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ALISON, Jim, ‘Thanks Courteous Wall’

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ScotLit 33, 2005 |

On 15 October 2005 the late Enric Miralles’ controversial complex of buildings for the Scottish Parliament won the prestigious Stirling Prize of the Royal Institute of British Architects. 

For the next two or three centuries pedestrians who tramp down to the Holyrood end of Edinburgh’s Royal Mile will find themselves brushing past the Canongait Wall. Like the much older Flodden Wall off the Grassmarket this is a defensive work, designed as a blast-proof bulwark on the northern perimeter of the new Scottish Parliament complex. Originally the architect Miralles had conceived it also as a symbolic Constituency Wall to be assembled from stones gathered from every constituency in the country. As with many other design features of our award-winning parliament, first bright thoughts had to be modified and what was finally unveiled in 2004 was a collage of engraved concrete renderings of Miralles’ sketches, a puddingstone of geological specimens embedded like the legendary cannonball on the Castlehill, and a mosaic of inscribed stone slabs of varying shapes and textures.

The texts which have been beautifully cut into these panels are of great interest, but the casual passer-by is not likely to be able to pause long enough to read all the fine print, scan their totality or ponder what the purpose of this enduring lapidary anthology might be. Moreover in some conditions of Edinburgh light they are totally inscrutable.

At the time of writing there is no attractively produced explanatory pamphlet on sale to visitors – a missed opportunity, surely – but the Parliament’s Public Information Service will supply on line a bare list of the quotations which are published below.

THE TEXTS OFFICIALLY LISTED AS CARVED ON THE CANONGAIT WALL

 

From the lone sheiling of the misty island
Mountains divide us, and the waste of seas –
Yet still the blood is strong, the heart is Highland,
And we in dreams behold the Hebrides.

Anonymous: “Canadian Boat Song” (first appeared 1829)

* * *

O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us
To see oursels as others see us!
It wad frae monie a blunder free us
An’ foolish notion.

Robert Burns (1759–1796): “To a Louse”

* * *

Then let us pray that come it may
(As come it will for a’ that)
That Sense and Worth, o’er a’ the earth,
Shall bear the gree, an’ a’ that.
For a’ that, an’ a’ that,
It’s coming yet for a’ that,
That Man to Man the world o’er,
Shall brithers be for a’ that.

Robert Burns (1759–1796): “A Man’s A Man for A’ That”

* * *

Put all your eggs into one basket – and then watch that basket!

Andrew Carnegie (1835–1919)

* * *

(I knew a very wise man who believed that) if a man were permitted to make all the ballads, he need not care who should make the laws of a nation.

Andrew Fletcher (1655–1716)

* * *

Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation.

Alasdair Gray (1934–)

* * *

This is my country,
The land that begat me.
These windy spaces
Are surely my own.
And those who toil here
In the sweat of their faces
Are flesh of my flesh,
And bone of my bone.

Sir Alexander Gray (1882–1968): “Scotland”

* * *

Is i Alba nan Gall’s nan Gaidheal is gàire is blàth is beatha dhomh.
It is Scotland, Highland and Lowland that is laughter and warmth and life for me.

George Campbell Hay (1915–1984): “The Four Winds of Scotland”

* * *

So, cam’ all ye at hame wi’ freedom
Never heed whit the hoodies croak for doom
In your hoose a’ the bairns o’ Adam
Can find breid, barley bree an’ painted room.

Hamish Henderson (1919–2002): “The Freedom come all ye”

* * *

What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889): “Inversnaid”

* * *

“What a lovely, lovely moon.
And it’s in the constituency too.”

Alan Jackson (1938–): “The Young Politician Looks at the Moon”

* * *

The rose of all the world is not for me.
I want for my part
Only the little white rose of Scotland
That smells sharp and sweet – and breaks the heart.

Hugh MacDiarmid (1892–1978): “The Little White Rose”

* * *

Scotland small? Our multiform, our infinite Scotland small?

Hugh MacDiarmid (1892–1978): “Scotland Small?”

* * *

But Edinburgh is a mad god’s dream
Fitful and dark,
Unseizable in Leith
And wildered by the Forth,
But irresistibly at last
Cleaving to sombre heights
Of passionate imagining
Till stonily,
From soaring battlements,
Earth eyes Eternity.

Hugh MacDiarmid (1892–1978): “Edinburgh”

* * *

Sweet ghosts in a loving band
Roam through the houses that stand –
For the builders are not gone

George Macdonald (1824–1905): “Song”

* * *

There is hope in honest error;
None in the icy perfections of the mere stylist

Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868–1928)

* * *

Chan e iadsan a bhàsaich
an àrdan Inbhir-chéitean
dhaindeoin gaisge is uabhair
ceann uachdrach ar sgeula;
ach esan bha ’n Glaschu,
ursann-chatha nam feumach,
Iain mór MacGill-Eain,
ceann is fèitheam ar sgeula.

Not they who died
in the hauteur of Inverkeithing
in spite of valour and pride
the high head of our story;
but he who was in Glasgow
the battlepost of the poor
great John MacLean
the top and hem of our story.

Somhairle MacGill-Eain (Sorley MacLean) (1911–1996): “The Clan MacLean”

* * *

tell us about last night.
well, we had a wee ferintosh and we lay on the quiraing. it was pure strontian!

Edwin Morgan (1920–2010): “Canedolia”

* * *

The battle for conservation will go on endlessly. It is part of the universal battle between right and wrong.

John Muir (1858–1914)

* * *

Abair ach beagan is abair gu math e.
Say but little and say it well.

Seannfhacal (Proverb)

* * *

Am fear as fheàrr a chuireas
’S e as fheàrr a bhuineas.
He who sowest best reapest best.

Seannfhacal (Proverb)

* * *

To promise is ae thing, to keep it is anither.

Proverb

* * *

Let the words of my mouth, and the meditation of my heart, be acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, my strength, and my redeemer.

Psalm 19:14

* * *

When we had a king, and a chancellor, and parliament-men o’ our ain, we could aye peeble them wi’ stanes when they werena gude bairns – But naebody’s nails can reach the length o’ Lunnon.

Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832): Mrs Howden in Heart of Midlothian

* * *

What tongue does your auld bookie speak?
He’ll spier; an’ I, his mou to steik:
‘No bein’ fit to write in Greek,
I write in Lallan,
Dear to my heart as the peat reek,
Auld as Tantallon.

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894): “Maker to Posterity”

* * *

Bright is the ring of words.

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894): “Songs of Travel”

The origins of this selection probably lie in a media consultation, The Voices of Scotland, which in 2002 generated the 90 quotations temporarily posted on the barricades concealing work in progress on the site. A small group of MSPs and literati oversaw that first exhibition but there is no information on the processes by which the final permanent items for the wall were identified. Who drew up the leet and who had the final say? Was is it a committee or a single person; an architect, a civil servant or a politician? One wonders what criteria operated. Given the physical limitations of the available space, omissions were inevitable, and there is little point in expecting balanced inclusiveness, but did anyone pause to think of the possible underlying agenda of these select graffiti? What if anything are they implying about Scotland? How will future generations read the runes?

Musing on the official list reveals some intriguing features:

    • There is no female author or direct reference to women.
    • The only two politicians mentioned are a communist and the leader of the anti-union party in 1707, and the prevailing attitude to politicians is at best sceptical.
    • As befits the medium of carved inscriptions, and perhaps a political audience, there is a tendency to terse aphorisms, canny, admonitory and aspirational.
    • There is only one light-hearted item, and that is from Scotland’s first official Makar.
    • Among the solemn themes foregrounded are international brotherhood, patriotism, sense of place, and conservation.
    • The quotations are mainly literary, with some weighting to poetry and to the 19th and 20th centuries. MacDiarmid is the most frequently cited author and there is no Adam Smith, Hume, or Hutton; no Barbour, Dunbar, Buchanan, ballads, Donnchadh Ban or Boswell. Space is found for one English contributor.
    • The three historic languages are represented, with English prevailing and the four Gaelic texts also translated in to English. No other language, classical or community, appears.
    • One complication is that although 26 texts are listed above, scrutiny on site reveals mysteriously that the wall carries only 24 of these. The missing items turn out to be Sorley MacLean on his admiration for his namesake, Great John; and Stevenson on his love of Lallans. One wonders why these particular two have been dropped. Were they jettisoned at the last moment by the politicians as insufficiently progressive? Were the texts too long or complicated for the carvers? It may be, of course, that they were just forgotten and will resurface as later additions.
    • Viewing it as a whole (and that is not easy), you may also sense that the wall looks sadly incomplete. It still carries some 70 empty lozenge-shaped cavities that are clearly intended for quotations or rock samples. Could it be that the compilers ran out of money or ideas – or indeed both?

These brief comments are meant to prompt speculation rather than criticism of the origins of the quirky, fragmentary, oddly moving little display which now embellishes the Canongait Wall, or Memory Wall as it is sometimes designated. Each of us could doubtless produce our own preferred alternatives and additions to this cultural jigsaw, but at least we should be grateful for a thought-provoking landmark to join Makars Court, the Book Trust, the Storytelling Centre, the Fergusson statue and the Poetry Library on the fringes of the Parliament’s campus in Unesco’s first City of Literature. After all, Miralles’ aspiration was that the buildings should be a demonstration of “architecture that’s never totally finished or totally explained”.

At the same time and for the sake of Festival visitors, WRI outings, school parties, overseas students and other puzzled wayfarers, someone ought also to consider publishing a well-designed booklet and CD celebrating whatever the wall may be trying to say about us Scots.

Postscript 
Since this article was written, the Parliament’s website has ventured further information about the Wall. This reveals that the two quotations from Sorley MacLean and Robert Louis Stevenson have now been dropped from the list so that it tallies with the 24 texts actually installed on the Wall. The overall designer and two carvers are given credits, and we learn that three MSPs were responsible for the final selection. There is no present intention to add any further texts. Welcome though these details are, they do not address the broader issues raised above, and there is still no booklet on sale for visitors.

Copyright © Jim Alison 2005

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

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ScotLit 34, 2006 |

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LINDSAY, Frederic, ‘Practising Crime for a Living’

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ScotLit 24, 2001 |

Writers and readers share a question about any branch of fiction: Do I want to spend time on this kind of book? The way I came to write a detective series may be of interest as having a bearing on at least this writer’s view of the opportunities and problems of the genre.

I had written four novels, published between 1984 and 1992, which differed markedly in tone and subject matter. When I got the itch to do another novel, I was drawn to the story of Detective Lieutenant John Trench of the Glasgow Police, who in attempting to prove that there had been a miscarriage of justice in the Oscar Slater case faced dismissal from the force and persecution by his ex-colleagues. Interested in the fate of the whistleblower and the political background to the story, I moved the events to Edinburgh and to the present and turned it into the novel Kissing Judas. The central character was a police detective called Jim Meldrum only because that’s what the story required. As far as I was concerned it was a one-off book, a study in integrity and what it cost.

Then I had a call from my agent to say that Hodder & Stoughton wanted to publish, and were offering a contract for another two books about this detective Jim Meldrum. Almost by accident, I had the opportunity to do a series of crime novels featuring the same character. One advantage, and it was one I found completely unexpected, was that the useful discipline of having to produce a book a year taught me that novels didn’t necessarily have to be written slowly. Now, four years later, I’ve had four Meldrum books published, and have just finished a fifth.

Anyone, however, who commits to a sequence of novels about a detective would be advised to think hard about Douglas Gifford’s percipient observation that crime fiction of this type may be ‘prevented from inclusion in the range of the most substantial and significant fiction because it inhibits its depth of human exploration by placing itself within limiting conventions and stereotypes.’ But this challenge to transcend limitations and turn rules into a strength is exactly what makes working within a form, whether it’s the sonnet or the detective novel, interesting if you are a serious writer.

As a practitioner, I see the problem of the series detective in terms of what E. M. Forster used to call the flat or round character. If you have a detective who is essentially a bundle – rather a small one – of vivid characteristics (Hercule Poirot or Sherlock Holmes) then there is no problem in running him unchanged through ten or a hundred investigations. But if you make him or her a round character – that is one who is affected by experience, altered and modified – then things become much more difficult. In so far as he is round, the reader may chafe against too much exposition of his previous situation or find him getting diluted as book follows book, or changing in ways which are inconsistent with the original conception.

Meldrum is affected from book to book by what he’s gone through. In Darkness In My Hand, the fifth book of the series, he reflects at one point that he’s a worse man than he was at the time of Kissing Judas. He is, of course, the same man – there’s something central to each nature; but how far it evolves and changes, erodes or is recovered is one of the things which interests me in doing the series. As you progress with that, you have in common sense to recognise that the reader who will start with you at the first book and read them in sequence is an improbable deal. Never, however, losing the momentum of storytelling in each novel as a separate entity while putting these other layers in is a useful discipline. I’ve realised, too, that, far from the crime novel forcing you to deal in stereotypes, the Meldrum books have given me the opportunity to revisit, extend and rework themes from earlier novels.

At the moment, I’ve notes for a sixth, a seventh, possibly an eighth Meldrum. Meantime, I was struck by something Allan Massie wrote about the most recent one, Death Knock. He said: ‘The question being probed here, as obsessively as the tongue seeks out a painful tooth, is what makes people step out of line, out of their normal lives.’ He talks about the various characters in crisis, but then goes on: ‘There is a fourth character within a short distance of disintegration and this is Meldrum himself. It will be interesting to see if he can get through another case, and another book, without cracking up.’

At the moment I’m trying to work out the answer.

Copyright © Frederic Lindsay 2001

MACGILLIVRAY, Alan, ‘Obituary for Christine Guthrie (1896–1999)’

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ScotLit 21, Winter 1999 |

Readers who have loved the writings of James Leslie Mitchell (“Lewis Grassic Gibbon”) will be saddened to learn that recently the death occurred in a Grampian eventide home of the woman whose early life he had immortalised in a fictionalised biography, the trilogy of novels, A Scots Quair. Chris Guthrie has for more than sixty years been regarded as Gibbon’s greatest literary creation. It is a tribute to his artistry that few people ever penetrated behind the fictional surface to make a connection with the very real woman who was his true subject. Now that Chris’s long life has ended in her hundred and third year, it is appropriate that the real relationship between the “novels” and Chris’s life should be brought into the open.

The main outline of Chris Guthrie’s life up to the age of nearly forty is well known from the pages of Sunset Song, Cloud Howe and Grey Granite. While Gibbon’s creative imagination and his obsession with the theories of Diffusionism and Communism led him to take some liberties in creating characters out of real people for the purposes of his story, the main events are true. Chris did undergo a traumatic sequence of personal losses with the destruction and dispersal of her family and friends over the years between 1912 and 1918, mainly because of the First World War; and although she went on to make a longer and happier second marriage, the pattern of her life up to middle age was a troubled one. It is not surprising that, as Gibbon vividly describes, she raised protective mental and emotional barriers to shield herself from the external world.

Only a few people now alive know how Leslie Mitchell and Chris Guthrie first met and how their literary partnership developed. When Leslie Mitchell was a boy in Arbuthnott, he used to cycle all over the district looking at prehistoric remains and historical ruins. Chris remembered meeting him first one day as she went up to the Standing Stones above Blawearie, a serious youngster who lectured her rather solemnly about the people of ancient times and then went down with her to the farm kitchen for a glass of fresh milk and a newly-baked scone. That was in the early summer of 1914 when she was pregnant with young Ewan, just a month or so before the outbreak of the Great War. Their paths crossed once or twice again before Leslie went off to Mackie Academy for his brief sojourn there; by the time he went there, Chris’s husband Ewan had gone off to join the army and Chris was running the farm almost by herself. Whether Ewan and Leslie Mitchell ever met is not known. What is pretty clear is that Mitchell used a high degree of licence in his description of Ewan Tavendale’s degeneration as a result of his military training. Chris herself was very reticent about the relations between herself and Ewan prior to his embarkation for France with the 10th Battalion of the North Highlanders, but nothing she ever said suggested that she and Ewan were totally estranged as a result of his treatment of her. Mitchell, of course, had a philosophical point to make about the degenerative effects of human civilisation and is known to have often subordinated literal truth to the needs of his thesis.

It appears that Chris Guthrie and Leslie Mitchell met again on one or two occasions about 1930 and 1931 when she was living in Segget. By this time Mitchell was married, had come out of the RAF and was living in lodgings in London trying to make himself a success as a writer. He was already beginning to take on or initiate more projects than he could comfortably handle, and it was probably about this time that he developed the idea of writing a long chronicle of life in the North-East, coming out of his own childhood love-hate relationship with the land and his home district. The idea of building it around a woman protagonist came partly from his own wife Rebecca, or Ray, Middleton and, it is now clear, partly from the figure of the young farm housewife whom he had first met years before and then renewed acquaintance with when she was a minister’s wife in Segget. Chris used to recall that they had a number of conversations in the Manse, during which she reminisced about her years of growing up in Echt and Kinraddie and spoke about the different world she seemed to inhabit as a lady of the manse. Mitchell expressed interest in her as the subject for a biography disguised as fiction that would explore social change in that part of Scotland in the first three decades of the century, and, with her permission, began making copious notes from their talk.

Once again, however, events took a tragic turn. Chris’s husband, Robert Colquohoun, died in rather dramatic circumstances while preaching a sermon of a political nature, and Chris had to leave Segget with her teenage son Ewan. They were now in very reduced circumstances and had to move to the city of Duncairn, where Ewan, like his mother before him, had to give up for the moment his thoughts of higher education and begin working as a industrial apprentice. Chris bought a small share in a boarding house and it was here that Mitchell met her again to continue discussing the treatment of her life in fictional terms, which he had already begun as the novel Sunset Song. They only met once to agree the pattern of the project, a trilogy of works covering Chris’s life in the three locations of Kinraddie, Segget and Duncairn, and further communication was by letters between Duncairn and Welwyn Garden City, where Mitchell had recently settled with his family. Unfortunately, no trace of this correspondence survives. Mitchell clearly destroyed Chris’s letters once he had assimilated their contents, and Chris’s attitude to personal belongings was for most of her long life one of total indifference.

The Duncairn volume of the trilogy, Grey Granite,turned out to be the one covering the shortest time. Ewan’s progressive involvement in left-wing politics and Chris’s unwise and short-lived third marriage caused the separation between mother and son and Chris’s move back to the farm of her birth, Cairndhu in Echt, in the summer of 1934. Mitchell brought the biographical trilogy to an end with Chris’s return as a kind of symbolic withdrawal from the world and all emotional involvement. He actually wrote the final words sitting on the Barmekin Hill above Chris’s home, creating a symbolic death or union of Chris with the natural world around her while she sat on the top of the hill meditating as night fell. Chris’s memory of the occasion is more prosaic: “I found I was getting very wet, so I just got up and went home to bed.” One could speculate that Mitchell might have written more about Chris’s life, but by the next year, 1935, he was dead. So, as far as the world knew, the story of Chris was at an end; and certainly it makes a satisfying artistic unity.

However, real life is rarely so accommodating. People’s lives go on, often in a prolonged and inartistic anticlimax. As some in the North-East know, Chris lived for another sixty-five years until her recent peaceful passing away in the eventide home where she spent the last fifteen years of her life. From 1935 until the mid-1960’s she made a slender living from her Cairndhu croft, which was latterly supplemented by her old-age pension. When that eventually became uneconomic, she let out the croft land for grazing and continued to live in the croft-house until her ninetieth year, at which point a place was found for her in a home and the house at Cairndhu was sold as a holiday home to a family living in the South of England. Until she was well through her nineties, she was physically independent, but failing sight and progressive weakness at last confined her to a chair.

Although she remained detached from close friendships and involvements, she was not totally isolated. In the post-war years, she renewed contact with her younger brothers Dod and Alec and their families in different parts of Scotland, and a number of her nephews and nieces with their young families spent occasional holidays with her at Cairndhu. The big adventure of her later life occurred when she made a journey to Argentina to visit her great-nephew, Juan Guillermo Guthrie Vasquez, the grandson of her elder brother Will, at his estancia on the pampas. Tragically, Juan later became one of the victims of the Argentine junta and is classified among the “desaparecidos”, the missing opponents of the regime, during these years. Chris’s third husband, Ake Ogilvie, never contacted her again after he sailed as a ship’s carpenter to Canada in 1934, but Chris learned after the war that he had been lost with his ship torpedoed at sea on a North Atlantic convoy in 1942. The great tragedy of Chris’s life after the period of the biographies was, of course, the death in 1937 of her only son, Ewan Tavendale, fighting in Spain with the International Brigade against the Fascist armies of General Franco.

As Chris Guthrie (she resumed her maiden name after the Second World War) moved into old age, she acquired a little local notoriety from her occasional appearances on Grampian Television talking about life as it had been in the farming communities of her youth, and her broadcasts on similar themes on Radio Duncairn. Some people pressed her to write a book about her life and times, but she always refused, saying that it had already been done. Although she never went back to education in her mature years, she was a great reader when the work on her croft permitted. One of the subjects that interested her was history, particularly of ancient and prehistoric times. She used to say that she could have a rare argument with Leslie Mitchell if he had been spared, since she had come to disagree profoundly with the ideas that he used to uphold and spread in his books.

After a long time in which she was deeply pessimistic about the possibility of anything of any value surviving, probably because of the many losses and disappointments she had had to endure, she came towards the end of her life, without being in any way drawn to religion, to believe that there was some cause for hope, against all the odds. She believed that love and charity might make some slight difference to the possible level of human happiness, and it was in that spirit that she lived out her last years. Finally, however, it was her memories that were her closest companions, coming home to her down the long tunnels of the years. It was reported by the nurse who was with her at the end that her last words were, first “Mother”, and then a few seconds later, just before her final breath, “Rob.”

The above article is a fictional tribute to the literary creations of James Leslie Mitchell

Copyright © Alan MacGillivray 1999

McGONIGAL, James, ‘Multilingual Poetries Lost and Found’

by

ScotLit 32, Spring 2005 |

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Praise

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

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

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

which we call the ‘praise’ on the cloth.

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

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

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

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

Nights governed by the moon’s flywheel.

                Men cycle off.

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

of raindrops in kail leaves.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Copyright © James McGonigal 2005

MENZIES, David, ‘Salute to an Adventurer’

by

ScotLit 35, 2007 |

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

he nevertheless conceded that he had:

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

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

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

The paper is a masterly touch.

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

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

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

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

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

She ruthlessly dismisses Laura’s romantic sentiments:

One lover is worth a hundred friends 

and is quite clear as to her beau ideal ..

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Copyright © David Menzies 2007

NORQUAY, Glenda, ‘The Far Side of Lorna Moon’

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ScotLit 27, Autumn 2002 |

The life story of ‘Lorna Moon’ – flight from the confines of a Buchan village, a series of romantic adventures which take her across America, a career as a script writer in the early days of Hollywood – presents the wildest challenge to our expectations for a woman from rural Scotland in the early twentieth century. Her writing, in equally dramatic fashion, takes the conventional subject of Scottish small-town life, and refashions it through a combination of satirical analysis and melodramatic romance that no other writer from the north-east has achieved. As one reviewer recently suggested, the publication of her Collected Works in 2002 indicates that there are still exciting new writers to be uncovered, new configurations to be traced within Scottish literature. 

On first encountering Lorna Moon’s writing, in David Toulmin’s editions of her fiction published in the early 1980s I could hardly believe that such a writer existed, indeed, half-suspected a hoax. Invited to review the two volumes for a prominent Scottish cultural magazine, I found the writing itself a fresh shock to the senses. Why did no-one know about this woman? The question was partly answered when the magazine decided they couldn’t include the review as they had more ‘significant’ material to cover. So began a small sense of injustice at Moon’s neglect and an awareness that in her own kind of ‘popular’ fiction she challenges some of the dominant paradigms of Scottish literature. I was delighted therefore when invited by Isobel Murray, another Moon explorer, to contribute an entry of the life and work for the New Dictionary of National Biography.This in turn led to contact with her son, Richard de Mille, and the project to republish her writings. The more I found out about this woman, the more I read her work, the more remarkable she seemed.

Born Nora Helen Wilson Low in Strichen, Aberdeenshire, in 1886 Lorna Moon began life with a family history that set her apart from the people of her local community. Not only was her father Charles Low a notorious socialist and an avowed atheist, whose garden hut was known as 10 Downing Street, a gesture towards the debating that went on within, but he had travelled far beyond Scotland – to Canada, America and South Africa – in his work as a plasterer. This intelligent and well-read man had been registered at birth as the illegitimate son of Mary-Ann Low and Charles May, the butler of a family for whom Mary-Ann had worked in Deeside; there was, however, some family speculation that his father may have been a more aristocratic member of the household. His daughter Nora, with her dark-red hair, intense beauty, and passion for reading, also saw herself as different from those around her. The people of Strichen, she believed, were farming stock, land-locked, whereas in her veins ran the Celtic blood of the fisher folk who inhabited the villages of Gardenstown, Rosehearty and Pennan where she often visited relatives. It wasn’t until her twenties however that Nora found the means to escape Strichen, in the form of William Hebditch, a commercial traveller who had stayed at the hotel run by her parents. 

Her flight into marriage with Hebditch was only the first of several dramatic manoeuvres into a new life through the passions of a new man. Hebditch took her as far as Alberta, Canada, but when the hard life there began to bear down on her she found Walter Moon, to accompany her to Winnipeg, introduce her to the world of journalism and, most importantly, to furnish her the excuse for a new name closer both to her romantic aspirations and her literary inspiration, Lorna Doone. According to anecdote, it was a spirited exchange with another man, Cecil B. deMille, that brought her to Hollywood and a successful career as a script girl during the most exciting period of the film industry’s development. In Hollywood deMille’s brother, William, became the father of her third child. This child, Richard, grew up unaware of the identity of his mother, only in later years tracking down his parentage and producing the moving and fascinating memoir, My Secret Mother, Lorna Moon. Lorna herself died from tuberculosis in a sanatorium in Albuquerque, aged 44, in 1930. Another devoted man, Everett Marcy, assisted her final flight, bringing her ashes back to be scattered on Mormond Hill beyond Strichen.

The life, then, is beguilingly romantic: a story of escape, of a woman in search of a fulfilment apparently not offered by either motherhood or the three different men with whom she bore children, and a narrative with a tragic end – early death at the peak of her writing powers in a place, Hollywood, in which she finally appears to have felt at home. The publicity photographs of Lorna in her Hollywood days show a woman in full enjoyment of her image; the letters, even those written when she was dying, reveal a delight in her creativity, a certainty of direction and again an impressive degree of control over the ways in which she was represented. Yet the short stories, published as Doorways in Drumorty(1925), and the novel Dark Star (1929), although produced in America, draw her back to Strichen. These texts speak of constraint and explore inhibition in Scottish small town life, as their character seeks to attain some degree of mastery within a world of petty codes and conventions and an obsessive concern with appearance and respectability. And the language of all her writing resonates with the rhythms of the north-east. If you don’t go, they say, you can’t come back: Lorna, I imagine, had no intention of ‘coming back’ but exile allows her imagination to revisit the scenes of her early years and distance provides the opportunity for a satirical analysis perhaps impossible from within that world. 

It would be a mistake then to see only the romance of the life; the sharp intelligence, humour and anger evident in her writing in itself makes an important contribution to our understanding of Scottish women’s writing, particularly in a context of the north-east of Scotland, while the forms of her fiction present a distinctive challenge to the conventions of the literary Kailyard.

The stories in Doorways in Drumorty reveal a writer fascinated by the workings of a closed community: the patterns of surveillance; the oppressions of a public morality; the evidence of private despair. Lorna Moon’s work is particularly striking in its awareness of the position of women in the community: her stories deal with minutiae, with networks of power that operate in apparently insignificant areas of social and domestic life. They also engage with the margins of this world, presenting itinerants, outcasts and misfits with a distinct lack of sentimentality. That particular fascination with transgressive and borderland worlds, represented by tramps, beggars, idiots, by carnivals and fairs, is perhaps characteristic of writing from Scotland’s north-east but also appears a territory to which woman writers were particularly attracted. In the work of Violet Jacob and Jessie Kesson and, to a lesser extent, Nan Shepherd we can see writers exploring developing female sexuality through such encounters with liminality.

It was not, however, a tradition of women’s writing in which Moon appeared to place herself. The demons she wrestled with were predominantly those of the Kailyard, and in particular, the shadow of J. M. Barrie. Her collection of short stories clearly signals its relationship to what was, after all, a highly successful publishing phenomenon in America. ‘Drumorty’ inevitably carries echoes of ‘Drumtochty’, the village central to Ian MacLaren’s recreations of rural life, while Lorna herself seemed happy that the ‘Doorways’ of the title (suggested by her publishers) presented useful resonances of ‘A Window in Thrums’. Yet in a 1926 letter from her American editor, D. L. Chambers comments that his author feels ‘she might as well be buried as Barried’. While she may have wished to profit by generic association, Moon certainly didn’t want to be seen as producing exactly the same kind of fiction as Kailyard authors: ‘I always said that I’d wanted to write “as WELL as Barrie”, and of course “well” became like. I don’t write at all like Barrie, do I?’ The differences are indeed significant: as critics have noted, Kailyard authors wrote with an increasing sense of the ‘otherness’ of their subjects, writing for an audience outside Scotland, as if those inside the country were foreign. In the case of Barrie in particular it has been suggested that his voice became increasingly reductive and ridiculing. Lorna shares some of Barrie’s bleak irony, but her stories more often challenge both community and the reader, thus avoiding the detached perspective and static knowingness of Barrie’s narratives. Ironically, given her very real ‘distance’ Lorna participates in the exigencies of the community, sees the full scale significance of their small dramas, as only a woman who has had to work within and decode that world could.

This is evident in Lorna Moon’s version of the courting ritual, as explored in ‘Silk Both Sides’, a tale also concerned with apparent female powerlessness. The story opens with Jessie MacLean, aged thirty-six, making the significant gesture of buying a ribbon with silk on both sides – in other words, a bonnet ribbon: to wear a bonnet is a sign both to herself and the community that she has resigned herself to spinsterhood. She has accepted, it would seem, that Jock Sclessor, who has been courting her for 15 years, will never make that equally significant gesture, of wearing a white gowan in his buttonhole (the emblem to indicate he intention to propose), when he comes to call for their Sunday morning walk to church. The irony of Jock appearing with the flower in his jacket the very day that Jessie emerges wearing her bonnet, is bleak enough for Barrie, but the force with which the narrator attacks the communal pressure decreeing that neither gesture can be undone displays a fierce anger at the emotional denial demanded:

Look your fill from behind the curtain, Mistress MacKenty. You can not see heartache when it is hidden by a black alpaca gown and when the heart belongs to Jessie MacLean! 
     Jock Sclessor, your one chance of happiness is now! Lead her back into the house and take the bonnet from her head! No, laggard and fool that you are, you are wondering if she has noticed the gowan! Has she not! She has watched for it for fifteen years! Speak, you fool! Don’t keep staring at her bonnet!

Much of Nora Low’s own sense of frustration at the regulations enforced by a community of watchers is articulated here. Yet the story does not only voice a counter-discourse: in its conclusion it offers a more complex recognition that fifteen years delay may, after all, represent unspoken desires in each individual for their own space:

At home, she brewed her tea, looking round at her rag rugs and white tidies with pleasure. … There was a certain contentment in knowing that it would never be; a certain exhilaration in knowing that next Sunday she could not be disappointed because next Sunday she would not hope. She sipped her tea peacefully and smiled at the bonnet sitting so restful-like on the big chair so spotless and smooth, and thought, ‘Jock Sclessor would have been a mussy man to have about a house.’

Apparently petty systems of signification are dissected with acuity but complexities of the characters emotional lives – circumscribed as they may be – are still respected and remain the centre of narrative attention. Rather than Barrie’s tales in which those emotions that matter most are trivialised because of the mute obduracy or emotional autism of the characters, and the reader remains amused and detached from such shallowness, Moon’s stories demand our involvement and understanding.

Equally demanding is Moon’s willingness to tackle subjects on the edges of respectability. Writing later than Barrie and other Kailyard authors may have allowed less restrictions, and her own experiences in Hollywood in the 1920s would have exposed her to moral codes very different from those of Strichen, but in a story such as ‘Wantin’ a Hand’ she anticipates, even goes beyond, the use of grotesque realism to be found at times in the writings of Lewis Grassic Gibbon. ‘Wantin’ a Hand’ shocks with the intensity of its opening, as the rambling of drunken Jean, abandoned by her lover because an accident deprived her of the physical prowess necessary to his success, is narrated through the eyes of the defiant woman. Alongside such realism Moon is also capable of romance, as ‘Feckless Maggie Ann’, with its tale of a faithful and regretful husband, who inadvertently crushed the very qualities he loved in his wife, demonstrates. The emotion involved, however, is not a sentimentality that comforts, but one that pushes us towards distinctions of value. The tale is also significant, as Moon herself noted, for occupying a different location. Doorways in Drumorty is, as Moon saw it, a book about ‘land folk’; in other words it operates within the confines of Strichen. ‘Feckless Maggie Ann’, and , by implication, Dark Star, are coastal works: and for Moon the coast is a world peopled by Celts – romantic and irrational: ‘you see, the fishing people and the land people in Scotland don’t mix, they are widely separated in their sympathies, even their blood isn’t the same.’ 

In a letter of April 1925 Lorna Moon wrote that ‘Wantin’ a Hand’ signalled a change of direction: ‘The truth is I am through with Drumorty in that vein.’ Moon is prescient is seeing the story as a sign to move on. If there is a ‘problem’ with the tale it lies in the melodramatic intensity of the plot with its Hardyesque ironies, too powerful to be contained by the frame of a short story within a collection of ‘anecdotes’; the novel as a form clearly called to her. And yet the novel she produced, Dark Star, while fascinating in itself, is a ‘hybrid’ piece of writing, not wholly at one in terms of style, genre or direction, giving some sense of the power she was moving towards achieving as a writer but also presenting both technical and critical problems.

Dark Star again gives an uncompromising picture of rural life, drawing on Strichen, but also nearby fishing villages such as Broadsea, Pennan, Rosehearty and Gardenstown. The novel dissects, with an odd mixture of realism and melodrama, the plight of Nancy, illegitimate and an outsider in her narrow world. Delineating her attempts to escape through romance, it explores the precarious social structures, the sexual instabilities and the surface hypocrisies that shape its confines. 

Overall the novel is a curious piece of writing: it begins with a brave and uncompromising first sentence – ‘Nancy was glad when her grandmother died.’ – and in its first chapters paints an even harsher picture of the surface respectability and mean-minded codes by which small town life is governed than Doorways in Drumorty. Tracing the adolescence of Nancy, it also offers a powerful analysis of developing female sexuality, as she deals with unwelcome and clumsy sexual overtures but also tries to understand the nature of her own aspirations and desires. Within this line of plot, Nancy’s search for the identity of her parents and resultant encounters with those on the edges of society serves as a convincing narrative quest for self. Her friendship with the ‘Whistling Boy’, visitor from another class, another world, and her subsequent adult relationship with him, is less convincing, drawing as it does upon conventional romance motifs, in which the small-town, lower-class girl realises fulfilment through an alien, upper-class and cultured masculinity; the conclusion of the novel moves into yet another dimension, ending in the style of tragic melodrama. 

The resultant hybridity, that uneasy mixing of forms, may be one of the reasons for both the commercial success of Dark Star and its subsequent critical neglect. For those expecting anecdotes in Kailyard style, it is strong meat: but for those seeking the psychological depths of the bildungsroman, it often seems to closely aligned to the parochial. Its proximity to romantic fiction, especially in the excesses of the later scenes, also sets it apart from more ‘serious’ twentieth century women’s writing, although it addresses questions of identity and issues of desire. Far from Scotland, forging a career on her own terms, Lorna Moon had a much less agonised sense of her own sexuality and a more developed awareness of the possibilities for its exploitation and control than most women of her time: ‘It is revolting to me’, she wrote in a letter, ‘that in a civilised world a woman’s virtue rests entirely upon her hymen. Excuse me, I always get worked up about this.’ In her correspondence Moon describes Dark Staras a ‘sincere effort to show what the men in a woman’s life bring to her, and take from her … It is the inside of a woman written from the inside.’ Within Scottish fiction, however, there is little precedent for having such issues addressed through romantic involvement with exotic musicians, illegitimate children who believe they possess aristocratic blood, and dark suicides off high cliffs. It therefore has an uneasy relationship not only to Kailyard fiction, but also to the realist novel and what might be termed the ‘feminist novel of self-development’.

From Moon’s letters it emerges that the author originally wanted to bring Nancy to Hollywood, but ‘She wouldn’t budge’; nor could she be sent to Paris or Vienna – ‘Once more she turned into a wooden doll’. This offers perhaps the most convincing explanation for the unevenness of the book: the scenes in which the hypocrisies of Strichen are portrayed are uncomfortably convincing, but the writer struggles to find an alternative to them which can be sustained throughout the novel. While the world of outsiders, represented by the travellers and social outcast such as Divot Meg who runs the local doss-house, creates a powerful imaginative domain for the reader, theirs is not viable escape for Nancy; rather for the people of the community such a route would represent a predictable fall. In attacking Strichen values, Moon can also see and judge with Strichen eyes: she therefore has to find a means of escape for Nancy which contains an element of grandeur, which allows her to transcend the petty and mundane. Her hesitation in creating a plot through which Nancy could follow Nora Low’s own path of escape suggests that Moon is still trapped in a double vision: one which has forced her out of Strichen but has also carried Strichen within her. 

If Lorna Moon never fully escaped Nora Low and Scotland, it is to the good fortune of her readers. Challenging conventions, both literary and social, her writing plays out the dynamic between individual desire and social conformity and does so with energy, understanding and an acerbic wit. It is time for Scotland to welcome her back.

Dr Glenda Norquay is Reader in Literary Studies in the Research Centre for Literature and Cultural History at John Moores University, Liverpool.

Copyright © Glenda Norquay 2002

ROYAN, Nicola, ‘The Poetry of Sir David Lyndsay’

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ScotLit 22, Summer 2000 |

In the late sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a literate household in Scotland was likely to own two books: the Bible and the works of Sir David Lyndsay. Today, while a performance of Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis can draw the crowds, whether at the Edinburgh Festival or in a small country town, very little is known about the rest of Lyndsay’s work. This is a pity: the richness and diversity contained within Ane Satyreis only a fraction of the variety which Lyndsay’s works offer. The ASLS annual volume for 2000, edited by Janet Hadley Williams, is designed to introduce some of Lyndsay’s best poems to a new audience.

One of Lyndsay’s greatest strengths is his ability at comic verse, and in particular a sense of the ridiculous. This is most evident in The Justing betwix James Watsoun and Jhone Barbour, the description of a contest allegedly staged before James V and his queen. Instead of the usual knights, the two combatants are ‘ane medicinar’ and ‘ane leche’, and whatever their skills in treating illness, they are useless on the jousting field. Both break their spears, one discovers his sword rusted into its hilt, another swoons when about to strike, and eventually they are reduced to hitting each other with their gloves. The poem is a parody of the joust, and by visual jokes, pokes fun at both the combatants we see and the formal nature of serious jousting.

Despite his distinguished career as a herald, finishing as Lord Lyon King of Arms, in The Justing, Lyndsay may also be questioning the value of chivalric practices. Not only is the poem a parody, but at the very end, Lyndsay thanks God that ‘that day was sched na blude’. Real jousts could kill, as happened to King Henry II of France in Lyndsay’s own lifetime. Lyndsay’s longer poems, Squyer Meldrum and The Testament of Squyer Meldrum also seem in part to interrogate notions of chivalry. Squyer Meldrum is a romance and it celebrates the life of one of Lyndsay’s Fife friends, William Meldrum of Cleish and Binns. While praising Meldrum, however, the poem also seems to mock the conventions of high romance as well as the knight. For while the Squire is compared to Lancelot, after rescuing a noble woman from rape, he runs away from her suggestions. Lyndsay thus implies that the heroes of romance may not be so easy to find, even in among the truly worthy and these poems, which seem to have been written for family and friends, offer some gentle humour at the discrepancy between the expectations of a romance hero and Meldrum’s actions.

The romance as a genre was still very fashionable in sixteenth-century Scotland, and there is plenty of evidence to show that Lyndsay saw himself as very much in a Scottish tradition. His early work, The Testament of the Papyngo, is a beast fable, comparable to Henryson’s best, in humour and dark comment. The papyngo, a parrot, has used her time as a courtier to grow fat; despite her shape, she persists in climbing a tree. She falls, and dies, but uses her passing to delivers two homilies of advice, to king and to courtier. Like Henryson, Lyndsay uses the humour of the bird’s silliness to seduce his audience, before evoking pathos to strengthen her moral points.

As well as beast fable and romance, Lyndsay also participates in a peculiarly Scottish tradition in his Response to the King’s Flyting. Such a poem is obviously more circumspect than the scatological offerings of Dunbar, but it nevertheless scores a few points against the king’s sexual activities. That Lyndsay was able to do this at all demonstrates his closeness to James V. As the early poems show, especially The Complaynt and The Dreme, Lyndsay had been an important figure in the household of the baby king. According to Lyndsay, he ‘bure thy grace upon my bak,/ And, sumtymes, strydlingis on my nek/ Dansand with mony bend and bek/. The first sillabis that thow did mute/ was Pa, Da Lyn’. This closeness permitted Lyndsay to offer advice to the king freely, suggesting moral restraint, probity, and the reform both of the church and of the nobility for the benefit of the rest of his realm; these themes of course are among the key ideas of the Thrie Estaitis.

As Lyndsay grew older, his poetry grew darker, and his concern for good government and church reform became more urgent. There is no clear evidence that Lyndsay himself was ever a confessed Protestant, but there is no doubt that he supported some of the aims of the Protestant movement, such as putting the Bible into the vernacular, and reforming the clergy. These concerns surface again in The Tragedie of the Cardinall and Ane Dialog betwix Experience and ane Courteour. The Tragedie presents the life and fate of Cardinal Beaton from the cardinal’s own mouth. Since Beaton had been murdered by Protestant lairds in revenge for his burning of a Protestant martyr George Wishart, to make the wraith of the cardinal speak allows Lyndsay subtle irony in the development of the character; it also makes the warnings to other priests and princes more telling. 

The Dialog is Lyndsay’s most serious work, and it castigates the state of the church, the state of the court and the state of the world. The poem presents a courtier-narrator discussing his situation with the figure Experience; as the young courtier accompanying the papyngo seems to represent the younger Lyndsay, full of hope and enthusiasm for the new king’s rule, so it is tempting to read the older courtier in The Dialog as speaking Lyndsay’s own disappointments and regrets. Lyndsay’s strength here as in the rest of his poetry is his combination of a plain register with literary complexity. He is happy to take earlier forms, such as the dream vision or the romance, and rewrite them for his own ends. He is also not afraid to state his mind on government, on religious practice and spirituality, and to give due attention to those not perhaps intellectual or powerful. Such are the features that made Lyndsay a popular writer in his own time; explored again, he may regain some of that status in ours.

You may also be interested in Sir David Lyndsay: Selected Poems, edited by Janet Hadley Williams.

Copyright © Nicola Royan 2000

TROUSDALE, Graham, ‘Language Matters’

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ScotLit 31, Autumn 2004 |

On March 1st 2004, the Scottish Executive announced that it was investing an additional £4 million to improve foreign language teaching in primary schools. Education Minister Peter Peacock stressed the importance of proficiency in foreign languages for all Scottish schoolchildren, noting that ‘better language skills also help pupils develop an understanding of other cultures, creating the type of outward-looking nation which will make Scotland an attractive place for people from other countries to live and work.’1 The issue of good language skills also features in the Scottish Executive’s National Statement for Improving Attainment in Literacy in Schools. Pre-school children should ‘be encouraged to develop a curiosity about words, how they sound, the patterns within words and how they are composed.’2 Students following the 5–14 curriculum should ‘be able to enjoy and respond to a variety of texts and, in so doing, achieve an awareness of genre and knowledge about language. For writing – pupils will be able to write in three modes (personal, functional i.e. informative and imaginative) and to convey meaning in language appropriate to audience and purpose. In so doing, they will pay careful attention to punctuation and structure, spelling, handwriting and presentation and acquire knowledge about language.’3

The message is from the Executive is clear: language matters. Scottish schoolchildren need to know about language if they are to become literate, if they are to be proficient in modern languages, and if they are to gain a better understanding of their own society and heritage. The question then is how to achieve these aims. How should Scottish children gain knowledge about the structure of language – for this is really what the National Statement is concerned with in its reference to, for instance, ‘the patterns within words and how they are composed’? Where should such a subject appear in the curriculum? One option is to shove it into the English curriculum. This is a bad idea, for a number of reasons: first, you don’t need to have done any Linguistics or English Language courses in order to become an English teacher in Scotland, and most university courses in English Literature teach you nothing about language, so not every English teacher would be willing to incorporate knowledge of language into the English curriculum; second, for those that are willing – those who have taken courses in English Language and/or Linguistics already, or are interested enough to find out more about such subjects – there are insufficient resources and training opportunities; third, there’s too much to do in a literature-oriented curriculum to do justice to the development of an in-depth knowledge about language and how it works (even just in literary texts); and fourth, language is too important to be seen as just an ‘add-on’ to literature: it deserves its own place. 

An option at once more radical and realistic would be to create a series of separate Scottish National Qualifications in Language, along the lines of the increasingly popular AS and A2 qualification in English Language, which is available in England and Wales. The specifications for AS/A2 English Language suggest that courses ‘should encourage students to develop their interest and enjoyment in the use of English, through learning more about the structures and functions of English, drawing on their experience and knowledge of language change and variation.’4 Such a course would follow on well from the 5–14 curriculum as envisaged in the National Statement for Improving Attainment in Literacy in Schools, referred to above. And it is certainly the case that courses in English Language at AS and A2 are successful: the most popular board and specification (AQA specification B) had 13,040 candidates for its AS English Language exam, and 9,130 for the A2 qualification in the 2003 academic session.5 An additional bonus, therefore, is that a Language Higher in Scotland could benefit from the published material for AS and A2 English Language. But the Scottish qualifications both could and should be different from those offered in English schools, and this is not merely to do with differences in the educational systems of the two countries. The situation in Scotland offers many opportunities for students to explore language issues, both local and global.

What issues might a Language curriculum in Scotland address? First, students would require a basic training in linguistic concepts and terminology (within the fields of grammar, phonology, meaning and usage) to provide them with an appropriate framework for linguistic observation and analysis. This training would also serve to help students in their work in foreign languages. It is ludicrous to expect anyone to understand the different uses of French tenses if they have no understanding of what tense as a linguistic concept is. Would students not have a better chance of understanding the syntax of subordinate clauses in German if they had had the chance to understand what a subordinate clause in English is? The 2003 Principal Assessors’ Reports for the Modern Languages made the following assessment with respect to student performance at Advanced Higher level: ‘Across the languages, as ever, the basic grasp of grammatical accuracy was disappointing.’6 Giving students the opportunity to explore the wonders of grammar – and it is genuinely wonderful – will enable them to become more proficient in mastering the grammars of their own and other languages. This knowledge, then, is not merely relevant for foreign language learning (otherwise such work could be dealt with exclusively in the Modern Languages curricula.) Greater awareness of language entails greater literacy and awareness of style: students who know more about the nitty-gritty of their own language are able to manipulate it for greater stylistic effect.

Second, students should apply this conceptual knowledge to an investigation of linguistic issues in Scotland, past and present. There are so many topics which could be covered: accents and dialects in Scotland, and the language of Scottish literature, are obvious candidates, but one could also imagine a module on multilingualism in Scotland, which would allow for discussion of a number of critical linguistic issues, such as: language planning (for both Scots and Gaelic); minority languages in Scotland (Scots and Gaelic again, of course, but also other languages such as Urdu and British Sign Language); and English in Scotland (both now and in the past). If Scottish students are encouraged to engage with the linguistic situation that (a) surrounds them now and (b) influenced their culture in the past, they will come to a greater understanding of the diversity of language and of certain factors influencing linguistic change. Such topics are central to a liberal arts curriculum and yet are currently marginalized in the Scottish educational system. This is a disgrace.

Third, students should be encouraged to explore differences between spoken and written language, and again this could be achieved in a number of ways. One option might be to have a module on original writing, to show how different linguistic techniques can be employed in writing to serve different purposes and audiences. Another might be to have this topic assessed by project work, where a group of students take a topic (for example, the war on terror) and collect data from a range of spoken and written sources (speeches by Blair and Bush, editorials in The Herald and The Daily Record, web discussion groups, a class debate, a radio interview and so on) and then each individual topic analyses the data in a different way – one looks at the language of persuasion, one looks at grammatical characteristics of spoken vs. written language, one looks at broadsheet vs. tabloid style and so on. This is merely one way in which project work could be incorporated into a Language Higher, but it would be a great way of getting students to engage with linguistics and its applications.

There are many other topics which might be considered (language acquisition, for instance); and it must be said that some of these topics are already addressed in the ‘Language Study’ module of the English Advanced Higher. Notice, however, that the language module in that qualification is an option, whereas the ‘Literary Study’ module is compulsory, and the range of topics addressed is necessarily much narrower than that which could be available to a student were a separate Language (Advanced) Higher in place. But the purpose of this article is not to lay out a curriculum. Its purpose is to highlight the following:

  • An understanding of language is a necessary part of Scottish school education. Knowing how language works leads to improvements in literacy and greater competence in foreign languages.
  • At present, there is no possibility of a rich and systematic treatment of language issues in Scottish classrooms. This is not the fault of teachers, but a fault of curriculum design.
  • In order to allow for a systematic treatment of language, therefore, a separate curriculum must be designed, and adequate training and resources must be provided for teachers.
  • Such a curriculum should be negotiated by school teachers, university academics, and representatives from local and national government, as well as representatives from autonomous agencies of the state, including especially perhaps professionals concerned with testing, qualifications, awards, and career development. Greater dialogue between those employed in Scottish universities and those employed in Scottish schools, and who have an interest in linguistic issues, would be a useful first step. The absence of such dialogue is as much a fault of the universities as it is of the schools.

Graeme Trousdale is a lecturer in English Language at the University of Edinburgh. He is also a member of the ASLS Language Committee.

Notes 

1 Source: National Grid for Learning 
2 Source: National Statement for Improving Attainment in Literacy in Schools (Scottish Executive publication), Part 1, page 1 
3 ibid., Part 2, page 3 
4 Source: QCA Subject Criteria for English AS/A Level 
5 Source: ‘A-Level English Language: a collection of facts and figures’, by Professor Richard Hudson 
6 Source: Principal Assessors’ Reports 2003 (Assessment Panel: Modern Languages)

Copyright © Graeme Trousdale 2004