SIR HUGH CASSON is an architect, designer and member of many royal committees. His activity in the London area has maintained and promoted elegance in the surroundings of prosperous, well educated people. His published diary is a self-consciously light-hearted record of “a full and fascinating year in the service of a great institution, The Royal Academy”, of which he is president. It gives a slight self-portrait of a busy man travelling the world as a distinguished guest, and recording nothing to stimulate thought or imagination. This diary contains no tension, no malice, no strong encounters or sharp pen-portraits. This is a typical entry:
Wednesday 11th, London Royal Fine Art Commission all day. Return visit of the Highgate Witanhurst project... How expensive and timewasting these endless indecisions. Some huge shopping complexes of indifferent quality. (Do people really like these air-conditioned malls with their emasculated Calders and potted plastic trees? Perhaps no. Men, as non-shoppers, should perhaps keep quiet.) Dinner at the Stock Exchange. Misprinted invitation gets me their half an hour early. Soothed by grovelling apologies.
Sir Hugh Casson knows that shopping malls are not built because women prefer shopping in them to smaller high street shops and traditional department stores. The Stock Exchange where he dined contains the financial forces that drive women into them, and employ him with other designers to give them a pleasant surface. However, he did not publish this book in order to tell the readers all he knows.
It would be a dull book without many little marginal watercolour sketches of elegant, spacious places Sir Hugh enjoyed visiting. These really do convey his enjoyment. He seems like a waiter handing us a small sample of icing from the top of the national cake, and doing so with the modest yet pleasent air of one who feels it is a very good cake. If, like me you are a jealous, cross-grained Glasgow man who thinks the national cake is in a wormy state and the icing nourishes nobody he knows, this sample may leave you feeling slightly sick. If you approve of the present government, buy the book for a female relative. She will probably find it charming. It costs £8.95.
GOOD PAINTING grounded on observant, careful drawing is a rarity nowadays, because the advertising which governs us suggests that good things should be immediately stimulating and gulped down quick. The current Chicago Exhibition at the Third Eye Centre showed paintings of the sixties and the seventies when many painters adopted the vivd colour and simple images of commercial art. These works were inventive and entertaining. The proper reaction to them was and is WOW! After being overwhelmed hardly anyone would find nothing to stand and look at for very long, but if life is a noisy party, these were the decorartions for it.
In the Collins gallery, Strathclyde University, is a show of paintings by James Cowie, who taught art in Bellshill Academy, Lanarkshire, during the 1920s and 30s, then became resident warden of Hospitalfield Artists Retreat. With slow, loving care over these years he made many drawings and a few remarkable paintings of children sitting in corners of an ordinary classroom, with an occasional breath of air entering from a landscape outside the window. Like the Mona Lisa and portraits by Holbein and Raeburn they face us with the mystery of other human beings, each of them as much the centre of their universe as we are. Abiding contemplation, they nourish parts of the soul some painters cannot reach.
A Modest Proposal*
LAST NOVEMBER the Edinburgh University Press, Polygon Books, held a conference in the bar of the Traverse theatre club to publicise their reprint of Edwin Muir’s book of the thirties, Scott and ScotIand. The theme of the conference was ‘The predicament of the Scottish writer’. On the platform were Iain Crichton Smith and myself and Trevor Royle and Alan Spence. Allan Massie was chairman. I had accepted his invitation to speak as immediately as a dog shuts its jaws on a proffered bone. Talking in public for a fee is much easier than writing sentences of informative prose, unless the talker writes the speech beforehand. It had not occurred to me to do that. I had decided to be spontaneous yet modest. In referring to The Scottish Writer I would make no references to myself, so that the writers and students and theatre people and arts administration people in the audience would know I was speaking for all of them, too. And when I came to The Predicament I would ignore sexual, parental, educational, religious and emotional predicaments, since these vary from person to person. I would stick to poverty and unemployment, of which everyone has, or pretends to have had, considerable experience. In general terms I would explain that ‘the predicament of the Scottish writer’ is the predicament of the crofter and steelworker – the predicament of Scotland itself. What a radical, hardhitting yet humane speech that would be. Since there would be no crofters or steel workers in the audience I would not upset a single soul.
I was first speaker and with a sinking heart saw Tom Leonard in the front row before me. He has a sharp ear for the glibly phoney phrase. However, I managed to forget him, and with vehemence and quirkiness I delivered a speech so essentially bland that I cannot now remember a word I said. Then Iain Crichton Smith spoke sadly about the predicament of writing within, and for, the Gaelic and Lowland Scots language groups; and Trevor Royle spoke embarrassedly about the embarrassment of being born in England before writing in and about this place; and Alan Spence, in his soft, quiet, clear, hypnotic, even-paced, level voice, spoke in terms which were probably as general as my own, for I cannot now remember a word he said, either. Then Allan Massie, who had introduced us with the crisp firmness of a Victorian headmaster, invited questions and comment from the audience.
George Byatt asked why there were no playwrights on the platform. Did the conference organizers think writers for stage and television were negligible? Allan Massie replied that the conference had been organized by book publishers to publicise a book. Several other people made clear and necessary statements which led to no debate or exchange of ideas, because once uttered they seemed obvious. Eventually a troublemaker tried to get a positive expression of personal prejudice from the platform. He asked why there were no women on it. The chairman said nothing. The questioner asked the other speaker to comment on this and only I was stupid enough to do so. Forgetting that Joan Lingard was in the audience and that she and Muriel Spark and Jessie Kesson and Naomi Mitchison and Ena Lamont Stewart and Elspeth Davie and Ann Smith and Agnes Owens and Marcella Evaristi and Liz Lochhead would constitute a brace of quintets twice as dazzling as our enplatformed one, I stammeringly suggested that the proportion of male to female Scottish writers, statistically calculated, might, er, not, er, perhaps justify, er, the presence of more than half a woman... Like a true friend Tom Leonard interrupted me here. He asked if this did not demonstrate that Scottish writing had a basically homo-erotic foundation? I was able to change the subject by denouncing him for exposing our secret. Whereupon headmaster dismissed the entire class.
So I cannot remember the conference with much pleasure or interest, apart from an extract from Edwin Muir’s Scott and ScotIand which Allan read out at the start as an indication of what ‘The Scottish writer’s predicament’ was. Iain Crichton Smith took account of it at the time. I fudged it over. A few weeks ago I was answering a questionnaire sent by research students, and one of the replies became the speech l would have given at the conference if I had been honest and careful enough to write it out beforehand.
Question An important consideration for any writer is the audience he wishes to reach; do you write for a Scottish audience primarily, or for a British audience or international audience? And do you feel that awareness of a potential readership in any way determines what and how you write? Answer Surely no good author considers national boundaries important unless he is explicitly writing about them. Writers who seek to persuade a limited class – commercial writers and propagandists – must think that way, but I’m sure that the stories and poems which the world has not yet allowed to die were written by folk who believed any ordinarily educated, sensible soul would enjoy them if they skilfully uttered what they thought important as best they could.
I want to be re
ad by an English-speaking tribe which extends to California in the West to Bengal in the East, and lies between the latitudes of Capetown in the South and George MacKay Brown in the North, unless the Shetlands and Alaska are further North still. This does not preclude me from using any words of Scots origin that l please – dunt, docken, eerie, canny etcetera, or bunnet, polis, ya prickye, if I feel like being Glaswegian. The Indians have also given words to the English language, though at the moment only shampoo comes to mind. I am sure that Oxford and Cambridge have contributed useful words to the English language, though at present I cannot remember any. Most English words were originally used by illiterate Celts, Germans and Scandinavians. To these an international civil-service of priests added some long Latin words and a clan of bullyboy Norman invaders some posh French ones. In the past century the main additions to our vocabulary have been devised by scientists and technicians.
Words stay alive because we find them useful or entertaining. An element in entertainment is surprise. One of the riches of English is the chance it gives to surprise the reader by putting a plain simple noun or verb, sometimes a strongly local one, into an abstractly posh-sounding sentence, and vice-versa. When a writer is using English dramatically – not necessarily in a play, it can be in a story where several speakers are quoted – the verbal colouring (if his characters are not bound to one social class in one emotional state) will be tinted with idioms which vary from biblical to the Johnsonian, from American film commercial to local cockney, Oxbridge or Glaswegian. And this is simple realism. Any writers in English – if their range of reading is sufficiently wide – can take an exciting but generally unfamiliar word heard in a nearby street and, if it is useful, make the meaning and nuance plain to a reader from a different English idiom through the context in which it is marshalled.
Good writers can also use the main diction of their locality, and if the thought and feeling is sufficiently strong and well expressed, folk from other places who like good writing will teach themselves to understand. Burns demonstrated this two centuries ago. English literature took to him at once - if by Eng. Lit. we mean the acclaim of his fellow poets and every really intelligent reader. Scott and Hogg and Galt came soon after him, Hugh MacDiarmid, Sorley MacLean and Tom Leonard more recently. Their achievements contradict Edwin Muir’s most quoted example of the double-bind: Write Scottishly and you’ll be sincere but neglected by the world-as-a-whole, write for the English world-as-a-whole and you must neglect the true speech of your emotional life. Surely that is nothing but a huge failure of nerve from lack of respect for our best examples.
MacDiarmid was one such example. He spoke of all the things he believed, using all the language he could master: local and historical, scientific-technical, political-polemical. One literary idiom was out with his ken – the dramatic. Burns, Scott, Hogg, Galt could dramatize, find language for people they were not. MacDiarmid had to make poetry from the dialectics of his self-contradictory intelligence. But that intelligence, that poetry, is still big enough for us to have worthwhile adventures inside. It is very queer that a small nation which has bred so many strongly local writers of worldwide scope still bickers and agonizes over the phoney local versus international double-bind.
Why? The fact that Scotland is governed from outside itself, governed against the advice of the three Parliamentary Commissions which looked into the matter, and against the wishes of most Scots who voted on the matter, cannot be used to explain our lack of talent, because at least in literature that lack is no longer evident. Scotland has as many first rate writers as the USA had when Twain wrote Huckleberry Finn and a far greater crop of good second-raters, all surveying the universe across a Scottish foreground from the current of their particular Mississippi. There is no evidence that the local experience of Royal Home Counties writers gives them worthier subject matter or more intelligent dictions. Why should it? Does the proximity of a thing called a government allow for a finer class of thought? lt might, if the government was fostering peaceful employment and social equality. It doesn’t, so all it fosters is the wealth of the rich and a false sense of self-importance. John Braine feels more significant because Michael Foot nods to him in a restaurant, but the best London-based writers show lives as unblessed by government as Scotland is.
The foregoing diatribe is too long an answer to a short question. The short answer is, that since I resemble other people I can entertain and inform them if l entertain and inform myself with matter and language which do it best. This is a partial truth, but saves wasting time on market-surveys and public-relations work.
* This was written for a 1983 number of Chapman, edited by Joyce Hendry in Edinburgh. It also had my first cover design for this Scots literary magazine.
1982 Janine
I had planned Lanark to be my novel, followed by one book of short stories, then a collection of my poems, then my book of plays then a collection of prose essays such as this one. Then I would work all the time as a visual artist. When Resident Writer at the University of Glasgow, from 1977-79, I heard Lanark was to be published and I now had leisure to complete my short story book Unlikely Stories, Mostly, so called as it was going to contain a few realistic tales. At the last moment these were left out. In 1981 I began finishing one of the realistic tales. It started by using the politics of the day & my hero’s erotic fantasies. It grew fast into my best novel. It was finished in 1982 (hence the title) and published by Jonathan Cape of London in 1984.
EPILOGUE FOR DISCERNING CRITICS. You have noticed lines in this book taken from Chaucer Shakespeare Jonson The Book of Common Prayer Goldsmith Cowper Anon Mordaunt Burns Blake Scott Byron Shelley Campbell Wordsworth Coleridge Keats Browning Tennyson Newman Henley Stevenson Hardy Yeats Brooke Owens Hasek (in Parrott’s translation, shortened) Kafka Pritchett Auden Cummings Lee and Jackson, so I will list writers who gave ideas for bigger bits.
The matter of Scotland refracted through alcoholic reverie is from MacDiarmid’s A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle. The narrator without self-respect is from Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground, Celine’s Journey to the End of the Night, the first-person novels of Flann O’Brien and from Camus’s The Fall. An elaborate fantasy within a plausible everyday fiction is from O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds, Nabokov’s Pale Fire, Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. Making the fantasy pornographic is from Buñuel’s film Belle de Jour and from The Nightcloak, a novel by someone whom I forget. The character of Mad Hislop is taken from Mr Johnstone in Tom Leonard’s poem Four of the Belt, which he here allows me to reprint:
Jenkins, all too clearly it is time
for some ritual physical humiliation;
and if you cry, boy, you will prove
what I suspect – you are not a man.
As they say, Jenkins, this hurts me
more than it hurts you. But I show you
I am a man, by doing this, to you.
When you are a man, Jenkins, you may hear
that physical humiliation and ritual
are concerned with strange adult matters
– like rape, or masochist fantasies.
You will not accept such stories:
rather, you will recall with pride,
perhaps even affection, that day when I,
Mr Johnstone, summoned you before me,
and gave you four of the belt
like this. And this. And this. And this.
Brian McCabe’s Feathered Choristers in the Collins Scottish short-story collection of 1979 showed how all these things could combine in one.
The most beholden chapter is the eleventh. The plot is from the programme to Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique; rhythms and voices are from the Blocksberg scenes in Goethe’s Faust and night town scenes in Joyce’s Ulysses; the self-inciting vocative is from Jim Kelman’s novel The Bus-Conductor Hines; the voice of my nontranscendent god from E. E. Cummings. The political part of Jock’s vomiting fit is from The Spendthrifts, a great Spanish novel in which Benito Pérez Galdós puts a so
cial revolution into the stomach and imagination of a sick little girl. The graphic use of typeface is from Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and poems by Ian Hamilton Finlay and Edwin Morgan.
Though too busy to be aware of the foregoing influences while writing under them I consciously took information and ideas (which she would disown) from a correspondence with Tina Reid, also anecdotes from conversations with Andrew Sykes, Jimmy Guy and Tom Lamb, also three original phrases of Glasgow invective from Jim Caldwell. Richard Fletcher informed and improved the book’s electrical and mechanical parts. The fanciful use of light and space technology comes partly from conversations with Chris Boyce and partly from his book, Extraterrestrial Encounters.
Flo Allan typed all perfectly with help from Scott Pearson in the denser pages of chapter 11. Ian Craig the art director, Judy Linard the designer, Jane Hill the editor, Bunge, Will, Phil and Tom the typesetters, Peva Keane the proofreader, worked uncommonly hard to make this book exactly as it should be.
And now a personal remark which purely literary minds will ignore. Though John Mcleish is an invention of mine I disagree with him. In chapter 4, for example, he says of Scotland “We are a poor little country, always have been, always will be.” In fact Scotland’s natural resources are as variedly rich as those of any other land. Her ground area is greater than Denmark, Holland, Belgium or Switzerland, her population higher than Denmark, Norway or Finland. Our present ignorance and bad social organization make Scots poorer than other north Europeans, but even bad human states are not everlasting.
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