the battle for adam smith

Scottish Review of Books

scottishreviewofbooks.org Christian LewisFraser Darling and the Summer Isles

Joseph Farrell50 Years of the Traverse

Neil DavidsonThe Battle for Adam Smith

Apocryphal Poems by Gerald Mangan

Vol 9 · NuMber 1 · 2013ISSN 1745—5014

2 scottishreviewofbooks.org Vol 9, Number 1, 2013

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Scottish Review of Books Vol 9, Number 1, 2013 3

edItorIAl

alasdair gray, who is interviewed in this issue of the Scottish Review of Books, recently caused a stushie with an essay titled ‘Settlers and Colonists’. For many commentators that was provocation enough and Gray, hitherto regarded as a national treasure, was roundly denounced as, at best, anti-English, and, at worst, racist. Politicians of every hue, including the Nationalists, who had once embraced Gray, eagerly distanced themselves from him, as if he had a transmittable disease. But what few people did was read Gray’s essay in its entirety, a common failing when politics and literature collide. We are reminded, for example, of the case of Salman Rushdie and The Satanic Verses, which very few of those who burned copies of the novel and effigies of its author had ever read or had the capacity to read.

However we believe that Gray’s essay deserves to be read and commented upon soberly. ‘Colonists and settlers,’ he wrote, ‘may start with the same homeland and some loyalty to it, a loyalty dependant on support the homeland gives them. The difference between these two sorts of invader becomes obvious when they have subdued the local natives by exterminating many of them, as in Australia, driving them away, as in North America, enslaving them as in South America, or (more rarely) giving some of them equal rights, as may be the case in New Zealand.’

No one, least of all Gray, is suggesting here (or elsewhere in the essay) that Scotland is directly comparable to the places mentioned. But it could be argued that the 1707 Union with England led to a form of colonisation which pertains today and which, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, resulted in the Highland Clearances and the mass expulsion of the indigenous population in a manner not dissimilar to that suffered by Native Americans.

That’s what happens when a country is colonised. Its own people are marginalised and their culture is derided and relegated until it slips off the radar. Colonists do not want to nurture or promote indigenous culture, for they recognise its potential threat. Instead they prefer to mock or ignore or suppress it. Native Americans, for example, were often discounted as barbaric and in urgent need of civilization, despite the fact that they were adept at husbanding their resources and protective of the environment, which is not something that could be said of their usurpers.

In contrast to colonists, settlers do their best to fit in, taking heed from the old adage that when one is in Rome it is perhaps a good idea to behave like a Roman. This requires patience and tolerance and a

degree of sensitivity. As a newcomer to a foreign place it is never advisable to talk about it in public when one’s knowledge of it is poor. After all, it is only the rudest and most arrogant of guests who comment adversely on their host’s taste in furniture or wallpaper. But too often in recent years people who have been appointed to positions of power in Scottish culture have aired their views – on the ‘inferiority’ of Scottish painting, the lack of depth of Scottish drama – and paraded their ignorance with scant consideration of any offence it may cause.

This, we believe, is what Gray was alluding to when he referred to the appointment of a non-Scot as head of Creative Scotland. It was not so much that that person was English but that he admitted to knowing nothing of Scottish culture and said that he was willing to learn. As Gray said, ‘Ain’t we lucky.’ What he then went on to say was: ‘And if you feel these remarks are full of anti-English prejudice, remember that these colonists were invited here and employed by Scots without confidence in their own and people.’

As we move ever closer to the independence referendum is it too much to ask that serious consideration be given to such sentiments? For too long, it seems, Scottish culture has had to shriek to hear itself heard on its own cabbage patch. Does it not seem odd, for instance, that the Edinburgh International Festival is often notable for its resistance to Scottish content? Or do Scots simply not care? But if that is true then what is the point of independence? What would be good to have is reassurance from our political masters that they have thought more deeply about cultural policy beyond offering knee-jerk acknowledgment of the arts’ contribution to our economic well-being. Which, when is all is said and done, is insulting and embarrassing but, alas, nothing less than we expect.

Scottish review of booksVolume 9, Number 1, 23 March, 2013

Publisher: Scottish review of books ltdregistered office: Scottish review of books ltd, Anderson Strathern Solicitors, 1 rutland Court, edinburgh eH3 8eYChair of the board: Jan rutherford directors: Christopher Harvie, leonard Forman, Jan rutherford, Alan taylor, Ian Wall

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We have no use for emotions, let alone sentiments, but are solely concerned with passions. Hugh MacDiarmid

Sponsored by the university of edinburgh

CoNteNtS4 Christian Lewis Fire Island: Tanera and

Frank Fraser Darling

6 Joseph Farrell The Traverse at Fifty

9 Gerald Mangan Apocryphal Poems

12 Alasdair Gray The SRB Interview: Fairytales,

settlers and colonists, and what he sees when he looks in the mirror

13 Harry McGrath Early Days of a Better Nation:

The Canadian Poet Behind a Famous Slogan

15 Alan Taylor Back to the Drawing Board:

Scotland’s Mapmakers

18 Christopher Harvie House With A View: Walter Scott’s Abbotsford

19 David Torrance In With a Bang, Out With a Whimper: The 1980s

20 Mandy Haggith In the Wilds of Aberdeen: Esther

Woolfson’s Field Notes from a Hidden City

21 Jonathan Wright Cardinal Virtues: What’s So

Special About Jesuits?

22 Rosemary Goring Mood Swings: The Poems of

Robin Robertson

23 Lucy Ellmann Too Many Bison: Infantilising Museums

25 Neil Davidson The Battle for Adam Smith

28 Brian Morton Alain-Fournier’s Solitary Masterpiece

29 Queequeg Crossword


In the late 1930s, just before the out-break of the Second World War, Frank Fraser Darling moved to the tiny Scot-tish island of Tanera Mor. He came as a naturalist, intending to study seals and

birds, and stayed on, for several hard-bitten years, to transform a ramshackle ruin into a thriving and productive farm. His was an urgent, sinewy, masculine enterprise, depen-dent, as so often, on the (largely) unsung labour of his devoted wife. But held in the daily mesh of action and practicality was another catch entirely: quiet epiphanies of looking and deep listening, the fruit less of mindfulness than of what some have called ‘placefulness’ – the blue-grey/blue-green wisdom given by Tanera itself.

Here, for example, in his memoir, Island Farm, he describes his pleasure in the eve-ning milking:

I loved drawing milk through my fingers and hearing the sound of it piercing the mounting foam in crock or pail…There was the distant calling of the barnacle geese newly come to this green point, there were the near sounds of rough tongues licking backs on which the hair was growing long for the winter, of diligent muzzles plucking the grass, and if they were not grazing I would hear the soft rhythmic cudding of the cattle, together with the comfortable rumblings of their vast bellies.

At such times, he said, ‘with the sea plashing on either side and the mountains darkening into the night, milking the little black cow was a moment of joy in [the] day and war was forgotten.’ He was entirely given over to the immediate task, and at the same time, entirely focused – listening out – deli-cately appreciative of each island sound.

If you were to look for Tanera Mor on the map, you’d find it on the north-west coast, not far from Ullapool. It is the largest of the so-called Summer Isles, originally used by mainland crofters as summer grazing for their cattle, and later as winter grazing for their lambs. It is composed of red Torrido-nian sandstone, with a thin covering of peat: some 770 acres of tussocky hillside, birch and alder woods, high cliffs, and bright-eyed lochans. I came there first in 2010, and have returned several times since, teaching a series of workshops with the local artist Jan Kilpatrick. Whether or not it is true that, as

the sociologists like to say, ‘cognition is place specific’—meaning that certain thoughts are only possible in certain places – there’s no doubt that Tanera has had a powerful effect on my own internal weather.

For years now, I have lived in the United States – first in Berkeley, California, then in New York City, most recently in a little col-lege town in Massachusetts. Returning to Scotland after so long away has, at times, an aching potency, which Tanera makes only more acute. When I first arrive, I like to take things slowly: looking, listening, paus-ing, breathing in. I take a long meandering walk, resting for twenty minutes on a sun-warmed rock, looking out across the body of the island. I glance down at the tough grass, seeded with brilliant wildflowers: the white and lavender and egg-yolk yellow of the little flower called eyebright, the creamy fronds of meadowsweet, the concentrated purple of knapweed or thistle, the varied yellows of coltsfoot, dandelion and tormentil, the soft puffs of white and crimson that mean clover.

Each visit fills me with the same impos-sible impulse – the desire to count and catalogue these island beauties, to accumu-late not stones or shells or pressed dried flowers, but memories, noticings. And yet that small-scale focus is constantly being disrupted, my eye moving out from Tanera itself to the tremendous frieze of mountains on the Scottish mainland, now radiantly vis-ible, now obscured. Stac Pollaidh, Cul Beag, Cul Mor; Ben Mor Coigeach; the Fiddler: one looks like a shifting family of mastodons (hence the official adjective, ‘pachyderma-tous’); another like a plum-pudding; the third is as sharply symmetrical as a child’s toy triangle.

Like the Summer Isles, these mountains are composed of mixed Torridonian sand-stone, set on a bed of gray Lewisian gneiss: at three billion years, among the oldest rocks on earth. Each has been submerged deep underwater; buried under layers of miles-deep sandstone; buffed and scored by glaciers. Each has its own inimitable char-acter, its own compacted history. One of the joys of Tanera is the sheer astonishment of that geology, the marvel of its daily company. ‘What do I know when I am in this place,’ asks Robert Macfarlane in his book, The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot, ‘that I know

nowhere else?’ What calls to me? Where do I pay attention? On Tanera, there are days when time itself seems visible, from those ancient blue-grey presences across the water to the shrill green of a single fallen leaf.

Meanwhile, I continue to explore the island, tramping up the steep track from the harbour, snuffing on the wind that raw, sweet scent: heather and honeysuckle and bog-myrtle, coffee and engine oil, the acrid tang of someone’s cigarette. I notice the smooth green pelt of the hillside, the splotches of rusty lichen, the clouds shifting to a wide fan overhead. I feel the squelch of peaty water through the straps of my san-dals, the sudden flutter of a meadow-pippet as she springs up underfoot. I go swimming at Mol Mor, the largest beach on the island, where the rocks are big and round and sleek with emerald weed, and the water is pure Aegean turquoise (though searingly, bitingly, breathlessly cold).

Another day, I go swimming off the pier, edging down the rusty barnacled steps into the dark water, afraid of that cold, afraid of cramp, afraid for a while that I won’t make it back, repeating like a mantra with each stroke, ‘Swimming to Scotland, swimming back to Scotland – ’ I ‘taste’ Scotland in that icy water, in the leafy dulse growing wild along the shore, and in every mouthful of salt sea wind. I taste it too each evening, as we settle down to dinner – haggis and veni-son from the mainland, fresh berries and courgettes and onions from a Tanera gar-den – the spirit of the land becoming energy and sustenance, taking on, however briefly, my own corporeal form. Between times, I listen out in ever-widening circles, start-ing with the soft whoosh of my own breath, and the shuffle of wind in the tall clumps of fern, noticing how differently it moves through the rowans and the aspen trees, the flapping plastic bin-bags, or my own unbut-toned mackintosh. In his book, Beauty: The Invisible Embrace, the Irish writer John O’Donohue wrote that landscape ‘is always in conversation with itself.’ Walking by the shore, I hear that muffled monologue in the low flop of the waves, the grind of stones on the shingle, the white gulls swooping and squabbling overhead.

The ancient Mesopotamians saw birds as sacred because their footprints so resembled their own cuneiform script. More recently, ‘the language of the birds’ has been seen by alchemists as the gateway to all mystery, all hidden wisdom. What Fraser Darling would have made of this, I’ve no idea. He was of course a professional ornithologist, alert to the ‘seething toiling birdlife’ on the island. Clearly he had an excellent ear, well able to distinguish the ‘loud song of the island wrens, the thin pi-i-i-i of tysties, the skirl of a guillemot, the cooing of eiders, and the purity of a thrush’s song.’ He remarked too, with his own brand of wry amusement, on the young gulls whose ‘unmusical voice’ was ‘like an un-oiled door-hinge.’

But there was something of the dreamer and the mystic to him too, and the notion of a deeper knowing, a deeper kind of listening, would, I think, have puzzled and intrigued him. He was fascinated by the island: not just its natural history and geology, but its (far more hidden) human story too. Who used to live here? What had their lives been like? And the lives of their ancestors? During his years on Tanera, he conducted unof-ficial oral histories, recording local legends and etymologies, along with a smattering of history and archaeology, in an effort to

reconstruct a living narrative. Without that work, it would be difficult

to interpret Tanera’s human past, at least beyond the most immediate impressions. On my first visit, I saw ruined crofts still stand-ing on the ridge above the pier, their rubbly walls lost in a tangle of ferns and nettles and wild iris. Young trees were sprouting from the space beside the hearth, and moss grew soft over the fallen stones. I took photographs of those crofts, and of the herring-curing sta-tion, further down the coast at Tigh an Quay. Tall and lean, it is an imposing edifice even now, its walls harled white with shell-sand and lime mortar, its empty windows cutting out clear rectangles of blue or cloudy sky. An old phone-booth stands to one side, its red paint long since faded, its door tied shut with a piece of turquoise twine. I took pictures of that too, and of the ‘new’ quay built by the Fraser Darlings in the long summers of the war, its red and grey and sandy-coloured rocks blotched bright with orange lichen.

By then I already knew some of the more recent history: herring, emigration, sheep, the Highland Clearances. But I had no idea how to make sense of what I saw. It took several readings of Island Farm, and some further research too, before I began to understand just how long – and how completely – Tanera had been inhabited. It is a tiny piece of territory, not more than a mile and a half in length. But reaching back across the years, I saw it thronged with invis-ible human presences.

Not much is known of Tanera’s ancient past, of the people who first lived there, or precisely when. Standing on the hillside, looking out, I imagine small bands of fisher-gatherers, searching for fish and shellfish along the shore, raiding the cliffs for prized sea-gulls’ eggs, and hunting seals and otters for their meat and skins. I picture the early Neolithic farmers, and later still, the Celts and then the Picts, sowing the machair with barley and wild oats, and grazing their cattle on the rugged pastures. By the time the Vikings arrived, towards the end of the eighth century, it seems likely that it already possessed a considerable year-round settle-ment. Hawrarymoir, those old marauders called it, ‘the island of the haven,’ in hon-our of its magnificent horse-shoe-shaped Anchorage.

Frank Fraser Darling preferred to believe that the name had an earlier (Celtic) deriva-tion, and meant ‘island of fire.’ He noticed that much of the peat had been scraped from the top of Meall Mor, its highest point, which may well have served as a beacon up and down the coast. Certainly such a bea-con would have had its uses on those long dark winter nights, when the Vikings sped across the Sound in their narrow longboats, burning and pillaging and taking hostages. On the island of Eigg, not far to the south, the Norsemen took over the farmland, and reduced the local population to slaves: a practice that may also have been replicated on Tanera. The earliest human record is a tombstone, dated 1193, when the Norse were still ensconced. ‘I do not wish to suggest the place is miserable,’ wrote Fraser Darling. ‘[But] at the back of everything I get a sense of great age, dark things done, and secrets held.’

In the centuries that followed, Tanera’s population shrank and swelled with the seasons. Crofters brought their cattle there for summer grazing, and returned them to the mainland for the winter. The soil, though poor, was not uncultivated. Traces

fiRe iSland Christian Lewis


of lazy-beds have been found on the lower slopes of the island, and some may have been worked until quite recent times. The Reverend Roderick MacNab, who wrote up the Parish of Lochbroom (and hence the Summer Isles) for the Statistical Accounts of Scotland described the use of ‘sea-ware’ as fertilizer, along with ‘compound dung-hills and shelly sand,’ claiming they could pro-duce ‘exuberant crops’ from land that was ‘formerly thought good-for-nothing.’

But for all their hard work, the people were, in his opinion, ‘rather poor,’ living mainly on fish and potatoes, supplemented with oysters, cockles and other shellfish. Rents were high, and ‘the engrossing of farms for sheep walks’ forced many to emi-grate to America. Whole districts were already depopulated, and where hundreds of people had once lived, ‘no human faces are now to be met with, except a shepherd attended by his dog.’

If there was one tremendous consolation to be found at that time, it was in the bounty of the local herring-fishery. Great shimmer-ing shoals migrated south between Tanera and the mainland, then back around the smaller islands to the open sea, in an abun-dance many thought would last forever. The keeper of the Statistical Accounts for 1834-35, a Reverend Thomas Ross, remembered that ‘prodigious shoals’ would appear off the coast of Loch Broom, often as early as the month of May, though most of the catch was taken between September and February:

When the herrings set fairly in… the benefit is very great. The herrings of this coast are of the very best kind – the people are instantly afloat, with every species of seaworthy craft … sloops, schooners, wherries, boats of all sizes… constantly flying on the wings of the wind, from creek to creek, and from loch to loch… Hundreds of boats are seen to start at day-set for the watery field, then silently shoot their nets, lie out at the end of their train, all night, and return in the morning full of life and spirit, to sell or cure their cargoes.

Several herring-curing stations were estab-lished locally; including the one on Tanera, at Tigh an Quay. The smoked fish (or ‘red herring’) were transported as far as the West Indies to feed slaves on the plantations. Some were also exported to Ireland, and Irish soil bought back as ballast in their place, hence an especially verdant field called ‘Little Irish Park.’ Fraser Darling was especially drawn to such etymologies, and the way they func-tioned as a mini-history. Not far from his house there was a little hill, called in Gaelic Cnoc Ghlas, or the ‘green knoll.’ Its name too was a compacted anecdote. For many years, the fishermen had spread their nets out there to clean and dry, and the dried sea slime had acted as a kind of fertilizer, endowing it with a cap of bright green grass.

The herring-fishery flourished for more than 400 years. But by the middle of the nineteenth century the shoals had begun to diminish, and with them Tanera’s prosperity and independence. In 1881, there had been 118 crofters on the island: fifty years later, every one of them had left. The Great Depres-sion tolled the death knell for the islanders. When Frank Fraser Darling arrived in 1938, he and his wife Bobbie were the only inhabit-ants. The herring factory was in ruins, as was the original quay, plundered for its cut and finished stone. The crofts stood roofless and empty. The schoolhouse, built in 1870, had

not served as a school since before the First World War. Already the island was returning to legend, dateless and inexact.

Hungry for information, Fraser Dar-ling befriended Murdo Macleod, the last crofter-fisherman to leave Tanera, and later wrote up many of his stories. There was the cargo of rum buried somewhere down near Tigh an Quay, ‘a legend known as far away as Orkney.’ There were the strange old coins Macleod had dug up as a boy, ‘silver coins, about the size of a shilling.’ There was the ancient graveyard next to Little Irish Park, with its rough unlettered graves, and crum-bly fragments of human bone. And always there was Tanera itself, with its wild red cliffs and rowan trees and ‘festoons of fragrant honeysuckle,’ its sandstone rock ‘dotted with tiny cornelians.’

Frank Fraser Darling left Tanera towards the end of World War Two, and died in 1979, with a long list of books and honours to his name, among them his 1969 Reith Lec-tures, appropriately entitled Wilderness and Plenty. Island Farm was recently reissued, with Bobbie’s smiling picture on the cover. Reading it, I realized they too had joined the legends. Frank was playing carols on his mouth-organ, while Bobbie sang, celebrat-ing the first Christmas of the war. He was lying in the schoolhouse with a broken leg, while Bobbie brought him cups of strong hot tea. He was writing, writing, writing; they were working on the quay. He was planting a sixpenny packet of sweet peas down by the shore, enjoying their ‘tiny world of fragrance and peace.’

After the Fraser Darlings left, Tanera was uninhabited for several decades. In 1965, it was bought by the Summer Isles Estates,

which restored several of the ruined crofts, and let them as holiday accommodation. A salmon fish farm was established on the island, along with a café, a post office and a small sailing school. At time of writing, the Wilder family, who own the island, and have lived there for almost two decades, were trying to negotiate a local community buy-out. They have since decided to put the place on the open market, starting in April, through C.K.D. Galbraith in Inverness. No one knows quite what will happen next. But for friends of the island – and indeed, for the most casual visitor – the hope is that not too much will change, that in a world of distrac-tion and overwhelm, Tanera will continue to be the haven it has been since Viking times, a source of wisdom, concentrated beauty, and yes, ‘placefulness.’ Nietzsche once wrote that the lakes were the eyes of the mountain, reflecting back the true light of the sky. On Tanera, one of the lochans holds its own small island, looking out across the heathery slopes with its own velvety green iris, its own keen, uncompromising gaze.

I thought of that last summer, as I stood with my friends outside the old school-house, where the Fraser Darlings had lived for much of their first year. We were star-ing back towards the far south-east, now lit up in delicate beige and gold, almond and lavender. The scene was being trans-formed even as we watched: Stac Pollaidh and its attendant mountains deepening from maroon to purple to blaeberry as the sunlight fled; the moon slipping out, deft as a tongue: a plain round face, long nose, and dark smudged eyes, a wide and doubt-ing mouth. We watched it rise over the hills, white, then pure bone ivory, its long track

lengthening across the bay. Meanwhile the sun was setting on the

other side of the island, a rampage of fiery orange and charcoal grey. ‘Tiger clouds,’ someone called them, their edges gleam-ing gold. It was a marvellous thing to stand there on the crest between: gazing first at the small round moon and quiet hills, and then back to the far west with its roaring angelic golden pyre – looking, listening, listening out.

ISlANd YeArS, ISlANd FArMFrank Fraser darling

lIttle toller bookS, 309 PP, £10, ISbN: 978 1 908213 01 3

tanera: ‘there are days when time itself seems visible.’


When in 1887 Lady Greg-ory and W B Yeats sent out a letter seeking backing for the theatre that would become The

Abbey, they stated clearly that the aim was to encourage plays ‘written with high ambition and so build up a Celtic and Irish school of dramatic literature.’ When in post-war Italy, Paolo Grassi and Giorgio Strehler drew up a manifesto for Milan’s Piccolo Teatro, they outlined their vision of theatre as a social service, as necessary to society as education or health. When in 1965, the free-wheeling Mickery Theatre was established in Amster-dam, its founder Ritsaert Ten Cate declared he was out to provide a venue dedicated to experimental, avant-garde ventures. And when the political climate created by the demonstrations and occupations in 1968 gave birth to a new style of theatre company, ranging from Dario Fo’s Nuova Scena to Peter Stein’s Schaubuhne in Berlin, they each issued high-minded manifestos proclaiming the new troupes to be socialist cooperatives committed to producing popular, mostly political, theatre and attracting ‘alternative’ (defining word of the Sixties) audiences.

So where is the comparable statement for the Traverse? What was it for? It came into being in 1963, and its history is garlanded with statements describing it as the most important theatre in, variously, Scotland, Britain, Europe, the World, and as having an unrivalled reputation for nurturing new writing. It is agreed on all sides that the Tra-verse matters, so why is it so hard to establish the initial driving force? Successive scandals, as well as directorial or committee disputes, have been discussed in anxious editorials in terms more suited to the Sarajevo assassina-tion, sometimes leaving the impression that theatre-goers should tread carefully on the way to the auditorium so as to avoid pools of blood. There was no founding manifesto, no ringing declamation, indeed no programme at all. If the other theatres mentioned strode confidently into public life bolstered by con-viction or credo, the Traverse seems to have peeped out like a mole emerging blinking into daylight, somewhat surprised at the hill it created as it burrowed to the surface. Maybe that is the Scottish way. Maybe David Hume has left a legacy of distrust of grand

principles and an inchoate belief that it is better just to get on with the job, whatever that job is.

But that is not satisfactory either. If there were, in Hamish Henderson’s words on another age, ‘no gods and previous few heroes’, there were dreamers, aspirers and even visionaries. The problem is that the early members who are still around disagree over what their hopes were then. It is not even clear that the Traverse was to be a the-atre. Perhaps it was to be a meeting place, a forum where like-minded people could meet and exchange ideas. Jim Haynes ran the leg-endary Paperback Bookshop in Edinburgh which was a proto-theatre and was certainly a place for debate. George Rosie, later jour-nalist and playwright, frequented it and remembers the lively arguments but, with the scoffing scepticism of his teenage years, was decidedly underwhelmed by the level of the quasi-philosophical discussion. Maybe that too is the Humean outlook. Others were more impressed. It might even be that some deep symbolism should be attached to the assertion made by Joyce McMillan in her stimulating, insightful 1988 history of the Traverse, that the very name was a misun-derstanding. The first artistic director, Terry Lane believed that traverse was the name for the design and shape of a theatrical space like the Traverse’s first home on the Lawn-market. Later he discovered that the correct term was ‘transverse,’ but by then the name had gathered the mystical qualities it would never shed.

The impression is that the Traverse was the product of enthusiasm, energy, creativ-ity and, above all, dissatisfaction, all bonded by the coming together in the one place of a group of people who were frustrated by the cultural and artistic status quo of an Edinburgh still weighed down by an eter-nal Calvinism of the spirit and by the heavy dullness of the post-war era. The past is not a different country, but its landscape has subtly different contours. The dominant cultural force then as now was the Festival, although for many its real excitement was located in the Fringe. In 1963, the City Coun-cil still viewed the Festival as a foreign and largely unwelcome implant which disturbed the digestive system of the douce body poli-tic. Censorship was still in force nationwide,

and could only be circumvented in the way it had been when Ibsen was introduced to Britain, by the establishment of a private club, which the Traverse became. Sexual intercourse, as Philip Larkin intimated, may have been invented in 1963, and there were certainly people, males especially, who were prepared to risk volunteering for that apparently untested experience. And while the ‘Sixties’ may have been slow to arrive in Scotland there were rumours of changes in the offing and of sightings of something called the Permissive Society, but elsewhere. On the other hand, in many aspects decline has subsequently occurred. The role of the Welfare State in providing for people’s needs was unchallenged, standards of living were rising, students had no debt and thus spare cash for cultural activities, and Aids was unknown. Maybe living was for now. In 1963, the sense that Edinburgh was a cul-tural desert for most of the year but an oasis of culture for three weeks was strong, so a driving ambition was to create some centre which could be all-year round Fringe. The critic Michael Coveney wrote that the Tra-verse was Britain’s ‘first fringe theatre.’ There were other clubs elsewhere, but the adjective ‘first’ sits well with the Traverse.

Some of the early Traverse members are, with hindsight, wholly unexpected. Who can match the Nicky Fairbairn who was on the board of the Traverse with the man who later became the censorious, gruff Tory MP? The names of Jim Haynes and Richard Demarco, founders both, have maintained their allure. The history of the Traverse can be written in many ways, and since it has risen to the status of institution it is tempting to write that history as a struggle between Prussians and Bohemians, between the indispensable, not always grey, people who form commit-tees and negotiate with ministries and local authorities, and the anarchic, open-eyed, devil-may-care, free-wheelers endowed with a mentality it is pleasant to tag ‘artistic.’ The deficiency of the artistic mentality is that it rarely actually produces art, although it may make its production possible. Demarco and Haynes were and are romantics, animated by vision, optimism, energy, enthusiasm and intelligence, all marred by a certain existen-tial carelessness. Demarco is an altruistic egoist, once described by John Byrne as a ‘secular saint,’ but saints are exasperating people. He was ousted in the early days by a committee which did not understand his passion for art or the demons which drove him. There is a fire in him which can mean that conversations are liable to be inter-rupted by cries of ‘Look, look!’ perhaps at something no more remarkable than a sunset but a sight he is desperate to have appreciated.

So the Traverse happened, but the ques-tion of what it was and is remains open. When I met Orla O’Loughlin, the current artistic director, I wondered what had drawn her to this particular theatre. ‘The Traverse is a legend,’ she replied thoughtfully and might have gone on even more thoughtfully had I not interrupted her rudely at the men-tion of the word ‘legend’, which has attached itself to the Traverse as an adornment, a challenge, an obstacle or an invitation. With the Citizens in the days of glorious epoch of Havergal-MacDonald-Prowse, the compa-rable word was ‘style.’ The term irritated all three of them, who disbelieved in a single Citizens style and asserted that each of the three had a style of his own. In the Traverse, every director has to live with the legend but

has the chance to reshape it. For the impres-sively astute Ms O’Loughlin, the Traverse is essentially a writer’s theatre, and so it has been for some time. Playwright Peter Arnott speaks gratefully of a meeting with directors Peter Lichtenfels and Jenny Killick when all he had done was some student work, which Killick had seen and enjoyed. They told him to write a big play for three actors. Being temporarily, and untypically, bereft of ideas, Arnott went to the library, found a book on Soviet women pilots in World War II and produced White Rose. O’Loughlin today speaks joyfully of her pleasure at work-ing with contemporary playwrights such as David Greig, Donald Maxwell and Peter Arnott. On appointment, she promised to make time for any playwright who wished to come and talk to her, and last year launched an ambitious venture when aspiring writers were invited to submit 500 word scripts, and she is continuing to develop many of these.

‘The Traverse Theatre is Scotland’s new writing theatre,’ it says on its website, and this dedication to new writing is now inscribed into the Traverse’s DNA, but it was not always. Some past directors have chafed at the constriction of working only with new writers, and have been unhappy at being unable to stage new interpretations of classi-cal or at least established work. In the 1980s, Lichtenfels was happier with innovative, translated work. O’Loughlin says she is glad she has the opportunity to work elsewhere on more familiar, perhaps classic, plays, but that the Traverse will remain the shrine of innovative, unperformed work. In its early days, the main impulse seems to have been to let in some air from Europe, so works by Arrabal, Sartre, Brecht and Betti featured. George Rosie saw an early production of Ubu Roi, but his clearest recollection was of amazement at hearing swear words on stage. It was a liberation of a sort. So too were the scandals provoked by early work, such as Balls which consisted of two tennis balls swinging in the void, or other works involv-ing nudity, obscenity, blasphemy all leading to media denunciation and to debates in the City Chambers, with the late Council-lor Kidd prominent among the scourges of licentiousness. We live in tamer days.

The website’s slogan also underlines the theatre’s Scottishness, and here lies another source of recurring strife, although less so in recent years. The issue of the obligations of theatres and galleries in Scotland to foster native talent has always been a thorny one, made more prickly by the fear that focus on local ability would in some way expose the institution in question to the dire charge of provincialism, the sin against the Holy Ghost. There is something in the Scottish psyche which whispers that too much self analysis is harmful, that real political or aes-thetic depth is attained only when the gaze is turned outward. Conversely, the Citizens was always open to the charge that its self-view as a classical theatre meant that it disre-garded current conditions, Scottish writing and Scottish traditions, a charge now raised in some quarters against the National The-atre of Scotland. In an odd way, the Citizens and the Traverse tacitly helped each other out. The Citizens were able to point to the Traverse, the Tron and later the Arches, as complementary places which cultivated contemporary talent, leaving them free to stage re-evaluations of classical theatre. The Traverse became at ease with its part in this divide of responsibilities. Perhaps this tacit collaboration reached its peak when John

The TRaveRSe aT fifTyJoseph Farrell


Byrne took The Slab Boys trilogy to Giles Havergal, who recognised its worth but felt it was not right for his company. He suggested to Byrne that he offer his play to the Tra-verse, where under David Hayman’s assured direction it became one of the company’s most successful productions. The ‘Scottish question’ in its widest sense is now, in the lead-up to the referendum, more urgent than ever. Playwrights like Greig and Arnott in particular have puzzled over dilemmas of identity for years, sometimes, especially in the case of Greig, in plays set in foreign bor-derlands or in those no-man’s-lands which are airport lounges. O’Loughlin, who took Alasdair Gray’s recent remarks on ‘settlers and colonialists’ more personally than the genial Gray could have intended, says she is on the lookout for the play which will dra-matise tellingly the predicament of the state of the Union, but has not so far found it.

It is, by the way, puzzling that at a time when Scotland has produced more play-wrights and actors of international quality than at any point in history, no really top quality director has so far emerged, so the

task of nurturing Scottish playwriting talent at the Traverse has been left to some English directors who happily took on the task. Chris Parr in the 1970s was especially active and successful on this front, as was Jenny Killick in the 80s. The contribution of the Traverse in recent decades to Scottish playwriting cannot be underestimated, but often this is expressed according to a very Scottish habit of mind which decrees that every achieve-ment will be met and resisted by an equal and opposite force of patrician or snigger-ing disparagement. Peter Arnott suggested that the centrality of the Traverse could be seen both in what it had done and in what had been done in opposition to it, by rival cliques who loathed what it came to stand for. At one point, the Edinburgh Playwrights’ Workshop and the Traverse, now viewed as the establishment venue, were two sides in a civil war, but each galvanised the other.

The history of the Traverse could be writ-ten from many angles, for instance in terms of the three buildings it has occupied – an ex-brothel in the Lawnmarket, a building up a close on the Grassmarket which gave a

frisson of historical as much as contempo-rary excitement each time it was entered, and the current modern building in Cambridge Street. The space as much as authorial imag-ination, directorial initiative or actorial flair determines the nature of what can be done.

For individual theatre-goers, its his-tory will be recalled in terms of memorable experiences. Simon Callow has written in Being an Actor of his delight in playing in 1974 in C. P. Taylor’s adaptation of Schip-pel, a work I remember as one of the most deftly and amusingly staged comedies I have ever seen. Jo (then John) Clifford’s Losing Venice in 1985 is another that merits a place in the same most treasured category. Seem-ingly, Clifford and director Jenny Killick were convinced during rehearsals that they had a flop on their hands, but the whimsi-cal, probing work featuring the Spanish poet Quevedo and an ageing Doge whose concern is not with the threat from Spain but with the inadequacies of his dinner exploded into riotous life on stage. It received then, and still requires, delicate handling. A Los Ange-les production, where the director had one of

the Spanish soldiers wearing a Nazi helmet, crushed its delicate magic.

But most effectively, the history should be written in terms of the writers who have worked there, but here too a distinction has to be made between excellent playwrights who have had work performed there, such as Byrne and Liz Lochhead, and others who can be viewed as Traverse playwrights. Of the latter, the pre-eminent are surely C P Taylor and Stanley Eveling. The philo-sophical probing which underlay much of Eveling’s delicate, unconventional dramatic structures delighted a generation of theatre-goers, which makes it all the sadder that his final dissociation from the Traverse was so painful. They are both dead and in history, but they helped nurture that most timid of flora, the Scottish theatre tradition. Others carry on in their own way. The Traverse has been fertile ground for that delicate, but now thriving, flower.

ricky demarco and Jim Haynes: romantics animated by vision, optimism, energy, enthusiasm and intelligence.


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drACulA’S brIde

He keeps telling me those stainson his shirt-front are ketchup from the all-night fast-food joint.And I keep saying: Pull the other one,I didn’t come up the Clydein a Transylvanian coal-puffer. I know pizza-sauce when I see itchurning around in the soapsudsall day in the launderette.

But does he listen? Does he hell.He snores in his pit all day, waiting for sunset, and Godknows what he does for dinner. I know he likes his meatvery rare, and hates garlic,but he always eats out. Whyare you shutting me out,I ask him, keeping all yourquality time for yourself?

But all he does is turn over in his customised box-stylesingle divan, muttering:Don’t forget to feed the bats.I’ve done the whole crypt overin Jugular White, Transfusion Redand Scab Violet, his absolutefavourites on the colour-chart.I keep it spick and span.and I kill ninety-nine per centof all known light-sources,

but he never even noticesmy racy-lacy chiffon dressesor my sexy sharkskin basqueor my cobweb-fine black stockingsor my spike-heeled gravedigger-bootsor my deadly-nightshade perfumeor my spangly red-claw nail-varnishor my clotted-blood lipstickor my permanent farewell waveor the gorgeous wee brass necklace I picked up at the flea-market for a chorus, which I wear to hidethose funny wee holes in my neck.

I’m dressed to die, some nights.But he still goes out, hell-benton painting the town red.Is he cheating on me ? Who knows. Sometimes he says I’m deadbeautiful. He says he’s mine,till death do us part.But something tells me it’s nota marriage made in heaven. He takes too much out of me.

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Apocryphal PoemsGerald Mangan claims to have discovered previously- unknown works by some of Scotland’s favourite poets. Here we present a selection.


lYNeS FrAe AN Auld SANG

Should auld acquaintance be your lot,An’ weel-kent faces a’ ye’ve gotTae see ye through the year, ye ought Tae buik a ticket,An’ tak’ a coach tae somewhaur hotThat’s faur frae Ayr or Kirk o’Shotts, Afore ye kick it.

For pleasures are like roses spread –Ye cannae smell them when you’re dead.So seize the day, as Horace said, And cease your toils.Come, lassies, lowse your maidenheads!They’re guid for nothing when ye’ve shed Yer mortal coils.

And Faither Time’s a cunnin’ scunner:He doesny steal yer years in wunners.He taks wee bits o’ springs an’ summers, Imperceptibly –No’ unlike a sleekit plumberSnafflin’ scraps o’ lead in hunners, Undetectably!


kAFkAA Suitable Case for treatment

Metaphors are among the many things that make me despair of writing

things make me despair of writing the many things that make me despair of writingMetaphors are among th many things that make me despair of writingMetaphors despair of writing etaphors are among the many things that make m e despair of writing ma ny things that make me despair things make me despair are many things despairMetaphors are among the m ny things that make m e despair of writingMetaphors are among the many things that make me despair Metaphors are despair are things writing Metaphors are things that make writingMetaphors make writingMetaphors are writing many things tha make me despair f writingMetaphors are among the many things that make me despair f writing Metaphors are among the many things that make me despair of writingMetaphors are among the man thingsMetaphors are many thingsMetaphors are among many things Metaphors make meMetaphors are things that make meMetaphors are among the many things that make me

IN PrAISe oF tHe tHIrd FortH brIdGe

O mighty Replacement Crossing over the silvery Forth,Where kings and queens have oft been ferried back and forth –How confidently you will stride across from shore to shoreTo replace the second Forth Bridge, which isn’t safe any more!

The first Forth Bridge, with its countless girders of iron,Still soars above the Firth as lofty as an ode by Byron,Though it does require a fresh coat of paint ever summerTo cover the rust, and the unsightly weldings by plumbers.

The second Forth Bridge, with its mighty hawsers of steel,Has sailed through many a steely wind on an even keel,Like our gracious long-lived Queen, at the helm of our great Nation,Who first declared it open to loud cheers of approbation.

But cruel Time has now defeated its makers and its menders,For heavy lorries and coaches have been bursting its suspenders. The suspense has been killing it, while waiting to know its fate.Sunday strollers and cyclists will soon be all it can take.

So let us hail the third Forth Bridge, new gateway to the north - And let us hope we’re still alive to hail the opening of the fourth!Perhaps the firth will see a fifth, but I hope that day comes never.When God said ‘Go Forth, and multiply’, He didn’t mean the river!


Alasdair Gray, who is 78 and lives in Glasgow, is a writer and artist. Initially, he was best known for his drawings and paintings but with the

publication of his novel Lanark in 1981 that changed and he was feted for the creation of a Glasgow Ulysses. Over the next four decades he produced a profusion of literary work, encompassing plays, poems, essays, novels and short stories. His most recent book is Every Short Story (Canongate, £30) which includes seventy-three previously published stories and sixteen new ones.

Normally, Scottish Review of Books interviews take place face-to-face but Gray was too busy on the dates proposed by the editor, Alan Taylor. As an alternative Gray suggested an email exchange which, he hoped, would ‘save time and eliminate mis-understandings derived from recorded voices.’ The result is the shortest interview with an author the SRB has yet published. It is also the only one in which the questions take up more space than the answers.

Scottish Review of Books: Your new collection, Every Short Story, covers more than sixty years, which a remarkable span of creativity. What was your motivation? A sense of completeness? A desire to bring between covers stories that are can only be found in disparate collections? Or to show how your work has developed and matured over that period? In a sense a portrait of the artist throughout all stages of his life?Alasdair Gray: All these three.

The first story, ‘The Star’, is illustrated with a picture of a boy in shorts sitting on a ledge in a bathroom window gazing out on a night sky. It’s as if he has the world on his doorstep and that he is about to embrace it, if not through travel then via his imagination. Of course Glasgow is a port and was then - the 1950s - still a place where ships were built. Did you ever think you’d get on one and sail away?No. Evacuated from Glasgow like many

others in 1940 I had experienced life on a farm near Auchterarder, in a Scottish coal-mining village, and in a Yorkshire market town. On returning to Glasgow after the war I found it so big and strange that getting used to it was a big enough job without trying to start again somewhere else.

You say in the Endnotes to Every Short Story that your parents never praised your writings and drawings to discourage ‘exhibitionism’ but that you nevertheless knew that they approved of them. Could you described what your parents and your early home life were like?I have done this so often in so many writings (chiefly Book One of Lanark) that it would be wearisome to do it yet again. A stack of interviews on my website also covers that ground in many places. The tersest answered questions by Christopher Swan and Frank Delaney in 1983.

Riddrie Public Library was your ‘second home’. Yet even some writers now think such places anachronisms and argue that they have outlived their usefulness. What’s your thoughts?I disagree.

Your early reading seems to have been dominated by fairy tales and fantasy literature. ‘Fabulous tales,’ you write, ‘free us from immediate, everyday suffering but also prepare us for it.’ How?By telling us nightmares that we recognise. Some teachers and bullies are as real to children as wicked stepmothers and ogres, some adults are as liberating as good fairies. Magic gifts can also liberate us, if rightly used. Imagination is the most powerful. Dr Sam Johnson and Sam Coleridge were very different poets but both approved of fairy tales for children.

You’ve lived in Glasgow almost all your life. What’s your perspective on it? Has it changed for the better? Is it a more cultured, civilised city? The most frequently quoted passage in

Lanark is the one in which Duncan Thaw asks: ‘What is Glasgow to most of us? Imaginatively, Glasgow exists as a music-hall song and a few bad novels. That’s all we’ve given to the world. That’s all we’ve given to ourselves.’ Are these views to which you would subscribe?That quotation is the view of an 18 year old art student in the 1950s when Glasgow was still one of the world’s most productive industrial cities. I was not aware of how artistically productive it had also been because the publicity we got from the best London news papers and the BBC never referred to it. It is bad that Glasgow, like other Scottish and English cities, no longer exports useful things to other lands. That artistic products are now noticeable as issuing in Glasgow and other parts of Scotland pleases me, because I earn my living by them, but Glasgow was happier for it’s inhabitants when most had jobs they could be proud of. Lanark appeared in 1981. I recall being at the launch at what was then called the Third Eye Centre. What’s your recollection of it?Cheerful.

I’ve always thought one of the most moving – and prescient – passages in Lanark is when Duncan submits a story for the school magazine and it’s rejected by his teacher on the grounds that he had tried ‘a blend of realism and fantasy which even an adult would have found difficult.’ On the one hand this seems to be a criticism of the timidity of teachers and, one the other, a comment on publishers distrustful of work not easily pigeon-holed.You may be right.

Have you ever considered writing genre fiction? A thriller, say, or sci-fi? Or a western? Or, now I come to think of it, a Fifty Shades of Gray?No. Most of my longer novels mix several genres, but I’ve seldom wanted to concentrate on one.

Much of Endnotes is concerned with the business of making a living. It seems that you lurched from days of relative plenty to a near breadline existence. Of course, until relatively recently writers had to have a second job, which used to be the norm....You are right.

The writers you tend be associated with are James Kelman, Tom Leonard, Agnes Owen, Liz Lochhead, with none of whom you seem to have much in common artistically. So what do you think binds you?We were first connected by meeting each other because of our Glasgow Hillhead, Art School, University extra mural department and other local associations. I think our writing has a lot of Scottish realism in common.

The novel seems now to be the dominant form. But at the beginning of your career all the major Scottish writers appeared to be poets: MacDiarmid, MacCaig, Morgan, etc.

Did you know them? Were any of them an influence? I talked to the three you mention, admired the work of all and like most Scottish writers was most influenced by McDiarmid. I have said that 1982 Janine owes a lot to A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle. A year and bit from now we’ll have the chance to vote for independence, which is something you’ve long been in favour of. Recently, though, you were taken to task for an essay you wrote, in which you descried the influence in Scotland of cultural colonists, who, you argued, know little of the country’s culture and who’re only using it as a step on the career ladder to greater things. In hindsight, do you regret anything you said?No. I am not responsible for sound-bites by which a journalist whipped up misled reactions to my essay, ‘Settlers and Colonists’, which the reactors had not read. Are we living in the early days of a better nation or at the fag end of a pipe dream?I have never smoked a fag in a pipe and dislike either/or questions. Life is too many-sided for Hegalian or Marxist dialectics.

For you, art and literature are often coupled. But rarely is music mentioned. Do you listen to it? Were you to go on Desert Island Discs what would you choose? I listen to it. A lot of stuff called Classical and also Folk.

Could you describe a typical day in your life?No, because any routines I set up keep getting changed.

A few years ago, you allowed your secretary, Rodge Glass, to write your biography. Have you read it? Yes.

When you look in the mirror, what do see?Something too familiar to interest me.

Have you realised yourself? No, because I have never known what myself is.

Have you achieved what you set out to do? I have achieved many things I set out to do.

What’s your legacy? Whatever people notice that I have left behind.

And what’s next on your agenda? I am translating Dante’s Sublime Comedy very freely, and am almost half way through Hell.

More subway murals?I doubt it.

Or more short stories?Perhaps.

Finally, were you to interview yourself, what question would you like to ask?None I could answer.

alaSdaiR GRay: The SRB inTeRvieW


eaRly dayS of a BeTTeR naTionHarry McGrath

on the Scottish Parliament’s Canongate Wall, the most paraphrased non-Scottish writer since devolution meets one of the most mis-

spelled Scottish writers of any era. ‘Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation’ was included in the 24 original inscriptions chosen for the building because they were ‘of relevance to Scotland and its Parliament’. It was attributed at the time to ‘Alisdair’ Gray.

In fact, Alasdair Gray paraphrased the line from a poem called Civil Elegies by Canadian poet Dennis Lee and has made no secret of that. In September 2012 Gray’s soon-to-be unveiled mural on the wall of the revamped Hillhead subway station in Glasgow was covered by a large black poster that read ‘work as if you live in the early days of a better world’. Gray explained why he had changed ‘nation’ to ‘world’ and said of the ‘nation’ version that: ‘I have always attributed it to him [Lee] but people started quoting it as if I had invented it’.

The Scottish Parliament was slow to make the correct attribution, but eventually ‘paraphrased from Dennis Lee’s Civil Elegies Toronto Anansi 1972’ appeared on its web-site. Now the term ‘better nation’ flies off the tongues of politicians of every stripe. It is the working title for blogs and referenced in innumerable Scottish twitter profiles. But what of the man behind the ‘better nation’ phenomenon?

Dennis Beynon Lee was born in Toronto, Ontario in 1939. In 1980 he lived in Edin-burgh as a Canada-Scotland exchange poet where he met Alasdair Gray. Lee is relaxed about his latest, unanticipated, Scottish connection: ‘I’m tickled to have those lines written in stone in Scotland. And I’m even more tickled by how off-centre, in fact down-right loopy, the whole shebang is. If someone said they could magically edit the inscrip-tion, make it punctiliously correct, I would cast a ‘Nay’ vote. I like it just the way it is.’

For the sake of punctilious correctness, the original reads, ‘And best of all is find-ing a place to be/in the early days of a better civilization’. Lee is as sanguine about Gray’s version as he is about the Canongate Wall inscription: ‘How it got slightly scrambled when Alasdair used it… well, probably due to the fact that it was Alasdair who was using it.’

Civil Elegies which provided the original quote was Lee’s second book of poetry and also his third. His first, Kingdom of Absence, was published in 1967 and provided him with a life-long source of reference when explaining to aspiring poets how not to write poetry. In a recent essay called ‘Re-greening the Undermusic’ Lee extracted one of his sonnet variations from the first collection (‘one of those little winners’) and presented it as an example of a poet ‘going nowhere, spinning his wheels’. In 1968 he published a version of Civil Elegies but was unhappy with its ‘big stentorian, public address voice’ and spent the next four years rewriting it. Civil Elegies was republished in 1972 by Anansi, a press that Lee co-founded.

The second version put Dennis Lee on the map. The change in voice between the Civil Elegies of 1968 and that of 1972 pro-vided a foundation stone for his entire career. This transformative period is explained in ‘Re-greening’: ‘I was connecting with the teeming rhythmic energy I’d been tanta-lized by for so long. If I sat and listened, I could sense a swoop and pummel and glide, a simultaneous whoosh and throb – many vibrations at once. I felt them humming in my body, even though there was no physical source. What was it? I had no idea. Where did it come from? I couldn’t say. But the kin-aesthetic pulsation was unmistakable, and it could govern the way a poem moved. It furnished a kind of undermusic, which the poem sought to track and re-embody. I had no theory to explain this rhythmic cascade. I did give it a name, though; for lack of a better term, I called it cadence. And I conjec-tured that I’d become open to cadence when I relinquished the colonial ways of framing experience that I’d inherited, and listened to my own here-and-now. But as for what this cadence consisted of, or where it came from, I had no idea.’

This ‘cadence’ eventually provided a ‘calmer meditative progress’ in the sec-ond Civil Elegies which explored, in nine long, inter-connected poems, the notion of ‘colonised space’. This conjures up Alasdair Gray for a second time in the form of his recent essay, ‘Settlers and Colonists’, which appeared in Unstated: Writers on Indepen-dence (Word Power Books), and the rather unedifying public ‘debate’ that followed it.

However, Lee was a lot more comprehen-sive, uncompromising and (meditative voice notwithstanding) angry.

The narrator of Civil Elegies – com-monly assumed in critical discourse to be Lee himself – is positioned in Nathan Phil-lips Square, Toronto’s agora. The city is booming and in flux but he is not impressed. Choked by a ‘noxious cloud’ of pollutants, he contemplates the condition of Toronto and, by extension, Canada. He seems sick in mind, heart and body; his personal sickness echoing in his country’s condition. The nar-rative wanders and returns but one theme endures: Canada is colonised by the United States, particularly in its cultural and mental spaces.

The lines that follow the ‘better civili-zation’ injunction are blunt: ‘For we are a conquered nation: sea to sea we bartered/everything that counts, till we have/nothing to lose but our forebears’ will to lose’. The lines that Canadian critics invariably cite are even more brutal: ‘But what good is that in a nation of / losers and quislings’.

Lee gave the lie to the benign Canadian, later to become almost a national brand. The sustained raw anger of it all is born in colonised space but it is also stoked by Cana-dian politicians who supplied Agent Orange for deployment in Vietnam and a compli-ant Canadian population that allowed that to happen. He displayed, in the words of one critic, ‘A real blood-and-spit kind of anger. And not just personal anger, either, or domestic anger. Instead, a massive, coast-to-coast, national anger. Anger as unifying theme’. In this respect as in others – essays that called for ‘freedom from inhibiting educational institutions’, interviews on the influence of music on his poetry – Lee appears to have more in common with Tom Leonard than Alasdair Gray.

Nevertheless the nation of losers and quislings gave Civil Elegies the Gover-nor General’s Award in 1972, to which Lee responded by switching almost immediately to children’s poetry. He wanted to write for his own children but also needed to make a living and, remarkably for a man who had just received the highest literary award in the land, was ‘very nervous because there were poets my own age who were doing much better work than I was at that point – Atwood and Ondaatje, Gwen MacEwen – so I was fighting for space as an adult poet myself.’

However, the shift from adult concerns may not have been as absolute as it first appeared. Lee was bent on ‘reclaiming lan-guage and liberating imagination’ in the young and cites the influence of lines from a New Zealand poem that he stumbled across:

In Plimmerton, In Plimmerton,The little penguins play,And one dead albatrossWas found at Karehana Bay

The poet – Dennis Glover – was unknown to Lee but he was taken by ways the poem seemed to dance with the penguins and its confident use of local place names which, if replicated in Canada, might form part of a more general reclamation project.

Lee’s career as a children’s poet was remarkably successful. He worked with Jim Henson, creator of The Muppets, and influenced the childhood of generations of Canadians. He often spoke of his embarrass-ment at not being able to find a less clichéd way of describing his children’s poems than

that they came from his ‘inner child’. His inner child, however, had a dark side:

Bugs and beetles, don’t be late Set your feelers nice and straight: Puke the slimy crud you chewed, And smear it through the humans’ food.

But he did not abandon writing poems for adults. When he was in Edinburgh in 1980, ‘this really multiple-voiced del-uge of riffs came through’ often ‘after too much booze’. The love-affair inspired, jazz influenced, quick-fire pieces introduced what one critic called ‘near-sense’ poetry to his repertoire. They are also a nice dem-onstration of range from the poet who painted the great canvas of Civil Elegies and reclaimed language for the children:

Wal, acey deucey trey divide –I`m a guy with a fine wide-eyed

lady freckles too & squirms when shefeels good I feel so good just

doin awshuckstricks an she`s SOFISTIKATED!

As indicated by the two versions of Civil Elegies, Lee is a constant reviser. His lat-est collection Testament: Poems 2000-2011 contains reworked poems from Un (2004) and Yesno (2007). Both were praised for their musicality just as Riffs (1993) received critical acclaim for its improvisational quali-ties when it emerged, belatedly, from his Edinburgh days. The aforementioned ‘Re-greening the Undermusic’ revisits many of Lee’s themes: writing in colonised space, cadence, and variations on the environmen-tal concerns raised in Civil Elegies. The essay was first presented as a lecture at Vancou-ver Island University in October 2012 and trailed as Lee ‘revisiting his 50 year career’. One thing missing from it is any indication of the anger that fired him in 1972, but asked in a different context for is thoughts on Can-ada’s right-wing Prime Minister, Lee said: ‘he’s taken the country in, apart from his having decided to bite the bullet on allowing gay marriage, I can’t think of anything in his tenure that doesn’t make me gag’. At 73 years of age, the ‘blood-and-spit’ is still there.


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Into my possession recently came a facsimile of Herman Moll’s Atlas of Scotland. Published originally in 1725, it was reprinted in 1980 in a limited edition of 500 with green cloth boards

and a brown leather spine. The copy which I have is numbered 149. The publisher was Heritage Press, based in Towie Barclay Cas-tle near Turiff in Aberdeenshire, which dates to the sixteenth century but is presently in a state of neglect. Publication, it seems, was made possible by the enlisting of subscrib-ers, among whom were Princess Margaret, Peter Shand Kydd, Princess Diana’s stepfa-ther, Keith Schellenberg, erstwhile laird of Eigg, the actor Iain Cuthbertson and Andy Stewart, the bekilted host of The White Heather Club who - in my mind at least - will forever be associated with the The Muckin’ o’ Geordie’s Byre.

If nothing else such a diverse group exemplifies the ecumenical appeal of maps and atlases. In 1725, Scotland was still find-ing its feet in its relatively recent union with England. Ten years had elapsed since the inept rising in 1715, led by John, Earl of Mar, and there were twenty more to go to the inglorious ’45, when Bonnie Prince Charlie sought to restore the Stuarts to the throne. These were limbo years as the two principles in a forced marriage sought a way of living harmoniously together. But in his introduction to Moll’s Atlas, John Adair, ‘late Geographer’ of Scotland, was markedly upbeat in his assessment of the country’s prospects. The air, he remarked, was ‘whol-some and temperate’, though he conceded that the weather could be more depend-able. There was clean water and decent soil, beneath which there were plentiful deposits of minerals and stone. But best of all, wrote Adair, was the bounty that lay in the sea and rivers, where ‘the greatest and surest Trea-sure’ awaited those inclined to go in search of it.

Of Herman Moll, however, there is no mention other than his name of on the title page. He was born in the 1650s in the Neth-erlands which can fairly claim to have been to cartography what Italy was to the fresco. In 1678, Moll moved to London where he opened a book and map shop. Like others in the field, he drew heavily on the work of his predecessors, not only cartographers

but historians, travellers and geographers. Map-making is the most palimpsestic of arts, each map adding to and subtracting from those which have appeared previously. There is no shame in this. Rather there is an understanding of the inadequacy of human knowledge and a desire to right wrongs. In 1711, Moll began his Atlas Geographus, which eventually ran to five volumes and was much copied. His success was such that he was well-known among his illustrious contemporaries, including Daniel Defoe. He was also acquainted with Jonathan Swift who, in Gulliver’s Travels, wrote: ‘I arrived in seven hours to the south-east point of New Holland. This confirmed me in the opinion I have long entertained, that the maps and charts place this country at least three degrees more to the east than it really is; which I thought I communicated many years ago to my worthy friend, Mr. Herman Moll, and gave him reasons for it, Although he has chosen to follow other authors.’

What Moll knew personally of Scotland is unclear. But what is apparent is that, like other cartographers, by and large he did not draw maps based on first-hand experience but on the existing work of others. Thus, as Christopher Fleet, Margaret Wilkes and Charles W.J. Withers note in Scotland: Map-ping the Nation (Birlinn, 2012) while in his 1714 map of the country he brought the names and locations of places up to date, there remained several ‘errant’ features, such as ‘the “crooked line” of the Great Glen, the blunt north end to the Island of Lewis and the orientation of Skye.’ Would Moll have produced a more accurate map had he vis-ited these places himself? In all likelihood he would but such an investment, in time as well as capital, was as prohibitive as it was impractical. For while he was obviously concerned to produce accurate maps Moll was also a businessman who had to main-tain a steady flow of production. Such has been the story of map making throughout the ages. What cartographers and explor-ers were always eager to do, however, was fill up blank space, where dragons were assumed to be lurking or which was labelled ‘terra incognita’ until someone had ventured there and relayed what they’d witnessed. The unknown was troubling and dangerous but also tempting for who knows what might be

found there.Scotland in the eighteenth century was

not of course an empty country though it was, as Dr Johnson suggested prior to his 1773 tour with Boswell, wild, savage and primitive. Map-wise, the country came into being in the mid-sixteenth century, when Paolo Forlani, a Veronese map-maker based in Venice produced what’s believed to be the first printed map that shows Scotland on its own. It is a rudimentary effort and looks like a child’s drawing. There are a few names - Iona, ‘Ila’, ‘Grampivs’, ‘Wigton’, etc, numerous mountains and a number of lochs and rivers - but it is not a map you could use with any confidence. Nearly a hundred years passed before there would be one on which you could rely. This was The Blaeu Atlas of Scotland, which is one of four beautifully reproduced in limited editions by Birlinn in cooperation with National Library of Scot-land (the others are The Great Map: The Military Survey of Scotland, 1747-1755, John Thomson’s Atlas of Scotland, 1855, and J.G. Bartholomew’s The Survey Atlas of Scotland, 1912) in what is undoubtedly one of the great publishing projects so far of the twenty-first century.

Blaeu is one of the most fabled names in cartography. Like his father Willem, Joan Blaeu was a mapmaker in Amsterdam and worked for the Dutch East India Company. His great work, his magnum opus, was the multi-volume Atlas Novus, which took seventy years to bring to a conclusion. Scot-land was the subject of volume five which included forty-nine engraved maps of the country, offering a unique perspective on how the land lay half a century and more before the Union with England. Like other mapmakers Blaeu leaned heavily on second-ary sources and information from friends and colleagues. As Charles Withers writes in a splendid introductory essay to the Atlas, its story is one of ‘war, of delays in the post, underachieving churchmen, anxious statesmen concerned with Scotland’s visual representation, and, naturally money. It is a story too of avaricious printers, neglectful children, courtly geographers, poetic pro-fessors, Antwerp mapmakers and Danish astronomers, as well as Amsterdam publish-ers, English and Scottish historians, and the views of Royalty about the power of maps.’

In common with Herman Moll, Joan Blaeu’s knowledge of Scotland was sec-ondhand. Indeed, what he knew of it was garnered first from Sir John Scot who held various important positions in the Scottish parliament, including Director of Chancery, Lord of Session and Privy Councillor. Scot travelled often and widely in the Low Coun-tries where he came into contact with Blaeu, with whom he corresponded. It was through Scot, for example, that Blaeu obtained the maps by Timothy Pont which would form the basis of his Scottish atlas.

Pont is a similarly revered figure in the annals of Scottish cartography. Around the turn of the sixteenth century he was appointed minister of Dunnet in Caithness, before which, it seems, he gave himself the task of mapping Scotland, none of which saw of the light of day while he was alive. Why Pont chose to do this remains something of a mystery. Certainly, he was well-connected. His father was also a clergyman, a friend of John Knox and an advisor to King James VI. Timothy Pont graduated from St Andrews in the early 1580s and in 1592 he was appointed to undertake a survey of minerals and metals in Orkney and Shetland.

The authors of Scotland: Mapping the Nation speculate that Pont may have com-pleted his mapping work by the time he was called to Dunnet though they also think it is conceivable that he moonlighted while a minister. When exactly he died is unknown but he was no more by 1615 when his wife is listed as a widow. What survived, how-ever, were his maps, which did not cover the whole of the country but a majority of it. Usually Pont offers admirable detail but occasionally he has no option but to plump for ‘extreme wildernes’ (when describing parts of Sutherland). Nonetheless what he offered was a peerless picture of Scotland in the sixteenth century, a place, like so many others at the period, where most people lived on the land, and where there was a thriving rural economy and fermtouns, country mills, impressive estates and not a few trees.

Though Pont was the begetter of the maps which made Blaeu’s atlas possible we should not underestimate Sir John Scot’s role in the enterprise. According to Blaeu himself, Scot ‘passed whole days in my establishment writing, dictating what made for illustrating the maps of his country, with such felicity of memory that, though lacking all papers and books, he dictated regional shapes, situations, boundaries, old and more recent lords, produce of the soil, rivers, and similar matters in great profusion.’ Thus - according to Withers - Scotland was ‘“put on view’’ as never before’. Moreover, the Blaeu Atlas, and its international cast of contribu-tors, offered a snapshot of a hitherto little known and uncharted country. Maps bring places into existence, making them familiar and visitable, at once demystifying them and opening them up, not only to tourists, as in recent times, but also to traders and military men. In the latter regard, William Roy’s The Great Map: The Military Survey, 1747-55 is significant. Unlike many others mentioned here, Roy was a Scot, born near Carluke. His map, made in the aftermath of the ’45, was the most scientific, comprehensive and precise yet produced of the country. Good information, it was reckoned, was needed to prevent and squash further insurrection and Roy offered it though he was modest in describing his own achievement. It was, he said, a ‘sketch’, if a very pleasing one at that. He also cautioned that ‘no geometrical

Back To The dRaWinG BoaRdAlan Taylor

dinner for a great explorer


Joan blaeu’s map of Scotia regnum, the kingdom of Scotland, which was included in the Atlas Novus.

exactness is to be expected, the sole objec-tive in view being, to shew remarkable things, or such as constitute the great out-lines of the Country’. Browsing through The Great Map’s pages one can imagine plotting a course through Glen ‘Terridon’ or around inaccessible lochs in the pursuit of rebels. Maps not only show what is there but what is not. From Roy’s depiction you can surmise what a bleak and uninhabited and scary place Scotland was and why only those who had good reason to go there would bother.

By the mid-nineteenth century Scot-land’s face was beginning to mature and you could look at maps such as those included in John Thomson’s Atlas and construct a mental picture. Thomson’s achievement was rooted in new geographical, scientific and technical knowledge, including advances in the printing industry. It was the age of spe-cialism. Gone were the days when men could legitimately boast that they knew every-thing there was to know. Every decade of the nineteenth century threw up a few new societies: the Geological Society in 1807; the Astronomical Society in 1820; the Zoologi-cal Society in 1826; the Royal Geographical Society in 1830; and the British Association for the Advancement of Society in 1831. As Charles Withers notes, ‘The term “scientist”, at least in its modern connotations of profes-sionalisation and subject expertise, likewise dates from the 1830s.’

John Thomson was a man who epito-mised his era. Born in 1777 in Edinburgh, he was a child of the Enlightenment. From bookselling he moved into publishing, pro-ducing A New General Atlas in 1817 which was followed by the Cabinet Atlas two years later. But for Thomson the 1820s was a boom and bust decade. In 1825, he was declared bankrupt for the first time; five years later he was bankrupt again. A large part of his financial woes stemmed from his invest-ment in The Atlas of Scotland, proposals for which he began circulating in 1818, fourteen years before it eventually appeared. Such an ambitious project required the commitment of numerous subscribers whom Thomson had difficulty in bringing on board, though he claimed there were 1,200. Engraving and printing costs were high, as was the cost of paper. Ultimately, Thomson was defeated. According to Christopher Fleet and Paula

Williams he ‘fades from the record’ after 1836. But his Atlas offered him an afterlife, its quality incomparable. ‘No other county maps of Scotland,’ write Fleet and Williams, ‘could compete until Ordnance Survey maps became widely available…Thomson’s maps, for all their faults, were the best available depiction of Scotland for over 30 years, lon-ger for some counties, at a time when the landscape of the country was changing.’

Statistics reveal just how profound that change was. In 1800, 17 per cent of Scots lived in towns of more than 10,000 inhabit-ants. By 1850 that figure had rise to 32 per cent and by 1900 to 50 per cent. The big-ger towns – Glasgow, Edinburgh, Dundee and Aberdeen – grew bigger and bigger, suck in people from near and far and visibly changing the nation’s landscape. The chal-lenge for mapmakers was how to keep pace with developments; new roads and railways, canals and bridges. Throughout the twen-tieth century it was the Edinburgh firm of Bartholomew which mapped this emerging, constantly metamorphosing Scotland, pro-ducing maps which catered for every need, including recreational. At its head was John George Bartholomew, who was born in 1860 and died at Sintra in Portugal in 1920. There were mapping Bartholomews before him but he took the business to a different level, pioneering new techniques in map produc-tion, encouraging the better teaching of geography in schools and helping to found the Royal Scottish Geographical Society.

Though his achievements were many it was The Survey Atlas of Scotland which cemented his place in cartographic lore. Pay-ing tribute to those who had preceded him, such as Joan Blaeu and Timothy Pont and John Thomson, and the Ordnance Survey on whose work the Survey Atlas was dependant, Bartholomew made the case for a collection of maps that truly reflected reality. To ensure accuracy, local authorities were consulted. For the first time ever, colouring showed the height of land and the depth of sea and riv-ers. It was - is - a lovely object, each plate a joy to behold. There used to be a copy in the library I used as a boy and I would go there after school and trace rivers with my fingers, wonder how steep hills could be and try to imagine what unpronounceable places were like. It was the kind of book you could open

anywhere and know that you’d find yourself far away from home.

tHe blAeu AtlAS oF SCotlANd, 1654Joan blaeu

bIrlINN, PP200, £100, ISbN: 9781841585857

tHe GreAt MAP: tHe MIlItArY SurVeY oF SCotlANd, 1747–1755 bIrlINN, PP400, £200, ISbN: 9781841586670

tHe AtlAS oF SCotlANd, 1832John thomson

bIrlINN, PP416, £150, ISbN: 9781841586878

tHe SurVeY AtlAS oF SCotlANd, 1912J.G. bartholomew

bIrlINN, PP158, £100, ISbN: 9781841588643

edinburgh in 1647, as drawn by James Gordon, which was intended to be included in blaeu’s Atlas Novus but was omitted.

‘ Scotland in the eighteenth century was not of course an empty country though it was, as Dr Johnson suggested prior to his 1773 tour with Boswell, wild, savage and primitive. Map-wise, the country came into being in the mid-sixteenth century, when Paolo Forlani, a Veronese map-maker based in Venice, produced what’s believed to be the first printed map that shows Scotland on its own.’



In 2008 Angus Calder died in a nurs-ing home within the precincts of Holyrood, Croft an Righ, Edinburgh’s blue-sky Marshalsea. Years earlier we had both agreed with John Buchan

that Chrystal Croftangry, protagonist of that autumnal novella, the 1827 ‘Introduction’ to The Chronicles of the Canongate, might have started a new Scott. The burnt-out rake returns to Clydesdale and the family estate to find the old house gone and ‘Castle Tred-dles’ in its place:

The house was a large fabric, which pretended to its name of Castle only from the front windows being finished in acute Gothic arches, and each angle graced with a turret about the size of a pepper-box. In every other respect it resembled a large town-house, which, like a fat burgess, had taken a walk to the country on a holiday, and climbed to the top of an eminence to look around it. The bright red colour of the freestone, the size of the building, the formality of its shape, and awkwardness of its position, harmonized as ill with the sweeping Clyde in front, and the bubbling brook which danced down on the right, as the fat civic form, with bushy wig, gold-headed cane, maroon-coloured coat, and mottled silk stockings, would have accorded with the wild and magnificent scenery of Corehouse Linn.

I went up to the house. It was in that state of desertion which is perhaps the most unpleasant to look on, for the place was going to decay without having been inhabited. There were about the mansion none of the slow mouldering touches of time, which communicate to buildings, as to the human frame, a sort of reverence. The disconcerted schemes of the Laird of Castle Treddles had resembled fruit that becomes decayed without ever having ripened. Some windows broken, others patched, others blocked up with deals, gave a disconsolate air to all around, and seemed to say, ‘There Vanity had purposed to fix her seat, but was anticipated by Poverty.’

‘Disconcerted’ went for Abbotsford, obvi-ously. Yet Corehouse has re-emerged in the last few weeks, just as New Abbotsford will be born on the Fourth of July. The mul-

tinational Cemex has defied a worsening economy with plans to dig more gravel east of New Lanark, slipping this through Historic Scotland without any discussion of environ-ment or aesthetics. Inside this manoeuvre is a small piece of touristic archaeology, which may be awkward.

Long roofless, the View House at Bon-nington stands above the Falls of Clyde at ‘Cora Linn’. It was built in 1708 by John Car-michael, Earl of Hyndford: a chamber with a door giving on to the falls. Fixed and mov-

ing mirrors allowed visitors to experience, without danger, a controlled landscape; they could feel they were within or below the fall-ing water. It was one of two, being followed in 1757 by the Hermitage at Dunkeld, built by the Duke of Atholl above the Falls of the Braan, which, after James MacPherson’s breakthrough in 1761-63, was christened ‘The Hall of Ossian’.

After 1822 Melrose could claim, besides Scott, that it rivalled Goethe’s Weimar as a centre of optics. Scott’s friend Dr David Brewster of Gattonside, later Principal of Edinburgh University, headed the field. He had patented his kaleidoscope in 1817, changing fragments of glass into decorative order. The principle was the same as that of the View Houses; indeed his wife was one of MacPherson’s four natural children.

Waverley has been seen as material proof of the Union’s success. Or was the novel another sort of ‘View House’: a kaleidoscope pavilion on the grand scale? It coincided with Scott’s move from Ashestiel to Abbotsford: otherwise a depressed farm ‘Clarty Hole’ on the old Galashiels to Melrose road, its ford

disused after Lowood Bridge in 1762 carried the highway north of the Tweed. Washington Irving, the American litterateur who visited in 1817 and found treelessness, interrupted only by a rackety industrial village in the val-ley of Gala Water.

Irving may have been minded of the bald islands of his father’s Orkney. TC Smout’s environmental research found sheep ate up trees. Upper Ettrick hadn’t been for centu-ries the forest Scott imagined: the name registered administration, not appearance. Industry and urban development didn’t help, adding pollution, health problems to general wear-and-tear. Abbotsford was awkward, involving detours via minor roads from Mel-rose or the Selkirk-Edinburgh turnpike. Its glory days would be short – from completion of Atkinson’s grand library-drawing room wing in 1824 to Scott going bust in 1826. Heroic melancholy among the saplings, from then on?

Yet as Scott strove against creditors, Benjamin Disraeli turned up and was sent packing. He was too ill in 1829 to see Felix Mendelssohn, whose Fingal’s Cave and Scot-tish Symphony would set Scotland firmly on its tourist trajectory. His polymath juggling projected the stature of man and country. Before Scott, scenery as toxin was mediated by the small complex buildings mentioned: ‘Safe Scotland’ as pictures, charm without scariness. They related directly to the Scots heroic; invoking literature and the busy sci-ence of optics, making the individual the patron of his own scenic world.

The View House principle fixed on wild beauty (and possible danger) and enabled the spectator to reproduce it around him (or more importantly her): a display to be controlled and altered. A bigger version of the ‘Claude Glass’, it moulded the land-scape, viewed through it, into the boskage of Claude Lorrain (1602-80) framing neo-clas-sic paintings of Tuscany or the Campagna, familiar from the Grand Tour.

Scott knew this, as well as his family’s wobbly position on the staircase of Scot-tish power, and the need for a market. Primitiveness, squalor, rain falling from grey mountains folding into grey cloud impressed Dr Johnson on his ‘Scottish Jaunt’ with James Boswell in autumn 1773. This persisted. Few of the ‘picturesque’ views in William Daniell’s Scotland (1818) show woodland, instead near-surreal mountain and savage-looking sea.

The post-Union Scottish circuit was aristocratic, through policies and castles crammed with continental loot. Calvinism had an uninviting alternative of martyr-dom. Introducing his Northern Muse, John Buchan stressed the place’s awful diet and weather, probably drawing too much on middle-class travellers moaning about recur-rent ‘little ice-ages’. If you were an aristo, you didn’t encounter this; if a commoner, you wouldn’t record. Abbotsford responded to its still-unformed landscape with its builder’s tastes, words and objects.

Scott’s own career after 1804 was realised between his Edinburgh and Border houses, and depended literally on ‘new’ roads. Edin-burgh to Selkirk was turnpiked in 1764, but travellers often found it easier to splash down the Gala Water. By 1818 he upped the ante: advised on the grand coastal Scotland of Daniell’s acquatints, based on his circum-navigation in late 1814. On the yacht Pharos was the engineer Robert Stevenson, not just a lighthouseman but the Britannica’s expert on road and rail. Scott was captivated:

I delight in these professional men. They always give you some new lights by the peculiarity of their habits and studies – so different from the people who are rounded and smoothed …

Daniell presented the Clyde’s six steam-boats, the latest the seagoing Rob Roy. Such mobile pavilions outdid Scott’s rail-way efforts. The 1811 Glasgow and Berwick horse-drawn line that Telford had surveyed, revised by Stevenson in 1812; a further Edin-burgh-Galashiels line, sketched by him in 1821, all unbuilt.

The Soutra turnpike made the point: over the hills, new roads were expensive. Telford’s Dalkeith-Pathhead stage, with its massive Lothian Bridge, was completed in 1831, as Scott died. Its great days lasted only sixteen years before the steam-powered Edinburgh and Hawick Railway breasted the Moorfoots. This was the making of Abbotsford in two respects: tourist trade and geld. James Hope-Scott as heir brought the latter in 1848-53, being Britain’s biggest railway lawyer.

The Abbotsford clan proved short-lived or useless: Charlie and young Walter drank like trout. Scott’s son-in-law John Gibson Lockhart had drive, but alienated people and anyway lived in London. Not long after March 1826 Scott’s fortune followed his wife into the shadows. In politics Robert Dundas was losing power, not just to clever Whigs but to Thomas Chalmers’ theocratic politics. Scott died fraught.

Our own coda is ambiguous. New Abbotsford will be there for Waverley’s 200th birthday. Cemex’s quarry, footprint-ing Castle Treddles, was signed off in late 2012 despite local objections, by an ‘arms length’ bureaucracy settling the public inter-est: more materiel for ‘shovel-ready projects’ – or ‘joabs on the tar’. Along the M74, these enable the labyrinthine Uddingston inter-change to route Tescotrucks from Daventry more swiftly to the malls of the West.

The rituals of Naples opera left the dying Scott ‘dog-sick of the whole of it’ though Ros-sini’s Donna del Lago had in 1819 launched him on Europe’s stages; today its sewage sys-tem mysteriously connects to no exit pipes. ‘Joabs on the tar’ is Glasgow’s end-in-itself, its logic in tight political and retail con-cerns and, as the architect Malcolm Fraser has pointed out, the drive to privatise public space. Earlier frustrated by civic-religious structures inherited from the 19th century, this reasserted itself when the bankers grabbed and ran.

The ‘View House’ was more principle than conceit. It reflected a civility still qualified by nature and climate, religious tensions, an evolving infrastructure, the wrench of industrial change. Abbotsford made a ‘pavilion’ into an oddly democratic vista, as Angus Calder always argued. Scott’s communal house was confronted by wool-capitalist robber baronial crowning the neighbouring slopes, brandishing private wealth, unconstrained by social sympathy.

Isolation came after 1969 with the Waverley Railway closure: its partial reopen-ing to Tweedbank, now under way, intends to reanimate the Borders. The battle with the bankers over access to ‘Scott’s Countryside’ reprised what he had intuited: that he was only the temporary king of that exfoliating heritage. In an age of extreme and aggressive inequality, Scott is worth study because, like Whitman, he contains multitudes. Waverley is still the book of the people.

houSe WiTh a vieWChristopher Harvie

Abbotsford: Awkward to get to


Ah, the 1980s. I remember it, of course, but mine was the van-tage point of a pre-teen, and by the time I’d figured out what was happening it had gone,

replaced by the more nondescript 1990s. If only I’d been a decade older, or even a few years, that tumultuous decade might have left more of an impression. Thus the decade of shoulder pads, BMX bikes, Stock Aitken & Waterman and Spitting Image is for me the recent past and, as Alan Bennett once observed, there is no period so remote. Yet the influence of the 1980s remains prevalent, in the number of privately-owned homes, the triumph of consumerism and nostalgic fads in music, fashion and literature.

Nevertheless it’s a gift to the contem-porary historian, conveniently bookended between the rise and fall of the Iron Lady and encompassing much that was distinc-tive culturally, politically and economically. Just the sort of decade that warrants a door-stopper of a book, which is where Graham Stewart’s Bang! comes in. It offers a Scottish Tory perspective on the 1980s, for Stewart is a product of an Edinburgh public school system, the distinctive voice of which often surfaces in his lucid prose. This is no bad thing. Plenty of history has been produced from an English, left-wing perspective, and balancing works are long overdue.

Gratifyingly, Stewart pays frequent attention to Scotland in Bang! and does so intelligently and with empathy. So the Thatcher that emerges from his book is more pragmatic, in economic and political terms, than the still prevalent discourse would oth-erwise suggest. Sure, no one could argue she ‘got’ Scotland and what Tony Judt called its ‘curious admix of superiority and ressenti-ment’, but nor did she set out to destroy it.

Conveniently, events in Scotland also bookended the 1980s: the 1979 devolution referendum hastened an already belea-guered James Callaghan’s demise, while opposition (if not riots, as in London) to the Poll Tax accelerated the defenestration of Margaret Thatcher. Mythology has since overtaken both events. As Stewart notes, it was disgruntled Labour backbenchers who ‘badly mauled’ the first Scotland Act rather than the Labour government, while the SNP’s failure to support Callaghan in

the vote of no-confidence did not usher in a decade of Thatcherism, as some histrionic Labour figures continue to claim, but rather robbed Labour of a full five-year term (an election was due by October 1979 at the lat-est). Nevertheless the 1980s in Scotland – if only among the political classes – began on a sour note. Sour because the 40 per cent rule in the referendum was manifestly unfair, and sour because the devolutionary hopes of a generation had been maimed by the ballot box and then killed off, in its first Parliamen-

tary act, by the new Thatcher government. Alex Salmond, who poured energy into the referendum and general election campaigns, later called it his annus horribilus.

What followed was undeniably trau-matic for many Scots. While in 1976 almost 30 per cent of Scotland’s labour force worked in manufacturing, by 1990 that figure had fallen by almost ten per cent. The steelworks at Ravenscraig assumed totemic status. Few remembered it had been brought to Scotland by a Conservative of a more mod-erate, Keynesian hue, Harold Macmillan; yet contrary to popular mythology, it also outlived the 1980s – only closing in 1992. Despite rhetoric about slaying lame ducks, Mrs Thatcher helped this one out twice, for which political credit came there none.

Elsewhere there was growth, not least in the north-east and Silicon Glen. At the height of the 1980s nearly a third of Europe’s personal computers were manufactured in central Scotland and one in eight of the world’s semi-conductors. By 1986 (the year of the Big Bang in the City of London, from which Stewart’s book takes its title)

Scottish-based firms managed £50 billion of funds, rising to £211bn in 1994. Thatcher did brag about this, but it fell on deaf ears. Even when, by the late 1980s, Scotland’s economy had moved into line with (if not, in some respects, ahead of) the rest of the UK for the first time in decades, it was too late to reap any political rewards; the pain of deindustrialisation had been too acute, high unemployment too persistent, and the message unpalatable however beneficial the consequences.

Even so, Thatcher was not as electorally toxic as many appear to believe. As Stewart writes: ‘Much as Scottish Tories would sub-sequently blame the legacy of Thatcherism for their annihilation in 1997, they still did far better with the honourable member for Finchley as their leader than any of her five successors in the twenty years after 1990.’ Indeed, for much of the 1980s Mrs Thatcher was backed by around 30 per cent of the Scottish electorate and around 20 MPs. Not a mandate in either sense (unlike 1955), but then much more so than the party shouting ‘no mandate’ the loudest. Even after eight years of supposedly ‘alien’ Thatcherite medi-cine, in 1987 the SNP only mustered 14 per cent of the vote and, at that election, three MPs, one of whom was the 32-year-old Alex Salmond.

Apart from a fleeting victory for Jim Sil-lars in Govan, the 1980s were barren years for the SNP. The early part of the decade had been consumed by internecine strife, while most of the things Nationalists expected to boost their support (North Sea oil, hatred of the Tories and latterly the Poll Tax) did so only marginally. Even Mrs Thatcher’s sup-posed constitutional inflexibility (the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement appeared to suggest otherwise) did not benefit ‘Scotland’s party’.

Salmond et al have also rewritten his-tory to some extent. While they frequently remind Scots that the wicked Tories opposed devolution throughout the 1980s they omit to mention the SNP did too (it only formally reversed that position in 1997, as did the Con-servatives). While Mrs Thatcher preached fundamentalist Unionism, the SNP (though not the more pragmatic Mr Salmond) banged the drum of undiluted indepen-dence. Although the 1980s ended with the SNP riding relatively high (the party polled respectably in the double Paisley by-election that followed Thatcher’s resignation), that was not how it felt at the time. Although I was an apolitical 10-year-old rather than a political obsessive, the impression I retain of leafleting and poster-pasting with my Nationalist father was of hope trying very hard to triumph over experience.

North Sea oil was mentioned constantly, although it was not then (or indeed now) the panacea depicted by the SNP (‘No Wonder She’s Laughing,’ screamed one memorable poster, ‘She’s Got Scotland’s Oil’). Initially the revenue kept Thatcher’s government afloat, but production had peaked by 1985, and a year after that the international oil price collapsed as quickly as it had soared seven years before. Drilling in the North Sea was cut by 40 per cent and value of pro-duction halved from £20bn to £10bn with the loss of 20,000 jobs. To crown it all the Piper Alpha disaster of 1988 also made the industry (which economically transformed the Grampian region) appear unsafe. There were to be no more cost-free riches, even without the environmental implications.

The government was also more alert to the Scottish dimension than is

acknowledged. In 1988 Nigel Lawson only allowed BP to acquire the Scottish-based Britoil if it promised to keep an HQ in Glasgow and endow several Scottish uni-versities. But Westminster, unlike Norway, failed to invest the proceeds. In one of his book’s many interesting ‘what if?’ passages, Stewart ponders what might have been while concluding that short-termism might actu-ally have extracted maximum value from the sea bed in the early 1980s. Nationalists were not alone in viewing black gold as an economic saviour. Labour had believed the same a decade before, while the Conserva-tives reaped the benefits from 1979 onwards.

But the question that needs to be asked about the 1980s is, contrary to Thatcher’s dictum (TINA), was there an alternative? It’s not one Stewart adequately addresses, nor indeed do many of the Conservatives’ most vehement critics. Arguably, there was. Sand-wiched between Ireland, which by the end of the decade was pursuing turbo-charged neoliberalism, and social democratic Nor-way with its enviable oil fund, the UK could, with a little imagination, have pursued a less destructive third way. Unfortunately the mainstream Scottish Left, be it Labour or the SNP, failed to rise to the occasion, instead looking in both directions and settling upon a sort of social democracy-lite, a beguil-ing notion that Scandinavian-style public services could be paid for via Irish levels of taxation. Of course there were dissenting voices, often articulate and compelling ones at that, but even by the late 1980s they were drowned out by the plausible business-speak of Gordon Brown and Alex Salmond.

This was captured in Salmond’s faux pas during an interview with Iain Dale, when he asserted that Scots hadn’t liked the social side of Thatcherism ‘at all’, but ‘didn’t mind the economic side so much’. Try tell-ing that to anyone who lost their job as a consequence of deindustrialisation or mon-etarism. Yet the SNP leader continues to view the Laffer Curve as a thing of beauty, an economic theory worthy of a modern, pro-gressive centre-left Nationalist movement. But then Salmond was forged in the 1980s, first at RBS and then in the House of Com-mons, as were Nicola Sturgeon and John Swinney in less influential contexts. But the central paradox in their politics, along with many of their Labour contemporaries, remains: a relentless and rather puerile dis-dain for Thatcher as a person, but a curious attachment to her political ethos, no matter how outdated or discredited it becomes, par-ticularly in the wake of the 2008 crisis.

Thus the same old mantras are trot-ted out ad nauseam: the Westminster government has ‘no mandate’; Thatcher hated Scotland; Scotland is more socially democratic than England, and so on. All of them took shape during the 1980s and were, perhaps understandably, comforting. But soon they became restrictive, dulling rather than sharpening political thought, restrict-ing rather than stimulating debate. And, to an extent, all today’s parties have become trapped by them; trapped by political cli-chés; trapped, in essence, by the 1980s.

bANG! A HIStorY oF brItAIN IN tHe 1980SGraham Stewart

AtlANtIC bookS, PP 560, £25, ISbN: 9781843549987

ThaTcheR in The RaWDavid Torrance

Margaret thatcher: unionist preacher


Covering a year in Aberdeen, starting in November with the onset of a snowy winter, Esther Woolfson’s Field Notes from a Hidden City takes the

form of seven thematic essays punctuating chronological notes. It is not a daily diary and sometimes a couple of weeks go by without comment, but it has the apparently random flavour of a nature journal, with entries triggered by observations or encoun-ters, liberally laced with textbook research. It is also a remarkably personal book, and by its end one is as familiar with the author’s family and friends as with the urban animals who share their lives.

Woolfson begins by finding a fledgling pigeon, fallen from its nest, which she takes home. She feeds and tends it, then sets this ‘wild, city bird’ free again. This inspires a rumination on whether it is possible to rec-oncile ‘the city’ and ‘the wild’, whether urban animals are ‘less wild than creatures liv-ing elsewhere’, which leads to the question which will dominate what follows: ‘I won-dered if the same might apply to humans, as if merely by being in a city, not only might our lungs be polluted but ourselves, our minds (and if we have them, our souls), as if urban dwellers must by definition be over-avid consumers of the unnecessary, weakened by purchase, alienated in every way, distanced from a lost, admonitory Eden. Are we, I wondered, living lives remote from all that is natural, beneficial, wild, or are we as much a part of the natural ordering of the universe as the wildest of things, moved by the same forces, as wild as anything else on earth?’

A similar question was raised at this year’s StAnza Poetry Festival, where I joined a panel of two writers, an academic and a painter, discussing poetry and the envi-ronment. Some in the audience seemed to be pressing for a clear distinction to be made between wild and managed environ-ments, or more generally between nature and people, while the panelists appeared to be unanimous in our suspicion of any such tidy dichotomy. We are part of nature, nei-ther disconnected physically nor culturally disengaged, as far as one can tell from the flourishing state of ecological arts and the presence of environmental policies in all walks of life. We are natural consumers of

nature but our footprints grow larger with every year. As social creatures those foot-prints tread most deeply where we gather in cities. Urban areas are the places most trammelled by people and the nature of such places has adapted to survive the changes brought about by intensive human use of the land. This is the nature documented by Woolfson.

As a rural dweller, when in cities, I seek out green places. When in Glasgow I make a point of using the corridors where nature dominates, such as the Kelvin River valley (where, on my last visit, an odd trill attracted my attention to a kingfisher which was sit-ting on a willow branch, then shot off down river, a turquoise avian arrow). In Edin-burgh I loop from park to park. My instinct for tree cover is strong. I go out of my way to find places and routes where birdsong can be heard despite the background of traffic noise, where the musk of a fox can outsmell the petrol and cooking fumes.

So I picked up Field Notes from a Hid-den City expecting to be guided into the interstices between the human spaces, to be shown the nature I recognise in the green spaces of Aberdeen. But that is not at all what it delivers. As I read I had a growing suspicion that there’s a vast gulf between the experience of some of those who live in cities, and those, like me, immersed in a rural world. With something close to cul-ture-shock, I realised I was having to open myself up to a different sensibility and an entirely unfamiliar world view. Adopting the fascination of an anthropologist for another culture, I have struggled to glean from this book something of the mind of a person who is comfortable among thousands of others and among the press of buildings, and who shares their home with urban wildlife in unexpected ways.

I see eye to eye with Woolfson on some topics. I share her horror at the trashing of a site of special scientific interest for Don-ald Trump’s hotel and golf course. I admire her analysis of the ethics of animal experi-mentation. We both consider the worth of all animals to be largely undervalued in our society, and I am intrigued by her suggestion that animals common in cities in particular lose value in many people’s eyes, ‘diminished by the very fact of their being here among us’.

Her way of trying to redress this, and the aspect of the book I most enjoyed, is a series of extended essays in praise of spe-cies of urban animals which do not often get much of a good press: slugs and spiders, pigeons, sparrows and jackdaws, rats and grey squirrels. Under Woolfson’s gaze, spi-ders are creative weavers, pigeons become angels, slugs are little cupids and rats are highly intelligent, cuddly children’s friends. Yet she is candid in her descriptions of some contradictory behaviour towards them. Take rats, for example. As a result of putting out bird food in her garden, rats take up resi-dence and she calls pest control to have them poisoned. Yet her children keep rats as pets and she even has a rat grave in her garden, complete with engraved tombstone.

Although she claims ‘I don’t want my garden to be macabre, or frankly weird’, when she finds a dead shrew while out on a walk, she takes it home to look at it and then bury it in the garden, seeking ‘to choose a site suitable for age and rank’ among the graves of many other animals. I was mysti-fied why she did this, but given that she had told us so much about her various pet birds, among them a rook (called Chicken, about which Woolfson wrote in her previous book, Corvus) and a crow (Ziki) that carries a plas-tic mouse about, I assumed she was bringing the shrew home to feed it to one of these. Her lengthy discussion of the dilemma of where to bury it comes towards the end of the book, and is the climax of my lack of comprehen-sion of her values and relationship towards wildlife, and wild death.

Those values are at least partly shaped by Woolfson’s Jewish heritage. One of the most intriguing passages of the book is an explanation, following Passover, of her sense of dislocation as a daughter of a Jew-ish immigrant from Eastern Europe, and the generalisation of this experience to one that has shifted many Jews to urban envi-ronments leaving them feeling that ‘the countryside is a place apart.’ The move to the city mirrors the biblical flight from Eden, seen as ‘both adventure, a promise of a better future but also the distancing from innocence.’ Her experience of country living is limited to a time spent on a kibbutz, which she describes as ‘a place set in what at least in theory was countryside, but felt more like a misplaced adjunct to a middle-class Ber-lin suburb ... with the addition of heat and scorpions.’ She is, she admits, ‘detached from the world of the countryside’. We are clearly chalk and cheese.

The way this manifests most clearly is in her desire to intervene with nature in a help-ful way, as compared with my wish to leave it as far as possible to its own devices, and in almost diametrically opposed views of the function of a garden. My garden is a fenced area in which I attempt to keep wildlife at bay: much as I love badgers and deer, birds and insects, moles and voles with which we

share our croft, I don’t want them in the garden, where my primary interest is food production. The garden’s boundary demar-cates where wild animals become mostly pests and wild plants, mostly weeds. I live on an area of land big enough so that the wild others are welcome on the vast bulk of it, and only a small portion is an exclusion zone for cultivation of alien food plants. Woolfson admits at one point, when describing slugs as ‘nibbling holes’ in plants, that she would perhaps not be so ‘sanguine’ about them if she were ‘dependent for food on the plants they ravage’. When she berates gardeners for using slug pellets, I long for more nuanced language that encourages us to use benign, organic methods in our struggle to keep our greens from the slime-gods.

But in Woolfson’s world view, food-growing is not a garden’s function. ‘We make gardens to keep at bay the concrete,’ she writes, ‘to ameliorate what we may see as the hard, bleak harshness of the urban world.’ In her garden, she provides wild birds with houses, food, even alpaca fleece bedding, and must then come to terms with the predators like sparrow hawks that feed on the flour-ishing population. How to behave towards other animal species is a central issue in Field Notes, and Woolfson struggles with the paradox of wanting to do something good for them whilst not really wanting to inter-vene too much. ‘Human beings, I’ve come to realise, have no place in this particular sys-tem’, she writes, ‘short of providing food or shelter...Our influence is malign in virtually every way, including those we don’t yet know about or understand. But within the limited framework of the artificial spaces of nature we have created, learning to stand back is all we can do.’

FIeld NoteS FroM A HIddeN CItY: AN urbAN NAture dIArYesther Woolfson

GrANtA bookS, PP368, £16.99, ISbN: 9781847082756

in The WildS of aBeRdeenMandy Haggith

A deer near union Street


Papal conclaves aren’t what they used to be. It only took a few days and five ballots to elect Francis I and, as best as we can tell, it was a well-organised and suitably deco-

rous affair. The mischievous historian in me almost longs for the time when conclaves were ill-humoured and could last for years. In the middle of the thirteenth-century the people of Viterbo grew heartily tired of the squabbling papal electors who had been abusing the town’s hospitality, depleting its precious food and resources, and not coming close to a decision about who should follow in St Peter’s footsteps. An obvious solu-tion presented itself: the citizens of Viterbo ripped the roof off the building in which their ecclesiastical leaders were gathered and hoped that heavy rain showers would force them into action. This was hardly an ideal way of proceeding but at least there was a healthy dose of drama.

Papal elections are much more seemly and, for all the pomp and pageantry, even a little boring these days. Cardinals gather in pre-conclave meetings to discuss (with impressive frankness) the state of the Church, they chatter at receptions, and gos-sip over dinner. The wheat is sorted from the chaff and by the time the conclave proper gets underway sides have usually been taken and a couple of front-runners have usually emerged. It was a little trickier this time around (lots of names were in the mix and hardly anyone anticipated the astonishing result) but the system still worked very well.

There are signs of modernity in the papal election process — the attempts (less ham-fisted with every passing conclave) to deal with the media, for example, or the way in which electronic buzzers sound when gar-rulous cardinals talk for too long in the pre-conclave ‘congregations’ — but there is also something timeless and, for the out-sider, something mysterious about the way in which the Catholic Church chooses its leader. It comes down, in theory, to the guid-ance of the Holy Spirit and, from a Catholic perspective, that’s as it should

be: Providence must play a leading role and the Church always, but always, elects the pope it deserves. That’s simply how the Pet-rine succession works. Still, one can’t help but suspect that the man who gets the top

job sometimes wishes the Holy Spirit had acted differently. This was surely the case with Benedict XVI, who would have been much happier in his study, and one suspects it is the case with Jorge Mario Bergoglio, who was presumably looking forward to a rela-tively quiet retirement at home in Argentina.

His days of commuting by bus are proba-bly over but the fact that Bergoglio is a Jesuit may help him adjust to his new, unantici-pated role. Op-ed writers around the world have been puzzling over the fact that it has taken five hundred years to elect a member of the Society of Jesus as pope but there’s no great mystery. Firstly, no Jesuit stood much of a chance in previous centuries: the Soci-ety has always had too many enemies within the Catholic fraternity. Secondly, Jesuits have never been obsessed with securing high ecclesiastical office: indeed their founder, Ignatius Loyola, was a stern opponent of careerism. But when called to high office Jesuits are obliged to comply. Bergoglio could hardly turn down the job offer and he can look to a long history of fellow Jesuits having greatness thrust upon them. This is sure to be a source of comfort but when it comes to what he’ll achieve in the Vatican, well, this is very hard to predict.

First, Francis will have to weather the storm provoked by all the prying into his past. Another thing that seems to separate papal elections from, say, the appointment of senior politicians or Supreme Court justices is the apparent lack of vetting (an infe-licitous word, but a useful procedure). We should not push this idea too far, however.

I may be proven wrong, and scrutiny is absolutely appropriate, but those cardinals know a great deal about each other and they would be averse to electing someone who was unable to account for his earlier deeds.

Second, he will have to take a posi-tion on the crises and conundrums facing the Church. On some issues we can expect more of the same. The fact that Francis is a socially-engaged priest does not mean that he is going to upset any apple carts when it comes to abortion or

homosexuality: his opinions seem fixed on these and related issues. He is no kind of radical and he looked askance at Liberation Theology even when it was very fashion-able in his homeland. But I do think we can

anticipate dynamism in other areas not least because, as the first Jesuit and Latin Ameri-can pope, he carries an enormous historical burden. The Jesuit factor will be crucial.

I have already talked about earlier papal conclaves but one in particular – in 1769 – must be at the front of Francis’s mind as he settles into his Vatican apartments. Over the previous decade the Society of Jesus had been banished from many of Catho-lic Europe’s leading nations and it was no longer legal to be a Jesuit in France, Spain, Portugal or their overseas territories. The upcoming papal election was all about the fate of the Society of Jesus. Zelanti cardinals campaigned for a pope who would defend the Jesuits; Politicanti cardinals preferred someone who would see the way history was unfolding and accept the logic of the Jesuits’ global suppression.

When the conclave reached its verdict one English Jesuit in Rome, John Thorpe, feared the worst: ‘the unanimous election of Cardinal Ganganelli was no sooner divulged about the city than everyone looked upon the Jesuits… to be inevitably ruined.’ As things turned out it took another four years for Clement XIV to abolish the Society of Jesus and when the axe finally fell there was great reluctance on the part of the pope. For the next forty years the Jesuits managed to survive. Not, in most places, as a corporate entity but as an idea and, by 1814, they were restored by papal command.

Francis I is doubtless very familiar with this history and he must be delighted by the extraordinary timing of his election: just one year shy of the 200th anniversary of his order’s return to the fold. Cause, certainly, for celebration but also a source of trepidation. Two hundred years is a short time in papal politics and there are still those who would relish the spectacle of a Jesuit making a hash of things. It would therefore make sense for Francis to put a Jesuit stamp on his tenure in the Vatican. Not out of revenge but because the results would be very interesting.

The only problem is that it is very hard to pin down exactly what the Jesuit iden-tity is. Over the past few days, I have grown increasingly infuriated at the attempts to sum up one of the most complex and con-fusing religious orders in Roman Catholic history. Every newspaper and website in town has provided a primer and almost without exception they have done a terrible job. Some commentators have decided that the Jesuits have always been a radical bunch; others have declared that they have always been papal lap dogs. We’ve heard a lot, from both sides of the interpretive fence, about a static Jesuit ethos. The truth, I’m happy to report, is far more fascinating.

There are, of course, Jesuit constants: a passion for mission and education, an engagement with all corners of the arts and sciences and, a few awkward moments aside, a deep loyalty to Rome. None of this should blind us to the fact that the Society’s history has been as muddled as it has been impres-sive. There have been conservative Jesuits and progressive Jesuits; missionaries who respected indigenous cultures and adapted their evangelical message accordingly and missionaries who treated those cultures with contempt; priests who emerged as peaceniks and champions of social justice and priests who supported noxious regimes.

If we have any hope of understanding the Jesuit taproots of the new papacy it is time to put away the stereotypes, though this will take some doing. For centuries attempts

have been made to identify the essence of the Society of Jesus and, more often than not, the caricatures have been decidedly negative. Lax morality, secretiveness, and a penchant for regicide have usually headed the list of charges and many languages have a special word — Jesuitical, in English — with pro-foundly negative connotations. None of this is helpful, and neither is a counterblast that portrays the Society of Jesus in an overly roseate light. We should listen to James Bro-drick, a Jesuit himself, who put it very well in his detailed history of the order: on one hand there is the ‘great army of canonised or beatified saints and martyrs,’ but on the other ‘there have been bad, unscrupulous, ambitious, foolish Jesuits… and a Jesuit fool is much the same as any other sort of fool.’

Bergoglio is clearly not a fool and, in many ways, he encapsulates the peren-nial tensions of the Jesuit enterprise. He is the humble man who, clearly, must have some ability to play the game of ecclesi-astical politics and someone who treads a fine line between respecting tradition and confronting the challenges of the modern world. So perhaps my initial diagnosis was unfair. Perhaps papal conclaves can still be quite dramatic. Someone joked that the roof-removing antics at Viterbo finally pro-vided an entry for the Holy Spirit. This time around it took a less theatrical journey and it is easy to mock the sight of all those aged cardinals sitting in rows, chatting and pray-ing, then enjoying pleasant suppers in comfy surroundings. The deck is always stacked, of course, because the papal priority is to appoint cardinals who are likely to appoint someone who will carry forward your vision of the Church. Nor is the process a shining example of representative government (not that it should be) and once you are on the inside you are likely to stay there unless you behave in an exceptionally heinous way (no prizes for guessing to whom I am referring). But, for all that, the College of Cardinals did something quite spectacular in March 2013, and with surprising speed. They elected a Jesuit pope. No-one saw this coming. Not Benedict who, one suspects, is less than pleased and not the new boss at the Vatican who, surely, is baffled and nervous.

With more than a little audacity I would offer Francis one piece of advice. Look back on Jesuit history, in all its complexity, and learn from the best of it. The whole story began with an attempt to serve and improve the Church and Catholics and non-Catholics alike would welcome the authentic con-tinuation of this tradition. It’s a lot to ask but, while most stereotypes are silly, one is legitimate: Jesuits have always relished a challenge.

caRdinal viRTueSJonathan Wright


to open Robin Robertson’s fifth col-lection of poems is to pass over the threshold of ordinary life and find yourself, like some fairytale char-acter, caught in an otherworld that,

while enchanting and beautiful, can also be malign. It is surely no coincidence that the image of keys runs through Hill of Doors, as if there is a series of locks the poet must open, an armory of bolts to be thrown until a particularly sticky door will creak open, beyond which the here and now, and a host of metaphysical realms, will finally be revealed. The only hill in this collection is Tillydrone Motte, one of Robertson’s boyhood haunts in the north-east of Scotland: ‘Fifteen years in every kind of light and weather:/my cas-tle-keep, watchtower,/anchorite’s cell, my solitary/proving ground, a vast sounding-board/here amongst the gorse and seabirds.’

It was perhaps here, though, that he first found doors into his imagination, ‘this hill where I went to be born’. Brought up as a son of the manse in Aberdeen, his background was a mixed blessing, as fellow poet Alastair Reid will affirm. Reid remained close to his father but roundly rejected the church, which plays almost no part in his writing. Robertson, though equally in thrall to his father and his memory, which he returns to frequently with tender grief, has a more complicated relationship with the creed that underpinned his early years, his imagina-tion seismically influenced by the stories and superstitions, the liturgy and rhythms, the beliefs and violent mystery of Christian thought.

This collection, like the four that precede it – A Painted Field, Slow Air, Swithering and The Wrecking Light – is riveted by the dark, bloody, unforgiving voice of a punitive Protestant faith. Yet out of this emotional forge Robertson hammers and twists biting, steel-bright poems that glow on the page as if still hot from the furnace, and offer if not hope, then a sense of hard-won convictions.

In Crimond, written in memory of Jessie Seymour Irvine, the Victorian organist from the eponymous north-east village who cre-ated the most popular setting for the 23rd Psalm, he takes an elegaic, worldly-weary tone, a mood that settles upon several of the works in this book:

How far we all are from where we thought we’d be:

those parishioners all vanished long ago; my father – ash

above the crematorium; me, swimming back-crawl

through the valley of the shadow of death, and you –

not even a photograph of you – the girl who will never

touch again the foot of the cross at Crimond.

But for every glimmer of Christian credo, reworked to suit his sometimes pitiless poetic eye, there is a counterbalancing from even more ancient myths, as the gods of the Greek pantheon cavort through the pages, spirited, sensual, ever-greedy for life. As on many occasions before, in Hill of Doors Robertson gives us his version of these characters, refashioned from the words of fourth-century poet Nonnus. So there is The Coming God, about the childhood of Dio-nysus, followed later by his adulthood, as in Dionysus in Love, when the youth he falls for comes to a bad end, but in so doing gives the gift of wine to the world, ‘a cure for regret, an end to love and grief./We hold it in our hands: a brief forgetting.’

Elsewhere Robertson reworks Ovid, or probes further into the life of the tormented Swedish playwright August Strindberg, who has become a welcome guest in recent col-lections, as if in this untame spirit Robertson finds a kindred soul or muse. In The Wreck-ing Light, Strindberg is found in Berlin; in Swithering he turns up in London and Paris, and here he is in Denmark, in Skov-lyst, working on his play Miss Julie, while renting rooms from a grand lady whose house is more menagerie than mansion. ‘Wherever you look: neglect, failure,/all the shit you could wish for./A home away from home’. Condemned to celibacy by his wife for a period of six months, Strindberg falls prey to a lusty young servant, whose brother believes he has raped her. Demonstrating the sliver of ice that reputedly lies in every writer’s heart, only in his case of iceberg pro-portions, the playwright consoles himself as chaos breaks out around him and he and his family depart: ‘And now I have my play’.

More interesting, however, is

Strindberg’s self-knowledge: ‘I steer towards catastrophe/then write about it,’ he reflects. To varying degrees, the same could be said of Robertson, whose work, from A Painted Field to Hill of Doors hints at a similar attraction to the dangerous, the risky, the downright self-destructive, although there are indications that he might be moving into less fierce waters of late. In a handful of these poems, and in many of his earlier pieces, Robertson reveals a taste for the macabre and disturbing. In his career as an editor, he is renowned for the school of Scottish writers he nurtured, among them Irvine Welsh, Alan Warner, Duncan McLean and AL Kennedy, some of whose gritty real-ism, and unflinching taste for the sinister or cruel he appears at times to share. Thus, for instance, in The Shelter, he evokes in a spare few verses a scene that a noir novelist or Scandic screenwriter would expand to a hefty chapter or climactic scene.

I could make out shapesinside, the occasional sound:a muffled cryingwhich I took for wind in the trees;a waspstuttering there at the windowsill.I listened. What looked likea small red coatwas dripping from its wire hanger.

More savage in its imagery, and far more disturbing, is A&E, where he returns to the image of open-heart surgery, first broached in A Seagull Murmur in Swithering, and now a full-blown nightmare as the narra-tor wakes, his chest soaked in blood where the sutures from his operation have opened. Hurrying to the hospital, he is about to be relegated to the queue by a nurse when he opens his tweed jacket to show her what the problem is:

Unfashionable, but striking nonetheless:my chest undone like some rare waistcoat,with that lace-up front – a black échelle – its red, wet-look leatherette,those fancy, flapping lapels.

The sardonic, detached voice only enhances the horror, in this, arguably Robertson’s most memorable poem, though the images it evokes are unwelcome. But Robertson is canny. Lest we are tempted to forget, he has already given the reader chapter and verse of this procedure, in The Halving (Royal Brompton Hospital, 1986), where we fol-low him into theatre with the surgeon and his saw. When he comes round, he drowsily contemplates his new situation, ‘Halved and unhelmed,/I have been away, I said to the ceiling,/and now I am not myself ’.

Alongside such portentous poems as these is a mere handful that work less well. Wire, about smuggling Mexicans over the border into the USA, is a studied, staccato sequence portraying of a way of life that feels second-hand and filmic, and even the nod to Robert Frost’s Mending Wall, in the phrase ‘good fences make good neighbours’ seems a little contrived. Less persuasive, too, is The Straw Manikin, after a painting by Goya, in which a life size doll of a man – it might be Christ, but equally it might be a nobody – is the plaything of a town’s womenfolk, and destined for death.

Unsatisfying as this poem is, it does illuminate the epigraph to the collection, from French artist Picabia: ‘let us not for-get that the greatest man is never more than

an animal disguised as a god’. It is in this uncomfortable apprehension, in fact, that Robertson is at his most unnerving, see-ing the jackal behind the innocent face, the teeth behind the smile.

Like a Scottish day, Hill of Doors has many moods, the weather changing from poem to poem. Homages to the classics fit neatly between barbed reflections on the church’s teaching.

But thoughtful as such poems are, Rob-ertson is, to my mind, most potent when describing the countryside, or delving into himself. On both subjects he appears to hold nothing back, liberated from his editor’s enquiring mind into a freer, wilder imagi-nation in which each word carries a weight of meaning and emotional depth, and every phrase rings with truth.

As seen in The Halving and A&E, one of his remarkable talents is for double-speak, for perfectly describing a scene or event or thought which mirrors something else, often, though not always, deeper and less transient. The best-known example is from Swithering, where Asparagus stands both as a paean to this most suggestive of foods, and its erotic twin: ‘in a slather and slide, but-ter floods at the bulb-head.’ In Hill of Doors, this dualling is seen, among others, in Glass of Water and Coffee Pot, a powerfully still domestic interior inspired by a tableau by Chardin:

...the same light lifting a gleamfrom a blackened coffee pot that’s some-

how managedto make it through, to find harmony hereon this stone shelf, happiness of the hand

and heart,to keep its heat and still pour clean and

true.

Partnering the sensual with the tender in a series of simple, heart-felt homely portraits with which he concludes the volume, Rob-ertson seems to be finding a more mellow register.

In these poems, affiliated by love, he reaches a pitch of subtle descriptive power that is breathtaking, equalled only by his observations of the natural world: ‘I knew/where the hawthorn tree stands, bent and fixed like blown smoke’. Indeed, several of the works, especially the shorter poems, are close to perfect. One such is The Dead Sound, where he compares the sudden awareness that a relationship is about to end with the dull noise a cracked pot makes; or The Key, the final poem in the collection where, in eight spare lines, he describes a man who has found love, and peace.

But no collection from Robertson would be complete without something to trouble the mind. Beyond those poems that quicken the heart, or lodge an image deep as a skelf in your thumb, there is also a nagging absence. According to the book’s list of contents, there is a last poem called Robertson’s Fare-well. Yet where it should lie there is only an empty, unnumbered page. A jest? An error? Or a clever way of reminding the reader that pages do not fill themselves, and already, while this book is fresh and unknown to us, the author is filling the white space of a new work?

HIll oF doorSrobin robertson

PICAdor, PP83, £14.99, ISbN: 9781447231530

mood SWinGSRosemary Goring


My husband and I made our way from Edinburgh to London for the launch, on Valentine’s Day, of my new novel, Mimi – a sort

of romance based in New York but written mainly in Orkney. This happened to coincide with ‘One Billion Rising’, a worldwide mass action against male violence, organized by Eve Ensler. I thought of going to the rally at Westminster myself but was scared of being kettled and missing my launch party! I also had reservations about the usefulness of this global stunt (reservations mainly to do with the American flavour of it all, and the use of dancing as a form of protest). But Ensler’s project did at least give women across the world a sense of camaraderie, if only for a day. Nik Williams, a friend who works for ‘Peace One Day’ (a global movement set on enshrining at least one day of peace a year: September 21st), was there and reported back that it was a lively event, featuring for instance a banner that said, ‘BIG SISTER IS WATCHING YOU’.

It’s a start, but is it enough? I’m not convinced pointing at the sky with an index finger (the One Billion Rising’s chosen hand gesture) and copying American dance moves are really going to change things fast enough. The One Billion Rising protests got very little coverage in the British papers, which were devoted instead to Oscar Pistorius’s alleged murder of his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp – who herself had recently tweeted about her opposition to violence against women. Women speak out, women dance, and none of it stops the violence.

What we need is a local, national or global strike every time a woman is raped or murdered. Withhold our labour, and gov-ernments would soon be forced to reduce violence and resolve war.

As Carlos Fuentes said in a talk on Don Quixote at Edinburgh University’s Playfair Library in June, 2005 (I’m paraphrasing): ‘Fiction is fiction and power is power. Art and literature can change things, but only over a long period of time.’ Much as he wanted the pen to overwhelm the sword, he felt we should be realistic about its chances. Still, I object to things best when sitting down – at my typewriter – and in Mimi I provide a very simple solution to violence against women,

something even simpler than a strike. And more peaceful.

* * *

One of the inspirations for my novel was Catherine Blackledge’s book, The Story of V (2003), which examines female genitalia from a biological point of view. She points out that the vagina is instrumental in select-ing sperm for procreative use. This means that, to ensure their genes survive, males, from fruit flies to humans, must strive to please females as best they can. Most mating is not rape, despite what Andrea Dworkin said, but the outcome of courtship, perhaps even love. Porn has helped us forget this, but nature prioritizes female pleasure, not male. Maybe this is the real reason for our continuing absorption in the female nude. Prehistoric relics too suggest that female-ness was honoured in art and ritual for tens of thousands of years. This satisfactory sta-tus quo was ruined by the invention of lethal weaponry in the Bronze Age. Men then had new powers and new games to play. Tired of venerating women and nature, men stole the show, and look what a mess they’ve made of things.

A second influence on my book was the work of Marija Gimbutas, the Lithuanian archaeologist who developed a comprehen-sive theory about the art of Old Europe’s ‘gynocentric’ matriarchal cultures, in which violence played very little part. Instead of war, these stable, socialistic societies devoted themselves to more beneficial pursuits like calendar-making, astronomy, botany, horti-culture, and the arts. As Gimbutas writes in The Language of the Goddess (1989):

‘I do not believe, as many archaeolo-gists of this generation seem to, that we shall never know the meaning of prehis-toric art and religion. Yes, the scarcity of sources makes reconstruction difficult...but the religion of the early agricultural period of Europe and Anatolia is very richly docu-mented. Tombs, temples, frescoes, reliefs, sculptures, figurines, pictorial painting, and other sources need to be analysed from the point of view of ideology.’

From semi-abstract objects depict-ing breasts or vulvas, to spirals, zigzags and all kinds of animal forms, Gimbutas

meticulously studied artifacts until they began to fit a pattern. She had detected a fathomable culture, and a cult of goddess-worship that lasted for thousands of years. Art was paramount. Of course. What else have we ever done that’s of any worth but art, music, dance and literature? It’s even better when they all come together in the form of opera! Opera features in my novel too, and at the launch we sipped martinis while three people from OperaUpClose performed extracts from Puccini. Even I, an introvert, loved that party.

* * *

The British Museum’s latest show offers a rare chance to see some of the types of sculpture Gimbutas was talking about. Its peculiar title, ‘Ice Age art: arrival of the modern mind’, instantly reminded me of Robert Benchley’s reaction to a caption under a picture of ancient Egyptian art: ‘Remarkably Accurate and Artistic Painting of a Goose…Drawn 3300 Years Ago’. ‘Why’, Benchley asked (in My Ten Years in a Quan-dary, 1947), ‘is it any more remarkable that someone drew a goose accurately 3300 years ago than that someone should do it today? Why should we be surprised that the people who built the Pyramids could also draw a goose[?]… They may not have known about chocolate malted milk and opera hats, but, what with one thing and another, they got by. And, presumably, every once in a while somebody felt like drawing a goose.’

The commentary on the walls of the BM exhibition expresses a similar confu-sion in the face of art created long ago. The whole show is pervaded by a profound and unthinking wonderment. Perplexity seems to be the main aim here, not elucidation. Perplexity and money. Who after all has the right to claim ownership of prehistoric arti-facts? The BM is raking it in with this show. Elsewhere in the museum you can see three eggs in a little pot (an Anglo-Saxon grave offering), and it’s free!

We woke early and rushed to our timed, £10-ticket, moment at the BM – all to be squashed into a tiny gallery with hundreds of other people trying to peer at dimly-lit bits of mammoth ivory or reindeer horn. It was like Lenin’s tomb in there: funereal, chaotic and weird. To add atmosphere, there was a flickering light under one bison sculpture, and a heavily amplified drip-drip sound throughout the exhibition, as if we were all in a cave together. Did prehistoric people never go outside? And there were too many bison. Inspired by them, the people with headphones kept bulldozing us out of the way so that they could reach the stuff the audiotapes were ordering them to view.

The curators’ remarks on the labels were full of idiocies. Not a mention of vul-vas, nor of Gimbutas and the whole system of symbols she so forcefully delineated. Just a lot of infantile talk about how much time Ice Age artists spent making these things. It took four hundred hours to produce the Lion Man, thirty-five to do a horse, etc. The label for an implement reverently desig-nated ‘The Spoon’ explained that its design ‘suggests the object did have a use’. Yeah, as a spoon! And everywhere we were reminded that these artists had human brains. Thanks. One statement would have driven Benchley wild: ‘The combination of human and ani-mal features shows the capability to imagine something that does not exist. Through this invention the artist expressed ideas rather

than the real world. This required a creative mind.’ Why all this surprise about signs of intelligence in prehistory? WE’RE the lame brains.

Scattered around were a few pieces of twentieth-century art – Matisse, Henry Moore, Käthe Kollwitz, Mondrian – but nobody was looking at them and their rel-evance did seem obscure. Matisse had apparently been dragged in to echo the ancient interest in women’s bodies, Kollwitz for a suggestion of motherhood, Mondrian and Moore for grid patterns and abstraction. It was hard to estimate exactly how many people were being patronised here, but they included at the very least Matisse, Kollwitz, Moore and Mondrian, along with prehistoric artists, the twenty-first-century goops who bought timed tickets for a show they could barely squeeze themselves through, and chil-dren, at whom the whole thing seems to be aimed. (Proof of which came with the dino-saur toys in the gift shop.)

They’ve dumbed down the National Museum of Scotland in Chambers Street the same way. This powerhouse, once full of Scot-land’s design heritage, used to be a miniature version of the V & A; now it’s just an amuse-ment arcade, a caricature of a museum, a kiddy fun park. (Contradictorily, they even got rid of the goldfish, which were univer-sally liked.) Why can’t children be exposed to the adult world once in a while, in which art is adequately displayed and labelled? Soon there’ll have to be a roller-coaster in the Sis-tine Chapel. In being kid-friendly, museums are art-unfriendly, and that’s ultimately bad for kids too.

What’s worse is the BM’s disrespect-ful treatment of prehistoric female-centred art. ‘The oldest portrait of a woman’ was considered noteworthy mainly for the sup-posed abnormality of one of her eyelids. (We couldn’t see anything wrong with it!) Else-where, sculptures of women were described in the hollow terms familiar to our brutish age. The curators had helpfully evaluated the assembled female forms for us in terms of their attractiveness. Some of the female figures are young, so presumably attractive; others are mothers, of therefore dubious attractiveness; and others older and not attractive at all. This tells us more about our own banality and poverty of imagination –our ‘modern minds’ – than it does about the culture from which these pieces came. It’s like getting a paedophile to assess putti.

Finally, we came on a film of cave paint-ings that they jazzed up by projecting it onto a piece of awkwardly-draped cloth, to imi-tate the curves of a cave wall. Added to this magic lantern show were some modernistic flashing white lines, unexplained. Every-thing there served to distract you from the real beauty and artistry of these crowded objects, which included some great horses, breasts on sticks, and one smooth, plump female backside. A billion women should rise up against these inane interpretations of their genuine and essential prehistory.

Too many BiSon: infanTiliSinG muSeumSLucy Ellmann


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Deadline for entries: Friday 30th August 2013, Entry fee: £17

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New Writing Scotland is the principal forum for poetry and short fiction in Scotland today. New Writing Scotland 30: A Little Touch of Cliff in the Evening is the latest collection of excellent contemporary literature, drawn from a wide cross-section of Scottish culture and society, and includes new work by – among many others – Lin Anderson, Ron Butlin, Valerie Gillies, Alasdair Gray, Andrew Greig, Agnes Owens, and the Glasgow comic-book duo metaphrog.

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on the Royal Mile in Edin-burgh stands a statue of Adam Smith. Sculpted by Alexander Stoddard and unveiled on July 4, 2008,

the only statue of the great man to be erected in the Scottish capital at first seems unexceptional—a worthy memorial to one of the great figures of the Scottish Enlighten-ment. It is certainly a more impressive work than the travesty of Hume, also by Stoddard, on the other side of the High Street. Hume appears in Classical garb and looking rather slimmer than contemporary memoirs and paintings of the philosopher would leave us to believe. Smith is at least represented in the costume of his age, standing in front of a scythe and sheaf of corn, symbols that rightly reflect the agricultural focus of The Wealth of Nations. Viewed from the back, however, the statue displays the difficulties we still face in coming to terms with Smith and his work.

On the plinth is a plaque contain-ing the names of the subscribers who paid for the statue, the first of which is that of Dr Eamonn Butler. In one respect this is appropriate, since it was the organisation which Butler heads, the Adam Smith Insti-tute (ASI), which commissioned Stoddard, negotiated with Edinburgh Council for his work to be situated on the Royal Mile and collected the subscriptions. But in another respect Butler’s imprimatur is not appropri-ate at all; for the ASI is a body whose views bear as much resemblance to those of Smith as the views of the former Soviet Institute of Marxism-Leninism bore to those of Marx and Lenin. In both cases some phrases are brandished – a ‘hidden hand’ here, a ‘dicta-torship of the proletariat’ there – to disguise the infidelity of these institutions to their supposed sources of inspiration.

The ASI was established in 1976, the bicentenary of The Wealth of Nations, by Butler and two fellow-graduates of St Andrews University, Stuart Butler and Madsen Pirie, as a think-tank which would focus on developing policies which could be adopted by sympathetic governments, the type of policies we now think of as character-istic of neoliberalism. At one point in 1994 the ASI ran a mock-interview with Smith from beyond the grave in which he called for the abolition in the USA of ‘minimum wages,

tariffs, export subsidies, agricultural market-ing boards, taxes on capital, “free” education at government schools and the whole US sys-tem of central banking’. To be fair – although there is no reason why one should be fair to those wonderful folks who thought up the Poll Tax – the ASI is obviously aware that it is unable to use Smith as a ventriloquist’s dummy for its own views in every case, so it also includes a cautionary note on its web-site: ‘While Adam Smith is our inspiration, we do not pretend that he was right about everything.’ The issues on which Smith was wrong, one gathers, are those on which he would disagree with the ASI.

The neoliberal attitude to Smith is well expressed by ASI heroine Margaret Thatcher, who noted with bemusement in her autobi-ography the failure of her ‘revolution’ to win hearts and minds in Scotland, ‘home of the very same Scottish Enlightenment which produced Adam Smith, the greatest expo-nent of free enterprise economics till Hayek and Friedman’. The more openly pro-market figures in the SNP, like Michael Russell, have a similar reasons for admiring Smith: ‘Adam Smith was the father of modern capital-ism and it is high time that his own people rediscovered his genius, particularly as, in his own land, that genius is currently tar-nished by the half-baked economic models espoused by most of our political parties.’

These comments confirm an observa-tion by two of Smith’s more acute recent interpreters: ‘It is no longer thought neces-sary to examine how and why Smith argued in favour of the market, nor indeed how he qualified his case.’ Yet many on the left accept neoliberal nostrums at face value and merely reverse their value judgements. On the occasion of Smith’s appearance of the £20 banknote in 2007, the late James Young claimed in the pages of The Herald that ‘Adam Smith was a pioneer of the vicious anti-humanist economics of capitalism’ and linked him, somewhat implausibly, ‘with all the other advocates of anti-gay entrepre-neurship; aggressive immoral and naked capitalism; and post-modernism’. As Young’s ravings suggest, the radical left often ascribe positions to Smith which are even less plau-sible than those of the neoliberal right.

Those on the social-democratic or centre-left tend not to abandon Smith to

the tender mercies of the neoliberals, but instead claim him for their own traditions. In 2002 Gordon Brown gave a lecture in which he ‘asked whether Adam Smith would feel more at home in the right-of-centre Adam Smith Institute or in the left-of-centre (John) Smith Institute, named after my good friend John Smith, the leader of the Labour Party’. Unsurprisingly, Brown opined that the latter would have proved the more con-genial to his fellow native of Kirkcaldy. In a work intended to support and elaborate Brown’s position, Iain McLean argues that to describe Smith as ‘a man of the Left’ would be anachronistic as the terms left and right did not acquire their political meanings until the French Revolution.

This seems unnecessarily concerned with labels rather than attitudes, since we can retrospectively identify what would later be left-wing positions prior to 1789, for example in the English Civil War; what is genuinely inapt is to ascribe to Smith positions associ-ated with social democracy – a term from an even later date than ‘Left’ – as McLean does: ‘It favours government intervention to coun-ter market failure’s redistributive taxation; and trade liberalisation for the benefit of all including the poor of the world. It does not favour producer groups; public ownership of trading enterprises (where there are no market failure issues); or protection, either in rich or poor countries.’

Finally, there have been attempts, per-haps surprisingly from the radical left, to discern in Smith’s work a model of a ‘real free market’ which has been violated by ‘the global corporate system’. As John McMurty writes, ‘every one of Smith’s classical princi-ples of the free market has been turned into its effective opposite’. This is an attractively counter-intuitive idea, which challenges the neoliberals on their own terms. Other writers, like the late Giovanni Arrighi have gone further and argued, not only that the market system envisaged by Smith can be distinguished from capitalism, but that ‘market-based growth’ distinct from ‘capi-talist growth’ is now embedded in Chinese or perhaps East Asian development more generally.

All great thinkers are subject to different interpretations of their work but, as this brief survey suggests, few can have been subject to quite so many contradictory interpretations as Smith. Why?

* * *

There have in fact been three major stages in Smith’s posthumous reputation, each associated with differing attitudes towards his work. The first began to gather support virtually from the moment of his death on 17 July 1790, which, as Emma Rothschild writes, ‘was the subject of little interest, in England and even in Scotland’. Yet within a decade Smith’s work began to be presented in a way that minimised its more radical ele-ments, as part of the conservative reaction to the French Revolution.

The mechanisms by which this occurred were often directly political. Dugald Stew-art, Smith’s first biographer, was appointed professor of political economy at Glasgow — the first anywhere — in 1793. In his Life and Writings of Adam Smith, published the same year, Stewart drew attention to parallels between and mutual influences on Smith and his French Enlightenment con-temporaries. Here and in his other writings, Stewart attempted to maintain a balance

between rejecting extreme interpretations of Enlightenment doctrine and urging the timely reform of the conditions that made such interpretations attractive to the unwary.

Remarks of this kind, which would have passed unnoticed in enlightened publica-tions fifty years earlier, or even during the American War of Independence, now bore the mark of the Jacobin beast and Stewart swiftly recanted. His retreat is emblematic in respect of the impact it had on his theoretical approach to political economy, for Stewart was primarily responsible for deradicalizing Smith. As Richard Teichgraeber has written: ‘In 1793, Dugald Stewart talked of a hope that “in due time” Smith’s example would be followed by other students of political econ-omy. Only ten years later, Francis Horner, a former pupil of Stewart and a founder of the Edinburgh Review, spoke of a “supersti-tious worship” that had come to be attached to Smith’s name.’ The generation of British Whig thinkers who rose to prominence after 1800, particularly those associated with the Edinburgh Review, illustrate the shift. They by no means completely abandoned scien-tific thought or even the desire for reform; but the issues over which these cadres were most deeply concerned were far narrower than those that had interested the Histori-cal School of the Scottish Enlightenment to which Smith belonged.

Yet there was also a reaction to this interpretation of Smith, associated not with the ideologists of industrial capitalism, but with the emergent working-class movement which was concerned to oppose, or at least humanise it. Both drew on The Wealth of Nations, but from markedly different sec-tions of the book. ‘As a result’, writes David McNally, ‘by the 1820s, “Smithian” apolo-gists for industrial capitalism confronted “Smithian socialists” in a vigorous, and often venomous, debate over political econ-omy.’ The latter strand ultimately led into Marxism, but from the last third of the nine-teenth century in particular, the intellectual defenders of capitalism show far less interest in Smith. Interestingly, this is increasingly because they began to regard as legitimate the claims which the left made on his legacy and this shift represents the second turn in Smith’s posthumous reputation.

Key here is the emergence of neoclas-sical economics, above all the marginalist reaction against both the classical political economy of Smith and the Marxist critique which sought to build on what he had accom-plished. In economic theory marginalism represented the final retreat from the kind of scientific inquiry undertaken by Smith, however imperfect, into ideological justifica-tion. It was signalled by the abandonment of the law of value, with its dangerous claim that the socially necessary labour required to produce commodities was also the objective measure of their value. The tenets of mar-ginalism were first set out by Leon Walras in his Elements of Pure Economics (1874) and ultimately codified by Alfred Marshall in his Principles of Economics (1890), although they have a long prehistory dating back at least to the 1830s. In relation to neoliber-alism, the most important thinkers have been those of the Austrian school, above all, Menger, Ludwig von Mises and Fried-rich von Hayek. Their attitude to Smith is instructive.

Smith presented a problem for the neo-classical school: Walras saw his work as being tainted by ‘unscientific’ social and moral considerations; Menger regarded it

The BaTTle foR adam SmiThNeil Davidson


as flawed because of Smith’s insistence that national economy was not simply an abstrac-tion – a view incompatible with the ‘atomism’ or methodological individualism of the mar-ginalists. This was understood as late as the final decades of the nineteenth century. Carl Menger was only exaggerating slightly when he wrote in 1891: ‘Smith placed himself in all cases of conflict of interest between the strong and the weak, without exception on the side of the latter.’

Indeed, in 1883 Menger had explicitly criticised Smith for his ‘one-sided rational-istic liberalism’, his ‘effort to do away with what exists’ which Menger claimed “inexo-rably leads to socialism”. Nevertheless, the marginalists needed, for reasons of ideologi-cal continuity, to claim Smith as a forerunner whose work they had completed, above all in relation to his advocacy of the market, which they removed from any historical context. ‘It was only the “marginal revolution” of the 1870s’, wrote Hayek, ‘that produced a satis-factory explanation of the market processes that Adam Smith had long before described with his metaphor of the ‘hidden hand”.’

The source of this misidentification lies in Hayek’s belief that there are two types of rationalism: constructivist and evolutionary. According to Andrew Gamble, adherents of constructivist rationalism ‘believe that human societies can be mastered by human beings and remodelled according to rational criteria’. Adherents of evolutionary ratio-nalism show ‘a distrust of the powers of human reason, a recognition of the extent of human ignorance about the social and natural worlds, and therefore a stress upon the unexpected, unintended consequences of social action’. Hayek’s ignorance of both the theory of the Scottish Enlightenment and the history of capitalist development in Scotland leads him to treat The Wealth of Nations as a description of how ‘commercial society’ works rather than as a programme for bringing it about; but considered in the latter way, Smith was as much of a con-structivist rationalist as Marx, which was, of course, precisely why Hayek’s predecessors regarded him with such caution.

The triumph of Keynesianism in the post-war West seemed to signal the final

reduction of Smith to purely historical fig-ure in the history, and one confined to the pre-history of economics, rather than of sociology or moral philosophy, at that. The prevailing attitude to Smith’s work has been admirably summed up by James Buchan: ‘His books now, were long and Scotch and close-printed. They were no more use to the modern economist and politician than six-penny tracts of eighteenth-century medicine to a General Practitioner or MD.’ Yet from the mid-1970s on Smith’s reputation began to experience an extraordinary revival. More extraordinary still was that the people responsible for this third reputational shift were largely the intellectual descendants of the neoclassical school which had previously shown no great enthusiasm for his work. Here, for example is Milton Friedman in a speech given in the year of the bicentenary, the hour of the ASI, at St Andrews: ‘Adam Smith was a radical and revolutionary in his time – just as those of us who today preach laissez faire are in our time. He was no apol-ogist for merchants and manufacturers, or more generally other special interests, but

regarded them as the great obstacles to lais-sez faire – just as we do today.’ There was one respect, however, in which Friedman believed contemporary free-marketeers would have to extend their categories, broadening ‘the “tribes” of “monopolists” to include not only enterprises protected from competition but also trade unions, school teachers, welfare recipients, and so on and on.’

In a sense this was a return to the original distortions of Smith which arose immediately after his death, but now in the context of the crisis of Keynesianism and state capitalism, and a resurgence of ideas about ‘free’ markets as the alternative. Some writers, such as PJ O’Rourke, have even ascribed visionary powers to Smith: ‘Smith was fostering free enterprise, and he was also nurturing – just in time – resistance to socialism.’ Resistance to socialism – in 1776. O’Rourke is a comedian and here he is, as they say, having a laugh. But the stupidity of these remarks indicates a flawed approach more fundamental than misconceptions about Smith’s attitudes to markets. It is summed up by this comment from the Bank

Adam Smith: As sculpted by Alexander Stoddart, the only statue of the great man in edinburgh.


of England website: ‘Adam Smith’s explana-tions of the society he observed in the 18th century are as relevant today as they were then.’ The essential error is repeated even by those who disagreed with the nature of his relevance, as in this ‘social-democratic’ perspective by Ryan Hanley: ‘Insofar as the conditions of contemporary capitalism are in many respects similar to those of debated by commercial society’s founding fathers, those engaged in the project to ameliorate those conditions stand to gain much from the effort to ameliorate similar these condi-tions stand to gain much from the effort to develop our answers to today’s problems in light of their efforts.’

* * *

The point is this: Adam Smith is not ‘rel-evant’ to our contemporary problems. Anachronistic misconceptions concern-ing his work could of course be corrected by the radical expedient of actually reading The Wealth of Nations and The Theory of Moral Sentiments, preferably after situat-ing them in their historical context, namely Scotland’s emergence from feudalism. When Smith attacked unproductive labour, he was not making some timeless critique of state employees, but thinking quite specifically about Highland clan retainers. When he opposed monopolies, he was not issuing a prophetic warning against the nationalisa-tion of industries in the twentieth century, but criticising those companies which relied for their market position on the possession of exclusive royal charters in the eighteenth. Above all, unlike his modern epigones, he did not see the market as a quasi–mystical institution that should be made to penetrate every aspect of social life; but rather as a limited mechanism for liberating humanity’s economic potential from feudal and absolut-ist stagnation.

Even so, the advocacy of Smith and his colleagues for what they called ‘commer-cial society’ was very conditional indeed. He intuited, long before capitalist indus-trialisation began in earnest, that it would lead to massive deterioration in the con-dition of labourers and their reduction to mere ‘hands’. Understood in the context of the Scottish Enlightenment conception of human potential, the description of pin manufacture at the beginning of The Wealth of Nations, reproduced from 2007 on £20 banknotes, not only celebrates the efficiency of the division of labour, but also shows the soul-destroying repetition that awaited the new class of wage labourers. In Book V, in contrast to the more frequently cited Book I, Smith explicitly considered the way in which the division of labour, while increasing the productivity of the labourers, did so by nar-rowing their intellectual horizons: ‘The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects, too, are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to assert his understanding, or to exercise his inven-tion, in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and igno-rant as it is possible for a human creature to become. The torpor of his mind renders him not only incapable of relishing or bear-ing a part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any generous, noble, or tender sentiment, and consequently of forming any just judgment concerning many even of the

ordinary duties of private life. Of the great and extensive interests of his country he is altogether incapable of judging; and unless very particular pains have been taken to ren-der him otherwise, he is equally incapable of defending his country in war. … His dexter-ity at his own particular trade seems, in this manner, to be acquired at the expense of his intellectual, social, and martial virtues.’

Smith contrasts this unhappy state of affairs with that existing under earlier modes of subsistence — modes which, remember, he was committed to transcending: ‘It is oth-erwise in the barbarous societies, as they are commonly called, of hunters, of shepherds, and even of husbandmen in that rude state of husbandry that precedes the improve-ment of manufactures, and the extension of foreign commerce. In such societies, the varied occupations of every man oblige every man to exert his capacity, and to invent expedients for removing difficulties which are continually occurring. Invention is kept alive, and the mind is not suffered to fall into that drowsy stupidity, which, in a civilized society, seems to benumb the understanding of the people. . . . Every man, too, is in some measure a statesman, and can form judg-ments concerning the interest of the society, and the conduct of those who govern it.’

It was uneasy anticipations such as these, which Smith shared with James Steuart and Adam Ferguson, that later informed Hegel’s conception of alienation and, through him, that of Karl Marx. In response he calls for the state to intervene to raise the educational level of the common people to that fitting of a ‘civilized and commercial society’: ‘For a very small expense, the public can facilitate, can encourage, and can even impose upon almost the whole body of the people, the necessity of acquiring those most essential parts of education.’ Here he has before him the example of his own country, in one of the few occasions it features positively in The Wealth of Nations: ‘In Scotland, the estab-lishment of such parish schools has taught almost the whole common people to read, and a very great proportion of them to write and account.’

It was therefore possible for Smith to approve of commercial society while disap-proving of the activities of actual capitalists. Indeed, in a passage which does prefig-ure Marxist analysis, he specifically denies that they represent society as a whole: ‘the clamour and sophistry of merchants and manufacturers easily persuade [the public] that the private interest of a part, and of a subordinate part of the society, is the general interest of the whole’. It is this, entirely real-istic, attitude which allows him to make his most famous comment: ‘People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for mer-riment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.’ But what would become of the arguments for com-mercial society if these excrescences turned out to be the essence of the new system? His argument in The Wealth of Nations can be seen, in McNally’s words, as a defence of ‘agrarian-based capitalist development in a landed commonwealth ruled by prosper-ous and public-spirited country gentlemen’ against the emergent ‘industrial and com-mercial capitalists’ whose amorality Smith distrusted. In relation to his native Scot-land, McNally notes: ‘Smith hoped that commercial forces could be used to hurry the development of an agrarian-based capi-talism guarded by a state run by a natural

aristocracy of landed gentlemen.’ It did not. What if, as indeed seems to be the case, commercial society as he envisaged it was actually impossible, or only possible under very specific conditions, such as pertained in the North American colonies whose inde-pendence he supported?

Smith based his support for commercial society on a hypothesis concerning its likely positive effects compared to those associated with feudal absolutism. Now that the conse-quences of ‘actually existing capitalism’ have been experienced for more than two hundred years, and it is clear that, for the majority of humanity, the dehumanizing effects of the division of labour already identified by Smith were not an unfortunate by-product but the very essence of the system, there is less excuse for such misrecognition. Politi-cal economy was the central discipline of the Enlightenment, the greatest intellectual achievement of the bourgeois revolutions. The expectations that Smith had of capital-ism have been disappointed, the predictions he made for it have been falsified; to defend capitalism now, to further claim him in sup-port of such a defence while ignoring the discrepancy between his model and our real-ity, is to attack Enlightenment values quite as comprehensively as did the feudal obscu-rantists to whom Smith was opposed. We now have a fine statue of Smith on the High Street; but his works need to be read for what they tell us about his century, not ours.

* * *

Among the books consulted in writing this article are the following: Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-first Century by Giovanni Arrighi (Verso, 2007); Adam Smith and the Pursuit of Perfect Liberty by James Buchan (Profile Books, 2006); The Adam Smith Problem by Dogan Gocmen (Taurus Academic Studies, 2007); Adam Smith and the Character of Virtue by Ryan Patrick Hanley (Cambridge University Press, 2009); Adam Smith: a Moral Philosopher and his Political Economy by Gavin Ken-nedy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); Adam Smith, Radical and Egalitarian: an Inter-pretation for the 21st Century by Iain McLean (Edinburgh University Press, 2006); After Adam Smith: a Century of Transforma-tion in Politics and Political Economy by Murray Milgate and Shannon C. Stimpson (Princeton University Press, 2009); On The Wealth of Nations by PJ O’Rourke (Atlantic Books, 2007); The Invisible Handcuffs of Capitalism: How Market Tyranny Stifles the Economy by Stunting Workers by Michael Perelman (Monthly Review Press, 2011); Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life by Nicho-las Phillipson (Allen Lane, 2010); Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet, and the Enlightenment by Emma Rothschild (Har-vard University Press, 2001); Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics by Daniel Stedman Jones (Princeton University Press, 2012).

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VOL 6 · NUMBER 4 · 2010ISSN 1745—5014

scottishreviewofbooks.org Katie GrantIn Bed with Sean Connery

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Essay CompetitionWinner Revealed

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Youth is another country. They do things differently there, accord-ing to different rules, and in a language which is quite lost to us in later life. It is easy enough to

capture early childhood in fiction. There are conventions about what the child knows and doesn’t know and because there is an adult (usually) in charge of the text, the child’s omissions, false beliefs and misunderstand-ings are flagged up, sometimes to comic, sometimes to poignant effect. Adolescence is more resistant. If Lacan – the first but not the last Frenchman here – is correct and the unconscious is organised like a language, then adolescent syntax and adolescent nar-rative must somehow reflect a mind in the process of being radically rewired for adult functioning. Ask a child to tell a story: the result is strange and beautiful. Ask an ado-lescent to tell a story and it seems disjointed and remote, full of internal contradictions and yawning lacunae, over-punctuated and stilted.

It astonishes me still that when read-ers and critics talk about the great fictional representations of youth they turn most often to The Catcher in the Rye and to Proust. The former seems to me a prolonged sulk, albeit a tour de force, the latter a pro-longed, unreadable hanky-flap. There are other, perhaps better examples. Portnoy’s Complaint is a riotous evocation of (male) adolescence, but one is always aware of the adult Philip Roth streaming the shocks. L. P. Hartley (who supplied the line about the past as another country, adapted above) gave a beautiful version in The Shrimp and the Anenome, as did Laurie Lee in Cider With Rosie. Henry James’s What Maisie Knew cut a child-height window in the house of fiction and the view from it has rarely been improved upon.

The greatest of all novels about adoles-cence marks its centenary this year, but is Le grand Meaulnes now much read outside France? Every few years sees a new English (or American) edition come along, but the book’s reputation seems strangely occluded in the Anglo-Saxon countries where readers either stick on Salinger or else get in training for A la recherche du temps perdu. I admit to a lifelong obsession with Alain-Fournier’s solitary masterpiece. Le grand Meaulnes was

the first foreign-language novel I read and the first time I encountered the convention of fudging a historical date: Il arriva chez nous un dimanche de novembre 189-.

In my copy, someone has written, ‘Alain-Fournier. This is his only novel. Wrote literary criticisms. Died early in War’. That’s almost it. One might add that Alain-Fournier was a semi-pseudonym for Henri-Alban Fournier (no one seems quite clear where the hyphen strictly belongs, but that’s the favoured version) who was

born in 1886 in La-Chapelle d’Angillon, not far from Bourges, that he was the son of a schoolmaster, aspired to a literary life and died when the War (there had only been one 20th century conflict when the previous owner inscribed his copy, hence the capital letter) was not more than two months old, on September 22 1914. He was 27 and, apart from his novel, which narrowly failed to win the Prix Goncourt, he’d left behind just a few scattered writings collected as Miracles, an unfinished novel called Colombe Blanchet

and a correspondence with his friend, the critic Jacques Rivière.

Fournier had himself fallen in love when he spotted Yvonne Marie Elise Toussaint de Quievrecourt walking along the quays of the Seine in Paris. She was the model, not much disguised, for Yvonne de Galais in Le grand Meaulnes.

The problem begins right there. British readers find it hard to speak the title – Luh grong Moan – and they have serious prob-lems persuading booksellers that the author has to be searched under A for Alain rather than F for Fournier, and that no, there isn’t a forename or initial. They’ll also have to persuade the same bookseller that all those titles eventually listed relate to the same book. English language versions of Alain-Fournier have gone out as The Wanderer in Françoise Delisle’s 1928 translation, The Lost Domain by Frank Davison in 1959, Meaulnes: The Lost Domain by Sandra Mor-ris somewhat redundantly seven years later, The Wanderer or The End of Youth (mislead-ingly, as we’ll see) by Lowell Blair in 1971, Le Grand Meaulnes: The Land of Lost Content (or Contentment – it’s the only one of these I don’t have) by Katherine Vivian, and three more recent versions, Robin Buss’s unim-provable Penguin Classic The Lost Estate, Jennifer Hashmi’s Big Meaulnes and Valerie Lester’s The Magnificent Meaulnes. There may simply be more female translators than male, but leaving aside the unread Vivian, snap judgement or sheer prejudice suggests that the men get it and the woman largely don’t, smearing Vaseline on the narrative lens, softening the focus and perversely toughening up the parts that need to be ren-dered more neutrally, as in the original.

Despite all this effort, there is a strangely persistent consensus that Le grand Meaulnes is untranslatable, from its title onwards. In truth, the ‘grand’ is no more – and thus no less – ambiguous than the ‘Great’ in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s dreamlike tale of yearning and loss. The similarities between Le grand Meaulnes and The Great Gatsby do not stop with the not-quite-developed title character. They have much to do with the narrative perspective as well. Some sentences do resist Englishing, or retain some essential shim-mer of uncertainty. Buss and others have singled out this one: Quant à Jasmin, qui paraissait revenir à cet instant d’un voyage, et qui s’entretenait à voix bass mais animée avec Mme Pignot, il était evident qu’une cordelière, un col bas et des pantalons-élé-phant eussent fait plus sûrement sa conquete …

Girdle? Sailor pants? Who or what is being conquered here? Grammatical gender is alien to British readers, but here it con-tributes to a mild bit of sex comedy – young boy, older woman with a reputation – that is genuinely hard to capture in any language but the original.

With the focus drawn out, though, Le grand Meaulnes doesn’t offer too many stumbling blocks, other than the usual temptation to mistake the identity of the real central character. The story is told by François Seurel, the 15 year old son of a rural schoolmaster, who he addresses as M. Seu-rel, and a mother he knows as Millie. To the school that autumn day in 189- comes a new boy, big, confident, troubling and exciting. Augustin Meaulnes does not so much arrive as manifest, a clue to his literary nature as well as to his personality. He is heard clump-ing overhead in the attic before he is seen, as if he emerges from the upper storeys of

the imagination rather than accompanied by the quiet, nervous mother who has come to introduce him.

No sooner has the newcomer settled into routine than there is a classroom discussion over who should accompany François to col-lect his grandparents. Meaulnes decides that he knows a better route and takes off on his own in a borrowed cart. He is missing for three days. When he returns he is strangely silent, but after a time he tells François that he has stumbled across a mysterious house and estate an unspecified distance away. As Meaulnes arrives, preparations are going ahead for an engagement party, and he is accepted unquestioningly as a guest. There are costumes, a Pierrot, strange children, horses. Meaulnes sees a girl at the party, with whom he becomes immediately besot-ted. Yvonne is the sister of the young man Frantz who is supposedly bringing home his bride-to-be. The party is another indulgence in their motherless lives. Then suddenly the party is cancelled and the guests begin to depart. Meaulnes takes a ride in a cart. There is a glimpse of violence in a wood, and then the whole mysterious scene dissolves.

One immediately understands why translators want to seize on the notion of the ‘lost estate’ (which it literally is) or the ‘lost domain’ of youth. There is an obvious symbolic equivalence between the strange house and grounds and the idea of para-disal innocence suddenly disrupted, but Alain-Fournier is more subtle than this. His sophistication may not be immediately obvi-ous from the succeeding chapters. There is the seeming oddity of boys not being able to find a house that is not so very differ-ent, but rural children of this generation inhabited a small world and even modest distances seemed cosmic. There is also some contrived business involving gypsies, one of whom turns out to be the wounded Frantz, a theatrical device that seems out of place in modern fiction. But consider how we learn what happens to Meaulnes. It is told to us by François at second hand and embedded in passages which make constant reference to sleep, so that we are never quite sure when the narrative is in a waking state and when it is the product of dream.

It’s powerfully disorientating, just as the dream-like party has been. Critics have pointed out the callowness of Alain-Fournier’s prose, its staccato succession of subordinate clauses studded with commas and ellipses: a modest four in the tricky sentence quoted above which also ends unresolved … But it is not the novelist who is callow. It is the young man who is telling the tale. Just as The Great Gatsby is really the story of Nick Carroway, so Le grand Meaulnes is a feint that disguises the autobi-ographical nature of François Seurel’s story. The very punctuation tells you that here is a mind that doesn’t quite understand what is happening, not just in the outside world but in itself. The very oddities of the book act out the psychology of adolescence.

After 100 years, a spoiler alert shouldn’t be necessary. I used to tell students that the most important aspects of almost any major novel would be found in the passages and chapters they had forgotten. It’s an exagger-ated principle, but one worth applying. Ask most purported fans of Le grand Meaulnes to give a summary and they will probably stop with the narrative of Meaulnes’s return to school and his – actually François’ – account of the strange house party. What many read-ers forget or suppress is that far from losing

alain-fouRnieR’S SoliTaRy maSTeRpiece Brian Morton

Alain-Fournier, author of Le grand Meaulnes


ACroSS 1 Novel way to line a new boat, in the past (6)4 Notions the Communist Party had at one time, before heartless Tsars (8)9 English satirist, however, left before the Queen (6)10 Did a GI crave being moved into a religious house? (8)12 The last taste in development of a cordial (8)13 Sent to foreign parts “for the good of my country”, according to Farquhar (6)15 Finally, they go back home into slavery (4)16 Analyst, at heart, will probe, and “will find it out”, wrote Herrick (10)19 Wondering how old English poet could catch fish without a line (10)20 Legal document composed by Fitzgerald’s “Moving Finger” (4)23 Reads about one being brought up (6)25 A model cared about the “curse of kings” (King John) (8)27 Spectator may be about to get sight for sore eyes (8)28 Could angling writer rule over heavyweight? (6)29 Macbeth’s promise “of success” with small gifts (8)30 After one advance, second comes up (6)

doWN 1 Sign, on line, points to the reading room (7)2 Inept Rick turned out to be a pedant (9)3 Floundered like a fish caught by Titian (6)5 Provided shelter for Roman poet (4)6 Dickens wrote of “ideal” salons “of Imagination” for publisher (8)7 Make a record return to Greek philosopher (5)8 Odds on banker losing his head to become a poet (7)11 Have to return greeting from Shakespearean character (7)14 Did Austen father-figure have little time for Alan (or Tony)? (7)17 Greek historian took up hours, to date (9)18 In the Odyssey, did writer have to run away to marry her? (8)19 Graduate had lower output for English dramatist (7)21 Bring the news of “comfort and joy”, traditionally (7)22 Is about to match up to “dwell a weeping hermit”. according to Collins (6)24 A gentleman of leisure epitomised in a series of essays by Dr Johnson (5)26 Feminist writer, in fact, now established (4)

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Solution for Srob Crossword no 15 ACroSSAcross: 1 digest, 4 Fielding, 9 Chapel, 10 Graceful, 12 examples, 13 untrue, 15 Sate, 16 Chesterton, 19 Freelances, 20 Grim, 23 empire, 25 Schiller, 27 kingsley, 28 Street, 29 rehearse, 30 unused.

doWN1 dickens, 2 Guarantee, 3 Sleeps, 5 Inro, 6 licensed, 7 Infer, 8 Galleon, 11 rethink, 14 essence, 17 thrillers, 18 Clarissa, 19 Flecker, 21 Merited.

Queequeg No 16The winner of the crossword in the previous edition of the Scottish Review of Books is Drew Yule from Thornhill, Stirling, who will shortly receive Here, There, Somewhere, Elsewhere, a four-volume collection of short stories. The prize for this crossword is Jane Dunn’s Daphne Du Maurier and Her Sisters.

Send entries to Queequeg, Scottish Review of Books, 42 New Street, Musselburgh, East Lothian EH21 6JN by 15 May.

his ideal love, Meaulnes does later meet and marry Yvonne. They even have a child, but by then Meaulnes has gone. He deserts her on their wedding night and goes off in search of the girl Frantz has lost. He finds her too and brings her back, but by that time François has moved close to Yvonne, nursed her through her pregnancy, and is present when she dies - with unflinching realism – of an embolism. The ideal and idealised girl becomes a purulent corpse. François vests his hopes in the child, which he seems ready to adopt as his own. But then Augustin (is he ‘august’ or is he a selfish rascal?) returns.

It’s worth reading the last lines with particular care, if you can get the tears out of your eyes. La seule joie que m’eût lais-sée le grand Meaulnes, je sentais bien qu’il était revenu pour me la reprendre. Et déjà je l’imaginais, la nuit, enveloppant sa fille dans un manteau, et partant avec elle pour de nouvelles aventures. My version: ‘I under-stood that the great Meaulnes had come back to take away the only joy he had left me with. And I already magined him one night wrapping the child in a cloak and bearing

her off on some new adventure.’ It’s note-worthy that contrary to some summaries of the book, Meaulnes hasn’t yet taken the girl away, but it’s sufficient that François believes he will, and at this point pity and self-pity are almost inseparable. The hint of envy and disapproval in young Seurel’s voice – for what hope of adventure is there for a recently qualified rural school assistant? – is obvious, but it isn’t clear whether the greater loss is the child or Meaulnes himself.

Read through the narrator’s own fuzzy lens, Le grand Meaulnes may well be a nar-rative of lost innocence and departing youth, just as, taken literally, The Great Gatsby is about shining people with reckless lives. But once one recognises the true role of their respective narrators these become quite dif-ferent books. Le grand Meaulnes is quite emphatically not a ‘coming-of-age novel’ but a book that in some way refuses to come of age. François may be taking on age and responsibility, but Meaulnes resists loca-tion and chronology. He is everywhere and nowhere, in the present and in some half-recovered, half-invented past. It is almost

possible to consider Meaulnes an imaginary friend, that common solace of childhood, which leaves only the problem of how an imaginary boy can father a child in a single night of marriage. There is a good deal of camouflaged sex in Le grand Meaulnes. We recognise it even when François doesn’t and we have our faces positively rubbed in it.

One of the things one forgets between readings is how tough and violent a book it is, how dark its passages. One also forgets how much of it is concerned with the act of writing, how much of the story is reported narrative, in letters or in Meaulnes’ strange ‘composition books’, school jotters in which he describes what has taken place since his second departure. Unless, of course …Meaulnes is the novelist and he is creating all that passes. A young man’s book and the best book ever written about young men …

‘ It still astonishes me that when readers and critics talk about great fictional representations of youth they turn most often to The Catcher in the Rye and to Proust. The former seems to me a prolonged sulk, albeit a tour de force, the latter a prolonged, unreadable hanky-flap.’


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the Great takeover – how materialist values now dominate our lives and what we can do about it Carol Craig & Zara kitson ARGYLL PUBLISHING £5.99 PB 9781908931061 Where do these ideas come from and what can be done. [Postcards from Scotland series]

the New road – Community renewal Alf Young & ewan Young ARGYLL PUBLISHING £5.99 PB 9781908931078 A father and son take a journey to see some of the inspiring community action projects going on.

Scotland’s local Food revolution Mike Small ARGYLL PUBLISHING £5.99 PB 9781908931078 Horse burgers? There has to be a better way to produce and distribute food. Mike Small, Director of The Fife Diet project points one way forward.

the Scots Crisis of ConfidenceCarol Craig ARGYLL PUBLISHING £9.99 PB 9781906134709 A brand new edition of Carol Craig’s successful exposition of Scots’ attitudes to and predilection for negativity. She offers a refreshingly different analysis of the big themes of Scottish culture. Rewritten in parts and brought up to date.

FICtIoNtestament of a Witchdouglas WattLUATH PRESSS £7,99 PB 9781908373212Set in the 17th century against the backdrop of political and religious conflict, the second of Watt’s John MacKenzie series is as historically rich and gripping as the last. MacKenzie investigates the murder of a woman accused of witchcraft and he must act quickly when the same accusations are made against the woman’s daughter. Superstition clashes with reason as Scotland moves towards the Enlightenment.

#freetopiary: An occupy romance THIRSTY BOOKS £6.99 PB 9781908931214 ‘Resistance is possible even for those who are not heroes by nature.’ Consumerism, passivity, apathy and distraction are challenged as Alan is introduced to the story of Bradley Manning.

the road to HellAn Alice rice MysteryGillian GalbraithPOLYGON £7.99 PB 9781846972522DS Alice Rice attempts to piece together and find the connection between two similar, but apparently motiveless attacks. Rice is taken to new personal depths and along a trail that leads to some of Edinburgh’s darkest and most sinister corners.

After Floddenrosemary GoringPOLYGON £14.99 HB 9781846972720A young woman searches for her brother, feared lost at the Battle of Flodden. This thrilling adventure, full of political intrigue and romance, follows the life of several characters who either had a hand in bringing the country to war, or were deeply affected by the outcome.

Friend & Foe: A Hew Cullen MysteryShirley Mckay POLYGON £12.99 PB 9781846972171The death of a young soldier leads Hew Cullen to both an astonishing discovery and his blackest hour, his fortunes inextricable from those of James VI himself. Set in 1583 St Andrews, real historical figures are interwoven in this fantastical tale of treachery, deceit and shadowy religious practice.

Veritasrita Monaldi and Francesco SortiPOLYGON £16.99 HB 9781846972577Vienna, 1711. An unfinished palace known as the Place with No Name, an exotic menagerie and a fantastical Flying Ship are just some of the ingredients of this baroque spy novel which will intrigue and delight fans of Monaldi and Sorti’s Atto Melani series.

Nor Will He Sleep: An Inspector Mclevy Mysterydavid AshtonPOLYGON £7.99 PB 9781846972515It is 1887. The streets of Edinburgh seethe with youthful anarchy as two rival gangs of students try to outdo each other in wild, criminal exploits. Enter Inspector James McLevy, a little more grizzled, but unchanging in his fierce desire to mete out justice.

Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe david PurdieLUATH PRESS £19.99 HB/ £9.99 PB 9781908373588/ 9781908373267

This new adaptation of Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe brings this classic tale to life for a modern audience. Purdie has cut the novel down from 179,000 words to 95,000, spurred on by his belief in the power of the story itself. This fresh adaptation manages to successfully maintain the novel’s soul, whilst making the prose more accessible to the modern reader.

An exquisite Sense of What Is beautifulJ david SimonsSARABANd £8.99 PB 9781908643278Sir Edward Strathairn returns to the Japanese hotel where he wrote his renowned novel ‘The Waterwheel’, which accused America of being in denial about Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But as we learn about Sir Edward’s earlier life and his relationship with an American artist, we realise that he too may be in denial. And that his past is now catching up with him.

bear WitnessMandy HaggithSARABANd £8.99 PB 9781908643292The brutal shooting of a bear cub galvanises ecologist Callis MacArthur, who dreams of bears roaming free. But as she embraces her wild side, she faces escalating challenges and agonizing personal losses. Combining lyrical prose, mythical themes and a cracking plot, Bear Witness will appeal to Barbara Kingsolver fans.

GArdeNINGAquaponic Gardening: A guide to raising fish and vegetables togetherSylvia bernsteinSARABANd £16.99 PB 9781908643087Aquaponics is an amazingly easy way of gardening that is completely organic, hugely productive, resource-efficient, and there’s no weeding, watering or digging. This is the definitive do-it-yourself manual, giving you all the tools you need to create your own aquaponic system and enjoy fresh and healthy fruit and vegetables.

HIStorYScotland: A Graphic HistoryJeff FallowLUATH PRESS £9.99 PB 9781908373120This is a concise history of Scotland in the form of a graphic novel. Both witty and informative, the book covers everything from the dinosaurs to David Cameron, with a plethora of battles, conspiracies, poets and politicians in between. Entertaining and accessible, this will appeal to teenage school kids, students, visitors and anyone else with an interest in Scottish history.

Scots in the uSAJenni CalderLUATH PRESS £9.99 PB 9781908373380

All over Scotland and the United States there are clues to the Scottish-American relationship, the legacy of centuries of trade and communication as well as that of departure and heritage. Scots in the USA discusses why Scots left their homeland, where they went once they reached the United States, and what they did when they got there.

Scots in CanadaJenni CalderLUATH PRESS £8.99 PB 9781908373038In Canada there are nearly as many descendants of Scots as there are people living in Scotland. This book follows the Scottish pioneers west from Nova Scotia to the prairie frontier and on to the Pacific coast. It examines the reasons why so many Scots left their land and families. The legacy of centuries of trade and communication still binds the two countries, and Scottish Canadians keep alive the traditions that crossed the Atlantic with their ancestors.

Islands that roofed the WorldMary WithallLUATH PRESS £5.99 PB 9781908373502Slate has been taken from the isles off the west coast of Argyll from their earliest recorded history and the richness and quality of the deposits meant that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries slate quarrying was one of the most important industries in Scotland. This is the story of the Slate Islands past, present and future, of their geology, industry, people and way of life.

on the trail of king Arthur: A Journey into dark Age Scotlandrobin CrichtonLUATH PRESS £9.99 PB 9781908373151King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table is one of the world’s greatest legends. Yet little is known of the truth behind the great story. This book enters the realm of conjectural history – the blurred middle ground between fact and fiction. Recorded events are linked to more shrouded possibilities and then compared to imprints on the landscape. This book includes detailed itineraries and maps, allowing readers to visit the locations and discover the clues for themselves. It is part of a project to develop an Arthur trail across Scotland.

Scotland the brief : A Short History of a Nation Christopher Harvie ARGYLL PUBLISHING £5.99 PB 9781908931191 A new edition of this brief outline for the beginner. Illustrated.

1814 Year of Waverley Christopher Harvie ARGYLL PUBLISHING £5.99 PB 9781908931238 The life and times of Walter Scott and the impact of the Waverley novels. Illustrated.

Fascist ScotlandCaledonia and the Far rightGavin bowdBIRLINN £12.99 PB 9781780270524Although Fascism in Britain is normally associated with England, the movement did find support in Scottish society. In this book Gavin Bowd relates a little-known part of Scottish history, revealing some uncomfortable truths which are bound to stimulate debate even now.

If Hitler ComesPreparing for Invasion: Scotland 1940Gordon barclaybIrlINN £20 Pb 9781843410621This book introduces the reader to a legacy of Scotland’s past that has been, until now, ignored. The heroic efforts made in the months preceding the war to prepare Scotland for an expected invasion are explored in this fascinating text.

traditional talesAllan Cunningham, tim killick (ed)ASLS £12.50 HB 9781906841089 A selection of folk stories steeped in the traditions of southern Scotland and northern England. Mixing the natural and supernatural, they blur the distinction between the oral traditions of the distant past and emerging ideas of literature and modernity. Originally published in 1822, these fascinating tales form an essential part of folkloric history.

Arthur’s Seat: Journeys and evocationsStuart McHardy and donald SmithLUATH PRESS £7.99 PB 9781908373465Arthur’s Seat, rising high above the Edinburgh skyline, is the city’s most awe-inspiring landmark. Although thousands climb to the summit every year, the history of the mountain remains a mystery; shrouded in myth and legend. Inspired by the NVA’s ‘Speed of Light’, this is a salute to the ancient tradition of storytelling, guiding the reader around Edinburgh’s famous ‘Resting Giant’ with an exploration of the local folklore and customs.

of dogs and MenJohn barringtonLUATH PRESS £9.99 PB 9781906817909Part autobiography and part history, ‘Of Dogs and Men’ is a celebration of the long relationship between man and dog. Former shepherd Barrington mixes his own personal recollections with a history of the evolution of dogs from wild animal to man’s best friend.

HuMourHaud ma Chips, Ah’ve drapped the Wean! Glesca Grannies’ Sayings, Patter and AdviceAllan MorrisonLUATH PRESS £9.99 PB 9781908373427A humorous and wise collection of the Scots sayings of Glasgow grannies. Covering various topics, from health and family to insults, each saying is accompanied by a straightforward English translation, Haud ma Chips is your introduction to the unique wisdom and advice of Glesca Grannies.

lIterArY CrItICISMrethinking George Macdonald: Contexts and ContemporariesChristopher Maclachlan, John Patrick Pazdziora & Ginger Stelle (eds)ASLS £12.50 PB 9781908980014The novels of George MacDonald (1824–1905) inspired later fantasy writers such as C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. The essays in this anthology look at MacDonald’s engagement with the works of his contemporaries and at his interest in the social, political, and theological movements of his age.

MArItIMe exodusdavid HollettBROWN, SON & FERGUSON £40.00 HB 9781849270298

Between the years 1830 and 1930 emigration from Europe to North America took the form of a mass exodus. During these years it is estimated that about 40 million people sailed from Britain, Ireland and Continental Europe for the United States, Canada, and other distant lands. The tragic story of the Irish and Scottish clearances and evictions, leading to disproportionately large emigrations from these troubled lands receive appropriate attention. One of the concluding chapters is dedicated to the loss of the White Star liner Titanic.

back From the brinkJamie WebsterBROWN, SON & FERGUSON £9.99 PB 9780851748085The fight to stop the closure of the Kvaerner Govan shipyard in Glasgow was the most high profile industrial campaign in Scotland since the UCS sit-in in the 1970’s. This is the inside story of that struggle, told in his own words by campaign leader, Govan’s yard convenor Jamie Webster.

Glenlee - the life and times of a Clyde built Cape HornerColin Castle & Ian MacdonaldBROWN, SON & FERGUSON £20.00 HB 9780851745091In the 10-year period beginning in 1882, 271 barques and full-riggers were built on the Clyde during which time the yards of Russell, Stephen, Connell, Lithgow and Rodger established a worldwide reputation for the construction of large sailing ships of outstanding design, quality and durability. Three-masted barque Glenlee was one such vessel. This is her fascinating story.

Gone…bill CummingBROWN, SON & FERGUSON £55.00 HB 9781849270137Based on real people and events this is a gripping factual account of the

PublISHer AdVertISerS

Classified contains a listing of new titles submitted for inclusion by publishers in Scotland. Advertisers in this section are:

Argyll Publishing01369 820 229argyllpublishing.comAssociation for Scottish literary Studies (ASlS)0141 330 5309 asls.org.ukbarrington Stoke0131 225 4113barringtonstoke.co.ukbirlinn ltd.0131 668 4371birlinn.co.ukbrown, Son & Ferguson 0141 429 5922skipper.co.uk Candlestick Press07500 180 871candlestickpress.co.ukGrace Note Publications01764 655979gracenotepublications.comluath Press0131 225 4326luath.co.ukNeil Wilson Publishing0141 954 8007nwp.co.ukPolygonSee Birlinnthirsty booksSee Argyll PublishingScottish Storytelling Centre0131 556 9579scottishstorytellingcentre.co.ukthe In PinnSee Neil WilsonVertebrate Publishing0114 267 9277 v-publishing.co.uk


background events and repercussions of the milestone launch of the world’s first 4-masted iron merchant ship in 1875. The phenomenal success of this large square rigged sailing-ship, named County of Peebles, prompted R & J Craig of Glasgow to launch a further eleven fabulous jute clippers.

Half of Glasgow’s Gone Michael dickBROWN, SON & FERGUSON £9.95 PB 9780851745091Glasgow, until recently, was a major European port and this publication describes its heyday, decline, neglect and subsequent redevelopment. Glasgow’s Harbour’s significant contribution to the 1939-45 war effort is also covered in some detail. The book records an important part of Glasgow’s heritage and a similar pattern of change, redevelopment and regeneration can be seen in other British ports whose roots lay in the 19th century.

truly Clyde built William kaneBROWN, SON & FERGUSON £60.00 HB 9781849270144Scott’s of Greenock grew from a small family business building and repairing Herring Busses in 1711 to leading the world in both merchant and naval shipbuilding to the highest standards. The gates closed permanently in 1993 thus ending a great relationship between the people of Greenock and the Scott Family Enterprise. DVD with 2GB of documents, tables and photographs included.

keepers of the light Malcolm MacPhersonBROWN, SON & FERGUSON £10.00 HB 9781849270113There are well over 200 lighthouses positioned around Scotland’s breathtaking and energetic coastline. The author has captured 33 of these dramatic Scottish lighthouses in watercolour for this first volume of his original paintings. Each painting is accompanied by a brief description of the lighthouse giving details of location, dimensions, history, and technical information.

At the Sharp end George H Parker BROWN, SON & FERGUSON £19.95 HB 9780851746104Provides an insight into the building and repairing of ships, on the Tay, on the Clyde, on the three rivers of the north-east of England, shipbuilding labour relations, and reasons for the decline of the industry. The late George Parker, the third generation of his family to build ships, writes about shipbuilding from the “inside”.

MIlItArYengine of destruction – the 51st (Highland) division the Great War Colin Campbell ARGYLL PUBLISHING £25 HB 9781908931276 Detailed and touching account of the WWI experience of the 51st Division is an amazing book in tribute to the Scottish soldier.

PoetrYParapets and labyrinths: Poems in english and Scots on european themes 1984-2012tom Hubbard GRACE NOTE PUBLICATIONS £6.00 PB 9781907676239In this book, Tom Hubbard takes us on another poetic tour of Europe, offering a number of translations (or rather transcreations) on the way. It is a collection of poems mainly in English (but with a significant presence of the Scots language – glossary included), is a companion volume to the Chagall Winnocks, which was published by Grace Note publications in 2011.

ten Poems from Wales: Fourteen Centuries of Verseedited by Gillian Clarke CANdLESTICK PRESS £4.95 PAMPHLET 9781907598166‘Ten Poems from Wales’ offers readers who are new to the poetry of Wales, and those who are already in love with it, a glimpse of a rich heritage. The ten poems, chosen by National Poet for Wales, Gillian Clarke, give the reader a taste of a beautiful, ancient and continuing literature.

An Cuilithionn 1939: the Cuillin 1939 and unpublished Poems

Sorley Maclean, Christopher Whyte (ed)ASLS £12.50 PB 9781906841034 This major new edition of MacLean’s epic work includes 400 lines never before published, along with MacLean’s own English translation, and an extended commentary. Forty-five other previously unpublished poems by MacLean also appear here for the first time, with facing English translations.

PolItICSblossom: A Journey beyond Independencelesley riddochLUATH PRESS £9.99 PB 9781908373694Disentangling Scotland’s cultural identity from decades of political, social and financial baggage is no mean task, but it’s a task Lesley Riddoch is willing to undertake. Blossom: A Journey Beyond Independence seeks Scotland’s true identity from amongst its people, its history, and the author’s own passionate and outspoken perspective.

Arguing for Independence: evidence, risk and tackling the Wicked IssuesStephen MaxwellLUATH PRESS £9.99 PB 9781908373335By offering an assessment of the case for independence across all its dimensions, ‘Arguing for Independence’ fills a long-standing gap in Scotland’s political bookshelf as we enter a new and critical phase in the debate on Scotland’s political future. With a foreword by Owen Dudley Edwards.

Scotland the Growing divide: old Nation, New IdeasHenry McleishLUATH PRESS £9.99 PB 9781908373458This is the follow-up to ‘Scotland: The Road Divides’, released in 2007. Five years on, and many of the conclusions reached in ‘The Road Divides’ have become a political reality. Now facing an imminent referendum on the independence of Scotland, McLeish focuses on the changing face of politics and what this means for Scotland and the UK.

SelF HelPdementia PositiveJohn killickLUATH PRESS £10.99 PB 9781908373571This book is not about the past, which has gone, or the future, which is uncertain. But it is for those who want to improve the lives of people with dementia and themselves in the Here and Now. The book is not written by an expert but by a man seeking to find new approaches concerning dementia who wishes to share his discoveries.

SPortraising the Standard: rangers, the Fall and riseStewart Franklin, Chris Graham, John Gow and Alasdair MckillopLUATH PRESS £9.99 PB 9781908373687For 140 years, Rangers Football Club has been one of the most successful football clubs in the world. The events of the past two years have dented a excellent reputation but the club has emerged from this period intact and there is an opportunity to examine not just the events of the recent past but also how the club can move forward and get back to its position as the premier club in Scotland.

the Nine-Holer Guide: Scotland’s Nine-Hole Golf Coursesderek McAdamLUATH PRESS £7.99 PB 9781908373601The beautiful, quiet and often little known nine-hole golf courses offer even the lowest handicap golfer a challenge. Walk in the footsteps of golfing legends and find some surprising gems, from the prestigious nine-hole courses which hosted some of the earliest Open Championships. Helpfully divided into geographical areas, The Nine-Holer Guide includes statistics and contact details for each course.

Jewel in the Glen: Gleneagles, Golf and the ryder Cuped HodgeBIRLINN £25.00 HB 9781780271095The history and impact of the Ryder Cup is traced through interviews with a wide variety of international celebrities. This book paints a unique and thorough

portrait of Gleneagles, Scottish golf and the history of golf ’s greatest prize.

trANSPortWaverley route – the life, death and rebirth of the borders railway david Spaven ARGYLL PUBLISHING £14.99 PB/ £20.00 HB 9781906134990/9781908931009

The story that says much about Britain’s railways in the late 1960s, and about the opportunities created by devolution of power in the last years of the twentieth century to right one of the great wrongs of the old model of London-based transport policy. A social history of the Borders as much as a transport book. Illustrated with numerous period and current photos never before published.

trAVelGreat british bike rides: 40 Classic routes for road Cyclistsdave barterVERTEBRATE PUBLISHING £25 PB 9781906148553Great British Bike Rides brings together 40 of the best road cycling rides in England, Scotland and Wales, searching out the country’s most celebrated routes, toughest climbs and scenic roads. Each ride features detailed route information, bespoke mapping and a statistical breakdown of every detail committed cyclists require.

WAlkINGScotland’s Mountains before the MountaineersIan MitchellLUATH PRESS £9.99 PB 9781908373298This work tells the story of explorations and ascents in the Scottish Highlands in the days before mountaineering became a popular sport - when Jacobites, bandits, poachers and illicit distillers traditionally used the mountains as sanctuary.

Charlie, Meg and MeGregor ewingLUATH PRESS £9.99 PB 9781908373618For the first time, Bonnie Prince Charlie’s arduous escape of 1746 has been recreated in a single journey. Gregor Ewing, along with his faithful border collie Meg, retraces Charlie’s epic 530 mile walk through remote wilderness, hidden glens, modern day roads and uninhabited islands.

of big Hills and Wee MenPeter kempLUATH PRESS £9.99 PB 9781908373304From the time he bagged his first Munro, Peter Kemp has remained an enthusiastic hillwalker and this book is a testament to his passion for Scotland’s outdoors and hillwalking culture. Accompanied by his life-long friends from Glasgow, he takes on the big hills of Scotland, finding both escape and companionship amongst the mountains of Scotland.

the ultimate Guide to the Munros, Vol 4: Cairngorms South (including lochnagar)ralph StorerLUATH PRESS £9.99 PB 9781908373519The Ultimate Guide to the Munros Vol 4 is the latest in the rucksack friendly series, which provides details of all the practicable routes up the Munros. With a combination of reliable advice and quirky humour, this book is the perfect route guide and ideal hill walking companion.

Walking with Wildness: experiencing the Watershed of ScotlandPeter WrightLUATH PRESS £7.99 PB 9781908373441In the follow up to his acclaimed Ribbon of Wildness, Peter Wright has compiled twenty-six walks along the Watershed of Scotland’s path, making this hitherto unknown landscape accessible to every walker seeking a new challenge. For the first time, walkers can experience the marvel of the Scottish watershed.

Caleb’s list: Climbing the Scottish Mountains Visible from Arthur’s Seatkellan MacInnesLUATH PRESS £16.99 HB 9781908373533In this beautifully written book, MacInnes interweaves his own experience of living with HIV with a description and history of ‘the Arthurs’. Written in an evocative style that mixes history, biography, memory and romantic lyricism, Caleb’s List is a hill-walking book with a difference.

CoNtrIbutorS Neil Davidson teaches sociology at the University of Strathclyde. He is the author of The Origins of Scottish Nationhood and Discovering the Scottish Revolution, for which he was awarded the Deutscher Memorial Prize and the Fletcher of Saltoun award. He has also co-edited and contributed to Alasdair MacIntyre’s Engagement with Marxism and Neoliberal Scotland. He is on the Editorial Board of International Socialism.

Lucy Ellmann was born in Evanston, Illinois, and now lives in Edinburgh. Her first novel, Sweet Desserts, won the 1988 Guardian Fiction Prize. She has also written Varying Degrees of Hopelessness, Man or Mango?, Dot in the Universe and Doctors & Nurses. Her most recent novel is Mimi, which is described as ‘a love story, a call to arms’.

Joseph Farrell was Professor of Italian at Strathclyde University. He has translated and written a number of books, including a biography of Dario Fo. His latest book is about Sicily.

Rosemary Goring is literary editor of the Herald and the Sunday Herald. She is the author of Scotland: The Autobiography, an anthology covering 2,000 years of Scottish history. Her first novel, After Flodden, will be published in the summer.

Alasdair Gray was born in Glasgow in 1934 and graduated in Mural Design, an abiding passion, from Glasgow Art School in 1957. Since then he has lived by writing fiction which has been published in many countries, by designing books (chiefly his own) and by painting. His latest book is Every Short Story, 1951-2012.

Mandy Haggith, who has been described as a ‘backwoods philosopher’, lives on a croft in Assynt. Originally from Northumberland, she spent a decade in artificial intelligence before leaving academe for a freelance career as a forest activist and writer. Her debut novel was The Last Bear. Her second novel, Bear Witness, will be published next month.

Christopher Harvie is a cultural historian. From 2007 to 2011 he was an SNP MSP, in which capacity he was described as “something of an oddity. For a start, he’s read book.” He has also written a number of books, including Broonland: The Last Days of Gordon Brown, A Floating Commonwealth and No Gods and Precious Few Heroes. Coming shortly is 1813 Year of Waverley: The Life and Times of Walter Scott.

Christian McEwen is a freelance writer, teacher and workshop leader. Her latest book is World Enough & Time: On Creativity and Slowing Down (Bauhan Publishing, 2011). She has edited four anthologies, including Jo’s Girls: Tomboy Tales of High Adventure and The Alphabet of the Trees: A Guide to Nature Writing, and helped produce the video documentary, Tomboys! She is currently working on a play about women and money, Legal Tender: Women & the Secret Life of Money.

Harry McGrath is the online editor of the Scottish Review of Books. He is the former Coordinator of the Centre for Scottish Studies at Simon Fraser University in

British Columbia and writes the only column in Canada regularly dedicated to Scottish affairs. He is a book reviewer for the Herald and Sunday Herald and a contributor to the Globe and Mail, Montreal Gazette, Bella Caledonia and numerous other media outlets.

Gerald Mangan is a poet, cartoonist, playwright and journalist. In the 1970s he was resident playwright at the Theatre Workshop in Edinburgh. He now writes and illustrates for the Times Literary Supplement and other journals. His collection, Waiting for the Storm, was published by Bloodaxe in 1990. This summer the Poetry Society in London is arranging an exhibition of his caricatures.

Brian Morton is a writer, broadcaster and journalist whose interests and expertise range from jazz to ornithology. In the past few years he has written books on Prince, Shostakovich and Edgar Allan Poe.

Alan Taylor writes for the Herald and Sunday Herald. He is the editor of the Scottish Review of Books.

David Torrance is a journalist, broadcaster and writer. His books include biographies of David Steel, Alex Salmond and George Younger. He is editor of a series of essays Whatever Happened to Tory Scotland? and Great Scottish Speeches. He is also the author of ‘We in Scotland’: Thatcherism in a Cold Climate.

Jonathan Wright was educated at St Andrews and Oxford universities. He has written for numerous newspapers and journals and is the author of The Jesuits: Myths and Histories and Heretics: The Creation of Christianity from the Gnostics to the Modern Church.

www.birlinn.co.uk Available NOW in bookshops, online or order

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FASCIST SCOTLANDCALEDONIA AND THE FAR RIGHT

Gavin BowdUncomfortable truths revealed in a study of a little-known period in Scottish history.£12.99 pbk

IF HITLER COMESPREPARING FOR INVASION: SCOTLAND 1940

Gordon BarclayHow Scotland built to defend itself from Nazi invasion in the dark days of 1940-1941.£20 pbk

EXPLORING THE NATION’S PAST

1868-ScotRevBks F-P split x 2 Ad Vis 3.indd 1 07/03/2013 15:00

the battle for adam smith

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