IAIN CRICHTON SMITH
Listen to the Voice
Selected Stories
Introduced by Douglas Gifford
Contents
Introduction
The Dying
The Adoration of the Mini
At the Fair
On the Island
Napoleon and I
What to Do About Ralph?
The Play
Survival Without Error
The Hermit
Listen to the Voice
The Black and the Red
The Old Woman, the Baby and Terry
Murdo
The Wedding
An American Sky
The Professor and the Comics
By Their Fruits
Chagall’s Return
Introduction
‘Listen to the Voice’ insists the title story of this collection, and Iain Crichton Smith, one of our finest writers, has always been engaged with the world of private and public voices. This has taken him from the existential bleaknesses of silence to the reviving and hilarious comedy which he finds in the oddness and banality of everyday speech. Some of his stories, like ‘The Black and the Red’ or ‘The Professor and the Comics’, suggest that following the promptings of an inner truth can lead to self-discovery and change. In others, however, as in the title story itself, the ‘voice’ listened to emerges as repressive, intolerant, or even mad.
All the evidence of Smith’s poetry and fiction indicates an author deeply divided as to whether human experience has validity or not, and the reader of these stories will discover a disturbing and unsettled world. Lonely people in sterile relationships struggle with the bonds of monotony and ‘duty’. Religion, culture and even daily village life, can suffocate, or make one an exile in one’s own country. And beyond the village, the world at large all too often appears no better, a realm of bourgeois pretension, banal obsessions and the materialistic images of television. Significantly, for someone brought up on Lewis, (an island many would consider to offer beauty and tradition), Smith finds little consolation in landscape, in myth and legend, or in local culture. His are not the characters of a Neil Grain or Grassic Gibbon, but of a bare, anonymous northern territory of unfriendly villages and dull towns, where, if nature intrudes at all, it is unknowable or alienating, as in the frequent imagery of an uncaring, heedless sea. If individuals triumph, it’s not via the promptings of natural beauty, but through the assertion of self or the acceptance of fallen humanity.
The final hallmark of all Smith’s work is his unremitting emphasis on the need to recognise the ordinary, weak, tragic, but vital nature of undistinguished people. This did not come easily to him, with his Free Church background, his dominating mother’s insistence on education, his Aberdeen University study of Classics and English Literature. The creative tension between a persistent respect for an élitist and academic British tradition and an opposing and radical love of the mundane is everywhere in these disturbing short stories.
The collection also reflects the tension in Smith’s fiction and poetry generally, that is, between the Lewis and Gaelic influences of childhood and the first half of his life, and the concerns of his maturity with the wider world, and particularly with issues of an existential and philosophical nature. The stories range from mundane local community concerns, where conformity matters so much, to fables such as ‘Chagall’s Return’, with its recognition that home and the local may be a coffin as well as a nest to the artist.
‘An American Sky’, ‘The Wedding’, and ‘The Black and the Red’ clearly define the claims and the failures of one’s home, village, island. ‘The Black and the Red’ was the title story of a 1973 collection, and it is an important semi-autobiographical account of Smith’s university transition just after the war, from mother-dominated past to involvement with ideas and issues radically alien to Lewis and the Free Church. The story is cleverly constructed so that it has a first part dominated by Black, with eight sections or movements, conveyed through the letters home to the mother, still tied up with concern for church and her opinions, and the second, increasingly Red, with five rapidly developing sections/letters showing rebellion and final epiphany and transformation. It is important, however, that the reader does not fall for a simplistic Black/bad–Red/good dichotomy. From the opening red rawness of the dawn sun over Skye, redness is new life—but also associated with the scavenging gulls, the uncertainty and vulnerability of George the sceptical student, and the brittle assertiveness and passion of Fiona. Yes, ‘red’ can be affirmative—it is blood and life after all—but it can also be wounding and pain. Even so, it is still immeasurably superior to the black, grey and ghostly deadness of the church bickering of Lewis, the mother’s implied reproaches and complaints, the disillusioned academics with their dead ideas from disappointed teaching.
‘An American Sky’ offers a warmer balance of the two; John MacLeod returns at sixty from America to a changed Lewis, of TV and motor bikes and laconic youngsters who are disconnected from oral tradition, Gaelic culture, even family and village. Chinese restaurants and bingo jar with his memories, so that in the end neither past nor modern worlds dominate or offer value. The ‘epiphany’ of this story lies in the enigmatic and repeated imagery of the swarm of midges:
They were rising and falling in the slight breeze. They formed a cloud but inside the cloud each insect was going on its own way of drifting with the breeze. Each alive and perhaps with its own weight, its own inheritance. Apparently free yet fixed, apparently spontaneous yet destined …
Doesn’t the reference to predestined life, with its exact balance against freedom, tell us much about Smith’s tension of Black and Red at this point? Similarly ‘The Wedding’ offers an initial downward estimate of island quality, in the way the father of the bride is shown up as clumsy, predictable and anachronistic amongst the young Gaels; but the story balances his banal wedding speech and the bride’s embarrassment by allowing him to blossom in the later singing, when only he can sing with authority and memory of the old songs. Significantly, the ‘I’ author finds the wedding strangely ‘authentic and false’—so that the nett effect of these Gaelic-based stories is to question both worlds. One can become an exile from the world as well as from one’s home, and Smith finds his main tension between acceptance of the bleeding world and alienation from it.
Concomitant with these stories of roots are the many stories exploring duty towards bleak and authoritarian parents. ‘The Adoration of the Mini’ and ‘The Dying’ show a movement from simple repudiation of repressive bonds to complex evaluation of what exactly ‘love’ and ‘duty’ amount to. ‘Hate’ and ‘fear’ are interwoven with them; yet while Smith nearly always concludes that new life is unquestionably superior to custom-based servitude, he shows always the paradox of pain resultant from self-assertion and love. The pregnant daughter of ‘The Adoration’ says farewell to her dying father; but ‘what she was included her father’, and she pities her unborn child, knowing that life may repeat her father yet again. This refusal to allow unqualified human love is taken to its ultimate conclusion in ‘The Dying’, where the relationship of the dying person to the watcher is reduced to one in which the human body becomes ‘the breathing’, ‘the grey hairs around the head’, ‘the voice’—and finally, ‘the log’, inert, dead matter, a cold factuality alongside a living grief. Death is unknowable.
This reduction of the human connection to the anatomised actuality pervades nearly all Smith’s stories. In ‘Survival Without Error’, ‘The Hermit’, and ‘Listen to the Voice’ marriages are reduced to a grey failure to communicate, or to dubious memories in which the survivor can’t quite decide whether love existed or not. Or they end up
in a solipsistic loneliness in which, as in ‘The Hermit’, a whole community becomes an aggregation of separate, lonely, and selfish people. ‘Survival Without Error’ introduces Smith’s concept of the final and necessary invention of the sick community, the scapegoat. His analysis of human complexity is profound here; the last turn of the introverted and loveless self and society is to create the ‘other’ who is nevertheless a version of the self and of the society. The lawyer of ‘Survival’ has to condemn Lecky, since to condone challenges him to see himself in Lecky and to deconstruct the defences he’s built to save himself from the same self-destruction. Likewise ‘The Hermit’ (worked up from a much shorter story in The Village, 1976) demonstrates the underlying bond between the retired headmaster, alone and vulnerable in frustrated age, and the self-sufficient hermit who seems to need nothing from other humans. ‘Survival’ is the less profound of the two; clearly its lawyer is inhumane and warped by national service, ambition and selfishness. ‘The Hermit’, on the other hand, disturbs more because it has a residual sense that perhaps the actions of the headmaster are sadly right, and in getting rid of the catalyst who seems to destroy people’s sense of themselves by simply being there, the web of the village has been preserved. Smith isn’t approving; but beyond the obvious petty sordidness of village affairs he suggests the darker view that scapegoats allow us our complacency, just as in ‘The Adoration of the Mini’ the dying man obscurely consoles himself by creating an enemy in his daughter, or in ‘Listen to the Voice’, a long-suppressed revenge masquerades as appalling honesty.
‘Survival’, with or without error, is another dominating idea, with two opposite implications. Yes, some survivals seem like genuine epiphanies, with hitherto quiescent or repressed protagonists asserting themselves dramatically, from the pregnant daughter of ‘Adoration’ to the amiable yet ferocious retiring Professor, or the tentative communication of Ralph and stepfather. But beyond the Red-loving student of ‘The Black and the Red’ or the reconciliation of ‘At the Fair’, several ‘survivals’ seem much more inscrutable. For example, the Canadian uncle of ‘By Their Fruits’, with his crass prejudice and vulgar easiness; is he a testimony to colourful widowerhood or a monument to selfish survival? It is almost as if Smith were asking why certain types and individuals survive when the weaker have gone under. ‘The Old Woman, the Baby and Terry’ likewise implies the question, since the answer to the social worker’s nagging speculation as to what links the aged parent, the unborn child which drains his wife, and Terry, who takes and takes again, biting the hand which helps him, is that all are survivors, instinctively taking from others, ruthlessly exploiting for survival. Often it’s the selfish who triumph, and often the strategies for survival are weird and grotesque, as in ‘Napoleon and I’, with its typical love-hate relationship, its powerful symbolism of war and classic megalomania, and the sting in the tail that the old woman can outdo her husband in selfish madness.
‘Napoleon and I’ also represents a kind of story and strategy increasingly used by Smith to handle some of his deepest perceptions of the randomness and unrelated nature of experience. It perhaps sounds odd after indicating how bleak Smith’s vision can be to celebrate his humour, but if one recalls the essential paradox underlying his work of tragi-affirmative co-existence, it may surprise less. Smith can make his reader suddenly guffaw, as when ‘Napoleon’ tells the milkman to bring up five divisions, ‘Touty sweet’. ‘On the Island’, with young Allan, Donny and William crazily and self-mockingly wandering from Louis Armstrong to ‘The Hen’s March to the Midden’, affecting accents, discovering Ossian (or was it Columba?) in the incongruous figure of the upright, old bearded patriarch in the rowing boat, or parodying philosophical and political debate, has for all its zany humour a hint of ‘the horror’. ‘Nevertheless, it’s got to be faced’, says William, a propos of nothing; and when asked what has to be faced, ‘this wilderness. Seas, rocks, animosity, ferocity. These waves all hating us, gnashing their white teeth …’, he replies.
They looked at it but their hatred was not as great as its, not so indifferent. It was without mercy because it did not know of them. It was the world before man … It was what there was of it. Nothing that was not unintelligible could be said about it.
The great achievement of this strand is the long short story ‘Murdo’. Here is agony and hilarious grotesquerie conjoined, the humour with its own bizarre Verfremmsdung effect, as Smith measures the depths of Murdo’s imminent breakdown by the goonery of his actions and declamations to astonished neighbours. Like the sad, humble, laughable figure of Mr Trill who features in several of Smith’s stories, Murdo is an extreme way of seeing the pretentiousness of culture, the naked quality of actuality, as well as being another strategy for handling the unbearable.
Of course, Smith has an opposite utterance to this; in which Art does matter, in which drama, painting, and human struggle to give utterance and to communicate, is seen positively. ‘The Professor and the Comics’, ‘What to Do About Ralph?’ and ‘The Play’ all allow epiphany through the value of therapeutic literature and art, as does the late symbolic prose-poem ‘Chagall’s Return’. Smith has always had two ways of seeing life: depending on the perspective, it can be coffin or nest, and homeland, native culture, community, and even Art itself can be equally ambiguous.
These are not perhaps the stories one might expect from one of the finest of our Gaelic poets. They are curiously un-Scottish in their un-identified and strangely de-contextualised villages and towns, with their ‘Ralphs’ and ‘Marks’. But their very refusal to deal with conventional Highland life makes its own stark criticism of what has really happened to these peripheral places of once-different traditions. There’s a great deal of oblique and implicit social criticism of what Britain has become behind the apparently localised action. Most of all, however, they are stories without parallel in their intensity of experience of the pain of loss of community, of belief in ideals, of acceptance of social value. The wonder is that Smith so often manages to discover in such pain moments of Grace, affirmation, communication, that, for all the bleakness of the human situation, there will always be a voice somewhere worth listening to.
Douglas Gifford
The Dying
WHEN THE BREATHING got worse he went into the adjacent room and got the copy of Dante. All that night and the night before he had been watching the dying though he didn’t know it was a dying. The grey hairs around the head seemed to panic like the needle of a compass and the eyes, sometimes open, sometimes shut, seemed to be looking at him all the time. He had never seen a dying before. The breathlessness seemed a bit like asthma or bad bronchitis, ascending sometimes into a kind of whistling like a train leaving a station. The voice when it spoke was irritable and petulant. It wanted water, lots of water, milk, lots of milk, anything to quench the thirst and even then he didn’t know it was a dying. The tongue seemed very cold as he fed it milk. It was cold and almost stiff. Once near midnight he saw the cheeks flare up and become swollen so that the eyes could hardly look over them. When a mirror was required to be brought she looked at it, moving her head restlessly this way and that. He knew that the swelling was a portent of some kind, a message from the outer darkness, an omen.
Outside, it was snowing steadily, the complex flakes weaving an unintelligible pattern. If he were to put the light out then that other light, as alien as that from a dead planet, the light of the moon itself, would enter the room, a sick glare, an almost abstract light. It would light the pages of the Dante which he needed now more than ever, it would cast over the poetry its hollow glare.
He opened the pages but they did not mean anything at all since all the time he was looking at the face. The dying person was slipping away from him. She was absorbed in her dying and he did not understand what was happening. Dying was such an extraordinary thing, such a private thing. Sometimes he stretched out his hand and she clutched it, and he felt as if he were in a boat and she were in the dark water around it. And all
the time the breathing was faster and faster as if something wanted to be away. The brow was cold but the mouth still wanted water. The body was restlessly turning, now on one side now on the other. It was steadily weakening. Something was at it and it was weakening.
In Thy Will is My Peace … The words from Dante swam into his mind. They seemed to swim out of the snow which was teeming beyond the window. He imagined the universe of Dante like a watch. The clock said five in the morning. He felt cold and the light was beginning to azure the window. The street outside was empty of people and traffic. There was no one alive in the world but himself. The lamps cast their glare over the street. They brooded over their own haloes all night.
When he looked again the whistling was changing to a rattling. He held one cold hand in his, locking it. The head fell back on the pillow, the mouth gaping wide like the mouth of a landed fish, the eyes staring irretrievably beyond him. The one-barred electric fire hummed in a corner of the room, a deep and raw red wound. His copy of Dante fell from his hand and lay on top of the red woollen rug at the side of the bed stained with milk and soup. He seemed to be on a space ship upside down and seeing coming towards him another space ship shaped like a black mediaeval helmet in all that azure. On board the space ship there was at least one man encased in a black rubber suit but he could not see the face. The man was busy either with a rope which he would fling to him or with a gun which he would fire at him. The figure seemed squat and alien like an Eskimo.
And all the while the window azured and the body was like a log, the mouth twisted where all the breath had left it. It lolled on one side of the pillow. Death was not dignified. A dead face showed the pain of its dying, what it had struggled through to become a log. He thought, weeping, this is the irretrievable centre where there is no foliage and no metaphor. At this time poetry is powerless. The body looked up at him blank as a stone with the twisted mouth. It belonged to no one that he had ever known.
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