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Home / Laverock

Laverock

ALISON, Jim, ‘Burns in School’

12 September 2021 by Duncan Jones

Laverock 3, 1997 |


Transcript of a talk given at the International Bicentenary Burns Conference, University of Strathclyde, 11–13 January 1996

The third cam up, hap-step-an’-loup 
As licht as onie lambie 
An’ wi a curchie low did stoop, 
As soon as e’er she saw me, 
Fu kind that day 
[…] 
My name is Fun – your cronie dear, 
The nearest friend ye hae …

These words, the arrival of Fun at the beginning of The Holy Fair, are my text for today; their application should emerge later.

1. WHY SHOULD WE BOTHER WITH BURNS IN SCHOOLS?

In the context of educational development in Scotland over the last 15 years … Standard Grade, SCOTVEC Communication, revision of Higher, the 5-14 programme, Higher Still … nothing in the curriculum can safely be taken for granted. For every component a case needs to be made. And that applies not just to Burns but, as we have been seeing recently, to the teaching of literature in general, and within that to the place of Scottish literature.

Briefly then before we come to Burns, I shall touch on two prior questions: 

  1. why bother with literature?
  2. why bother with Scottish literature?

Literature 
The Scottish educational system at both primary and secondary levels has viewed literature and language as intimately reinforcing each other within the subject English. Most of us would, I think justify the study of literature on grounds such as these:

  • it demonstrates the fullest, most precise use of language,
  • it gives young people access to vicarious experiences and promotes their imaginative, aesthetic and moral growth,
  • it gives students knowledge of their cultural milieu and heritage,
  • it yields reflective enjoyment – and so on.

These claims can seem high flown and they are horribly vulnerable to classroom realities, but they remain articles of faith to which most teachers of English will subscribe. They are being severely tested at the moment in the Higher Still debate.

Scottish Literature 
So also are the claims of Scottish literature, which has recently been gaining more official recognition within the curriculum. I believe that Scottish texts, generously defined, have important advantages which should recommend them for classroom use at all stages. They can give our students imaginative insights into episodes and experiences which are part of our country’s distinctive past, and may influence our present and future.

They help us all to understand what living hereabouts has meant to the folk who have gone before us; they give shape to ideas, casts of mind and ways of saying which have haunted Scots over the centuries and which are often with us still.

In practical terms some are likely to tap into the domestic and non-standard language that young children bring to school. Many will also draw upon shared experiences of teachers, students and their families or illuminate local events and places. Fascinatingly they link with our music and art, our political, social and economic history. Overall they can help us to gain a sense of our cultural identity in relation to our neighbours and other nations.

But only if we know about them.

Burns 
Assuming then that we have made positive answers to these two general questions, we turn to Burns. Why bother? Among all the competing claims what has Burns to offer schools today?

In what follows I shall be speaking mainly about Burns in the context of English/English language courses in school. It’s important, however, to urge that there ought to be a coherent pattern of Scottish contributions to other areas of the curriculum such as Environmental Studies and Expressive Arts in the primary school, and that within these the work and life of Burns has contributions to make at all stages – particularly in music and history but also in art and drama and possibly R.E.

National Poet 
What does he have to offer to the study of literature and language? Well we are still, on his bi-centenary, being told on all sides that he is our NATIONAL POET. Ian McIntyre, for example, starts the most recent major biography: ‘Scotland’s national poet was born in the same year as William Pitt, Schiller and Mary Wollstonecraft’. Virtually every reputable contemporary work of reference also offers that thought: ‘The national poet of Scotland’. But what does the phrase mean? … Scotland’s greatest poet? its most popular? the only poet most people have heard of?, the only one who can stand international comparison. You will remember the surrealist musings of Iain Crichton Smith’s Murdo upon the Muse and the mouse, with that embarrassing echo of the English teacher in it somewhere:Murdo: ‘What does the mouse do when he sees this ploughshare approaching? Well he did what was natural for a mouse in such circumstances. He ran away. Not only that, but he ran away with bickering brattle. A fine phrase in itself. Here is the mouse in the corn, as we might say, helpless and here is the great poet who has by this time written many great poems. It is not a minor poet that we have here but a major poet at the height of his powers, or pooers as I might say. What did this great poet, author of such famous poems as Death and Doctor Hornbook do? He addressed the mouse. Most great poets would not see in this tiny animal matter for speculation. But Rabbie Burns did. That is why he is our national poet. At this moment he would teach us a lesson.’

I am not sure where that definition or that lesson gets us – other than offering a terrible warning to teachers who pontificate on Burns!

Burns is obviously not our ‘national poet’ in the sense of writing the epic dealing with the national myth or story, like Vergil or Camoens. In that sense ‘the matter of Scotland’ had been treated by Barbour and Harry, as Burns acknowledged, and perhaps even by Ossian Macpherson. But he did see himself as speaking for Scotland and as being charged with a responsibility to do something for Scotia, ‘or sing a sang at least’; and many people in his own time accorded him that role, ‘Caledonia’s bard, brother Burns’.

We note also his disinterested commitment to collecting and editing ‘the poetry and music of Old Caledonia’ for Johnson and Thomson. He has a patriotic interest in Scottish history, ‘the patriot and the patriot bard’; and he sees himself in a long line of Scottish poets which include his immediate predecessors Ramsay and Fergusson.

Pivot 
Any point in history can of course be portrayed as a time of transition, but Burns writes at a pivotal time for Scotland when, as Tom Devine has already demonstrated during this conference, society was feeling the social pressures of really traumatic agricultural, industrial and cultural change. Remember Auld Glen, James Tennant of Glenconner, neighbouring farmer and close friend of the Burns family whose son ‘Wabster Charlie’ founded the great St Rollox chemical complex! Burns illustrates remarkably widely these forces in poems such as The Twa Dogs; the diptych of Love and Liberty and The Cotter’s Saturday Night: The Author’s Earnest Cry and Prayer, Address of Beelzebub, The Gallant Weaver, Why shouldna Poor Folk Mowe? and many more. His work embodies matters of history, politics, commerce, religion, sexual mores, the social classes, festivals, music, language, agriculture, the landscape, travel and other aspects of Scotland in what Smout called ‘the crucial decades of the 1780s and 1790s’. He is in fact the first of our poets to be sensitive to a reasonably broad sweep of contemporary Scottish culture and to bring to bear on it some kind of historical perspective.

Quality 
On the grounds then of his aspirations, and the scope and diversity of his materials and styles, we are justified in seeing him as a national poet, but it is the quality of work that entitles him to the rank of the national poet, and a consequent international status. Assessments of his quality and his position in the canon have swung between 19th century bardolatry and the fierce critique launched by MacDiarmid in the second ‘Burns Cult’ essay for the EIS in 1926; then partly back via the judicious, but warm reappraisals of Daiches, Crawford, McGuirk and others, many of whom, happily, are taking part in this conference. My own belief is that the present proceedings, though stopping this side of idolatry, will confirm once and for all the use of the definite article … the national poet. If we believe, as I have urged, that the schools have a duty to vivify and transmit our national literary heritage, then we must in a systematic way introduce students to Burns as the one writer at the very heart of our national culture. The rest of our literature can be shown to fall into place around him. But it should also be part of a significant body of Scottish Studies within the primary and secondary curriculum.

Qualities as a Writer 
Among the qualities of Burns’s writing which justify our attention are:

  • his humour: from high-spirited fun to fierce satire,
  • range of feelings: compassion, patriotism, indignation, melancholy, sexual excitement,
  • lyric power: sentiment to sexual (humorous and serious) 
  • dramatic presentation of character,
  • narrative skills,
  • technical agility with words, ryhythm and poetic forms,
  • control of Scots/English language resources,
  • sensitivity to literary traditions, 
  • folk song qualities, matching words and melody,
  • letter writing skills and personae.

Belatedly we need to do justice to the extraordinary diversity of his riches … in the letters and songs as well as the poems; and to take account of the great range of his appeal at different ages and stages of students. What other poet in the canon of English Literature can appeal from early primary to sixth year secondary? Chaucer? Donne? Pope? Keats? Browning? Tennyson? Yeats? … even Shakespeare?

I shall return in a moment to the important question of his use with younger children.

2. RECORD OF THE SCHOOLS

How have Scottish schools been treating Burns in the past? Drawing on my own experience of over 50 years as pupil, teacher, teacher trainer and HMI, I have to conclude that the pattern has remained remarkably constant across the years and across the country. In primary and secondary school alike Burns has seldom if ever been grossly neglected: in certain ways he keeps popping up, but on the other hand he has seldom figured in any planned fashion. A typical situation is revealed away back in 1912 in Glasgow where the Albany Burns Club minutes its thanks to the headteacher and staff of Provanside Higher Grade school:‘For the great trouble and time they devote from the ordinary curriculum in working up children for the competition.’

In other words Burns has tended to be an extra, sometimes admittedly a treat, but never fully part of the curriculum.

Within my own experiences the usual manifestations have been:In primary school:

  • telling the folk hero tale of the lad born in Kyle, learning, singing one or two songs e.g. Duncan Gray, perhaps a visit to the cottage (and new Tam o’ Shanter experience).
  • Some elements of Burns Supper … Haggis, etc., might involve singing, reciting, dramatizing …
  • working for Burns Federation award certificate.

Additionally in secondary school:

  • S1-S3: some further poems, usually around January … Tam o’ Shanter, (tho also in primary) plus perhaps To a Mouse, To a Louse, Scots wha hae, etc. Also possibly the Burns Federation competitions.
  • S4-S6 some study of more demanding poems for exam purposes, such as The Twa Dogs and Holy Willie’s Prayer, and more recently pieces in the SEB designated lists for Higher or CSYS. Perhaps Burns Supper, School Burns Club, Writers’ Club etc.

The Scottish Examination Board 
It is worth registering by the way that SEB and its predecessors have always made it reasonably rewarding in examination terms to spend some time on Burns. Before the 1960s, when specific authors and texts were mentioned in examination papers, Burns turned up in some form or other as regularly as Shakespeare. The Leaving Certificate of 1930 for example asked for a comparison of the poetry of Burns and Pope, and that of 1931 asks ‘In what kinds of poetry do you think Burns is most successful? Illustrate your answers by quotations’. Hardly stimulating tasks, but typical of the time and no worse than any of the other questions in the papers.

The crucial new step in 1994 was the specification of 13 poems to be studied by anyone who chose the Burns option for the Higher Grade examination. I do not know how popular with students this option has been, but I believe that for the first time it encourages teachers to undertake a substantial study of Burns at Higher level. I realise that the specified text question has been unacceptable to some teachers but at least it has had the advantage of making it worth while to study some key Scottish poets at length ie. so far, MacCaig, Crichton Smith and Burns. One can only hope that whatever form of assessment replaces it in Higher Still is as beneficial in this respect. Personally I doubt it.

Variations 
The effectiveness with which Burns is presented across the school stages has always of course depended on the commitment of individual teachers. In the west there have been in the past some marvellously enthusiastic Burnsian primary headteachers who have made a rich and happy experience of their Burns topics; in other instances in some secondary departments it has meant little more than an annual dusting down of George Ogilvie’s Selected Poems or one of the Burns Federation Readers or the selection in John Blackburn’s Gallery. When studying Burns’s poems closely at the senior stages, teachers have of course used a variety of teaching techniques, from class exposition to open-ended group discussion. On the whole they have handled them much as they would the work of any non-Scottish poet, the main difference being the attention given where needed to Scots language forms.

What I have just described is the kind of mix I recall as a pupil; got involved in as a teacher in Glasgow and Aberdeen; and could still be pretty sure of encountering as I inspected primary and secondary school until two years ago. It is true of course that after the professional disputes of the mid ‘80s additional voluntary activities such as Burns Suppers and Burns Federation award preparations diminished markedly, and sometimes have not recovered. Additionally when teachers are under the administrative pressures of new syllabuses and assessment arrangements they can be excused for feeling that apparent add-on luxuries such as Burns activities may be jettisoned.

Evaluation 
On balance one could argue, and I think I would, that this admittedly patchy experience of the work of Burns over the primary and secondary stages was a more rewarding treatment than many other authors have received in Scottish schools. There has been, after all, some emphasis on enjoyment, and some chance that pupils would sing or perform and join in a group activity of some kind….. even if it was only making neeps and tatties in P5 or saying The Selkirk Grace. But it is worth stressing in this bi-centennial year that our school system can and should do better by the national poet.

3. THE BURNS FEDERATION

One cannot comment fairly on the way that Burns has been taught in Scottish schools without taking into account the promotional work of the Burns Federation over many years. I make no apology for giving due credit to it in this talk but, in preface, I should plead that I have never been a member of a Burns Club and am not engaged in a PR exercise for that excellent international organisation, the Federation. My observations are those of an outsider not privy to the inner councils. Tomorrow morning Mr. Murdo Morrison its president will have his say.

It has been common in the past for critics under the influence of MacDiarmid to denigrate the activities of the Federation, and of course it is an old Scots custom to be snide about enthusiasts. No doubt some of us also have unhappy memories of being dragooned into reciting by heart ‘To A Mountain Daisy’. Nonetheless I consider that its contribution to keeping Burns alive in our schools has been quite remarkable, if inadequately recognised.

Beginnings 
It is true that when founded in 1885 as a means of bringing together Burns associations of various kinds, it did not see itself as having any educational brief. Its first aim was social, to ‘consolidate the bond of friendship among members’. A reading of the early issues of its journal, the annual Chronicle (First published 1892), shows no articles on the potential of Burns in schools. Its contributors were mainly concerned with the biography of the poet and his family, the preservation of manuscripts and memorabilia, and the erection of monuments. An important purpose was to report the activities of the ever growing number of active clubs. It was only in 1911 that its formal objects were revised to include the aim:

‘To encourage and arrange school competitions in order to stimulate the teaching of Scottish history and literature.’ (Vol XXI, 1912)

This change in the constitution merely acknowledged however a movement to stimulate school competitions which was already well under way. The first formal reference to a school competition had come in the 1902 report of the Bridgeton Club, but the practice had started in 1878, originally only for the children of members and pupils of three east end schools, Hozier Street, Parkhead, and Martyr public schools. There is even evidence of the Greenock Club, arguably the oldest in the world, organising some kind of children’s prize as early as 1806.

In 1912 the Annual meeting of the Federation (in Carlisle!) heard a first report on the subject:

‘Mr. John Neilson, Thornliebank, submitted a report on the educational work conducted by Burns Clubs among school children. Ten years ago in the West of Scotland six clubs promoted competitions on the songs and poems of Burns: now no fewer than 42 clubs were engaged in this work, which had proved educationally and socially a great success. He advocated competitions being held every second year, and advised that the help of teachers should be requested in the work. Mr. Neilson promised to give preliminary hints to any clubs beginning School Competitions. In seconding the report, Mr. John Wilson, Glasgow, thought that the competitions should not be restricted to the songs and poems of Burns, but should embrace Scottish song and poetry generally. On behalf of the Scottish Song Society he offered to give hints to popularise the songs of Scotland.’

Some of the ingredients of these early competitions remain of great interest to us today, in particular their repeated emphasis on three key components:

  • music and song
  • recitation and performance
  • community involvement

The competitions usually resulted in a prize-giving linked to an annual children’s concert which was often a sell-out in the district. Such activities can at their best bring out the elements of celebration and carnival which are at the heart of Burns’s work.

Development 
Unfortunately the varied club events lost some of their individuality between the wars, when with the best of intentions the Federation took them over centrally in cooperation with the Education Authorities and, with greatly increased numbers, added something like a national examination syllabus in Scottish Literature, with texts prescribed for the session and written papers at different levels. These were taken each January, with certificates awarded to the best pupils in each class. Alas, for some older Scots today the only memory of Burns at school is a test plucked out of the air at short notice for no strong reason and thereafter quickly forgotten.

But these were the occasions when things went wrong! Overall the Federation has done its best to keep abreast of educational developments. It introduced personal projects and an Art award, encouraging the setting up of school Burns Clubs, and with the sponsorship of an oil company introduced a very popular one-day national festival for young competitors. I understand that some 140.000 young Scots from nearly 700 schools (mainly primary) are still entering for its competition annually. Happily this is not an assessment system which I was ever called upon to inspect, but I bumped into it periodically by accident and was impressed sometimes by the enthusiasm it could generate.

Larger Issues 
To its credit the Federation has often supported the larger educational cause of Scottish literature as a means of improving the expertise of teachers. From the first it insisted that Burns had to be seen in a wider context of Scottish studies. It had a large hand in creating the chair of Scottish History and Literature at Glasgow University. Its early Vernacular Circles, notably the London circle so much derided by MacDiarmid, did a great deal to raise consciousness of Scots language issues, and the Federation was a strong early backer of the Scottish National Dictionary.

Resources 
More closely relevant to schools, it has sponsored over the years a series of very useful anthologies in which Burns is imbedded in a range of other Scots poetry, prose and drama. In 1937 the first of these collections, I am proud to say, was edited by a former Senior Chief Inspector of Schools, J.C.Smith, and a former secretary of the EIS, Thomas Henderson. A more recent version, A Scots Kist, had the backing of Douglas Gifford. Among other materials produced by enthusiasts associated with the Federation have been the delightful bairnsangs of the three Ayrshire men who disguised themselves as Sandy Thomas Ross; the folk tale and nursery rhymes collected by Norah and William Montgomerie (he died a year ago but should not be forgotten on an occasion such as this.); the simple 24 page account of Burns’s life by James Veitch, a Burns Federation Song Book edited by John McVie and the anthology for younger children, A Scots Handsel, edited by J.K.Annand. I shall say something more about a current collection Burns for Bairns in a moment.

It is fair to say also that the Federation has acted as a catalyst for the introduction of a group of Burns poems into the present Higher Grade course (which I Persist in thinking is a GOOD THING).

Value of these Efforts 
I suggest then that we should be profoundly grateful for the Federations dogged efforts since the 1890s. It may have made mistakes in stressing the competitive motive so heavily and encouraging an elocution approach to the performance of party pieces, but we have to recognize that these features have been very popular with parents and children, and may account in part for the phenomenal survival of interest over the generations. In the face often of official indifference, the Federation has tried to understand and work with the school system. At its best it has maintained a generous vision of Burns as a great writer within a wider Scottish culture. It has seen the importance of the language issue. It has produced valuable materials for use in schools, and it has never forgotten what William Soutar affirmed … that if Scottish literature and language was to come back alive ‘It would come first on a cock horse.’ This is not surprising since many of its most committed members have been Scottish teachers … whom Christopher North, speaking of Burns’s many dominie cronies, characterised as that ‘meritorious and ill-rewarded class of men’.

4. BURNS FOR YOUNGER CHILDREN

I want to say something about Burns in our primary schools … on the assumption that our other contributors today will be dealing mainly with the secondary sector. What I take from the Federation’s best efforts over the years are, as I have mentioned earlier, the value of celebration and festival and simple fun in the education of young people. Burns’s poetry calls out today, particularly in the earlier stages, for music, song and dance; for performance, dramatisation and group involvement.

Burns, as far as I know never wrote consciously for young children, though he occasionally addresses them in his poems. Some of his songs and his smaller pieces, as well as extracts from the major poems, have however the genuine whigmaleerie touch … the humour, rhythm and linguistic playfulness with an occasional disturbing frisson that children love, particularly if there is also opportunity for music.

Burns himself said of one of them:‘Duncan Gray is that kind of light-horse gallop of an air, which precludes sentiment. – The ludicrous is its ruling feature.’

This is what Edwin Morgan has called the ‘madcap, inventive, quicksilver’ side of Burns. It is the manic dimension of his work; we have also to recognize that there is a powerful depressive side as well, and that the one is the obverse of the other. For the purposes of primary education however, we should make the most of this greatly underestimated resource of sheer fun in Burns.

Likely Items 
If we are setting out to choose Burns material for primary purposes, likely items include:Up in the Morning Early, Wee Willie Gray, Hey ca thro, We’re a Noddin, O Whistle and I’ll Come to ye my Lad, Duncan Gray, To A Haggis, To a Louse, Address to the Toothache, O Willie Brew’d a Peck o’ Maut, The Deil’s Awa wi the Exciseman, On Tam the Chapman, Killiecrankie, What will I do gin my Hoggie Die?, Poor Mailie’s Elegy, The Auld Man’s Mare’s Dead, On a Schoolmaster in Cleish Parish, The Kirkudbright Grace.

Nor should we forget the wonderfully lively Scots prose tale of The Marriage of Robin Redbreast and the Wren which according to Burns’s sister Isabella he made for the amusement of the younger members of the family. As a narrative of a desperate journey it’s an early preparation for Tam!

Materials 
How at the moment does a primary teacher get a convenient selection of Burns materials? Even in the bicentenary year the answer is, ‘not easily’. The Federation’s earlier publications, notably the excellent Scots Kist and Scots Handsel, are mostly out of print. It recently revised an anthology Burns for Bairns mainly for the purpose of its recitation competitions. This is quite a comprehensive selection, and crucially does not hesitate to make extracts from longer or more adult pieces.

Extracts 
I mention extracts for primary use because, as you are well aware, in Burns what starts as fun ‘may end in Houghmagandie’ (that is after all the plot line of The Holy Fair)! I first met ‘There was a lad …’ when I was twelve, and for years I did not realise it had a final verse about ‘the bonny lassies lying aspar.’ The school edition had simply dropped it off the end. I am not advocating bowdlerising Burns, simply saying that there are some poems that are eminently accessible in parts to younger pupils, and these opportunities should not be neglected. We should not through any fear of destroying the integrity of works of art hesitate to cull what we want for our pupils.

Burns for Bairns 
Unfortunately, as the title of the recent publication, Burns for Bairns, might suggest, its touch is uncertain: it contains feeble stuff such as The Banks of Nith and The Banks of Devon, and its advice on elocution and delivery is singularly unhelpful (eg. it says of The Gallant Weaver, ‘Treat this poem with a pleasant tone and tune, giving a good final cadence to the last line’). It is a pity that an opportunity has been lost here, particularly since the project was generously sponsored by one Burns Club with the intention of putting copies into all primary schools. There is still therefore place for a well packed primary kit (or Kist!) of Burns materials including selections of prose, background historical resources, tapes of music, a topographical video etc, in other words, a specialised version of SCC’s forthcoming 5-14 Kist. It may be that something of this kind has already been produced in Ayr division. If not, it is worth doing…perhaps by the new unitary authority or the Federation or the ASLS or the Saltire Society or SCCC. If we are in future to give Burns his key place at the centre of our teaching of literature and language from primary upwards, a well produced resource of this type is essential.

5. TEACHING METHODS

The teaching methods suited to presenting Burns in the 5-14 stages are in the main no different from those for any other imaginative writer: it should be possible to accommodate him within the programme for listening, talking, reading and writing, and find also room within Expressive Arts and Environmental Studies. One or two points, however, in no particular order:

i. Fun with Words 
It is worth exploiting every chance for language fun in Burns, particularly the crossing over between Scots and English forms. I remember, many years ago, two 12 year olds who had been learning and singing Duncan Gray coming to me with a painting they had done of the poem. This showed some kind of quadruped offering a bunch of flowers to what looked anatomically vaguely like a woman:

Me: explain please. 
Them: it’s a goat. 
Me: why the flowers? 
Them: it’s in love. 
Me: What’s the point? 
Them: it’s a wooing goat. Ha, ha, the wooing goat.

ii. Gender 
Even with primary children it is worth confronting the issue of Burns’s attitude to women. The song Sic a Wife as Willie had is a typical blend of linguistic nimbleness and grotesquerie. In a sense it is great fun, but is it right to laugh at a deformed woman? What do you think of the girl’s attitude in Whistle and I’ll Come to you my Lad? Write the dialogue between Kate and Tam on his homecoming. There are many opportunities for lively work in topics such as these.

iii. Winter 
In many Primary schools the curriculum rightly retains a quite primitive seasonal cycle. Summer excursions and holidays, autumn, harvest, Halloween, Christmas, Spring and Easter are all worked in somehow to class activities. We should not then devalue the annual January recourse to Burns. There is some fitness in his being established as the poet of the Scottish winter festival. Winter was his favourite season after all, and there are many vivid pictures of it in his poetry that can be extracted and enjoyed, and even sung. For example:

The wintry west extends his blast 
And hail and rain does blaw 
Or the stormy north sends driving forth 
The blinding sleet and snaw. 
Wild-tumbling brown the burn comes down 
And roars frae brae to brae, 
and bird and beast in covert rest 
and pass the heartless day.

This is the first verse of the unpromisingly titled song Winter: a Dirge. It’s good strong visual stuff which intriguingly anticipates Hopkins’s Inversnaid. I suppose it should have been called Winter: a Rant since it goes very well to Burns’s intended tune, MacPherson’s Rant. It can stand on its own, and does not need for our purpose its two following verses of Augustan Deism. Or take the extraordinary first five stanzas of A Winter’s Night describing the snow storm and the animals sheltering. Even the murderous fox wins the farmer’s pity. This latter piece has the added fascination of Scots and English rhymes. Which pronunciation to choose? A vote on it?

iv. Drama, Music and Dance 
There are also in Burns many chances for drama, music and dance, however modest your confidence and skills may be. Pieces such as The Deil’s Awa’ and Willie Brewed a Peck o Maut’ cry out for mime and movement. The Burns Federation, has a useful popular songbook with words and music and also a glossary by David Murison. Some schools now benefit from visiting tutors in traditional music, and children who can play fiddle or chanter. Happily moreover for schools that are not so endowed, there is now a lot of good Burns folk music on tape. I understand for example that Linn Records are releasing this week the first of a series which will cover the whole corpus of Burns’ songs. I had a chance to hear from it an irresistibly rhythmic version of Wee Willie Grayby Rod Paterson and Tony Cuffe. Some though certainly not all of the items in this first CD are likely to be very suitable for primary use. The revival of enthusiasm for country dancing among young folk is also worth exploiting, for Burns himself loved the dance. (‘The plooman laddie dancin’), though it was a cause of contention with his father.

Remember Fun in The Holy Fair:

The third cam up, hap-step-an’-loup 
as licht as onie lambie 
An wi a curchie low did stoup 
As soon as e’er she saw me.

His poems are full of such references and opportunities for ‘mirth and dancing’, and his songs make use of the old dance tunes. I should add that my own first war-time experiences of country dancing in primary school were a total, embarrassing disaster. I still blush to think of them.

v. Audio-visual Media 
There has always been a temptation to present Burns visually. When I started teaching I had one 35mm film strip of Tam o Shanter and one of Chaucer’s Pilgrims; neither was strikingly successful as a visual aid. However having recently fought my way through all the fudge, perfumes, tea trays and engraved crystal, I think I would recommend for any primary teacher a class visit to Alloway. The Tam o Shanter Experience, three-screen presentation in purpose-built auditorium, introduces a very convincing Meg and a less than diabolic Old Nick. Nanny is decent, just: not too abandoned. Her reverend grannie would not have been too shocked! This little show has a nice touch of comic, slightly homely terror which I believe Burns might have appreciated. I don’t think it diminishes the poem at all. In terms of the ‘horrible and aweful’ it is certainly no match for contemporary horror videos, but I am told that many of the primary classes who have already visited it have enjoyed it thoroughly. The recently refurbished Biggin is, for adults at least, a chilling, disturbing place, effectively and simply presented, but eerily empty. In the adjacent museum the new wall displays about Burns’s story and Ayrshire life are of very good quality. All in all, I think this is, with the adjacent brig and kirk, a worthwhile additional resource for primary classes provided they prepare for their visit in advance.

6. CONCLUSION

In this talk I have stated a case for Scottish literature in our schools. I have argued that the time is ripe to place Burns’s work right at the centre of our teaching of literature and language, and within a framework of Scottish studies planned across Primary and Secondary. I have described what I think are the strengths as well as the weaknesses of our traditional handling of Burns in the schools. In so doing I have acknowledged the valuable contribution of the Burns Federation over almost a century. Finally I have offered some thoughts on approaches to Burns at the primary stages. Throughout I have dwelled on the potential for high spirits and simple ‘fun’ in Burns’s work… ‘the nearest friend ye hae’.

Copyright © Jim Alison 1997

Filed Under: Articles Tagged With: Jim Alison, Laverock, Robert Burns, Schools

MACGILLIVRAY, Alan, ‘The Worlds of Iain Banks’

11 September 2021 by Duncan Jones

Laverock 2, 1996 |


If the popularity of a writer is to be gauged by the numbers of his or her works sitting on the shelves of the reputable bookshops, selling at the full retail price, and not marked down in Bargain Books, then Iain Banks is undoubtedly way up there near the top of the premier division of current authors. All of his novels are currently in print in either hardback or paperback editions, and show no sign of being relegated to the discount displays. For his publishers, he is clearly a big money-spinner; and his circle of readers shows every sign of being on the steady increase. There is no doubt that Iain Banks is the most successful writer currently active on the Scottish literary scene.

And ‘active’ is certainly an appropriate word to apply to Iain Banks. His writing career, measured in terms of publishing success is as yet no more than eleven years old. Yet in that short time he has published thirteen full-length novels as well as a novella and a collection of short stories. No other Scottish writer aiming beyond the pulp fiction market begins to approach that intensity of output.

Both of these qualities carry their built-in dangers for the aspiring critic of the writer exhibiting them. Popularity with a wide circle of readers is not the best qualification for securing the approval of literary critics and academics, the arbiters of literary reputations. Their seal of approval has been pre-empted by reactions of the reader: their praise becomes redundant, while their criticism savours of sour grapes. Likewise, bulk of output is intimidating to the literary analyst. Like the small birds grooming the rhinoceros, it is easiest for the critic to concentrate on particular areas and fail to grasp the whole picture, to select one or two particular books as being representative or one aspect of the writer’s achievement as being manageable within the confines of the small article or review.

This has been the pattern of treatment of Iain Banks so far. The first decision of the commentator has invariably been to ignore large areas of Iain Banks’ science fiction and concentrate on what is rather dubiously called his ‘mainstream’ fiction. That conveniently gets rid of five large novels and a novella. The second decision has been to consider Banks primarily as the shock/horror writer of The Wasp Factory and to interpret his later writing in the light of that sensational debut. The third decision has usually been to think of Banks in terms of post-modernism and literary game-playing, and to elevate these elements above others that are indubitably there and clearly visible. The most excusable decision, given the nature of literature courses, has been to focus on only one novel and use it as the sole exemplar for discussing Banks as a novelist. I have to plead guilty to the first and last of these charges, in that I have tended to teach Iain Banks in university courses primarily as revealed in the novel The Bridge, and omitting any detailed reference to the science fiction. So I regard this article as an opportunity to purge some of the guilt and try to give a more balanced and wide-ranging view of a writer whom I regard as the most consistently inventive, imaginative and exciting figure on the contemporary literary scene, and I’m not thinking in simply Scottish or British terms. However, since the readers’ needs are to have recommendations of texts that they would consider placing before senior pupils, I shall try also to mediate the undoubted complexity and adult challenge of Banks’ work and come up with specific novels to consider for classroom and examination purposes.

My title, The Worlds of Iain Banks, is intended to focus on what would certainly be agreed on as Banks’ most visible quality as a writer: his variety of subject-matter and style. The word ‘worlds’ carries associations of other worlds than the one real and mundane world that we inhabit, associations of fantasy and invention and the writer as omnipotent creator. A rapid survey of Banks’ novels in terms of their action and setting will reveal his imaginative diversity as a useful starting-point and may also be useful for those readers who are not familiar with the range already encompassed by Banks.

While reading the following discussion, it would be useful to keep referring to the accompanying bibliography listing Banks’ published works. This list is constantly in danger of going out of date, and readers should note the most recent novel, Whit (1995), which arrived on the bookshop display shelves too late for treatment here.

The first novel that Banks published was The Wasp Factory. It was, he has said, not the first novel he wrote but was the first one that he revised. Any revision that he made was certainly not in the direction of accommodating the story to the normal conventions of good taste. With The Wasp Factory, Banks clobbered the reading public with a pyrotechnic display of humorous sadism and over-the-top bad taste. The setting is Scotland, with a specific location in the Moray Firth area, inspired by Banks’s own working experience at Nigg Bay in Easter Ross. Yet it is a surrealistic setting, an island on the sandy coast with the large crumbling house of an old-established family, the Cauldhames, where a strange death-obsessed teenager, Francis Leslie Cauldhame, lives with his eccentric recluse of a father. It is the fantasies of Francis allied to the approaching menace of his brother’s return home after escaping from an asylum, culminating in Francis’s discovery of his real identity, that constitute the action of this weird novel. Banks and his publisher now include in the paperback edition a selection of the appalled reviews that greeted the book on its first appearance. ‘If a nastier, more vicious or distasteful novel appears this spring, I shall be surprised. But there is unlikely to be a better one either’ (Mail on Sunday). Readers who don’t already know The Wasp Factory may be wondering what this has to do with teaching English as they know it. Well, they have to start by reading the novel – I guarantee they will either love it or loathe it; given their sophisticated awareness of the literary tradition, the latter is more likely. They will laugh more than they vomit. School pupils, if they have discovered The Wasp Factory, have already made up their minds about it. They love it. Reading it in class and giving it to them to take home to their parents will, however, be a recipe for instant trouble.

The classroom problem raised by Banks’s next novel, Walking on Glass, is not primarily the question of good taste, unless you happen to draw the line at sibling incest. Instead, it presents a reading problem: what is the connection between the three narratives of the novel, two of which inhabit London of the 1980s, and one of which presents a Gothic fantasy castle on a dying planet after a disastrous war? The connections are there, but the reader has to work to find them, the first of many examples of how Banks likes to play games with his readers, setting them puzzles and expecting them to demonstrate a high level of textual awareness.

It is Banks’s third novel, The Bridge, which carries this textual game-playing to its greatest heights so far. The action is divided between, on the one hand, an artificial world, the Bridge, which is a vastly expanded Forth Rail Bridge, supporting a whole society on its pillars and joining the City and the Kingdom across a great sea, and, on the other hand, the reality of Scotland, more specifically Edinburgh, between the late Sixties and the middle Eighties. Banks has drawn inspiration from Alasdair Gray’s Lanarkin having two protagonists who are in fact the same person in different states: Orr, which is the character’s alternative name while he is in a coma in hospital and mentally inhabiting the Bridge World, and Alexander, or Sandy, Lennox, who is a civil engineer living his life in modern Scotland. Banks’s main game with the reader is to keep Lennox’s name concealed and only revealed in two textual clues, requiring for their unravelling a knowledge of both modern Russian history and contemporary rock music. Bridge is the name of the game, but also the game of the name.

So far, with these three early novels, two main subject areas of Banks’s writing seem to have been delineated: the contemporary world, particularly Scotland, which may, however, take on surrealistic aspects, and a fantasy world using both traditional and technological features. Banks’s next published novel was the first of his explicitly science fiction works, (although it was written earlier than some of the novels already mentioned), Consider Phlebas, a title containing an impressively abstruse literary allusion (to T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland) that seems to have little to do with the novel it adorns. In this novel Banks employs the settings and situation that are the basis for his science fiction work in a whole group of fictions, including the novella The State of the Art.

Banks creates the usual space opera fittings of a great galactic system of humanoid planetary civilisations, with one superior system that has designs on controlling the whole galaxy. However, unlike the usual scenario as, for instance, in Star Wars, the individual planet civilisations are conceived of as being cruel, vicious, reactionary and aggressive, whereas the superior system, known as The Culture, is benevolent, technologically highly advanced, libertarian rather than authoritarian, even communistic and left-wing rather than capitalistic. Iain Banks has said that he designed the Culture with the deliberate intention of annoying and challenging the prevailing American science fiction conventions of right-wing simplistic reactionary political systems being seen as the desirable norm. Here, as in his other fiction, Banks is not concealing his political leanings. Just as in Walking on Glass and The Bridge Banks lambasts the Conservative Government of Mrs Thatcher and its policies, so in Consider Phlebas, The Player of Games and Use of Weapons, he presents unflattering pictures of societies that ignore the plight of the weak and poor, that are prey to superstitious ideologies, that solve problems by violence and war. He contrasts them unfavourably with a Culture that gives material and social advantage to all its citizens by harnessing the inexhaustible resources of the universe through a use of the limitless artificial intelligence of computer networks and robot drones. Cushioned by their immense technology, the inhabitants of the Culture have ample time for enjoying consciousness-enhancing drugs, wild parties and ingenious games, free love, intellectual conversation and inter-stellar travel. Their relationships with other galactic powers are in the hands of shadowy departments called Contact and Special Circumstances, and it is the agents of these euphemistically-named groups who are Banks’ chief characters. At the top level, they are either super-intelligent Minds in the physical form of free-flying robot drones or immensely sophisticated and intelligent women. These agents rarely interact directly with the representatives of the lesser breeds, but hire other agents, often from outside the Culture, usually men with the right physical and psychological attributes, often morally flawed but responsive to the right kind of persuasion, a mixture of logic, idealism, sex and material reward. We are not a million parsecs from James Bond or the heroes of John Le Carré and Len Deighton.

On a superficial level, this might not add up to a fiction that engages the critical faculties too deeply. Yet, because Banks has in a way turned the political convention of pulp science fiction inside-out, there are some interesting paradoxes visible in the novels, paradoxes that have their counterparts in Banks’s mainstream fiction. The first of these has to do with the ethics of interfering in other political systems at all. It may be an act of beneficence to reform another civilisation, but because the Culture is by self-definition non-interventionalist and libertarian, the acts of intervening to reform and upgrade other civilisations must be invisible to the other side: hence the use of intermediary agents and of strategies that appear to be either chance occurrences or inspired by the most liberal faction in the targeted civilisation. The second has to do with the Culture itself and its total dependence on the intelligence and skills of non-human intelligences. Can the human Culture retain control over its servants, and do the inhabitants of the Culture retain their real humanity if struggle and challenge and competition are made irrelevant? Hence, while the Culture justifies its intervention in the affairs of other societies on humane moral grounds, it is perpetually beset by the fear that it may be acting as an anti-human force in the evolution of the species.

Of course, there is nothing particularly new about these arguments, either in ‘quote’ serious fiction or in science fiction. Star Trekkies of long standing like myself have heard many such discussions between Mr Spock and Dr McCoy as the Starship Enterprise encounters yet another set of aliens. One of Banks’s sources is quite clear. In Consider Phlebas, the resemblances of the Culture’s opponents, the Idiran Empire, to the Klingons in Star Trek are very strong, and the Enterprise’s mission to seek out new civilisations is obviously one of the Culture’s concerns, with the understood intention of doing good unto them with the ‘technology of compassion’.

What I have been saying has been relevant to the science fiction published up to 1991. Since The Bridge in 1986, Banks has followed the practice of publishing a science fiction alternately with a mainstream novel. So I shall now turn to the four novels other than science fiction that Banks has published since 1987 (excluding the most recent, Whit). Of these four, three have Scottish settings either wholly or in part, and I shall consider them together. The fourth is Canal Dreams, in which the protagonist, a Japanese woman musician, a cellist of international reputation, is trapped on a ship held hostage on a lake in the Panama Canal during a revolution, and subjected to rape amid the murder of her other companions. The climax of the book deals with her gruesome and apocalyptic revenge on her abusers. There is no doubt Banks was catching the trend for exploitative fiction on the rape revenge theme. What elevates the novel in tone is the examination of Hisako Onoda’s psychology and past through the use of flashback and dreams. So far, however, Canal Dreams remains rather isolated of its kind within Banks’s fiction.

The three novels, Espedair Street, The Crow Road and Complicity all have Scotland as their setting, either wholly or in part. Espedair Street, as the title suggests, is focused for much of the action on Paisley and Glasgow (Espedair Street is a real street in Paisley). The novel is to a significant extent the autobiography of a rock musician, Danny Weir, known as Weird after the way his name used to appear on the class register – Weir, D. Born and brought up in poor circumstances in Ferguslie Park, Danny finds fame and fortune as songwriter and performer with a local rock group, Frozen Gold, who make it big on the international circuit. The novel gives us Danny’s recollections of his career and his disillusionment with the money and extravagant life-style, culminating in his decision to put it finally behind him and seek out a girl-friend of earlier years now living in the West Highlands, a girl whom he remembered meeting in Espedair Street on the day musical success arrived to take him away from his old life for ever. After The Wasp Factory, Walking on Glassand The Bridge, Espedair Street is on the surface a return to a more natural and accessible fiction style and pattern.

Similarly, The Crow Road appears to be a more conventional narrative. Again it concerns the life and feelings of a young man, a Glasgow University student, Prentice McHoan, who comes from a large West Highland family, who have made their money from a glass-making business and live in a large country house overlooking a sea-loch. This is reminiscent of Francis Cauldhame in The Wasp Factory, but there the resemblance ends. Iain Banks has said about The Crow Road: ‘Well, it’s about 147,000 words at the last count, but seriously, it’s about Death, Sex, Faith, cars, Scotland and drink.’ Banks, of course is being playful, like so many authors when faced with an interviewer. All of these things figure in the novel, but what The Crow Road is certainly about is the set of circumstances over a couple of generations that has led to a disappearance and possible murder, in fact two murders. As the title suggests, Glasgow figures in the narrative but not significantly: the real Crow Road is visited, along with other Glasgow locations, but the title also implies the road to death in traditional lore. Like Espedair Street this is a straightforward novel in structure, using flashbacks to the preceding generation and the lives of Prentice McHoan’s father and uncles and aunts. And, along with The Bridge and Espedair Street, The Crow Road is a novel that English teachers might consider strongly as recommended reading matter for senior pupils in the context of the Review of Personal Reading. I shall return to these three novels later.

It is when we come up to Banks’s more recent mainstream novel, Complicity, that the doubts felt by readers and critics about The Wasp Factory come to the surface again. Banks has said that, if people were offended by the latter, then they will be even more outraged by Complicity. Not only does it describe in vivid detail a number of sadistic murders and attacks on prominent members of the Establishment, it is the most specifically political of Banks’s novels dealing with contemporary issues and events from an outspokenly anti-Tory viewpoint. An investigative journalist on an Edinburgh newspaper called ‘The Caledonian’ gains information about a major Government cover-up from a mysterious anonymous source and, in following it up, becomes involved personally and suspected of the murders being carried out by the Radical Revenger, who acts like the Four Just Men in the old Edgar Wallace stories, who avenged social injustices in a ruthless way. Those readers who are not offended by the strong political propagandist tone, the acts of cruelty and the sexual passages may take exception to the personal habits of Cameron Colley as he snorts cocaine and smokes and drinks excessively – just your average ‘Scotsman’ reporter, in fact. The tone of the novel is so strong that I feel that somehow Banks has lost a degree of control, and allowed his anger and pessimism to actually boil over, to the detriment of artistic success. All that apart, Complicity is a powerful and intriguing mystery, with authentic Scottish settings and important contemporary concerns like Trident and the Gulf War. Teachers would be well advised, however, to affix a parents’ and councillors’ health warning to their copies.

Iain Banks’s two most recent science fiction novels have moved away from the Culture theme of the earlier ones. Against a Dark Background is a quest and pursuit novel in a picaresque vein. Sharrow, another of Banks’ sophisticated and aristocratic women characters, is being hunted by the members of a violent fundamentalist religious cult and the only way to save herself is to find a fabulously powerful ancient weapon, the Lazy Gun, and trade it for her life. The dual intention of keeping ahead of her pursuers and finding the Lazy Gun takes Sharrow through a series of picaresque adventures within a single planetary system, and also requires her to investigate her own past to find out the reasons why this is happening to her. The next science fiction novel, still moderately warm from the press, Feersum Endjinn, brings together a number of very large themes in a staggeringly complex plot structure. Indeed, the plot of the novel might be seen as one of the fearsome engines of the title. Banks uses the well-known traditional theme of the impending global catastrophe, called the Encroachment in the story, a thickening cloud in space that is dimming the sun and bringing about a new Ice Age. One of the focuses of the novel is on the social and political efforts by the civilisation of the time to meet this challenge by rediscovering the technology of the great dead civilisation whose remains they inhabit. The most obvious relic of this past civilisation is a great castle, so massive that it stretches above the clouds and whole societies live in single rooms on its many levels. The discovery of the purpose of this edifice is one of the mysteries of the novel. The other theme that Banks plays with imaginatively is the currently fashionable concern with Virtual Reality. Banks goes further than William Gibson in his cyberpunk stories of the computer matrix, and creates the alternative reality of the Crypt in which the individual consciousnesses of the dead are preserved, into which characters must go to find some of the answers they seek, and out of which comes a possible saviour for the crisis facing humanity. Feersum Endjinn is not the longest of Banks’s science fiction novels, but it is certainly the most complex and baffling, with its title carrying more than one interpretation.

So there is the range of the achievement of Iain Banks. Merely keeping up with the reading is a major task. In Wallace and Stevenson’s survey of the Scottish Novel since the Seventies, the chapter on Banks is entitled ‘Iain Banks and the Fiction Factory’. This recognises the prolific output, but unfairly carries an academic criticism: can such a fertile writer really be any good, or is quality being sacrificed to quantity? Maybe Banks is suffering from the same sort of criticism that has been levelled at Robert Louis Stevenson, that a seemingly inexhaustible output of good stories is in some way a literary weakness. Only time will decide how enduring Banks’s fictions are and what place he will have in the Scottish literary tradition.

Banks might be rather scornful of the idea that he inhabits a Scottish tradition; he has even expressed some doubts about the identity of Scottish Literature itself. Well, from a Stirling University graduate of the early 1970s, perhaps that is an understandable error. If he had passed more recently through that university, he would be more confident on the subject. This is no place for a lengthy disquisition on the Scottish qualities of Banks’s writing. No one who reads the novels that are set wholly or partly in Scotland can doubt that here is a writer who is deeply involved with his country, who loves its landscapes and its cities, who feels strongly about the social and political state of Scotland, and sees it constantly as a valid society subjected to intrusive and unjustifiable pressures from outside. In all these novels Banks is accurate and vivid in his presentation of Scottish idiomatic speech from different classes and areas; and in The Bridge he brings off a literary tour de force in creating the figure of the Glasgow barbarian mercenary whose trilogy of adventures both sends up the Swords and Sorcery genre and allegorises the Scottish working-class standpoint vis-a-vis Southern culture, personified as a little birdlike familiar perched on his shoulder and lecturing him in a posh voice:

… Drive ye daft, so it would. I cany get the wee basturd aff ma showlder niythir on account of its got these claws inside me, biride in ma flesh so they are. Their no soar untill I try takin the thing aff, but soar enuoph then alright … Enyway, Ive dun alright sinse it took up with me, so maybay its lucky after oll … like I say, Ive dun alright sinse it took up with me an its taut me a load a new wurds an that, so am a bit mair ejucatit these days ken … Wish it didnae shite doon ma bak thow.

The world of Banks’s mainstream fiction, with the exceptions of Walking on Glass and Canal Dreams, is very definitely a Scottish world, drawing from the documentary realism of actual places, down to the level of real streets, pubs and natural features and from the generalised aspects of the Scottish scene, like the hills and lochs, beaches and lairds’ houses, and the texture of life in Scotland in the seventies and eighties.

It would be straining things too far to try to find a specifically Scottish quality in Banks’s science fiction. It is tempting to think of his wish to turn the SF conventions around and look at them from another angle as being in some way a Scottish literary characteristic, linking Banks with the big names such as Hogg and Galt, with their daring narrative techniques and ironic perspectives. However, the truth is probably the obvious one that Banks is more directly influenced by the modern European and American innovators in fiction, like Umberto Eco, Thomas Pynchon and Gunter Grass, and the major science fiction names like Isaac Asimov and Arthur Clarke. The world of Banks’s science fiction is a collection of recognisable elements, with its constituent parts drawn from the whole genre of contemporary fiction and from film and television. And so many elements too within the one novel. Perhaps Banks’s most significant characteristic as a writer is his astounding generosity as a provider of fantasies and dreams. Into a single plot, he pours enough inventiveness and imagination to create a dozen novels. The texture of his fiction is amazingly rich: The Bridge, for example, is running over with dreams experienced and invented by the chief character, with surrealist images of life on the Bridge, with scenes and episodes of violence and desolation from his experiences beyond the Bridge; all within a vividly and richly realised world of the Bridge, all this inhabiting the mind of the character Lennox, who is in a coma and temporarily detached from his equally fully created life in Scotland in the Seventies and Eighties, with its recognisable frame of reference based on the interests of a young man entering and enjoying the developing yuppie life-style of the times. To pick up every reference is an impossibility, even for those readers who have lived through the same times in more or less the same locations. References to books and, films, to rock music, to places and personalities, crowd in upon you exhilaratingly, and as you read you are aware that in this fictional stream that you are navigating there are fish swimming past you that you ought to be able to identify. Banks’s fictional world is, after all, a postmodernist world. He is using the vast resources of the literary and the popular cultures as stores to plunder at will in order to entertain the sophisticated readers with teasing puzzles, to create a resonating environment of familiar and half-familiar references, which intensify the readers’ satisfaction the more that they can follow Banks into his Castle of Cultural Bequests. The Wasp Factory becomes a multi-layered text once you recognise what Banks is doing with both the Swords and Sorcery fantasy genre with its offshoot, the Dungeons and Dragons game cult, and the Scottish father/son literary cliché. Walking on Glass makes more sense as a narrative when you see the hidden cyclical narrative pattern as well as its visible structure of three concurrent stories: the influences of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast, of Borges’s vision of the great library as a world in itself, and the folklore elements of the game to be won or the riddle to be answered as a test, all these lie behind the concept of the dual Castle Doors or Castle of Bequest created as the fantasy world of Ajayi and Quiss.

It is in The Bridge, which Banks has described as his own favourite novel, that the post-modernist tone is strongest. You are likely to encounter references to classical mythology side by side with Wellsian science fantasy, to the various modes of popular music of the Seventies and Eighties, to Shelley’s Ozymandias and to Eliot’s Waste Land; quotations from Chabrol’s film Le Boucher and from Planet of the Apes, from Shakespeare and General Douglas MacArthur; the symbolic use of Scottish place names and historical references; and so on. All adding up to a complex text, or set of texts, that almost needs the apparatus of a Glossary of Plagiarisms like its great counterpart in 1980s Scottish fiction, Alasdair Gray’s Lanark. The Bridge is certainly a difficult novel to read, but the more you engage with it, the more satisfying it becomes.

In more straightforward ways, Espedair Street and The Crow Road move through and within the literary and popular traditions. For those knowledgeable in the field of contemporary rock music, Espedair Street is full of references to and echoes of bands and musicians that have figured in the charts of the Seventies and Eighties, recalling the sustained use of the same popular culture in The Bridge. Equally there is an evocative use of Scottish places and landscapes. Danny Weir’s autobiography is both ‘bildungsroman’, the story of a developing personality, and Confessions, the self-revelation and redemption of a guilty being, echoing in a modern spirit and tone the concerns of Scottish writers like Hogg and George MacDonald, though Banks would deny such influences. The Crow Roadowes its debt to the family saga genre, though fortunately avoiding its trilogy format; and to the first-person account of a young man’s search for love, sex and all that in a kind of Lucky Jim tone set at the very start with the arousing opening sentence: ‘It was the day my grandmother exploded.’ In their different ways these two novels, along with The Bridge, are accessible to the teenage reader, although teachers will wish to read them themselves first before recommending them as Personal Reading texts. In a wider sense, of course, all pupils should be aware of one of the most successful writers of modern Scotland.

Two final points about Iain Banks and his fictional worlds. From his comments in interview and passing references in some novels, one can recognise a strong anti-religious attitude. Banks’s scientific and technological leanings lead him to dismiss religion and beliefs in greater powers than the human and natural as superstition that can positively harm human health. Both in his mainstream and science fiction, religion is presented unsympathetically. (To an extent, this can be seen in his most recent novel, Whit.) Yet this does not lead him into a glowing endorsement of science and technology as saviours of humanity. There are one or two results of this that come through strongly in Banks’s writing. The first is a pervading sense of pessimism in the face of human cruelty and injustice. From The Wasp Factory through Walking on Glass and Canal Dreams to Complicity, there are extended statements of despair and nihilism as Banks’ characters look into the heart of darkness. One of the most recent is at the end of Complicity (page 310):

But in those moments of blackness you stood there, as though you yourself were made of stone like the stunted, buried buildings around you, and for all your educated cynicism, for all your late-twentieth-century materialist Western maleness and your fierce despisal of all things superstitious, you felt a touch of true and absolute terror, a consummately feral dread of the dark; a fear rooted somewhere before your species had truly become human and came to know itself, and in that primaeval mirror of the soul, that shaft of self-conscious understanding which sounded both the depths of your collective history and your own individual being, you glimpsed – during that extended, petrified moment – something that was you and was not you, was a threat and not a threat, an enemy and not an enemy, but possessed of a final, expediently functional indifference more horrifying than evil.

Against this, all that the characters can do is drink more malt whisky, play the rock music more loudly, snort some more cocaine. To some degree, Iain Banks is still an unreconstructed hippie from the Seventies.

Yet it is not by any means all gloom in Banks’s fiction. What there has not been space to develop, since it could make a complete study in itself, is the scintillating range of Banks’s humour and ludic inventiveness. Jokes in abundance, constant playing upon words and ideas, puzzles and riddles for the reader, the creation and description of games of all kinds, good humour and black comedy, even sick humour: all these and more enliven a Banks novel. More than that, after the pessimistic endings of his earlier novels, there is a lightening of the vision. The Bridge has an ambiguous, but perhaps optimistic ending. Espedair Street and The Crow Road bring their heroes to moments of epiphany within a natural Scottish setting. Complicity, despite what I have quoted earlier, leaves Cameron Colley nursing his cancer and contemplating Edinburgh in a mood of mixed optimism and laughing defiance. ‘What the fuck. Screw the world, bugger reality.’ The most recent science fiction novels, Against a Dark Background and Feersum Endjinn, have happy endings though on very different scales. In the former, Sharrow is free of her pursuers and, though bereft of all her friends and family, can make a new way in a dangerous world. In the latter, the novel’s anti-hero, Bascule the Rascal, writing in his typewriter keyboard phonetic style, sees a major shift for the better, which, in a way, might be taken as an allegory of Banks’s view of how human progress can be made – little by little, using all the resources of the fearsome engine of science and technology, and clinging to hope while almost imperceptible gains are made.

Thi sun shon down, thi moon did likewise, thi planits continyood on ther alotid pafs, but it woz like thi big ole nasty Encroachment had gon in2 revers, however unlikely that mite sound 
     It woz sum time b4 thi astronimers spotid whot woz reely happinin & it woz a evin longir time b4 they convinsd themselves it woz tru, but it woz & it is & now we no xactly whot thi bags ov thi Diaspora left us wif 2 get us outa trubil, & itz a feersum endjinn indeed. 
     Thi sun shines a teeny bit strongir evry day, & tho itil b a long time b4 nybody can c it wif thi naykid I, thi starz ½ moovd. 
     Thi End.’

(Feersum Endjinn p.279)


See the ASLS Scotnote on three novels of Iain Banks: The Wasp Factory, The Crow Road and Whit

PUBLISHED FICTION

  • The Wasp Factory – 1984
  • Walking on Glass – 1985
  • The Bridge – 1986
  • Consider Phlebas (as Iain M. Banks) – 1987
  • Espedair Street – 1987
  • The Player of Games (as Iain M. Banks) – 1988
  • Canal Dreams – 1989
  • Use of Weapons (as Iain M. Banks) – 1990
  • The State of the Art (as Iain M. Banks) – 1991
  • The Crow Road – 1992
  • Against a Dark Background (as Iain M. Banks) – 1993
  • Complicity – 1993
  • Feersum Endjinn (as Iain M. Banks) – 1994
  • Whit – 1995
  • Excession (as Iain M. Banks) – 1996
  • A Song of Stone – 1997
  • Inversions (as Iain M. Banks) – 1998
  • The Business – 1999
  • Look to Windward (as Iain M. Banks) – 2000
  • Dead Air – 2002
  • The Algebraist (as Iain M. Banks) – 2004
  • The Steep Approach to Garbadale – 2007
  • Matter (as Iain M. Banks) – 2008
  • Transition – 2009
  • Surface Detail (as Iain M. Banks) – 2010
  • Stonemouth – 2012
  • The Hydrogen Sonata (as Iain M. Banks) – 2012
  • The Quarry – 2013

Copyright © Alan MacGillivray 1996

Filed Under: Articles Tagged With: Alan MacGillivray, Iain Banks, Laverock

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

11 September 2021 by Duncan Jones

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Copyright © Margery Palmer McCulloch 1992

Filed Under: Articles Tagged With: Laverock, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Margery Palmer McCulloch, Neil Gunn

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

11 September 2021 by Duncan Jones

Laverock 3, 1997

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Prose

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Poetry

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

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


BIBLIOGRAPHY

General Works

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

Prose

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

Poetry

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

Note also the following collections of verse:

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

Copyright © Donald E. Meek 1997

Filed Under: Articles Tagged With: Donald E. Meek, Gaelic, Laverock

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

11 September 2021 by Duncan Jones

Laverock 3, 1997 |


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is the lesson Isabel does learn.


Suggestions for further reading

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

Copyright © Isobel Murray 1997

Filed Under: Articles Tagged With: Isobel Murray, Jessie Kesson, Laverock

MURRAY, Isobel, ‘Robin Jenkins’ Fiction’

11 September 2021 by Duncan Jones

Laverock 2, 1996 |


Robin Jenkins was thirty-eight when he published his first novel, So Gaily Sings The Lark in 1950. He was teaching in a rough area of Glasgow’s east end, the third major setting for his own life and his subsequent novels. The first setting was Flemington, near Cambuslang in Lanarkshire, where he was born in 1912 and brought up in a working-class environment by a widowed mother in straitened circumstances. Flemington was a small mining village where ‘pit bings rose like volcanoes out of fields and woods,’ and poverty and deprivation were commonplace. Jenkins himself is very clear that the early years are crucially formative for any novelist:

A novelist whose purpose is the portrayal of character writes with confidence and insight about the people he knows instinctively, those he was born and brought up amongst. As a child he (or she) stores up, unconsciously, a reservoir of knowledge of human nature, upon which he draws for the rest of his life. When he grows up he adds to that knowledge, from observation and thought, but whatever inspirations he may have will come from his store of childhood memories.

Many of his novels, including Happy for the Child and the football saga The Thistle and the Grail, are set in Lanarkshire, in the depressed central belt of Scotland, and some, including A Very Scotch Affair and Guests of War, are set in part in a very squalid Glasgow.

But one other milieu was to have a great and determining effect on his fiction. Between the Lanarkshire of the Depression and the city slum school of the late Forties came the war. Jenkins’ detestation of cruelty and inhumanity had early led to his becoming a convinced pacifist, and he was eventually accepted as a conscientious objector on condition that he went into forestry or agriculture. From 1940 to 1946 the future novelist worked for the Forestry Commission in Argyll, an outstandingly beautiful part of Scotland. Six years in the forests of Argyll made an indelible impact on the man and his work, as is evident to any reader of The Cone-Gatherers, for example: it is no accident that he left Glasgow in 1955 for a post at Dunoon Grammar School. Although his books were beginning to attract attention and his professional prospects in Glasgow looked good, ‘I decided to everybody’s surprise that I would come down to Dunoon and teach in a humble assistant’s job because I wanted a place that had a beautiful background where I could get on with my writing.’ Although he was to spend a lot of time abroad, in Afghanistan, Borneo and Spain, he put down roots in Argyll, and his home is still on a hillside outside Dunoon, with breathtaking views of the Firth of Clyde. And many novels reflect the forestry setting and experience in particular, or a passionate appreciation of natural beauty in general.

The vivid contrasts of industrial poverty and deprivation with radiant pastoral beauty so common and so striking in the novels are thus based on profound personal experience. They seem to have become as central to Jenkins’ imagination as similar contrasts did for Edwin Muir; the paradisal Orcadian island of Wyre in his early childhood, the hellish slums of Glasgow in his tormented adolescence, becoming powerful symbols of innocence and perversion. In Jenkins’ case, except in the books based on his time abroad, these contrasted pictures, first underlined in Guests of War and The Changeling, remain crucial in the later novels too: a boy traumatised by witnessing his father’s murder of his mother may be healed by love on a beautiful Hebridean island in A love Of Innocence: the eponymous Fergus Lamont dreams of returning to the slums of his native Gantock mysteriously able to redeem the people because of the purifying effect of his ten years with Kirstie on an impoverished island.

Indignation at the maiming effects of poverty was clearly a large part of the impetus which led Jenkins to write. But this does not emerge in a political approach to writing; rather an individually moral one. In his personal quest for truth, justice, goodness and love, he has tended to be independent and even idiosyncratic on moral, political and religious issues. Often it is as if the author tacitly and unobtrusively provides a court in which, prosecutor and defender, he balances rigorous moral investigation, and sometimes condemnation, with a persuasive account of mitigating circumstances. Passionate atheist though he is, in his novels Jenkins more than most novelists usurps the traditional functions of God. The irony which is a major weapon here can easily be missed or misunderstood.

As a teenager he sampled many churches before resolutely embracing atheism. He empathised with children unfairly punished at school, and has continued to oppose cruelty and brutal force. Personal conviction more than any party line led to his own stand as a conscientious objector. Before that, for a time in the late Thirties, although clearly he was never one of nature’s joiners, Jenkins belonged to the Independent Labour Party, and became a branch secretary. But he described it in 1985 with a rueful chuckle:‘I was in the ILP, for instance, before the War, and the ILP must be the purest political party that ever existed. So pure that they just were blown away in the end by this wicked world! We thought that we could show men a better way! But we found not.’

He usefully summed up his individual belief and novelistic practice:

‘I don’t see myself as a political person. I see myself as a moralist. I judge all political issues from a moral point of view. And my books, I’m pretty sure, are sometimes over-steeped in morality.’

And he said to me in September 1988, at the launch of the new edition of Guests of War at Glasgow City Chambers: ‘It’s a bit of a martyrdom seeing life in moral terms all the time.’

It is tempting but dangerous to make generalisations about Jenkins’ early treatments of urban slum and country life, of the poverty and deprivation that maim and deform people, and the increasing importance in the novels of some quasi-Wordsworthian experience of love or nature or both, that heals and reforms. Another temptation to generalise comes when we see how often Jenkins seems to suggest that it is almost as though happiness, innocence and goodness all depend on a less than 20/20 adult vision of the world. We think of Calum in The Cone-Gatherers, Sammy McShelvie in Guests of War, Fergus Lamont’s partner Kirstie. But I would stress that what is most interesting is not generalisations, but always the specific, particular novel, how contrasts are introduced and used, the subtleties of character, the nuances of particular points of view.

Happy for the Child is a claustrophobic novel, centring on two boys in very different kinds of poverty, narrow, grim, and realistic in a heightened way. The Cone-Gatherers is a tragic fable of human evil. Guests of War is a comic tour de force about the evacuation of Glasgow slum children to a wealthy Borders town, as well as a moving study of its central character, Bell McShelvie, and The Changeling begins somewhere near farce and ends in tragedy.

Happy for the Child is set entirely in Jenkins’ native Lanarkshire, unrelieved by any contrastingly beautiful scenes. For John Stirling, the only real escape from the mean circumstances of his life is the traditional Scots escape via education. John is exceptionally intelligent — a model of the traditional ‘lad o’ pairts’ — and he has every chance of succeeding at the Academy where his brains have won him a place, unless he is shamed out of the school, as he feels sure he will be, if his classmates ever learn that his mother earns her pitifully small living by washing and scrubbing. John consciously indulges his sensitivity on this issue, repeatedly making his mother suffer for his shame, and Jenkins makes it clear that John understands the pain he inflicts, and deserves condemnation for it. Jenkins’ children are quite as capable of wrongdoing as his adults, and he does not spare them.

The other unhappy child, the demonic counterpart to John Stirling, is Sam Gourlay. We meet him first through John’s gloating thoughts: one of the less endearing aspects of most of the boys in the book is the way they find comfort — even at times delight — in considering the plight of those in worse circumstances than their own. So John comforts himself by comparing his lot with Sam’s. The description of the Gourlay family, being the perception of an unsympathetic and somewhat hostile small boy, has added bite:

Gourlay was a dunce thrashed every day by his teachers for stupidity or insolence … Gourlay’s mother was a huge cruel desperate woman who hammered and starved him. His father, small, sleekit, idle, wore the same dirty green muffler always and, jouking down as if it was a joke, picked fagends off the street. His sister Jeanie, a specky white-faced pimply girl with teeth missing and with great red blotchy hands like docken leaves, worked in the laundry. Gourlay had already been at court several times, for stealing, for doing damage, for setting squibs off in the street; it was said he was on his last chance, next time he would be sent to a reformatory.

We meet Gourlay in person a few pages later, engaged in a characteristic activity with a companion. They are busily impaling earwigs on a fence rail with pins.

It is Sam’s father who articulates the horrors of their life: 

‘Will I tell you, elder, why I don’t believe in hell? Because I’m convinced it’s beyond the ingenuity of even the Almighty to think up worse punishments than these. We breathe and we’re in hell. Listen.’ 
     They heard Jeanie’s sobbing, a bus on the street outside, and in the house thuds and screams from the thudder.

And the unemployed Gourlay’s experience of emptiness, unhappiness and boredom is memorably conveyed:

He turned and looked at the clock. The thought of the long cold eternity till bedtime distracted him. Little diversions such as putting on his jacket, winding his green muffler closer round his neck, blowing his nose into the sink, investigating in the coal bunker, keeking out of the window at winter, rifting in the middle of the floor, turning up the gas and having to lower it again because of its snake-like hiss and his wife’s she-bear’s snarl, pokering the last few embers, searching four times through all his pockets: all these passed a terrifyingly short time. When he glanced at the clock again it was just half-past seven. 
     He sat down by the fire, and himself underwent a slow extinguishing.

One reason for the peculiar vividness and success of Happy for the Child is its closeness to the author’s own experience. The author agrees that the situation of John Stirling is close to his own; a poor home, a hard-working mother, a bursary to a feepaying school (Hamilton Academy), a brilliant scholar:

‘Yes, I think to some extent Happy for the Child is autobiographical … They refused to believe that it was as difficult for me as it was for John Stirling. I say this, it was every bit as difficult for me.’

As I read it The Cone-Gatherers is Jenkins’ major analysis of man’s evil, and his propensity for war. We do not escape war by retreating into the wood. The gamekeeper Duror has his own war to fight, in his marriage situation, and he also comes to represent real evil. We are early told of his ungovernable disgust at deformity, something that has been with him since childhood: now the world outside corresponds to his secret rage:

He had read that the Germans were putting idiots and cripples to death in gas chambers. Outwardly, as everybody expected, he condemned such barbarity; inwardly, thinking of idiocy and crippledness not as abstractions but as embodied in the crouchbacked cone-gatherer, he had profoundly approved.

Although there are few characters in the novel, they represent the whole scale of human possibility, from Duror’s evil to Calum’s mentally handicapped pure goodness. In between we have Lady Runcie-Campbell, trying to reconcile her beliefs in class privilege and Christianity, love and war, the (offstage) conscientious objectors, Neil and Tulloch. Neil’s experience of life in some ways resembles Duror’s, and he too has some bitterness. Duror, who almost instinctively hates deformity, has to watch the woman he loves becoming monstrous, fat and silly, and to suffer sexual repression. Neil never flinches from carrying his brother as burden: he truly is his brother’s keeper, and he has turned his back on marriage and his longing to be a sailor, to care for Calum. He is seen at times as bitter, angry and even vengeful, but the human extent of his rage underlines by contrast the near diabolic rage of Duror.

Lady Runcie-Campbell’s differences of opinion with her son Roderick are obvious places where her personal conflict between her idea of aristocracy and her father’s ideal of Christianity is at its most intense. His innocent, uncontaminated, instinctive morality measures her compromise. Her differences with the adult Tulloch are also enlightening. He understands the situation of the cone-gatherers, and tries to protect them. He tests Lady Runcie-Campbell with the possibility of replacing the cone-gatherers with conscientious objectors, one he knows will not please her. He understands Duror’s sorry filth about Calum, when she only becomes overwrought, and he sees three possible explanations for Duror’s condition; the whole man’s disgust at the deformed man, the intrusion into his wood, or inexplicable dislike. As the reader has already learned from the narrator, all three are true readings.

I suggested earlier that although Jenkins is a sharp judge of humanity, he is also a powerful presenter of mitigating circumstances: but in the case of Duror, he has to present a developing picture of a nightmarish insanity of evil that is in the end unquestioned. Early on we feel quite sympathetic. Duror’s life situation, his grotesque wife’s illness, his mother-in law’s malice, are all rendered convincingly. Even his childhood hatred of deformity is described as an affliction, not something that is his fault. But by careful manipulation Jenkins changes this, gradually distancing us from the keeper, and full awareness of his state of mind. We are unprepared, and as surprised as the beaters when Duror is heard uttering his wife’s name in ‘a shout of anguish,’ and is seen staggering about. Then we are allowed a brief glimpse of his horrible dream of birds pecking Peggy to death before we are shut out again from his thoughts.

Next we have the dramatic climax of the deer hunt with blood everywhere, Calum screaming, the deer in its death agony, and Duror’s ‘berserk joy’ as he savagely cuts the deer’s throat. We cannot identify with this. Then we share his discovery that he hates Calum so profoundly because he has become the personification of his own deformed life. At last we get a gloss on Duror’s experience of the deer-killing: ‘in the wood his wife had changed for an instant into a roe-deer and he had cut her throat and tried to appease his agony in her blood.’ He sees himself as a tiger. After that he virtually disappears from the story, and we have no more insights into his mind, only seeing him through the eyes of others. Only when Roderick sees him standing menacingly by the cone-gatherers’ hut does he enter the story again, and then only through the boy’s eyes. Later he appears suddenly to spew filthy accusations about Calum to Lady Runcie-Campbell. We never recognise him again. He has become a demonic, unrecognisable figure, embodying extreme evil and destructiveness.

Even his name changes its significance. Duror has been associated with endurance, especially by the doctor, who understands something of his trials, and proposes a toast to endurance. But his name becomes increasingly associated with ordure. The man who cared so much about trees and who saw himself as a tree is now associated with a dead and rotten tree, and with ordure: ‘A few yards off stood a dead Chilean pine, with the ground beneath littered with its fragments like ordure.’ Graham ‘caught sight of the gamekeeper under the dead Chilean pine,’ and when he walked off with his gun in the direction of the cone-gatherers, ‘it was as if the rotting tree itself had moved.’ Lady Runcie-Campbell also sees: 

…the sinister transformation in Duror, itself an episode from a macabre fairy tale, suddenly in the wood the straight stalwart immaculate ash tree turning to squat warty bush swarming with worms.

Even radiant natural beauty has become corruption and rot. 

Guests of War and The Changeling both exploit the contrast of the foulest slums with some of Scotland’s loveliest scenery and more prosperous citizens, and at least one character in each novel believes strongly in the healing and sustaining power of these landscapes. The situation of Guestsof War offers a chance to explore the question of the healing power of beauty on the largest scale, as it records and reflects one of the biggest mass movements of civilians in our history. The novelist was both witness and participant in the evacuation of Glasgow children in August 1939: ‘I did go with Strathclyde Primary School kids to Moffatt, and quite a lot of the things that happen in the book did happen in real life. Pretty much as I describe it too. It was hilarious!’ This largescale migration of children, mothers and teachers to the elegant Borders town, Langrigg in the novel, is not only an excuse for wonderful comic observation, it is also a perfect context in which to measure the heroine Bell McShelvie, who has lived in a Glasgow slum for the last twenty of her fifty years, but has never forgotten or ceased to yearn for the country, where she lived until she was six.

Bell distrusts her own motives, puts the worst possible construction on her own behaviour, and is her own most stringent critic. Jenkins the pacifist has an ironic habit, in this novel as elsewhere, of using images of war for situations we normally associate with peacetime. So at the start of the novel Bell accepts her neighbour’s reproach that her desire to accompany the children to Langrigg is running away, and she strengthens it in her own mind:

Here indeed was her battlefield: the enemy she had to fight was despair at the ugliness shutting her in, at the inevitable coarseness and pitiable savagery of many of the people shut in with her, and above all at her inability to keep her own family healthy, sweet, and intact. She was weary of fighting. Even soldiers in war were given relief … The battle was at its height, … and she had made up her mind to desert.

I want to call this book a comedy, for all that it incorporates a desperately sad, potentially tragic situation. At the start, we learn that Bell’s son Sammy, generally thought to be ‘soft in the head’, is what has made up for the loss of the country in her life: ‘most admitted the softness, and greenness, were in his heart. As a substitute for those meadows and hills, Sammy all his twelve years had sufficed.’ Repeated hints throughout the novel suggest that Sammy will die young, will be the price Bell has to pay for her ‘desertion’. After his death, ‘the prospect back in Wallace Street seemed to her unbroken darkness’: in the past, ‘Sammy sometimes had been able to scrape away some of that soot, and let in a little light’. Nonetheless I would call the book a comedy for two reasons: the evacuation generally is treated as a hilarious comic epic, and the class conflicts in Langrigg finally belong to a rich, affirmative picture of life: and Bell meets her personal ‘tragedy’ with determination and affirmation.

The Changeling is very different. One well-meaning, bumbling school teacher conceives the idea that he can reverse the shocking impact of the slums for one bright pupil, by taking him on the family holiday down the Firth of Clyde. Charlie Forbes himself does come to understand the impracticality and failure of his project, and he and his wife have to learn the hard way ‘that love had failed amongst them, and for the rest of their lives they, and their children, must live in the shadow of that failure.’ But the protagonist of the tragedy here is not the absurd would-be Samaritan teacher, nor a strong, middle-aged woman like Bell McShelvie; it is a thirteen-year-old boy, Tom Curdie. For Tom, the tragic process is clear: on the holiday it is less even the radiant beauty of the landscape than the kindness and companionship of the Forbes family that gradually overcomes his independence. Increasingly he learns that he cannot return ‘home’. By the end of the novel, overcome by the appearance of his unlovely family at the Forbes’s holiday home, he simply has nowhere to go.

The ending to Guests of War is a qualified victory for Bell. She has gone out at last, to climb Brack Fell, the hill she has dreamed of climbing for so long. The last chapter quietly follows her thoughts on this climb, as she decides at great personal cost to return home, ‘to create as much light there as she could, not only for herself and her family, but for her neighbours.’ In the end she realises that she cannot reach the summit before nightfall, and relinquishes her dream, to return to Gowburgh: she descends willingly and with resolution to the Gowburgh women below.

As she plodded along the road her feet stung and her whole body ached: but she was smiling, with the tears running down her cheeks.

The horrific ending of The Changeling is also on a hillside. Young Gillian Forbes, once Tom’s most wary antagonist, has come to understand and love him, and she takes him up on the hill to escape both his family and the police. Gillian plans to hide him in a shepherd’s hut, but we are warned, ‘for him it could only be another place in which to try and solve what could never be solved’. Every line of this brief chapter is chilling. The two children sit listening, and ‘she could scarcely hear him breathe … He might have been dead.’ Gillian feels ‘pity and love’ for him, and then terror, the classic Aristotelian combination. At last she goes out to listen for her father, and comes back to find Tom hanging with a noose round his neck, not quite dead. The stark ending describes briefly but unforgettably how she tries to save him, but her strength fails. In the end, like and so unlike Bell, she has to go down alone: ‘Weeping, and falling often, she made her way at a desperate pace down the hill.’ If Guests of War represents Jenkins at his most optimistic about the endurance and strengths of exceptional human beings, The Changeling offers dire news of the failure of love among some of the best intentioned, and the potential danger of love to the most deprived.

See also the ASLS Scotnote on Robin Jenkins’s novel The Cone-Gatherers.

Copyright © Isobel Murray 1996

Filed Under: Articles Tagged With: Fiction, Isobel Murray, Laverock, Robin Jenkins

PETRIE, Elaine, ‘Sing Us One of the Old Songs – Why Teach Ballads?’

10 September 2021 by Duncan Jones

Laverock 3, 1997 |


Anyone who contemplates teaching the ballads is quickly going to ask – or be asked a few basic questions: What is a ballad? Where do I find them? Who wrote them? Why are we doing this? For many people interested in contemporary popular song, a ballad is simply a slow song, like Frank Sinatra’s ‘My Way’. And it may be hard to offer a satisfactory definition to replace this.

Perhaps it’s the form that defines the ballad better for us. It is usually narrative verse, in two or four rhymed lines with the four line stanza frequently made up of alternating iambic tetrameters followed by trimeters. There’s a further impression that the setting must be historical and that ballads are long – very, very long. In addition there’s often stark, violent action; dramatic changes in the unities of time and setting; repetition in both dialogue and action; patterns of events in threes. There may well be some supernatural intervention, just for good measure.

So does this count as a ballad?

O Bessie Bell and Mary Gray,
They war twa bonnie lasses;
They bigget a bower on yon burn-brae,
And theekit it oer wi rashes.

They theekit it oer wi rashes green,
They theekit it oer wi heather;
But the pest cam frae the burrows-town,
And slew them baith thegither.

They thought to lye in Methven kirk-yard,
Amang their noble kin;
But they maun lye in Stronach Haugh,
To biek forenent the sin.                     (to shelter from the sun)

And Bessy Bell and Mary Gray,
They war twa bonnie lasses;
They biggit a bower on yon burn-brae,
And theekit it oer wi rashes.

It’s short, and there’s no supernatural element but in other respects it fits the bill. For many enthusiasts the clinching argument is that it appears as item 201 in Francis J.Child’s would-be definitive collection of The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, a five volume compendium published between 1882-1898 which drew together ballads from earlier printed collections and manuscripts.

In many ways, it is the influence of these earlier collections and the texts they presented that governs our expectation of what a ballad should be. The most familiar ballad versions – certainly the ones in the Oxford anthologies derive from Sir Walter Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border. They were favoured because of the completeness of the text and their historical and romantic elements which sat fairly well with contemporary models of what poetry should be but that polished, satisfying literary quality owes a good deal to Scott’s careful editorship. Research has shown that he invented very little but he certainly pieced together verses to create what he saw as a recreation of the fullest ‘original’ form. ‘Sir Patrick Spens’, ‘The Wife of Usher’s Well’ and ‘The Battle of Otterburn’ as we know them, all owe their popularity to the success of Scott’s publishing and editorial work. An interesting exercise is the comparison of the traditional ballad ‘Jock of Hasilgreen’ with Scott’s ‘Jock o’ Hazeldean’.

This argument is taken a stage further in Dave Harker’s provocative study Fakesong. He suggests that the concepts of the ‘ballad’ and even ‘folksong’ itself are artificial, constructed partly knowingly, partly innocently by the mainly middle-class song collectors of the last three hundred years. It is his view that the collectors – Scott and Child included – patronised the working-class singers from whom they collected and carefully selected areas of their repertoire to preserve, shaping it, enhancing it and giving it a certain sort of gloss and prestige by the way they presented it.

Modern, comprehensive collecting practices prove that singers always have, and therefore probably always had, a mixed repertoire of narrative, lyric, comic and serious songs, both old and contemporary and of course, it’s all ‘folk’ music wherever it comes from. When we ask what a ballad is we should perhaps follow one definition from around 1700 which gives it as no more than ‘Common song sung up and down the Streets’ (Harke,p.r8). You can put it another way as the famous quip often attributed to American blues singer Big Bill Broonzy has it: any song is a folk song ‘cause I ain’t never heard a horse sing.’

I would suggest that there is a case to answer about the sanctification of some areas of folk life and lore. With the increasing awareness of oral history projects and the growth of Media Studies, it is time to be more adventurous in the selection of ballad/folk texts, not always selecting the items that look most like standard high poetry or prose.

The best response to the question of who wrote the ballads is that it doesn’t matter but here again there has been some controversy. The answers that have been given to this question are all coloured by issues of social values and class or gender perspectives. Matthew Macdiarmid argues that the best ballads are so good they must have been created by men of poetic genius, well-educated in literary composition and traditions: Lord Hailes, Burns and Scott himself. By contrast, many of the best transmitters of ballads seem to have been women: Anna Brown, whose manuscripts Scott used, Bell Robertson and Margaret Gillespie both significant contributors to the Greig-Duncan collection in the northeast.

Macdiarmid is not alone in rejecting the myth of some spontaneous outpouring by ‘the folk.’ There is an argument that each song must have had an originator whose presence is now blurred by the accretions and distortions of the transmission process. David Buchan suggests that singers in traditional, non-literate communities did not learn a fixed version of a narrative song. Instead they stored away the skeleton of the narrative and recreate the song anew each time – a bit like the way good jokes are stored and repeated. He claims that singers used well-known formulaic phrases, repetitions and patterns of threes to build up and develop the song. In a sense each singer is the author, recreating the song each time it is performed. The idea of a fixed text to be memorised and passed on verbatim in the same form each time only becomes established after the advent of print.

One useful classroom spin-off of this approach is that you needn’t feel too worried about tailoring your own ballad from the version as available in Child or Greig-Duncan. Better still, you can get your students to edit their own preferred version.

Often the first question that springs to mind in dealing with the ballads is why teach them – or any traditional form at all? The answer has as much to do with national self-esteem as with practical criticism.

The ballad represents the persistence of a vernacular culture and some sort of continuous indigenous literary tradition which survived the hiatus brought about in the high literary tradition in Scots after the Union of the Crowns in 1603 and the transfer of the court and its patronage to London. When the literary revival came in Scots, it developed in some measure out of a popular song tradition with Allan Ramsay’s song collections The Evergreen (1724) and The Tea-Table Miscellany (1724-32) and his use of songs in his pastoral drama The Gentle Shepherd (1725). The line from Ramsay through Burns and Scott, all collectors, all poets, is quite clear. In drama,even Home’s The Douglas of 1756 draws on ‘Gil Morice’ (Child 83 `Child Maurice’).

The ballads are something are something to be proud of – a national symbol. The number and quality of songs collected in Scotland have earned us the right to speak about these loosely as ‘Scots’ ballads even where versions of many of these songs have also been collected elsewhere and the extent of motifs shared with other – frequently Scandinavian – cultures suggests some earlier European root. Even if we dismiss this form of chauvinism, then we can still point with pride to the development of quite distinctive regional contributions which have come to be regarded almost as separate genres: the Border riding ballads and the North-east bothy ballads. Each of them reflects a particular society and its own heritage.

The next issue is probably where to begin. There are 305 titles in Child’s 5 volumes and there is the prospect of 8 volumes in the Greig-Duncan collection to contend with. The best point of entry is probably through the magical ballads like ‘Thomas the Rhymer’ or ‘Tam Lin’ and there is good background material available on these in Matthew Macdiarmid’s tape. ‘Clyde’s Water’ (Child 216, Greig-Duncan 1231) is perhaps more challenging.

This is a song that grows on you. Most versions are fairly long and the different tunes to which it is most familiarly sung are usually striking but plaintive. The story itself contains elements that cannot fail to impress. There is something implacable in Maggie’s mother’s relentless, incremental list of stables/horse/, barns/corn, bowers/gentlemen and it doesn’t really matter that there’s a tradition pattern of three, for the concrete power of the corn/horse/men images is so definite and conclusive.

Willie’s hat and cane again introduce a three-part movement and our first reaction may be that these motifs seem slightly anachronistic if we believe that ‘real’ ballads date from the 1600s. They can even seem bathetic and out of place with their eighteenth century broadsheet overtones. What gives them power is the fact that they represent the personal element, as powerful symbols of ordinary, familiar, everyday life specifically set against the dramatic randomness of death and disaster. They are like a bag of messages found at the roadside after a hit and run accident and they seem frail and trivial pitched against the crushing elemental force of the Clyde’s Waters. This is the sort of snapshot detail we admire in Edwin Morgan for instance or in a telling piece of film-making and perhaps it is ultimately more impressive than the superficially more intriguing use of supernatural forces represented by the mother’s curse on Willie.

Ostensibly Willie dies because he has refused to do his mother’s bidding and stay at home. The ballad shows the mother’s love is dangerously all-consuming and Willie properly rejects it to seek romantic love with Maggie although some versions of the ballad show that Willie recognises his mother’s authority by fatalistically accepting the inescapability of the curse and refusing to accept his brother’s suggestion that he cling to his horse who will swim with him to the shore. It is not the curse itself that kills him but his own compact with the river. His burning love for Maggie helps him to defy his mother but his bitter acceptance of Maggie’s apparent rejection snuffs out this positive fire and abandons him to despair and the water.

Willie’s pact with the river – ‘mak me a wrack when I come back but spare me as I’m gaun’ – has all the authentic rashness of a young man in love and it rings well to the ear with the internal rhyme of ‘wrack’ and ‘back’ but it seems that this is perhaps one of the oldest elements of the song and one that puts it in touch with older traditions in literature as it is used in verses on Hero and Leander by the Roman poet Martial. Francis Child thought that ‘the conceit does not overwell suit a popular ballad’ (4,187) but I cannot agree. The idea has obviously been borrowed (and has stuck) because it catches the imagination and proves the balladeer’s ability to recognise an arresting phrase and to take it over in a natural way.

Another striking element of the ballad is Maggie’s devotion. While it is not unusual by ballad standards, her immediate calm determination to find her William is an impressive movement in the ballad. She is more active than many women in conventional literature. She calmly faces the rushing of the Clyde which, we are reminded, would fear nine hunder men.’ She acknowledges the force of the river with a mixture of awe and understatement: `o and alas this lady cries your water’s wondrous deep’.

The final image of the lovers in their chaste death embrace is as powerful as the ending of Romeo and Juliet and the two texts make for interesting comparisons in their treatment of the archetypal theme of lovers facing parental disapproval. There is irony but also a curious dignity and consolation in the idea that the lovers will be united ‘like sister and like brother’ while we are well aware that this less, much less, than the wedding and fortune that other ballads and the ‘happy-ever-after’ side of popular fiction and traditional tale-telling offer.

The beauty of this ballad is that it matches the grand scale and power of elemental archetypes against small scale domestic details (Willie’s boots full of Clyde water) in a way that helps us sense William and Margaret as living characters and not just cardboard stereotypes.

One thing ballads are good at is striking openings. It’s not just that they frequently plunge straight into the action; in many cases they open with a stark, figurative image – like the king safely ensconced in Dunfermline downing his wine while Sir Patrick Spens is pacing a cold deserted shore. My own favourite is the opening of ‘Sweet Willie and Fair Annie’ (‘Lord Thomas and Fair Annet’ Child 73E), where

Sweet Wille and Fair Annie 
    Sat a’ day on a hill 
And though they had sitten seven year 
    They neer wad had their fill.

Child is probably closer to the mark when he describes this as ‘one of the most beautiful of our ballads, and indeed of all ballads.’ Adolescent groups might find Willie’s two-timing a topic that provoked discussion. Bell Robertson’s version (Greig-Duncan 212D) again offers a contrast between the strictly economic considerations of Willie’s mother who advises him to look go for a wealthy bride and the romantic view of his younger sister who bids him follow his ‘heart’s desire’ and marry for love.

One of the difficulties the ballads present to modern readers may be the violent treatment of women who all too often appear to be commodities to be guarded by jealous brothers or tricked and abused by lovers or vindictive mothers. Some, like Willa Muir, have suggested that this is an echo of matrilinear descent where family property and wealth passed to one’s sister’s son. Matrimonial connections with the right families were therefore essential and a brother might well feel more than a passing interest in his sister’s intended. Be that as it may, the women of the ballads and their undertakings often present a very positive view of womanhood. As we have seen, many exhibit tremendous dedication and endurance and they can be ready to take forceful action to secure their aim. See for example ‘Glenlogie, or Jean of Bethelnie’ (Child 238; Greig-Duncan 973), where Jeannie, aged fifteen or sixteen, eventually persuades Glenlogie, whose love is ‘promised awa’, to give up his sweetheart and marry her.

If love with its trials and tribulations proves dangerous, you can always opt for adventure and the hardihood of the Border riding ballads. There’s lots of help here and George Macdonald Fraser’s The Steel Bonnets (London, 1971) gives good background while James Reed The Border Ballads(London, 1975) is also useful. 

As Hamish Henderson says, the riding ballads are a bit like Damon Runyon’s Chicago gangster stories, full of gang lists, revenge killings and treachery. One character, Hobie Noble, actually turns up in two ballads. In one, ‘Jock o’ the Side’ (Child 187), he helps to spring Jock from prison in Newcastle.

Now Hobie was an Englishman, 
    In Bewcastle-dale was bred and born; 
But his misdeeds they were sae great, 
    They banished him ne’er to return. 
Child 187B

The raid is successful:

And now they are fallin to drink, 
    And they drank a whole week one day after another, 
And if they be not given over, 
    They are all drinking yet. 
Child 187C

But all did not end quite so well with Hobie. As an Englishman in hiding in Scotland, he is in great demand for his skill as a guide on Scots raids into the south. He is led into a trap and is arrested and taken to Carlisle. He is well-received by the ordinary folk who have heard of his part in rescuing Jock o Side.

They gave him a wheat loaf to eat 
    And after that a can o beer 
Then they cried a’, wi ae consent, 
    Eat brave Noble, and make good cheer! 
Child 189

Despite all this he is hanged for breaking his banishment and presumably also for the unspecified `great misdeeds’ that prompted his initial flight.

The single biggest problem with the riding ballads is that they can become a confusing tangle of names. Even ‘The Battle of Otterburn’ has the Douglas picking out his team like a Premier League line up:

He chose the Gordons and the Grahams 
    The Lindsays, light and gay, 
But the Jardines wald not with him ride, 
    And they rue it to this day. 
Child 161C

To some extent you can point a similar charge at the bothy ballads. Many of them immortalise masters and their farms (‘The Boghead Crew’,‘The Skranky Black Farmer’, ‘Drumdelgie’, ‘Bogie’s Bonnie Bell’, ‘Guise o Tough’, ‘Swaggers’, ‘Sleepytoon’) and so the basic pattern is easy to characterise. Their real strength lies in the detailed social record they leave behind of life among the ploughman lads and kitchie deems. They usually bitterly attack the broken promises and harsh conditions doled out by parsimonious farmers

As I cam in by Turra Market
      At Turra Market for to fee
I fell in wi’ a wealthy farmer
    The Barnyards o’ Delgaty

Lintrin adie toorin adie
Lintrin adie toorin ae

He promised me his ae best pair
    I ever set my e’en upon
When I gaed hame to the Barnyards
    There was naething there but skin and bone
The auld black horse sat on his rump
    The auld white meer lay on her wime
And a’ that I could hup and crack
    They widna rise at yokin time
Meg MacPherson maks my brose
    Her an me we canna gree
First a mote and syne a knot
    And I ae the tither jilp o bree

The songs tell their own story with vitality and detailed imagery and are a true record in as much as they often refer to actual characters as Peter Hall has shown. Out of this tradition grew the witty penmanship of George Bruce Thomsom, responsible for some first rate, tongue-twisting songs that brilliantly depict the fermtoun way of life. Each a technical tour de force with words exactly fitting the rhyme of the tune, they present a rich feast of Scottish dialect and an exact record of the food, implements and utensils of the time (about eighty years ago). The songs work because of their humour and also because of the lightning pen sketches of a moment such as the break up of a good going party when one of the farm pigs stumbles in and causes confusion. The moment when one of the farm workers trips in the pantry and pulls all the jars and preserves down on his head is particularly good and if this isn’t balladry in the high tradition then it’s certainly an eloquent advocate for casting a wider net.

Johnnie Murphy he ran efter her, and ower the pig was leapin’ 
Wan he trampit on an ashet that was sittin’ fu’ o’ dreepin 
An’ he fell doon and peel’t his croon ,an’ quidna’ haud frae greetin’ 
At McGinty meal and ale whaur the pig ga’ed on the spree. 
And the pantry shelf cam’ ricklin’ doon an’ he was lyin’ kirnin 
Amang saft soap, pease meal, corn floor and yirnin’ 
Like a gollach amang trickle(treacle) but McGinty’s wife was girnin’ 
At the soss upon her pantry fleer and wadn’ lat him be.


Further Reading:

  • David Harker – Fakesong, (OUP 1985)
  • George MacDonald Fraser – The Steel Bonnets (London 1971)
  • James Reed – The Border Ballads (London 1975)

There are many selections of ballads, the main reference being made to F.G. Childe – English and Scottish Popular Ballads, but an easily available collection is Emily B.Lyle’s Scottish Ballads published by Canongate.

The Greig-Duncan Folksong collection is currently being published in several volumes.

Scotsoun have also produced a tape on the ballads by Matthew Macdiarmid.

Copyright © Elaine Petrie 1997

Filed Under: Articles Tagged With: Ballads, Laverock

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