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

11 September 2021 by Duncan Jones

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.

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

11 September 2021 by Duncan Jones

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 Morga n. 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:

journeys in time and space (or the space-time continuum)
isolation and social solidarity (the solitary seeks solidarity)
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.

McGONIGAL, James, ‘Multilingual Poetries Lost and Found’

11 September 2021 by Duncan Jones

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.

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

11 September 2021 by Duncan Jones

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.]

MENZIES, David, ‘Salute to an Adventurer’

11 September 2021 by Duncan Jones

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 62^nd 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.

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

11 September 2021 by Duncan Jones

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’.

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

11 September 2021 by Duncan Jones

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.

MORGAN, Edwin, ‘Scottish Drama: an overview’

11 September 2021 by Duncan Jones

ScotLit 20, Spring 1999 |

The general assumption in the past has tended to be that an overview of Scottish drama would not take very long. Between Sir David Lyndsay and James Bridie, what was there of any lasting importance? The spirit of theatre seemed to have found Scotland an uncongenial place. If we now want to modify that belief, we still have to admit that there were bleak periods when not much was happening – notably in the 17th century. But popular kinds of dramatic or semi-dramatic entertainment, shows and spectacles, communal celebrations don’t die out, even if they have to watch their step or go underground in oppressive or authoritarian or anti-hedonistic times, and they are always ready to be thawed out again, like cryogenic Lords of Misrule, whenever society gives them a chance. It isn’t surprising that there should be this subterranean continuance. Lyndsay’s Satyre of the Thrie Estaits did not come out of a vacuum. If it seems unique, this is because other plays and playwrights that we know about from the medieval period have left no trace except their names or titles. There were also wandering minstrels, frowned on by the law, who could sing, dance, mime, tell stories. And there were authorized minstrels attached to the court, both men and women, singers, dancers, jugglers, acrobats, clowns and jesters. At the court too, which was a natural centre of entertainment, there were splendid masques, festivals, tournaments, often with elaborate stage effects. And everywhere there were folk-plays and folk-revels on May Day, at Midsummer and New Year. Guisers with their faces blacked up would dance through the churchyard, men dressed as women and women as men. Bakhtin would have loved these reversals and confrontations, the very essence of drama. So it won’t do to say that the Scots are by nature undramatic or untheatrical. But they suffered a double blow with the loss of the court to England in 1603 and the clampdown of religious censorship after the acts passed by the reformed kirk’s General Assembly in 1575.

So are we making grand gestures about the death of drama? What actual plays have we got? I think it’s important, in any survey like this, to at least remind ourselves of the evidence. The world, as Wittgenstein said, is everything that is the case. Let’s not forget George Buchanan’s Latin tragedies, available to us in Robert Garioch’s Scots translations as Jephthah and The Baptist, both based on biblical stories, Jephthah being much the better of the two. These were not closet dramas. Jephthah was written to be acted, and it was acted, by the college students Buchanan was teaching in France at that time. It has a thoroughly dramatic subject – Jephthah, ruler of the Israelites, makes a vow to God that if he defeats his enemies the Ammonites in battle he will sacrifice the first thing that comes out of his house when he returns (possibly thinking of a dog or some other domestic animal), and is horrified when he sees his only daughter coming out to meet him. Can he, and should he, carry out his rash but solemn promise? [Judges XI] The play became very popular on the Continent, and was translated into French, German, Italian, Dutch, Polish and Hungarian. It, and Buchanan’s other plays, had a marked influence on French classical tragedy. The irony is that it was not translated into Scots or English, and so this Scottish playwright had no influence in his own country. If he had had, we might have produced a Scottish Racine in the 17th century! But still, Jephthah exists; we have it now in a good Scots version, and I don’t see why it shouldn’t be regarded as a play to be played, a part of our repertory.

Another contemporary of Sir David Lyndsay, though we don’t know who he was, wrote the comedy of Philotus which was published in Edinburgh in 1603 and was very possibly (though there’s no record of it) produced at the court of James VI (who liked to encourage drama) sometime during the 1590s. The interest of this piece is that it’s the only romantic Renascence comedy in Scotland, written in verse, in Scots, with a story taken from English, Italian, and eventually Classical sources, young lovers, plenty of mistaken identity and cross-dressing (both ways), and a happy outcome. Philotus is a wealthy old man of eighty who falls in love with Emily, a girl of fourteen, and she doesn’t want him even as a sugar-granddaddy. In the ramifications of the plot, Philotus is married to Emily’s handsome brother who is her lookalike and is dressed in woman’s clothes. The wedding night is a scene of high farce, as you’d expect. In the end there are two pairs of young lovers successfully brought together, with Philotus lamenting his solitary state and warning other old men to keep their eyes off young lassies. The play is both sophisticated and coarse, in a peculiarly Scottish way. The author has added two characters not in the original story, The Plesant (= jester, fool) and the Macrell (= bawd, procuress), and their outspokenness gives a distinctive tang to the play. If a line ends in luck, you may be sure that the next rhyme will be fuck, and if a line ends in blunt it’s not hard to guess what the next line will end in. One 18th-century English theatre historian wrote of the play: ‘This delectabill treatise [as it’s called on the title-page] is by far the most offensive drama ever produced… These words so frequently scribbled in chalk on walls and shutters are here printed at full length; a sufficient proof of the barbarous state in which Scotland remained till civilised by its intercourse with England.’ Well, boo to that! Philotus could not be more unlike Jephthah, but both plays are, like it or not, part of our dramatic inheritance, and so they’re worth noting.

About a century later, we have another of these one-off plays which can’t be put into any continuing Scottish theatre tradition but which don’t deserve to be forgotten. In 1692 a distinguished physician called Archibald Pitcairne wrote The Assembly, sometimes described as the only Scottish Restoration comedy. The title refers to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, and the play is a satire on Presbyterianism by an author who was an Episcopalian and a Jacobite. In the list of characters at the beginning, various names connected to the General Assembly are printed as Member of the Ass——, Moderator of the Ass——, Clerk to the Ass—— and so on, a neat way of combining prudence with mockery; the Assembly, like the law, is an ass. The main targets are fanaticism, bigotry, and hypocrisy; there’s a theological main plot which is well dovetailed with a love subplot; and the play is written in racy colloquial prose, a mixture of English and Scots, with much word-play and double-entendre. There’s an interesting verse prologue which makes it clear that the author knew he was doing something quite bold and original:

The Author gently doth bespeak and pray,
The Criticks[’] Favour for his first Essay.
Our Northern Country seldom tastes of Wit,
The too cold Clime is justly blamed for it:
Nothing our Hearts can move, our fancy Bribe,
Except the Gibberish of the canting Tribe.
’Tis a long while since any Play hath been,
(Except Rope Dancing) in our Nation seen:
Yea, but in this our all reforming Age,
We have a Play, the Pulpit turn’d a Stage!
And Jack the Actor, doth appear Devout;
The only Way to catch the senseless Rout …

You’ll notice how conscious (and ashamed) the writer is of the decline of formal drama in Scotland. He’s aware that there has always been what we would call street theatre, popular entertainment: his reference to ‘Rope Dancing’ is not just a throwaway phrase but is quite specific and not entirely dismissive. We know from many other sources that tightrope dancing and acrobatics, often of a remarkable order of skill, were great crowd-pullers, especially in the streets of Edinburgh. They were part of a motley crew of buskers of all sorts, ballad-singers, storytellers, musicians, and those unfortunate persons with physical disabilities who were paraded as freaks. Pitcairne knew all this, but he wanted something else. I think he might have agreed with John Cage, who once wrote: ‘Theater exists all around us and it is the purpose of formal theater to remind us that this is so.’ The antics and theological acrobatics of the black hoodiecraws in the General Assembly were just as much ‘theatre’ as what you saw in the streets and squares of the city. As Pitcairne said, ‘We have a Play, the Pulpit turn’d a Stage!’

Unfortunately The Assembly was not performed. There was no theatre to put it in, and even if there had been, its subject would have made it virtually impossible of acceptance. So, remarkable though it is, it’s another cul-de-sac, even if, as I think will emerge later, there may be some links between our cul-de-sacs which could be of interest. There is, by the way, a nice irony in the fact that a proposal to stage The Assembly in the Assembly Hall during the Edinburgh Festival of 1965 was turned down by the church authorities, who said such a bawdy and blasphemous play was totally inappropriate for such a holy building. So Pitcairne rests his case, even three centuries on! They haven’t changed, you can hear him say.

When we come to the 18th century, and the establishment of theatres in Edinburgh and Glasgow, we are in more familiar territory, with Allan Ramsay’s pastoral comedy The Gentle Shepherd (1725–1734) and John Home’s tragedy Douglas (1757). The Gentle Shepherd, with its songs and music, is perhaps more ballad opera than play, but it has a certain charm which means that it does get revived from time to time. It has a flimsy, fairy-tale kind of plot, with shepherds that turn out to be aristocrats after all, but within its conventions, and especially in its use of a vigorous Scots (as opposed to passages of stilted English, of which fortunately there are not too many), it gives some vivid impressions of country life, including its negative aspects as well as its attractions. Its popularity in Edinburgh showed that audiences’ ears were delighted to hear a Scots speech they had been deprived of for so long. That being so, why did audiences also flock to Home’s Douglas, written on a Scottish theme but not in Scots, and indeed in a monotonously heavy and unidiomatic, tonally inert English blank verse? A gloomy, almost static historical tragedy, with no comic relief of any kind, with long flashbacks which explain the plot but don’t advance it, and even with a misleading title since the central character is not Douglas but his endlessly grieving mother who at last discovers her long-lost son just before he is killed and then kills herself: what was the attraction? Well, it was a time of revived interest in Scotland’s past, whether real or legendary. It was the time of the Ossian of James MacPherson (whom John Home greatly admired), of a new Scottish patriotism in the poetry of Ramsay, Fergusson, and Burns. The much quoted cry of the man in the audience, ‘Whaur’s yer Wullie Shakespeare noo?’ bears this out. A play of historical moment like that is hard to keep in the repertory unless it’s outstandingly good, which Douglas is not. Attempts to revive it may in fact be doomed – unless we could find some Mrs Siddons to play Lady Randolph, because it is a fact that she mesmerized her audiences with her portrayal of the part – all stops out, vast gestures, tears at command, ham acting if you like to call it that – so perhaps that is what it needs, turn it almost into an opera, add strong atmospheric music to cover up the fustian of the language. When it was played at the Edinburgh Festival in 1986 it was panned by even the most sympathetic critics, partly because this was a rather genteel production, in the Signet Library, by a company that obviously felt too timorous to risk anything more robust in case that would have had the audience rolling in laughter. Over the top and deil tak the hinmaist may be the only way to deal with this play. It has done its bit, a long time ago, and perhaps we should be satisfied with that.

Before we leave the 18th century, can I infiltrate another of my neglected-but-interesting examples, from c.1786. This is a little play, a playlet, called Hubble-Shue, by Christian Carstaires. I can’t tell you anything about her except that she was a governess in Fife, and judging by her play the fortunate children she looked after must have had a whale of a time. Indeed, since there are children as well as adults in the cast, it’s possible she wrote this piece in the first instance for a family in a big house, though that’s only a guess. The interest of this play is that it’s a bizarre, anarchic comedy, more like Jarry or Ionesco than Douglas or The Gentle Shepherd. The title, Hubble-Shue, is an old Scots word with a variety of meanings from ‘uproar’, ‘commotion’, ‘riot’, to something like ‘a milling crowd gathered together to watch an event’; it can be good or bad. I suspect that Ms Carstaires, being a well-educated governess, had probably come across William Dunbar’s poem (at least it’s attributed to him) ‘The manere of the crying of ane playe’ (crying = public proclamation), which begins ‘Harry, harry, hobbillschowe, Se quha is cummyn nowe…’ Christian Carstaires gives us a play within a play, and sometimes it’s quite hard to tell which play we’re watching, though she gives plenty of stage-directions. Here’s the latter part of Scene 2, there’s been a dinner party and the characters go into the drawing-room:

Fat Minister: Come, Miss, give us your Italian –.
Miss: Yes, Papa.
Si li si ti o to
Ki li qui si o so
Fa la se scud
Qui a vi a vi a
Que a vi a ve a
Qui a vi a bo. &c.&c.
[Enter Mrs Consul and her Grandchild.]
Mrs Consul: Madam, I beg you ten thousand pardons, it was not in my power to wait upon you at dinner; there is no separating my grandchild and the little black girl.
Child: O, Mamma, I’m frightened.
Mrs Consul: Why are you frightened?
Child: The little girl says a great fish (a crocodile) came out of the water (the Ganges) and devoured her father – and a fine gentleman came running with a sword and stab’d the monster – and her father was all bloody, and she would have been killed; but the fine gentleman took her away, and they were carried by a black man with muslin on their head (turbans) – and the fine gentleman gave her to a great lady – All the fine things could not make her forget her poor father …
Fat Minister: Hold your tongue, my bonny dear, and you and the black girl shall go to the dancing school.
Child: No, Mamma. [Crys] … Take me home, Mamma…
Mrs Consul: Come my dear – excuse me, Madam – my child is really not well – feel her hand – I am afraid she’s feverish.
Apothecary: Madam, you had better give miss a little Senna and a puke, if it operates six times it will be sufficient.
[…A coach calls to take them all to the playhouse to see the play…the play is delayed for half an hour, the audience is restive – a girl sings a song on stage to fill in:]
When you hear a mournful tale
Laugh and hide your tears.
When you hear a mournful tale
Laugh and hide your tears.
La-a-a-a-laugh, &c.
This is poor entertainment (from one of the boxes.)
An orange from the footmans gallery hits the Irishman such a blow on the nose – He flies upon the stage, drawing his dagger – throws one of the players heels o’er head – wounds Mr Hallion – makes such a hubbub, the gentlemen from the pit are obliged to interfere.
The house is in great confusion – the company crowding to the door with great difficulty get to their coaches – a Nabob’s carriage driving like Jehu – the coachman being drunk overturns one of the hackneys – they shriek frightfully, and the Minister roars like a bull.
The old Ensign, chancing to walk on foot, comes up and helps to lug them out.

All quite mad? – and yet not entirely so – the author mocks the current Scottish craze for importing Italian singers – and she uses the two little girls to make a sympathetic comment on the unhappiness of Indian children snatched from their families to become servants in Britain, even if they’re well looked after as the black girl in the play evidently is… Altogether the playlet with its light touch makes a refreshing contrast to the stiff formalities of Douglas.

The 19th century tends to be linked to the 17th by historians of drama as a period from which there is very little Scottish drama to be rescued. At the beginning of the century the plays of the prolific Joanna Baillie were admired by Scott and Byron, and some were produced with a slight measure of success, but succeeding generations seem to have agreed to let them gather dust. Still, who knows? A director who knew nothing about her might come to her with fresh eyes and find something worth trying out. Her prose tragedy called Witchcraft, set in Renfrewshire, written in a mixture of English and Scots, might be worth a look. Apart from her, there’s a poet William Tennant, best known for his long poem ‘Anster Fair’, who published in 1823 a blank verse tragedy called Cardinal Beaton; although it is over-rhetorical, it has the strong subject of the burning of the early Protestant martyr George Wishart, followed by the revenge killing of Cardinal Beaton; perhaps it should be tried out in St. Andrews, where it is set. And at the end of the century, it may be time to cast a glance over the plays of the poet John Davidson, and in particular Smith, which he described as a ‘tragic farce’, although his proneness to overwriting makes it unlikely that his plays would have wide appeal. And in fact, revivals of all three, Baillie, Tennant and Davidson, would be only marginal to the general absence of serious drama.

There may have been an absence of great drama, but there was no absence of popular theatre, of which the 19th century was the golden age, in Scotland as well as in England. A distinction between drama and theatre is always an unhappy one, but sometimes it has to be made. To the ancient Greeks and the Elizabethans it would have seemed absurd, since they were able to write and perform works of the highest quality which were also enjoyed by large audiences. But in Scotland this marriage has proved extremely difficult. The job which the 20th century set itself was if possible to bring the two together, as they had been in medieval times. It was still difficult: dramatists had to compete for audiences first with cinema and then with television; but they felt, quite rightly I think, that there is always an audience for live theatre, even a big audience, if they could crack the code of tapping into it. What could they learn from the 19th century experience?

The Victorian theatre in Scotland had a popular diet of English classics and dramatizations of novels, especially those by Walter Scott. Local writers were not encouraged to produce individual plays, and the local genius had to find its expression through pantomime, and later music-hall, where a wealth of local references and language could be inserted, but within the limits of those modes of entertainment. It has to be said, in this respect, that the ‘literariness’ of a dramatist like James Bridie, when he appeared in the 1920s/1930s, may have been one of the reasons why his work did not carry forward, and the enthusiasm roused by later companies like 7:84, Wildcat, Communicado and TAG, which employ modern variants of pantomime and music-hall song and gesture and dance, suggests they are mining a lode of drama that does in fact relate them back to Victorian times. The 19th-century Scottish novelists (who they? you might ask, but they do exist!) give us some tantalizing but striking glimpses. In Zachary Fleming (=Henry Johnston)’s novel Martha Spreull (1884, 1887), the eponymous heroine, who is a students’ landlady in Glasgow, talks about an elephant ‘at the wild beast show… at the foot o’ the Sautmarket’, public baptisms of Latter-Day Saints in the East End, and the sudden springing up of new tenements in the High Street ‘just like ane o’ thae transformation picturs ye see i’ the pantymime’. More interestingly, Frederick Arnold’s novel Arthur Leslie (1856) takes its hero along Argyle Street on a Friday night:

The evening was darkening, and the shops were a blaze of light; their lurid glare fell on a sea of faces, marked by ten thousand varying expressions. I felt as if walking down a vast picture gallery, with only a moment’s space to look on a striking figure here and there.

The young man visits a ‘singing saloon’, really a weird mini-theatre up a Saltmarket close:

The concluding passage of Stern’s [sic] Sentimental Journey was being roughly dramatised for the behoof of the audience. The piano strummed loudly, the actors shouted and screamed, the room was crammed, corks and waiters were everywhere flying about. But my mind was outside the building, in the dingy street, among the fearful forms that blocked it up.

Two points that strike me about these rather fascinating passages: (1) they bear out what John Cage said in the quotation I gave earlier, how ‘theater exists all around us’ – perhaps especially in Argyle Street! – and (2) they show that in order to compete with the theatre of the streets you may have to hire a saloon in the Saltmarket, provide music and plenty to drink, allow people to talk during the performances, which are in a hot crowded sweaty space, and yet, and yet, have the actors perform of all things, Laurence Sterne, an English classic, who probably went down well because the last scene of A Sentimental Journey is deliciously erotic in Sterne’s most openly suggestive style [speaker at inn overnight – only bedroom with three beds – has to share with lady travelling with maidservant (fille de chambre) – the decencies are observed until the last sentence – ‘So that when I stretched out my hand, I caught hold of the fille de chambre’s——.’]

It’s all quite deplorable, isn’t it? You can see why, when it came to the early 1920s, when the Scottish National Theatre Society was set up and working out its agenda, people like John Brandane, James Bridie, and Tyrone Guthrie were so determined to give the public a more serious drama than what their parents and grandparents had been used to. Two of the stated objects of the Society, as given out in 1922, were ‘To develop Scottish national drama through the productions by the Scottish National Players of plays of Scottish life and character’ and ‘To encourage in Scotland a public taste for good drama of any type’. They wanted better plays, they wanted better audiences, and they sensed (rightly) that the time was ripe for change. Other groups, rural groups, community groups, miners’ groups, and later Glasgow Unity Theatre, were also working towards a more relevant contemporary dramatic scene, and it’s from this period that the variety of our present theatre scene has developed, a variety that is quite rich, though not without its disappointments and frustrations. For all that, for all these conscious developments and ideals, there’s something in the vivid image (almost itself like a scene from a play) of the Victorian Saltmarket saloon which sticks in your mind and gives you a gut feeling that here is a thing we must never lose, rough, raucous, warm; some ordinary people enjoying a wee refreshment and some music and at the same time taking in their stride the words of a literary classic. The very incongruity of the scene is its importance. Bakhtin rides again. ‘If Only Bunty Was Here’, as Tom Leonard says in the title of his little play.

I have mentioned James Bridie, and when we look back at his work from the 1990s we see someone who is still, for all his faults, the most substantial Scottish dramatist of the century. In a writing career of some twenty years he wrote over forty plays, the majority of which held the stage and were much discussed. We have had plenty of plays since his death in 1951, but no single dramatist has been able to equal the range and continuity of Bridie’s output. The nearest would be John McGrath, but his is a rather special case because of the company teamwork he has always been so closely associated with. Playwrights have tended to produce one or two or three good plays, often with big gaps between them, sometimes vanishing into non-theatre activities and leaving audiences and admirers caught up in the ‘Whatever happened to–?’ syndrome. The brute economics of making a living by writing for the theatre in Scotland is no doubt a large part of cause of all this, but the fact remains that no one seems to be able to build up an oeuvre by which he would establish and retain a recognizable identifiable public impact – like that, for example, of prolific American contemporaries such as Sam Shepard and David Mamet.

To go back to Bridie: despite the limits put on his reputation by middle-class assumptions, his plays remain good theatre. His characters toss ideas about playfully as well as analytically, and often the drama is set in motion through a contrast or opposition between a mocking, reductive, very Scottish spirit and the thrawnness of some one character who is possessed or 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, or the young medical student Charles Cameron in A Sleeping Clergyman who studies the germs of his own disease under the microscope although he is dying of tuberculosis. And the spirit of Bridie does not permit even these two characters, Knox and Cameron, to come through as unsullied heroes: the attitude to Knox, in his involvement with the Burke and Hare murders, is highly ambiguous, and any virtue in the desperate Charlie Cameron has to work itself out three generations later as the play moves in time from the 1860s to the 1930s.

Some of his plays are set locally, in Glasgow, but the majority are not, and it’s a part of his strength that he enjoyed retelling old stories – historical, legendary, biblical – wherever they were set. Like Shaw, he believed the discussion-play should outflank naturalism and he incorporated some symbolic and expressionist elements without becoming a symbolist or an expressionist. His plays appealed to audiences in both Scotland and London, but often for different reasons, and a success in one place might be a dull thud in the other. Daphne Laureola, where the central character is a drunken upper-class woman, delighted London but left Glasgow cold; and the converse was true of Mr. Gillie, a low-keyed serious play about an idealistic Scottish schoolmaster and the fate of one of his protégés. The variety of receptions of his plays in different parts of the two countries helped to keep a buzz of discussion going about them, but of course did not make it easier for people to reach a consensus about his value. Was he a sage disguised as a puck, or a puck pretending to be a sage? The jury is still out on that one.

For all Bridie’s importance as an individual playwright, Scottish drama did not cultivate the ground he had broken. It’s almost as if the generation after his death wanted to redress a balance, to fill in his omissions, to deal in particular with the realities of everyday experience. So both Bridie and the writers of historical plays in Scots like Robert McLellan (Jamie The Saxt) and Alexander Reid (The Lass Wi The Muckle Mou), began to fall out of favour, though sporadically revived and not forgotten. Language had something to do with this. There was a reaction against the old-fashioned, semi-historical, largely comic Scots used by McLellan and Reid and others. A growing interest in the use of Glasgow speech, rather than English or a backward-looking Scots, also militated against Bridie. To be fair to the McLellan/Reid/Kemp camp, it’s worth quoting what Alexander Reid wrote in the foreword to his Two Scots Plays (1958):A British Theatre does not exist and never has existed. There is an English Theatre and a French Theatre and a Russian Theatre… If we are to fulfil our hope that Scotland may some day make a contribution to World Drama as individual and valuable as that made by Norway in the 19th and by Ireland in the present century, we can only do so by cherishing, not repressing our national peculiarities (including our language), though whether a Scottish National Drama, if it comes to birth, will be written in Braid Scots or the speech, redeemed for literary purposes, of Argyle Street, Glasgow, or the Kirkgate, Leith, is anyone’s guess. That it will be written in some sort of Scots however is quite certain. A National Drama cannot be created in a language foreign to the people from whom it springs and the spoken language of Scotland, whatever name we give it, is not standard English.

Interesting. But notice that he spoils the effect in that book, because the two Scots plays it contains, The Lass Wi The Muckle Mou and The Warld’s Wonder, have been translated by him into English for the English market; the book is published in London, and he gives the address of his agent, also in London. Notice also that he’s no Tom Leonard as regards Glasgow speech: that speech has to be ‘redeemed for literary purposes’! But still, with its limitations, the passage is worth pondering.

But both Bridie and McLellan were increasingly felt to belong to a dramatic world that, whatever its virtues, had ceased to be relevant. A new mood was established with plays like Ena Lamont Stewart’s Men Should Weep, George Munro’s Gold In His Boots, Roddy MacMillan’s All In Good Faith and The Bevellers, Bill Bryden’s Willie Rough, Hector MacMillan’s The Sash, Tom McGrath’s The Hard Man, John Byrne’s trilogy The Slab Boys, Iain Heggie’s A Wholly Healthy Glasgow, and Tony Roper’s The Steamie. These plays and others like them, in the five decades since the late 1940s, appealed to an urban public which rejoiced to see and hear a degree of realism (at times melodramatic, at times nostalgic, but mainly honest and down-to-earth) applied to recognizable situations and settings (a shipyard, a glass-works, a prison, a public wash-house, a massage parlour, a carpet factory) and unfolded with both comedy and pathos. Characters were shown at work, as much as at leisure. Relevant public issues – football commercialism, religious bigotry, decline of heavy industry, treatment of prisoners, women’s place in society – were presented in a human and immediate way. They were received as entertainment, and no doubt quite often as tracts for the times too, but different from the single-minded punch provided by the more expressionist music-and-song shows of the 7:84 and Wildcat companies, which went back to pantomime and music-hall, and indeed to Sir David Lyndsay, for their inspiration.

Realistic contemporary social drama can be seen as both a liberating and a limiting force. It’s worth remembering that Tom McGrath is the author not only of The Hard Man (based on the experience of Jimmy Boyle in the ‘cages’ at Peterhead prison) but of the highly original and thoughtful play Animal, in which grunting, banana-scoffing actors without monkey suits play out a remarkable fable of the higher apes and humanity. Donald Campbell’s excellent play The Jesuit may be naturalistic in form, and may have some contemporary relevance, but basically it is a powerful study of the trial and execution of a Catholic priest, John Ogilvie, in 1614 in Glasgow, and it’s asking its audience not just to feel but to think, about historical, religious, and political matters in a tradition (if it is a tradition) that links back (as I began to suggest earlier) through Pitcairne and Buchanan and Lyndsay, a very Scottish fondness for intellectual critique and debate – something which perhaps we should encourage a bit more of at the present time. In this connection it’s worth mentioning one almost forgotten play, Ewan McColl’s Uranium 235, presented by Theatre Workshop in Edinburgh in 1951 and in Glasgow in 1952. This was certainly ‘people’s theatre’, sponsored by Joan Littlewood, Norman Buchan, Hugh MacDiarmid, and Duncan Macrae, but it was not warm or couthy. It came in the immediate shock-waves people felt after the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, and it was a sort of expressionist scientific documentary with ongoing arguments about power and control. I remember quite vividly seeing the Glasgow production in the old St. Andrew’s Halls (before they were burned down) and thinking to myself, yes, this is one of the things theatre in Scotland ought to be doing – even with its bit of agit-prop and characters called The Puppet Master, 2nd Proton, and 3rd Neutron. It’s not The Steamie! The Steamie is fine, but we need other things too.

And the dramatists have felt that. Stewart Conn will write about two elderly women reminiscing in a Glasgow tenement in I Didn’t Always Live Here, but he also embarked on a sinister anthropological-erotic fantasy, redolent of Frazer’s The Golden Bough, in The King. Greater freedom still is exercised by Liz Lochhead in plays ranging from Blood And Ice (on the Frankensteinstory) and Dracula (a reworking of Bram Stoker’s classic) to Mary Queen Of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off (a play in Scots and English, opening out its historical theme into a vivid across-the-centuries evocation of the Scottish consciousness). Peter Arnott moves from contemporary Glasgow in Losing Alec(where a ghost-story technique is used to examine socialist ideals and practice) to wartime Stalingrad in White Rose (a Brechtian look at war, love and women’s role in society) and then to the seething and ruthless revolutionary world of the 1790s in Thomas Muir’s Voyage To Australia(the ambitious, intermittently powerful beginning of a trilogy dealing with the great reformer). No one is going to complain about the general liveliness of this dramatic scene, and its capability of springing surprises, like David Harrower’s play Knives In Hens, produced by the Traverse in Edinburgh in 1995, an intense, almost inarticulate study of three characters in some pre-industrial village unidentified in time or place. But is there more than variety and surprise?

Peter Arnott has said that in writing Losing Alec he had in mind ‘a State-of-the-Nation-type play’, and some of his other plays, including those with historical settings, could be similarly described. The same concern obviously throbs through the work of 7:84 and Wildcat, and it is quite explicit in John McGrath’s A Satire Of The Four Estaites shown recently at the Edinburgh Festival. The fourth estate is the media, and the chief villain in the story is not too hard to identify, with his Australian accent and his name, Lord Merde. The main theme is whether a potentially independent country like Scotland would find means of surviving in a world of ruthless multinational organizations. The pantomime style includes a procession of statues of Thatcher, Major, and Blair as ‘Mother, Son, and Holy Ghost’, and the strange sight of a riverdance by the extremely well brought up young ladies of Mary Erskine School. It’s all very good fun, and when I was there it certainly had a full house and an appreciative audience. The London critics thought it was dreadful: ‘Full of noise and shallow clichés’ (Sunday Times), ‘crude, predictable and awesomely unfunny’ (Telegraph), ‘a silly, coarse and imaginatively monotonous spin-off [from Sir David Lyndsay]’ (Times). Perhaps we are doing something right if London dislikes us so much? But that’s too simple. The play does raise questions even in Scotland, and some of these were voiced by Joyce McMillan in Scotland on Sunday when she qualified her praise of its energy by saying: ‘Too much of the politics is unargued, as if the assent of the audience to both socialism and nationalism could be taken for granted… and the whole spectacle is far too widely focussed to hit any of its satirical targets very hard.’ This suggests that the play has a soft core, and that this appeals to a soft core in the audience, and I think there is some truth in this.

Liz Lochhead’s Mary Queen Of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off is also a state-of-the-nation play, but is less didactic and more subtle. As her chorus-like character La Corbie says:

Country: Scotland. Whit like is it?
It’s a peatbog, it’s a daurk forest.
It’s a cauldron o’ lye, a saltpan or a coal mine.
If you’re gey lucky it’s a bricht bere meadow or a park o’ kye.
Or mibbe… It’s a field o’ stanes.
It’s a tenement or a merchant’s ha’.
It’s a hure hoose or a humble cot. Princes Street or Paddy’s Merkit.
It’s a fistfu’ o’ fish or a pickle o’ oatmeal.
It’s a queen’s banquet o’ roast meats and junketts.
It depends. It depends.

In her later play, Jock Tamson’s Bairns, even though she had less say in the final production which was very physical and non-verbal, the theme of Scotland was pervasive from the title onwards. References to Burns and MacDiarmid, a descent into hell and a human haggis eviscerated like a Scottish Pandora’s box, a notable contest for the new age between Cutty Sark and John Barleycorn, symbolically foiled attempts to get either saltire or red flag bravely fixed, a snowbound last supper, with a quaich for a cup, finally stilling the swarming, ragged, unidentifiable, half-demonic bairns – the points not really gathered up, but scattered lavishly throughout by music, song and dance rather than through dialogue – all this had a clear popular appeal and chimed in with the wide dissatisfactions and disaffections and would-be self-determinations of the Scottish 1980s. It was not a well-made play, and reviewers pointed out its shortcomings, but it had poetry and impact, and we are left with a dilemma that is both old and new: are we better off with ambitious imperfect state-of-the-nation plays or with the concentrated narrow focus of a slice of history as in Sue Glover’s excellent Bondagers? In the present state of Scotland, with ongoing recovery of so much of its forgotten history and the rescue of forgotten writers (how many people know that a woman called Catherine Birrell published a play called The Lesbians in Glasgow in 1914?), at the same time as inescapable speculations about the broader issue of the country’s political future, we probably need both. Do we need anything more? When I think back to the marathon storytelling of Peter Brook’s Mahabharata in the cavernous space of the Tramway Theatre in 1990, playing to packed houses and to just about the most attentive audience I have ever been part of, I feel there must be somewhere a hunger for state-of-the-universe plays and not merely state-of-the-nation ones.

Details of some of the earlier plays mentioned:
Philotus is in Scottish Text Society Miscellany Volume, 1933.
The Assembly is edited by T. Tobin, Purdue University Studies, Lafayette, Indiana, 1972.
Douglas is edited by G. Parker, Oliver and Boyd, 1972.
Hubble-Shue is in T. Tobin, Plays by Scots 1660-1800, University of Iowa Press, 1974.
Since giving this lecture I have learned of the recent production in Oxford of another early Scottish play, John Burel’s Pamphilus Speakand of Lufe, published in Edinburgh c.1594. Dr. Reid Baxter, we are told, is preparing ‘modern acting editions’ of both that play and Philotus ‘in the hope that they will be used in schools’.

MURRAY, Isobel, ‘Gibbon’s Chris: A Celebration With Some Reservations’

11 September 2021 by Duncan Jones

James Leslie Mitchell (Lewis Grassic Gibbon) 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. References are given at the end of the document.

I am a great admirer of A Scots Quair. It is a wonderful trilogy. But I have frequently stabbed my toe on its imperfections, wishing I could call its author back from the shades for half an hour, to score out lines or phrases that gar me grue. “‘Oh Chris Caledonia, I’ve married a nation!’ … He said suddenly and queerly, ‘The Last Supper, Chris’” … the last sentence of Grey Granite …I think it is perhaps the most imperfect great work of literature I know. Maybe this is not surprising, given the pressured haste with which Gibbon composed it. And today I find myself getting at the creation most generally agreed to be its triumph, Chris Guthrie. I want to say her creation is very imperfect too. I start with a remark from Tom Crawford’s Introduction to Sunset Song in his fine edition of A Scots Quair:

In this novel Gibbon has created the most convincing female character in Scottish fiction, and so sympathetically, so inwardly, that many of the original readers wondered whether ‘Lewis Grassic Gibbon’ might be the nom-de-plume of a woman author.¹

It’s true that women at first thought it might have been written by a woman, but I don’t think it’s possible to think that now, now that the dust has had time to settle. At best, I’d argue, Chris may be the most convincing female character in Scottish fiction created by a male author. To outline my case, I place the trilogy – or, because of shortage of time today, Sunset Song – beside two other novels of the time, Nan Shepherd’s The Quarry Wood (1928) and Willa Muir’s Imagined Corners (1931).

Gibbon is unparalleled in creating the passionate lyricism of Chris’s Song. And he is not above learning from his contemporaries, which is praiseworthy. I have pointed out elsewhere how many suggestions he took from Willa Muir, including the portrayal of Chris as composed at different times of warring selves.² It was Muir who pioneered this technique in Imagined Corners, with both Elizabeth Shand and Elise Mutze. Elizabeth Shand, trying to be a perfect wife, has a waking nightmare experience, ‘feeling that she was lost and no longer knew who she was’.³ When she remembers the name ‘Elizabeth Ramsay’, her maiden name, the nightmare vanishes. She faces the diminution of her personal identity, but rallies: ‘Elizabeth Ramsay she was, but also Elizabeth Shand, and she herself, that essential self which awoke from sleep, had felt lost because she had forgotten that fact’ (IC 65).

Elise Mutze also recognises co-existing selves, as she tries to find a ‘central self’, looking back in some self-mockery at ‘Elizabeth the first’ and ‘Elizabeth the second’: ‘When she was a little girl Elizabeth the second had been, if anything, a few moments the quicker of the two, and Elizabeth the first was restricted to making sarcastic comments’ (IC 147). These references are carefully selected, and few.

As we all know, Gibbon memorably adapted the technique, in Sunset Song, with the English Chris and the Scottish Chris: ‘two Chrisses there were that fought for her heart and tormented her. You hated the land and the coarse speak of the folk and learning was brave and fine one day; and the next you’d waken with the peewits crying across the hills, deep and deep, crying in the heart of you and the smell of the earth in your face, almost you’d cry for that, the beauty of it and the sweetness of the Scottish land and skies’. (SS 32). This is a brilliant utterance of the self-reflexive you, but we might argue that Gibbon uses the technique of divided selves too often, and fragments his heroine too many times. We remember Chris’s emotional response to her realisation of her pregnancy –‘And Chris Guthrie crept out from the place below the beech trees where Chris Tavendale lay and went wandering off into the waiting quiet of the afternoon, Chris Tavendale heard her go, and she came back to Blawearie never again’. (SS 176). Each usage is effective, but they don’t stack up: it is not necessarily a failing of literal-minded undergraduates that they become puzzled by the Epilude when Chris says to Robert, ‘Oh my dear, maybe the second Chris, maybe the third, but Ewan has the first forever!’ (SS 253). And it is perhaps a self too far when she dreams in Cloud Howe of going her own way, ‘Chris-alone, Chris-herself, with Chris Guthrie, Chris Tavendale, Chris Colquohoun dead!’ (CH 166).

I suggest also that the intimacy and conviction of Chris’s thought-and-feeling, combined with the marvellously contrived structure of Sunset Song, blinds us to the drama – or even the melodrama – to which Gibbon subjects the readers of Sunset Song. These qualities obscure the speed and drama with which events pile up for Chris.

The Quarry Wood is a deal less eventful. Rory Watson says it shows ‘what might have happened to Chris Guthrie, had she decided to go to university after all’,⁴ and says Martha ‘makes the same difficult journey towards intellectual and emotional maturity at a time when such space was seldom freely given to women’. The action here is much more mundane. Martha’s mother Emmeline has a lot in common with Jean Guthrie on the face of it. We are told in a dry, dispassionate way of her circumstances on page 2:

With base effrontery she married the man she loved, and after twelve pinched and muddled years, with her trim beauty slack, two dead bairns and a living one mostly nerves and temper, she stood in her disordered kitchen and fretted that she could not offer her aunt a decent cup of tea.

Emmeline does not commit suicide, nor murder: she hashes her way along, picking up extra bairns to nurture at every turn. Martha goes to university, nurses mother and aunt repeatedly, becomes a teacher, falls hopelessly in love with her best friend’s husband, and in a moment of un-Shepherdlike passion exchanges one kiss with him. It’s a fine novel.

It is possible to make the action of Imagined Corners sound sensational, if you say it starts with a newly married couple arriving in Calderwick, and ends with the bride running off with another woman. But it is not sensational. The most that happens is that people rebel against the repressive society of Calderwick, and leave, and the main action is internal, a matter of self-discovery for the two main female characters.

Contrast Sunset Song, where Chris is fifteen during the horror of the difficult birth of the twins. There follow in quick succession the move to the Mearns; the ‘daftie’ going on a sexual rampage which involves Chris; Mother killing herself when she discovers she is pregnant yet again; Mother killing the year-old twins as well; the loss of brothers Dod and Alec, the departure of Will, leaving Chris alone with her father; father’s strokes, his attempted incest; his death; Chris’s decision to stay on the land; her marriage to Ewan, pregnancy and childbirth, and after all that she is still a teenager! We might call this ‘heightened realism’, perhaps?

The same kind of ‘heightened realism’ can be seen in the cast of characters. The Quarry Wood has a wide range of both sexes, and Martha as main female character is surrounded by strong portraits of women of different ages – the ever-memorable Great Aunt Josephine, Martha’s feckless mother Emmeline, her friend Dussie, the intimidating intellectual Lucy Warrender and more. Similarly, in Imagined Corners we meet a wide range of characters of both sexes, the women most notable including, as well as the two Elizabeths, Sarah Murray, Mabel Shand, Aunt Janet and the Watson sisters. But in Sunset Song female characters other than Chris are stripped away or kept in very minor positions. In the whole trilogy, Chris has only one equal female friend, Marget Strachan. We recall that vivid short scene when Marget shows Chris how her future lad will kiss her – ‘quick and shameful, fine for all that, tingling and strange and shameful by turns’ (SS 46). But she is almost immediately removed from the scene, never to return, not even as a guest at Chris’s wedding, and she fades from the reader’s memory.

Jean Guthrie of course is taken away from Chris as well, by her own act. And I’ve always found her suicide affecting and horribly understandable: the birth of the twins was described so graphically that her fear at another prospective delivery makes sense. (But I’ve never understood killing the twins – only one even named, and given a gender, though they have been part of the family for a whole year. Jean has apparently no compunction about killing them, although she has cared for them for a year; and Chris makes little of their deaths: both she and her father wonder later why Jean left them, but seem to have forgotten the babies, surely distinct personalities to the whole family by this time). The rest of the family is stripped away, leaving Chris and her father alone. Now Chris is the only sexual focal point on the landscape, in an otherwise all-male environment, with sexual tensions in all directions, from Chae, Long Rob, Ewan, and of course Father.

The local people who were affronted on the publication of Sunset Songperhaps had a point: it is drenched in sex, to a unique degree. I am unfashionable here: it is not my favourite volume of the trilogy, because the drenching with sex tends to overwhelm the other aspects of Gibbon’s vision, and it is after all rather superficial. I find the treatment of the troubled love between Chris and Robert Colquohoun, as we see it in Cloud Howe, and in retrospect in Grey Granite, has greater depth than the treatment of sexuality in Sunset Song. We remember the day when Andy the daftie goes on the sexual spree, and follows Mistress Ellison, Maggie Jean and Chris herself, who is able to take refuge in Pooty’s. But we are struck by John Guthrie’s reaction: ‘Father raged when he heard the story from Chris, queer raging it was, he took her out to the barn and heard the story and his eyes slipped up and down her dress as she spoke, she felt sickened and queer. He shamed you then? he whispered.’ (SS 52-3). This is like his fury when he finds Chris treading the blankets bare-legged, when it was ‘as though she saw a caged beast peep from her father’s eyes’ (SS 60). Or the fearful night during the harvest madness when she hears him lurking outside her bedroom door. We are well prepared for his attempted incest when it comes. There is the rest of the harvest madness sequence, which attacks father first: ‘every harvest there came something queer and terrible on father’ (SS 67). Then the casual working tink offers to relieve Chris of her virginity, and she does consider it, however briefly. Ewan Tavendale is seen with Sarah Sinclair; Cuddiestoun surprises the manse maid and the minister; people talk about Will and his Molly, and the minister reveals the depth of his hypocrisy in this regard.

Now I must tell you a wee story that dates back to the first time I offered a Scottish special subject to Honours students, and I encountered the Donald Paterson syndrome. Donald was a bright and lively student: I learned later that he and his mate Callum used to rehearse some of their best lines together before the seminar, to get maximum impact – and it worked! But it was unrehearsed, and in a spirit of pure pity that he said to me at the Sunset Song seminar –‘Isobel, you’re never going to understand the Gibbon thing until you realise that every male reader is in love with Chris.’ I saw what he meant, and was grateful for the tip. But since then I have seen it ever more clearly, and no longer feel simple gratitude. I now see that for all her unique intimacy with the reader, the self-reflexive you, Chris is regularly seized on by her (male) creator and displayed to the male gaze.

I’ve often asked female students since Donald Paterson’s year whether they have a recurrent need to retreat upstairs to a cold, wintry bedroom, there to undress and inspect themselves slowly in front of the mirror. I’ve never yet met one who owns up to this tendency, although women’s bedrooms are surely warmer now than in Chris’s young day. This adds a new meaning to the Mirror Phase. Chris does it five times in Sunset Song, six times in Cloud Howe and eight times in Grey Granite. Maybe using a word such as voyeurism is unkind and unnecessary, but there is an element of titillation here that seems unusual.

In Quarry Wood Martha Ironside is not a mirror sort of girl, and I think she is only recorded as looking in a glass twice. This extract shows us a great deal about her with Shepherd’s customary economy:

But what did they all see in her eyes, she queried, staring in the dull and spotty mirror. She could not even tell their colour exactly: they had something in them of Nature’s greens that have gone brown, of grass-fields before the freshening of spring. What did they all see in them? She looked in the mirror longer than she had ever looked before, searching for her own beauty. It was not to be found there. (QW 79)

The mirror is dull and spotty – and the colour of her eyes is suggested very specifically; and what other people see in her eyes is nothing she will ever find by looking in a mirror. Soon after she looks again, transformed by wearing the very special frock handed down through the family. This time she does almost glimpse an elusive, real Martha:

Wearing it, Martha had an uncanny sense of being someone other than herself; as though she had stepped carelessly to a mirror to dress her hair and had seen features not her own looking out from the glass. The mere wearing of the frock could not have changed her: but like the mirror it served to make her aware of alteration; and she seemed to herself farther from her folk and her home. Wearing the lustre frock, she had no Ironside instincts. She did not belong to the Leggatts. Across the mirror of lustre there flitted an unfamiliar Martha with alien desires. (QW 93)

In Imagined Corners Elizabeth Shand is not a mirror person either. She is gawky and awkward, a girl with a passionate soul and no interest in make-up, but here she is resolving to be a good wife to the appalling Hector, and take care of him as he requires:

She now presented the comforting appearance that Hector expected of her. She must have known this instinctively, for she first bathed and powdered her face, and then put on her prettiest frock. In Calderwick at that time it was considered slightly improper to powder one’s face by day, but Elizabeth excused her daring by reflecting that darkness had already set in, although it was not yet five o’clock. She inspected herself in the glass and added a string of coloured beads, signs of dawning femininity which might have pleased her sister-in-law. (IC 126)

Like Shepherd, Muir preserves a dry detachment, even amusement toward her characters, who are more complex, and more insecure than Gibbon’s Chris. Elise Mutze, the continental sophisticate who used to be Lizzie Shand, is no doubt much more used to utilising the mirror than Elizabeth Shand. But her author does not take us there routinely. On this occasion a Calderwick tea-party has irritated Elise beyond bearing, and she has escaped, only to glimpse something very interesting in her bedroom mirror:

In that moment of consciousness she caught sight of herself in the long mirror. One cannot look at oneself and remain angry; contrariwise, if one insists on remaining angry one cannot go on looking at oneself. Elise stared; the mirror was like a fog enclosing a ghostly image; gradually the image grew clearer, took shape, and Elise, breaking into a smile, said: ‘Hello, Lizzie Shand! Where have you been all these years?’ The impetuous, resentful small girl who had hovered in the church and stepped with Elise over the paving stones of Calderwick had come back. (IC 233)

In all these examples the authors are using the simple act of looking in the mirror to convey complex nuances of character and theme.

It feels mean, now that I’ve reached them, to point out my examples of Gibbon’s Chris, or a selection of them. Oh well. The first is a moving picture of a beautiful, sensual woman looking frankly out at the reader, who is encouraged to dwell on her attractions, and follow the path, even the touch, of the moonlight.

Closed the window, shutting out the smells of the night, and slowly took off her clothes, looking at herself in the long glass. … She was growing up limber and sweet, not bonny, perhaps, her cheek-bones were over high and her nose over short for that, but her eyes clear and deep and brown, brown deep and clear as the Denburn flow, and her hair was red and was brown by turns, spun fine as a spider’s web, wild, wonderful hair. … And below face and neck now her clothes were off was the glimmer of shoulders and breast and there her skin was like satin, it tickled her touching herself. Below the tilt of her left breast was a dimple, she saw it and bent to look at it and the moonlight ran down her back, so queer the moonlight she felt the running of that beam along her back. And she straightened as the moonlight grew and looked at the rest of herself, and thought herself sweet and cool and fit for that lover who would some day come and kiss her and hold her, so. (SS 70-1)

The same kind of description is found again, the emphasis this time less on wonderful hair and more on satin skin and long lines, with a touch of pity for those less well equipped. I have to quote again to underline the similarities, the effects:

And she saw the light white on the satin of her smooth skin then, and the long, smooth lines that lay from waist to thigh, thigh to knee, and was glad her legs were long from the knee to the ankle, that made legs seem stumbling and stumpy, shortness there. And … she bent to see if that dimple still hid there under her left breast, it did, it was deep as ever. Then she straightened and took down her hair and brushed it, standing so, silly to stand without her nightgown, but that was the mood she was in. (SS 147)

Next is a snatch of the pregnant Chris, again admiring her reflection, and pitying by contrast women whom pregnancy does not become.

She was glad, peeking at herself in the long mirror when she was alone, seeing gradually that smooth rounding of belly and hips below her frock – lucky, she had never that ugliness that some poor folk have to bear, awful for them. (SS 183)

I think I have to call it voyeurism. Certainly the author seems as entranced with his own creation as Emma Tennant suggests Hardy is with his, in Tess.

There may even be a deliberate, self-conscious acknowledgement of Gibbon’s subtle voyeurism. Remember when his horrible namesake, the Rev Gibbon, came to try for the pulpit at Kinraddie? He preached a very ‘rare’ sermon on the Song of Solomon:

Christ’s description of the beauty and comeliness of the Auld Kirk of Scotland, and …a picture of womanly beauty that moulded itself in the lithe and grace of the Kirk … and in a minute or so all Kinraddie kirk was listening to him as though he were promising to pay their taxes at the end of Martinmas.

For it was fair tickling to hear about things like that read out from a pulpit, a woman’s breasts and thighs and all the rest of the things, in that voice like the mooing of a holy bull; and to know it was decent Scripture with a higher meaning as well. (SS 55)

Chris may not be the most convincing female character in Scottish fiction, but Gibbon seems aware that he has taken pains to make her the most attractive!

But remind us how completely he triumphed at the end of the day, let me quote again what Jessie Kesson wrote to Douglas Young some years ago:

To read it, I ‘snecked’ myself inside our dry lavatory next to the pig’s sty. And although I had ‘written’ bits and pieces ever since I could spell!!! – it was then I had my first conviction that I’d be a writer, in my reaction to Sunset Song – in the dry lavatory. ‘That’s MY book’, I protested to myself. ‘He’s written MY book!’ I so identified with Chris Guthrie.⁵

Notes

¹ Tom Crawford, ed, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, A Scots Quair Introduction to Sunset Song, p viii, Canongate Classics 59, 1995. Further page references to Sunset Song and Cloud Howe will be given in the text as (SS 000) and (CH 000).
² Isobel Murray, ’Selves, Names and Roles: Willa Muir’s Imagined Cornersoffers some inspiration for A Scots Quair’, Scottish Literary Journal, May 1994, Vol 21 No 1, pages 56-64.
³ Willa Muir, Imagined Corners in Imagined Selves, Canongate Classics 69, 1996. Further page references will be given in the text as (IC 000).
⁴ Nan Shepherd, The Quarry Wood in The Grampian Quartet, Canongate Classics 70, 1996, Introduction by Roderick Watson, page viii. Further page references will be given in the text as (QW 000).
⁵ Quoted in Isobel Murray, Jessie Kesson: Writing Her Life, Canongate 2000, page 81.

MURRAY, Isobel, ‘Jessie Kesson: Writing Her Self’

11 September 2021 by Duncan Jones

Laverock 3, 1997 |

Jessie Kesson sharply dismissed suggestions that she was a feminist writer. Understandably, she wanted to be a writer, not a woman writer, and to compete with men on their own terms. She was inevitably unaware of the nuances of modern feminism, both feminist writers and feminist critics, despite a long and fervent admiration of Virginia Woolf, and she instinctively resisted identification with a world she had learned to think of as secondary, from the early days writing cosy paragraphs for the woman’s page of a Scottish weekly magazine.

But the evidence of her books very clearly shows an abiding determination to reveal the situations of women in more or less oppressed situations. She repeatedly featured girls or women faced with experiences quite contrary to their ambitions and desires. With considerable understanding she also portrayed their effective ‘enemies’, women conditioned into acquiescence to patriarchal law and customs, and themselves sustaining the patriarchal authority and trying to curb the growth of individualism in others as thoroughly undesirable. Take the situation of Another Time, Another Place. The newly married young woman in that short novel is in conflict. She has married, largely to escape an oppressive situation, but is learning that marriage is to be a prison, with however kindly a jailer, and the end, not the beginning, of formative and individual experience. The reported advent of Italian prisoners-of-war is already exciting:

The young woman felt a small surge of anticipation rising up within her at the prospect of the widening of her narrow insular world as a farm worker’s wife, almost untouched by the world war that raged around her. She always felt she was missing out on some tremendous event, never more so than when she caught a glimpse of girls of her own age, resplendent in uniform, setting out for places she would never set eyes on. Or when she caught their laughter-filled whispers of a whirling social life, the like of which she had never known. (p.8)

Awareness of the possibilities of other lives, even those caused by the ‘tremendous event’ of war, increases her frustrations as she learns the circumscribed limits of her prison cell. Her friend Elspeth, independent, engaged, bound for a new life in Canada, hardly comprehends her despair:

‘Nonsense,’ Elspeth had reproved her. ‘Stuff and nonsense. You’re but young yet, lassie. You’ve got the whole world in front of you yet …’
She had thought that too. Before she was married. She had thought she could go anywhere. Go everywhere, do anything. Do everything …
‘Not now though Elspeth,’ she had confided. ‘It’s all different now. Being married, I mean …’ (p.11)

The young woman lives in one of a row of three relatively isolated cottar houses, and Kirsty and Meg, older married women with children, try to guide her into the roles this tiny society expects of her. They believe in the rightness of these roles, and they need solidarity. In Kirsty’s insistence that the young woman come with them to the flower show the young woman wonders if she only imagines ‘a tone of desperation in Kirsty’s voice. A plea for reinforcement.’ But the cottar wives experience the flower show as a real ordeal.

It hadn’t been imagination. The young woman realised that the moment she stepped inside the marquee. For, although the village lay little more than a mile away from them, the cottar wives had no real part in its integral life. They could have ‘dropped in’ from another planet, to find themselves invisible, in a marquee. Huddling closely together, they began to wander round the different ‘sections’, their voices rising loud in praise of each and every exhibit on show. As if the sound of themselves could merge within that of the folk who surrounded them. (p.28)

Similarly at the harvest home, the year’s only other social gathering, Kirsty and Meg strive to teach the young woman their own habitual inconspicuousness and self-consciousness, the danger of making a fool of herself with ‘everybody looking’.

Nobody was ‘looking’. They should have gone through life invisible, Kirsty and Meg, their fear of attracting attention to themselves was so deeply rooted.
Even on social occasions like this, neither frill nor ribbon put forth a frivolous claim, no innocent coquetries, no small vanities. It was as if the whole chapter of their youth had been torn from their book, and they had turned the page from childhood to middle age. (p.35)

Throughout the book the young woman continues to resist, however hopelessly, the tearing out of that chapter, the turning of that same page in her own life.(p.35)

So I would want to argue that in regard to the understanding and expression of women’s experience Jessie Kesson is supremely accomplished. She found expression for lives, and not only her own, that had never approached expression before. She told the story of reading Sunset Song, published when she was almost sixteen, in the outside ‘lavvy’ at the orphanage, and crying out in a mixture of delight and frustration: ‘This man has written my book!’ She was of course right to be impressed by Grassic Gibbon, and to recognise in Chris Guthrie the nearest thing in all her literary ranging to her own self, her own situation, her own story, but perhaps she was too intimidated. If she had not read Sunset Song, she might not have had to write at least fifteen versions of The White Bird Passes before she could be satisfied. I do not think it is a diminution of Gibbon’s achievement to suggest that Kesson went on to outdo him by a long way in her depiction of female consciousness. But she never saw gender issues as isolated, separated from the complex of social and economic issues that imprisoned farm workers in tiny worlds, and in tied houses from which they could be evicted at the farmer’s whim every six months. So feminist issues or gender issues certainly concern her, but perhaps never exclusively so. And she always tended to judge her work on how fictional it was, how ‘created’ or ‘imagined’. She deprecated the popularity of The White Bird Passes because it was ‘only’ her own story (and so by implication very easy to write), and she was proud of Glitter of Mica because it had a male protagonist (portrayed with great but not uncritical sympathy), and covered three generations and a wide range of characters, and of Where the Apple Ripens, because of its ‘normal’ home background, such as she had never known.

The sensationalised headlines of Kesson’s life are well known: she was born illegitimate in the workhouse in Inverness in 1916, and raised in an Elgin slum by a single mother who was, if not the stereotype of a city prostitute, at least an ‘enthusiastic amateur’. She was removed by courts from her mother’s care when Liza contracted syphilis, and sent to a distant orphanage to finish her schooling. The sensational nature of all this tends to obscure simple facts. Kesson never had a father, or any siblings, her grandfather refused to recognise her existence, and she lived in an unconventional and largely female environment. She had to create herself and tell herself her own story, defining herself as best she could: this is what made The White Bird Passes in particular such an urgent and demanding task. She was completely orphaned at an early age, losing the beloved if undemonstrative mother who had initiated her into the beauty and poetry of life as well as its fears , insecurities and squalor. Liza visited her just once at the orphanage, physically and emotionally destroyed by her terminal illness. Then she was completely alone, and had to survive the regimes of orphanage and school. At school she excelled, and began to love writing, encouraged by the beloved dominie to whom she always paid warm tribute, the first supportive male figure in her life. She did well and passed her exams, and the dominie bought her books from which to coach her for the University Prelims. But – and this never, ever, ceased to anger and to grieve her – the Trustees declared that such an education would be wasted on a girl, and that a career in domestic or farm service would be more appropriate. She was decisively punished for her gender, and this determined much of the rest of her life, and of her writing. Apart from anything else, it taught her that she had to trust to herself in the last resort to establish and maintain her individual identity.

She ended The White Bird Passes there, with Janie leaving school. The ‘end’ is more ambiguous in the novel than it was in life. In the book, ‘the Mannie’, Mrs Thain’s husband, suggests to the Trustees that farm work would suit her better than inside work. Janie declares: ‘I don‘t want to work on a farm. I want to write poetry. Great poetry. As great as Shakespeare.’ (151)

Jessie thought it was clear in the novel that Janie would be a farm-worker, and inevitably soon the object of sexual interest by male farm-workers (and by implication bound for the prison inhabited by the young woman in Another Time, Another Place). But some hope remains, some ambiguity, when ‘the Mannie’ declares that she will only be threshing this one summer: ‘Janie’s going to Kingorm [Aberdeen University]. They’ve decided to mak’ a scholar oot o’ her. They have that!’ (p.154) But the poem from which Kesson took her final title, ‘The Valley of White Poppies’ by Fiona Macleod, does not bode well: it speaks of ‘the grave of dreams’:

A white bird floats there like a drifting leaf:
It feeds upon faint sweet hopes and perishing dreams
And the still breath of unremembering grief.

And as a silent leaf the white bird passes,
Winnowing the dusk by dim forgetful streams.

Kesson’s disappointment over her education and her future potentialities brings us to a place where modern feminist criticism can effectively help us to understand her and to place her in a context, although to some extent her social circumstances would continue to separate her from any nourishing contact with her ‘sisters’ and her ‘mothers’, with the accidental but happy exception of Nan Shepherd. Her experience in service led to a nervous breakdown (about which, interestingly, she wrote remarkably little, ever). The diagnosis was neurasthenia, and she spent a whole year in a mental hospital before the release described in the short story ‘Good Friday’. This illness was not unique, and had indeed visited many women writers especially from the 1890s on. Elaine Showalter gives a fascinating account in The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture, 1830–1980 of the debilitating effect of trying to be a woman in a world made for and by men, which shows one important link Kesson has with her ‘sisters’.

The appearance of the New Woman, with her demands for education, work, and personal freedom, presented Darwinian psychiatry with a direct challenge to its social gospel. At the same time that new opportunities for self-cultivation and self-fulfilment in education and work offered to women, doctors warned them that pursuit of such opportunities would lead to sickness, sterility, and race suicide. They explicitly linked the epidemic of nervous disorders – anorexia nervosa, hysteria, and neurasthenia – which marked the fin de siecle to women’s ambitions.

Showalter quotes a description of the neurasthenic given in 1907 by a simplifying and condescending male doctor:

A woman, generally single, or in some way not in a condition for performing her reproductive function, having suffered from some real or imagined trouble, or having passed through a phase of hypochondriasis of sexual character, and often being of a highly nervous stock, becomes the interesting invalid.

An American woman doctor (the ‘epidemic’ started in America), a woman who suffered herself from neurasthenia, attributed female neurasthenia ‘not simply to overwork but to women’s ambitions for intellectual, social, and financial success’, ambitions that could not be accommodated within the structures of late-nineteenth-century society.

Showalter documents the passage of neurasthenia from America to England, where it was mainly associated with intelligent young women:

For many late Victorian female intellectuals, especially those in the first generation to attend college, nervous illness marked the transition from domestic to professional roles. Similar to the fears and depressions described by Nightingale, Bronte, and Craik in the 1850s, these protracted and vaguely understood illnesses were now subsumed under the label of ‘neurasthenia’. From the pioneering doctor Sophia Jex-Blake to the social worker Beatrice Webb, New Women and nervous illness seemed to go together.

Ironically, the illness was most frequent among intellectuals and the well-to-do, with no suggestion that it could visit ‘the labours of domestic servants, the harshness of rural existence’: here as elsewhere, Kesson was a striking and solitary exception. Ness MacDonald, moving from orphanage to service to mental hospital, was unawares part of a much wider problem of women trying to adapt to new possibilities which suddenly seemed to become available to women, virtually inside a generation.

I think contemporary feminist criticism also helps us to understand why so much of Kesson’s published fiction is autobiographical, to different extents. It is not of course at all surprising that she uses the life circumstances she knows best to ground her fiction – that in Glitter of Mica for example she exposes the inequalities, tyrannies and insecurities of the farm-worker’s life she knew only too well, and uses her later familiarity with social workers in her depiction of Helen Riddel’s work experience, or that the conflict of the adolescent sexual excitement she had experienced acutely with the grim possibility she had observed of disgrace in unwanted pregnancy should be a frequent subject (in Where the Apple Ripens, Glitter of Mica and ‘The Gowk’). But Kesson’s fiction does seem to be exceptionally autobiographical in The White Bird Passes, and to a lesser extent in Another Time, Another Place, which was based on the real billeting of Italian prisoners-of-war in the circumscribed community of a Black Isle farm.

The first very simple and obvious point I want to make is that it is never safe to identify an author and her protagonist.

Janie in The White Bird Passes does not ‘equal’ Kesson. She is the last of at least fifteen constructed versions of Kesson’s childhood, all notably different, and she is the one which most satisfied her author. But traditional literary criticism and contemporary theory and feminist criticism would all suggest the considerable dangers of identifying the two. David Copperfield was not Dickens, although they shared very painful childhood experiences. Ruskin wrote a vividly remembered autobiography, Praeterita, in which he did not include incidents that it gave him no pleasure to remember – including such details as his disastrous and much publicised marriage. He described its protagonist as ‘the “natural” me’ – only peeled carefully.

To the commentator on women’s writing of the last hundred years, there special features in women writers’ attempts at autobiography. These are often women who have grown up seeking to measure themselves, or to recognise themselves in a largely male-engendered tradition, which, particularly in the nineteenth century, tended to polarise women into the sainted, sexually pure wife and mother, the ‘angel in the house’, passive and incapable of sexual feelings, and the fallen dangerous woman, sexually experienced and seductive, threatening or even monstrous. Finding these reflections of herself woefully inadequate, the woman writer has had to create a more adequate framework in which to construct her own identity. Linda Anderson has tackled this phenomenon in an article called ‘At the Threshold of the Self: Women and Autobiography’:

Inevitably autobiography as the way to write the self, or give the self a narrative, is deeply bound up with these questions or questionings of identity … It is necessary to take into account the fact that the woman who attempts to write herself is engaged by the nature of the activity itself in re-writing the stories that already exist about her since by seeking to publicise herself she is violating an important cultural construction of her femininity as passive or hidden. She is resisting or changing what is known about her. Her place within culture, the place from which she writes, is produced by difference and produces difference. The myth of self which recent theorists have questioned may not be present for her in the same way; it is more difficult for her to believe in a self that can exist before writing, a self that is unified and continuous. Autobiography may selfconsciously exist for her as an alternative place of identification.

This approach does seem to me to help us to understand why Kesson returned again and again to the attempt to recreate her Lane childhood and her orphanage experience. It may also help us to see why she later remained silent about the early versions, which I found to my surprise when looking for her early journalistic contributions. (See Kesson chapter in A History of Scottish Women’s Writing.)

I began this topic by suggesting that fiction is not the same as autobiography, that it is dangerous to identify author and character. To complete the paradox, let me ask whether all autobiography is not in fact fiction. By the time any writer has consulted her inevitably unreliable memory, selected and eliminated among the things she does remember, selected among literary forms and stances and points of view and chosen between first and third person narrative, the eventual construction will be something else, and something that exists on the page and not in the past, written by someone who is no longer identical with the irretrievable person who experienced something like this in what we amusingly call real life.

Kesson of course knew the pitfalls of autobiography as well as or better than anyone. Her own projected autobiography, splendidly entitled Mistress of None, was advertised as forthcoming in 1981, but never written. In a recent interview with Hugh Macpherson she said The White Bird Passes had effectively ‘done’ her childhood, the most important part of her life, but I think she showed more insight into herself when she wrote to me in 1985:

You see, Isobel, the things that have affected me most in my personal and creative life … are the things I cannot … myself … find … words … for … or … rather … cannot … myself … utter.

Autobiographical as some of it is, her work is also notable for reticence. Like Ruskin, she presents ‘the “natural” me – only peeled carefully’. The more we look at all her characters, the more we notice reticence, selectivity, irony, obliqueness. She uses the first person very rarely, even in early versions, and even Grassic Gibbon’s ‘you’ only occasionally. Her protagonists are effectively but unobtrusively protected in part by third person narrators. And of course she wrote many plays, where again the individual may retain some privacy. Almost as notably as Muriel Spark she selects how much we are to know about them, especially their emotional turmoils. In Elgin slum or institution, whether orphanage or hospital, in confined areas where others never hesitate to invade their private space, her main characters strive to retain some privacy, some distance around them, some element of control over circumstances, however constraining. This can include even the area of sexual activity, where the body itself can betray the created, would-be private self.

Again and again her characters are isolated, as she herself pointed out. They are ‘ootlins’, as she asserts in The White Bird Passes. ‘Queer folk who were “oot” and who, perversely enough, never had any desire to be “in”’ (118). When Bob Tait and I interviewed her in 1985 she quoted this, and continued:

Every work I‘ve ever written contains ae ‘ootlin’. Lovely Aberdeenshire word. Somebody that never really fitted into the thing … It’s always aboot people who don‘t fit in! Now I know mysel at last and it’s just in one line in that book where fowk were oot who never had any desire to be in.

What such characters prize most is privacy, and what they fear most and respond to most is humiliation, loss of dignity. We see Janie become a very private young woman, and if she loses her dignity we are not told of it. But in Glitter of Mica, Helen Riddel is desperately humiliated by the simultaneous discovery of her sexual need and its disclosure to Charlie Anson: later she is mortally humiliated by her father’s discovering her with Anson, but attending to his old enemy, not herself. The young woman in Another Time, Another Place envies above all the dignity of her friend Elspeth, who is economically more independent. She is humiliated like Helen in the discovery of her sexual need with Luigi, and then doubly humiliated by feeling she must confess this intimacy in her futile attempt to rescue him.

Isabel Emslie in Where the Apple Ripens seems impervious to every kind of warning about sexual activity and pregnancy, even the death after childbirth of her former schoolmate Helen Mavor, except the one she finally gets, being discovered in the nick of time and shamed and humiliated by the male solidarity and knowing, smutty comments of Alex Ewan and the Postie:

For never. Never again would she stand not knowing what to do. Crumpled and sticky and dirty, with her knickers dangling around her knees. And herself being told to ‘tidy up’. (p.68)

This is the lesson Isabel does learn.

Suggestions for further reading

Flora Alexander, Contemporary Women Novelists, 1989, Chapter 1, pp. 1–14
Carol Anderson, ‘Listening to the Women Talk’, in Gavin Wallace and Randall Stevenson (eds.),The Scottish Novel Since the Seventies,1993,pp.170–186.
Linda Anderson, ‘At the Threshold of the Self: Women and Autobiography’ in Moira Monteith (ed.) Women’s Writing: A Challenge to Theory, 1986,pp.54–71.
Joy Hendry, ‘Jessie Kesson Country’ in The Scots Magazine, October 1989,pp.11–22.
Joy Hendry, ‘The Double Knot in the Peeny’ in Gail Chester and Sigrid Nielsen (eds.) In Other Words: Writing as a Feminist,1987.
Hugh Macpherson, ‘Scottish Writers: Jessie Kesson’ in Scottish Book Collector 2, Issue 8 1990/1991, pp.22–25
Pam Morris, Literature and Feminism: An Introduction 1993.
Isobel Murray, Jessie Kesson: Writing Her Life, second edition.
Isobel Murray, ‘Jessie Kesson’, a chapter in A History of Scottish Women’s Writing.
Isobel Murray, ‘Two Singular North-East Voices: David Toulman and Jessie Kesson’ in Northern Visions, forthcoming, pp.199–212.
Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture, 1830–1980. 1987, especially chapter 5, ‘Nervous Women: Sex Roles and Sick Roles’.

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