Fergus Lamont

by Robin Jenkins

  ‘What was your regiment, Muir?’

  ‘The King’s Own Scottish Borderers, sir.’

  ‘Did you see any action?’

  If his whining but boastful tale could be believed he had, a good deal.

  ‘But no’ as much as you, sir. That’s the MC ribbon, isn’t it, sir?’

  If I had been loyal to my principle of honouring men who had fought in the trenches above baronets, magistrates, and coalowners who had not, I would of course have taken Muir’s part and denounced my companions. But, like everyone else, I had learned when to uphold an awkward principle, when to modify it, and when to ignore it altogether.

  ‘Aren’t you ashamed to let your regiment down?’ I said. ‘Especially those of your comrades who never came back. They gave their lives to keep the Boche from coming here and helping themselves. Yet isn’t that just what you’ve been doing?’

  ‘Juist twa or three rabbits, sir. Fermers say rabbits are vermin, sir, like rats. If it was rats we took and ate naebody wad complain. When we were in camp once Captain McNiven use to tell us to go and snare rabbits. He was killed later, at Vimy Ridge.’

  ‘That was war-time, Muir. War-time’s different.’

  He began to whine that it wasn’t his fault he couldn’t get work, he’d dig ditches for the sake of a job, he had four children, one was sick, rain came through the roof of his house.

  ‘Being up against it is no excuse for stealing,’ I said.

  ‘It’s a’right for you to talk, sir.’

  He was being humble, but in his humbleness there was, to the trained ear, an unmistakable note of insolence.

  Once, against the advice of my sergeant-major, I had passed on a deserter to be tried by higher authority. He had been sentenced to be shot, but it had been commuted to ten years’ hard labour. He was still serving it. As he was being marched away he had shouted: ʻIt’s a’ right for you, you big stuck-up red-haired bastard.’

  ‘If I was you, Sir James,’ I said, ‘I’d let the police have him.’

  I felt sorry for him of course, and would have liked to send him away with a five-pound note in his pocket, to feed his family and buy medicines for his sick child; but if I had done anything so self-indulgent I would have let my side down, especially my little red-haired daughter, Dorcas, whose good opinion was very important to me. Socially precocious, at two and a half, she already had people divided into classes, those above her (very few), those on the same level as herself (a not very numerous élite), and those beneath her (countless millions).

  Sir James, however, did not have the courage to take my advice.

  ‘Not this time,’ he mumbled. ‘Let him go, McCulloch. He’s had his warning. Next time, though, it’ll have to be the police.’

  The gamekeepers were not pleased. They had evidently spent long wet cold hours lying in wait for the fellow. No doubt they had already given him a good kicking, and as soon as they got him outside they would give him a still better one, but they wouldn’t feel appeased. The working-class are their own most implacable enemies.

  ‘Thank you,’ whined Muir. ‘Can I keep juist the yin for the pot?’

  ‘All right, all right. Let him have one, McCulloch.’

  Going out, McCulloch gave me a grin that showed he thought me a proper gentleman. Muir, even more complimentarily, looked at me as if, given the chance, he would shoot me in the back. A few men in my company had had that wish too. They had resented my brusqueness: being too unimaginative to understand that if I had used kindness instead it might have unmanned them. Just as Muir could never be able to see that by suggesting he ought to be prosecuted I had been showing no ill-will towards him personally, but simply had been protecting the foundations of society.

  ‘Sorry about that, gentlemen,’ muttered Mutt-Simpson. ‘It was his mention of the officer that asked him to catch rabbits.’

  ‘Probably a lie,’ remarked one of us.

  But we rallied round our comrade who had faltered, for such honourable motives.

  Only arid perfectionists would have expected me to be as understanding of and compassionate towards the poor in my capacity as an ambitious social being, as I was in my capacity as inspired poet. In his poetry does not Burns pour scorn on seducers of innocent young girls, and did he not, in his active life, seduce any such girl he could lay his hands on, whether on the flowery banks of Doon or on mucky straw in a byre? In his novels Scott rejoices in madwomen and fishwives, but it was duchesses he entertained at Abbotsford. Shakespeare calls money trash, but amassed as much of it as he could.

  Poets have a hard enough task showing mankind what truth and love are, without their having to be truthful and loving themselves, at any rate all the time.

  SIX

  First Poems was published by Bob Gilzean, because no other publisher in Scotland would do it. He had inherited from his father a prosperous printer’s business in the Haymarket. This he had brought to the edge of ruin by preferring to print, instead of lucrative tickets, books of so-called Scottish literature, most of them, alas, painfully uninspired and all of them disastrously unprofitable.

  As a book to hold in the hand, First Poems was shoddy, with coarse yellowish paper full of skelves, and innumerable foolish misprints. Betty had provided a subsidy of fifty pounds, and this ought to have ensured better paper at least, but into Bob’s office one day rushed a berserk novelist called McWheep, who seized him by the throat and demanded payment of an advance five years overdue. Some money had to be given him. He left behind a hole in the glass door that any enraged poet could have clambered through. Some did, and snatched their share of what was left of Betty’s fifty pounds.

  I did not like the title: it sounded too jejune. I suggested Gathering Dung, and other poems. Bob would have agreed, but Campbell Aird counselled against. ‘“Dung” was a name that could stick,’ he said.

  Naturally I wanted to be called Corse-Lamont. Bob, though, the mildest nationalist I ever met, turned dour and sulky over that hyphen: it was English, he said, and went with monocles and shooting-sticks, not girrs and quoits. To my surprise Betty supported him. She pointed out that it was really Fergus Lamont who had written the poems. When I came to publish my poems about the War it would be in order then to call myself Corse-Lamont. Besides, it would be prudent not to let our society friends like Sir James Mutt-Simpson and Sir Hubert Cuthbertson know I had written poems that revealed an inside knowledge of working-class ways: mere eccentricity would not explain that. Whatever doubts they had about my origins would be stirred up. Above all, she said, I should bear in mind that, given the choice of having for her father either a famous poet or an accredited gentleman, Dorcas would without hesitation choose the latter.

  So Fergus Lamont it was that appeared on the title page.

  150 copies were printed. Of these 40 were sent out for review. Of the remainder, how many were sold, how many given away, and how many destroyed in the furnace as valueless lumber by Bob’s liquidators, I never knew. Today they are, as I have said before, rare as ospreys. What I did know was that I received not one bawbee. This was expected. What was not expected, what came as a shock, in spite of Campbell Aird’s warnings, was the abuse heaped on me, instead of the admiration and praise I had been looking forward to.

  Consider the solan goose, or gannet. Gloriously down the sky he plunges, folding back his beautiful black-tipped wings, and cleaves the sea, vanishing for a minute while the whole world waits, and then rising again with a fish in his beak. Stupid, callous men nail a fish to a floating board. The brave bird dives, strikes impenetrable wood, and breaks his neck. In a moment he is turned from a splendid creature of sea and sky to a bunch of sodden feathers, which will be washed up on some forgotten shore.

  I was the solan goose, my poems the daring and thrilling dive, the stupidity and callousness of critics the treacherous floating board.

  In a corner of a pub in Rose Street Campbell Aird tried to explain.

  ‘You must understand, Fergus, these critics, particularly the S
assenach ones, come from a class of society where humanity, if this be defined as warm, rumbustious relationships, is chronically deficient, in comparison certainly with the red-blooded vigour of your East End streets. Therefore, though they giggle so wittily at your poems, they are in their hearts bleating with envy. Most are would-be poets themselves, with subjects restricted to their souls’ torment or meditations, say, on earwigs. They would much rather write about running with a girr or gathering dung or throwing quoits, if they knew anything about these.

  ‘Their language is as anaemic as their humanity. They snigger at what they call your vulgarity, but what they know to be your robustness. They have all the allusions, all the appropriate quotations, all the scraps of foreign languages, all the smart references to foreign poets, all the wit, all the polished phrases, and all the elegant metaphors. What they do not have is life. Take your poem “Reinitiation”, for instance, where the young man is caught by the balls by the harridan. Suppose such a thing had happened to them. They would have made of it merely a contrived Rabelaisian flourish, complete in itself, a dead end. They would be quite incapable of making it, as you have done, an act from which there flows an intricacy, a whole delta, of rich, comic human relationships.

  ‘If you had written about Greek peasants, or Australian aborigines, these critics would have shown some interest and sympathy; but no section of the whole human race is less congenial to them than the Scottish working-class.’

  A copy of the poems was sent to the socialist weekly, Advance, of which Mary was then assistant editor. I felt sure it must appreciate how I had shown the lives of working-class people to be in many respects richer than those of mercenary bourgeoisie or effete aristocrats. Instead, there appeared a peevish diatribe. Sneered at as ‘member of the officer class’, and accused of portraying the poor as ‘exhibits in a menagerie’, I was advised to write about the kind of people I let myself be photographed with in the Scottish Tatler. The initials at the foot were CKK, those, as I ascertained, of the Honourable Charles Kinnoull, Mary’s friend and probable lover, and the renegade son of the Earl of Strone. He had spent years abroad and knew many European socialists. His sympathy for the poor was, I felt sure, merely tactical.

  I wrote to Mary. She replied that she had read my poems and agreed with Charlie Kinnoull’s opinion of them. In her opinion, the first and foremost function of literature was to show up the immorality of a society in which some people had far more than they needed while others had a great deal less. If that criterion was applied to my poems, they failed utterly; indeed did they not make jokes out of abominations like stairhead lavatories?

  Such misinterpretation staggered me. It was true that I had treated stairhead lavatories humorously, but surely it was plain that I had done so in order to make the humiliations they caused bearable?

  In common with most provincial Scottish newspapers, the Gantock Herald seldom paid attention to books. It needed all its space for advertisements, pictures of weddings, and accounts of sheriff court proceedings. Thinking however that an exception might be made for my poems I had a copy sent. The outcome was a short paragraph, at the bottom of an inside page under a huge advertisement for Kirkhope’s groceries: it stated that a book of poems had been published recently purporting to be about life in Gantock; but, though the drawing on the cover could well be that of the Auld Kirk in Auchmountain Square, the poems themselves revealed no knowledge of Gantock ways and were amateurish. Mr Kelso, it seemed, had not forgiven me.

  Sammy Lamont, then studying law at Glasgow University, still reported to me. He wrote that his father and mother had been offended by my poems. He had tried to read ‘Gathering Dung’ to them, but his mother had made him stop. Uncle Tam, though, had enjoyed it, and sent his regards.

  As always, Sammy himself passed no judgment. As always too he dropped a hint that he was still waiting for an invitation.

  What disappointed me most was that my fellow poets did not shout hosannas. Sievewright, Tushielaw, and the rest knew in their hearts that my poems were as good as any in Scotland since Burns. They ought therefore to have hailed my achievement, not for my sake, but for their own: they could have found some sort of fulfilment in the thought that their own work, with all its limitations, had prepared the way for mine.

  Writers find it too painful to admit a contemporary’s superiority. They are much happier overpraising the dead. Campbell Aird pointed out that my shortcomings as a man, or what my detractors regarded as my shortcomings, were too conspicuous, too constantly up everyone’s nose. To begin with, I always wore a kilt, the garb of stage comics or caber-tossers or anglified lairds, but not of poets. I did not respond to whisky as I ought. After no more than two halfs I did not turn belligerent or lachrymose, either of which would have been normal, but Rechabitic, which certainly wasn’t. I had no gift of intimacy. Not even with a fellow poet, drunk and in tears, with his arm about me, praising me and belittling himself, could I be close. I claimed friendship with the redoubtable Holmscroft, but I so manifestly did not give a damn who went cold and hungry.

  That was how they saw me, said Campbell, and to be truthful, he jestingly added, that was how I was. I should not wonder therefore that my fellow writers, who considered themselves large-hearted, idealistic, and knowledg-able, should find it quite intolerable that their own poetry was so much inferior to that of a selfish, ignorant, conceited, unconvivial, aloof, and unsympathetic bastard like me.

  I had reason to be grateful to Betty. Unable to give me as a man tenderness, she more than made up for it by giving me as a poet unflinching support. In her position, that was to say, as maker of the money and keeper of the purse, most women would have badgered me with taunts of idleness. Writing poetry, they would have girned daily, was just a hobby, like fretwork or golf: no self-respecting able-bodied man would ever think of making it his full-time occupation.

  Though in her novel Mark Eglintoun’s Vow she portrays the poet Marmion Stream as a consumptive sipper of absinthe, with fragrant locks and a penchant for far-fetched witticisms in archaic language, Betty knew well that in real life the composing of good poetry was both physically and spiritually exhausting.

  Alas, while she was encouraging the poet she was at the same time betraying the husband.

  SEVEN

  After the War there came on to the market a number of country estates at bargain prices. One of these was Pennvalla, about twenty miles out of Edinburgh. It consisted of a fine substantial house of some twenty rooms and policies of over one hundred acres, which contained within them the ruins of a fourteenth-century abbey. The village nearby was called Abbey. With the help of a loan from Mutt-Simpson Betty bought Penn valla. The title deeds were in her name, but in the eyes of the world I passed as owner. At last I had a home worthy of my lineage.

  The stone with which the house was built was a beautiful reddish colour, like that of azalea leaves in autumn. Once I was so overcome by gratitude that I kissed it when I thought no one was looking. Dorcas, however, was. Only four, she was always spying on me and thereafter clyping, with her tiny forefinger pointed in accusation.

  Betty and Mutt-Simpson bought Pennvalla for Dorcas so that she could grow up a lady, and for Torquil not yet born so that he could grow up a gentleman. They also bought it for me, in the hope that I would be so engrossed in my new role as a laird that I would not notice their philandering.

  But, as they say in Gantock, I did not come up the Clyde in a wheelbarrow. I saw what was going on all right. Since the situation was more advantageous than grievous for me I did nothing to end or even to moderate it.

  One afternoon a day or two before Christmas when Betty was seven months pregnant I was pacing about the lawn in front of the house composing my poem ‘A Taste of Brains’, which describes the death of Archie Dungavel. Dorcas’s Pekinese Roger kept snapping at my brogues, which he pretended were rabbits. I had now and then to tread on his paws.

  Suddenly two faces one close behind the other appeared at the window of Betty’s be
droom upstairs. Hers was the one in front, Mutt-Simpson’s the other. They were not snatched away. On the contrary, they were kept in view the whole five minutes. I recognised the beatific smirks on Betty’s.

  There was no doubt in my mind that they were engaged in sexual congress. This approach from the rear was made necessary by the bigness of Betty’s belly. It was practicable enough with perseverance, as I knew from experience.

  I am well aware of the enormity of what I am saying. My wife was renowned throughout the country, indeed throughout the world, as the authoress of books in which chastity, decency, purity, innocence, and Christian faith, always prevailed. Edwin Hinshelwood’s painting of her with Dorcas aged ten months in her arms was thought by many people to illustrate the beauty and dignity of motherhood better than any outlandish Renaissance Madonna and child.

  As for Mutt-Simpson, he was a baronet, a product of Eton and Oxford, a wealthy landowner, a philanthropist and humanitarian, and a potential High Commissioner to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland.

  It will be objected by the incredulous that two faces in suspicious juxtaposition at an upstairs window fifty yards away was hardly enough evidence on which to base a charge of adultery, and not very straightforward adultery at that. It will be suggested by the naive that they were merely gazing down at me and Roger, with seasonable smiles.

  The incredulity and naivete of the masses as regards the erotic activities of the rich and powerful have always amazed me. Whatever the evidence to the contrary, and the sensational press contains plenty, they keep on believing that these pre-eminent ones live private lives of marmoreal virtuousness. Stories of royal, prime-ministerial, and archiepiscopal profligacies they read with relish and then mysteriously disregard, as children do with fairy-tales full of violent deaths.