The Red Door

by Iain Crichton Smith

  For me it [the community] is a processional play with continually changing actors . . . The young man for some reason puts on the disguise of the middle-aged man and the middle-aged man in turn the guise of the old man. The earth flowers with corn and then becomes bare again. The sky at moments is close and then as far away as eternity.

  ‘The Hermit’ is, like Nabokov’s Lolita, more than it seems to be: it, too, is a meditation upon language. There are a great many references to language and the nature of communication stated – and buried – within this most densely revealing of texts. One of the story’s greatest successes is to pitch the unknown, the unsaid (the hermit) against the familiar, i.e. that which has been said so often it has become routinely acceptable and ultimately meaningless: ‘Language almost becomes like tobacco which is as much chewed as smoked . . . So much of language is lying, polite lying but still lying.’

  Crichton Smith’s stories often triumph by communicating to the reader that which is, to the characters at least, incommunicable. But, furthermore, some of his stories communicate something that seems to be, paradoxically, above verbal understanding: and the fluid, surreal images of many of Iain Crichton Smith’s stories, reminiscent of actual dreams, are one of their most recognisable features

  Daydreams, night-dreams and literary dreams are surely the inspired cinema screens that brought to light many of the images and stories contained within these volumes. ‘On the Train’, ‘The Survivor’, and ‘The Maze’ are supremely Kafkaesque, while nonetheless being Crichton Smithesque at the same time. A number of Crichton Smith’s stories take place in a kind of Twilight Zone of shifting perceptions, a world that is recognisably ours, but one that is filtered through a sinisterly dreamlike atmosphere of paranoia, implication, pessimism, and an inability to control one’s destiny. These surreal vignettes burn themselves into the mind like ultra-vivid paintings, fugitive in meaning but unforgettable as works of art. Sometimes their concluding ambiguities offer a measure of solace:

  Slowly the sun disappeared over the horizon and darkness fell and he felt the pressure of the maze relaxing, as if in a dream of happiness he understood that the roads were infinite, always fresh, always new, and that the ones who stood beside him were deeper than friends, they were bone of his bone, they were flesh of his disappearing flesh.

  (from ‘The Maze’)

  As with much of Crichton Smith’s work, a sinister intellect hovers about these stories. Many of these pieces are as unshakeable as the grip of a vivid dream that haunts without necessarily yielding its meaning. Images shift and coalesce according, it seems, to their own secret agenda.

  ‘Through the Desert’ is dreamy as a Dali painting and is a very fine example of this kind of surrealistic writing, despite a deficient ending. Its tremendous energy, its vivid movement, its colour and its life, are admirable. Images somersault across the page and land on the right side of disorientated sense, quirkily standing up to sympathetic scrutiny:

  ‘ . . . it was always day and there were no clouds, only a sun which hammered on a steel anvil like a giant at the opening of a film.’

  ‘ . . . a river with dark water which made the sound of crossed telephone conversations.’

  ‘Getting Married’ has the feel of an experimentally surreal piece – nicely written, and ‘The Little People’, too, is an unusual story, like a nebulous fairy tale. Its engaging mixture of realism and absurdity is both alluring and discomforting.

  I feel that many of these surrealist stories seem to prefigure, describe, or subsequently attempt to understand Crichton Smith’s own breakdown. In a later work, ‘In the Asylum’, reality bends ‘like plasticine’ as the author struggles with his place in the world: ‘I do not feel authentic.’ Undeniably, however, much of the nightmareish imagery Iain utilised throughout his career feels both authentic and convincing.

  Surrealism is actually evident, in varying degrees, throughout his oeuvre. ‘Goodbye John Summers’ is pure Iain Crichton Smith, a story that enigmatically ponders the thorny issue of how well we can actually know a person (and, in this case, a person who seems undistinguished almost to the point of invisibility). Like many of his stories, this meditation on death, Christianity, ambiguity, and communication is shot through with strange and imaginative (dream-like but graspable) images and ideas: ‘It was a fine bright glittery day when they buried him. I stood at the graveside and stared at the coffin as if I wished to make it transparent, but I was confronted by an opaque yellow hexagon.’

  While some of these narratives interweave realism and surrealism, others move inexorably from one to the other. ‘In the School’ is hellish and yet magnificently minimalist. Its characters are delineated with little decoration – like fine fingerprints they are tidy and self-explanatory. The story glides from dark realism to dark surrealism with an accomplished register. Its imagery revolves around cinders, sparks, fire, ideas of power and leadership and mental health.

  Sometimes the departure from strict realism manifests itself as an irruption of the supernatural into the everyday world. ‘The Brothers’ was initially published in an anthology of literary ghost stories. It is a moving – and chilling – insight into the mind of a writer who has shunned a significant part of his linguistic and cultural heritage. The narrator is a writer from the Highlands who has moved to Edinburgh to write his (English-language) stories and novels. ‘The Brothers’ feeds off many of the tensions Iain himself explored in his fabulous version of the Old Testament story of Joseph. (And yet it is not without its humour, for surely its mentioning the ghostly but more accurate typing implies a tongue-in-cheek reference to Iain’s own typescripts, which were legendarily erratic). The story is propelled by a terrifying and insightful imagination:

  My eyes pierced the door which was like skin and on the other side I saw my brothers broken by defeat and starvation but still human and rustic and brave. It was to them that I must offer myself, not to the alien kings and an alien land.

  The ending seems happy, though it is tempered by the notion that yellow often signifies a kind of sickness in Crichton Smith’s work: ‘I sat in my yellow robe at my yellow typewriter in the yellow room. And I was happy. I overflowed with the most holy joy.’

  Crichton Smith’s huge mind also bred story after story concerning exile, an understandably common theme in Highland literature. ‘The Exiles’ features a disapproving, religious cailleach, a familiar character-type in his work. This story is not, however, predictable. The old lady has a refreshingly unsentimental view of her native Highlands. As jaded and unenlightened-to-the-point-of-racism as she seems, the relationship that develops between her and the Pakistani salesman/student is touching and plausible.

  ‘An American Sky’ is a longer story, concerned with another popular Iain Crichton Smith character-type: the returning exile. This story carefully considers the issues that assail the return of a long-exiled Lewisman – the ‘implicit interrogations’, the hard realities of homeland change. John Macleod, like many before him, comes to understand ‘One always brings back a judgement to one’s home’. He decides to return to urban America, or, in Crichton Smith’s remarkable and characteristic phrasing, suggesting rapid change and a lack of adequate communication, ‘the shifting world of neon, the flashing broken signals of the city’.

  The semi-autobiographical ‘The Black and the Red’ is a story to which many islanders, in particular, relate, concerned as it is with the transition from closeted (or at least insular) life to greater maturity and freedom. Kenneth, writing letters to his mother, reveals how much of university learning occurs outwith the university itself, as he loosens the ties between himself and an oppressive, overbearing mother (and island):

  I think it’s time you went out amongst people more. I think it is time you depended less on me, although I shall never abandon you. It is time you looked at the facts. I do not want this burden of guilt. It is time we laughed more – high time.

  Ultimately, Kenneth even comes to the realisation that his illnesses h
ave been to some extent psychosomatic: ‘I mean that: I’m not going to be sick again.’ He is still his mother’s loving son, but he is an individual now, aware of his potential and his freedoms.

  One of the most appealing features of Iain Crichton Smith’s stories are those occasional and cherished instants of intelligent, lyrical, unforgettable epiphany, usually at a story’s conclusion. Such moments of epiphany, knitting agreeable, legitimate, and meaningful correspondences together, make for supremely pleasurable reading, no matter that the perceived message behind the images might be shadowy or negative.

  ‘Moments’, for example, is an eloquent analysis of those instants of clarity triggered when seemingly unrelated events appear to reveal an unguessed-at synchronous relation in a profoundly meaningful way. A quotation from the episode about the second ‘moment’ may well apply to the endings of some of Crichton Smith’s own stories: ‘And that is the thing with “moments”. They illuminate but at the same time they don’t necessarily lead to what you call understanding. And in any case one man’s “moment” is different from another man’s.’

  A number of the stories end on a note of admirably equivocal epiphany – ambiguity is a common feature. For example, nothing seems clear-cut in ‘The Exorcism’, a story that hinges upon interpretations of Kierkegaard’s philosophy, on which Crichton Smith dwells frequently in his stories and poems. (He was attracted to him partly because Kierkegaard was a poet as well as a philosopher). Ideas and opinions in this story form a spectrum of merging colours – hues and tones that themselves often change as they are being regarded. Devils and saints, realists and fantasists, the possessed and the overpowering encircle each other . . . and the result of the exorcism is satisfactorily problematic:

  I looked at him for a long time knowing that the agony was over. It was a victory but an empty victory. And even in the midst of victory how could I be sure that this was not indeed a second Kierkegaard, how could I be sure that I had not destroyed a genius? How could I be sure that my own harmonious jealous biography had not been superimposed upon his life, as one writing upon another, in that wood where the birds sang with such sweetness defending their territory? I looked down at him white and exhausted. The exorcism was over. He would now follow his unexceptional destiny.

  Some of the stories (such as ‘The Angel of Mons’) employ experimental narratorial devices. Because Crichton Smith’s stories rarely offer neat conclusions, preferring instead to scrutinise the world through highly subjective spectra, these devices often tend to be appropriate and satisfying.

  ‘The Ghost’ (from Selected Stories – not the same ghost that appears in The Village!) throws a shifting light on the ambivalence, the ambiguity, that can underpin inherent inex-plicabilities of human existence – and the different ambiguities that can remain after an explanation has been offered, while the final story in The Village ends strongly but ambiguously: ‘After a while our ambitions, thank God, grow less.’ The implication is that the villagers are limited, kept in their place; and their place is, simply, the village.

  Some of these stories also explore an inherent duality in the human mind reminiscent of Jekyll and Hyde – for example ‘Mac an t-Sronaich’, the title of which refers to a Lewis bogey-man, a dreaded character based upon a real-life murderer who stalked the moors of Lewis at one time and stalked the imaginations of storytellers and children just as effectively thereafter.

  ‘The Old Woman, the Baby and Terry’ harks back to the theme of ambiguous survival, with an undertow of selfishness running strongly throughout. Even the baby in the womb has an implied sense of innate manipulation: ‘The baby moved blindly in her womb, instinctively, strategically.’

  Love is imperative: ‘ “I love you,” she said. “There’s nothing else for it.” ’ It is a source of their strength that many of Iain Crichton Smith’s stories conclude with a unification of seemingly irreconcilable opposites in a single (and sometimes wholly enigmatic) dualism.

  Naturally, one of the most pressing themes in the stories is that of education: the nature of education and of the institutions and individuals who decide what and how to teach. ‘Murder without pain’ introduces us to Mr Trill, a name Crichton Smith calls upon in a number of stories and poems. Indeed, Trill represents an archetypal Crichton Smith figure: the principled bachelor, a man so dedicated to routine his life seems to have shrunk all about him.

  Trill is a devotee of the Roman intellect. He is such an admirer of the Classical contribution to culture that the reader feels he is almost out of place in the modern world. Disciplined, cool, patient, respectful of that which he deems worthy of his respect, he feels threatened as his world-view is challenged by events at his school. The ending of this story – sometimes dismissed as melodramatic – is confessedly and classically dramatic, as Trill decides to execute a form of justice that is ‘Greek to its very essence’.

  ‘The Ring’ is based upon an actual event that Iain witnessed during his own schooldays. It is told from the point of view of a pupil, but with the later revelation that the pupil grew up to become a teacher. It is enticingly narrated and is, I think, one of Crichton Smith’s finest stories. The pupil’s attitude is clear: ‘After all, teachers were invincible beings who appeared at the beginning of a period and left at the end of it . . . they were not human beings . . . like the rest of us.’ The adult’s subsequent attitude towards teaching is clear, too, if more cynical:

  It seemed to me that the best thing about geometry was it never lied to you, which is why I myself am a mathematics teacher as well. It has nothing to do with pain or loss. Its refuge is always secure and without mythology.

  ‘The Play’ is an excellent and hugely engaging story that is also based upon a real event, this time when he was teaching at Oban High School. The girls in the class have ‘. . . a fixed antipathy to the written word’. The teacher decides that if they will not read or write (‘Shakespeare is not necessary for hairdressing’ as he wryly concedes) then the girls can involve themselves by acting out dramas. The story is an uplifting and a memorable one. Crichton Smith’s responsibility is to the human – not to the régime – to individuality and not to conformity. The real-life drama of the original incident that inspired the story resulted in an astonished and pleased school inspector: meanwhile we empathise with the teacher completely as he broods upon Miss Stewart’s snobbish dismissal of the pupils’ (and teacher’s) achievements:

  You stupid bitch, he muttered under his breath, you Observer-Magazine-reading bitch who never liked anything in your life till some critic made it respectable, who wouldn’t recognise a good line of poetry or prose till sanctified by the voice of London, who would never have arrived at Shakespeare on your own till you were given the crutches.

  This story of triumph is a triumph.

  The Black and the Red collection modulates into a new key with the masterful final story, ‘The Professor and the Comics’, an excellent narrative that melds the serious and the humorous to great effect. The aptly named Professor Black’s comment that ‘Everything is different in spring . . . except history’ is dry and thought-flipping, like a Wildean phrase.

  The sinister shadows that lurk around many of Crichton Smith’s stories are often tempered by a humour that is clever, offbeat, punny or satirical. ‘By their Fruits’ runs in parallel with Iain’s (posthumously published) narrative poem, ‘My Canadian Uncle’ and draws inspiration from a trip Iain and Donalda made to White Rock (Canada) to meet Iain’s uncle, Torquil Campbell. It brings together a number of very Highland themes – exile, religion, and humour. It is both thought-provoking, subtle, and witty

  Many examples of Iain’s gleefully absurd or knowingly sharp humour can be found in these volumes:

  ‘I thought that if the poet who had climbed the lamp-post had fallen down we might have had our first concrete poet.’

  ‘She was an incomer from another village and had only been in this one for thirty years or so.’

  Sometimes the humour relies less on punch li
nes than on wider social observations. ‘The Travelling Poet’ is a wickedly funny portrayal of the egotism and the artistry involved in being a poet and there are flashes of great wit and insight in this marvellous tale. ‘Mr Heine’, too, is winningly sardonic, his tone of voice almost simultaneously gratifying and sarcastic.

  ‘A Night With Kant’ returns us to Crichton Smith’s infatuation with philosophy, but it is also very witty. When a prostitute offers to show Kant ‘a very good time’, his reply is amusing: ‘ “The time is seven o’ clock,” said Kant mildly. “It is neither better nor worse.” ’ As she ‘totters’ away, Kant is ‘stirred by a regretful desire’: ‘And at that moment the Categorical Imperative was very distant indeed.’

  These stories have not generally received the recognition they deserve and it is impossible to give a complete and fair critique of them in the limited space afforded by an introduction. In any case the most convincing demonstration of their quality is to be found within the stories themselves.

  Read these stories because they deserve wider critical and general appreciation than they have hitherto been granted. Read these stories because they greatly help us understand why Iain Crichton Smith was not only one of twentieth-century Scotland’s best but also one of her most important writers.

  Read these stories because some of them offer ideas for surviving a world that can be more powerful and sinister than one might reasonably have expected. Some explore the interaction between the mind and the shared world of ‘reality’. Some face squarely, questioningly, the connections between the causal and the casual, revealing how identity, contingency and synchronicity impinge upon life. Some teach us valuable lessons about the human condition, about our lives, or about the lives of people we have met (albeit met, perhaps, in a dream). And if some of these stories leave you with no more certainty, clues, or logic than a dream might, then this is because life, surely, is not always clear-cut, and circumstances will sometimes hint at significances touched upon but not grasped (just as the significance of these stories has not previously been grasped).