are like a landscape 
to be negotiated, in the slow setting out 
time has almost stopped. I concentrate my life to his: [. . .]

Time and space are slowed down and distorted. ‘Thematic variation’ (where the adverbial phrase is used to start a clause or sentence, rather than coming, as normally, after the verb) makes ‘Inch by inch’ the ‘theme’ of the sentence, the point that comes first to our minds and is emphasised. The slow pace of time is measured by the small inches taken – not ‘we drift inch by inch’ but ‘inch by inch we drift.’ The use of personal pronouns ‘I’ and ‘we’ here marks a contrast with the objectively-described opening of the poem, where alliteration and onomatopoeia help enact the scene for us. There is an extraordinary technical skill behind the setting of an ordinary scene: 

A cup capsises along the formica, 
slithering with a dull clatter.

But this moment-by-moment journey (‘And slowly we go down. And slowly we go down.’) is set within a final shocking perspective of days, years, spent as a cripple, stretching from birth to age: ‘Dear Christ, to be born for this’. Beyond that again, looking further back in time, there is the poet’s admiration or wonder at the old man’s perseverance, a very human survival trait, as he climbs: 

with many pauses but with that one 
persisting patience of the undefeated 
which is the nature of man when all is said. 
And slowly we go up. And slowly we go up. 
The faltering, unfaltering steps 
take him at last to the door [. . .]

So this one incident, a chance encounter of the poet happening to be present when a disabled man asks for help to go to the toilet, first slows down time and then expands it across one life, and then across human lifetimes and ages – a perspective caught in that sharp and admirable paradox of ‘faltering, unfaltering steps’. This trivial incident of a few moments of kindness towards a stranger pulses with frameworks of time that include moments, days, years, aeons of human survival and progress. (The thematic link to the geological timescale of ‘Slate’ is clear, albeit in a very different poetic form.) 

The final exclamation, ‘Dear Christ, to be born for this’ is not a prayer, but seems to be half an expletive, half a challenge to a divine order that allows such a disabled and limited life. The authors of Scottish Short Texts take this reference to Christ and link it backwards in the poem to the biblical Simon of Cyrene helping Jesus to bear his burden towards crucifixion on Calvary, but I’m not really sure about this. Morgan was well-read in the Bible early and late, both as a smart Sunday-School pupil and as a lecturer on John Milton’s verse and prose, and he would have known that Simon was constrained by the Romans to help carry the cross rather than volunteering to do so. But it is perfectly true that the religious perspective does lead us to ask searching questions. In a supposedly Christian city, why is it only the atheist who volunteers to help the old man? Who is the Good Samaritan here?

This leads us on to consider another sort of time: namely, religious or supernatural time. In theology, the distinction is made between the Greek terms ‘chronos’ (chronological or historical time) and ‘kairos’, which is the crucial or sacred time, the moment of decisive change, which must be seized. Chronos sees time as a quantity, kairos concerns time as a quality. When Jesus says to his mother Mary at Cana ‘My hour is not yet come’, this does not mean he has just checked his wristwatch! It is a different kind of ‘hour’, a different order of time. It means the hour of destiny, or ultimate self-realisation. Now Edwin Morgan had his own disagreements with organised Christianity, both in its Protestant and Catholic forms (his parents were Presbyterians, but for mainly social reasons, he thought, and his father was a Freemason, again for business reasons). Their son gave up going to church about the age of fifteen. As a soldier in the Middle East, Morgan visited Bethlehem, Jerusalem, the holy places – and was not impressed by their commercialism. But the powerful persona of the Jesus of the gospel narratives continued to niggle him, and to fascinate by his difference. This would lead Morgan finally in the year 2000 to write a trilogy of plays on the life of Jesus, entitled AD. This non-traditional version of the gospel story caused some controversy at the time, most of it manufactured by the Scottish media. 

We see that interest in religious or supernatural time in ‘Trio’ and ‘Good Friday’. Morgan questions religion by presenting alternative interpretations of it. In ‘Trio’, it is a bit too easy to suggest equivalence between the three Magi of the traditional Nativity in Bethlehem and the three young people carrying their gifts of the chihuahua in its Royal Stewart tartan coat, the guitar with its tinsel and the Christmas baby ‘in its white shawl’. In this reading, the Christmas lights on Buchanan Street are linked to the star of Bethlehem. But in a chronos/kairos reading of this particular ‘sharp winter evening’ at the ‘end of this winter’s day’, any Christian message is deliberately agnostic:

Whether Christ is born or not born, you 
put paid to fate, it abdicates [. . .]

The quasi-supernatural kairos energy suggested in the references to the defeat of ‘fate’ and ‘monsters’ is more focused here, I think, on the political march of humanity. These three are like a protest march against ‘monsters of the year’ – which might be negativity, oppression, a sour humourlessness. Against these, ‘all three of them are laughing’, and they vanish into the city street crowded with Christmas shoppers, with ‘laughter ringing them round like a guard’ (a nice conflation of the ringing sound of laughter and a protective ring of steel). The moment of significance seems political, about the young and their need for freedom, a very 1960s concern. There is a religious perspective present, of course, but it is not traditionally Christian. Rather, it takes a longer view backwards in time beyond the BC/AD divide of the birth of Jesus towards the pagan world (or simply the human world), one that organised Christianity would to some extent supplant. The most memorable images resonate with the pagan mysteries, not church services:

The guitar swells under its milky cover, tied at the neck 
with silver tinsel tape and a brisk sprig of mistletoe. 
Orphean sprig! Melting baby! Warm chihuahua!

Pagan sensuality and celebration of animal life, of birth and kindness, of gift-giving and keeping small creatures warm – all of these can oust the morose parody of Scottish Protestant Christianity which was later represented in comedy by the character of the Reverend I. M. Jolly.

The poem ‘Good Friday’ opens at the kairos moment of Christian faith: ‘Three o’clock’, the hour of Christ’s death on the cross. The poet has remembered this, but the rest of the poem takes an agnostic or humanistic look at what religion has come to mean for many ordinary working people: ‘I don’t know what today’s in aid of’, says the drunk man. His religious or existential confusion is nicely set against the lurching line breaks, where enjambment constantly enacts the speaker’s drunken sway (even when seated!). Dashes and repetition are used too for the typical speech pauses caused by a drunk man’s need to focus on what he wants to say:

The bus lurches 
round into the sun. ‘D’s this go –’ 
he flops beside me – ‘right along Bath Street? 
– Oh tha’s, tha’s all right, see I’ve 
got to get Easter eggs for the kiddies.’

I’ve already signalled disagreement with the view of the drunk man as not being someone with whom we would sympathise. I do think sympathy is being evoked. I do not think that the poet is silent during the drunk man’s monologue to signal his disapproval, or to ignore him in the hope that he will go away. Nor do I think, as BBC Bitesize suggests, that he is a Catholic. He may be. But most Catholics I know would refer to ‘Jesus’ not to ‘Christ’ in talking about the gospel story. It is true that the economic migration of Irish labourers both Catholic and Protestant into Scotland meant the uprooting and loss of cultural and religious continuities. My sympathy comes from the poet’s portrayal of a man who is smart enough to realise how working-class industrial life has cut him off from education and understanding, that it has wasted his potential: the working man is ‘jist bliddy ignorant – Christ aye, / bliddy ignorant.’ The accuracy of the speech rhythms here is harsh with self-blame. 

The poet-narrator’s silent attention points us towards the causes of cultural loss, the social frustrations drowned or dampened down by alcohol. These are things that need to be heard, not to be commented on but simply listened to. And there is also the positive point of him not having spent all of his money on drink, but having kept enough back to buy Easter eggs ‘for the kiddies’. (That choice of ‘kiddies’ here, rather than the more traditional Glasgow dialect term ‘weans’, led me in the Scotnote to read these ‘kiddies’ as grandchildren. There is no indication of this distinction in the poem, however: it was merely a reflection of my own life at the time of writing it, with six of them to think of – grandchildren and Easter eggs.) The poem ends on a positive note, again one of human survival. The man is last seen heading towards the sun. The wordplay on the Son of God, and the way in which Christian tradition blends the rolling aside of the entrance stone from the Easter tomb with the pagan Spring fertility symbol of rolling eggs, are both understated, but just present, perhaps, in the final mood.

The last dimension of time is where we most often notice it passing – that is, within our own lives, or on the faces of family and friends. Decade follows decade and suddenly it seems that hair has turned grey and retirement approaches. Morgan was born in 1920, at the start of a new decade, and he always took the turn of the year seriously, settling all his bills and taking down old calendars. Even more serious was the change of a decade, which marked turning points in his life. In 1930 he was ten, becoming aware of his own sexuality. In 1940, at 20 he became a soldier for six years. In 1950 he was thirty and beginning to publish as a poet and academic. But 1960 felt much more significant than any of those. Morgan finally left home for a flat of his own in Glasgow’s West End. And he fell in love with John Scott, a working-class Catholic, a factory storeman, an attractive Other to almost everything in his earlier and often lonely life. In his creative life the 1960s brought engagement with international writers, translators and avant-garde artists. In politics there came a thaw in the Cold War that had divided Western and Eastern Europe since the end of World War Two. That was important because of his socialist ideals and horror at the thought of atomic warfare. In local politics, Glasgow saw a bold new programme of slum clearance and the building of social housing schemes, with major road works to improve travel and communication. 

All of that sense of personal and political change is poured into his poem ‘The Second Life’, which provided the title for his first poetry collection, The Second Life (1968). His first major collection, at the late age of forty-eight – and a very successful, award-winning collection too. In the poem he seems amazed at life, its promise and renewal:

But does every man feel like this at forty – 
I mean it’s like Thomas Wolfe’s New York, his 
heady light, the stunning, plunging canyons, beauty – 
pale stars winking hazy downtown quitting-time, 
and the winter moon flooding the skyscrapers, northern – 
an aspiring place [. . .] (CP: p. 180)

I dwell on this because the set poem ‘Winter’ (written 9–10 December 1977) really needs to be read through the mirror of ‘The Second Life’. Some of the optimistic images of the earlier poem are revisited and rewritten. It is not just a poem of complaint (‘But does every man feel like this at fifty-seven –’) – but in some ways it is a poem that is full of complaint. Morgan was very unhappy in his domestic and personal life at this point. There were messy and expensive repairs to his flat, disrupting his work routines. Worse, he had not only quarrelled badly with John Scott, but he had deliberately kept himself aloof. The two men would not be reconciled at all before John’s death from cancer the following year. Morgan felt tremendous guilt over that, made worse by the fact that he had already become attached to a much younger man. In a poem called ‘The Divide’ he talks about ‘the years between us like the sea’. The love affair is described in several poems: ‘Smoke’, ‘The Beginning’, ‘Planets’, ‘Resurrections’ (CP: pp. 369–73). 

Morgan was not only conscious of his own age, but also of the recent death of friends and contemporaries – the young Scottish experimental poet, Veronica Forrest-Thomson, died of an accidental overdose, possibly suicide. Musicians and artists he admired had died: Elvis Presley, Marc Bolan, Maria Callas, Vladimir Nabokov, Robert Lowell. Just three months before composing ‘Winter’, he wrote a poem called ‘A Good Year for Death’, with a verse about each artist, each ending with the same refrain, ‘Death has danced his tune away’. 

So ‘Winter’ is a poem about time as experienced in the aging process, and the impossibility of arresting the progress of time. The myth of Tithonus (in Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s re-telling of it in his dramatic monologue, ‘Tithonus’) is used as an ironic commentary on Morgan’s own life. The setting of his poem overlooking the frozen wintry scene of Bingham’s Pond, which he could see from his flat on Glasgow’s Great Western Road, is a bitter reprise of his optimistic ‘The Second Life’ (May 1963), written fourteen years earlier. In the myth, Tithonis had been granted perpetual life but forgot to ask for perpetual youth (a bad mistake!) and so was forced to live on within an increasingly decrepit body. In his poem, Morgan almost seems to be mocking his own 1960s experimental poetry as he plays verbal games with Tennyson’s famous opening lines, which are:

The woods decay, the woods decay and fall, 
The vapours weep their burden to the ground, 
Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath, 
And after many a summer dies the swan.

Morgan keeps this autumnal scene, but fast-forwards it into winter:

The year goes, the woods decay, and after, 
many a summer dies. The swan 
on Bingham’s pond, a ghost, comes and goes. 
It goes, and ice appears [. . .].

These fragmenting sentences, stopping and starting in the wrong place and turning the meanings upside down, enact Morgan’s confusion and the loss of coherence in his life – everything is broken, including his usual optimism. The motto he would choose for his Collected Poems (1990) was: ‘Beti zeru urdin zati bat dago: bila ezazu’. No translation is given, but it is a saying in the ancient Basque language:

‘Somewhere in the sky there’s one shred of blue: chase that’.

The saddest line in ‘Winter’ to me is the longest:

Even / dearest blue’s not there, though poets would find it.

If he himself can’t find it, the central core of his life as a poet has vanished. ‘The Second Life’ and ‘Winter’ share the setting of Great Western Road, and Bingham’s Pond with its skaters in the evening dark – but what a change of mood from the happy skaters and their happy audience of the crisp cold early 1960s evenings when

they swung and flashed among car headlights, 
the drivers parked round the unlit pond 
to watch them, and give them light, what laughter 
and pleasure rose in the rare lulls 
of the yards-away stream of wheels along Great Western R

In ‘Winter’ now the scene is ‘stark’ and ‘cut by evening cries, by warring air’. Not communal ‘laughter’ but a sense of violence and threat in the darkness. Not ‘a stream of wheels’ and helpful headlights, but instead it is the fog that is on the move, as it ‘drives monstrous down the dual carriageway / out to the west.’ The monsters of the year which once seemed to have been banished by the happy laughter of ‘Trio’, have come back to haunt the poet. Tithonus had been granted eternal life by Aurora, the Dawn Goddesss of the East, but the poet’s life seems to be heading west with the declining sun, in a fog of uncertainty. The white page he is writing on can’t seem to meet the challenge of ‘the grey dead pane of ice’. In the course of the poem, the ice has altered from ‘swan-white ice’ with glints of ‘crystal beyond white’ to something that is as inert and grey as the poet now feels. The ‘grey dead pane’ is the image of the cold division between life and death. In this mood, time has ceased to be flexible, and any life and any relationship can be seen as limited and finite.

We have looked at various aspects of time in the poems so far:

  • examining the behaviour of time: how it can seem to speed up or slow down (and how the poet’s word order and rhythms can make that seem to happen); 
  • or considering significant or meaningful time, moments of destiny or discovery with the present day set against a sacred past, at Christmas, or Easter time, with Christian and pagan world-views intersecting with the present; 
  • or finally time passing in one person’s life from youth to age, from a sense of life as being open to the future to a sense of life closing down, locked into memories or regrets.

And within this theme of time, we should also think about the narrative movement of the poems, how they move from the upper to the lower level and back again (‘In the Snack-bar’), or from street level to top deck of the bus then back down to the street again (‘Good Friday’); or, within the remembering mind, from the hopeful 1960s to the almost despairing 1970s. Morgan liked to describe himself as a story-teller, and narratives also deal with time – as in that most famous story opening, ‘Once upon a time . . .’. 

Isolation and social solidarity

Themes can intersect within a poem, as in a Venn diagram. ‘Winter’ creates a time, a season, but it also presents an isolation. The grey ice is like a window pane that divides the flat-dweller from the life of the city outside. This takes us on to the second overarching theme in these poems selected for National 5 – a division between the solitary writer and the solidarity of social life outside or beyond him. It is a contrast between isolation and social identity. I am thinking of ‘identity’ as a confident or easy sense of belonging to a community, whether seen as a family, or a social class grouping, or even a sexual identity or orientation. Frequently in Morgan’s poetry we find him on the outside, observing, looking in on other people’s lives, catching them as in a photograph, in an instamatic or Instagram pose.

We find this division in the poems of Glasgow life. The trio in Buchanan Street are happy, instinctual, unreflecting – the poet is alone on the busy street of shoppers. In ‘Good Friday’ he is the almost silent passenger, listening carefully to what the drunk man is saying, taking it in, recording it, reflecting on what it implies. The one person to come to the aid of the hunchbacked man in the snack-bar is the other loner: the poet is in the café but not part of a crowd, on his own, it seems.

Various factors combined to place Morgan in an outsider role. He was an only child, the bookish son of non-reading parents whose main interest was the family business of ship-breaking. The parents were conservatives, their son was a socialist with a particular interest in Russian literature and society. They did not approve of his academic career and would have preferred a more secure and perhaps better-paid job in a bank. In his academic life, Morgan was deliberately not a traditional specialist, and his main areas of interest were not part of the English curriculum when he started teaching: American literature, avant-garde poetry, literature in translation, Scottish literature (then seen as part of Scottish History) and cultural studies that included science and social science. So he was, in a sense, isolated from more traditional colleagues.

What made him most acutely a loner, of course, was his sexual identity as a gay man – a secret identity, since homosexual activity continued to be criminalised in Scotland until 1980. (England and Wales became more liberal in 1967, in response to the Wolfenden Report of ten years earlier.) If Morgan’s sexual life had been discovered and he had been arrested and jailed, then he would have lost his job and been socially ostracised. So the love poems that he wrote for John Scott in the 1960s, such as ‘One Cigarette’ or ‘Strawberries’ were written in a deliberately ‘coded’ manner, where the gender of the loved one is unclear. And this gives the poems their power to speak for love beyond gender and sexuality. There is a sense, which the poet certainly felt, that his poetry in the early 1960s was part of an underground movement for ‘gay liberation’, even before that term had been invented. ‘Glasgow Green’ is the most explicit of such poems, although even here some of his colleagues did not recognise what its implications were. My biography of the poet, Beyond the Last Dragon, A Life of Edwin Morgan (2012 extended paperback edition) provides a full account of these crucial aspects of the poet’s identity.

Morgan was regularly invited to give readings in secondary schools all over Scotland, and was often asked to read ‘Glasgow Green’ which was taught in many classrooms. He sensed a gradual change in pupils’ attitudes towards homosexuality. In 2003 this topic came up in an interview on ‘Gay Writing in Scotland’, for a book called Ethically Speaking: Voice and Values in Modern Scottish Writing (2006). 

If ‘Glasgow Green’ is an appeal for gay liberation, then it is just possible (I put this forward tentatively) that ‘In the Snack-bar’ might also be seen as offering a corrective towards biased views. To be a gay man in a toilet in a basement, helping another man, is not necessarily to be ‘up to no good’. In this poem, kindness and charity and sensitivity to the needs of others are signs of a shared humanity, not an occasion for social prejudice. We may sense here that, just as the pagan and Christian symbols overlap in ‘Trio’ or ‘Good Friday’, so isolation and identity overlap in ‘In the Snack-bar’ and the other Glasgow poems too. The drunk man on the bus is isolated too, despite all his talk – ‘it’s the drink talking’, as the saying goes, and he has cut himself off by inebriation from a society (and a divisive schooling system, as it then was) which has failed to recognise the contribution he could have made. 

The poet, then, presents the light and dark of modern city life, but he is also a witness to its humanity and warmth from which, in the nature of things, he sometimes feels excluded. Often he presents a camera’s-eye view, snapping the urban landscape and letting it speak for itself – as in the poem ‘Death in Duke Street’ where a young man and a young mother hold an old man who has collapsed dying on the street: ‘As if he still belonged / they held him very tight’. The poet is watching this, on the edge of the crowd it seems, but that too is a position of isolation, a single focus. Singleness is not, of course, something we associate with Morgan’s work. He is the most multi-faceted of poets, open to the widest range of experience and poetic forms. But the individual’s perspective, isolated and sharp, is part of a key theme of longing for solidarity. 

Voices for Scotland

This leads onto the third broad shaping force in Morgan’s poetry, which could be called ‘Voices for Scotland’ – a focus on the plural and multiple. If you want a political slogan, you might demand ‘a voice for Scotland’, or present yourself as ‘the voice of Scotland’. These are party slogans. In Edwin Morgan’s world there is no single voice, nor should there be. He was critical of creative writing tutors who advised young writers to ‘find their voice’. For him, the world spoke in many voices. This included its many languages (he translated substantially from a dozen European languages, ancient and modern, and occasionally from several others) but also the imagined languages of machines. ‘The Computer’s First Christmas Card’ is well known, but what about its second Christmas card, and its code poem and dialect poem? Objects are made to speak too (‘The Apple’s Song’) and creatures both imaginary (‘The Loch Ness Monster’s Song’) and real, as in ‘Hyena’. We have already seen how he includes, among Scotland’s voices, the Glaswegian dialect which had formerly been discounted as an unacceptable literary medium.

I sometimes think that these multiple voices were being presented partly against Hugh MacDiarmid’s unique and powerful voice, ambitious for his own poetry and for Scotland. MacDiarmid was knowledgeable on many matters, but not perhaps gifted in knowledge ‘from the inside’ – whereas Morgan was happy giving voices to all sorts of things, not content only with describing them ‘from the outside’. So the techniques of the dramatic monologue appealed, and were extended into new territory. The Hyena’s voice, dispassionate, ironic, cold, insolent, efficient, is a good example of Morgan’s skill in dramatic monologue.

The first-person narration conveys the creature’s character and threat from the start: ‘I am waiting for you’ – followed by a pointed description of how hungry and thirsty it is. The present tense verbs draw the reader in towards this dangerous encounter – we are brought closer to its eyes ‘screwed to slits against the sun’. There is an arrogance about this creature. He sounds like a narcissist, a charming sociopath. Three times the hyena compares itself to Africa in similes that emphasise its rough coat, its craftiness, its energy. The energy is itemised in its tireless prowling movements: ‘I trot, I lope, I slaver, I prowl’.

The essential movement of the poem is towards the reader, in a scary way. Having explored the desolate and ruined places, and described in slow motion how to tear open a dead lion, the hyena moves in on us, by way of listing pieces of anatomy that we humans share with other prey: foot, heart, sinews and glazing eye. In the final lines, it is the reader’s bones that are picked clean and left to the winds. In the creation of the hyena’s voice, the number of questions posed to the reader/listener is a way of turning this encounter into a one-sided conversation. ‘What do you think of me? . . . Do you like my song? Do you like me when my tongue comes lolling over my jaw?’ This gambit of question as threat reminds me of the well-known Glasgow pub enquiry, posed in a somewhat aggressive manner: ‘What are you looking at?’ (There’s no absolutely safe answer to that.) This also makes for interesting contrasts with the dramatic monologue form, partial in ‘Good Friday’ or fully in ‘Slate’. It might strike us, also, that the hyena is a loner, but a dangerous one.

Unlike the other set poems, ‘Hyena’ was specifically written for children, commissioned by Penguin for its early 1970s school anthology series, The English Project. It was in Stage One of a three-stage series. Writing to his friend Iain Crichton Smith in October 1971, Morgan describes the process of writing it:

I am not at all sure that I know what happens when I am creating a poem, and whatever it is basically, it varies a good deal from poem to poem (since my poems are of many different kinds). At one extreme perhaps is the commissioned poem, like ‘Hyena’, ‘Heron’, and ‘Goal!’ which Penguin Books asked me to do for school anthologies: in each case they sent me a photograph of the subject, and my poem was to be an accompaniment to the photograph (a sort of reversal of the more usual habit of finding an illustration to go with an existing poem). It worked reasonably well; I was able to react strongly enough to the photographs to be roused into verbal activity, though not immediately, since I let them lie around for a while and sink into my subconscious, and then eventually had a more intense go at them and tried writing ‘with my eye on the subject’ as in this case it had to be. Having gone through this process I feel it has something to be said for it. Maybe more poems should be commissioned. 
(Edwin Morgan, The Midnight Letterbox: p. 260)

We might note again here the combination of photographic image and an entry point into an estranged moment of encounter, a solitariness or distance that, as we have seen, Morgan had some personal experience of, but emerging powerfully here from his creation of a non-human voice. 

This phrase ‘non-human’ brings us to ‘Slate’. The choice of this poem as the set piece from Sonnets from Scotland (1984) may be slightly puzzling, when there are so many other marvellous ones to choose from in the series of 51 poems. ‘Slate’ is published at the beginning of the sequence, but opens with the paradoxical claim: ‘There is no beginning’. This may a challenge to biblical explanations, whether in Genesis or at the opening of the Gospel of St. John: ‘In the beginning was the Word [. . .]’. But in any case, ‘Slate’ was not the first sonnet written. That was ‘The Solway Canal’ (printed 26th in the series) which imagines a journey by hydrofoil, at some time in the future, along a canal dividing Scotland from England. This dividing line reveals the political impetus behind the sonnet series – the failed Referendum of 1979 when a majority of Scots voted for a Scottish assembly, but not in a sufficient majority of everyone actually eligible to vote. Morgan felt that it was wrong to be too pessimistic over the result, but better to view it as a spur to writers and artists to create a more confident sense of Scottish identity. And indeed Alasdair Gray, James Kelman, Tom Leonard and Liz Lochhead (to mention only Glasgow writers) all went on to publish important work in the 1980s.

Beyond the paradox of ‘There is no beginning’ for the beginning of a poem at the beginning of a series, there is the puzzle of the words that complete this first line: ‘We saw Lewis / laid down [. . .]’. Who are ‘we’, who in the next sonnet in the series are to be found scuba-diving in the warm prehistoric seas around Bearsden, near Glasgow, or in the next sonnet again are watching glaciers melt or discovering the ashes of hunter-gatherer fires in the Grampian mountains. ‘We’ are time-travelling intelligences, all-seeing and existing perhaps in the sort of parallel universes that Joseph Dunne proposed in An Experiment in Time, mentioned above as influential on Morgan as a student. The recorded observations of these intelligent beings create the vibrant images of this poem and the other poems in the series, ranging over Scotland in time and place. 

Their exploration of Scotland’s pre-history and lost history and still-to-be-written histories is carried confidently through the series on two formal elements. The first of these elements is the traveller’s voice, which is interested, poised, wise, all-seeing and not unemotional. These intelligent presences are able to appreciate colour and other sensory detail. The words ‘Drumlins blue as / bruises were grated off like nutmegs [. . .]’ bring a close tactile sense, almost a heightened synaesthetic awareness. As they explore Scotland through various epochs of its history, these travellers become fond of the place and its people, and are ‘loth to go’ by the final poem, ‘The Summons’: ‘If it was love we felt, would it not keep / and travel where we travelled?’ As they prepare for lift-off there is a sound: ‘a far horn grew to break that people’s sleep’ – an ancient Pictish horn that is also a political gathering-call. 

The call is political, but it is calm and assured, not panicky or aggressive. The second formal element, the choice of writing in sonnet form, assures that confidence. We can do this, the series seems to say, and we can make it rhyme, with total assurance and without strain, time after time. Morgan was a master of the sonnet form, had translated many examples from other languages and particularly admired John Milton’s use of the sonnet for political themes. The sonnet form is often associated with love poetry, and it could be argued that these are love poems to Scotland, or at least that they are written to show what there is about Scotland, its landscape and its people, that might make it loveable. 

There are other layers of meaning, too, in ‘Slate’. There is the notion of ‘a clean slate’ (making a fresh start) and ‘put it on the slate’ (keeping a record of our debts to the past, as an obligation to repay these in the future). Choosing to place this poem first, Morgan was probably also remembering that as a child he learned to write using a slate pencil on a piece of slate. He described it later: ‘It was a revelation / When words appeared / Writing on a piece of earth / with another piece of earth.’ Scotland is the piece of earth that Scots call home – but this sonnet reminds us of the immensities of time, the slow processes of erosion and change. There are lovely lines and details to look for, alliteration and internal half-rhymes, an almost tactile sense of time passing: 

bens / and a great glen gave a rough back we like 
to think the ages must streak, surely strike, 
seldom stroke, but raised and shaken [. . .]

There is the final onomatopoeic entrance of men: ‘Their heels kicked flint, chalk, slate.’ This was before human memory existed (‘That was to come’) so the onomatopoeia is an apt sonic image: closer to the animal alertness that Edwin Morgan always responded to – sound patterns, sound effects, speech rhythms.

Towards assessment

That ‘Slate’ describes or enacts the passage of time so well also brings us back to the three overarching themes of Morgan’s poetry: journeys in time and space; isolation and solidarity, and different voices for Scotland.

It is possible to see how these themes intersect, and thus to reflect on the final exam question that asks students to make connections and comparisons between the set poems. Scottish Short Texts is really excellent here, with its focused use of Venn diagrams to show similarity and difference, and its very professional assessment guidance.

So we might combine 

  • ‘Winter’, ‘Slate’ and ‘Hyena’ as poems set on alien, inhospitable landscapes.
  • Or ‘Slate’, ‘Hyena’ and ‘Good Friday’ as differing examples of the dramatic monologue.
  • Or ‘Slate’, ‘Winter’ and ‘Trio’ as poems exploring time in overlapping or contrasting ways.
  • Or ‘In the Snack-bar’, ‘Good Friday’ and ‘Trio’ as explorations of urban life and alienation (with advice as to how to cure it).

There are other possibilities, of course. The poems offer opportunities for independent research tasks, where pupils can become aware of cultural and scientific references (Orphic, mistletoe, Tithonus, geological processes) and also features of genre (the sonnet or dramatic monologue). There are many opportunities for group and class discussion of language and dialect, social responsibility, alienation and identity. These six short poems of Edwin Morgan are often astonishing in how they seem to expand and contract, touching on immense distances while remaining local and relevant to the engaging details of everyday life.

Copyright © James McGonigal 2015

McGONIGAL, James, ‘Multilingual Poetries Lost and Found’

by

ScotLit 32, Spring 2005 |

In the streets and shops of Glasgow, I hear snatches of conversation between different generations of Asian Scots and other minority ethnic families, and wonder about their present experience of Scotland, and how this interaction of cultures and languages will affect all of us over time. My work in teacher education takes me into classrooms where young Asian Scots and more recent ‘international students’ learn in Standard and Scottish English. My other life as a writer brings me into contact with poets and novelists from a variety of minorities, bringing new sorts of awareness and language to contemporary Scottish writing. Caught up in this cultural change, I wonder what is being lost and gained, and what happens to the memories and ideals carried in the mother tongues of these new Scots, that are now being over-written by new language and understandings.

Such global shifts of population seem new, but have happened here before. My own recent experience of writing what became a prize-winning long poem, Passage/An Pasaíste (Mariscat Press, 2004), in English, Scots and Irish Gaelic, brought me into contact not only with the personal histories of my own migrant ancestry but also with identities lodged within the language they spoke and then forgot. They were part of the large-scale 19th century economic migration into the West of Scotland that brought newly charged encounters between Irish and Scottish workers, who were divided from each other by culture, religion, politics and language, while sharing the daily burden of the mill-working or coal and iron production on which depended their own and Scotland’s prospects of advancement. 

The complexities of linguistic and cultural change, all too visible at the time, were largely hidden or inchoate so far as Scottish literature is concerned. Cairns Craig has argued that the mainly local and sentimental concerns of 19th century Kailyard novels are evidence of a society unable to create a satisfactory narrative of its own industrial transformation, and falling back instead upon safer homely themes and small-town characters. The Irish were largely written out of this storyline – or, in the case of my Dundonian namesake, were considered to have totally lost the plot! 

Then, the role of new ‘Scots-Irish’ writers and intellectuals was certainly problematic. Political attempts at controlling the crisis of democratic radicalism in the early 19th century, especially after the United Irishmen’s rebellion of 1798, led to the disappearance of one intellectual strand of the narrative of the Irish in Scotland into secret trades union activity and even a United Scotsmen movement. More generally, the Irish migrants’ rapid loss of the intimacies of speech and memory, as well as of homeland, was oddly typical of the culture into which they were now inducted. There were clearances of traditional agricultural patterns of life in the Highlands and in the Lowlands too, and the industrial towns and mining villages of the Central Belt from Renfrewshire to Midlothian became home to many uprooted workers. 

The word ‘Irish’, however, continued to function as a sign of difference within the host culture, in relation to religion, to Scottish rationality and deductive reasoning, and to the individualistic cast of mind embedded within a Calvinism that laid upon the lone conscience the existential terrors of election to salvation or damnation. In their Scotland (and perhaps residually in ours) as in nearby Northern Ireland religion and politics were desperately entangled. The historical, ideological and emotional complexity of this heritage was such that I finally came to believe only imaginative writing could answer it. 

When at last I came to write as a poet about the Irish in Scotland, some harmonisation of the different dimensions of my Scots-Irish identity would have to be attempted. As it turned out, the defeated republican rebellion of the United Irishmen, who in 1798 managed to combine Catholic and Protestant forces towards a shared libertarian ideal for a brief period (until government agents fomented sectarian infighting that fatally undermined the rebel forces) would play its part in Passage/An Pasaíste. So too would the abandoned Irish language, and the largely forgotten history of industrial life that had absorbed a culture shaped by the rhythms and lexicon of that tongue. 

My own introduction to the aftermath of the Scots-Irish experience began in the 1950s, when I was sent at age ten with my elder brother as a sort of vanguard to a family move from Dumfries to Glasgow. I had been born in that rural county town, where my father had come to work and recover from what may have been tuberculosis, endemic in the poor housing conditions into which he had been born (in 1916 in a miners row with a clay floor and a pit railway running past the door). Now he had got a job in the Mathematics department of Stow College of Engineering, but had to work his notice in Dumfries. For some reason, financial or logistical (there being five younger siblings), we were sent ahead to stay for about six months with my grandmother in the Lanarkshire mining village of Cleland. 

Her husband, a miner, had successfully argued for a move to a new post-war council house in the early 1920s (apparently it was unusual for these to be allocated to Catholics), but there was still a high bing or spoil heap just beyond my grandmother’s back door, and beyond that the never-ceasing glow and roar of the ironworks at Newmains, and the groan of ore trains by day and night. My brother and I had been enrolled in a school in Glasgow, near where it was planned that the family would eventually live, and we travelled the fifteen miles to school in Glasgow and back each day by train and tram, through an industrial world that was decaying even as we rattled through it. 

Unhappy and uprooted at the time, I have since come to value the experience of those dark months. My grandfather had been killed in a pit accident in 1932, leaving his widow with eight children to raise through the years of Depression and war. Two had died of tuberculosis. Life in the house had changed little in essentials, and I had the experience of a culture that stretched back to the migrant households of the previous century, in terms of religion, food, dress, and a cast of mind and phrasing that was profoundly unlike the Scottish norm. This would gradually change in the 1970s, with home improvements, television and so on, but in the 1950s we said our Rosary nightly after listening to Irish and Scottish music on the old radio, we attended long wakes for the newly dead, we were sent out on Sundays on a sort of pilgrimage of three miles to the large grotto at Carfin – really a series of grottoes and statues which had been carved out by unemployed miners during the 1920s, and which had made such a positively exotic impact on Edwin Muir on the travels recorded in his Scottish Journey (1935). 

This was a matriarchal world, with fierce intelligence geared towards survival in an unforgiving environment, and with a devotional Catholicism as the deep sacramental source of that survival at a spiritual level. I did not fully understand this Irishness under a smoky Scottish sky (my mother, a convert, had grown up in the Scots Presbyterian tradition) but gradually engaged with its familiar foreignness. Here too I encountered a lived sense of the prejudice at various levels of Scottish society against which Catholics had struggled in their slow rising through education towards the professions. It was spoken of lightly enough, often with a satirical wit, and it was only later research that revealed its extent. 

When my own children were young in the 1970s and 1980s, I avoided visiting Ireland because of sectarian unrest and violence there. Gradually in the 1990s, however, we took the ferry back across the Irish Sea into the smoke-and-mirrors world of Ulster, oddly similar to the West of Scotland in its terrain and tensions, and in the bone structures, speech patterns and surnames of its people. I was drawn back again, and travelled in both Ulster and Eire over six or seven summers, usually trying to learn something of the language and always baffled at the ease with which I forgot it on returning home. 

In poems written there or thereafter, however, and out of my reading of Irish poetry, there emerged the sense of a different poetic voice that I might have possessed had not my ancestors come across to Scotland and erased a way of responding to the world by turning, as they must, to the other Scottish life at hand. Trying to recreate that lost resonance, I began a series of ‘Poems written for translation into an abandoned language’, constructed in a sort of translatorese – that not quite English language encountered on the right hand page of any selection of Gaelic poetry. Instead of staring glumly at the original before turning to the translation, I decided to put the translation on the left hand page, and to write it first. Thinking that I was writing for Scottish Gaelic, I was surprised and delighted when the Dublin poet Rody Gorman, teaching at the Gaelic College of Sabhal Mór Ostaig on Skye, translated them into Irish. They were published in various magazines or anthologies in the 1990s, either with or without the translations. Here is a sample:

Praise

I often praise God for the glittering 
giftwrap of another language – 
often but not often enough it seems

for just as He lets me remember 
the machair and lichen word perfect 
just as often He casts me

up on a desoloate shoreline 
having lost all of the words but one 
for the smell of the waves on my jacket

which we call the ‘praise’ on the cloth.

Such creative exploration was underpinned by family history, mainly the work of my wife, whose research gave insights into the living and working conditions of mining and foundry workers (our shared ancestry) and the politics of 19th century Ireland and Scotland. Her family name included that of a radical priest, James Coigly, who was the last priest to be hanged in England, in fact, for seeking assistance from the French revolutionary government for the United Irishmen’s struggling cause. Her research on poor law applications and court cases as well as on the founding of Catholic churches and schools built up a surer sense of the life whose passing I had witnessed in my own early years. 

But how was all this to be shaped and focused for a long poem? If it was to be even a mini-epic in aspiration, then it needed some journey or quest to sustain it. The idea of the voyage across the time and cultural space undertaken by my ancestors seemed appropriate, and was a really unexplored area in Scottish poetry. In the single word ‘passage’ I could link the migrant voyage from Ireland to Scotland, the passing of time, and even the narrow coal seams mined by many ancestors, named or nameless, and in particular by my grandfather, who had died in one. The poem’s title ‘Passage East’ derived from an English mistranslation recorded on road signs near Waterford in Ireland. ‘Passage East’, the name of a small ferry port linking the estuary banks of the rivers Barrow and Suir, is given alongside the Irish An Pasaíste, which rhymes with East but means simply Passage. But if Passage East now existed, and could name the journey from Ireland to Scotland, then why not Passage South, North or West?

These become the poem’s co-ordinates. I could envisage the final evening journey south to the pit where my grandfather would die on an April nightshift in 1932. A Passage North would take the poem back to Northern Ireland in the 1990s, and Passage West would reach Donegal again and the western seaboard. Lines from the earlier translations of my ‘abandoned language’ poems could be stitched into the weave early and late to signal something of the linguistic and historical change involved in migration, and there would be use of Lanarkshire and Ulster Scots too to ground the poem in particular localities.

A voice that turns out to be my grandfather’s introduces the poem, plunging us into the midst of things (in medias res) in a section called ‘Entry’. This recalls ‘the ingaun e’e’ (the ingoing eye) that was the old Scots mining term for the entrance to a pit shaft dug into a hillside, starting at an easy understated pace before plunging suddenly into violent accident. His life and labour are only later recovered and reassembled in Section 3, as it were, by the images and sounds of the life he left behind on an April evening in 1932:

Nights governed by the moon’s flywheel.

                Men cycle off.

Kitchen hearths are banked with dross. The moon floats 
              in the reservoir and on eyeballs

of raindrops in kail leaves.

In this role as poet speaking for an almost forgotten community, I sometimes had a strange sense of being guided to find what needed to be found. Helping my wife in a library search on an unrelated topic, my eyes lit on a contemporary geological survey of the Bathgate coalfield, written a few years before the death that was a focal point of the work, and so I was able to locate the pit (long abandoned and now invisible under farmland) and also imagine more clearly the levels of rock and sediment through which he and his fellow miners had toiled on a daily or nightly basis, and also to contrast the discourse of geologist and collier, with Scots terms (such as ‘cry’ for ‘call’) mingling with the more aspirational English which my grandfather would have studied for his promotion to fireman (or shot-firer) in the team:

Not coal we’ve won, but coals. 
Down the shaft you’ll fall past 
Millstone Grit, Leavenstone, 
Orchard and Index Limestanes, 
then seams of Lady Merton Coal 
(that we cry Jewel) 
down to the Bathgate Main. 
That peters into Johnstone Shell 
above top Hosie Limestone. 
I’ve shouldered some of those 
as well as sandstone, fakes, blaes 
and coarse fireclays.

Earlier in ‘Passage East’, the first main section of the poem, other night voices are recalled on the overnight ferry from Derry to Glasgow, some of them escaping from the United Irishmen’s failed rebellion. The rebel priest James Coigly is heard in his political role: ‘How ignorant, then, or how wicked / must that man be, who attempts, / through interested motives, / to make us enemies for religion’s sake’ but also in a secret spiritual lexis that is carried across with the migrants into protestant Scotland:

Angels of the height fall backwards treading air 
with wrists still intricately fluent in the language 
ash trees speak in a breeze. Their wings open 
like atlases whose veins mark hills and corries 
of that tongue. Who could master it?

He, or another companion, recalls the frustrated rebellion, and in the process drifts naturally in and out of Gaelic:

and I think of Antrim men catching 
the full force of the weather 
out on the hill or along the shore 
walking home in it 
uisce baístí ag rith anuas 
a graiceann is ag bogadh a léine
rainwater running down 
their skin and soaking their shirt.

The next section, ‘Passage South’, takes us intimately into a later settled Scottish Catholic world, mingling work and spirituality in the way I had experienced it as a child in industrial Lanarkshire:

But when the sun shines across chairs 
we are content, through window squares 
of blue or rain-streaked grey or violet. 
This mystery of glass that searches heaven. 
Our sky is rimmed some mornings 
with blue and white like an enamel 
bowl ringing with heat. 
Grace before I earn our meat.

That meditative voice continues in a different guise in ‘Passage North’, which owes something of its tone to the Japanese poet and Buddhist traveller Basho, whose Narrow Road to the Deep North in Penguin translation made an impact on me as a student in the 1960s. Here the poem tries to catch both the sectarian violence and the natural beauty of Down and Armagh, the impossibility of easy resolution, and the intimate connection with Scotland’s people, ‘planted’ here as part of an earlier solution to earlier Troubles, and now inextricably part of Ulster’s language and culture, and of its problems. Personally I find myself oddly more at ease here amid the tension of a divided society than in easy-oasy Eire, and put this down to the depth of my Scottification. So there is a bleak humour and a fetching intractability that I like in this section, as well as more muted reflection on history and ancestry:

The dead can read maps 
white swans and stars use    gliding 
clear of Mourne Mountains.

‘Passage West’, the final section, offers a sense of recovery as single poems record aspects of journeys westward from the Glens of Antrim, within sight of the Mull of Kintyre, to ancestral Donegal. Towards the end, I face the possibility that, had my people remained there, I might have become a terrorist. That is shocking to think and to write, and seems unlikely, and yet it has to be faced:

that was when a man of my age with two dogs 
stooped out of his farmhouse door and passed 
through the glare from a workshop where his son 
was still focused by arclight, holding the gun 
up for appraisal, the stare from its single black eye 
that ends in a blink –

In formal terms this links back to the United Irishmen’s republican revolution, but the poem as a whole evokes a sense of time passed, of weariness with armed struggle, of uncertainty as to its ends. My ancestors’ journey to Scotland possibly saved me from all that. 

The passing of the worst excesses of prejudice against my ancestry within modern Scotland could too easily slide into the typical Scottish denial of history that Cairns Craig has warned against. My long poem’s true direction is forward, therefore, with a sense that only by recognising the validity of a neglected set of experiences can one strong ethnic Irish strand of Scotland’s weave sit naturally with the rest, and emotional lessons be learned for the future. As the migrants strove to escape the sense of political and economic defeat from which they had come, and the industrial degradation from which they now struggled to rise, modes of speech and thought were left behind, and many things left unspoken. Overcoming such migrant reticence by recalling or re-creating words for forgotten lives is important for the creative life of the nation too. This is particularly the case as the language and insights of a new generation of Scots-Asian writers such as Suhayl Saadi, Bashabi Fraser, Ghazzi Hussein and Daljeet Singh Dilber, and of other migrant peoples, begin to enrich our understanding of what it means to be Scots in this new century. 

From a personal perspective, of course, it pleases me greatly that Passage/An Pasaíste has won awards, in whole or in part, in both Scotland and Ireland.

Copyright © James McGonigal 2005

MEEK, Donald E., ‘The Gaelic Literature of Argyll’

by

Laverock 3, 1997

(This is a revised and expanded version of a talk given at the Conference on ‘Neil Munro and Writers of Argyll’, held by the ASLS in Inveraray on 11–12th May 1996.)

Argyll is a region of great significance in the development of Gaelic literature. A scan through the evidence contained in bibliographies and in such books as Professor Derick Thomson’s invaluable Companion to Gaelic Scotland shows that, since the early Middle Ages, Argyllshire writers, scribes and composers have made major contributions to the growth of Gaelic literature. Literary creativity, ranging from the copying of manuscripts to the writing of books, has been evident in Argyll since the time of the Lordship of the Isles (c.1200–1493). We can trace such creativity even further back to the Island of Iona and the work of Columban and post-Columban monks in their island ‘university’ in the sixth and seventh centuries A.D. The Iona monastery was a highly literate community, engaged in the making and copying of manuscripts, recording in Latin events of local and national significance, and maintaining close links with other Columban houses in Ireland. Iona was, of course, located within the early Gaelic kingdom of Dál Riata, whose heartlands were broadly coterminous with the later county of Argyll, and whose principal fortress, Dunadd, lies in the present day Mid-Argyll. We could devote a whole lecture to the so-called Dark Ages to the end of the Lordship of the Isles and the rise of the Campbells, who were also patrons of the Gaelic arts. The Campbells’ importance in this respect is often overlooked.

Literary creativity thus has a long history in Argyll, but in this lecture we will focus on the Gaelic evidence, particularly in the period since 1500. During that time, creativity in Gaelic has been so pervasive that there are few parts of the county which cannot lay claim to at least one writer or composer of some significance who originated there, and who made his or her mark on modern Gaelic literature.

There are some small problems of definition which arise when discussing the Gaelic literature of Argyll. First of all, there is the need to define Argyll itself. As one whose formative years in the area predate the local government reorganisation of 1975, I think (and will for ever think!) primarily in terms of the ‘old’ county of Argyll, extending on the mainland from the Mull of Kintyre to Kinlochleven on the east of the Great Glen and to Fort William on the west side, and embracing the Inner Hebrides as far north as Tiree and Coll. Nowadays, of course, the area is included in Argyll and Bute Region, having been part of the massive Strathclyde Region from 1975 to 1996.

Then there is the difficulty of setting restrictions to the ‘of’ in the phrase ‘of Argyll’. Is it the place of origin of the writer, or the place in which the ‘composition’ was done, which should determine the validity of the definition? Many of the writers ‘of Argyll’ who are discussed in this paper produced their material when living outside the county, but the identity of the majority with Argyll, usually through birth or childhood upbringing, is not in doubt. After 1800, it is generally the case that the most productive Gaelic writers from Argyll were resident outside the county, usually in Glasgow or Edinburgh, and, in another context, they could be included among the Gaelic writers of Glasgow or Edinburgh. One very fine modern Gaelic poet, Duncan Livingstone (1877–1964), who was a native of Torloisk, Mull, emigrated to Pretoria, and wrote some splendidly prophetic verse on the twentieth-century challenges which were to confront white rule in South Africa. He thus has a claim to be included in any forthcoming survey of the Gaelic literature of Africa!

The opposite process did, of course, occur, and the county became home to writers who originated in other parts of the Highlands and Islands. Often these were ministers or schoolmasters. If we were to compile a list of such people, it would include modern Gaelic writers such as the Rev. Dr. Kenneth MacLeod, of Road to the Isles fame (or notoriety), who was a native of Eigg, but was latterly parish minister of Gigha. It would also include Dr. Iain Crichton Smith, a native of Lewis who has lived in Oban and later in Taynuilt for a large part of his active literary life, and who taught English in Oban High School for many years. When I was a fifth-year pupil in Oban High School in 1965-66, Dr.Smith was my English teacher, and the Rector of the school was the distinguished Classical scholar, John MacLean. At the same time as Iain Crichton Smith was enriching Gaelic literature with his innovative short stories and poems (and explaining the significance of Sorley MacLean’s poetry!), John MacLean was translating the Odyssey into Gaelic. Both men had a great interest in Gaelic literature, and encouraged their pupils to take an interest in it too; but they also practised what they taught – and that was very impressive. With the infectiously pro-Gaelic activist, Donald Thomson (a Lewisman), in charge of the Gaelic Department, and Donald Morrison (another Lewisman!) also teaching Gaelic and writing short stories and Gaelic articles, Oban High School was a veritable Gaelic academy in those days! Among more recent Gaelic writers who have been attracted to the county is Myles Campbell, a Gaelic poet and prose-writer who hails from Skye, but who has been resident in Mull for a considerable period. 

There are also some ‘borderline cases’ whose activities seem to straddle both sides of the county boundary, or who, while originating just over the border, drew inspiration from events on our side of the line. The virulently anti-Campbell Gaelic poet of the seventeenth and early eighteenth century Iain Lom (otherwise known as John MacDonald) illustrates the point; while belonging geographically to Keppoch (in Inverness-shire) on the ‘other side’ of the line, he was a frequent visitor to Argyll, and he loomed very large in the Argyll literary consciousness – so large, in fact, that he is given a prominent place in Neil Munro’s John Splendid. Iain Lom’s best known poem is his ‘Là Inbhir Lòchaidh’ (‘The Battle of Inverlochy’) commemorating the defeat of the Campbells by Montrose’s men in 1645. The poem is a series of painful verbal sword-strokes, cleaving the Campbell pride to its heart, and extolling the MacDonalds (especially Alasdair mac Colla) in the glitter of the blade. The outstanding eighteenth-century Gaelic poet, Alexander MacDonald, was another ‘borderline case’ and also a great tormentor of the Campbells!

There is, of course, great danger in thinking of literature too much in territorial terms; we need to recognise that literature is not a product of places but of people, whose inspiration is drawn not only from places, but also from events and happenings and processes of thought which may originate far beyond their own districts. What finds expression ‘in Argyll’ may be part of a thought-process which comes from the other side of the world. This is particularly significant in the Argyll context, since the county was so close to the Lowlands, and was exposed to ‘new’ modes of thought (e.g. the Reformation) earlier than other parts of the Highlands.

Notwithstanding these contextual challenges, I have decided to devote the main part of my paper to a Gaelic literary tour of Argyll, looking at different types of literature, and identifying some of the persons and places of significance in the creation of that literature. In this way you will gain some familiarity with the main features of the Gaelic literary landscape of Argyll.

As we travel along on our imaginary outing, I will name salient writers who belong to Argyll, pointing to the specific areas of the county in which they were reared or with which they were closely connected, and commenting very briefly on their significance. I also will leap across hills, valleys and centuries to mention some of their successors. For the purposes of the tour I will restrict my definition of ‘literature’ to what has been written down on paper, and more specifically to what has been published in print. Indeed, one of the distinctive features of Argyll is the high number of Gaelic writers whose works achieved printed form. To round off, I will try to answer the question of why Argyll has been such a productive county in terms of Gaelic writers. 

First of all, we are going to visit places, and meet persons associated with the writing of Gaelic prose, both religious and secular, and then we will change gear, so to speak, and look at persons and places associated with Gaelic poetry.

Prose

The first stop on our quest for Gaelic prose writing must be Carnassarie Castle in Mid-Argyll. The very first Gaelic printed book to appear in Ireland or Scotland was published in Edinburgh in 1567, but it was produced in this imposing castle which stands just above the main road through Mid-Argyll, not far from Kilmartin. The occupant of the castle in the 1560s was a powerful and influential clergyman called John Carswell, who enjoyed the patronage of the 5th Earl of Argyll. If you go into the castle, you will see on the lintel of the main door the words Dia le ua nDuibhne (‘God [be] with Ua Duibhne‘, Ua Duibhne being the Campbell Earl of Argyll). With the warm support of the Earl, John Carswell became a Protestant at the time of the Reformation, and translated into Gaelic a fundamentally important book of the Scottish Reformation, namely John Knox’s Book of Common Order. The Book of Common Order was a directory for the conduct of worship in the Reformed churches. Carswell’s translation, calledFiorm na nUrrnuidheadh, was of great importance for the implantation of Reformed doctrine in this part of the Highlands; it would have been used by Gaelic-speaking ministers like Carswell himself who were formerly priests in the pre-Reformation church. But the book was of even more importance for the future of Gaelic; it established the tradition of printed Gaelic, and it used the Classical Gaelic of the Middle Ages as the vehicle for the transmission of Protestant doctrine. It also laid down a standard – the Classical standard – for the spelling of Gaelic. This is important because other scribes, notably the compilers of the Book of the Dean of Lismore (1512–42), a manuscript which takes its name from the title and office of James MacGregor, one of its scribes, were operating in Fortingall on the Eastern edge of the Highlands, and employing a spelling system for Gaelic which was based on the systems of Middle and Early Modern Scots. If these scribes had beaten Carswell to the printing press, the spelling of Gaelic might have been very different; it might have resembled that of modern Manx. Carswell’s foundational book ensured that there was to be continuity between the Gaelic literary conventions of the Middle Ages and those of the modern era.

The vision which inspired Carswell’s work was not only that of a Protestant Highlands; it was also a vision of a region whose literary culture had made a successful transition from script to print. Carswell was very much aware of the implications of the technological revolution of his own day, and in his Epistle to the Reader he wrote of the ‘information super-highway’of contemporary Europe.

Acht atá ní cheana, is mór an leathtrom agus an uireasbhuidh atá riamh orainde, Gaoidhil Alban agus Eireand, tar an gcuid eile don domhan, gan ar gcanamhna Gaoidheilge do chur a gcló riamh mar atáid a gcanamhna agas a dteangtha féin a gcló ag gach uile chinél dhaoine oile sa domhan; agus atá uireasbhuidh is mó iná gach uireasbhuidh oraind, gan an Bíobla naomhtha do bheith a gcló Gaoidheilge againd, mar tá sé a gcló Laidne agus Bhérla, agas in gach teangaidh oile o sin amach, agus fós gan seanchus ar sean nó ar sindsear do bheith mar an gcédna a gcló againd riamh, acht gé tá cuid éigin do tseanchus Ghaoidheal Alban agus Eireand sgríobhtha a leabhruibh lámh, agas a dtámhlorgaibh fileadh agus ollamhan, agus a sleachtaibh suadh. Is mór-tsaothair sin ré sgríobhadh do láimh, agas féchain an neithe buailtear sa chló ar aibrisge agas ar aithghiorra bhíos gach én-ní dhá mhéd dá chríochnughadh leis.

(Great indeed is the disadvantage and want from which we, the Gaels of Scotland and Ireland, have ever suffered, beyond the rest of the world, in that our Gaelic language has never been printed as all other races of men in the world have their own languages and tongues in print; and we suffer from a greater want than any other in that we have not the Holy Bible printed in Gaelic as it has been printed in Latin and English, and in all other tongues besides, and likewise in that the history of our ancestors has never been printed, although a certain amount of the history of the Gaels of Scotland and Ireland is written in manuscripts, and in the tabular staves of poets and chief bards, and in the transcripts of the learned. It is great labour to write that by hand, when one considers what is printed in the press, how smartly and how quickly each work, however great, is completed thereby.)

Erasmus himself could not have put the case more clearly. Carswell’s role underlines the importance of the Protestant Church in laying the foundation of Gaelic prose.

Since Carswell’s time, clergymen of the Reformed Church in Argyll have played a major part in the creation of Gaelic literature, particularly Gaelic prose literature. Clergymen were not so keen to compose original Gaelic poetry, though Carswell did compose a poem to send his book on its way; they did, however, contribute massively to the development of Gaelic prose, especially religious prose. Ministers of the seventeenth-century Synod of Argyll, following Carswell’s example, translated catechisms into Gaelic, and even set to work on a translation of the Bible into Gaelic. The Old Testament reached completion by 1673, and was apparently available in manuscript. Sadly, it did not reach print, because of the political and ecclesiastical turmoil of the times. When the Bible was eventually translated into Gaelic, between 1755 and 1801, Argyllshire men again played their part in the task, the most notable Argyllshire contributor being the Rev. Dr John Smith (1747–1807), a native of Glenorchy and minister of Campbeltown, who translated the Prophetic Books in a revolutionary manner resembling the ‘dynamic equivalence’ versions of today. His work annoyed some of his colleagues, and it was later brought into line with the ‘word equivalence’ of the other translators. Argyll was indeed a ‘dynamic’ and highly creative area!

We now move northwards at great speed, and reach the other end of the county. We cross the water from Oban to Morvern, and call in briefly at the Manse of Morvern, where we find further evidence of the contribution of Argyll to Gaelic prose. This is a place which contributed massively to the diversification of Gaelic prose literature of the nineteenth century, since it was the home of a family of MacLeods with roots in Skye, who produced a distinguished succession of ministers, whose best known modern representative was the Rev. George MacLeod, Lord MacLeod of Fiunary. The Manse of Morvern was the boyhood home of the Rev. Dr Norman MacLeod, otherwise known as ‘Caraid nan Gàidheal’ (‘The Highlanders’ Friend’) whose father was the parish minister of Morvern. MacLeod was the editor of the first Gaelic periodicals to be devoted to the regular publication of prose and verse. These periodicals were An Teachdaire Gaelach (1829–31) and Cuairtear nan Gleann (1840–43). MacLeod was successively minister of Campbeltown (1808–25), Campsie (1825–35) and St Columba’s, Glasgow (1835–62). He established the two periodicals in an attempt to provide a wide-ranging diet of good, informative reading in natural idiomatic Gaelic for the large numbers of Highlanders who were becoming literate in Gaelic through the work of the Gaelic schools and General Assembly schools from the opening years of the nineteenth century.

Today Norman MacLeod’s work may seem stodgy and dull, but in its own time it was very important in extending the range of Gaelic prose. Much of the available Gaelic prose material which had been written before his time consisted of translation of English puritan prose works, and it was heavily weighted towards doctrinal knowledge. MacLeod provided a variety of new prose styles, including dialogues, essays and short stories. The aim of the periodicals was didactic, but it was a broad-minded type of didacticism. In his venture he was ably assisted by two other Argyllshire men. One of these was his own son-in-law, the Rev. Archibald Clerk (1813–87), a native of Glen Lonan, who was latterly minister of Kilmallie. Clerk edited MacLeod’s collected works. The other Argyllshire man who helped Norman MacLeod was Lachlan MacLean (1798–1848), a native of Coll, who was a merchant in Glasgow.

Archibald Clerk has a further claim to distinction. He was the first editor of the Gaelic Supplement of Life and Work, first published in 1880, and continuing still, under the able editorship of the Rev. Roderick MacLeod of Cumlodden (although, sadly, we have to accept that he is a native of North Uist!). Another Argyllshire man, Donald Lamont (1874–1958) from the island of Tiree, edited the Gaelic Supplement for over forty years (1907–51). During most of this period, he was parish minister at Blair Atholl, Perthshire. Under Lamont’s ceaselessly provocative pen, the Gaelic Supplement became the main vehicle for thematic and stylistic experimentation in Gaelic; it carried sermons, essays and short stories. Lamont had a particularly lively imagination, and was not afraid to create ‘factional’ characters and scenarios, and to use these to carry the message he wanted to communicate. He was obviously aware, to a remarkable degree, of the opportunity he had, as a clerical writer, to contribute constructively to the well-being of the Gaelic language. His concept of a Gaelic Supplement was not one that ran in the rails of ecclesiastical convention, restricted by doctrinal rigidity and enslavement to purely homiletic styles.

The tradition of printed Gaelic prose was established primarily by writers from the mainland of Argyll, but, as the contributions of MacLean and Lamont indicate, writers from the islands were of great significance to the growth of modern written prose. One very fine writer of Gaelic prose came from the island of Jura. He was Donald MacKechnie (1836–1908). MacKechnie, who was resident in Edinburgh for most of his life, wrote essays in which he empathised with the animal world – cats, dogs, and deer – and discovered a close affinity between them and himself. He was the first Gaelic writer to internalise the influence of Darwin’s theory of evolution, and to acknowledge its implications for the relationship between humans and animals. He had a wonderful sense of humour too, writing a splendid essay on the theme of ‘Going to the ant’. He describes vividly how he sat down on an ant-hill on the Salisbury Crags, and, having got ‘ants in his pants’, had to pull off his trousers in dire emergency. His dog, seeing his master in this ‘state of nature’, went slightly crazy … and the whole chaotic scenario was witnessed by a rather ‘proper’, well-to-do lady. The moral of the story is that one must not take proverbs too seriously, lest primordial chaos and embarrassment should be the result. In his satirical and (philosophically) existential approach to life, MacKechnie differed markedly from his contemporaries, and not least from his close friend, Professor Donald MacKinnon (1839–1914), a native of Colonsay who became the first Professor of Celtic at the University of Edinburgh in 1882. MacKinnon contributed extensively to the Gaelic periodical, An Gàidheal, in the 1870s and onwards, and was the first major literary critic who wrote in Gaelic. He expounded, rather ponderously, the meaning and philosophy of Gaelic proverbs, and provided assessments of the works of Gaelic poets.

In our tour of the prose-producing areas of Argyll, we have touched on Carnassarie and Morvern and Glen Lonan on the mainland; and among the islands we have mentioned Tiree, Coll, Jura and Colonsay, but we must also pay tribute to Islay. There is one major literary figure connected with that island who deserves our attention – John Francis Campbell of Islay (1822–85). The son of the last Campbell laird of Islay, he was perhaps the first Gaelic scholar to acknowledge the special importance of the prose tales which circulated in oral transmission. He organised a band of collectors who wrote down the tales from the mouths of reciters, and later, between 1860 and 1862, a selection of these tales was published in four volumes entitled Popular Tales of the West Highlands. Campbell’s Popular Tales were no more than a small sample of the immense richness of the Gaelic story-telling tradition. Adventures of heroes seeking their fortunes, of great warriors overcoming tremendous odds to win fame, were the stuff of legend, and the inspiration of men; and it seems to me that Neil Munro was well aware of, and particularly influenced by, the riches of traditional story-telling in Argyll. He would have known full well of the particular contribution which the Campbells – first John Francis Campbell, and then Lord Archibald Campbell – had made in this field, by recording what Lord Archie called the ‘waifs and strays of Celtic tradition’.

Storytelling was very much part of Gaelic culture in Argyll, and the county produced a number of minor writers who had some considerable significance in their own time, and whose works would have been known to Neil Munro. I think, for example, of Henry whyte from Easdale (1852–1913), who was a stalwart of the late nineteenth-century Highland ceilidh circuit in Glasgow, and produced volumes of humorous tales; and I think too of the Mull writers, John MacCormick (d.1947), who produced the novel Dùn Alainn (1912), and John MacFadyen (1850–1935), with his series of books of humorous tales and poems, of which Sgeulaiche nan Caol (1902) is an example.

Poetry

The tales told by Neil Munro often allude to the Gaelic literary activity of the area, especially that of the poets. This is particularly evident in John Splendid, for example, where Munro frequently refers to Gaelic song and verse. Gaelic poetry, like Gaelic prose, has a long history in the county, and it is pre-eminently with poetry that the literary activity of Argyll is connected in the popular mind. A literary tour of the places associated with Argyll poets would take us to the native areas of some of the greatest poets of Gaelic Scotland. Starting in the north, we would look across to Dalilea in Island Finnan, the early stamping ground of the formidable poet, Alexander MacDonald (c.1698–c.1770), otherwise known as Alasdair mac Mhaighstir Alasdair, who served his reluctant time as a schoolmaster in Ardnamurchan, before becoming Prince Charles’s Gaelic poet-laureate, and lampooning the Campbells with his barbed wit. Later, after the ‘Forty-five, MacDonald was active in Inverness-shire, becoming baillie of Canna. MacDonald is widely regarded as the greatest of the eighteenth-century Gaelic poets, certainly in terms of intellectual fire. His volume of poems, Ais-eiridh na Seana Chànoin Albannaich, was the first volume of verse by a Gaelic vernacular poet to be put in print. It appeared in 1751, but because of its Jacobite sentiments, it was burnt by the public hangman in Edinburgh. Only a few copies of the original printing of the book have survived. MacDonald’s poetry had a profound influence on his contemporaries in Argyll, notably (it would seem) Argyll’s best known poet, Duncan MacIntyre.

Coming down towards Tyndrum (a village on the western edge of Perthshire!), on the road southwards from Glencoe, we would skirt the lower edges of a mountain which has ‘the honour above every mountain’, namely Beinn Dobhrain, which was celebrated by the Gaelic poet Duncan MacIntyre, better known as Donnchadh Ban Mac an t-Saoir (1724–1812). MacIntyre is the Gaelic nature bard par excellence; he celebrates the wonderful productivity which can be achieved when humanity and nature are in a co-operative harmony. His poem, ‘Moladh Beinn Dòbhrain’ (‘In Praise of Ben Doran’), is perhaps the finest poetic description ever made of the wildlife of any region in the British Isles. Duncan MacIntyre was, of course, unable to read or write, but many of his poems were written down by a native of Glenorchy, the Rev. Donald MacNicol, parish minister of Lismore. His verse was published in 1768.

Gaelic poets and songsters of lesser stature than Donnchadh Ban were active throughout Argyll. We could call at many places, and find an almost inexhaustible number of poets in all of them, particularly of the local ‘township bard’ type, commemorating events and personalities within their own districts. Representatives of the nineteenth-century poetic tradition on the mainland include Dr John MacLachlan, Rahoy; Calum Campbell MacPhail, Dalmally; Iain Campbell, Ledaig; Evan McColl, Lochfyneside; and Dugald Gordon MacDougall, a native of Dunach in Kilbride parish. MacLachlan and MacPhail, in particular, observed, and commented on, the patterns of social change as their areas were transformed by ‘improvement’ and clearing.

Poetry and song flourished strongly in the islands from the Middle Ages to the present century. The Lords of the Isles acted as patrons to the poets until the end of the Lordship in 1492, and thereafter the patronage of lesser kindreds, who filled the vacuum left by the Lords’ demise, grew in significance. Particularly noteworthy is the role of the MacLeans, including the MacLeans of Duart and the MacLeans of Coll, in maintaining poets of considerable stature. Island lairds too were often skilled in song. The ‘township bard’ is well attested in most island communities, especially in the context of crofting, after 1800. Tiree was particularly rich in poets of this kind. Some island poets achieved major recognition within the wider Gaelic area. Islay, for example, was the home of one of the best of the nineteenth-century Gaelic bards – William Livingstone (1808–70), who composed memorable verse on the clearances in Islay. Two editions of his poems were published. 

The Gaelic poets of Argyll, like those of other parts of the Highlands and Islands, had a tremendous appreciation of the value of their own local communities. A sense of place has always been important to Gaelic writers, but it has probably been more evident in verse than in prose; it is epitomised in the lines in John Splendid, where the young Elrigmore, fresh home from the continent, says,’Shira Glen, Shira Glen! If I was bard I’d have songs to sing to it, and all I know is one skulduddry verse on a widow that dwelt in Maam!’ Argyll itself has been not only the home of the poets; it has been the creator and inspirer of poets, right down to our own time. One of the greatest Gaelic poets of the twentieth century is George Campbell Hay (b. 1915), whose roots were in Tarbert, Loch Fyne, and who celebrated the beauty of the Kintyre landscape and the achievements of its people, particularly the fishermen who were among the last custodians of the Gaelic language and culture of the area.

Conclusion

Looking across the centuries, we can see that Argyll has been highly productive of Gaelic literature, both prose and verse. Literary activity extended from the Middle Ages down to the present century, and the region has contributed massively to the development of Gaelic literature. Perhaps the most important contribution that Argyll has made to that development has been in facilitating the transition from oral tradition to manuscript, and from manuscript to the modern printing press, thus ensuring that there was, and is, a modern Gaelic printed literature. Writers born in Argyll led the field in the production of Gaelic printed books; the first Gaelic printed book comes from the county, and almost all the composers and collectors whom I have mentioned published printed volumes of their works. It is worth noting, in passing, that a native of Islay, Archibald Sinclair, established the Celtic Press in Glasgow in the second half of the nineteenth century, to ensure that Gaelic material was printed. In this he gave a singular service, not only to natives of Argyll, but also to other Highlanders until the 1920s, when the business was taken over by Alexander McLaren.

At the outset, I said that I would try to offer some explanation of why Argyll has such an important place in Gaelic literature. What made this county so productive of Gaelic composers and literary leaders?

Perhaps the fundamental reason is that Argyll was, throughout the centuries, a region in which there was a Gaelic literate class who were used to plying their literary crafts, and expressing their thoughts on vellum, parchment and paper. Literary creativity was given a high place from the time of the Lordship of the Isles onwards, and patronage continued through the Campbells and other local families. The value of literacy was maintained by the schools. When formal schooling began to come to the Highlands, Argyll was provided with parochial schools and grammar schools from an early stage in the seventeenth century. Not all of these schools were sympathetic to Gaelic, but in 1706 the parochial school in Lochgoilhead had a teacher who was capable of writing Gaelic, and he may have taught his scholars to do the same.

If schoolmasters were not always sympathetic to Gaelic, the clergy of Argyll certainly used the language, and greatly aided its development as a literary medium. The Protestant clergy in Argyll were less tied to doctrinal straitjackets than their colleagues in other parts of the Highlands. The evangelicals of the northern Highlands tended to regard Argyll as a rather ‘moderate’ region. It is certainly true that the more profoundly world-denying evangelical movements which altered the religious shape of the northern Highlands and Outer Hebrides were less influential in Argyll, though they were by no means absent. As far as Argyll was concerned, these post-1800 movements came very late in the ecclesiastical day, and did not displace the foundation of broad-minded humanism (in the Renaissance sense) which has already been laid by Carswell and his successors. This allowed sacred and secular to breathe together more freely, and even ministers of small, intensely evangelical bodies such as Baptists had a high degree of cultural awareness and published volumes of hymns; Duncan MacDougall, a native of Brolas in Mull who had close connections with the Ross of Mull, became the founding father of Tiree Baptist Church (1838), and put his hymns into print in 1841. His sister, Mary, was the composer of a Gaelic hymn, ‘Leanabh an Aigh’, which is famous today as the carol ‘Child in the Manger’. Mary also composed secular verse.

The proportion of ministers who were natives of the region and contributed constructively to the development of Gaelic literature per se is thus probably higher in Argyll than in any other district of the Highlands. The county had a liberal and liberating atmosphere in which writers could pursue their callings. This continuing feeling of liberation may partly explain why Gaelic writers from other parts of the Highlands still find it a congenial place. 

The openness of Argyll was created not only by its religious complexion but also by its geographical position as a threshold area of the Highlands. This was its weakness as well as its strength. People from Argyllshire travelled backwards and forwards to the Lowlands with relative ease. As a consequence, the fashions of the Lowland south entered Argyll more quickly than they entered other parts of the Highlands; witness, for example, the ready reception of Protestantism in the region shortly after the Scottish Reformation. Printing accompanied Protestantism, allowing Gaelic tradition to take printed form faster in Argyll than in any other part of the Highlands and Islands. Argyll was a multicultural, cosmopolitan region, but this had dangers for Gaelic. The overall result is very evident. Today there are very, very few active Gaelic writers who are natives of Argyll, and the primary roles in developing and maintaining Gaelic literature in Scotland have passed to writers who are natives of the northern Highlands and the Outer Hebrides.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

General Works

  • Cameron,N.M. de S. (ed.), The Dictionary of Scottish Church History and Theology (Edinburgh, 1993)
  • Thomson, D.S. (ed.), The Companion to Gaelic Scotland (Oxford, 1993)

Prose

  • Campbell, Archibald: Waifs and Strays of Celtic Tradition, with various contributors, 4 vols (London, 1889–91)
  • Campbell, John Francis: Popular Tales of the West Highlands, 4 vols (Edinburgh, 1860-62)
  • Carswell, John: R.L. Thomson (ed.), Foirm na n-Urrnuidheadh, (Edinburgh, 1970)
  • Clerk, Archibald: (ed.),Caraid nan Gaidheal: The Gaelic Writings of Norman MacLeod, D.D. (Glasgow, 1867)
  • Lamont, Donald: T.M. Murchison (ed.), Prose Writings of Donald Lamont (Edinburgh, 1960)
  • MacCormick, John: Dun-Aluinn no an t-oighre ‘na dhìobarach(Glasgow, n.d.)
  • MacFadyen, John: An t-Eileanach (Glasgow, 1890); Sgeulaiche nan Caol (Glasgow, 1902)
  • MacKechnie, Donald: Am Fear-Ciùil (enlarged edn, Edinburgh, 1910)
  • MacKinnon, Donald: L. MacKinnon (ed.), Prose Writings of Donald MacKinnon (Edinburgh,1956)
  • MacLean, Lachlan: ed. of periodical, An Teachdaire Ur Gaidhealach, 9 numbers only (Glasgow, 1835–36); author of Adhamh agus Eubh (Edinburgh, 1837)
  • MacLeod, Norman (Caraid nan Gàidheal): see Clerk, Archibald
  • Smith, John: translator of the original text of Volume IV of the Gaelic Old Testament (Edinburgh, 1886)
  • Whyte, Henry: several popular volumes of essays and poems, including The Celtic Garland (Glasgow, 1881) and Leabhar na Cèilidh (Glasgow, 1898)

Poetry

  • Campbell, Iain (the Ledaig Bard): Poems (Edinburgh, 1884)
  • Hay, George Campbell: Several collections of verse, including Fuaran Sléibh (Glasgow, 1947), Wind on Loch Fyne (Edinburgh, 1948), O na Ceithir Airdean (Edinburgh,1952), Mochtar is Dùghall(Glasgow, 1982). We await the publication of Hay’s collected works, now in press, edited by Michele Byrne (publ. the Lorimer Trust).
  • Livingston, William: Duain agus Orain (Glasgow, 1882)
  • Livingstone, Duncan: There is no printed collection of the poet’s work, but see Ruaraidh MacThòmais’s fine article in Gairm, 119 (Samradh 1982), pp. 257-68
  • McColl, Evan: Clarsach nam Beann (Glasgow, 1836)
  • MacDonald, Alexander (Alasdair mac Mhaighstir Alasdair): A most useful introduction to the works of this highly prolific poet can be found in D.S.Thomson, Alasdair mac Mhaighstir Alasdair: Selected Poems (Edinburgh, 1996)
  • MacDonald, John (Iain Lom): A.M. Mackenzie (ed.), Orain Iain Luim(Edinburgh, 1964)
  • MacDougall, Dugald Gordon: S. MacMillan (ed.), Bràiste Lathurna(Glasgow, 1959)
  • MacDougall, Duncan: Laoidhean Spioradail a chum cuideachadh le cràbhadh nan Gael (Glasgow, 1841)
  • MacIntyre, Duncan: A. MacLeod (ed.), The Songs of Duncan Ban MacIntyre (Edinburgh, 1952)
  • MacLachlan, Dr John: H.C. Gillies (ed.), The Gaelic Songs of the Late Dr MacLachlan, Rahoy (Glasgow,1880)
  • MacPhail,Calum Campbell: Am Filidh Latharnach (Stirling,1947)

Note also the following collections of verse:

  • Cameron, H. (ed.), Na Bàird Thirisdeach (Glasgow, 1932). [Verse from Tiree]
  • Meek, D.E. (ed.), Tuath is Tighearna (Edinburgh, 1995). [Verse of the Clearances and the Land Agitation, with specimens by several Argyllshire poets.]
  • Ó Baoill, C. (ed.), Bàrdachd Chloinn-Ghilleathain: Eachann Bacach and other MacLean Poets (Edinburgh, 1979). [Seventeenth-century verse from Mull]
  • Ó Baoill, C. (ed.), Duanaire Colach (Aberdeen, 1997). [Verse from Coll.]

Copyright © Donald E. Meek 1997

MENZIES, David, ‘Salute to an Adventurer’

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ScotLit 35, 2007 |

The great writers, those who still resonate down the generations, do so because their vision was not confined by or restricted to the circumstances of the age in which they lived. But should we not make space occasionally to celebrate some of the humbler hewers of words? Those who, in their own day and in their own way brought the pleasures of reading to many, but whose appeal has not outlived them? They too have things to tell us: of the causes and concerns of their times, of the ebb and flow of literary fashions and, if only by default perhaps, of the art of writing.

An apposite candidate is, I would suggest, James Grant, novelist, historian and lifelong champion of Scottish rights.

Grant was born in Edinburgh in 1822 and died in London in 1887. He came of Highland stock, his forebears being Grants of Corrimony in Glen Urquart, a Jacobite-leaning cadet branch of the powerful Strathspey clan. His paternal grandfather was a highly respected advocate, doyen of the Edinburgh bar, while his father was an officer in the Gordons, a veteran of Wellington’s Peninsular campaigns. His maternal grandfather, Captain Andrew Watson, was a second cousin of Sir Walter Scott.

James set out to follow his father’s profession, taking up a commission in the 62nd Regiment only to give it up two years later. For a time thereafter he studied with David Rhind, the Edinburgh architect, but it seems he had already formed a passion for history and had an itch to write. His first novel, The Romance of War, which drew extensively on his father’s experiences, was published in 1845.

Its success with the growing readership for novels of adventure, and at that time especially for military novels, led to its inclusion in Routledge’s Railway Library – one-volume inexpensive reprints sold on W.H. Smith’s new station bookstalls. By 1857, Smith’s sales figures showed that the Library’s most popular authors, after Bulwer Lytton and Captain Marryat, were Miss Austen, the Mesdames Gaskell and Trollope, and James Grant.

After The Romance of War and Adventures of an Aide-de-Camp (1848), Grant was regarded as one of the masters of his chosen genre. Many of his subsequent novels were based on campaigns in which Scottish regiments had featured prominently and his title pages often identified him as ‘The author of Adventures of an Aide-de-Camp’ or ‘James Grant of the 62nd Regiment’. His reputation as an expert on all things military resulted in his being consulted by the War Office during the army reforms of 1881. His personal collection of militaria can be seen in the War Museum in Edinburgh Castle.

This early success persuaded Grant to make a living entirely by his pen. He wrote a further fifty or so novels, short stories, articles, biographies and miscellaneous works on historical or antiquarian topics, his inspiration usually Scotland’s past, occasionally its present. But competition in his chosen market was intense, and though his energy never flagged, changing tastes and the proliferation of new practitioners gradually sidelined him. The Scottish themes had to give way to rousing tales set in the expanding Empire, and increasingly his audience was a juvenile one: enthusiastic readers of his fiction in their boyhood years included Thomas Hardy and Neil Munro. While his works were reprinted often in his lifetime and some achieved foreign translation, he never repeated his early success, dying ‘destitute’ as one of his obituarists dolefully claimed.

A few of his titles lingered in print into the twentieth century – The Romance of War, The Yellow Frigate (1854) – in such collections of ‘classics’ as those brought out by Nelson and Collins. Indeed, the Frigate, some of the action of which is set in medieval Dundee, was relaunched in a 1984 paperback edition by a local publisher. His Old and New Edinburghremained a respected work of reference for years after Grant’s death. Beyond these little is left. His two sons died childless; Routledge, his first publishers, did not preserve records of their association with him. He has become a footnote, a literary mini-Ozymandias, his stone toppled, face down, in St Mary’s R.C. Cemetery, Kensal Green.

It has to be acknowledged that, even applying the most generous critical standards, one could not claim that Grant advanced the craft of fiction. His novels are a hard read today: they scarcely qualify as Scott Lite, far less Scot. Lit. Plots are perfunctory (there is effectively only one, which, with minor variations, serves them all); character and action are only haphazardly related; and the narratives are overloaded with historical and antiquarian detail. He regularly interposes his opinions as well as his learning, often blatantly diverting his storyline to provide opportunities for outraged animadversions on the plight of Scotland. Nonetheless, his yarns do not lack pace, rushing on as they do from one dramatic incident to the next, propelled by either the chronology of historical events or, where structurally necessary, by shameless coincidence. ‘Dashing’ is the word favoured by the kindlier contemporary reviewers.

Of course it is easy to point up the weaknesses: they are the weaknesses of writing against the clock to feed a public greedy for this kind of stuff, a new readership increasingly able to afford increasingly affordable book prices. Grant was no worse than the more fashionable Lytton and Ainsworth, and while one critic reviewing the achievements of the leading writers of romantic fiction in the mid-century said of Grant:

… unfortunately his object is to supply the booksellers with quantity rather than the public with good quality. Two novels a year is his average; he is very moderate and forbearing not to publish twice as much.

he nevertheless conceded that he had:

… a quick, lively, fiery pen, capable of great achievements.

And it is this capability, tantalisingly discernible amid the fustian, that can be cited as one justification for commemorating his work. For it is not difficult to find passages in most of the novels and in his non-fiction where Grant drops sensationalism for realism; where he achieves such imaginative penetration of a scene or an incident – a riot, the High Street of Edinburgh in the sixteenth century, a military column complete with camp-followers trudging through a winter rainstorm, the red dye seeping out of the soldiers’ greatcoats – that the effect of his crisp description is positively filmic. This, from Oliver Ellis (1861), is part of the description of the battlefield of Fontenoy:

Rusty cannon-shot half-buried in the earth; three-cornered hats, hussar and grenadier caps, belts and cartridge-boxes, were yet lying thickly, as the peasantry and plunderers had failed to glean up everything; and the white ammunition paper was whirling, like autumn leaves, in the eddies of the wind.

The paper is a masterly touch.

Other rewarding discoveries the patient reader will come across are a talent for poker-faced satire, the more surprising since his obligatory ‘comic’ characters and situations are achingly unfunny.

Admittedly it is pointless to speculate that, had he enjoyed the financial security of some of his rivals and freedom from the restrictive conventions that limited authorial scope in his day, Grant could have raised his game, so to speak, and acquired real literary stature. Nevertheless it is possible to sense from his treatment of, for example, the relations between men and women, that Grant, writing two generations on, would have been more interested in and more interesting on this topic. As it is he takes risks: his heroes and his secondary heroines are at least unmistakably sexual beings.

The heroes are usually soldiers, and for much of the story are on active service abroad. After they depart, news from home brings them word that their insipid fiancées have married a rival, or letters miscarry or some misunderstanding arises which leaves the young men ostensibly fancy-free. Thereupon, military duties permitting, they enthusiastically woo exotic ladies who, being foreign, do nothing to discourage them.

In describing these encounters, Grant allows himself interesting liberties. In The Romance of War, Ronald Stuart attempts to seduce a nun, for heaven’s sake; Allan MacInnon in Laura Everingham (1857), enjoys a full-blown adulterous affair. To maintain the proper Victorian double standard these various mesdemoiselles and signorine have, of course, to meet dreadful fates (a handy cholera outbreak carries off Sister Antoinette) leaving the hero free to return to Scotland and his true love emotionally unencumbered: ‘—but that was in another country / And beside the wench is dead.’

Of course, such episodes have always been narrative clichés in picaresque fiction and thrillers (think Bond girls). Grant can do better than this, however. Fanny Clavering is friend and temporarily sister-in-law to the eponymous Stepford heroine in Laura Everingham, and is clearly intended to represent a healthier attitude to the man-woman thing. She is beautiful: ‘Lola Montes-looking’, ‘Di Vernon-looking’; rich; witty; ‘painfully outspoken’; athletic (point-to-point, archery and billiards); and a merciless coquette: ‘the pet of the Household Brigade’. An intriguing blend of Becky Sharp and Joan Hunter-Dunn – but the care with which Grant works Fanny into the events of the novel signals her importance.

She ruthlessly dismisses Laura’s romantic sentiments:

One lover is worth a hundred friends 

and is quite clear as to her beau ideal ..

—I should like a man with a lofty presence—a man of whom I should feel proud, even when I had tired of him and ceased to love him. 

Despite being kidnapped by Turkish bandits, Fanny survives intact (whether intacta has been unclear throughout) and marries the only other character in the novel with creative credibility – a violent, saturnine man below her social station. The reader – this reader anyway – finds this convincing and quite satisfactory … and hankers to know how it works for them.

However, the case for rescuing James Grant from obscurity and acknowledging his modest contribution does not depend only on glimpses of what might have been. Another – and probably more cogent – argument derives from his relationship with Scotland and from the influence of that relationship on his writing. His consistent aim is to memorialise the values and traditions he saw as unique to Scotland and which he feared were threatened by the arrogant indifference of her English neighbours and the uncaring acquiescence of the Scottish mercantile and professional classes (his denunciation of the bourgeoisie resounds through every tale).

This decision to follow an almost exclusively Scottish muse was mirrored by his one foray into political action when, in 1852, he and his brother John were founder members of the National Association for the Vindication of Scottish Rights. The NAVSR began respectably enough under the patronage of the Earl of Eglinton and with the support of W.E. Aytoun, Hugh Miller, eminent churchmen and several royal burghs and the wildly enthusiastic encouragement of the student bodies of Edinburgh and Glasgow. Its demands were reasonable enough: more Parliamentary time for Scottish affairs and the rectification of various breaches of the Treaty of Union. The campaign failed to fire the interest of the Scottish public or the Scottish press, however, and a series of rowdy meetings in the two cities incurred the opprobrium of the aforementioned bourgeoisie. The movement faltered and died, though many of its claims were met over the succeeding decades. (Grant continued to raise grievances, most of which related to the improper use of heraldic devices on flags and coinage, another of his fields of expertise).

It is likely that Grant’s reputation as a lightweight – if successful – novelist did not help to make the movement popular among the thinking classes; it is equally probable that his reputation as an activist did little to enhance his standing as a man of letters. Yet this concern to define ourselves in terms of an honourable balance of past dignity and present pragmatism is a gowping nerve in the Scottish body politic to this day, and Grant was brave enough to probe it in his life and in his literature, however clumsily.

And while ‘clumsy’ may be one of the words that comes readily to mind in summing up his literary crusade in Scotland’s name, there can be no doubting his genuine love for his native land. Sentimentalised it may be, uncritical the use of sources and over-lavish the detail, the real relish with which he sets about recreating a scene from Scottish history is unmistakable. Many of his vignettes linger in the memory long after the daft plots they grace are forgotten. His fictional characters may be one-dimensional, but his real heroine was Scotland.

To these two claims that can be made on Grant’s behalf – that he could write well even if his reach exceeded his grasp; and that he can at his best convey enough of the essence of our history to make us want to re-explore it for ourselves – could be added the recognition that his writing life covered those extraordinary forty years in which Scotland expanded as an industrial nation, extended itself as a partner in empire-building yet shrank as road, rail and steamship opened up its ancient fastnesses. Grant’s novels set in his own times offer fascinating perspectives on the Victorian world view. A salute is surely due to one of our first modern professional writers nearly one hundred and twenty years after his death. He got few in his lifetime.

Copyright © David Menzies 2007

MORGAN, Edwin, ‘The Contribution of Iain Crichton Smith’

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ScotLit 23, Winter 2000 |

I’d like to begin with a brief sketch of the man, just to place him in your minds. He was born in 1928 in Glasgow, but was brought up on the island of Lewis. It’s frequently stated, even in books from his own publisher, that he was born on Lewis, but his first two years were in fact spent in Glasgow. What influence this could have I don’t know, but it must have meant something to him, since he wrote poems about the fact, so those who keep saying he was born on Lewis have not been reading his poetry with due care and attention! Anyhow, he was brought up in a Gaelic-speaking community on Lewis, so that English was his second language, first learned at school. He went to Aberdeen University and took a degree in English there. From then on, he earned his living as a schoolteacher, to begin with in Dumbarton where I first met him in the early 1950s, and thereafter at Oban High School. I still have a photograph I took of him in Dumbarton, standing outside his house, leaning against a lamp-post with a match between his teeth, looking more worldly and gallus than he really was. The match-stick rolled between his teeth was a favourite gesture. I think he must have got it from American films. We got on extremely well right from the start, and talked about everything under the sun, including of course Scotland and its status. Although he later travelled about quite a lot, he remained very much a writer based in the Highlands of Scotland, and Highland culture and landscape and history are diffused through his work, interestingly punctuated by references to Freud and Lenin and Marx and Wittgenstein and Virgil and Dante. It’s not a learned poetry as such, and it’s not a difficult poetry; perhaps what it does is show how someone brought up in a narrow, constricted environment can be open to the whole intellectual world if he wants to be. The narrowness of the world he grew up in – and it’s a narrowness he exclaims against in poem after poem – was the teachings and influence of the Free Church, which was still powerful, dogmatic, authoritarian, and as he saw it, philistine, anti-cultural. It gave him a rooted dislike of all dogma, whether religious or political. In an early poem about his own island, ‘Poem of Lewis’, he says ‘They have no place for the fine graces / of poetry.’ So he had to strike out on his own, dip his toe in the wider world, yet always marked by an inheritance he could never shrug off. I should add that he has been criticized for his almost totally negative view of Lewis. The poet Derick Thomson, who had a very similar upbringing but did not share that negativity, suggests that personal factors were at work: Iain was a lonely child with a lot of illness, and with a good deal of unhappiness in the family background, and this, I would agree, is something that has to be taken into account. But whatever the causes were, the iron had certainly entered into his soul on some aspects of life.

     He was a prolific writer, in English and Gaelic, and produced novels, short stories, essays, radio plays and stage plays as well as many volumes of poetry. He wrote quickly, usually without revision, and with the risk (which he was aware of) of being careless and slapdash when he was not writing under good pressure. On the other hand, he gained in a sort of unstudied, often surprising lyrical quality which he couldn’t have got any other way. His best poems often seem to slide onto the page without strain or effort; they seem natural, seem right, seem inspired. He had an impatience with formal structures, especially if they were complex, and that can be either good or bad. Poetry by its nature has form. It is not prose, it is not speech. So there is always a danger if you pay all your dues to spontaneity. The element of luck looms large. Smith, especially after his early poetry, took that risk, and wanted to write as freely as possible. Also, we have to note that his dislike of formal showiness was very characteristic of the man, who was in himself totally modest and unpretentious. He had a certain Highland reticence, but added to that, in his earlier years, he was very tense and nervous, and it took him quite a while to become inured to public poetry-readings. I remember once, when we were both about to go on the platform at a reading in Edinburgh, he was prowling about, looking thoroughly miserable, and muttering, O God, I wish I was in Stornoway! He never read his poems really well; they tended to come out in a rapid low monotone which missed the expressive possibilities that were undoubtedly there, and when he had finished one poem he hurried on to the next, without allowing the audience time to react. He gradually evolved a method of performance, of pleasing the audience, by interspersing the poems with bizarre jokes (really awful jokes sometimes!), and eventually with some of his short stories, which were often hilariously funny (particularly stories about his wildly eccentric alter ego, the Holy Fool, Murdo). Latterly, I have been reading with him when he read no poetry at all, only prose, which I felt was cheating a bit, but of course it worked with the audience. His sense of humour was very engaging, at times rather surreal, and at times giving the impression of something on the edge, possibly more dark than joyful. He had in fact one period of complete paranoiac breakdown, and was for some time in a mental hospital, though he made a full recovery and found a new happiness and sociability in the latter part of his life. After the breakdown, as he said himself, he ‘rejoined the human race’.

     What else can we say about him? His favourite writers were Auden, Kierkegaard, Robert Lowell, and Dostoevsky – a formidable quartet. He loved crosswords, especially of the Torquemada type. And as a teacher, he had the great quality of imagination: he would turn an English class into a vehement discussion of the rights and wrongs of the wonderful story of Dido and Aeneas in Virgil’s Aeneid: the pupils might never learn Latin, but they would learn something about human nature, about love, about ambition, about destiny, about high ideals and the often dark underside of high ideals: in other words, education for life.

     In looking now at his work, I shall be considering his poetry mainly, since that is central to his literary contribution. But he did write a dozen novels, and a few words about these are in order. He was not a natural born novelist, as he himself admitted. The language is plain and colourless; the characters are thinly sketched and often speak in clichés; and there is very little solidarity of background in description of places or things or even persons. The plots, such as they are, are suggested by his own autobiographical history. Sometimes he struggles through, and the book is readable enough, but a good novelist would have to be more in the world, to mix more with a variety of people, and above all to be more observant than Smith was. Why did he spend so much time writing these books? Maybe there are two answers. After he took his early retirement from teaching, he needed some extra income, and the novels helped. But also, on a deeper level, I think they relate to his fear of not writing, his habit of setting aside a regular number of hours a day for literary creation of some kind. He said in an interview in 1995 that his obsessive fear was ‘to stop writing altogether – I wouldn’t know what to do with myself. That would be the most devastating thing that could happen.’ It’s generally agreed that by far the best of his novels is Consider the Lilies (1968). The book about the Highland Clearances is very short, really only a novella, and was written in ten days. It is a very compressed account of the eviction of a stubborn old woman who shows us that even at the age of seventy it is possible to change, to grow, to begin to understand that your local minister may be a tool in the hands of the evictors and that the local atheist may be more Christian than the minister. When the book came out, it was much criticized for all sorts of historical inaccuracies, most of them quite blatant to anyone who really knew about the period. Does it matter? Smith himself, when he was interviewed about it, was fairly laid back. He said, with a laugh, ‘The history was a bit haphazard. I should perhaps have done a bit more research … I don’t think I was too concerned with historical truth. There were a number of mistakes … I don’t know if a novel has to be that accurate. I was more concerned with the old woman’s mind.’ Any how, the public seems to have decided that Smith was right. The book has become a minor classic and has been reprinted several times in the Canongate Classics series.

     The only other novel where Smith really did do research was much less successful. An Honourable Death (1992) retells the story of Major-General Sir Hector Macdonald, a peasant boy from the Black Isle who joined the army and rose through the ranks until he received the highest honours for bravery, a soldier who was successful, admired, loved, but who shot himself in a hotel in Paris rather than face a court-martial which had accumulated evidence of his extensive homosexual activities with native youths in Ceylon. His life was a powerful, moving, tragic story, almost Aristotelian in its evocation of pity and terror, and you would think no-one could make a boring novel about it – but Smith does. The style is humdrum, dutiful, plodding through all the incidents he has dug up from his reading (he actually includes a bibliography in the book), and the awful real-life denouement comes across like something in a cheap novelette. As one reviewer remarked, the book is ‘calamitously lacking in dynamic life’. If this is so, Smith’s instinct to avoid research for Consider the Lilieswas probably quite sound.

     One other novel is worth mentioning both because it is well written and because it has a painful relevance to the author’s life. In the Middle of the Wood (1987) traces the story of a married man, a writer, who suddenly has an attack of paranoia, thinks his wife is having an affair, becomes obsessed with the idea that he is being spied on and everything about him is being bugged, loses more and more contact with everyday reality, and is driven to the verge of both murder and suicide. After a spell in a mental hospital he recovers and is reunited with his wife, in a very touching conclusion to the book. Smith has said that the whole story is true, and if this is so, it is a most remarkable example of how an artist will use the material of his life, no matter how terrible it may be, and perhaps achieve the double function of exorcising some of his demons and presenting his readers with a highly dramatic story.

     As far as the prose is concerned, his most popular work has always been the series of short stories about Murdo. Murdo is mad, but harmless. He shatters the complacent surface of life wherever he goes. He casts some doubts on the supremacy of reason. Like MacGonagall, he is perfectly serious, and that is what makes him so funny:

One day Murdo visited the local library and he said to the thin bespectacled woman who was standing at the counter: 
    “I want the novel War and Peace written by Hugh Macleod.” 
    “Hugh Macleod?” she said. 
    “Yes,” he said, “but if you don’t happen to have War and PeaceI’ll take any other book by the same author, such as The Brothers Karamazov.” 
    “I thought,” she said doubtfully, “I mean are you sure that…” 
    “I’m quite sure that the book is by Hugh Macleod,” said Murdo, “and I often wonder why there aren’t more of his books in the libraries.” 
    “Well,” she said, “I think we have War and Peace but surely it was written by Tolstoy.” 
    “What’s it about?” said Murdo, “Is it about a family growing up in Harris at the time of Napoleon?” 
    “I thought,” she said, “that the story is set in Russia,” looking at him keenly through her glasses. 
    “Bloody hell,” said Murdo under his breath and then aloud, 
    “Oh well I don’t think we can be talking about the same Hugh Macleod. This man was never in Russia as far as I know. Is it a long book, about a thousand pages?” 
    “I think that’s right,” said the woman, who was beginning to look rather wary. 
    “Uh huh,” said Murdo. “This is a long book as well. It’s about Napoleon in Harris in the eighteenth century. Hugh Macleod was an extraordinary man, you know. He had a long beard and he used to make his own shoes. A strange man. I don’t really know much about his life except that he became a bit religious in his old age.”

     Murdo is not the only character in Smith’s short stories to have been brushed by the wing of insanity. One of the best of these stories is Napoleon and I, about an old married couple where the husband has gone mad and thinks he is Napoleon, leaving messages for the milkman to deliver five divisions of troops tomorrow, calling his wife Josephine, and dressing in a Napoleonic coat and hat. The story is told by his wife, who is at her wits’ end knowing what to do with him; she thinks a hospital would be cruel; she simply has to look after him, though they are both in their eighties. Like the Murdo stories, it is extremely funny – even the wife finds her husband comical at times. But the comedy is very deceptive; it is really a tragedy where no-one is at fault. The wife remembers that she once loved him – where is that love now? They cannot even talk to each other. The contrast between what might have been and what is now is very moving.

     Turning now to the poetry, and I shall be speaking only about his English poetry, or Gaelic poetry in translation, I think it may be useful to have at least a word about the fact of his bilingualism. Gaelic was what was used at home and in the playground, but English began to dominate as soon as he went to school. He is unlike his contemporaries (Sorley MacLean, Derick Thomson, for example) in writing so much of his poetry in English and so little in Gaelic (Sorley MacLean said once that he could not write poetry in English – he used to apologize for his English versions of his own poems). Smith is quite different, in that he very early became fascinated with English and American poets and evidently felt impelled to challenge them, with a sort of determination not to let the fact of his using a second language, an imposed, non-native language stand in his way. Was this a betrayal of his birthright? He sometimes seems to have felt so. More often, he simply felt caught in a dilemma from which there was no satisfactory escape. In his essay ‘Real People in a Real Place’ (1986) he has a very bitter passage which is worth quoting:

I recall with a sense of injustice my own fragmented life, the choices I had to make when I didn’t realise that I was making them, the losses I endured before I well knew that I was enduring them, the contradictions I was involved in before I knew they existed. And I know that my own life has been a snake pit of contradictions, because of an accident of geography and a hostile history. I envy, for instance, those poets who have developed in a stable society, who can start from there and are not constantly analysing the very bases of their art.

     That ‘snake-pit of contradictions’ is easily seen in the antithetical titles of so many of his books, from The Law and the Grace (1965) to The Leaf and the Marble (1998). He eventually erected a whole philosophy of life on the contrast between things dogmatic and authoritarian on the one hand and things fresh and vulnerable and spontaneous on the other. But even in small, apparently artless poems he can make a wonderfully unexpected attack on traditional wisdom, so-called, forcing us to turn things round, turn them inside out, re-examine our thoughts on consensus ideas. Here is one which specifically throws a punch at his own people, the Gaels. It’s called ‘The Gaelic Proverb’, and he wants you never to believe that proverb again, even if it seems cosy and friendly:

The Gaelic proverb says, 
sad is the state of the house 
without a child or cat.

But sad is the state of the child 
who carries his house on his back 
like a trapped snail.

And the cat who cannot go out 
into the deep greenery 
but sits on the spinster’s lap 
narrow and infertile, 
as the wild sun goes down.

     It’s really a nicely subversive little poem, delivering a body-blow to those who praise close-knit communities. Smith had had quite enough of close-knit communities! It’s time for the deep greenery and the wild sun!

     Things that restrict and stifle have always been Smith’s target. In his own upbringing, the long arm of the Free Church became the focus of deep feelings of enmity which permeate many of his poems. The claim to be right, the claim to have the truth, the despising of pleasure, the indifference to art, the willingness to condemn and if possible punish the slightest backsliding, the inability to compromise, and perhaps worst of all, the incomprehension of any conception of creative change or growth: these were damning factors in Smith’s eyes. He was not given to public controversy, but one letter he had published in The Scotsman in 1988 showed how strong his feelings were in this matter. The context was that the Rev. Alexander Murray of the Free Presbyterian Church had been suspended for three months for asking Monsignor Thomas Wynne to say a prayer at a meeting of the Highland Regional Council’s working party on religious affairs. Iain Crichton Smith wrote:

The impudence and the arrogance of the Church Synod is breathtaking. Do they really believe that only they have a hot line to God, and that Catholics are unfit to speak to him? At a time when the Free Church Moderator spoke of the hunger for reconciliation it seems another and very familiar backwoods step into the neolithic darkness which has spawned so much conflict. When will these people come out of their demonic jungle? …. What can one think of these pitiful figures huddling together in outer darkness except to blow them away with the cleansing wind of humour? Let us hope that the tiny paranoiac God whom they have created in their own images will have more respect for them than those who believe in ordinary Christian compassion are likely to have.

     From a man of sixty, this is heady stuff, and obviously heartfelt. Perhaps the most interesting phrase is ‘the tiny paranoiac God’. God is paranoiac if he is afraid of a Catholic priest saying a prayer at a Council meeting; but Smith deflates him right away with the unexpected word ‘tiny’: in the end he’s nothing, and we shouldn’t be afraid of him.

     In poetry, as opposed to polemic, what does Smith make of these things? Poetry has to be a bit more subtle than the ‘neolithic darkness’ and ‘demonic jungle’ of the Scotsman letter. One of the best examples is ‘Old Woman’. He has half a dozen poems with that title – an absolute rookery of black-clothed figures – so we have to distinguish – and the one I’m referring to is not the famous one (‘And she, being old, fed from a mashed plate’) but the one beginning ‘Your thorned back’. I’ll quote it:

Your thorned back
heavily under the creel
you steadily stamped the rising daffodil.

Your set mouth
forgives no-one, not even God’s justice
perpetually drowning law with grace.

Your cold eyes
watched your drunken husband come
unsteadily from Sodom home.

Your grained hands
dandled full and sinful cradles.
You built for your children stone walls.

Your yellow hair
burned slowly in a scarf of grey
wildly falling like mountain spray.

Finally you’re alone
among the unforgiving brass,
the slow silences, the sinful glass.

Who never learned,
not even aging, to forgive
our poor journey and our common grave

while the free daffodils
wave in the valleys and on the hills
the deer look down with their instinctive skills,

and the huge sea
in which your brothers drowned sings slow
over the headland and the peevish crow.

     The puritanical old woman has ‘cold eyes’, a ‘set mouth’, she stamps down the rising daffodil, she does her duty by her husband but the cradles are all filled with original sin, and although she would no doubt call herself a Christian she has never learned, even in old age, the essential Christian virtue of forgiveness; she lives in a prison of her own making, while outside the free daffodils wave in the valleys and the deer look down from the hills. With characteristic sensitivity Smith finds things to say in her favour: she lost her brothers to the sea, her husband was a drunk, and is now dead; and – in a fine image at the very centre of the poem – her blond hair ‘burned slowly in a scarf of grey’ – she too was mortal. The overall picture, however, is highly critical of the oppressive environment which moulded a woman who never became a full human being. So what has life got to weigh in the balance against this oppressiveness and unhappiness? If the old woman is the law, where is the grace? It’s not to be found in any rival view of life, in some carefully worked out libertarianism designed to eclipse Presbyterianism. That is not Smith’s way. The answer is a sudden given, a happening, an event too ordinary to be aggrandized by some such term as a Zen satori, but a revelation all the same. Its very ordinariness guarantees its authenticity. Here is ‘Two Girls Singing’:

It neither was the words nor yet the tune.
Any tune would have done and any words.
Any listener or no listener at all.

As nightingales in rocks or a child crooning
in its own world of strange awakening
or larks for no reason but themselves.

So on the bus through late November running
by yellow lights tormented, darkness falling,
the two girls sang for miles and miles together.

and it wasn’t the words or tune. It was the singing.
It was the human sweetness in that yellow,
the unpredicted voices of our kind.

     Really the only thing I would say about that very fine poem (it was one of the author’s favourites, and he was right) is that his often-used method of contrast has a freshness, an unexpectedness about it that – once you catch it – underlines the meaning of the poem. Yellow is always a very negative colour in Smith, and it’s used twice here, referring to yellow sodium streetlights. The streetlights not only have this alarming colour, but they march in strict ordered lines along the dark road. The sinister authoritarian predictability of the streetlights is contrasted with the sudden unpredicted almost wordless voices of the two girls singing on the bus.

     I have quoted very good short poems, but Smith also had ambitions towards something longer and more complex. These ambitions showed themselves in poems like ‘Deer on the High Hills’ and ‘The White Air of March’. The former, an early poem, has been much discussed by critics, both positively and negatively, so I thought it might be more interesting to say something about ‘The White Air of March’, which is sometimes underrated. This is a long poem in 16 sections, and in different styles, some of them very free; indeed the whole thing was a new departure for Smith, and it wouldn’t be unfair to call it more ‘modern’ than his usual approach. It has learned something from Auden, Lowell, Eliot – indeed, it incorporates some lines and phrases from T.S.Eliot. Basically, it is a state-of-the-nation poem about the Highlands of Scotland, first published in 1969 (Scottish International 7, Sept.1969). It paints a scornful, sometimes angry picture, though it looks for change. Scotland swims in a sea of kitsch, of triviality, of a bad kind of populism. He attacks some obvious targets: Andy Stewart, tourism, golf, Scottish country dance music (‘used as torture’ to make prisoners confess), the Sunday Post, female Highland dancers, Gaelic pedantry over tiny details of genealogy or grammar coupled with lack of interest in the real issues affecting Gaelic society … But behind this surface froth there is a deeper malaise about what he calls being an exile in one’s own land. Exile is a recurring theme throughout Smith’s poetry, especially his awareness of the physical exile of emigration, but also an inner alienation. As he says in Section 8 of the poem:

The exiles have departed, 
           leaving old houses. 
The Wind wanders like an old man who has lost his mind. 
‘What do you want?’ asks the wind. ‘Why are you crying? 
Are those your tears or the rain?’ 
I do not know. I touch my cheek. It is wet. 
I think it must be the rain.

It is bitter 
to be an exile in one’s own land. 
It is bitter 
to walk among strangers 
when the strangers are in one’s own land. 
It is bitter 
to dip a pen in continuous water 
to write poems of exile 
in a verse without honour or style.

     This sense of exile is at least partly self-imposed, and comes from his divided cultural inheritance. Here he is, a native Gael, writing modernist free verse in English, to the dismay of his more conservative Gaelic contemporaries. He himself calls it ‘a verse without honour or style’, though that might appear a harsh judgement. If he looks for role models, he fails to find them in Scotland. He looks for seriousness, truth, high endeavour, where are they? In Section 7 he writes (and he puts it in brackets, almost as if it belonged to another world):

(I speak now of those who told the truth. 
Let them be praised. 
           Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, 
Kafka – let them be honoured. 
For them there shall be a cross pointing both ways, 
Vertical horizontal. 
The idiot waits for the Cossacks in crystal and iron. 
The hunchback squeezes the last ounce out of the wine…)

     Without these men, he implies, a Russian, a German, a Dane, a Czech, what use is it to consider either the romance or the tragedy of the Highlands? We need vision. We need new thoughts. We need to look out and up. In its search for renewal, the poem is not unlike ‘The Waste Land’. Eliot says ‘April is the cruellest month’, when the new life is struggling; Smith’s title of ‘The White Air of March’ suggests an even greater struggle, a more reluctant spring, but nevertheless a possibility, a potential, even in the land of what he calls ‘the intrepid hunters of golf balls’. He uses the image of the Cuillin mountain-range as something high, sharp, difficult, but beckoning and beautiful, which must be striven for at all costs. In Section 15:

The Cuillins tower high in the air – 
Excellence. 
We climb from pain to perfume: 
the body opens out; gullies, 
crevices, reveal the orchis. 
The soul flies skyward, 
impregnated with scent. 
On the right hand 
           the sun will tenant 
Skye. 
           The mist dissipates. 
Gold grows at our feet.

‘The White Air of March’ ends with two lines that sum up what the search is for – not a new political system, not a language revival, not a recalled diaspora, but simply

In the white air of March 
A new mind.

That poem had some hard things to say about the Gaels and their decline. But almost as if to make amends, he has a witty Gaelic poem which has no lack of modernity. He calls it ‘The TV’, and this is his own translation of it:

The sun rises every day 
from moving shadows – 
on the TV

We did not believe in the existence of Ireland 
till we saw it many nights – 
on the TV.

He knows more about Humphrey Bogart 
than he knows about Big Norman – 
since he got the TV.

Said Plato – 
‘we are tied in a cave’ – 
that is, the TV.

A girl came into the room 
without perfume without expression – 
on the TV.

At last he lost the world 
as Berkely said – 
there was nothing but the TV.

He bought War and Peace, 
I mean Tolstoy, 
after seeing it on the TV.

When he switched off the TV 
the world went out – 
he himself went out.

His hands did not come back to him 
or his eyes 
till he put on the TV.

A rose in a bowl on the TV set, 
the things that are in the world, 
the things that are not.

He found himself in the story. 
He was in the room. 
He didn’t know where he was.

You, my love, are dearer to me 
than Softly Softly 
than Sportsnight with Coleman.

‘In locked rooms with iron gates’ – 
but, my love, 
do they have TV?

     It is of course typical of Smith that he uses the everyday object of the TV to plunge at once into questions of what is really real. It all goes back to the shadows on the wall in Plato’s cave, which are uncannily like television. And Bishop Berkely, who asserted that nothing could exist unless it was perceived to exist, also comes into the picture very neatly. Did he bring Plato and Berkely and Tolstoy into a Gaelic poem just to tease the Gaels? Possibly!

     In his last years Iain Crichton Smith brought out two book-length poems of sixty pages each: The Human Face (1996) and The Leaf and the Marble ((1998). Not much has been written about The Human Face, and I get the impression that people are a little embarrassed with it and don’t know quite what to make of it. I have to say that it doesn’t work for me, but I must add that at least one poet-critic, Christopher Whyte, whom I respect, has praised it, so I hope you will read it for yourselves and make up your own minds. The book has an epigraph from Robert Burns, ‘Man’s inhumanity to man / makes countless thousands mourn’, and it’s written in the Burns stanza, continuously, with no sections or divisions. It’s partly a lament, about human cruelty and violence, and partly a diatribe, against religious and political dogma. It has a wide historical sweep, and many pairs of enemies are listed and condemned: Saxon and Norman, Crusader and Turk, Irish Protestant and Irish Catholic; ethnic cleansing in the Balkans and elsewhere is attacked; the attractions of uniforms and weapons and a chain of command which removes individual responsibility are condemned; and there is a recurring theme of the sinister role of ideas, of abstractions, of incitements to violence, whether personal murder or national war. He is particularly bitter about theory and it doesn’t matter whether its Marxist or capitalist or Islamic; it always leads, he argues, to dehumanization, intolerance, and death. Even a supposedly good theory, like the theory that we have ‘souls’, is attacked, firstly because we do not have souls, and secondly because in the name of that theory we can burn thousands of innocent people at the stake. As he says in one stanza:

A theory can saw a leg, 
a theory can send a plague, 
a theory can make a thug 
           into a saint, 
a theory can make a rogue 
           into a gent.

     So how does all this come about? The villain of the piece is not Hitler or Jenghiz Kahn. The villain is God. Smith has often been described, and indeed has described himself as an atheist. I am not sure that that is the correct term. I see him as an antitheist. He still uses capital letters for ‘He’ and ‘Him’ when talking about God, and no self-respecting atheist would do that. God looms large in the poem, and is the ultimate source of evil; the buck stops with him; everything can be traced back, to the Flood, to Cain and Abel, to the temptation of Eve. God is not non-existent, as the atheist would claim. He is like a sore the poet cannot help picking at. God is there all right, and he’s a rank bajin!

     What is wrong with the poem, it seems to me, is that it is too generalized and too repetitive to move the reader as it obviously wants to do. There is no argument, there is no narrative, the poem simply states, states, states. He criticizes what he calls ‘windy abstractions’, but the poem is full of windy abstractions. Not once does he pause to make something real by describing an actual incident in detail, as someone like Wordsworth would do. His sincerity is obvious, but sincerity is not enough. The shrill, almost hysterical tone becomes wearisome, and the reader, even if he agrees with what is being said, is presented with a counter-productive overkill. Added to that, it has to be said that Burns must be moving uneasily in his grave if he hears what Smith has done with his famous stanza. Metre is extremely rough, and rhyme is often so approximate as to be virtually non-existent. Burns was a man of the eighteenth century, brought up in the neoclassical tradition, a virtuoso of the formal structures of poetry. Smith has always downgraded the form and technical aspects of verse, relying heavily on the accidents of inspiration and spontaneity and speed to carry him through. So his cavalier treatment of the Burns stanza is in character. I should add that Christopher Whyte makes a virtue of what I would regard as a sort of impatient incompetence: he takes a postmodernist view, and praises Smith for, as it were, ‘exploding’ the tight Burnsian form and liberating it from its unnecessary constraints. Well, there’s a good argument there, though I think I’m right!

     The Human Face, then, has not yet settled down into any consensus of appreciation, and, largely because it is more recent, neither has The Leaf and the Marble, so that one should perhaps be more tentative in talking about it. It may not, in the end, be more persuasive to the unbiased but thinking reader, but it is more interestingly written as poetry, and its free verse (with some rhyme here and there) comes as a relief after the laced-up stumble of the earlier poem. It is also a more personal poem, coming out of a holiday in Rome, and being at the same time an extended love poem to his wife and a meditation on the city of Rome. You will notice from the title that it goes back to his earlier favourite method of contrasting two opposing views or states, and in doing this it gains over The Human Face, which had no dialectic – there was no one to speak for God, or for the idea of conflict as a factor of some value in human evolution. In The Leaf and the Marble, the two elements of the title are in total and perpetual opposition: the leaf stands for organic, free, irregular spontaneous life, the marble stands for everything that is solid, fixed, unyielding, dictatorial. As the speaker in the poem wanders through modern Rome, he sees everywhere the massive – massive even when ruinous – relics of ancient Roman civilization, quite often in the midst of trees and foliage and flowers, and the contrast between the hard cold dead stone and the flickering shimmering vulnerable leaves and petals makes him build up in his mind an eventually totally alienated view of the Roman empire. Roman statues were too self-satisfied and arrogant; Roman roads were too straight; Roman armies were too ruthless; Roman spectacles in the arena were too inhuman; and Roman power allowed no questioning. One of the examples he brings in is the story of Dido and Aeneas from Virgil’s Aeneid. Virgil, although he had every sympathy for Dido, and clearly saw the tragedy of her life, wanted nevertheless to argue that Aeneas was right to abandon her, even though it led to her suicide, because he was under the divine command of a greater mission, to found the Roman empire. Well, we know what Smith thinks of divine commands; Dido’s suffering is another nail in the coffin of fascistic authoritarianism.

     I’d like to quote one or two passages from this poem, which some of you may not have seen. Here is a part of Section 13 (Part One), which is about Avernus or Hades; Avernus, a volcanic lake near Naples, was regarded by the Romans as the entrance to the underworld. The poem at this point describes the speaker as emerging from Avernus, climbing into the upper world after a period of torment. We do not, perhaps, need to take a biographical reading, since the passage has a self-contained moving quality, but we can hardly escape knowing that it does celebrate the ending of the author’s mental breakdown:

Out of Avernus
I steadily climb
bearing a leaf

so tremulous
in a flood of light
and here I greet

you in your fresh
leaf-coloured shirt
or about the house

your flowery blouse.
The tenderness
of this wavering breeze

how ever express,
or behind our reason
that Rome of dark,

vast and compressed,
as towards you now
I bear this leaf,

my joy and my grief.
Out of the grave
of flickering Hades

I joyfully rise
after these scenes
that hurt my eyes,

and terrified me,
the running wolves,
the emptying graves.

And now I bear

my quivering leaf
as an angel might
on the new found earth

or the gift of a rose.
So out of the gross
dark of Avernus

I freely bear
my gift of a leaf

from my renaissance
this light bright leaf.

     One of the passages directly about Rome is worth quoting, partly because it has the curious paradox of equating ‘Roman’ and ‘Presbyterian’, and we have to remind ourselves that he is not speaking about Catholic Rome but about ancient pagan Rome. He cannot resist, even at this late stage of his life, thinking back to the Presbyterian oppressions of his youth: this is from Section 14 (Part One):

And so I have traced,
yes, I have traced
the secret at last

it is Rome that is
the Presbyterian
uncreative place,

it is Rome that has
the massive ponderous
unlifelike gaze

with its deaths and spies,
its historical bones,
its skeletons

of cobwebbed skulls.
It is Rome that dulls
bright nature’s smile

with its heavy marble
and stony designs.

     The pessimism of finding Presbyterianism alive and well, many miles from its birthplace and many years before it was born, does not permeate the whole poem. There is a charming passage, set back in Scotland, at the speaker’s own house, where he imagines Virgil and Dante, in their classical robes, stopping and asking for directions as they pass along the road: this is from Section 9 (Part Two):

Let Virgil 
and Dante enter 
like beggars or like 
tourists from the street, asking 
directions among the radiance. We are 
here, waiting, in this day 
that passes. The rabbits 
race below the leaves. You touch 
your togas ornamented 
with green. Sit here 
on this bench, I will bring you 
a cup of pure water, after the 
light has touched your gowns. 
Look at the leaves. It is right 
To gaze on this foliage, the light 
and luminous green. You wear 
the shifting marble of Rome and the 
ashes of Hades. Here there is none 
such, the leaves 
are random, arbitrary, and the weeds 
thrust among them, demanding their own lives.

     When I said, at the beginning of discussing the poem, that readers who liked it might still not find it fully persuasive, this is simply because there is as much to be said for Rome as against Rome, and the poem is totally one-sided. The reader has to determine whether that famous old suspension of disbelief can take care of the lurking objections. Perhaps the clear freshness and immediacy of the poem as reflecting an actual experience, the leaf suggesting life and love, the marble suggesting memorials and death, carries it through.

     I shall not attempt to sum up any grand verdict on an author who would have disliked such a thing. The range and variety of his work, and the naturalness of his best pieces, will always attract and please. If he has anger, he also has compassion, and he opens our ears to ‘the unpredicted voices of our kind’.

Copyright © Edwin Morgan 2000

MORGAN, Edwin, ‘James Bridie’s The Anatomist and John Byrne’s The Slab Boys’

by

Text of a talk given to a conference on Scottish literature organised by the Association for Scottish Literary Studies, University of Strathclyde, 3 October 1987 |

The Anatomist (1930) and The Slab Boys (1978) are obviously two very different plays, but they do have certain things in common, and they make interesting comparison. They both have clear links with their authors, who know what they’re talking about. Bridie was a doctor, and his play is about doctors and medicine and medical research. John Byrne was himself a slab boy, mixing paint for the designers at a carpet factory, and his play is about slab boys in a carpet factory. So in this sense both plays carry and convey a kind of authority and confidence which is notable and convincing. Also, you could claim that both plays are comedies. Certainly The Anatomist has a large element of tragedy and melodrama, but the beginning and end seem to indicate that the play is some sort of comedy – a serious, exciting, thoughtful comedy, full of ideas and arguments, containing horror but somehow managing not to leave that as the final impression. The Slab Boys is more obviously and continuously comic, but it too has tragic undercurrents and serious ideas, and is, if you like, a ‘portrait of the artist as a young man’, with a great deal to say, or suggest, about the struggles of a working-class artist in post-war society. And finally, both plays are good theatre. Both were successful with audiences from their first production, and both have shown that they can be revived successfully. This is not unconnected with the fact that both Dr Knox and Phil McCann, the two heroes, are strongly theatrical characters. The main difference between the two plays is that they belong to different eras of Scottish theatre. Bridie was writing mainly before the Second World War, in the 1930s, and his appeal was in general that of a middle-class writer to middle-class theatregoers. Byrne is writing after the war and in the wake of the post-war change of emphasis towards realistic and often socially committed working-class plays – the tradition of plays like Ena Lamont Stewart’s Men Should Weep, George Munro’s Gold in his Boots, Roddy McMillan’s All in Good Faith and The Bevellers, Bill Bryden’s Willie Rough, Hector MacMillan’s The Sash. (The Bevellers seems particularly close to Byrne’s play.) And going outside Scotland, one interesting difference is that John Byrne is asking his actors and director to show, as far as is practical on stage, the actual process of mixing paint for carpet designers – it’s a very physical play, you can’t mime it! Now this is what you also get in other plays of the period, like Arnold Wesker’s The Kitchen, where the play is set in the kitchen of a large restaurant, as realistically as possible, or David Storey’s The Contractor, where a huge marquee for a wedding reception is gradually set up, bit by bit, realistically and correctly, in the first part of the play and dismantled in the latter part. Both Wesker’s kitchen and Storey’s marquee are no doubt images or metaphors for something else, but from the audience’s point of view there is a great fascination in watching people at work. The Slab Boys comes into this category of play, and that is part of its hold on the audience. Plays have tended in the past to be about what their characters did or said when they were not at work, but since 1950 work has itself often become both a setting and a theme. Of course there is work in Bridie’s play too, in the background, but the work there is anatomical dissection, and this might have strained theatre resources or audience reaction!

Bridie, to look at him first, died in 1951, but in the thirty-odd years since his death we don’t seem to be much nearer any really agreed assessment of his place and value as a dramatist. His plays are not very frequently performed, and are, you may say, out of fashion. Yet when the best of them, like The Anatomist are revived, they prove to be very good theatre. So what is the problem? Bridie was himself a somewhat impish and enigmatic character. He wrote plenty about himself, for example in his autobiography One Way of Living (1939), but he likes to provoke and play with and tantalise the reader, using a good deal of mockery and irony and sometimes claiming to be less serious than he really was. The way he begins his autobiography is very typical (and I should add that he calls it among other things the History of a Happy Bourgeois – is that ironic?):

The Lowland Scot is the fine flower …’
‘To consider curiously the Scottish Character …’
‘Whatever we may think of the general characteristics of the Lowland Scot …’
I found I had put in the carbon paper wrong side up. I tore out the sheet and began again.

The Lowland Scot differs from the rest of mankind in that he has no Unconscious Mind. He is aware and critical of all the levels of his consciousness, even when he is asleep or tipsy. He is expert upon himself, if upon no other matter … One result of this is that the Scotsman is a good biographer but a bad autobiographist. His remarkably objective view of himself brings the recording of his own acts and experiences out of the field of art and into the field of mathematics. The story of an instrument of precision has poor appeal to the emotions. I am a Lowland Scot … So far as I know there is not a drop of English or Highland blood in my veins. I am thus ill-qualified to write the story of my life or of any part of it. (pp. 4–5)

You will notice how even that simple beginning contains an elusive note: if the story of an instrument of precision has poor appeal to the emotions, then the autobiography will be incomplete.

In trying to (or trying not to!) define himself, he takes up a number of themes: education, religion, politics, nationalism. Of these, it might be worth quoting what he says about religion, since The Anatomist is in its way a play that keeps raising religious issues, especially the opposition between conventional Christian disapproval of ‘interfering with nature’ and the new ‘religion of science’ which doctors and other researchers were drawn into. Religious issues and references and images do indeed recur throughout Bridie’s plays, but he disclaimed belief, and tells us how much he hated, as a boy, having to attend services in the Pollokshields Free Church in Glasgow:

I hated the dreadful smell of varnish and damp cushions and moth balls and hot pipes and the lavender and eau de cologne on the ladies’ handkerchiefs … I hated the creak of the minister’s boots on the pulpit stairs … I hated the nippit faces and reverent bronchitis of the worshippers. I hated the abominable, snivelling voice with which the parson addressed his maker. I disliked most of the hymns and practically all the psalms … I hated the cruel, stone-eroding monotony of the sermon … I liked only the elders when they came round with the plate. Some of them, I knew, were pleasant men; and I had a sense that I was paying my threepenny-bit to get out of Purgatory. When the time came when my mother asked me to join the Church these early terrors must have fought for me and I remained an outlier and a heathen in spite of all appeals to my honour, my religious sentiment and my affection.

On the matter of nationalism, and language, and the English and the Scots, Bridie was in part forthcoming, and in part undecided. He was very much concerned with the establishment of a Scottish National Theatre, but when it comes to nationalism in the larger sense he is not so ready to be pinned down; what he is quite sure of, however, is that the English and the Scots are different – that is the basis you have to start from – and the difference is what he and Moray McLaren investigate in their letters in the book called A Small Stir (1949). It is instructive to remember how mercilessly the poor Englishman Mr Raby is mocked in The Anatomist for his inability to understand Scots accents; even the genteel Edinburgh delivery of the Misses Dishart seems to flummox him (‘Are you fond of Naples, Mr Raby?’ ‘Yes, ma’am. I like them very much.’). The play uses English (Raby), Scottish-English (Knox and the Disharts), Irish-English (Burke and Hare), the various kinds of Scots (Mary Paterson, Davy Paterson). Bridie relishes the variety, as a dramatist, but he also enjoys pointing to the fact that a Scotsman and not an Englishman wrote the play. In one of his letters in A Small Stir (pp. 137–43) he comments:

A week or two ago, a Sunday newspaper offered me some money and I wrote them a playful article about Scotland … I hinted that God, from time to time, had been very lavish in providing Scotland with perfervid and original minds. I suggested that Scotland was waking up, now … [1949] I expressed the fantastic wish that some of Scotland’s remarkable men should come out of the land of Egypt [i.e. exile in England] and sport their kilts of many colours in the land of Scotland, where they were born and where, presumably, they could still flourish.

He went on to describe the reaction to his article: letters of praise from Scottish nationalists, and a spate of vicious letters from England about Scottish ingratitude for all the good things England had done for the Scots since 1707. This English view of history he won’t accept – even though a lot of his own income as a dramatist came from London theatres. As he puts it, ‘any serious resistance to their kindly despotism brings out the worst side of the English.’ And he warns us, finally, not to underestimate them, if we do resist or oppose them. ‘Moscow has nothing on the English in making adverse witnesses talk nonsense. They do it without drugs, or hypnotism or torture, or even the use of mirrors. They do it by magic.’

So overall you have the picture of a moderate-minded, non-religious, ironical, middle-class Lowland Scot from Glasgow who discovers his talent for writing plays during a period of renascent nationalism, and also a period of violently clashing ideologies such as Communism and Fascism, and who – perhaps this is the most we can say – is enormously interested in the ideas and movements of the time but finds it hard to commit himself to any of them. His characters toss ideas about, playfully or sceptically or seriously; and often the drama is set in motion through a contrast or opposition between a mocking or reductive spirit and some character who is possessed and obsessed by some new idea pointing to the future, like Dr Knox in The Anatomist who sees the necessity for regular dissection in medical training and research, or the young medical student Charles Cameron in A Sleeping Clergyman’ who studies the germs of his own disease under the microscope although he’s dying of tuberculosis. And the temperament of Bridie does not permit even these two characters to come through as unsullied heroes: the attitude to Knox, in his involvement with the Burke and Hare murders, is highly ambiguous, and any virtues in the desperate Charlie Cameron have to work themselves out three generations later as the play moves in time from the 1860s to the 1930s.

In The Anatomist, the medical subject of body-snatching and dissection suited Bridie as a doctor, but it also leads him right into highly dramatic human situations involving murder, prostitution, crisis of conscience, dedication to an ideal, the place of love in life, the place of the scientist in society – many themes emerging from realistically presented human dilemmas. Yet there is something more, in that Dr Knox (as I mentioned earlier) is highly theatrical, he is, if you like an actor in his own drama – it’s not for nothing that he feels he’s like Hamlet, engaging in banter with Mary Dishart as Ophelia, near the beginning: ‘You are facetious, Mr Knox.’ ‘Your only jig-maker.’ A jig-maker is a deviser of little theatrical interludes or epilogues, as Hamlet is, and perhaps Knox is too. Bridie was attracted by the theatrical possibilities of someone who was himself theatrical: the interest to the audience of an outwardly rather bizarre figure, unhandsome, bald, with an eye-patch, yet dressed like a dandy, fascinated by and fascinating to women, commanding a loyal following of students, full of playful or cynical or brutal conversation yet totally and knowledgeably committed to medical teaching and research, a man who plays the flute so badly yet so engagingly in Amelia Dishart’s drawing-room that she doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry, and yet the very man who is unwilling to question the true provenance of the bodies brought to him for dissection – a man of so many sides, so many contradictions, that he becomes a perfect focus for Bridie’s ambiguous purposes. The Actual difficulty of knowing what Knox as like in real life in early nineteenth-century Edinburgh (and this difficulty remains, despite the book on him by Isobel Rae, Knox the Anatomist, 1964) is precisely what draws Bridie to him as a dramatic subject. In Bridie he is a great anatomist; he is a tragic-comic, half-ludicrous lover; and there are suggestions that like Faust he has a touch of the Devil, as in the conversation between Paterson and Raby at the end of Act 2:

‘It’s a nice morning, Mr Raby.’ ‘Yes … I say, he’s a cool fish, the Governor.’ ‘Robert the Devil they call him.’ ‘Deep, ain’t he?’ ‘As deep as the pit.’ ‘What do you think? Does he think they knocked that girl on the head?’ ‘His Maker only kens what yon man’s thinking.’

These contrasts in the main character are then built up by Bridie into a play of contrasts, and especially the movement from the genteel Edinburgh drawing-room of the first act to the low-life scenes in the Canongate tavern in Act 2 and back to the Disharts’ drawing-room in Act 3; and the use of the Disharts’ house as an impromptu lecture-theatre for Knox and his students at the end is a brilliant contrast, bringing the medical and non-medical themes together. The middle act, with Walter getting drunk, and Burke and Hare luring the beautiful Mary Paterson to her doom (Don’t you worry, you’ll sleep sound this night,’ as Hare says), and then the tea-chest brought in with a lock of red hair caught in the lid – all this has so much inherent Melodrama that it presents a real challenge to the producer: but it can be done, it can give us a genuine pathos and the pathos is helped by the fact that Mary is no shrinking waif but a very robust character, strong-armed and strong-mouthed, so that her becoming a victim of the murderers is all the more striking and effective. This pathos makes Knox’s possible guilt, in turn, all the more strong as a dramatic theme. Indeed some critics have blamed Bridie for not making Knox, at the end, a complete villain, perhaps being condemned in court for complicity in murder, or alternatively, for not giving him a clear vindication as an innocent sufferer in the cause of science. But I think Bridie was right in not making it a morality play. The ambiguity is essential. The end, in its own way, is in fact very positive, even frighteningly so, in the emphasis it places on the sheer power of Knox’s personality, his Nietzschean imperturbability, and the comic undercurrents in his last speech never undermine its near-grotesque yet heroic stance.

With you I shall take the liberty of discussing a weightier matter … ‘The Heart of the Rhinoceros.’ This mighty organ, gentlemen, weighs full twenty-five pounds, a fitting fountainhead for the tumultuous stream that surges through the arteries of that prodigious monster. Clad in proof, gentlemen, and terribly armed as to his snout, the rhinoceros buffets his way through the tangled verdure engirdling his tropical habitat. Such dreadful vigour, gentlemen, such ineluctable energy requires to be sustained by no ordinary forces of nutrition …

Turning to The Slab Boys, we can see that John Byrne does not want or need the strong contrasts of scene or environment you find in Bridie. The two acts of the play are both set in the slab room of a carpet manufacturer in Paisley in 1957, and the action takes only one day. There is a sort of classic concentration or unity about this that seems to suit Byrne’s double purpose: to use a fairly claustrophobic setting (‘a small paint-spattered room’) where his characters will constantly be forced to interact, and to suggest the idea of escape, whether into the dubious promotion of the design studio or out into the ‘real’ world where an apprentice designer might become a real artist. And whereas Bridie wants to have moments of calm or quietness interspersed among the loud or argumentative or violent passages – variety of pitch as well as variety of tempo – Byrne’s play goes fast and hardly ever lets up. There’s a curious sort of paradox in the fact that although The Slab Boys is a very funny play, almost continuously so, and might therefore be thought somehow to be indulgent or easy-going compared with the high drama of a play about body-snatching, it has a hard edge, a rawness that hits a few nerves, even through all the fantastic and often black humour, whereas it could be argued that Bridie sometimes falls back on stereotyped emotional triggers that seasoned theatregoers may resist. But perhaps that is only because Byrne is our contemporary, and we really feel the thrust of how he says what he has to say about work or art or hospitals or growing up or growing old in our time – there’s no historical escape back into 1828. (When I say ‘in our time’ I realise of course that the events of the play are already thirty years back, and Byrne has an acute sense of period; but it is still a good deal nearer to us than Bridie’s Burke and Hare world.)

The quickfire inventiveness of the verbal humour is what immediately hits the audience. It spreads all through the play, but its power centre is the hilarious double act of Phil McCann, the would-be artist, and his friend Spanky Farrell, both nineteen and both from beautiful downtown Ferguslie Park. There is a great joy in these exchanges, either with each other or more usually against a third character. Sometimes when they gang up on poor Hector or puzzled Alan or the unfortunate Jack ‘Poky Chops’ Hogg, they remind us a little of Pinter’s Goldberg and McCann (another McCann!) in The Birthday Party. At other times their backchat and stand-up routines are more like the clowning in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. They relish – and this is not at all unrealistic, though exaggerated:; teenagers do it all the time – putting on other voices, becoming other characters, acting out satirical scenarios through their imitations, e.g. their fondness for contrasting Ferguslie Park and Stobo’s carpet factory with the Frank Richards world of Greyfriars School and the Owl of the Remove and all its pukka hierarchies.

HECTOR: My bloody wireless! That was for my Maw’s Christmas present. 
PHIL: Bless my boater, did you catch that, Cherry? A yuletide cadeau for the squirt’s Mater and blow me if old Quelch ain’t went and confiscated the blighter! 
SPANKY: Christ, Nugent, that’s torn it. 
PHIL: Buck up, Pygmy Minimus … Cherry and I’ll think of something. Any ideas, Cherry, old chap? 
SPANKY: How about a set of cufflinks? 
PHIL: I’ll wager that beast, Bunter had a fat finger in this …
(p. 5)

Or at the very end, Phil and Spanky left on stage, Phil dismissed from the factory and still hoping to get to Art School sometime, Phil has the last word, distancing himself from his misfortune by putting on the public school persona once again.

PHIL: I wonder what the Guv’nor’s got for one’s tea t’night? Plate of jolly fine mince, perhaps? Or a shoulder of lamb to cry on? Best fling the leg over the trike and zip back to Fairyland … find out, eh? Confront the old duffer … break the news about the scribblin’ school, the sack, and … oh, yes, the Old Dear’s impromptu dip, what? Might stop off en route and chuck a bottle of bubbly in the boot … cheer the little tike up. (picks up dustcoat) Would you mind stuffing that down Quelch’s throat as you leave, old bean? Thanks. Oh, and do pop a few of Bunter’s boils for me, there’s a good chap. Think I’ve got everything …? Yes. Gosh, and All Serene, what a bally day. Started off pleasantly enough … one’s Mater off for few days in the country … but, fuck me, if it ain’t gone downhill since then. Fuck me, if it ain’t! (Pause) Christ, I’ve just remembered something … (Takes a couple of steps and executes a cartwheel) Giotto used to be a Slab Boy, Spanks!
(pp. 43–44)

Phil gives the play a positive, hopeful conclusion (only just, but he does), in his own voice, and by his own action, his physical cartwheel being the equivalent of the perfect circle which according to legend Giotto was able to draw.

There’s also the running humour of their attack on the middle-class Alan with his Parker pen – they refuse to give him any real identity by calling him everything but Alan (except once): Archie, Eamonn, Albert, Adam, Arthur, Alfie, Aldo, Agnes … 

And apart from verbal humour, there’s the use of classic physical farce situations, like the number of times Hector is bundled back into the cupboard in Act 2 – funny, if a bit overdone, though it fits in with the general physicality of the play.

As regards what I called the ‘hard edge’ of the play, there are two points I would note. The first concerns the fact that Phil McCann, the hero of the play, is a talented nonconformist who is trying to tell us something about the system in which he feels he’s caught, or in danger of being caught. Whether he will ever make it as an artist we don’t know (he’s still an unsuccessful artist at the end of Still Life, the third play in the trilogy), but we do know that he has real talent and that he cares about matters of art. With all the joking and fooling around we might not be sure, but it’s made clear at one or two particular points. Near the beginning of Act 2, Jack the designer criticizes him for apparently taking nointerest in the business, in the details of carpet designing, and Phil is angry because Jack has assumed he would not be interested in some design magazines he’s going to lend Alan. It’s a social thing as well as an artistic thing. Jack’s unspoken assumption is that slab boys from Ferguslie Park don’t read design magazines. Phil bursts out:

PHIL: Ach, pish, Jack! ‘Some of us take a pride in what we do’ … You? You lot! You’re a bunch of no-talent no-hopers, arse-licking your way up the turkey-runner to Barton’s office, a fistful of brushes in this hand and the other one tugging at the forelock … ‘Good morning, Sir Wallace, by Christ but that’s a snazzy Canaletto print up there on the wall next to that big clock that says a quarter to eight … Suffering Jesus, is that the time already? My, but how time flies when you’re enjoying yourself. Pardon me, while I flick this shite off my boot … Just after stepping on one of Jimmy Robertson’s sketches … it’ll wash off, I’m sure. What? No, no, not at all, Sir Wallace … of course I don’t mind putting in a bit of unpaid overtime … it’s results that count, isn’t it?’ Jack, you wouldn’t know a good design from a plate of canteen mince. Interest? As soon as Barton starts revving up his Jag you’re the first one out the door and the leg over the bike before Miss Walkinshaw’s even got her teeth out of her waterjug!
(p. 24)

The other area where the play has a bite and isn’t merely entertaining concerns Phil’s mother. This comes out especially in relation to Alan and his happy family background. In Act 2 Phil learns that his mother has vanished from hospital and might be anywhere. Alan enters, and Phil takes it out on him (unfairly – but that’s the play!):

SPANKY: Leave him alone, Phil … he doesn’t know what you’re talking about. 
PHIL: I bet you he doesn’t. (To ALAN) What do you know about getting up in the middle of the night in your shirt tail to say five decades of the rosary over your Maw’s open wrists? What do you know about screaming fits and your old man’s nut getting bopped off the Pope’s calendar? What do you know about razor blades and public wards and row upon row of gumsy cadavers all sitting up watching you stumble in with your Lucozade and excuses? Christ, what one’s mine? Is that you, Maw? What do you know about living in a rabbit hutch with concrete floors and your old man’s never in and you’re left trying to have a conversation with a TV set and a Maw that thinks you’re St Thomas Aquinas? What do you know about standing there day in, day out in the Factor’s office asking for a move and the guy with the shiny arse on his trousers shakes his head and treats your Old Dear like dirt?
(p.36)

This again, like the outburst on art and design, is a social outburst as well as a personal one, and it’s strong. It brings across the vividness of Phil as the central character and it also makes him a spokesman, without being soapboxy or strained – what he says comes out of his actual teenage experience. It is still, in the way he talks, comic; but it bites.

Like The Anatomist, The Slab Boys has been criticised for not having a real climax. At the end, the characters are getting ready for the Staff Dance. Hector has been promoted to designer, Phil has been sacked, Phil’s mother has been found, fished out of the river safely (‘the grappling hooks did not break the skin’ as the ambulance man says in a last flick of black humour), and that’s it. Perhaps the answer is that it’s the first play in a trilogy? But even the trilogy as a whole lacks a really convincing climax. Things are still open-ended. Perhaps there is more to follow? Middle-aged one-time slab boys? It’s interesting that Byrne’s more recent play, Tutti Frutti, which for most of the time seems very slow and unstructured, does have an undoubted climax, a literal coup de theatre, with an aging rock star setting fire to himself in his leathers in the Pavilion Theatre in Glasgow. But that was television. Maybe Byrne likes to do things differently in the theatre. At any rate, there seems no doubt that in The Slab Boys he wrote something which combines a lot of entertainment with some pungent comments on the world we live in, and perhaps the unfinished action is a part of the comment.

Note 

Quotations from the plays are taken from James Bridie, The Anatomist, Constable, London, 1931 (second edition, revised, 1932), and John Byrne, The Slab Boys, Salamander Press, Edinburgh, 1982. The other plays in Byrne’s trilogy, Cuttin’ a Rug and Still Life, were also published by Salamander in 1982.

Copyright © Edwin Morgan 1987