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BROWN, Ian, ‘The Representation of Manifold Identities in Post-war Scottish Theatre’

12 September 2021 by Duncan Jones

A paper presented at ESSE 2012 |

Carla Sassi was not alone when she famously talked in 2009 of ‘the powerful literary strain that rigidly connotes Scottish nationhood as male, working-class and, ideologically, as socialist or republican’.¹ Certainly this was an issue I drew attention to in my chapter on Scottish theatre in the Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature.² That chapter’s title was ‘Staging the Nation’, but it continues ‘Multiplicity and Cultural Diversity in Contemporary Scottish Theatre’. This paper argues that, while there was certainly a period when Sassi’s strictures and mine held true, particularly for theatre the 1970s, there was a different version of Scottish nationhood to be found earlier in the twentieth century and a much more complex representation more recently. In the early part of the century, the difference was found, not least in the productions of the Scottish National Players, active in one way or another between 1921 and the end of the World War Two. The Players had very little to do with a concept of Scottish nationhood that was ‘male, working-class, and ideologically socialist and republican’. I will argue, however, that in the 1920s, when the Scottish National Players were attempting their version of Scottish nationhood, Joe Corrie with the Bowhill Players and In Time o Strife (1927) offered, in reaction, an alternative vision closer to that identified by Sassi. But Corrie stood, if not alone, at least relatively marginalised.

The idea of forming the Scottish National Players emerged before the First World War, largely as means of establishing a Scottish drama as opposed to the predominantly English-language West End-centred industrial-scale theatre that prevailed throughout Britain. One of its objectives was ‘To found a Scottish National Theatre’.³ The idea’s fruition was deferred until peace came and, launched in 1921 and based in Glasgow, it toured intermittently into the rest of Scotland. Its actors were amateur or semi-professional and, despite a wish by board members like the playwrights James Bridie and John Brandane that the company set itself on a fully professional footing, this never happened. David Hutchison suggests that the reason for this was that the actors ‘were understandably nervous about giving up their jobs’.⁴ Brandane was a driving force in the company and it presented his play The Glen is Mine in 1923, first at the Athenaeum and later that year, and again in 1926, at the King’s Theatre, Glasgow. This play typifies aspects of the Scottish National Players’ repertoire.

The Glen is Mine sets an island landowner, Colonel Murray against his son the Captain, Charlie, to whom, the Colonel, to avoid death duties, has handed over responsibility for his estate. Charlie, working with London financiers wants to mine for haematite in the glen to supply the iron industry. The colonel is horrified by Charlie’s plans:

CAPTAIN: But it just comes to this. There’s money in that old hill, so why shouldn’t we have it?
COLONEL: And you’re Highland, and can say that! Ben Creach! The deer-forest! […] The river with oily scum on it! Labourers slouching about!⁵

The Colonel ‘s horror is clearly at the desecration in his eyes of industrialising his rural fastness. It is ironic in this case that the deer-forest that arose out of the impact of the Clearances is by this stage seen by him, and Brandane, as the natural state for the Highlands. The Colonel’s horror is as much at the thought of ‘labourers slouching about’ ‘his’ glen as at the oily scum on the river. The vision of the Highlands as unspoiled and idealised continues:

COLONEL: […] But the Highlands, Charlie! Is this to be the beginning of the end of them? Are the old hunting pastoral days to go – the wild free open life?⁶

Brandane entirely ignores the social and economic forces that have led to the depopulation of the Highlands to create this idealised free open wilderness that has now to be protected. His romantic values look back to the kailyard, while his play is written with a clear sense of social hierarchy. The Colonel is not only sure of the pristine nature of his Highlands, but is opposed to those he sees as arriviste:

It’s always your profiteers that love to get their claws into our set. Makes the hair-restorer Johnny and the furniture polish man feel big to point the finger of scorn at the old families.⁷

Beside the established landowner’s desire to keep the Highlands as they are is a social snobbery that is entirely assured that the present hierarchy is as it should be and the Highlands should not be developed by new investment. The use of language marks here a similar sense of hierarchy, one in which the local characters who speak Scots (though in this play that is marked lightly in the use of words like ‘ken’ and ‘skelp’) are treated as comic unless they are the two young romantic lovers, Morag and Murdo. A key sub-plot is the confounding of the local merchant, MacPhedran, who is also, by offering credit, in effect a moneylender. In this position, he does not scruple to try to use his power over Angus MacKinnon, a crofter whose croft’s location is key to the Captain’s plans, to help to try to evict the crofter who loves his land. While Brandane gives Murdo a speech that attacks the hard life of crofting, he asserts the romance of the ‘free’ way of life found in the ‘Glen’. The Colonel’s generosity saves Angus and, in the end, the developers are defeated so far as the ‘Glen’ is concerned, though they find a more profitable area in the Highlands to develop. Brandane’s Glen may be saved, but not someone else’s. The romanticised way of life remains under threat, but clearly the Players and Brandane are promoting a rural, regressive and socially conservative vision of ideal ‘Scottish nationhood’.

The Glen is Mine accords very well with David Hutchison’s description of the repertoire of the Scottish National Players:

As many of the [company’s] plays […] are naturalistic in form and set in areas where dialect was still spoken at the time of writing, it was possible to use the Scots of the particular area, and this may be another reason why dramatists preferred rural settings: they were able to use Scots without producing the uneasy situation where contemporary characters speak in archaic language. The rural setting, because dialect could be employed, possibly seemed to them to be that much more Scottish than the urban one, although there was nothing to prevent a writer from rendering the Glasgow dialect on the stage, as Unity’s writers were later to do.⁸

The issue that emerges here, as in other plays presented by the Scottish National Players is just what constitutes ‘Scottish’, or, for that matter, to quote another of the company’s objectives, what constitutes Scottish ‘life and character’. On the question of the identification of ‘national’ or ‘nation’ in their work, Bill Findlay remarks of the Scottish National Players and companies that followed their path:

despite their ‘national’ aspirations, held with sincerity and integrity, the companies tended to have a limited sense of ‘national’ when it comes to work in a Scots idiom, in that the playwrights avert their gaze from the contemporary industrial and urban reality of Scotland, and therefore from the associated linguistic reality, too. Hence work in Scots typically has country or historical settings; settings where the Scots employed could be a traditional, conservative, country-inflected Scots, or a re-imagined Lallans.⁹

In effect the Scottish National Players represented an attempt at a Scottish theatre, but one frankly conservative in its artistic and social attitudes, a largely bourgeois theatre.

There is a tendency now in thinking about Scottish theatre in a post-war setting to forget the importance of the vision of Scottish nationhood embedded in the work of the Scottish National Players. Indeed, this vision largely permeated the plays presented throughout the Scottish amateur movement under the auspices of the Scottish Community Drama Association founded in 1926 and still active. In fact, the kind of ‘Scottish nationhood’ Sassi rightly identifies can be seen to arise from a reaction against the Highlandising, idealising, feminising, historicising drama that grew out of the work of the Players. Even if Brandane’s The Glen is Mineis contemporary to its time of production it is nostalgic, while other of Brandane’s work, like The Lifting (1925) – a Jacobite adventure involving resistance to redcoats – is clearly backward-looking in its identification of ‘Scottish nationhood’.

It is against a background of such drama that Corrie writes the plays he does in the 1920s and certainly in reaction to such romantic nostalgia that Unity Theatre develops its repertoire. This from George Munro’s Gold in his Boots (1947), about corruption in football, to Robert McLeish’s Gorbals Story (1948), about housing shortage, is determinedly working-class and socialist in its tone. Yet Unity was not, as we remember in the work of Ena Lamont Stewart, simply ‘male’. Neither her Starched Aprons (1945) nor her Men Should Weep (1947) expresses strong support for the male as an embodiment of Scottish nationhood, but both represent a society in which men have substantial power, and weaknesses. This was especially true of the first version of Men Should Weep where Maggie ends by killing herself. The version we are now more familiar, with rewritten in the 1970s, where Maggie faces down her husband’s male attitudinising, emerged from a later period and later ideas about the role and power of women in society.

Although Unity closed under public funding pressure in 1951, it marked, when Corrie had been tamed to become effectively a house dramatist for the Scottish Community Drama Association, a diversification of Scottish theatre away from a bourgeois ‘legitimate’ theatre. Yet, the most prominent Scots-language theatre continued to be written by such figures as Robert McLellan, Robert Kemp, Alexander Reid, and, in translation, Douglas Young. This generally did not conform to that principles of Unity, nor was it a drama that was in Sassi’ terms ‘male, working-class and, ideologically, as socialist or republican’. It was generally historically focused, with traditional views of social organisation and hierarchy. In fact, what Sassi rightly confronts as a key strain in Scottish literature and drama prevailed substantially in the later decades of the twentieth century and especially in drama in the 1970s. One should remember that, when those literary and dramatic strains developed, they were often a progressive reaction to what preceded them. When Stewart Conn, Bill Bryden and others began to write in Scots broadly in the terms Sassi identifies, they were resisting a tame, bourgeois theatre. This looked back at Scottish history, by and large, sentimentally so that ‘Scottish nationhood’ was under that influence defined in regressive terms that paid no attention to the urban and industrial nature of contemporary Scottish life. The new synthesis of popular and ‘legitimate’ theatre that came to fruition in the 1970s broke that mould, but it did so in terms of presenting maleness, working life and socialist values. From our perspective now, this may seem limited. At the time it was revolutionary and fresh.

Nonetheless, this male, working-class, socialist drama opened new doors and led to further diversification of identities on the Scottish stage. It would be redundant at this point to list the many ways in which women’s playwriting broke through after 1980 in the work of Sue Glover, Liz Lochhead, Marcella Evaristi and Sharman Macdonald, not to mention later women playwrights like Nicola McCartney and Isobel Wright. After my own play exploring gay sexuality and activism, The Fork, (1976) – performed not by a Scottish company as it happened, though the Traverse’s Chris Parr was interested in it, but by Gay Sweatshop, which toured it to Edinburgh – a number of 1980s gay playwrights presented gay themes on stage. These included John Binnie and Christopher Dean, while Rona Munro explored lesbian love in Saturday Night at the Commodore (1989). Michelle Macleod and Moray Watson have written eloquently on the vitality of Gaelic-language drama in the 1960s and 1970s in their chapter in the Edinburgh History.¹⁰ Despite the failure to survive of the companies Fir Chlis (1978–81) and Tosg (1996–2006), attempts at Gaelic-language drama have been energetic and often in the form of soaps, like Machair(STV, 1992–98), have made a longer-term impression. Now, any vision of ‘Scottish nationhood’ expressed on the Scottish stage has achieved such a range of diversity and multiplicity of identities that it is no longer possible to argue for any single vision of ‘Scotland’. As David Pattie puts it, the questioning of ‘Scotland’ by one of our leading playwrights, David Greig

seems to position Scotland as the silent partner in a never-to-be completed conversation; as though the country has no substance in itself, but acquires meaning only through a process of continual re-engagement. Greig is not simply Scottish, he exists in a dialogue with the nation, one in which neither Greig nor the nation he identified with are fixed essences. One might say that the two exist only when placed in relation to each other.¹¹

Pattie estimates Greig’s prolific output at five plays in most years; alongside David Harrower Greig is one of the most widely translated Scottish writers, being translated into something of the order of thirty other languages. Scottish nationhood, as expressed in its drama, is now clearly manifold and firmly set in international contexts.

Twentieth-century theatrical developments, after the first strugglings in the1920s of the Scottish National Players and Corrie’s radical reaction to them, were reinforced by the work of Glasgow Unity, not to mention new writing presented by the Glasgow Citizens, founded in 1943, and the Edinburgh Gateway Theatre Company, founded in 1953. Since the 1970s, a diversification of topics, themes and language choice, whether English, Scots or Gaelic, has meant that Scottish theatre has embodied and led in the determination and celebration of the perception that there is no single Scottish ‘identity’. Rather there is recognition of many identities – linguistic, gender-based, sexual, regional and social – which make up Scottish culture, or ‘nationhood’. That ‘powerful literary strain that rigidly connotes Scottish nationhood as male, working-class and, ideologically, as socialist or republican’ has been subverted and surrounded by enhanced and enriched conceptions of what makes up Scottish nationhood. But I would always want to repeat that, in its time, in the middle of the twentieth century, that strain, which now seems so regressive, was, in its time and context, progressive. I suppose today’s literary and theatrical revolutionaries will, to the next generation, appear somewhat passé.

Notes

Carla Sassi, ‘The (B)order in Modern Scottish Literature’ in Ian Brown and Alan Riach (eds.), The Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth-Century Scottish Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh |University Press, 2009) p. 153.
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007).
Quoted by Hutchison, ‘1900 to 1950’ in Bill Findlay (ed.), A History of Scottish Theatre (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1998), p. 221.
Ibid., p. 223.
John Brandane, The Glen is Mine and The Lifting (London: Constable, 1925), p. 35
Ibid., p. 36.
Ibid., p. 106.
David Hutchison, The Modern Scottish Theatre (Glasgow: Molendinar, 1977), p. 71
Bill Findlay, ‘ Modern Scots Drama and Language Planning: A Context and Caution’, in John M. Kirk and Dónaill P. Ó Baoill (eds.), Towards our Goals in Broadcasting, the Press, the Performing Arts and the Economy (Belfast: Cló Ollscoil na Banríona, 2003), pp. 165–169, pp. 166–7.
‘In the Shadow of the Bard […]’, in vol. 3, pp. 280–2.
David Pattie, ‘Scotland & Anywhere: The Theatre of David Greig’ in Anja Müller and Clare Wallace, Cosmotopia: Transnational Identities in David Greig’s Theatre (Prague: Litteraria Pragensia Books, 2011), p. 55.

BURGESS, Moira, ‘Dot Allan – a Glasgow Woman Novelist’

12 September 2021 by Duncan Jones

ScotLit 19, 1998 |

A 1930s novel by a Scottish writer; theme, the contemporary Great Depression and the hardships of a workless Glasgow; near the beginning, the sentence: ‘It was one of those days when you felt God had forgotten the city.’ Would you like to guess the author and title? George Blake’s The Shipbuilders, perhaps or James Barke’s Major Operation? No, it’s Hunger March by Dot Allan, published in 1934, predating Blake’s and Barke’s better-known treatments of Depression Glasgow in 1935 and 1936.

All three are novels of social concern. The Shipbuilders and Major Operation are sometimes called ‘proletarian fiction’, but it’s not so simple. While Barke was proud of his descent from Galloway farm-workers, several critics (including himself) have pointed out that Blake was hardly a child of the proletariat, and the same could be said of Dot Allan.

She was born in 1892 in industrial Stirlingshire, only child of an iron merchant. Her maternal grandfather was founder of the Vale Paper Works in Denny. By the time she begins to appear on the literary scene we find her, still a young woman, living in the west end of Glasgow with her widowed mother. She remained there, never marrying, until her death in 1964.

Contemporaries describe her as small, soft-voiced and retiring, hostess of elegant afternoon teas. During both World Wars she apparently abandoned writing for nursing and charity work. She does seem an unlikely figure to have written a Glasgow proletarian novel, and indeed that’s not exactly what she has done in Hunger March. What she did do may lead us to consider the relationship between her fiction and her life.

We should first sketch Allan’s writing career as a whole. The stereotypical west-end lady, the daughter at home, is surely a dilettante writer? Yet by 1926 Christopher Murray Grieve (Hugh MacDiarmid) had mentioned her work in his influential Contemporary Scottish Studies:As belonging to the new Glasgow school may be mentioned Miss Dot Allan with The Syrens (some of her more recent work in the form of short sketches has reached a much higher level) …

Grieve does not specify which sketches have impressed him, but Allan was writing a lot; sketches, articles and short stories were regularly published in a range of newspapers and periodicals. This was not a hobby, but – albeit freelance – a career.

In 1921 Allan published her first novel. As Grieve indicates, The Syrens, romantic and slightly clumsy, is prentice work. In some of her later novels, indeed, there’s an uneasy feeling that she’s still searching for her own voice. Allan’s contribution to the currently popular genre of realistic tenement stories, The Deans (1929), isn’t a great success, possibly because she had never lived in a tenement. She is much more at home in Deepening River (1932), the leisurely tale of four generations of a shipbuilding family in Glasgow, and in John Mathew, Paper-Maker (1948), closely based on her own family history. (Her grandfather the paper-maker was called John Luke.) These books take a ‘managerial’ point of view, unusual in Glasgow fiction; we may class them, perhaps, with George Blake’s ‘Garvel’ novels and Guy McCrone’s Wax Fruit.

Allan published only some ten novels in all in a writing career which spanned nearly forty years. Her work found popularity and critical approval in the 1920s and 1930s. (Her post-war novels seem to have sunk without trace, the time out for charity work doing no good for her career.) Among these earlier novels is Hunger March.

Hunger March ought not to remain entirely forgotten in a Scottish publishing scene which has rediscovered so much equally flawed – for it does have its faults – but significant work. Though undoubtedly a ‘Glasgow novel’ – the city is unnamed, but clearly recognisable as Glasgow – it tries to steer clear of parochiality, opening with a prologue which makes that very point. The hunger march of the title, one of many during the Depression years, is seen as one of a series of events dating from earliest antiquity. Allan cites the tale of Joseph and his brethren and the story of Jesus with the loaves and fishes. ‘The meanest hunger marcher today … is walking in the shadow of God.’ That is the big picture, in Allan’s view.

To considerable effect, the action is confined to a single day, the day of the great hunger march. Intending to present a complete overview of the city, Allan chooses both working-class and middle-class characters, whose stories interweave through the day. Like Blake and Barke, she explores a ‘two cities’ theme: the middle classes don’t care about the workers – sometimes don’t even notice them – while the workers intend to make them notice. We focus in turn on the failing merchant Arthur Joyce; his cleaner Mrs Humphry and her longterm unemployed son Joe; a young clerk facing dismissal; a (now very dated) ‘society beauty’; and a charismatic revolutionary Nimrod, as observed by middle-class radical Jimmy. Again like Blake and Barke, Allan copes better with some of these strands than with others. If she doesn’t quite manage in Hunger March to get the whole of Glasgow into one novel, she is not alone among Glasgow novelists.

The Mrs Humphry/Joe story is perhaps rather determinedly ‘Glasgow’, but the mother-son relationship has moments of sensitivity. Mrs Humphry’s incessant blathering about the glories of work brings the unemployed Joe to such a pitch of frustrated rage that he nearly brains her. But he )or Allan) stops in time, and the moment is a turning-point for the characters.

The novel moves to its obligatory scene of violence in the Square and an epiphany for the young reporter, Jimmy, a credible enough character, though Nimrod is a bit larger than life. But Allan is probably most comfortable with the employer Mr Joyce, on the survival of whose business the fates of many of these characters depend. The symbiotic relationship between employer and employee, a feature of both The Shipbuilders and Major Operation, is no less significant here. Allan sees the future of firms like Joyce and Son as the future of Glasgow. Arthur Joyce has vowed to carry on, rather than winding up his business before it collapses and retiring in modest comfort. Recognising how his workers would suffer if he gave up, he is racked with responsibility and guilt.

But Hunger March is not a hymn to middle-class virtues. A telling scene occurs while the great march is converging on George Square in early afternoon. The marchers are idly watched by leisured shoppers and lunchers. In one of the famous Glasgow tearooms we overhear a comment by a lady customer: ‘It shouldn’t be allowed. I’m sure and I don’t know what the world is coming to!’ In a corner of the room a young waitress silently agrees, but – as Allan economically indicates – with quite a different implication to her thoughts.

As we have seen, Dot Allan, by upbringing and outward social status, is the lady at the table, but she sympathises with the waitress. She is registering an indictment of the prosperous middle class to which she herself belongs; an attitude which recurs in her writing.

Among other good reviews which Hunger March received on publication, the Times Literary Supplement found it ‘honest and inspiring’. There is something, however, a little odd about this review: ‘Mr Dot Allan has adopted an ingenious and effective technique for his story Hunger March…’

The reviewer has assumed (presumably from reading the book) that the author is a man: an interesting misidentification. Perhaps, even as late as 1934, it isn’t the kind of book that women are expected to be writing? Has Allan managed to break free of the persona of a middle-class lady (which does appear in some of her sketches) and write as she could write, unhampered by any conventions about ‘women’s writing’? These questions call for further investigation, particularly because, some years earlier, Allan had considered these very conventions in her second novel, Makeshift (1928), even less well known than Hunger March.

Makeshift opens with a condemnation of middle-class ladies so pointed and bitter that the reference in Hunger March pales in comparison. The prologue introduces the child Jacqueline, whose adolescence and adulthood are the theme of the book. Her mother, a dressmaker working at home, is embittered about the state of her marriage. her husband is a sea-captain and his ship is her rival, the mistress to whom he rushes off eagerly after every leave. She thought marriage would be wonderful, but:’Second best!’ she raved. ‘That’s what my life has been made up of, Jacqueline; makeshift all the time … I’ve missed it somehow; but there’s more in life than that.’

Her lady clients treat her with disdain, not even paying their bills, on which income she and Jacqueline depend. At last she slashes a customer’s dress material into shreds, realises what she’s done, goes into her room, and gasses herself. Nothing here for the comfort of Dot Allan’s neighbours in Kelvinside.

Jacqueline, the ‘second best’ cry in her ears, grows up, begins to write, and feels the first stirrings of ‘sex consciousness’. The phrase is awkward, but there is honesty and frankness in Allan’s description of Jacqueline’s sexual feelings, and of her awareness of the same urge in men. Makeshift is as outspoken for its time as Catherine Carswell’s Open the Door!

After a closely-observed scene of sexual harassment by Jacqueline’s boss, and more conventional romance with Owen (who is then rather melodramatically stabbed to death), Jacqueline is called home to keep house for her widowed uncle, and begins to go out with William, the bailie’s son. She is moved by unexpected passion (to William’s surprise, not to say alarm), but accepts his proposal almost entirely from fear of becoming a ‘surplus woman’ like her alcoholic colleague Miss Price. ‘Would it be all right? At the back of her mind she knew that it wouldn’t.’ When writing friends drop in before the wedding, William is annoyed.What the blazes did the man mean jawing away about Jacqueline’s poetry, puffing up the poor kid she could write? Write? Hell! Didn’t he realise she was going to be married – married?

Shades of Carswell’s The Camomile, and Allan treats no less thoughtfully the problems of a woman writer in 1920s Scotland, which (as in Carswell) can only be solved by taking the train south.

Were they, to some extent, Allan’s own problems? She did not take the night express to Euston, but stayed in Glasgow, caring for a frail mother. Some of her writing is fairly run-of-the-mill – what you might expect from a middle-class woman writer of her place and time – but Makeshift and Hunger March transcend such expectations. We can postulate, but pending further research cannot prove, tensions in her life and work between what she ‘ought’ to write and what she wanted to write, what she was doing in genteel Kelvinside and what she wanted to do. Meanwhile Hunger March and Makeshift ought to be rediscovered – as the work of Blake, Barke and Carswell has quite recently been – and studied in the context not just of Glasgow fiction, but of Scottish women’s writing.

BURGESS, Moira, ‘The Glasgow Short Story’

12 September 2021 by Duncan Jones

Laverock 2, 1996 |

It’s safe enough to declare that the short story form is flourishing in Glasgow at present, sharing in the general flowering and excitement which has marked Glasgow writing for some years now; but how valid is the term ‘the Glasgow short story’? Is there such a thing, a separate sub-genre, as it were, of the Scottish short story? Hamish Whyte and I boldly declared that there was, a few years ago, by compiling two anthologies of Glasgow short stories, Streets of Stone (1985) and Streets of Gold (1989).

Between them, the anthologies cover some fifty years of short story writing. Our criterion was that a story should be set in Glasgow or be written by a Glasgow writer, though not necessarily both. Beyond that we were looking, I suppose, for something less tangible: a kind of essence of Glasgow, the spirit of the place, or people, or both together. What we found did, I think, go some way towards proving that the Glasgow short story really does exist.

The earliest story in Streets of Stone dates from 1936, and in our research we couldn’t find anything much farther back than that. We were looking, of course, for literary short stories, not anecdotes and not sketches. A couple of early stories could, at a pinch, have been considered: John Gait’s ‘A Rich Man’ from 1837 – the hero’s rise from messenger-boy to Glasgow Merchant – and a comic story by W.E. Aytoun from 1845, ‘How we Got Up the Glenmutchkin Railway, and How we Got Out of It’, involving two young Glasgow gentlemen who are trying to make their fortune on the stock exchange. But they didn’t quite meet our demands, and, in terms of an anthology, their inclusion would have drawn all the more attention to the hiatus between 1845 and 1936.

During that hundred-year gap, incidentally, Glasgow short fiction was thriving, but in the form of sketches. Everybody knows J.J. Bell’s Wee MacGregor, which was published in book form in 1902. Bell took a chance on book publication precisely because his short, humorous sketches had been so popular on their original appearance in the Glasgow Evening Times. Similarly, Neil Munro’s Para Handy sketches, and his Erchie sketches which are specifically set in Glasgow, were eagerly read in the Evening News before they were ever collected in book form. And they were far from being alone in their field. William Donaldson’s seminal work Popular Literature in Victorian Scotland (1986) first alerted scholars to the treasures of humour, Scots language and social comment to be found in Victorian and Edwardian periodicals. Light as they are, these sketches are rich repositories of information about contemporary Glasgow, and they speak with a Glasgow voice.

Jeems Kaye, for instance, is well worth rediscovering. These sketches appeared in the Glasgow weekly periodical The Baillie during the 1870s and 1880s. In the very first one we find that horse-drawn tramcars have just taken over from horse-drawn buses, and he doesn’t see this as an improvement. He avoids using ‘the caars’ whenever possible, but one cold night he and his wife are forced by circumstances to wait for a tramcar, and we’ve all shared his experience: ‘The first siven that came up were gaun tae the Goosedubs, and that, I need hardly say, was no oor road’.

And in the wake of the Year of Culture, with the Year of Architecture ahead, we cannot overlook a contemporary view of Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s Willow Tearoom, as seen by Erchie, who visited it about 1903 with his friend Duffy the coalman. Please call to mind at least a general picture of the Mackintosh style as Erchie says:

Ye’ll no guess where I had Duffy. Him and me was in thon new tearoom wi’ the comic windows … There was naething in the hale place was the way I was accustomed to; the very snecks o’ the doors were kind o’ contrairy … The chairs is no like ony ither chairs ever I clapped eyes on, but you could easy guess they were chairs; and a’ roond the place there’s a lump o’ lookin-gless wi’ purple leeks pented on it every noo and then.

However, the honour of inaugurating the Glasgow short story proper seems to belong to George Friel and Edward Gaitens, who were writing literary short stories, set firmly in Glasgow, in the mid 1930s.

George Friel is probably best known for his five novels, all set in Glasgow, of which Mr Alfred MA is now considered to be in the very first rank of Glasgow novels, with The Boy who Wanted Peace and Grace and Miss Partridge not far behind. His short stories remained uncollected for many years, but were published in 1992 under the title A Friend of Humanity.

They are sombre, sensitive stories. Many have an autobiographical element – the Plottel family encountered from time to time is generally thought to be based on Friel’s own family – and others are marked in Friel’s notebooks ‘Wholly true’, drawn from the working-class Glasgow life around him. Quite unforgettable, for me, are ‘Clothes’ – a searing memory of a child’s humiliation in his Education Authority suit which marks him out as poor – and ‘Home’, tracing in unsparing detail Mrs Plottel’s long day of cleaning in the suburbs, which she isn’t even paid for because her airy employer doesn’t have the right change. Friel was neglected even as a novelist for many years, but at last he has been recognised as a major Glaswegian writer, a reputation further justified by these stories.

Edward Gaitens is unquestionably one of the finest short story writers produced by Glasgow, or even perhaps by Scotland. In a sense, short stories form the major part of his work, because he published only two books – the collection of short stories Growing Up (1942, long out of print) and the novel Dance of the Apprentices (1948, now available in Canongate Classics) – and Dance of the Apprentices is in part a reworking of some of the stories in Growing Up.

The title story ‘Growing Up’ heads a remarkable collection of stories, the more remarkable since, as we’ve seen, they were among the first literary short stories set in Glasgow. The 1930s, when Gaitens began to write, is, of course, the decade when several of the classic Glasgow novels were published – George Blake’s The Shipbuilders, James Barke’s Major Operation, and, indeed, Alexander McArthur’s No Mean City. It is interesting to speculate whether this upsurge in Glasgow fiction had any influence on Gaitens, in the broad sense that it was now seen to be ‘possible’ to write about Glasgow, but I am sure these books had no influence on the style or content of his work. In no way was he jumping on a bandwagon: he is a true original. His picture of working-class life is certainly more authentic than Blake’s and perhaps more personal than Barke’s, and between his writing and that of No Mean City there is really no comparison.

In addition, some of his stories have a poetic quality which is hardly, at this date, to be found elsewhere in Glasgow fiction. ‘The Sailing Ship’, included in several anthologies, is one of the finest. A young man is the central character – Gaitens himself perhaps? – and the story meshes most credibly the realistic details of his actual situation – he has come back, after two years in prison as a conscientious objector, to slum life and unemployment – with his dreams, his sensitivity, his response to the beauty of the great sailing ship France. The story ends:

Sunset met her like a song of praise and his heart went after her as she rippled past. Ach, if he could only have served her on her last few voyages, before she was dismasted and broken up! She dipped slowly into the dying sun and the waters fanned out from her bows like flowing blood. Then the sun went swiftly down and her beauty was buried in the darkness. ‘Goodbye, lovely ship!’ he called after her. ‘Goodbye! Goodbye, France!’
So ecstatic was his concentration upon the vanishing ship that he felt her decks quiver under his feet, saw her high spars tremble, heard the flap of her sails, as he gazed with uplifted head. He was sailing on, away from the ignorance and misunderstanding of his parents, to the infinite nobility of the sea! His eyes were moist, his hands in his pockets painfully clenched, his limbs shook like a saint’s in the ardour of prayer. And for a long time he stood there bareheaded, unaware that darkness, with small rain and a cold wind, had enveloped his transported body.

Following these excitements of the 1930s and early 1940s, there may seem to be another considerable gap in the history of the Glasgow short story. Nothing much was published in book form, in fact, for thirty-five years, between Growing Up in 1942 and Alan Spence’s Its Colours They Are Fine in 1977.

Glasgow short fiction was not dead during these years, nor even sleeping. Stories were being published in ‘little magazines’ like Saltire Review and Scottish International, and on the Weekend Page of the Glasgow Herald where several Glasgow writers, later to be famous, were trying their prentice hands, and Glasgow stories were well enough represented in anthologies. Missing from the publishers’ lists of those years, however, are collections of the work of individual writers. Perhaps this was purely a matter of fashion, and hence of publishing economics – short story volumes by new writers are often seen as slow to sell. For whatever reason, we didn’t get, as we should have done, for instance, collections by such fine writers as Margaret Hamilton and Joan Ure.

Margaret Hamilton was a prolific writer of short stories from the 1940s until her death in 1972, but, as far as I know, her stories remain uncollected, though they are to be found in various anthologies. Not all are set in Glasgow, but we may look at ‘Jenny Stairy’s Hat’, dating from 1947, for two main reasons. First it is the economy of its style. It covers a long period of time, summed up near the end of the story:

Jenny had always been quiet about things. Her brothers had cheated her out of marriage with a man who loved her less than his dignity. She had been left alone to bear the burden of her mother’s helplessness. She had been indirectly to blame for the death of two men she had loved. And now a man was asking something from her.

Technically speaking, a short story shouldn’t really need such a summary, and Hamilton herself might have managed it differently in later years, but I quote it to suggest that many a writer would have made a whole novel out of this story, and to less effect. The second reason to note ‘Jenny Stairy’s Hat’ is that it speaks movingly and without fuss for women’s experience in Glasgow; something which had scarcely ever been done in this way before, and was not to be done again, with one exception, until quite recent years.

That exception is the writing of Joan Ure, whose stories, similarly, should have been collected long ago. Posterity will probably regard her as a more important writer than Margaret Hamilton, and Alasdair Gray has a fine appreciation of her personality and work in the volume Lean Tales (1985), but even her plays, for which she was best known in her lifetime, remain uncollected. There is one of her sensitive short stories, ‘Kelvingrove Park’, in Streets of Stone, and another, ‘New Journey Forth’, in Carl MacDougall’s anthology The Devil and the Giro (1989). More stories, poems and prose pieces are hidden away in the back files of periodicals; let’s hope they will be found soon.

Glasgow writing entered a particularly active phase in the 1960s, and at the end of the 1970s, in terms of the Glasgow short story, it all came together. What exactly happened? It’s hard to say. The writers appeared, but, as we have seen, to some extent they had always been there. The general liveliness of the writing scene helped, but this had been so before – for instance in the 1920s and 1930s – without any great upsurge of short stories. A foretaste of the riches to come appeared in 1976, in the shape of the little book Three Glasgow Writers, which contained work by Alex Hamilton – some of whose stories were set in housing schemes, an area of Glasgow life not much treated until then – Tom Leonard, now so well known as a poet and critic, and James Kelman, to whose work we’ll return at greater length.

Then in 1977 Collins published a collection of Alan Spence’s short stories – which had been appearing individually, here and there, for some years – under the title Its Colours They Are Fine. And this was immediately recognised as something special.

Allan Massie’s extremely favourable and perceptive review in The Scotsman spotted Spence as an exciting new writer, and the excitement has remained through his later works of fiction (all too few: a novel The Magic Flute, in 1990, and a second short story collection, Stone Garden, in 1995). Massie also recognised at once that Its Colours They Are Fineisn’t just a collection, but a short story sequence, building from childhood – the little boy in the marvellous first story ‘Tinsel’ is only six – through school and adolescence, to stories of adult experience. Not all are connected – ‘Greensleeves’, for instance, about an old woman in a tower block, stands alone – but in most of the stories there are multiple links; the same wee boys appear in different situations, and there’s a recurrent examination of the Glasgow sectarian syndrome, in the title story and in others.

And in a bold yet delicate move Spence brings back one of his nice tough wee Glasgow boys, Shuggie, in a later story, ‘Brilliant’, as a teenage hardman with a steel comb in his pocket, ready for a run-in with a rival gang. Spence doesn’t specify what happened between stories – where, if you like, Shuggie went wrong; there’s no explanatory paragraph like the one we saw in ‘Jenny Stairy’s Hat’. Spence, a consummate artist, just presents the situation and leaves us to react to this waste of a nice wee boy, with pity and, maybe, shame.

We have reached the 1980s and the problem is which writers to select, which stories to single out, in what was a remarkable decade. These were the years of ‘The Glasgow group’, comprising – among others – Agnes Owens, Carl MacDougall, Alasdair Gray and James Kelman, all, happily, still at work, so that no final judgment can yet be given. It’s very much a question of catching up with what they have written so far and keeping a sharp eye open for future developments.

Agnes Owens came fairly late to writing and her first novel, Gentlemen of the West, was published in 1984, but she had already attracted attention for her short stories, some of which appear in Lean Tales together with work by Kelman and Gray. Her stories are all strong, realistic and thoughtful, but one or two of them – to my mind the most successful, and certainly the most distinctive – have a further quality. This is a black humour so marked that the whole story takes on a surreal dimension; not unique in contemporary Glasgow writing, but still unusual enough to bring the reader up with a start. ‘Arabella’ is a tour de force in this style, and really must be read in full, but something of the same quality crops up – it’s almost more disturbing this way – in an apparently realistic story, ‘The Silver Cup’.

Sammy punched the air and shouted, ‘It was a pal who left it here! [it being the silver cup.] … He just left it while we went out for a gang bang with the boys up the lane.’
Sammy’s Ma wrinkled her forehead. ‘Gang bang?’ she repeated.
‘What am I going to tell him?’ demanded Sammy.

And that’s all we ever hear about the gang bang. There’s a confidence about this which marks Agnes Owens out as a considerable writer.

Carl MacDougall published a collection of stories, Elvis is Dead, in 1986, though his reputation in this field had been high for a number of years as his stories appeared regularly in magazines and the annual Scottish Short Stories. There’s great variety in his work. Some of his stories are very funny: I recommend ‘Mister Brown the Taxi’, and what must by now be a minor humorous classic, ‘The Thomson Family Read The Sun’. Some, however, aren’t funny at all; far from it.

He doesn’t always write about Glasgow – don’t miss ‘The Soldier’s Tale’, a totally horrifying and credible story with its roots in the troubles of Northern Ireland – but when he does, he manages better than almost any other writer to communicate place and people together, and in balance; our intangible criterion for a Glasgow short story. Quotation doesn’t do justice to the complex and moving story ‘Getting On’, but in it we meet a young couple buying and decorating their first flat:

It was wonderful on a sunny winter afternoon: the gas-fire going snicker-snack, an opera on Radio Three, the Sunday papers, our chairs drawn over to the window, Lapsang Souchong; looking across the city, the river and the cranes, the high-rise flats, hills in the background and sunsets that bled the days dry.

Then they meet the old lady downstairs, forty years in the close, who says about her new neighbours: ‘They’ve taken a good close and they’ve ruined it.’ She goes on:

‘I could tell you some stories about the houses in this close. What’s the use, different people here now. This lot,’ again she waved her hand, ‘I don’t even know some of their names. One of them told me, such a quiet area and such a lovely view. View: I never see it. You don’t live on views.’

But this fine story – with his others – must be read in full and with care for a proper appreciation of Carl MacDougall’s work. He has since published two novels but I think there’s something special about his short stories; make up your own mind.

Alasdair Gray published a number of his short stories in the volume Unlikely Stories, Mostly in 1983, others in Lean Tales, and recently a new collection Ten Tales Tall and True (1993). In all three books – as one would expect from the author of Lanark – text, artwork and typography combine in a seamless unity. As to the stories themselves, no two are alike, and here again quotation absolutely fails to convey their flavour.

Which to choose? The hilarious story of ‘The Crank that Made the Revolution’, perhaps? This introduces us, among much else, to ‘the world’s first knitting frame, later nicknamed “McMenamy’s knitting granny” ’, and I should add it’s a real live granny. The ironic parable ‘Five Letters from an Eastern Empire’? The haunting little story ‘The Star’, written when Gray was only seventeen?

If I had to choose one, it might be ‘The Comedy of the White Dog’. It begins with the straightforward sentence: ‘On a sunny afternoon two men went by car into the suburbs to the house of a girl called Nan.’ There’s a dog lying on the lawn, ‘a small white sturdy dog with a blunt pinkish muzzle and a stumpy tail’.

One of the men asks, ‘Is he asleep?’ and his friend says ‘Don’t fool yourself. He hears every word we say.’ Well, we’ve all said that about pets, haven’t we? There’s no hint yet – or is there? – of the way the story is going to develop, which it does with casual yet hair-raising power. A remark from a review of Unlikely Stories, Mostly applies well to this story, and perhaps to Gray’s short stories in general: ‘Expect to be thoroughly entertained, but don’t expect to be left feeling comfortable’.

James Kelman remains to be dealt with, and he’s a true rarity. It’s quite unusual for a writer to excel in both the novel and the short story form, yet in Kelman’s case it’s nearly impossible to decide whether he’s better at one than at the other. He tends to publish novels and short story collections alternately and his latest book, whichever it is, usually swings you in that direction. However, if I were forced to predict which he’ll finally be remembered for, I think I’d go for the short stories.

Surprising as it may now seem, Kelman didn’t find it easy at first to achieve book publication in this country; his first collection, An Old Pub Near the Angel, was published in the States in 1973. His work appeared, as we have mentioned, in Three Glasgow Writers (1976), and a booklet, Short Tales from the Night Shift, was published in 1978. These collections already contained stories like ‘No Longer the Warehouseman’ and ‘Acid’, which in their different ways surely approach perfection.

His first full collection, Not Not While the Giro, was published in 1983, Greyhound for Breakfast in 1987, and The Burn in 1991. By now we’ve all learned to recognise Kelman’s Glasgow, Kelman’s world, as set forth in these bleak, ironical, angry stories, often with a painful humour, always with absolute honesty. Not all his stories are set in Glasgow, but it may be relevant to quote a few lines which he wrote as an introduction to his section in Three Glasgow Writers:

I was born and bred in Glasgow
I have lived most of my life in Glasgow
It is the place I know best
My language is English
I write
In my writings the accent is in Glasgow
I am always from Glasgow and I speak English always
Always with this Glasgow accent
This is right enough

It would be foolish to recommend ‘a few of Kelman’s stories’ to you. If you haven’t read them already, you must read them all, immerse yourself in their world. As well as the two I’ve mentioned, however, there are others which are particular favourites of mine: ‘Not Not While the Giro’ itself, for instance, and ‘Forgetting to Mention Allende’. And there’s a small gem, ‘Old Francis’, which for me is the archetypal Kelman story. An old man on a park bench; three men stopping beside him; superficial friendliness; underlying threat. Nothing actually happens – this is often the case in a Kelman story – but something is going to happen, we dread it, and we’re helpless to stop it. In other words, we’re totally involved. This involvement is the hallmark of a Kelman story.

You may have noticed that women writers have not so far been over-represented in the history of the Glasgow short story, but the last few years have seen a great change. No account of the subject could now omit three young women writers: Dilys Rose, Janice Galloway and A.L. Kennedy. Dilys Rose, who was born in Glasgow, is one of the best short story writers of today, wide-ranging in the topics of her stories and thoughtful in her treatment of them. She has so far published two collections, Our Lady of the Pickpockets (1989) and Red Tides (1993). Because she has lived for some time in Edinburgh, and because the settings of her stories reflect her years of travelling and working overseas, she is perhaps on the margin of the Glasgow short story scene, but I would recommend ‘Barely an Incident’, set (I would say) in Queen Street Station, as another story which leaves the reader shaken and self-questioning.

Janice Galloway and A.L. Kennedy, on the other hand, were born in Ayrshire and Dundee respectively, but have settled in Glasgow, and it does seem that they are finding Glasgow a good place to write. Galloway published her first stories in 1986 and her collection Blood appeared in 1991. She is possibly best-known for her two novels, The Trick is To Keep Breathing and Foreign Parts, but, again, there’s something most distinctive about her short stories. Hers is very physical writing: you’ll probably never visit a dentist again after reading ‘Blood’, nor stand at a butcher’s counter with any degree of comfort after ‘The Meat’. She is often aligned with urban realist writers like Kelman, but, like Agnes Owens, she sounds occasionally a note of surrealism: as in ‘Breaking Through’, where the cat is seen ‘sheathed in golden-hearted arrows of flame’, later to be joined by his mistress, and in ‘It Was’, where a girl finds a face lying in the mud as she walks along. Her ‘Scenes from the Life’, stories in dramatic or film-script format, are particularly strong, packed with closely-observed detail, pared to the bone. One of them in particular, ‘The Community and the Senior Citizen’, must be read, though it isn’t fun to read.

Galloway is often cited as a feminist writer. Her central character is often a woman alone, sometimes by choice and sometimes not. Her characters explore what is to them very definitely a man’s world, and question its assumptions, as in the fine story ‘Fearless’. Fearless is a drunken derelict who shouts and swears at the women and children in the small town of her upbringing, and she observes that ‘we had to put up with it the way we put up with everything else that didn’t make sense or wasn’t fair’. She rebels, but:

I still hear something like him … coming across open, derelict spaces at night, blustering at bus stops where I have to wait alone. With every other woman, though we’re still slow to admit it, I hear it, still trying to lay down the rules … The outrage is still strong, and I kick like a mule.

A.L. Kennedy’s stories, collected so far in Night Geometry and the Garscadden Trains (1991) and Now That You’re Back (1994), are unique in their structured power. A typical Kennedy story opens in a wandering, casual way; hard to see what, if anything, is ever going to relate to anything else. By the end we know the answer. Everything has been relevant, everything connects, and it connects with stunning force.

The stories (and her equally distinguished novels) move with beautiful freedom between present and past, sometimes letting us glimpse the future: after the last words of ‘Tea and Biscuits’, for instance, or ‘The Moving House’, what’s going to happen next is all too clear. Kennedy’s careful, gentle words draw her characters in a few lines. In ‘Didacus’ we meet a small woman called Jean who makes love with her boss before going home to her unemployed husband.

He (her husband) sits on the mattress in the way that he sits when she knows that she has to go and hold him … The streets around them flatten under the wind as it rises and the final doors are locked until the morning … They consider the freedom ahead.

In ‘Star Dust’ we listen to an elderly woman remembering her life: how it was and how it should have been. She has taken up photography; she loves the technical terms involved:

They are happening now, they are young words and, because I understand them, part of me can still be happening now and young.

But ideally she’d like to direct films for people that she knows – ‘for’, as well as ‘about’ – and its in those terms that we hear of her mother, her childhood, her marriage, her brief love-affair. The story works delicately on many levels to leave us with a picture of a woman we are never going to forget.

Worth reading, in addition, are short story collections by Jackie Hodgman, The Fish in White Sauce Incident, and Jimmy Miller, Tenements as Tall as Ships, both published in 1992. A collection by Jeff Torrington, The Devil’s Carousel, was published earlier this year to join his acclaimed novel Swing Hammer Swing! There have been anthologies like An East End Anthology, edited by James Kelman and Workers City, edited by Farquhar McLay, both published in 1988; and new stories are appearing in ‘little magazines’ and in pamphlets published by writers’ groups. It does seem that the Glasgow short story exists.

Quite evidently, at least, Glasgow is a good source of story ideas – a good place to observe the kind of split-second incident which so often proves to be the germ of a story. One could call up the often-cited likeness between a short story and a poem – significant content in small compass – and one could be daring enough to draw a comparison between the kind of snapshots of Glasgow life which can make a short story, and Edwin Morgan’s Instamatic Poems. There’s no need to do so, in fact, because Edwin Morgan has more or less done it himself:

As far as observation is concerned, writers who live in large cities and use urban material develop – instinctively! – a very quick, unstudied, unprying, oblique, yet intense and unforgetful way of looking at people and things: it’s like using a very good silent automatic camera disguised as a pair of eyes. To look too long at anyone is dangerous (in Glasgow at any rate – I don’t know about other places), and so the rapid flickering scan is characteristic of the urban poet. The many minute impressions are a shorthand which he can expand later within the (slightly!) less nervous world of the poem. The urban poet and the urban short story writer, gleaning impressions and crafting a work of art; the modus operandi, I’m sure, behind the Glasgow short story.

See also:

Imagine a City: Glasgow in Fiction
The Glasgow Novel
Reading Glasgow
Streets of Stone
Streets of Gold

BYRNE, Michel, ‘Tails o the Comet? MacLean, Hay, Young and MacDiarmid’s Renaissance’

12 September 2021 by Duncan Jones

ScotLit 26, Spring 2002 |

On 4 May 2002 the ASLS held a conference at the University of Glasgow to celebrate the work of Sorley MacLean whose Dàin do Eimhir, so ably edited by Christopher Whyte, was the ASLS Annual Volume for 2001. ScotLit is very happy to reproduce here a slightly shortened version of Michel Byrne’s paper on the relationships between the poets Sorley MacLean, George Campbell Hay (son of the novelist John MacDougall Hay, author of Gillespie) and Douglas Young – all poets of the second wave of cultural energy which characterised the 1940s in Scotland – and Hugh MacDiarmid, poet and champion of the first wave who was a major influence on younger poets.)

At last, at last I see her again
In our long-lifeless glen
Eidolon of our fallen race,
Shining in full renascent grace,
She whose hair is plaited
Like the generations of men,
And for whom my heart has waited
Time out of ken.

Hark! hark! the fead chruinn chruaidh Chaoilte,
Hark! hark! tis the true, the joyful sound,
Caoilte’s shrill round whistle over the brae,
the freeing once more of the winter-locked ground,
the new springing of flowers, another rig turned over,
dearg-lasrach bho’n talamh dubh na h-Alba,
Another voice, and another, stirring, rippling, throbbing with life,
Scotland’s long-starved ears have found.

The exultant tone on which opens Hugh MacDiarmid’s long poem “On Receiving the Gaelic Poems of Somhairle MacLean and George Campbell Hay” (1940) should hardly surprise. Little could have done more to herald a new dawn of the Scottish Renaissance Movement launched twenty years before, than the emergence of these two poets. MacLean and Hay seem so much like the fulfilment of MacDiarmid’s hopes, that had they not existed MacDiarmid would have had to – and probably have tried to – invent them. This article aims to point out some of the connections between the two rising stars of Gaelic poetry and MacDiarmid’s Renaissance, and to highlight the role of fellow-poet Douglas Young, to whom the opening poem was first sent.

MacDiarmid had been waging his long kulturkampf against the Anglocentrism and parochialism of Scottish culture since the 1920s. The ‘Scottish Renaissance Movement’ (as it was named by French critic Denis Saurat) sought, in MacDiarmid’s words:

- - to shift the cultural and political emphasis away from “our affinities with the English, [and] to our differences with the English”
  - to “refecundate Scottish arts and letters with international ideas and tendencies … – importing them direct, not via England, and without … the automatic filterscreen of the English language”.
  - “to recover our lost Gaelic and Scots traditions in their entirety” – “among our main tasks must be a systematic exploration of the creative possibilities of Braid Scots and a recapture of our lost Gaelic background”.

In the course of the late twenties and early thirties, MacDiarmid’s preoccupation with the role of Gaelic in his cultural revolution grew more and more pronounced. It wasn’t merely that “the profitable affiliations of Scots lie, not with English, but with Gaelic”, but that Scots culture was “really a subsidiary development of … ancient Gaelic culture”, “represent[ing] the Celts’ compromise with circumstance”. In the introduction to his Golden Treasury of 1940 MacDiarmid would restate that the Renaissance aim of recharging the Scots language was “only a stage in the breakaway from English, preliminary to the great task of recapturing and developing our great Gaelic heritage”.

In 1927 MacDiarmid advocated that the next essential step in resistance to capitalist globalisation – “the great over-ruling tendency towards standardisation inherent in contemporary industrialism, dependent … on cosmopolitan finance” – should be the formulation of a “Scottish Idea” complementary to the “Russian Idea” of Dostoevsky and other Russian intellectuals. MacDiarmid identified an artistic tendency throughout Europe towards “neo-classicism”: “the re-concentration of advanced artists in all countries … on the ‘ur-motives’ [aboriginal motives] of their respective races. So far as we in Scotland are concerned our ‘ur-motives’ lie in our ancient Gaelic culture. We must repair the fatal breach in continuity which has cut us off from our own roots.”

In literary terms, in an echo of his “Back to Dunbar” cri-de-guerre to Scots poets, he recommends “an increasing endeavour to win back to the tradition and technique of the Bardic Colleges – behind the feminisation of Mary-of-the-Songs” (17^th century vernacular praise poet Mary MacLeod). He also calls for “social and political equivalents” and sketches out a theory of “neo-Gaelic Economics”, including the abolition of the usury-based banking system in favour of Social Credit. “The impetus to civilisation” MacDiarmid claims, “ was an Ur-Gaelic initiative” (presumably referring to the westward migration of the Celts), and he concludes that “the reconciliation of East and West” is therefore “the ineluctable mission of the Gaelic genius”.

The Scottish Idea also found expression in poems such as “Dìreadh”:

I covet the mystery of our Gaelic speech
In which rughadh was at once a blush,
A promontory, a headland, a cape,
… And think of the Oriental provenance of the Gael,
The Eastern affiliations of his poetry and his music,
… And the fact that he initiated the idea of civilisation
That today needs renewal at its native source …

MacDiarmid’s ideas are impressive in their ambition but also in their sheer presumption. However glorious the world mission being bestowed on Gaelic, the “ur-Gaelic intiative” is clearly the latest in a long line of alien appropriations of the language and its culture. (One is reminded of Derick Thomson’s wish for a ‘soisgeulaiche … nar cainnt fhin’ [‘an evangelist…in our own tongue.’]). Sorley MacLean himself would comment with exasperation in 1940 that MacDiarmid “should really stop his pose of interpreter of Gaelic Scotland” (though he conceded that “perhaps it’s not a pose, but honest boosting”). Yet it is striking the extent to which MacDiarmid’s notions chimed with MacLean and Hay’s own concerns. What we can see repeatedly is MacDiarmid flagging up very real issues in Gaelic culture, with a partially informed understanding which then gains in substance as he establishes his friendships with MacLean and Hay.

For example, before meeting MacLean in 1934 MacDiarmid had already opined with typical hyperbole that:

in Gaelic literature sight has been lost of the great traditions, and the whole field is monopolised by insignificant versifiers expressing Wee Free sentiments. The ministerial voice is ubiquitous and poems are judged by their conformity to sectarian dogmas and canons of provincial respectability. … And, above all it is insistent that the substance of poetry must be silly vapourings, chocolate-box lid pictures of nature, and trite moralisings. Penny novelette love is all right, but not politics, not religion, not war, not anything that can appeal to an adult intelligence. Finally good poetry cannot be anti-English. It must bow the knee to Kirk and State. Anglophobia and sedition are out of the question.

These criticisms prefigure the scathing assessments of modern Gaelic poetry and the prevailing cultural ambiance, that would issue from both MacLean and Hay – the preponderance of the “pretty-pretty”, of romance over truth, Hay’s reference to “the ring of clergy, Comann Gaidhealach Britons and academicians who would like to preserve the Gael in a kind of intellectual red Indian reserve where… they will be aesthetically and morally catered for by the soiree and the kirk”.

Similarly, before meeting MacLean MacDiarmid had already trumpeted the virtues of the major eighteenth century Gaelic poets, and had championed the re-evaluation of the 19^th century nationalist poet William Livingston of Islay (“that splendid masculine poet, who has put away childish things [and] was sure of misrepresentation in his pusillanimous and effeminate age”). But it was MacLean who enabled MacDiarmid to substantiate his promotion of Gaelic poetry by providing him with detailed translations of the work of MacMhaighstir Alastair, Donnchadh Bàn, and Livingston. These formed the basis of the texts published in MacDiarmid’s Golden Treasury of 1940. Not entirely to MacLean’s satisfaction, though, as he told Douglas Young:

I wish he had not represented Gaelic by the very few very bad prose translations [of mine] which were merely to give him an idea for versifying.

Neither did MacLean wholeheartedly endorse MacDiarmid’s enthusiasm for Livingston:

Why the hell has Grieve to boost L as a poet because of his political opinions? He never does that with Scots Lowland poets whom he knows at first hand.

To take yet another example, MacDiarmid had already understood in the Twenties the inauthenticity of Celtic Twilight presentations of Gaelic culture, condemning “the pseudo-Celtic ‘Hebridean’ songs of Mrs Kennedy-Fraser and the like”. In a 1935 article, however, we find that hecan offer specific examples of the “egregious fraud and shoddy substitution” effected in Songs of the Hebrides, which he has clearly derived from MacLean.

A final example is found in MacDiarmid’s ambition to “revive the classical traditions and modes of our ancient Gaelic literature, and reapply [these] to modern conditions”. Such literary re-Gaelicisation in MacDiarmid’s own work finds expression in bardic postures, in the notice given to a major Gaelic poets such as Mac Mhaighstir Alasdair and the liberal sprinkling of quotes from Irish and Gaelic found in To Circumjack Cencrastus. His specific call for a return to the discipline of the medieval bards, however, (quoted above, from 1927) emerges as one of the central tenets of George Campbell Hay’s poetic manifesto published in 1939 – in MacDiarmid’s own quarterly The Voice of Scotland.

Hay had broached the subject in a letter to MacDiarmid (probably his first communication with the doyen, cited anonymously in the Voice of May 1939), in which he decried developments imported wholesale from English poetry, and insisted that “Gaelic poetry hasn’t drawn all the sap from its own roots yet”. Modern poets should develop the metrical potential of Gaelic folksong, and emulate “the discipline and close-knit diction of bardic poetry.” The young poet was given space to elaborate his ideas in full in the following issue by an editor presumably delighted to see a decade-old hobby-horse vindicated from within the Gaelic world.

Hay was a valuable addition to the ranks of the Renaissance in other ways too: he fulfilled the internationalist role demanded by MacDiarmid, in his translations from Greek, Welsh, Irish, and (in the Forties) from French, Italian and Arabic; and above all, he embodied the reconciliation of Gaelic and Scots cultures, the “higher synthesis” of Highland and Lowland “without [which] … a Scottish cultural unity is impossible”. Since the Twenties MacDiarmid had denounced “the vicious Highland v. Lowland antagonism [which] proved one of the main stumbling blocks to the reintegration of Scottish nationalism”. Here was a trilingual poet who explicitly celebrated “Alba nan Gaidheal ’s nan Gall”.

These, then, are some of the ways in which MacDiarmid’s meeting with MacLean in 1934 and with Hay five years later drew their work into the centre of his cultural war. The development of MacDiarmid and MacLean’s friendship after their meeting in 1934 has been well documented (see Joy Hendry’s chapter in Sorley MacLean: Critical Essays), but it is impossible to discuss the relationships between MacDiarmid, MacLean and Hay in the late Thirties and into the Forties without highlighting the role of Douglas Young as intermediary, friend and propagandist.

A gifted classical scholar and polyglot, a genial man of immense integrity and strong political commitment, and himself a poet, he cemented the relationships between Hugh MacDiarmid and Sorley MacLean, introduced Hay and MacDiarmid to each other’s work, was instrumental in bringing MacLean and Hay together, played an important part in the publication of both Gaels’ work and also promoted their poetry through his own Scots versions. He was memorably described by the poet William Soutar as “an exceedingly tall fellow with a shovel-beard – his leanness, longness and fringiness [giving] the impression of a BBC announcer who had partially metamorphosed into an aerial”. His friends simply referred to him as God, or The Deity.

Young’s years in Oxford in the mid-thirties (following his first degree at St Andrews) coincided with Hay’s own classical studies, and the two young men struck up a very strong friendship, based largely on their passion for literature and languages and their commitment to leftwing nationalism. Before their return to Scotland, both had vowed to uphold an SNP conference resolution to resist conscription into the Crown Forces in the event of a war. This eventually led to Hay spending eight months as a fugitive in 1940-41, and twice to Young’s incarceration. (By then Young had entered the arena of electoral politics and was even elected Chairman of the SNP.)

It was at Oxford in 1936 that Young introduced Hay to the poetry of MacDiarmid. Indeed Young attributed Hay’s maturation as a poet to this “acquaintance [which] stirred him up to performances of novel and striking varieties”. He pithily recalls this in his “Letter to MacDiarmid, 1940”, when he describes himself passing time in Waverley Station reading Scots Unbound:

a present o whilk I well remember
giean to Deorsa ae day in December
fourr year syne. And I’ld aisilie show it
set him on to becoman a poet.
Thon’s a thing wi rime but nae reason,
the makan o Hay in a winter season.

It was in 1939 in turn that Young brought Hay’s work to Grieve’s attention, having written to comment on his new periodical The Voice of Scotland(the first issue of which had featured MacLean’s new poem BanaGhaidheal.) Immediately MacDiarmid featured a selection of original poems and translations from Greek, Welsh and Irish by Hay. Over the following months Young kept MacDiarmid abreast of his various projects with Hay, including a “gallimaufry” of their joint work, a satirical political sequence which was never completed (perhaps surviving only in Hay’s poem Grunnd na Mara, rendered into the Scots Thonder They Ligg by Young), and later a joint book of translations from Classical and modern European literatures.

MacDiarmid’s generosity in championing the younger poets is striking, particularly given his own extremely difficult circumstances in those years of poverty and isolation in Whalsay. Having been unable to include their work in his Golden Treasury (though drawing attention to the “two very remarkable young Gaelic poets” in his notes), in Spring 1940 he is not only preparing a sequel to include Hay, MacLean, Young and Goodsir Smith, but also a Six Scottish Poets for Hogarth Press which features these four with Soutar and himself. He also offers to draw on his Irish contacts including Douglas Hyde and Frank O’ Connor to ensure the publication of MacLean’s political epic An Cuilithionn and Hay’s poems, and suggests setting up a subscription list to which he’ll add his name and a note of commendation, for Hay’s and Young’s joint collection.

It was during MacLean’s period of teaching in Edinburgh in 1939 that he and Young met. The first selection of MacLean’s poems was published in Seventeen poems for 6d, a collaboration with Robert Garioch, in January 1940, and it was around this time that according to MacLean “Douglas Young came and pretty well took me over aesthetically”. Hay supplied Young with a review of MacLean’s contribution, in which he commented: “How long ago was it that the last Gaelic poetry that really meant anything was produced? At the time of the evictions? Long since anyway. But from these poems it seems as if we are getting out of the rut at last.” Later, in 1941, he would say of the still unpublished Dàin do Eimhir, many of which he had copied into his own notebooks: “The life of these poems is hot enough to break-up even the thick casing of dead-ice that has lain over Gaelic literature so long.”

Young’s extraordinary dedication in preparing the Dàin do Eimhir for publication is documented in Christopher Whyte’s splendid edition. It is astonishing that on top of his own academic, political and literary work, Young found the time and energy to meticulously type out and edit Sorley’s drafts – only painfully legible – checking variants and every linguistic dilemma with MacLean. Sorley told him while in Catterick military camp: “All I can say is that no one else has ever done so much for me as you have done, intellectually and materially.”

Hay also entrusted Young with his poems before leaving for North Africa and continued to send him copies of each wartime poem. The production of Hay’s volume, however, was a far more tortuous affair, suffering from too many hands on the oars and too little direction from Hay. The advertised collection, Gaoth air Loch Fìne, was scrapped by Hay when he realised that it included “political rants” he had no desire to see published as poetry. He had his own reservations in any case about his work, as he confessed to MacLean: “Doubts assail me at times as to whether ¾ of my stuff is worth publishing. A lot of it may be bonnie verse, but is not new or significant.” And a few months later: “It’s not a book that will show much advance or development on the past in the way Dàin do Eimhir has done. My only hope is that it revives a few genres and some technique that was valuable in the past. But I feel in the trim for a forward jump one day.” Within four months he had begun to write his great war poem Mochtàr is Dùghall, and the run of major poems which mark the apogee of his work.

The poem by Young quoted above, “Letter to MacDiarmid, 1940”, was composed in response to receiving from Grieve the poem which opens this article, “On Receiving the Gaelic Poems of Somhairle MacLean and George Campbell Hay”. In it Young refers to the younger poets (whom MacDiarmid wishes could visit him in Whalsay) as “sparks i the tail o your comet”. Young’s first collection Auntran Blads which appeared in the same year as the Dàin do Eimhir, was dedicated to Sorley MacLean and George Campbell Hay, and carried a long introduction by MacDiarmid. Among its translations from a dozen languages, it included Scots recreations of poems by both Gaelic poets. Young’s book highlights the close communication, the support and mutual inspiration binding some of the key literary figures of mid-twentieth century Scotland.

CAMPBELL, Ian, ‘James Leslie Mitchell’s Spartacus’

12 September 2021 by Duncan Jones

[DIGEST OF A PAPER GIVEN TO THE ASLS GENERAL MEETING CONFERENCE, KING’S COLLEGE, ABERDEEN ON 9 JUNE 2001.]

Much of the material will be found expanded in the introduction to the forthcoming reprint of the novel to be published by Polygon on 31 July 2001. Some of the material from the discussion following the paper has been included.

It has taken a long time for James Leslie Mitchell to come in from the cold, even here in Aberdeen, where his books were regarded with suspicion (and downright hostility in Arbuthnott) even in the 1950s, before Penguin were in the dock for printing Lady Chatterley, before the kind of discourse which passes without comment in the world of Welsh and Kelman was familiar in Scottish literature. While A Scots Quair (Sunset Song, 1932; Cloud Howe, 1933; and Grey Granite, 1934) is his single most remembered work, now famous through repeated republication, television serialisation and teaching at school and university, Spartacus (1933) was to take longer to catch fire in the public imagination, and though it is repeatedly mentioned by Mitchell’s critics in respectful tones it has been largely out of print since the author’s death and has been overcast by Howard Fast’s better-known recreation of the Spartacist slave rebellion chosen by Hollywood for the celebrated film Spartacus. The forthcoming reprint by Polygon (31 July), one of several in the last decade, is part of the process of correcting the picture of a ‘one-book’ author, for few so little fit that description as the astonishingly prolific Mitchell. Under his Scottish pseudonym of ‘Lewis Grassic Gibbon’ he made A Scots Quair public property and established it as a Scottish classic: under his own name, which he reserved for a different kind of publication (and for the pleasure of reviewing his own work – often favourably) he published history, archaeology, accounts of exploration. A committed Marxist and implacably hostile observer of the Scottish and British social and political scene, he found a natural attraction in the story of the Spartacist rebellion.

When I hear or read of a dog tortured to death, very vilely and foully, or some old horse driven to a broken back down a hill with an overloaded cart of corn, of rats captured and tormented with red-hot pokers in bothies, I have a shudder of disgust. But these things do not move me too deeply, not as the fate of the old-time Cameronian prisoners over there, three miles away in Dunnottar; not as the face of that ragged tramp who went by this afternoon; not as the crucifixion of the Spartacist slaves along the Appian Way. To me it is inconceivable that sincere and honest men should go outside the range of their own species with gifts of pity and angry compassion and rage when there is horror and dread among humankind. (ScS 304)¹

As ‘blasphemer and reformer’ (his own terms, skilfully used by W.K. Malcolm in his analysis of Mitchell) he was to produce in Spartacus a telling indictment of men’s inhumanity to those over whom they had total control – and the authorial disgust at such inhumanity pulses through every page of Spartacus.

The novel is revealing of many features of Mitchell’s life; his vivid imaginary power to recreate scenes he could not possibly have visualised from real life; his sympathy with the oppressed; his deep antipathy to people who abused power. Above all, Spartacus is a vivid insight into the critique of society which spurred him (particularly in Cloud Howe and Grey Granite, which still await full critical study) to write again and again a diffusionist attack on civilisation run to fat, exploitative, uncaring, inhuman.

‘Diffusionism’ in Mitchell is a clumsily-titled but not really difficult system which needs to be grasped to make sense of Sunset Song’s standing stones and the decadent Aberdeen of Grey Granite, the pre-lapsarian society of Three Go Back – and the Roman civilisation of Spartacus. To the Diffusionist civilisation is a slow curse, overtaking originally free and happy humanity from the Egyptian pyramid-builders on, bringing settlement, culture – property, compulsion, war, tyranny, religion, mental enslavement. To Mitchell (and to his contemporary and friend MacDiarmid) civilisation was a blight and a curse, and its nadir the Depression they saw around them, and Mitchell remembered vividly from his Glasgow years in the slums. Ewan in Grey Granite embodies a lot of his author’s fastidious distaste at the depression and its horrors, wandering the streets of Aberdeen in the summer heat, taking refuge in the clean marble halls of the Art Gallery.

There was a cast of Trajan, good head; Caesar – the Caesar they said wasn’t Caesar. Why not a head of Spartacus? Or a plaque of the dripping line of crosses that manned the Appian Way with slaves – dripping and falling to bits through long months, they took days to die, torn by wild beasts. Or a statuary group of a Roman slave being fed to fishes, alive in a pool … (SQ 406-7)

If this was civilisation, plainly Mitchell wanted little to do with it. Yet his creative imagination, uncomfortably enough (for much of his work is uncomfortably full of pain and suffering), could not leave it alone. The Spartacist rebellion was plainly a subject for a historical novel he could use as a trenchant commentary on his times.²

Clearly, Mitchell chose to write about a rebellion. Already we have seen his hostility towards a conspiracy which would make of history a cosy and unchallenging account of the past, and there is nothing at all about his version of the events of 73-71 B.C. which is relaxing. The inspiration of the novel is the enormous impetus given to the pent-up rebellious instincts of the slave class in Italy by the towering and charismatic leader in Spartacus the historical personality.

The plot starts with rebellion, if not with its ultimate leader; the plot has little to do with the events after Spartacus’ own death, except to record in its sickening detail Rome’s public revenge. The emphasis in the original historical sources is simply omitted; strict concentration on the rebellion itself is clearly the artistic intention of Spartacus.

The narrowness of Mitchell’s treatment is extraordinary when the novel is finished and the reader reflects. By the invention and retention of the character of Kleon throughout the narrative – Kleon anticipates Spartacus and survives him, narrowly – Mitchell is released from any obligations to provide a wider contextual framework in order to make sense of the rebellion. Kleon makes sense, sense enough for his own narrow intentions and sense enough to interpret a savage, over-simplified society to the reader. The unimpassioned account of a mutilated former slave is the ideal narrative vehicle for the passionate and often repulsive material of the story. Not for Mitchell any sentimental glossing-over of detail or building-up of false heroics: though the novel does make room (and this came up in the discussion) for exploration of the tensions in a predominantly all-male society, the relation between powerful men, even the possibility of a sexually-driven relation between a castratus and a Roman female captive. As in much of his work, Mitchell is pushing back the boundaries of what can be said and read about (and discussion also touched on his liberal use of cruelty and blood in his fiction): Spartacus is about a fiercely unnatural world, and Mitchell does not shy from suggestions of unnatural behaviour in it.

One really significant omission is the Romans – the Masters, as they are universally called here. Masters they are to the slaves, and Masters they are to the reader who never approaches them closer than the understanding of the slave army or the superior intelligence. of Kleon. Glimpsed in the gathering dusk or in the distant dust-cloud, occasionally eavesdropped on in council or Senate discussion, the Romans remain in Mitchell’s novel a satisfactory enigma, not understood and therefore totally hated. In isolating the reader from the Roman lifestyle, which might encourage identification (and worse still, sympathy) in the modern reader, Mitchell compels sympathy with the barbarous and alien lifestyle of the slave army.

Barbarous the action certainly is. When Crassus the Lean finds his orders disobeyed, the Cambridge Ancient History wryly notes he found his relief in

… decimating an unsteady cohort – with the most beneficent results to the morale of the remainder.³

Mitchell’s account of the episode laconically conveys not only the punishment but the complete lack of surprise or sympathy such a punishment might arouse.

When Crassus heard this, the face of the Dives went livid with anger. He commanded that the hundred men of the velites he decimated. Then the whole army stirred at the shouted orders of the tribunes and marched north on the slave-camp. (S 209)

It was the norm of life in the army. The death of one man in ten was hardly worth commenting on, ordinary army discipline. This calculated tight-lipped description of cruelty cumulatively does much to transmit the horror Mitchell obviously felt at the circumstances surrounding the rebellion, and the society which bred it. ‘Bring Cossinus’ head’, orders Spartacus at one point, ‘and Itul the Iberian hewed it from the trunk which his club had mangled, and brought it dripping'(S 93). No comment is required for an emotion doubtless no one felt.

The slaves implored the Gauls to free them. They were manacled one to the other, and when they were discovered with their overseer slain they would undoubtedly be crucified, as a warning to other slaves.

The Gauls listened and were moved a little. But they had no time to unmanacle the gang, and the slaves of it would encumber the scouts. So they left them, hearing their cries for long as they rode round the shoulder of the hill. (S 204-5)

Laconically, Mitchell tidies up the episode a few pages later.

They passed by the field where the ten chained slaves had watched the Gauls of Titul slay the overseer. Ten shapes lay very quiet there now: already the spot was a-caw and a-crow with ravens. Gershom glanced at it indifferently. (S 212)

In catching hardened indifference to suffering, torture and death Mitchell cleverly implants in the reader’s mind the ability to see the events of the novel, people and places, with the artificiality of a narrow slave perspective. Excitement is possible, no doubt, the excitement of personal loyalty to Spartacus, excitement of winning a battle over the Masters, even the thrill of seeing Rome,

at noon, from the Campagna, from the Sabine Hills, shining below them, Mons Cispius crowned with trees and the longroofed Doric temples, Mons Oppius shelving tenement-laden into the sunrise’s place, Mons Palatinus splendid with villas, fading into a sun-haze mist where the land fell … Aventine lay south, and north, high-crowned, the Capitoline Hill. Rome! (S194)

Yet the greater part of the book is calculatedly barren of excitement, barren of emotion, whether in the reactions of the mutilated Kleon, the enigmatic Spartacus, or the hardened slaves themselves.

The extent of Mitchell’s calculatedly narrowed vision is seen easily enough in a comparison with Howard Fast’s Spartacus of 1951 (source of Rank’s 1959 film starring Kirk Douglas). Fast implants the story within the Roman society of the time, with flashback and forward through the experience of Crassus, Gracchus, Cicero and a young pleasure-seeking aristocratic Roman circle. Fast’s narrative has its own harrowing moments, a vivid insight into his early years as a slave in the Egyptian mines which Spartacus was lucky to survive, a dreadful description of the crucifixion scenes on the Appian Way. Perhaps Fast’s most vivid achievement is to realise, in a low-key way, the full horror of being a slave in scenes underplayed skilfully as follows:

The litter-bearers, weary from all the miles they had come, sweating, crouched beside their burdens and shivered in the’ evening coolness. Now their lean bodies were animal-like in weariness, and their muscles quivered with the pain of exhaustion, even as an animal’s does. No one looked at them, no one noticed them, no one attended them. The five men, the three women and the two children went into the house, and still the litter-bearers crouched by the litters, waiting. Now one of them, a lad of no more than twenty, began to sob, more and more uncontrollably; but the others paid no attention to him. They remained there at least twenty minutes before a slave came to them and led them off to the barracks where they would have food and shelter for the night.⁴

To describe reality with as little emotion as this is to suggest powerfully the Romans’ contempt for the slaves as human beings, and their simple indifference to them. Indifference is something Mitchell and Fast both attribute to the Romans, Fast in a splendid aside attributed to Brutus waving a hand at the slave-crosses on the Appian Way, their troops’ handiwork.

Did you want it to be genteel? That’s their work. My manciple crucified eight hundred of them. They’re not nice; they’re tough and hard and murderous.⁵

Spartacus is told with Mitchell’s characteristic verve and economy, for he was a writer who experimented through the short story to find a mature and very recognisable narrative style early in his career. There is indeed a place for good narrative style, since the novel contains very few female characters, little straightforward love interest, and a great deal of unpleasant violence. To counter the violence, to distract the reader’s attention from the relatively narrow spectrum of character and incident, Mitchell fortunately has at his command a flexible and arresting prose. The basic narrative medium is well-written narrative English, the language of Stained Radiance and The Thirteenth Disciple. As everywhere in Mitchell’s work, the reader is drawn without preamble into the fully-active plot.

When Kleon heard the news from Capua he rose early one morning, being a literatus and unchained, crept to the room of his Master, stabbed him in the throat, mutilated that Master’s body even as his own had been mutilated: and so fled from Rome with a stained dagger in his sleeve and a copy of The Republic of Plato hidden in his breast. (S 15)

The style is arresting; it raises expectations; it provides essential background unobtrusively. Above all, it intimates the general scene of violence, mutilation and death we can expect from the rebellion.

Two interesting points in Mitchell’s narrative strategy are the references to the Masters by the slaves’ name (rather than ’Roman’), setting the tone for the narrative stance throughout, and the very early setting up of a stylistic device which Mitchell exploits to excellent effect throughout. Kleon is described in the first sentence as a literatus without explanation: it is soon clear from context that a literatus is one who can read, but already the reader is immersed in some variety of Roman experience, the Roman term used without gloss or explanation. Latin-derived words are used exactly: ‘the Way’, ‘casqued’, ‘slave-market’, ‘to compute’ appear early in the narrative; Kleon unwinds, does not open a book; the perverse sexual tastes of Kleon’s master are hardly explained, and certainly not illuminated by references to the tales of Baalim, Ashtaroth or Ataretos. The East is the ‘Utmost Lands’, the supreme deity ‘Serapis’. All this functions without delay to put the reader in the position of a reader of the time.

Mitchell is doing no more here than adapting the triumphantly successful technique of his earlier success in Sunset Song where he had re-shaped the narrative English to the ‘rhythms and cadences of Scots spoken speech’ while adding a minimum number of Scots vocabulary items to produce a narrative medium which gives a warm impression of participation in a Scottish community.⁶ In Spartacus the words and cadences are not from Scots, but from Latin, and share the same comforting feature that they operate independently of the reader’s knowledge of Latin.

As the Scottish words in Sunset Song rapidly explain themselves by context, rendering glossary unnecessary so the Latin (and occasionally Greek) words in Spartacus operate in the same way. In a description of the first century B.C. the reader can without difficulty decode references to the ‘half a century of cavalry’ (S 122), the sacrifices ‘to the manes of dead Crixus(S 163), to the decimation of the velites (S 209) already referred to, to Lavinia’s ‘himation'(S 159), to the instrument played by the ‘bucinator'(S 189).

So much for vocabulary. Rhythms and cadences are also skilfully imitated from the original Latin. Occasionally Mitchell is content to intrude a single archaism:

Then said Crixus: ‘We’ve come to the feast, but the meat is still uncooked.’ Thereat he took a javelin in his hand, rode forward, stood high in his stirrups, and hurled the javelin … (S97)

Sometimes the effect is denser.

The battle was to Spartacus, as once to Pyrrhus. But of the eighteen thousand Gauls and Germans a bare three thousand survived. With these fell Castus, as has been told, who loved Spartacus, and never knew him; and Gannicus, who hated the Gladiator, and was killed in his sleep. (S 261)

This is compounded of Latin translated directly into English (the battle was to Spartacus), commonplace tags from Latin narrative (as has been told), and a conscious archaism from the Bible (and never knew him) covering the point of Castus’ homosexual attraction to Spartacus. Carefully used, the device of direct translation from Latin into English functions powerfully to give the reader a sense of involvement,

The slave horse … met the circling Roman cavalry, and, armed with clubs, splintered the levelled hastae, and smote down the riders. In a moment the fortune of the battle changed. The Germans turned and the legionaries, caught between two enemies, struggled to reform in double lines. But this, in that marshy ground encumbered with dead, they could by no means achieve. (S 99)

This is an account which clearly draws upon an accumulated reading of Latin or Latin-inspired narrative. Fortuna belli, the fortune of war, is too prominently placed in the paragraph to be mistaken; even if the hastae or spears are not recognised, this they could by no means achieve is recognised for it unfamiliar syntax, even if not recognised as Latin. Retiring to a sleeping-room (S 112), fighting in a slave army which prepared to receive a Roman charge (S 150) – the effect is immersion and participation through words used in a sense slightly or completely unfamiliar.

The weakness of the style is in repetition, occasionally injudicious reliance on one effect. Kleon is too often described as cold; Gershom strokes his beard irritably far too often; the violence and the chilling lack of pity finally can overcome reader squeamishness. On balance, the style works triumphantly. Narrow, brutal, shaped by forces beyond its control, continually threatened by sudden death or agonising retribution by a ruthless army of the Masters, the slave experience which forms the totality of this narrative is caught with unpleasant but accurate focus. It was a desperate time, and Mitchell realistically recreates that desperation.

And this is why the book’s imminent republication – in a form accessible to the general reader and those using it for teaching purposes – is a welcome step in establishing the full range of Mitchell’s talent. Many of those who have worked to make criticism of Mitchell generally available are in this room, and we owe gratitude both to Mitchell’s widow and daughter for the generosity of their help, and to Polygon who are preparing to complete their paperback republication of all Mitchell’s books (except the Quair and some of the material in Valentina Bold’s recent Smeddum). Mitchell’s tragic early death led to the rapid unavailability of most of his books, and they have remained very hard to locate outside specialist libraries. Now, at last, it will be possible to sample the full range of those astonishingly productive last years. And Spartacus will be seen as one of his most enduring achievements, still vivid, still experimental, till burning with the anger he felt at the barbarous events of history. It deserves the compliment of being read.

Notes

¹ Books are referred to according to the following code:

Scottish Scene [with Hugh MacDiarmid] (London, 1934) – ScS
A Scots Quair (London, 1978 reprint) – SQ
Spartacus (London, 1933) – S

² The best treatment of Diffusionism will be found in Douglas Young’s Beyond the Sunset (Aberdeen, 1973)
³ S.A. Cook, F.E. Adcock and M.P. Charlesworth, Cambridge Ancient History (Cambridge, 1932) IX, 331
⁴ H. Fast, Spartacus (New York, 1951), p. 51; (London, 1952), p. 38
⁵ Fast p. 23; (London, 1952), p. 31
⁶ From ‘Literary Lights’, ScS, 205. For further discussion see “The Grassic Gibbon Style” in eds. J. Schwend and H.W. Drescher, Studies in Scottish Fiction: Twentieth Century (Scottish Studies no. 10) (Frankfurt and Bern, Peter Lang, 1990), 271-87

CORBETT, John, ‘The Current State of Scots’

12 September 2021 by Duncan Jones

Observations by John Corbett, submitted to a Scottish Executive Committee investigating Scots Language Provision

1. The current linguistic situation

The current linguistic situation in Scotland is complex. The complexity encompasses the use of different language varieties. These varieties in turn have spoken and written forms, and may be described from a range of perspectives: the accent(s) associated with them, their vocabulary and grammar, the uses that the variety is put to (public and domestic), the region, social class, ethnicity, age of typical speakers, etc. Still, out of this complexity, the following generalisations can be made:

English

‘English’ in Scotland ranges from a written standard variety disseminated by the education system. The written standard variety usually influences the vocabulary and grammar used in the speech of those Scots who like to consider themselves ‘educated’. Standard English in Scotland differs little in vocabulary and grammar from Standard English varieties elsewhere, but the accents of Scottish English are clearly distinctive.

In Scotland, as elsewhere in the English-speaking world, there are non-standard spoken varieties that have their own norms and conventions, and serve to indicate affiliation to different communities, defined by a complex of factors such as class, age, ethnicity and gender. These varieties are often stigmatised as ‘uneducated’ by those whose speech adheres more to the norms of standard English, particularly when used in writing. However, non-standard speakers adhere to non-standard forms because they have prestige within the communities to which they prefer to affiliate.

Scots

Closely related to English, Scots still is still used in speech and writing in Scotland. Although Scots is used as a literary medium by some, there is at present no written standard variety (i.e. there is no prescriptive form of Scots codified in dictionaries and grammar books, disseminated through and enforced by the education system and used as a matter of course in public documents). No such variety has ever evolved in Scotland.

Scots, therefore, is largely restricted to speech and therefore is often equated with non-standard English. Like non-standard English, it serves to indicate affiliation with particular communities, defined by factors such as region, social class, and age. However, Scottish characteristics may or may not be stigmatised as ‘uneducated’ depending on largely on the political affiliations and linguistic prejudices of the individual. Scots speakers can point to a distinctive literary tradition and linguistic history to justify their use of certain linguistic features. Over the years, the educational system has been ambivalent about Scots: first trying to eradicate it, and then advocating tolerance.

Gaelic

Gaelic is obviously an indigenous language of Scotland; however, it currently has few native speakers and fewer still of those are monolingual. It nevertheless attracts government support as a minority language. In many ways it is easier to argue for support for Gaelic than Scots, since its status as a different language from English is more clear-cut and the community it serves is also distinctive.

Community Languages

Various immigrant languages are also spoken by ethnic communities within Scotland: Urdu and Chinese being the best established. They are little studied but are probably having an impact at local levels where there are large numbers of Urdu/Chinese speakers.

2. Scots Language Groups

Current Scots language groups tend to have emerged from cultural and political nationalist movements in the 20^th Century. They are of various types and have different objectives. Among the best known are:

The Dictionary Projects

Cultural nationalism can be said to have driven the two great dictionary projects of the last century, the Scottish National Dictionary (SND) and the Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue (DOST). The former was financed and organised by a limited company run as a charitable organisation (the Scottish National Dictionary Association) and the latter by major Scottish Universities (Edinburgh, Glasgow, Dundee, Stirling, and Aberdeen). As DOST comes to publication and the Joint Council of Universities winds up, there is a move to merge the two projects into one new body, provisionally entitled Scottish Language Dictionaries (SLD), with substantial core funding from the Scottish Arts Council. If the application for funding succeeds, the SLD project will act as a major research archive, and a source for individual dictionary projects.

Scots Language Society, Scots Tung, Aiberdeen Scots Leid Quorum, etc

These are ‘activist’ societies, to promote the written and spoken use of Scots, the best established and most influential of which is the Scots Language Society (SLS). It has various branches, holds annual collogues, and publishes the long-running magazine, Lallans (supported by the Scottish Arts Council). The activist societies tend to focus on the establishment of a common, national, homogeneous, literary Scots, based on historically verified speech forms. This form of Scots (once identified) would be available for dissemination through education, and usable in public documents. The assumption is that the promotion of Scots necessitates the kind of standardisation process undergone by English, in order to create a prestige written standard that (like standard English) would also form a model of ‘good spoken Scots’. This assumption is not universally held, and can cause hostility from those who feel that a standard Scots would necessarily exclude them as non-standard Scots speakers and writers. There is also some debate about which variety of contemporary Scots would serve as the basis for standard Scots e.g. NE Scots or Central Scots?

Association for Scottish Literary Studies

The Association for Scottish Literary Studies is another organisation largely made up of volunteers, but with two paid staff, a general manager and part-time secretary. It receives core funding from the Scottish Arts Council, and publishes various texts each year, mainly to subscribers: one hardback volume of Scottish Literature (sometimes with a strong Scots content, as in the acclaimed two-volume edition of the poems of William Dunbar), the annual New Writing Scotland, and the academic journal Scottish Language. The ASLS Language Committee organises conferences on the languages of Scotland (mainly Scots and Gaelic) and various of its members are involved in academic and educational support for the study of Scots. The ASLS Schools Committee also holds an annual conference and provides educational materials for teachers. For example, a new ASLS anthology for the 10-14 age range will be jointly published with the Scottish Children’s Press (with SAC assistance). It has prose and poems in a variety of local forms of Scots (Dundee, Aberdeenshire, Glasgow) as well as English and one poem in Gaelic.

Scots Language Resource Centre (SLRC)

The SLRC was originally based at AK Bell Library in Perth. This was set up with a grant of £30 000 from the Scottish Office, and then subsidised by Perth and Kinross District Council, as well as by the SLS. In the past two years, funding has been subsidised by the Scottish Arts Council. It originally shared some of the aims of the SLS (i.e. the promotion of Scots in the public domain), although it was run by a committee with a wider range of interests and experience. It set up a web site and employed staff to handle queries, and ran events, sometimes in conjunction with SLS. However, after the local government subsidy was withdrawn, the SLRC regrouped and the organisation is presently chaired by Professor Richard Johnson of Stirling University. Professor Johnson also directs the Scottish Centre for Information on Language Teaching. Under Professor Johnson’s chairmanship, the SLRC has moved more towards stimulating debate on language planning issues, and actually producing materials, e.g. Scotspeak, a manual for actors wishing to produce different varieties of Scots on stage. The SRLC comes up for review next year, and without further SAC funding, the future of the SLRC is unclear.

Institute for the Languages of Scotland (ILS)

This is an ‘umbrella body’ that seeks to bring together several of the current language groups (e.g. Dictionary Projects, SLRC) with some of the academic activities going on in Scots (eg work done by Edinburgh University’s School of Scottish Studies, and Glasgow University’s Scots Corpus). The ILS applied for Scottish Executive funding, and was turned down, which may have dealt it a body-blow. Originally it sought to represent all the languages of contemporary Scotland (Scots, Gaelic, Community Languages) but, given that Executive support already exists for Gaelic, it might regroup and apply again for funding specifically to support Scots. Currently under the chairmanship of Dr Margaret A. Mackay of the School of Scottish Studies at Edinburgh University, the ILS has been granted funds from the Carnegie Trust to perform a feasibility study on how best to co-ordinate current projects on Scots.

Scottish Cultural Resource Access Network (SCRAN)

SCRAN was set up with lottery funding to make electronically available to educational and private subscribers a wealth of information on Scottish culture. In the first phase of its development it was explicitly ‘non-text-oriented’; however, it has been involved in the digitisation and dissemination of spoken Scots and Gaelic, e.g. 300 poems recorded by poets have been digitised. It has also been involved in the digitisation of some of the archives of the School of Scottish Studies in Edinburgh. As the funding basis changes, SCRAN might become more active in the provision of educational materials relating to Scots, eg a CD-ROM for schools based on 18 poems in Scots, Gaelic and English, is about to be produced.

Cross-Party Group on the Scots Language

This body is made up of a selection of the above bodies and so perhaps not surprisingly suffers from a lack of focus. The debates in the CPG resurrect some old debates in a new format: the substantial proportion of activists in the group promotes the wider use of Scots in the public sphere, whilst running up against the problem that English is the ‘natural’ medium of public communication in most of Scotland today. However, it is a useful medium for bringing a range of linguistic, educational and cultural initiatives to the attention of MSP’s.

3. Language in Education

5-14

The Scottish Office Education Department’s National Guidelines on English 5-14 (1991) state that primary and secondary children should learn about the diversity of accents, dialects and languages in Scotland. The major initiative over the past few years has been the provision of the Kist materials by the Scottish Consultative Council on the Curriculum. These materials included an attractive pupils’ book, teacher’s book, photocopiable worksheets, and audiocassettes. The take-up of these materials was reported to be high in Scottish primary schools; however, it is necessary to keep these materials in print, and update them where necessary (e.g. put the audio material on compact disc).

Other Scots materials are being produced and proposed for this age level A Braw Brew edited by Liz Niven, and a lottery-funded application by Matthew Fitt and James Robertson, to produce materials for primary schools. The first of a proposed 3-volume ‘English Course for Scotland’, Turnstones 1, has recently been published by Hodder & Stoughton. It uniquely aims to integrate Scots fully within the English curriculum at this age level and is well calculated to serve the 5-14 National Guidelines on Language.

The educational materials produced at primary levels reflect the range of language varieties available in contemporary Scotland they give examples of urban and rural varieties of Scots, as well as Shetlandic and (in the Kist) some Gaelic. However, to my knowledge there has been no research done on the educational impact of the Kist materials and their ilk how widely are they being used, and what influence have they had on the linguistic attitudes of pupils and teachers?

Secondary Education

HM Inspectors of Schools’ report on English in the series ‘Effective Learning and Teaching in Scottish Secondary Schools’ (1992) indicates that Scottish English and Scots should be recognised as significant and distinctive varieties of language, and that it ‘should be the essential aim of English teaching throughout secondary school to develop the capacity of every pupil to use, understand and appreciate the native language in its Scots and English forms’

The Higher Still programme of assessment for ‘English and Communication’ (1997) contains a rationale for ‘substantial emphasis on Scottish texts and the languages in which they are expressed.’ Accordingly, the study of a Scottish text is made compulsory at all levels. At Advanced Higher level, new optional units in ‘Scottish Language’ and ‘English and Communication’ allow for substantial exploration of language issues.

The new AH language options made their debut in 2001, and no-one opted to take them. Given that teachers would have had to construct new curricula with little information, this is not surprising. However, as the new exams bed down, it is to be hoped that pupils will be encouraged to study towards them. Several events are planned for the autumn of 2001 to raise the profile of the exams amongst teachers the ASLS Schools Conference in October and a conference promoted by the SLRC at Newbattle College in November.

Guides on ‘English in Scotland’ and ‘English and Communication’ are currently being prepared by a senior academic for use by teachers. Although I have only seen an early draft of the former, and an advance copy of the latter, neither is likely to attract teachers to the language options. Neither at present is closely related to the examination as it is currently constituted, and the advance copy was densely written and suffered from typographical errors that rendered some parts misleading and others incomprehensible.

Other teachers’ resources are currently being produced: the Languages into Language Teaching (LILT) project provides an electronic glossary on CD-ROM of linguistic items for use by both English and Modern Languages teachers. Again, this is not targeted at specific examinations or levels, but aims to be a more general resource for teachers wishing to update their language knowledge and gain access to broad teaching suggestions. Some information on aspects of Scots is included on the CD-ROM.

Learning and Teaching Scotland (LTS)

Learning and Teaching Scotlandis a recent body subsuming the earlier Scottish Consultative Council on the Curriculum (SCCC) and the Scottish Council for Educational Technology (SCET). Over the years, the SCCC issued practical guidelines on the uses of Scots language and literature in the classroom:

Scottish Literature in the Secondary School (1976) had a crucial appendix on language by AJ Aitken
Scottish English the Language Children Bring to School (1980) gave advice on Scots in early schooling
Developing Scottish Literature at Higher Grade and CSYS (1990) were among various staff development and exemplar material issued to back up the Standard Grade and Revised Higher programmes
The Kist/A Chiste (1996) was an adventurous package designed to support the language recommendations of the 5-14 programme, and included a handbook on the teaching of Scots and Gaelic at this level
Using Scottish Texts (1999) offered a comprehensive set of support notes and bibliographies for Higher Still English and Communication, and included a fell section on Scottish Language materials by Liz Niven.

More recently, however, the activities of SCCC have been less supportive. In 1998-9 they suppressed a report on Scottish Culture; anecdotal evidence from those involved in the SCCC meetings at the time report that hostility to the Scots Language elements doomed the report. The LTS website fails to contain substantial information on Scots. Information on The Kist is absent, although the publication is still commercially available from Nelson Thornes. Reference is, however, made to the electronic Scots School Dictionary, and the Scottish text bibliography for Higher Still.

The prospects look better for the formal study of language in Scotland than they have ever done. Further progress will, however, require the provision of more and better resources support materials and in-service training than are currently available. LTS clearly has a role to play in the provision of materials that give detailed support to the emerging language curricula.

Tertiary Education

Extensive undergraduate teaching of Scots is largely confined to the English Language Departments at Edinburgh and Glasgow Universities. Teaching about the history and development of Scots currently forms part of the undergraduate provision at both Universities; Glasgow also contributes an optional module on ‘Scots Language’ to a taught Masters degree aimed at teaches re-training for the new Higher and AH curriculum. A ‘primer’ to encourage undergraduate interest and research into Scots is planned for publication by Edinburgh University Press in 2002.

Post-graduate research into aspects of Scots takes place at various institutions around the world; however, activity is patchy and could be more systematic. Bodies in Scotland that act as a focus for research are:

Elphinstone Institute, Aberdeen University: focuses particularly on the sociolinguistic situation in NE Scotland
School of Scottish Studies, Edinburgh University: focuses on ethnology of Scots folk culture
SCOTS Corpus, Glasgow & Edinburgh University: a new grant-funded project to create a searchable computerised corpus of written and spoken contemporary Scots/Scottish English. Funded for two years, initially, it is hoped that this will become a long-term on-going project.

Opinion is mixed about whether these bodies and projects should come together under an ‘umbrella’ body, such as the proposed Institute for the Languages of Scotland. Certainly, the projects would benefit from co-operation, formal and informal, that has not always been forthcoming in the past, whether through institutional politics or simple lack of time. New technologies certainly should help communication between the various university projects dedicated to aspects of Scots.

A general problem lies in where the academic study of Scots should be situated. At Edinburgh University, Scots research takes place in the Departments of Linguistics and English Language, and also in the School of Scottish Studies. At Glasgow University it is in the Department of English Language. While Departments of English Language and Linguistics are the natural ‘home’ of research into Scots, it has been the case that such departments have been under pressure in Scottish Universities an expansion rather than a reduction in English Language/Linguistics provision at Scottish Universities would be required to foster further research into Scots.

4. National Cultural Strategy

The Scottish Executive recently published a National Cultural Strategy that initially promised much. Its first priority, indeed, was identified as ‘Promoting Scotland’s languages as cultural expressions and as a means of accessing Scotland’s culture.’ However, the document itself seems to be ambivalent about its treatment of ‘Scotland’s languages’. While Gaelic is explicitly ‘valued’ and practical means of support are listed (p.25), the history of Scots is simply acknowledged, and no list of funding achievements or suggestions for progress are listed, beyond the encouragement of an Institute for the Languages of Scotland, an initiative latterly denied direct Executive funding.

The practical outcomes of the Cultural Strategy document for Scots appear to be negligible. Funding of the ILS has been devolved to the Scottish Arts Council, where language matters must compete with projects seeking funding from the Literature Committee.

5. Recommendations

The current climate for language education and Scots is more favourable than it has been for some time. However, the situation is still precarious and continued and expanded funding will be necessary to build on the progress that has been made.

Scottish Arts Council funding is crucial for a number of the bodies noted above, namely:

the merged Dictionaries Project (i.e. the Scottish Language Dictionaries)
ASLS Schools and Languages Committee activities
the publication of Lallans magazine
the Scots Language Resource Centre
the Institute for the Languages of Scotland As there is more pressure on the SAC for limited funds, there might well be a squeeze on funds available for activities that promote Scots. Continued SAC funding is therefore essential, and the SAC must recognise its role in the promotion of Scots, and budget accordingly. In particular, the establishment of a Language Committee on a par with the Literature Committee would ring-fence language projects and initiate some welcome stability for key projects such as the Scottish Language Dictionaries.

Support for educational initiatives at primary and secondary level. In particular,

continued provision of teaching materials at 5-14 level
research into the impact of these materials at 5-14 level
support for in-service training and materials production for the new secondary examinations at Higher Still and AH levels.

Support for research at tertiary levels, in particular:

Encouragement of current projects, such as the SCOTS Corpus
Encouragement of research into language education in Scotland
Encouragement of the expansion of language studies in Scotland

There is a desperate need to improve language and communication skills throughout Scotland. This requirement requires a greater sophistication in the way that we teach children to think about and use the range of languages available to them. An enlightened nation needs to deploy all its linguistic resources positively, and encourage its citizens to use them effectively and creatively. We do not have the structures in place to do this; funds will need to be used effectively if we are to create these structures in future.

CORBETT, John, ‘Literary Language and Scottish Identity’

12 September 2021 by Duncan Jones

The Shape of Texts to Come: the writing of a new Scotland, 13-14 May 2000 |

References are given at the end of the document.

Shibboleths

Our first reading for today is from the Book of Judges, Chapter 12, verses 5–6 in a recently-published version by John Manson. The Gileadites have been fighting the Ephraimites at the River Jordan. They’ve been fighting for so long that they’re muddy and dishevelled and can hardly tell one from the other.

And the men o Gilead
tuik the mountain-passes o Jordan
bifore the men o Ephraim:
and this wis the wey o’t,
that whan the men o Ephraim
wha haed wun free
frae the men o Gilead
said, Lat me gang throu;

‘Shibboleth’, which possibly meant in Hebrew ‘stream in flood’ or ‘ear of corn’,² comes down to us today as a word that signifies someone’s regional or social origins. It is a badge of identity, a badge displayed with sometimes fatal consequences. Closer to home, and much more recently, shibboleths again crop up in the title story of Walking the Dog by Bernard MacLaverty, an Irish writer living in Scotland. One night, outside Belfast, a man and his dog are abducted by two gunmen, who say they represent the IRA. A verbal sparring match ensues in which each tries to probe the other’s identity. The gunmen ask the man’s name (‘John Shields.’ ‘What sort of a name is that?’), they ask the school he went to (‘It’s none of your business.’), and they ask, directly, whether he is a Protestant or a Roman Catholic (‘I’m … I don’t believe in any of that crap. I suppose I’m nothing.’) Finally one of the gunmen says:

‘Let’s hear you saying the alphabet.’
‘Are you serious?’
‘Yeah – say your abc’s for us,’ said the gunman.
‘This is so fuckin ridiculous,’ said John. He steeled himself for another blow.
‘Say it – or I’ll kill you.’ The gunman’s voice was very matter-of-fact now. John knew the myth that Protestants and Roman Catholics, because of separate schooling, pronounced the eighth letter of the alphabet differently. But he couldn’t remember who said which.
‘Eh … bee … cee … dee, ee … eff.’ He said it very slowly, hoping the right pronunciation would come to him. He stopped.
‘Keep going.’
‘Gee … ’ John dropped his voice, ‘ … aitch, haitch … aye jay kay.’
‘We have a real smart Alec here,’ said the gunman.³

The episode in the Book of Judges and the MacLaverty story both show clearly some of the means by which we construct tribal identities. We can construct these identities on the basis of shared experience (we go to the same schools, do the same jobs, pray at the same church, read the same newspapers, enjoy the same leisure activities), and we can do it semiotically (we wear the same clothes, adopt the same hairstyles, and speak the same variety of language). Anyone who does not conform is banished beyond the pale, or worse. None of these identifying characteristics is (pace the Book of Judges) necessarily essential. Unlike the Ephraimites with their shibboleth, John Shields, in ‘Walking the Dog’ can make his mouth say both ‘aitch’ and ‘haitch’; he just cannot remember which version his kidnappers would prefer. Shibboleths, as John Shields recognises, are a ‘myth’ in the way that Roland Barthes uses the word ‘myth’, to mean an arbitrary sign that is invested with a social meaning beyond the literal (as a shibboleth is no longer a ‘stream in flood’ or an ‘ear of corn’ but a marker of tribal boundaries).⁴All of which is really to say that there are obvious ways in which we can draw upon language variety, as one resource amongst many, to construct a powerful sense of community. For example, we can focus on shibboleths (s/sh, aitch/haitch) as linguistic markers of community boundaries – they may seem at first glance insignificant but they act as badges of identity, excluding or including, and we have a limited degree of control over them.

Tribe and Nation

If we consider the literature and languages of Scotland at the beginning of the twenty-first century, it is clear that (even if we wanted to) we would have a tremendous problem in identifying simple, workable shibboleths. This difficulty has indeed always been with us. Once you move from the particularities of tribal identity to the complexities of a multicultural nation, the range of identities and potential markers of identity becomes huge. Scotland, of course, has always been multicultural, a melange of Picts, Scots (or Gaels), Saxons (or Angles), Norse, French, Dutch, Irish, Italian, Polish, Pakistani, Chinese … to name a few. What shibboleths can we possibly all share? Particularly, what kind of literary language can we all claim ownership of? What kind of language binds us together as a single, national community?
Much of Scotland’s literary history (though by no means all of it) can be seen as a contest to establish and promote one language variety that will ‘speak for’ the nation. And much of Scotland’s literary history can equally be seen as a rebuttal of the claims of these language varieties. What I want to do for the rest of this talk is consider some of the historical debates about a distinctively Scottish literary medium, see how they inform some current writing, and speculate about future possibilities, the ‘shape of texts to come’.

Against Decorum?

As well as being multicultural, Scotland has always been multilingual. In the late mediaeval period there were Scottish texts in Latin, French and ‘Inglis’ – and the tradition of writing in Latin continued up until at least the nineteenth century. In the sixteenth century, some writers like Gavin Douglas and James VI explicitly distinguished the ‘language of the Scottish nation’ from that of English (although most of their contemporaries still referred to their language as ‘Inglis’). And there is, of course, the strong Gaelic tradition in Scottish writing, beginning in the 1300s and reaching peaks in the 18^th and 20^th Centuries.

The instinct to seek shibboleths in the face of this rich cultural and linguistic diversity has been passionately condemned by Professor Ronnie Jack.⁵ What single strand of this complex tapestry can possibly function to hold us all together as one nation, a single speech community? Certainly not Scots, says Professor Jack. The desire to equate the Scottish literary tradition with a tradition of writing in Scots (with the grudging addition of Gaelic) is distorting and reductive, and forces us to neglect in particular work in English and Latin. I yield to no-one in my admiration for Professor Jack’s erudition and I wholeheartedly acknowledge the service he continues to do in broadening the canon of Scottish literary texts. However, I worry that his beloved classicism tends to depoliticise the linguistic tradition.

In brief, Professor Jack has argued that the key to understanding linguistic diversity in Scottish literature is the classical notion of decorum. A concern for decorum lies at the heart of classical tracts such as Horace’s Ars Poetica, a verse epistle in which, for example, he commends to his readers lofty language for tragic subject matter and familiar, yet powerful language for satire:

shamefaced among the wanton satyrs. If ever I write satyric dramas, my dear fellows, I shall not be content to use merely the plain, unadorned language of everyday speech … I shall aim at a style that employs no unfamiliar diction, one that any writer might hope to achieve, but would sweat tears of blood in his efforts and still not manage it – such is the power of words that are used in the right relationships, and such is the grace that they can add to the commonplace when so used.⁶

The complex high style, drawing its coinages mainly from Latin and French, is used for the topics you hold to be the most serious and noble; the middle constitutes the normal style and draws mainly from Scots and Inglis, while the staccato, low style, supplemented mainly by Scandinavian and Germanic loanwords, is used for low subjects, vituperation and farce.⁷

From this point of view, the achievement of the 18^th Century ‘Vernacular Revival’ was to restore to Scottish writers the full range of registers previously available to the makars:

eighteenth century poets accepted the makars’ view that the two dialects had always been intertwined. What they did revive on rhetorical criteria, was the full and varied range of styles by returning Scots diction to interlace as complement and supplement to English within all registers.⁸

Now, this view can and does give powerful explanatory accounts of the use of language in many Scottish texts. True, some writers who largely play by the rules of decorum occasionally burlesque them, as in William Drummond of Hawthornden’s Polemo-Middinia inter Vitarvam et Bebernam (c.1645) which constructs a macaronic Scots-Latin to satirise the dispute between two Fife families about a right-of-way. (This poem, and a translation of it, can be found in the ASLS anthology The Christis Kirk Tradition⁹). Still, even by burlesquing the rules of decorum this poem acknowledges them: the Scots elements in the Latin provide the ‘mock’ in ‘mock heroic’. The problem I have with Professor Jack’s view is that the model of language implicit in the classical model and here applied to the literature of Scotland seems static rather than dynamic, and consensual rather than conflicting. A theory of decorum depends upon a consensus that says: this language is lofty (ie Latin and French), this language is low (ie Norse-derived Scotticisms), and this language is plain. That’s the way it is, and that’s the way it stays.

Many Scottish writers, consciously or unconsciously, refuse to accept this view of language. The whole point of a poem like Tom Leonard’s ‘Unrelated Incidents (3)’ (in which the six o’clock news is read in a Glasgow accent) is not to burlesque the rules of decorum, but, by inverting them, to challenge head-on the social structures and attitudes which maintain them. Social consent, in the view of political theorist Antonio Gramsci (and indeed linguist Noam Chomsky), is always manufactured, always subject to contention and negotiation.¹⁰ The dominant forces in society draw upon their resources to persuade the dominated that the status quo is in their interests and should be maintained. The alternative to slaughtering those who say ‘sibboleth’ or ‘haitch’ is simply to persuade them that they are uneducated and vulgar because they utter such deviant forms, and so they had better accept their lowly position in life. Or, in Leonard’s words, ‘if a toktaboot/thi trooth/lik wanna you/ scruff yi/ widny thingk/ it wuz troo.’¹¹ Even the linguistic situation that prevailed in the late middle ages can be seen in terms of domination and resistance: Latin and French became the prestige languages in Britain because of Roman imperialism, the influence of the Church, and the establishment of feudalism after the Norman Conquest in England. The ebbing of Gaelic in the lowlands of Scotland was not the result of some physical exclusion of Gaels, but rather a consequence of the rise in economic power of the burghs, where Inglis was the language of commerce and administration (to the extent where it eventually replaced Latin as the language of the law, and Gaelic as the language of everyday communication). Writers have long played a part in challenging as well as upholding the current social order, and some literature can be seen as confronting the rules of decorum that imply a certain social structure. In the fifteenth century the challenge was: why shouldn’t bourgeois Scots replace clerical Latin and become a high-style language? Nowadays one challenge is: why do we have signs in English and Gaelic in the new Scottish parliament – but not in Scots? The argument from decorum, ie that it is not appropriate to use Scots in such contexts, perhaps simply masks a more fundamental truth: certain social groups within our society (branded by their shibboleths) are still being systematically excluded from access to power and resources.

Reforging Identities

To summarise the argument so far: when you move from the relative homogeneity of a tribe to the multicultural complexities of a nation, you can no longer rely on a clear-cut set of shibboleths that everyone knows and uses as a common badge of identity. Instead you have a complex range of linguistic markers which are evaluated, and praised or stigmatised, according to rules of decorum. These rules can be presented as linguistic ‘facts’ but, of course, they are the result of social forces which themselves are subject to either acceptance and celebration, or challenge and resistance. What I want to do now is consider some writings from different linguistic traditions in Scotland and consider how the authors use language to respond (whether directly or implicitly) to the prevailing linguistic and social orders. There are so many obvious passages from the last century that spring to mind: from Chris Guthrie pondering the relative merits of Scots and English in Sunset Song, through Hugh MacDiarmid’s attempt to write a nation into existence by devising a grand linguistic fusion, to Tom Leonard’s powerful evocations of urban speech. However, in the spirit of the conference, I want to focus instead on more recent work: one extract from a forthcoming novel, and two from still-fairly-newish New Writing Scotlands, Volumes 15 and16, Some Sort of Embrace and the appropriately-titled The Glory Signs.

Consider an extract from a short story by Suhayl Saadi, ‘Bandanna’, a stream-of consciousness narrative of three teenage boys (Salman, Ali and Zafar) as they go on the randan across Glasgow:

They reached the end of the street. Ahead lay the Tramway, a theatre which none of them had ever been in, not even when the Mela had been there. The Mela wis jis fur kids and cooncilurs. Sal and his dosts preferred machines to people. They were noisy, irascible, silicon-based like Michael Jackson. They’d play the robots for hours, not bothering whether they won or lost, not caring about the game. Just moving to the beat of chip upon chip, a twitch of the film-star thigh, the hot shoulder shuffle. They were on the film set, they were living in total. There were no spaces in their existence. No gaps of silence. The Gang turned west, away fae the Mosques, towards Maxwell Park. That’s where they were heidet. To the pond, and the trees. To muck up the quiet. To fill it wi gouts ae Bhangra and Bassie. They skatit past the tenement closes, each one a blink in the Gang’s eye. The sound of generations carved into each corniced ceiling. Flip back: Sal in the gao. Or, to be more accurate, in Azaad-Kashmir, the Land of Freedom. His family’s land, earth-brown like their skins (not like Sal’s though), old blood, like the tenement stone. But Sal was another type of Azaadi. Another hybrid.¹²

mela: – festival
Azaad-Kashmir: – Free Kashmir
gao: – village

Sal, the focus of the story, explores his hybrid identity in a polyglot medium that draws on colloquial Scots, Punjabi and English (ranging from self-conscious literariness to teenage slang). The story captures the mood of someone on the cusp of various social categories, unable to fit comfortably into any one, other than (for now) the Gang whose symbol (or visual shibboleth) is the black bandanna. Sal is between Scotland and Kashmir, childhood and adulthood, family and independence, white and black. The jarring synthesis of languages in the story is decorous but only insofar as it is appropriate to the multiple identities to which Sal can potentially affiliate, to a greater or lesser degree. Like the Ephraimites in the Book of Judges who ‘could not frame to pronounce’ shibboleth, he cannot himself wholly determine his identity. Like John Shields in ‘Walking the Dog’, he can attempt to obscure the arbitrary badges of affiliation — the three boys wear black bandannas to make them look whiter — but acceptance into any community is never controlled by the relatively powerless individual. And so the slang, the swearing, and the code-switching that characterise this story cannot be seen simply as the appropriate language to use in a vigorous social satire, but as a dramatic expression of the painful process of identity-formation in a hostile society.

‘Bandannas’ is a gift to a talk like this because it is about multiple identities and it uses language to dramatise the difficulties inherent in forming an identity within a multicultural society. What about a piece of literature that has a very different topic? Let’s turn to Meg Bateman’s poem, ‘Things are not so hard’.

Chan eil rudan cho trom
air an neach a dh’fhalbhas
bidh faradh eile aig a’ghrèin,
bidh mùthadh na chomas …
Chan amhlaigh dhan neach a dh’fhanas
is gach oisean san t-sràid na chuimhneachan,
doras gach taigh-seinns’ na chlach-chinn
dhan toileachas-inntinn a chaidh seachad.

Things are not so hard
on the one who leaves –
the light will have a different slant,
change will be possible …
It’s not the same for the one who remains,
with every street corner a memorial,
every pub-door a headstone
to that excitement that has passed.¹³

Here we have an apparently simple, slightly bitter poem of lost love, presented in Gaelic and English. It is personal, low-key and not explicitly about identity. And yet, as Christopher Whyte and Iain Galbraith have argued recently,¹⁴ any poem written in Gaelic and translated into English is pregnant with unstated assumptions about identity and power within a pluralist culture. In reviews of Gaelic poems, Chris Whyte worried about what he was supposed to be reviewing: in particular what should he take to be the status of the English translations? Paraphrases or poems in their own right? The problem is compounded by the fact that most Scots only have access to the Gaelic through the translation. Iain Galbraith, faced a similar set of questions when including Gaelic poems in a bilingual anthology of translations of Scottish texts into German: should he include the English translations? Initially he was inclined not to, and simply put the Gaelic and German on facing pages. Then (perhaps influenced by Robert Crawford and Bill Herbert’s Sharawaggi ‘translations’ from English to Scots) he felt something of the polyglot character of the presentation of Scottish poetry was lost in this solution. Is Scottish Gaelic poetry now something that is not lost in translation but is rather born in the unstable interaction between the Gaelic and the English?

It is even possible to re-read Meg Bateman’s poem in the light of this debate. It is after all about a relationship that has gone wrong: for the partner who has moved on, there is novelty and hope. For the partner who has stood still, there are only memories and intimations of mortality. But it is in the relationship – the unstable interaction – that the excitement resides. Perhaps now the different linguistic strands which make up the tapestry of Scotland’s languages should only be seen in the volatile but energising context of each other: English, Scots, Gaelic, Urdu, Chinese, whatever.

When faced with complexity, the easy solution is of course to deny the complications, to idealise and simplify. People who fear diversity argue that there must be common ground, a myth, on which the nation can unite – we need a shibboleth or some other kind of marker of national identity, to brand us as a single community, a tangible commonweal. In the last century, Lallans of course, was promoted by some as a way forward, a standard written Scots that (if implemented in the school system and taught in the universities) would act as a focus for a sense of Scottish nationhood. Though it still has its supporters, Lallans failed as a general substitute for standard English, partly because of the economic and political dominance of English in the world today, and partly because of fears that Lallans would eventually signify the same social exclusion that English had come to represent. Even so, some form of Lallans (or at least, some form of non-regional, written literary Scots), I think, still has a role (and a future) as a medium that can, alongside Gaelic, in principle signify the nation, beyond the tribal specificities of urban and rural Scots dialects. Matthew Fitt’s forthcoming science fiction novel in Scots, But n Ben a Go Go, dares to imagine a future for Scots. It’s not an entirely pleasant scenario: a climatic catastrophe has meant that the world is largely drowned and the seasons have been reversed. The wife of the protagonist, Paulo Broon, has been turned into an ‘Omega’, that is, a comatose zombie after being infected with a lethal sexual disease during an adulterous affair. In the following extract, Broon visits her in the Rigo Imbeki Medical Center, ‘high up on Montrose Parish’:

Paolo’s ile-stoor resistant bitts squealed on the ceramic flair as he stepped back an glowered west alang Gallery 1083. It wis a summer Sunday forenoon the clatty end o January an the mile lang visitors’ corridor wis toom. A singil lawyer an her lycra-leggit secretary intromittit the silence, shooglin past on a courtesy electric caur. An indie-pouered germsooker jinked inconspicuously in and oot o Paolo’s personal space, dichtin up microscopic clart as it drapped aff his body.

A quarter mile doon, the wersh blinterin sun forced itsel in throu the UV filter gless at the corridor heid, illuminatin the faces an keek panels o the first fifty Omegas. An as he skellied intae the white bleeze, a troop o droid surveillance puggies advanced in heelstergowdie formation alang the corridor roof, skited by owre his heid an wi a clatter o mettalic cleuks, skittered awa eastwards doon the shadowy vennel. The toomness o the visitors’ corridor offered Paolo nae bield fae the buildin’s oorie atmosphere; Gallery 1083 wis an eerie airt wi or wioot passengers.¹⁵

Fitt’s Scots is iconoclastic, eclectic, and fun. In a way, a fantasy world is a perfect setting for this kind of Scots, a Scots which does not necessarily appeal to a strong social or regional identity, but which tries to speak for an ‘imagined national community’ of Scots.¹⁶ Though such a Scots is sometimes seen as a betrayal of social, ethnic or regional origins, there is still, I think, a home for it in the linguistic tapestry because it speaks for no individual tribe.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, a talk given on language and Scottish identity could well be subtitled (like a Dulux catalogue?): ‘In Praise of Glosses’. Reading through a book like New Writing Scotland, one is struck by the number of times a text has to be glossed: whether Gaelic, Scots or Punjabi into English, which might irreverently be described as our common pidgin (or arguably, ‘King Creole’). What, then, am I trying to say about literary language and Scottish identity?

First, there is inevitably a tension between what you might call our ‘tribal’ languages (whether languages of region, class, ethnicity, religious affiliation, age or gender) and a national language that all our tribes could in principle rally around. A national language can never be stable because it will always reflect the changing status of the ‘tribes’ within our society. The imposition of, say, standard English, or Lallans, or Gaelic, or even Shetlandic Scots will be resisted by those among us who feel it does not represent them, or represents them only partially. If we are to exist as a nation, however, we must pay active attention to the variety of languages around us and to give them (as our youth tribes would say) ‘respect’. That does not just mean walking round with a permanently open mind. It means ensuring people from the rural Borders to the remoter islands have access to, say, to the urban demotic, and vice versa. It means that we must hear on television and radio and on cd’s, not just English and Gaelic and a bit of Glasgow or Edinburgh demotic, but a full range of Scottish voices from all our communities. It means we must be aware of how shibboleths are used, positively and negatively, as badges of identity for tribes within our pluralist society, and it means that we must realise that a multicultural nation is ultimately much, much more than a grab-bag of linguistic markers. What I’ve been arguing is that our ‘national language’ lies not in the shibboleths of any one linguistic variety but in the fruitful interaction between many. That does make us unique.

Publications like New Writing Scotland are invaluable because they have a history of seeking out literary language in all its variety. They embody the interactionist philosophy I’ve been proposing today. The signs elsewhere (particularly in schools) are currently looking very hopeful too, which, I dare to believe, augurs well for the shape of texts to come.

Notes

¹ Manson, John (2000) ‘Shibboleth’ in Lallans 56, p.142
² See the entry for ‘Shibboleth’ in Mcarthur, T. (1992) The Oxford Companion to the English Language Oxford: OUP, p. 932
³ MacLaverty, Bernard (1994) Walking the Dog and Other Stories London: Jonathan Cape, pp. 7-8
⁴ Barthes, Roland (1972) Mythologies trans. A. Lavers London: Jonathan Cape
⁵ See, for example, his Critical Introduction to Jack, RDS and Rozendaal, PAT, eds (1997) The Mercat Anthology of Early Scottish Literature: 1375-1707 Edinburgh: Mercat Press
⁶ Horace, Ars Poetica translated by T.S Dorsch (1965) Aristotle/Horace/Longinus: Classical Literary Criticism Harmonsworth: Penguin p. 87
⁷ Jack, RDS (1998) ‘Burns and the Makars’ in G. Ross Roy, ed Studies in Scottish Literature XXX, University of South Carolina, p. 13
⁸ Jack op. Cit. P. 17
⁹ Maclaine, A. Ed (1996) The Christis Kirk Tradition Glasgow: ASLS
¹⁰ See Gramsci, A (1971) Prison Notebooks, NY: International Publishers; Chomsky, N and Herman, ES (1988) Manufacturing Consent Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press
¹¹ Leonard, T (1984) ‘Unrelated Incidents (3)’ in Intimate Voices 1965-1983 Newcastle upon Tyne: Galloping Dog Press
¹² Saadi, S (1998) ‘Bandanna’ in D. O’Rourke, K. Jamie and R. Gorman, eds The Glory Signs Glasgow: ASLS
¹³ Bateman, M (1997) ‘Chan eil rudan cho trom/Things are not so hard’ in D. O’Rourke, K. Jamie and R. Gorman, eds Some Sort of Embrace Glasgow: ASLS
¹⁴ Galbraith, I (forthcoming) ‘To Hear Ourselves as Others Hear Us’ Translation and Literature, University of Glasgow; Whyte, C (1996, 1997) Reviews in Lines Review, 137 & 141.
¹⁵ From Fitt, M (1999) Sair Heid City Kingskettle: Kettilonia; extracts from a novel to be published in full as But n Ben a Go Go Edinburgh: Luath, 2000
¹⁶ Anderson, B (1983) Imagined Communities Verso

CORBETT, John, ‘Scots: Practical Approaches’

12 September 2021 by Duncan Jones

ScotLit 25, Autumn 2001 |

Advanced Higher Specifications

The new Higher Still and Advanced Higher examinations in English promise (or threaten, depending on your point of view) a ‘greater range and intensity’ of work on both language in general and Scots in particular. For example, the Advanced Higher support notes suggest that:

Students will engage in a variety of language activities e.g.:

analysing and describing textual materials and discourses, both historical and contemporary
consulting reference materials, including dictionaries, glossaries and thesauruses of Scots
applying linguistic concepts, terminology and techniques to the description of Scottish language
acquiring knowledge of the sound system (phonetics), the forms (syntax and morphology) and the vocubulary (lexis and semantics) of Scots
collecting and analysing linguistic materials gathered in fieldwork

Literature as such is not mentioned, except possibly in the indirect reference to ‘textual materials and discourses’, but the specifications elsewhere mention journalism or ‘a soap opera set in Scotland’ as being more likely to provide raw data for linguistic analysis. Understandably, perhaps, in the creation of a new unit in Scottish Language, the designers have wanted to put some clear blue water between language study and literary study, literary study being understood here in its traditional sense of exploring aspects of the self and society through imaginative writings. Language and literature have not always been happy bedfellows: enthusiasts for literature often feel that the sometimes clinical precision demanded by language study kills any life in a poem, or novel or play. This attitude is perhaps best summed up in Tom Leonard’s poem, which begins:

would thi prisoner
in thi bar
please stand

fur thi aforesaid crime
uv writn anuthir poem
awarded the certificate of safety
by thi scottish education department

fit tay be used in schools
huvn no bad language
sex subversion or antireligion

I hereby sentence you
tay six munths hard labour
doon nthi poetry section
uv yir local library
coontn thi fuckin metaphors

So there is a sense then, that a turn towards language in literary studies, if you like, signals the death of the creative impulse; just as there is in language study the vague sense that the intrusion of literary texts will signal the end of scientific rigor. I’ve always felt that the polarisation of views is a pity, though it is sometimes understandable. Unless you are careful – and unless precise description can be wedded to interpretation – the linguistic study of a literary text can become a mechanical exercise. But equally, given that for the past 400 years most written Scots has been literary, it seems a shame to neglect this rich resource for the study of how language works. This talk, then, is an attempt to show how an exploration of the language of literature in Scots can both illuminate the given literary texts, and reveal insights into how communication – language – works more generally. We’ll be looking at activities at different levels of language: sounds and spellings, words, grammar and discourse. The activities are such as could be used in the 14+ age range, though some are more demanding than others.

Sounds and Spellings

Some people might argue that the first example is not a literary text at all. It’s an excerpt from an old Scotland the What? sketch in which a toy-shop owner from Ballater phones up the late Princess of Wales to ask her what kind of Christmas present she’d like for her then new-born son, William. I’ve used this sketch for a number of years with second-year students at Glasgow University and also with teachers of English in Poland, where it went down very well:

A. From Scotland the What?, by Buff Hardie, Stephen Robertson and George Donald (Gordon Wright, 1987)

In this comic monologue from 1982, the owner of a toy shop in Ballater, near Aberdeen telephones the Princess of Wales to ask what her son would like for Christmas.

Noo, fit wid he like for his Christmas, the loon? Fit aboot a pair o’ fitba beets? Beets. Beets. B-O-O-T-S, beets. Weel, I ken that, but he’ll surely grow intae them. Weel I’ll tell ye fit I’ve got. It’s something very suitable. It’s oor ain special line in soft toys, and it is a cuddly futret. A futret. Div ye nae ken fit a futret is? Futret. F-E-R-R-E-T, futret. Now, cuddly futrets is exclusive tae the Toy Shop, Ballater. We get them specially made up by a wee wifie, in Hong Kong. Oh, an’ fit a job I hid explainin’ tae her fit a futret is. Ye wid like a futret? Oh we’ll fairly manage ye a futret. Noo fit size o’ a futret wid ye like? We’ve got a dinkie futret, a mini futret, a life-size futret, a jumbo futret or a mega-futret. Ye’d like a jumbo futret? No, it disnae hae a trunk. No, it’s got a string that ye pull, an’ it sings Run, Rabbit, Run. Weel, fit else div ye expect a futret tae sing? Now is there onythin’ else the loon wid like? Fit aboot a rubber duke…for his bath? A duke. No, no, nae that kinda Duke. D-U-C-K, duke. A quack quack duke. Like Donald Duke. Donald Duke. He’s a freen’ o’ Mickey Moose…Moose…M-O-U-S-E, Moose! God, div ye nae understan’ English, lassie?

This extract is interesting for a number of reasons. First of all, obviously, it illustrates some of the stereotypical features of NE Scots: the /f/ phoneme in ‘fit’, the /i/ in ‘beets’ and the /dj/ in ‘duke’, as in ‘Donald Duke’. Other features (such as the /u/ in ‘moose’ are shared with most other varieties of Scots. One obvious way of approaching this text would be to ask what characteristics are true of the pupils’ own variety of Scots, and what characteristics are not.

More interesting, though, are the relationships between (i) the sound and the spellings in the text, and (ii) the speaker and the listener. When asked to spell the unrecognised words, the toy-shop owner does so: ‘D-U-C-K, duke’ and ‘M-O-U-S-E, moose’, and at last in exasperation, he exclaims, ‘God, div ye nae understan’ English, lassie?’ The sketch wittily raises key issues about the status and perception of Scots: the toy-shop owner has access to two different linguistic systems, spoken Scots and written standard English, but rather naively he equates them. For him, ‘B-O-O-T-S’ spells ‘beets’. In one sense there is no reason why ‘beets’ shouldn’t be spelled like this: spelling is an arbitrary system for representing sound – and English is notoriously arbitrary in the way it represents sounds. The toy-shop owner’s naivety lies in the fact that he thinks everyone speaks and writes ‘English’ like him. He’s unaware that while he and the Princess share a common written standard, their speech characteristics are markedly different. This is a key element in the comedy of the sketch – the fact that the toy-shop owner does not recognise that he and the Princess come from markedly different social and geographical backgrounds, and so he does not modify or accommodate his speech to bridge that social and geographical divide. He talks to the Princess as if she were a local wifie and cannot comprehend where her difficulties are coming from.

Many Scots texts have the advantage of being more or less explicitly about language. This is one. Practically it can be used to explore the following issues:

What are the sounds that characterise this variety of Scots?
What is the relationship between sounds and spellings? How are the sounds represented in writing?
What is the social relationship between the speakers? How (if at all) does the language of each speaker attempt to bridge any social/geographical divide between them?

A creative way of using this kind of text is to attempt to write a pastiche or parody of it. Who for today’s pupils would represent someone from their own place and class, and which famous person would definitely not belong to their community? You could ask the pupils to invent their own sketch, using their own language variety, based on a phone call between, say, a Hollywood actress and a local chemist, who thinks she might be interested in a new kind of anti-dandruff shampoo. The activity can then explore which phonological features and vocubulary items characterise the pupils’ local speech variety, and would be opaque to someone from outside that community. It also raises issues of how these essentially spoken characteristics are written down.

Words

From sounds and spellings I want to move now to words. The vocabulary of Scots is probably the biggest obstacle to its reception by readers in general, and teachers and pupils in particular. The sad fact is that much Scots vocabulary is no longer known, by most teachers and pupils, and that the close study of most texts in dense Scots will rather tediously demand frequent recourse to a glossary or dictionary. This obstacle is compounded by the fact that even familiar words often appear in unfamiliar spellings: the reaction of many people to Scots texts, as William McIlvanney recently observed, is the same as if they were written in Linear B script.

These barriers are there, they’re real, and they have to be tackled if you are going to make an earnest attempt to deal with Scots in all its complexities. Ways have to be found of introducing the vocabulary in interesting ways, and even of making the consultation of dictionaries and thesauruses (demanded by the Advanced Higher guidelines) an interesting and even stimulating activity. Strategies can be adopted from language teaching – EFL has over the past decade rediscovered the importance of teaching vocabulary in a rich and stimulating fashion. There is no shame in treating Scots as a foreign language if that is what much of it effectively is. Since vocabulary is such a big issue I’d like to focus on two simple strategies for making its study a bit more interactive.

The first strategy, adopted from EFL, is to use a ‘word rose’. You take a sample of words and phrases from the text, put them on the board in roughly the shape of a rose, and ask the pupils to check their meaning, and to predict what they think the poem is about. Try it and see what you come up with:

                    plook
     birslin                    bumbee
  playschule sun               pus
fremmit                           dog’s braith
   clort                     public laavies
       tholed                incubus
   coordy custard         skyrie
                    semmit

‘Birslin’ might not be generally known: it means something like ‘scorching’, or ‘crackling with heat’. ‘Skyrie’ means ‘bright’ or ‘garish’, ‘fremmit’ means ‘strange’ or ‘foreign’.

The vocabulary activity here is directed at pupils coming up with their own predictions of what the poem is about. Therefore, by the time they read or hear the poem, they have familiarised themselves with some of the vocabulary and invested some time and energy in making sense of it. In other words, they’ll have a reason for listening to or reading the poem and making sense of it too – if only in order to compare it with their predictions.

Yalla
Sheena Blackhall

Yalla’s a playschule sun on a bairn’s pictur
A budgie’s poop o a colour
Skyrie’s a fried egg.
A meenister wadna gie it a secunt luik.
It’s the margarine clort we butter on public laavies
Ye see it, shakkin a leg on a dandy dyeuk.

Splytered ben Daft Hoose waas
It’s common as muck.
Tae be tholed in teenie doses
Like a flu injection, mebbe.
It’s the coordy-custard Bully-Boy Big-Buck
Stripe, on a wasp’s semmit
Birslin as mustard, fand in a fremmit
Vase o Van Gogh flooers.
It’s a hoor’s peroxide hair
An ahin-the-Gas Works colour
O Chastity laid doon wi its bumbee bare.

Excitin’s a burst plook,
It’s an explosion of pus
An incubus o a tint
That fell aff the back o a barra
A dog’s braith colour, yon’s yalla.

A ‘word rose’ can get you into a poem and help make it more immediately comprehensible. Once there, you can do other lexical activities: one is to make a ‘mini-thesaurus’ of the lexical items in the text and see where that leads you. Here, you might group ‘Daft Hoose, flu injection, burst plook, pus’ in a semantic field of sickness and insanity, and ‘budgie’s poop, public laavies’ with bodily waste, and ‘fried egg, margarine, butter, mustard’ rather disconcertingly joining them as foodstuffs. The poem, ostensibly about the colour yellow, seems to associate it with feeding and excrescence, illness and moral corruption (‘meenister, hoor, Chastity laid doon’). Playing around with the vocabulary, trying to predict contexts and make semantic links between items, all go beyond the mechanical activity of ‘looking things up in a dictionary.’ It also helps bring the language alive.

In my book Language and Scottish Literature I suggest doing this with a poem quite deliberately chosen as an example of very dense Scots, Kate Armstrong’s ‘This is the laund’.

This is the laund that bigs the winds; winds big the cloods;
the cloods, the weit, the weit, the grun; an antrin steer
o syle an rain. Thon frimple-frample watter rowin
frae Kenmore tae Dundee is cried the River Tay.
It’s no the Tay ava. The get o aa the oceans
fae Mexico tae Greenlaun, gift o a cloodit warld
an we wid awn it, screive it. Siccar the wather-man
ettlin tae shaw the springheid, warstles wi his isobars
an seeks tae trammel fer ae day the fricht o kennin
the yird’s sclenter. Tae whitna maitter scarts atween these banks
on loan a whilie, we sall gie particlar name. But gif
the medium be the message, raither mind hoo thocht
or scoukin haar kenna the immigration laws.
Frae muckle warld tae muckle warld, bairnie tae mither,
spicket tae seiver, onding tae quernstane,
sae Scotland’s fowk, skailt frae ae clood or ither
intil a sheuch descrives them as her ain;
sae ilka braith an ilka tear ye share, an antrin steer
o rain an syle, a thocht baith gied an taen.

It is an admittedly difficult poem to get into. The suggestion I make in the book is to compare the vocabulary in the poem with that of a nightly weatehr forecast on BBC Scotland or Scottish Television. If you do that, then you find that the vocabulary of the forecasts fall into a fairly narrow set of semantic fields: meteorological events, (wind, rain, fog) and processes (rising or falling temperatures, freshening winds, etc). One thing which strikes us about the poem is that there is a greater variety of semantic fields than are found in the weather forecasts. Some are detailed below:

Rain, wind, cloud
laund (1)
winds (1,1)
cloods (1,2, 16), cloodit (6)
rain (3, 19)
haar (13)
onding (15)

Geography & Topography
grun (2)
Greenlaun (6)
syle (3, 19)
warld (6, 14, 14)
watter (3)
yird [?] (10)
River Tay (4)
sclenter [?] (10)
the Tay (5)
maitter (10)
oceans (5)
banks (10)

Confused/violent activity
steer (2, 17)
rowin [?] (2)
frimple-frample (3)
warstles (8)
trammel (9)
sclenter [?] (10)
scarts (10)
skailt (16)

Offspring
get (5)
bairnie (14)
mither (14)

Possession
gift (6)
awn (7)
on loan (11)
her ain (17)
share (18)
gied (19)
taen (19)

Communication
screive (7)
shaw (8)
gie … name (11)
medium (12)
message (12)
descrives (17)

People (see also Offspring)
wather-man (7)
Scotland’s fowk (16)

Seasons
springheid (8)

Meteorology
isobars (8)

Mental state
fricht (9)
kennin (9)
mind (12)
thocht (12, 19)
kenna (13)

Physical activity
braith (18)
tear (18)

Legislation
immigration laws (13)

Channels for water (man-made)
spicket (15)
seiver (15)

The classification of the lexical items into sets here is more thorough than that attempted for the weather forecast – partly because the communicative purpose of a poem is harder to pin down. Parts of a weather forecast can be neglected if they are irrelevant to the needs of the viewer (who might be interested in a particular area, and who might or might not be interested in gardening, or skiing, for example). But if poetry is written and communicated for its own sake, then none of the lexical sets, large and small, noted above, can be considered inessential.

The poem shares with the weather forecasts some areas of vocabulary: Rain, wind, cloud and Geography, for example. However, other areas of meaning are prominent in the poem, notably words for Confused activity, and – perhaps less obvious when we actually read the poem – words in the lexical sets of Possession and Communication. Collecting the lexical items into sets such as these can help display prominent themes in a text, and the sets can support arguments about the interpretation of the poem: we can say, for example, that the poem is about the great natural cycle: the global transformations of earth to air to water to earth (a cycle echoed by that of mother to child). People (here ‘Scotland’s fowk’, typified by the ‘wather-man’) try to possess this terrifying process by naming it: ‘awn’ is yoked to ‘screive’ as if one is a paraphrase of the other. However, the poem’s speaker asks us to remember that natural cycles, like thought itself, cannot be pinned down by the labels and limits of humankind, and that, despite our claims of ownership, we are equally part of the great natural cycle.

This kind of activity demands the use of good Scots dictionaries, and if possible the Scots Thesaurus, which is a fascinating reference book. But again, we are not encouraged simply to look things up – the dictionary and thesaurus activities are subordinated to the making sense of a lexically dense text, but one, I would suggest, that rewards the effort.

Grammar

From words I want to turn now to grammar. Teaching first-year students grammar at Glasgow University I’m frequently struck by how… innocent of formal grammatical knowledge many are when they arrive. I hope that with the new Higher examinations that innocence will gradually disappear. It’s difficult teaching grammar in an interesting way, and I can’t claim to have found a way of doing that yet, especially when you’ve got 10 short weeks and a class of 400. With smaller groups and more time, I’d be less inclined to go for the brutalism of ‘this is the lecture on the preposition phrase’ and more inclined to go with the concept of grammar as choice. We have choices in the way we combine words – grammar looks at these choices and considers the different meanings that result from those choices. To talk precisely about these choices, true, you need to know how words combine to form phrases, and how phrases function as constituents of clauses (ie as Subject, Verb, Object, Complement, Adverbial).

The importance of grammatical choices becomes clear when you have been doing what I’ve been doing most recently, and that is looking at the history of translation into Scots. I’m probably prejudiced if not obsessive about this now, but it seems clear to me that translation stands as one of the main pillars of the Scots literary tradition: from the earliest times it has fed, inspired and internationalised our literary activity. It’s extended the language we use and extended the types of literary genre we can use it in. In terms of grammar, however, interesting things happen when two or more people translate the same text, as happens for example with the Old English elegy, The Seafarer, translated into Scots by Tom Scott and Alexander Scott, and into English by Edwin Morgan (and a whole host of others, including a significantly strange version by Ezra Pound). Different translators make different choices about how they will render the source text, and these choices are particularly interesting when the source text is a West Saxon dialect, one of the ancestors of Present-Day English, and cognate to the ancestor of Present-Day Scots. The Seafarer is a tenth-century elegy, a lament by the eponymous sailor about his harsh life, that ends in Christian hope and the prospect of a final voyage, possibly to and beyond death. This is how the two Scots versions begin:

Alexander Scott, ‘Seaman’s Sang’

Anent mysel I’ll tell ye truly:
hou, stravaigin the sea in trauchlesome days,
aye tholan the dunts o time,
I’ve borne strang stounds in my breist,
kennan my ship the hame o monie cares.

Tom Scott, ‘The Seavaiger’

A suthfast sang I can sing o my life,
Vaunt o vaigins, hou I vexious tyauvin
In days o sair darg hae dreeit aften.
Bitter the breist pangs I hae abydit,
Kent abuin keels care trauchlit wonnins…

Now the basic sentence structure of English and Scots today is SVO (Subject followed by Verb followed by Object). Adverbials (ie adverbs and prepositional phrases) give extra information and they are quite mobile – they can come at the beginning or end of sentences, though seldom between Verb and Object (they can interrupt Verb and Object in other languages, which is why ‘I am meeting in the morning Richard’ is something, let’s say, a Spanish speaker might utter, but you wouldn’t normally hear it from an English-speaker). There are historical reasons for the SVO pattern in Present-Day English and Scots. When The Seafarer was written, word-order was actually more flexible because the endings of the words told the listener or reader what function the phrase was playing, whereas today these endings have been lost so we rely much more on the position in the sentence to signal the clause function. One of these two translations systematically inverts expected clause patterns: which is it?

Alexander Scott, ‘Seaman’s Sang’

A [Anent mysel] S [I] V [’ll tell] O [ye] A [truly]:
A [hou, stravaigin the sea in trauchlesome days],
A [aye tholan the dunts o time],
S[I] V [’ve borne] O [strang stounds] A [in my breist],
A [kennan my ship the hame o monie cares].

Tom Scott, ‘The Seavaiger’

O [A suthfast sang] S [I] V [can sing] A [ o my life],
V [Vaunt] A [o vaigins], A [hou S [I] O [vexious tyauvin]
A [In days o sair darg] V [hae dreeit] A [aften].
C [Bitter] O [the breist pangs] S [I] V [hae abydit],
V [Kent] A [abuin keels] O [care trauchlit wonnins]

The Tom Scott version is grammatically much more tortuous than the Alex Scott version. If you take the Adverbials away, you basically have two SVO patterns in Alex Scott’s version, while you have OSV, SOV, and COSV patterns in Tom Scott’s version. The last line has one of those ‘Spanish’ intrusions of an Adverbial into a VO sequence. Obviously, faced with the same source material, the two translators made very different grammatical choices. Why?

Briefly, I’ve argued elsewhere that Alex Scott’s translation is intended to be much more fluent – he keeps to expected grammatical patterns because he wants to have a ‘normal’ speaking voice that seems ‘natural’ or ‘conversational’ to the reader or listener. This is a translation that hides the fact that it is a translation. Alex Scott plays down the poetic qualities of the original, subduing the alliteration and choosing vocabulary that is fairly accessible.

Tom Scott disrupts grammatical expectations, employs at times thumping alliteration, and chooses more obscure vocabulary. This is a translation that draws attention to itself, is self-consciously literary, and tries in a way to reconstruct the strangeness of the source text, by way of its archaic grammar as much as its arcane vocabulary.

Interesting comparison can be made with two English translations. Edwin Morgan adopts a more or less, conversational tone, much like Alexander Scott’s:

This verse is my voice, it is no fable,
I tell of my travelling, how in hardship
I have often suffered laborious days,
endured in my breast the bitterest cares,
explored on shipboard sorrow’s abodes,
the welter and the terror of the waves.

Ezra Pound’s notorious and celebrated translation, however, pushes further the alienating strategies of Tom Scott:

May I for my own self song’s truth reckon,
Journey’s jargon, how I in harsh days
Hardship endured oft.
Bitter breast cares have I abided,
Known on my keel many a care’s hold,
And dire sea surge.

Again the grammatical deviations from the SVO norm make this text more self-consciously poetic, much more visible than the fluent translations of Morgan and Scott. Different grammatical choices have different effects. If these effects are to be articulated, the grammatical characteristics of the poems have to be described, precisely and accurately, and pupils have to have the tools to do this. But it’s not necessarily a mechanical operation – at best, if grammatical description can be linked to interpretation, it can be creative and expressive.

You can’t always find a set of translations like this to demonstrate to your pupils, though translations into Scots are so numerous that it shouldn’t be difficult to find English/Scots versions at least of useful texts: over the past few years there have been stage versions in Scots of Phaedra, Medea, The Three Sisters, A Government Inspector, The Hypochondriac amongst many others. There are published versions of Cyrano de Bergerac in Scots, English, and Indian English (‘Binglish’) for example, and these bear fruitful investigation about lexical and grammatical choices.

But at the very least, it is possible to make your own versions of texts: take a sonnet and rewrite it as free verse, or vice versa. Translate from Scots to English and English to Scots. Play about with the grammar and consider the consequences of doing so. The trick is to convey the potential of different grammatical choices for altering meanings…and then to go deeper into the technical mechanisms by which this is done.

Discourse

I want to conclude by saying a few brief words about discourse. ‘Discourse’ technically refers to patterns of organisation above the level of the sentence, and unlike grammar it can be approached in a number of different ways. Approaches vary, for example, depending on whether you are considering spoken discourse or written text. Spontaneous conversation has its structures and constraints: the taking of turns, the shifting of topics, the give and take of evaluations and interruptions, the supporting ‘mms’ and ‘ayes’ and nods that signal you are awake and listening. Written text is more goal-oriented, has conventions that develop in accordance with the social expectations of the genre: a job application, for example, will have a certain format and register and content.

Literary texts, since they are intrinsically playful (whether or not the play is for a serious purpose) tend to disrupt our expectations about the organisation of discourse. We tend to expect texts to make sense. Sometimes, however, they don’t. Consider the opening paragraph of James Kelman’s ‘Comic Cuts’:

These things always begin in a less than unexceptional manner. It’s a case of grabbing the nettle. What else is there? What else could there be? And I stress the ‘could’. One has to accept these things; if ye were to examine every last detail, every last detail. Being speaking, I was awake, but weary, weary. I stared at the guy, having to concentrate my mind, focus, focus, abracadabra. Then came a screech. It was just the wooden chair I was sitting on. I had shifted my seated position. Another sound, barely discernible, the ticktick of a clock. Then too Vik’s breathing, regular, not snoring. My best mate, partner and mucker, he was stretched out behind the kitchen table. He had terrible bony joints and couldnay have been too comfortable.
From Kelman, James (1998) ‘Comic Cuts’ in The Good Times, (Secker and Warburg), p. 128

I’ll confine myself to a few observations about this text. First, the opening sentences work by throwing the reader in at the deep end and deliberately disorienting him or her. ‘These things’ – what things are being referred to? What’s ‘a case of grabbing the nettle’? And when the narrator asks the rhetorical questions ‘What else is there? What else could there be?’ (rhetorical questions that assume that the listener knows the answer) the reader (who is occupying the position of the listener) is completely lost. But we stick with the text, assuming that it is not nonsense, that it will make sense. In other words we work with the text to make sense of it – the coherence of a text results from an interaction between writer and reader through a text. Meaning does not reside in the text; it is actively constructed by a reader using the text, using his or her knowledge of similar texts, and using knowledge of the world. James Kelman’s short stories often work like this – teasing the reader by offering sentences that do not hang together coherently, forcing the reader to make inferences, fill the gaps, construct meanings. We do this as a matter of course with other texts, but the clues are usually more obvious.

There are ways to articulate how the discourse of this text is working: we could point to the patterns of reference (eg ‘what do “these things” refer to), the use of the definite article (‘the guy’ assumes we know who is being talked about, but we don’t yet), and we could consider the assumptions that we normally bring to bear upon a text when we are reading it (we assume that the writer is generally cooperating with us in the creation of meaning, that what he or she says is relevant, that it gives us enough information to make sense, that it is not deliberately untruthful, that it is not deliberately obscure). Fiction tends to subvert these expectations – literature tells lies, misleads, is obscure, withholds information – yet we persevere with it, hopeful of a reward by the end. By frequently denying our expectations of how discourse works, it does us the service of showing us how discourse normally works.

Conclusion

This has been a wide-ranging and in some respects idiosyncratic consideration of how Scots literary texts might be used practically in the classroom to shed light on the texts themselves and on the linguistic systems though which they communicate. We’ve touched on a number of the themes in the Advanced Higher guidelines: the sounds and words and grammar of textual materials, and the use of dictionaries and thesauruses in a stimulating, creative way. In the Advanced Higher in Scottish Language, the emphasis is not on literature, and in the Scottish Literature components the emphasis is not on language, but I would like to suggest that there can be useful interaction between the two.

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

12 September 2021 by Duncan Jones

ScotLit 30, Spring 2004 |

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Background Reading

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

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

12 September 2021 by Duncan Jones

Laverock 2, 1996 |

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

Laidlaw (1977)

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

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

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

The Papers of Tony Veitch (1983)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Strange Loyalties (1991)

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

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

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