by James Hogg
To dance with the devil in the pale moonlight is a rich theme in literature. When somebody is as clever as Faustus or as socially rebellious as Don Juan, the devil rides out to meet his blood brother. Diabolists, moreover, don’t blunder into wrong-doing, as if to commit a secular crime; rather, their transgressions are purposeful and insolent. Faustus experiments with the limits of his brain power; Don Juan, inviting the Stone Guest to dinner, the ghost of a man he’s killed, the father of a girl he’s seduced, is seeing how much he can get away with. Hence, Robert Wringhim Colwan. Though the character of his real father, the fire and brimstone preacher, predicts the devil’s mannerisms, the devil actually makes his first direct appearance in the text during a moment of religious ecstasy. The Rev. Wringhim anoints Robert as one of ‘the just made perfect’, and as ‘a justified person’ he gambols across the landscape — ‘I deemed myself as an eagle among the children of men.’ At which juncture he meets his sinister double. It is love at first sight: ‘I can never describe the strange sensations that thrilled through my whole frame at that impressive moment.’
What ensues may be as endlessly argued as Hamlet’s antic disposition. Is Robert a schizophrenic to be pitied or a psychopath to be actively hated? Is the apparition of the devil an emanation of what is already latent in Robert’s nature (as Mr Hyde is the self-confident and vivid version of meek and masochistic Dr Jekyll) or is he supernaturally possessed by demons? To what extent is he responsible for his actions? Is Robert the devil’s double, or is he, as a prig and bigot, simply victimized? Is Robert, in fact, removed from the scene altogether — his body invaded and snatched away, to be replaced by an unholy simulacrum? After his first meeting with the stranger in the wild woods, for example, he returns home and upsets his parents — they find him altered, ‘translated’. How so? And if we try and match the chronology of the confession with the action of the editorial sections, we see that just when George was haunted and humiliated, Robert was bedridden with fever and hallucinations for a month.
Hogg has space, here and there, for all these bewitching possibilities. Sometimes Robert’s companion is, ‘as the shadow is cast from the substance’, alongside him; at other moments he is internalized (‘our beings are amalgamated’) and the voice of insanity (which ‘tyrannized over every spontaneous movement of my heart’); then again he retires into the background, forlorn and degenerating, ‘raging with despair at his fallen and decayed majesty’. The fact of his fluidity, however, now in Robert’s mind, now his room, now in the shape of George, or Thomas Drummond, or anybody, witnessed by strangers or invisible to them, is constant — and never naturalistic. And it is in the dark intensity and languor of the devil’s magical transformations that the eroticism is to be found; in his disappearances, the way people’s bodies are merging and deliquescing, one into the other. Satan sets up a rhythm with which Robert complies and to which, increasingly exhausted, he yields — ‘the power was not in me to separate myself from him’.
Robert’s relationship with the devil, therefore, is presented as a sexual bond. (His being trussed upside down and beaten by a weaver and being tethered and whipped by the two Arabellas are other, minor, delicacies out of de Sade.) This becomes explicit when, back as the new laird of Dalcastle, Robert is obliterated for a spell (he seems to suffer a six-month narcoleptic trance) and some ‘second self … some other being who appears in my likeness’, roams the countryside, depraved, drunk, despoiling. As the devil never admits that he’s been the one getting up to ‘the basest and most ungenerous of purposes’, raping a village wench, forging legal documents to acquire neighbouring estates, and so on, it is as if Robert’s released and violent inner self has been carrying out the crimes and misdemeanours, fulfilling its appetites whilst he sleeps — a nightmare self. (The devil stands back, sombre and disgusted, merely reminding Robert of his promise that ‘no human hand shall ever henceforth be able to injure your life, or shed one drop of your precious blood’. If he doesn’t realize this is the devil talking it is only because he doesn’t want to.) The culmination of the orgy is the murder of his mother, who had become ‘exceedingly obnoxious to me’, after which he flees into the night, creating commotion wherever he goes — horses are maddened, cats with talons out fling themselves at him, etc.
The justified sinner’s surrender to Satan’s fascination, with the opportunities for character renewal, leaving your body, and, as he hopes, moral indemnity, connects Hogg’s novel with that other flirtation of the Romantic age — after the imitations and translations of books and papers — the actor. Actors (like lunatics) were licensed for extravagance and excess. There was an element of mystery to their art — and they were full of the gusto which Hazlitt, for example, also detected in, as it might be, Indian jugglers or a prize fight. Coleridge famously complimented Edward Kean’s Hamlet on being like a reading of Shakespeare carried out between lightning flashes. Actors had a transformative genius. G. H. Lewes, George Eliot’s would-be husband, saw Kean play Othello in 1825 and remembered a small man who was yet enlarged by the emotions the role made him feel — Kean grew into Othello, the eloquence of the lines and the strength of the drama (‘this is all the witchcraft I have used’) converting him mentally, therefore physically. This is the witchery of theatre, to be found also in The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, for the devil is a master mummer: ‘My countenance changes with my studies and sensations … If I contemplate a man’s features seriously, mine own gradually assume the very same appearance and character … I not only attain the same likeness, but, with the likeness, I attain the very same ideas as well as the same mode of arranging them, so that, you see, by looking at a person attentively, I by degrees assume his likeness, and by assuming his likeness I attain to the possession of his most secret thoughts.’ This could be a description of the processes whereby actors absorb their roles; and it is also in tune with the sympathy and versatility the Romantic writers found in Hamlet, an unstable acid of a man, who ‘sees evil hovering near him like a spectre’ (Hazlitt), who ‘gives substance to shadows, and throws a mist over all commonplace actualities’ (Coleridge), whose speeches ‘are the effusions of his solitary musings’ (Lamb) — and who is, of course, being death-obsessed and misanthropic, the ancestor of Robert Wringhim Colwan.
The chief objection against the Shakespeare play in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was that it had to involve the vulgarity and compromises of the stage. Hamlet, it was felt, being ‘wrapped up in his reflections’, is incongrous in the theatre of the mind. And it is this region which Hogg’s character never leaves. Indeed, he’s shut up there, tormented, like Colin Hyslop in Hogg’s ‘The Witches of Traquair’ (Black-wood’s Edinburgh Mazazine, Vol. XXIII, April 1828), by ‘monstrous shapes, torn by cats, pricked by invisible bodkins’, unleashed by the Prince of the Power of the Air.
Nevertheless, if Hogg’s book borrowed Hamlet and put him at last in a novel, it is of interest to note that the film director Alexander Mackendrick had a long-held ambition to put The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner on to the screen. And yes it would have worked marvellously as an Ealing movie. The sardonic tone of Whisky Galore or The Man in the White Suit, the ‘lethal innocence’ (as Philip Kemp calls it) of the rebels and reactionaries who populate the stories — such an atmosphere and approach could have captured Hogg’s irony and drive. Then there are the set-pieces, which are ideal for the cinema — e.g. the mob violence incited by the devil (‘… thousands were moved to an involuntary flight they knew not why …’), or the villagers and the party of officers closing in on Robert with a warrant for his arrest (‘everything is in train for your ruin’), or the special effects of the doubles and the disappearing. The book contains straightforward comedy, too — as when the Rev. Wringhim, outraged to be charged with Robert’s paternity, says that, if the boy resembles him, it is simply because of his mother’s private thoughts and affections: ‘I have known a lady … who was delivered of a blackamoor child, merely fro
m the circumstance of having got a start by the sudden entrance of her negro servant, and not being able to forget him for several hours.’
The way Hogg’s brief novel is rich in suggestiveness, asides, ellipses, matter which has to be read between the lines, would have suited Ealing — where restraint and economy were virtues and, given the era, put to alluring adult use. The extent of the evil, the erotic, the necromancy, and the appeal of these, isn’t spelled out by Hogg, and Mackendrick, especially, would have similarly half-touched in such gists and piths. (Does anybody want to draw a conclusion about what being Scottish entails at this point?) Over all: Robert and the devil — what opportunities for the actor, who can get around to giving a performance of gleeful craziness. A gift of a part for him who (in Hogg’s words) ‘by setting his features to the mould of other people’s, … entered at once into their conceptions and feelings’. In the cinema we’d be able to see what he sees.
If not yet a film, however, Hogg’s novel, we may mention in closing, does not entirely stand alone. The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner stands behind Anthony Burgess’s Enderby trilogy. In these novels, dating from 1963, 1968 and 1974, the poet F. X. Enderby seeks a perfection of his art, rather than in his life — until, that is, the devil enters his world in the guise of various temptresses and treacherous muses, who destroy his calm, and hence his work. As in the Hogg original, there are a fear of sex, a hatred of women, and a number of false prophets. At the conclusion of Inside Mr Enderby, the hero is delirious. In a suicidal temper he breaks down and the doctors reorientate his identity. He is put in an asylum as Piggy Hogg, whence he is released at the beginning of Enderby Outside to rehabilitate by working in a pub. He pipes up when the author Hogg is mentioned: ‘The Ettrick Shepherd he was known as. Pope in worsted stockings … A very Jacobitical poet, that one. Charlie he’s my darling. Wha the deil hae wi goten for a king but a wee wee German lairdie. He spoke out, Enderby. He didn’t give a worsted stocking damn.’ The allusion specifically made, what next?
The devil comes back into Enderby’s orbit as Miranda Boland, an expert on moon studies. She tries to seduce him (he’s impotent), tries to inspire him to compose rubbishy sentimental verses, and exploits his docility. On the run following the murder of a pop singer he’s not quite sure he committed, he arrives, disguised and babbling that his name is now Puerco, in Tangier — Miranda on his trail. As a diabolist, she is capable of altering her state. Like the waxing and waning of the moon, she has the ability to look thin or fat, slim or ugly, depending on her mood. She is affected too by the proximity of the sea and tides. Burgess indulges in much typical wordplay about sea = la mer and mother-in-law = la belle-mère — the step-mother and mother-in-law figure being Enderby’s chief hate and primal arch fiend. (‘You’ve been doing your damndest to turn into my step-mother,’ he eventually snarls at most of his wives.) La Belle Mer is the name of the bayside bar he comes to work at.
By the time of The Clockwork Testament, Enderby is in the psychic hell of New York, a visiting professor of creative writing at a university. The novel is chiefly notable for its attempts to pretend that a serious and lengthy theological debate — about free will versus predestination — can be given any narrative excitement. Burgess offers us tutorials, slanging matches in bars, the transcripts of television talk shows. (Why didn’t he simply climb into a pulpit?) His ideas merely reproduce didactically what Hogg explored dramatically — ‘If you get rid of evil you get rid of choice. You’ve got to have things to choose between, and that means good and evil. If you don’t choose, you’re not human anymore. You’re something else. Or you’re dead.’ Or you are a clockwork orange — like Alex, in Burgess’s most famous novel, his brain scoured of nastiness, lobotomized, an ambling strange fruit. ‘Human beings are defined by freedom of choice. Once you have them doing what they’re told is good just because they’re going to get a lump of sugar instead of a kick, then ethics no longer exist.’
According to Burgess, we are each of us a mixture of volatile compounds, ‘forepunished’ for our wrongdoings, at liberty to carry out ‘mixed rape and torture and cannibalism’. It is up to each individual to exert self-control and decide which way to proceed in the garden of the forking paths. Burgess mentions the myth of Oedipus, compelled to choose at the crossroads, and focusing many Freudian dilemmas as a result: a disposal of the father-figure, love of the mother, and so on. Such anxieties may also be found in Hogg, scores of years before Freud. That demonology has a sexual cause, for example, is perceptively put across in ‘The Witches of Traquair’, where the supernatural and the gothic are ways for Hogg to explore and explain the bored and disappointed outlook, the neuroses, of people who are growing old: ‘Women, beyond a certain age, when the pleasures and hopes of youth delighted no more, flew to witchcraft as an excitement of a higher and more terrible nature …’ Black magic is an explanation for what we’d now talk about as the hormonal imbalance of the menopause — just as the fevers of adolescence are ascribed to witchcraft in Arthur Miller’s play, The Crucible.
That Robert’s own devil-worship and ‘ungovernable passions’ coincide with the uproar and hazards of young adulthood are further evidence of his tragedy’s connection with whatever sensations were rushing through his nervous system — his life and death might all have biochemical underpinnings, his visions brainstorms ‘on a blue islet of ether, in a whole sky of blackest cloudage’ (to use Coleridge’s attempt at describing what became known as the subconscious). Virtually a century before it was clinically diagnosed, Hogg’s book demonstrates the symptoms of schizophrenia:
1. The patient’s conversation may be unreal and disturbing.
2. Thoughts and perceptions are odd and distorted and often imply persecution of the patient.
3. The patient may hear voices, see visions, have irrational beliefs and delusions.
4. Behaviour may be bizarre.
5. The patient may be agitated and may behave in an antisocial or violent way.
(from Medical Terminology in Hospital Practice, ed. P. M. Davies)
Burgess’s own books contain much on medicine and disease. The Doctor is Sick deals with the fantasy of a patient dying from a brain tumour. The infernal underworld where he believes he is heading is blended with the criminal underworld of a Dickensian London; or Honey for the Bears about losing one’s identity in the madhouse of Soviet Russia; or Nothing Like the Sun, where Shakespeare is in the tertiary phase of syphillis; or his many adaptations of Cyrano de Bergerac, with its hero emotionally crippled by a huge nose … There are many more. The whole lot could be seen as prefigured in Hogg’s interests. Like the historical Hogg, Burgess’s fictional characters demonstrate the insecurities of men educated out of their social class — men who have too much brain, who are never satisfied or safe, and who have nothing to protect themselves with except language. It will have to be left to other commentators comprehensively to elucidate Burgess’s obsession with doubles — good and evil, creativity and poetasting — and to discuss the rift between his origins and what he has made of himself, as sketched in his volumes of memoirs, which he subtitles his Confessions. And who is going to examine the way the celebrity on the Côte d’Azur, with his villa on Malta and chalet in Switzerland, is related to the half-Scottish Manchester Catholic schoolmaster, born John Wilson, the very same name as James Hogg’s friend (1785-1854), the metaphysician and editor?
Roger Lewis
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner was first published, anonymously, by Longmans in June 1824 and reissued in 1837 as The Private Memoirs of a Fanatic, heavily edited by D. O. Hill, who removed all the Calvinistic satire and references to the devil. An edition by Shiells & Co. in 1895, called The Suicide’s Grave, Being the Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, returned to the 1824 original, but introduced many new misprints and slips. The 1824 text was also used for an edition of Hogg in the Campion Reprints Series (1924) and by the Cress
et Press (1947), where the book was introduced by André Gide, who said Robert’s behaviour ‘is the exteriorized development of our own desires, of our pride, of our most secret thoughts’.
There are two other modern texts available, both following that of 1824. John Carey’s, for the Oxford University Press World’s Classics Series (1969), contains a detailed bibliography, pinpointing the discrepancies between editions, and exacting explanatory notes on such items as the Covenanters, the Scottish legal system and Episcopalian dress. He also informs us that a grey stone slab may be found at the top of Fell Law mountain, at the exact spot where Hogg places Robert’s desecrated tomb. In his preface, Professor Carey usefully investigates the so-called factual nature of the Editor’s Narrative — and discovers considerable indecisiveness: ‘the old laird marries after succeeding to Dalcastle in 1687, but his second son is seventeen on 25 March 1704; Colwans and Wringhims go to Edinburgh in 1704 to attend a session of parliament that took place in 1703; Mrs Calvert sees Drummond’s claymore glittering in the moon, and the surgeons testify that this sword fits George’s wound, whereas Wringhim, by his own and Mrs Calvert’s account carried a rapier; George’s body is found on a ‘little washing green,’ but Mrs Calvert remembers it as ‘not a very small one’; she thinks she sees him ‘pierced through his body twice,’ but examination reveals only one fatal wound; Wringhim sees his mother’s body being carried to the house, but in the traditional account she is lost without trace.’
John Wain’s edition, for Penguin Classics (1983), contains no bibliography, but there is instead a glossary of Scottish words and phrases, gleaned from the Scottish National Dictionary. In his notes, Professor Wain discusses many of the biblical terms to be found in Hogg: Belial, Canaanitish, Moabite, Melchizedek, etc.; and in his preface he concentrates on the political background to Hogg’s novel, giving the work a profound historical context. The mob violence, for example, relates closely to contemporary fears of revolution. During the parliamentary session of 1703, there was a dangerous division between the Jacobites, supporters of the Stuart Crown (and descendants of executed Charles I) and the Government Party, which wanted to introduce the English Act of Occasional Conformity, i.e. allegiance to the Protestant Hanoverian succession. Interestingly, the man framed for George’s murder, Thomas Drummond, really was the second son of the Duke of Melfort — a nobleman who’d gone into exile with James II to St Germain-en-Laye.