Scotland’s Yesterday – an IRISH Production: Irish Pages reviewed by Owen Dudley Edwards

Scotland’s greatest living Irish Historian on an Irish publication of Scottish writers on the state of Scotland. Owen Dudley Edwards casts a critical eye over the recently published Irish Pages Scotland issue.

Scotland’s Yesterday — an IRISH Production

Holbrook Jackson (1874-1948) in The Eighteen Nineties (1913), Shane Leslie (1885-1971) in The End of a Chapter (1916), Frederick Lewis Allen  (1890-1954) in Only Yesterday  (1931), and Harry Hopkins (1913-88) in The New Look (1963) wrote cultural histories of immediately preceding years thus inaugurating their definition for subsequent historians, Jackson for the eponymous last Victorian decade, Leslie for the UK in his lifetime up to World War One, Allen for the USA in the 1920s, Hopkins for England in the 1940s and 1950s.  

            Whether we know it or not, our retrospective thinking has been conditioned by these books and their impact.   In terms of intellect the books and their authors go

successively downhill.    In backgrounds, Jackson was an unrivalled professional bibliophile, Leslie an Irish Protestant landlord sharing an American grandfather with Winston Churchill and converted to Catholicism and Irish constitutional nationalism, Allen an editor of elite American literary magazines, Hopkins an English popular journalist.

            IRISH PAGES    volume 12 number 2 published at 129 Ormeau Road Belfast edited by Kathleen Jamie and Don Paterson has apparent hopes of determining our retrospect on Scotland from the Referendum on Independence in 1914 to now, with an eye to our future prospect, carried out by ‘Scottish writers of distinction’ and a ‘specially curated selection of Scotland’s emerging poets’.   And, like the English curate’s egg, it is good in spots.

            Several of the prose pieces — for instance those by Neal Ascherson, James Campbell and James Robertson — ought to be read and reread as long as Scotland endures, minuets of art and intellect.   They realise the greatness of certain Scottish literary genres by themselves proving unmatched in the traditions they embrace and evangelise. 

            Certain other contributions dishonour the human intellect.

 II.

 IRISH PAGES, learn your trade (cf. Yeats).

            Hither, PAGES, and stand by me, If thou knowest it, telling:

            Yonder peasant, who is he, where and what his dwelling?

[That second line could well be the theme of the history of our archipelago, capturing the predatory glare of the slave-capturing Irish pirates from St Patrick’s day to the Atlantic ship-owners’ also taking on board Bonnie Prince Charlie to and from the ’45.

The Norman and English land-grabbers might similarly survey an endless multitude of Gaelic landlords and tenants fit to be devoured.   So might the Scots clan chieftains educated by southern gamesters and bankers into evicting and exiling their cousins and dependents.   So might the Welsh sheep-stealers before evolving into Tudors and David Lloyd George.   They would then baptise themselves as ‘Civilization’.]

On back cover, PAGES self-describes: 

The magazine is cognizant of the need to reflect in its pages the various meshed levels of human relations: the regional (Ulster), the national (Britain and Ireland), the continental (the whole of Europe), and the global.

‘Ulster’ does not exist, save as a geographical designation in nineteenth-century use, meaning Ireland’s northernmost 9 counties, and as a device for Lord Randoph Churchill in 1886 and Sir Edward Carson in 1912-14 to claim that the Protestant minority in the easternmost 6 counties was in fact a majority.   The meshing happened en route.

‘Britain and Ireland’ has less national identity than any fraction in their composition. ‘the whole of Europe’ is a landmass whose eastern limits remain undefined. ‘the global’:   Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump claiming real estate on our moon and in Mars.

On PAGE [2]:

IRISH PAGES … has no editorial position on the constitutional question.   Its title refers to the island of Ireland in a purely apolitical and geographical sense in the same manner of the Church of Ireland or the Irish Sea.

The definition of the Church of Ireland as the generic form of the apolitical is less justifiable than the doctrine that the Earth is flat.  Its author is ignorant of Irish history from 1169 to 1869.  

‘The constitutional question’ is probably a meaningless expression to anyone save its author.   It used to mean whether Sinn Fein could win a majority of Irish votes in the 6 Counties of Northern Ireland and in the 26 counties of the Republic (Catch-32) or its secular arm, the IRA, kill its way to conquest of Northern Ireland (Slaughterhouse-6).

Also on PAGE [2]:

This issue has been generously funded by Creative Scotland, and the Arts Councils of Northern and Southern Ireland.

There is no such entity as ‘Southern Ireland’, and never has been, save as an imaginary administrative convenience in early 1922 during the constitutional creation of the Irish Free State formally enacted in December 1922, previously created under the Anglo-Irish Treaty itself agreed in December 1921 and ratified in January 1922 by the relevant constitutional bodies of the United Kingdom and the unauthorised Irish Republic.  

‘Southern Ireland’ has no legal significance and any usages of it are internationally illegal and geographically ignorant.    IRISH PAGES should have flushed the convenience for fear of being flushed with it. 

The Republic of Ireland replaced the Irish Free State (Eire) in 1949, both being the same geographical entity of 26 counties of which the northernmost, Donegal, extends farther north than any land or island under the jurisdiction of Northern Ireland or the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, Donegal’s farthest north being Malinhead with ‘Malin’ as point of weather observation internationally and climatically.

‘Southern  Ireland’ existed as an imaginary and unenforced provision in the Government of Ireland Act 1920 which created Northern Ireland.

The credentials of IRISH PAGES for the designation and anticipation of Scotland since the Referendum of 2014 are hardly enhanced by plunging UK readers even deeper into indifference and ignorance of the remnant of our islands’ stories.   It might almost seem to satirise Creative Scotland by counter-creativity.

On PAGE [5]:

            STANDS SCOTLAND WHERE IT DID?

On PAGE [9]:

            STANDS SCOTLAND WHERE IT DID?

On PAGE [10]:

            Stands Scotland where it did?

Although nowhere contextualized or credited by IRISH PAGES, the words are by William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Macbeth (Act IV, Scene iii, Line 165) set 550 years earlier to be uttered by Macduff, Thane of Fife, self-exile to the English Court finding the asylum-seeking Prince Malcolm, and now answered by the Thane of Ross first with lies later supplanted by admitting the dreadful truth: Macbeth’s murder of Lady Macduff and their children.   Shakespeare’s lines must have been approved by King James (1566-1625) VI of Scotland (from 1567) and I of England (from 1603), self-proclaimed owner of Shakespeare’s theatre company within days of his accession, probably chief adviser (and certainly the most intellectual Scot in England) for the play composed around 1604.  (Ben Jonson had found himself temporarily in jail for a play with Scottish touches displeasing to his scholarly Majesty.)   Ross answers Macduff:

                                                            Alas, poor country,

            Almost afraid to know itself!   It cannot

            Be call’d our mother, but our grave: where nothing,

            But one who knows nothing, is once seen to smile;

            Where sighs, and groans, and shrieks that rent the air,

            Are made, not markt; where violent sorrow seems

            A modern ecstacy: the dead man’s knell

            Is there scarce askt for who; and good men’s lives

            Expire before the flowers in their caps,

            Dying or e’er they sicken.

It could have applied to much of James’s own regal boyhood under a sadistic tutor, overlords destroying and destroyed, beloved friends exiled from him, his own kidnapping under risk of his life, his mother forever denounced, imprisoned and finally executed by a ruler later denying ordering her death as Macbeth ordered and denied his command to kill his comrade Banquo.   On arrival in London, James had Elizabeth displaced from her Westminster Abbey tomb to be replaced by his mother Mary.    But the deeper tragedy is first hidden by Ross and then admitted: that Macduff’s wife and children are dead by Macbeth’s murder mission with Macduff no longer in post to defend them.   It could apply to our post-Referendum tragedies.

So why the triple if diminishing Scottish question and the refusal to use its poetic context?

Co-editor Kathleen Jamie in a headnote for a FOREWORD precedes last use of Scotland’s thrice-enquired location:

How will Scotland fare in an era of momentous and unpredictable political change?

 Macbeth is too famous a text for us not to know where the question was first asked, and we must be taken to know or find Ross’s reply with its whitewash sequel scraped away by the ultimate hideous admission.   The thrice-demanded enquiry has all of the ritualistic fidelity prescribed by the Three Witches.

Then follows a FOREWORD by Jamie and her co-editor Don Paterson preceded by an unascribed quotation ‘In rest we gather strength’.   It seems derived from Psalm XXX.7 (King James translation):

Rest in the Lord and wait patiently for him: fret not thyself because of him who prospereth in his way, because of the man who bringeth wicked devices to pass.

IRISH PAGES seems apprehensive of direct religious allusion, having told its customers on PAGE  [2]:

IRISH PAGES is a non-partisan, non-sectarian, culturally ecumenical and wholly independent journal.

The superstitious effect of this seems to be fear of mentioning any source that might seem religious, especially when it is.   One thinks of a Victorian patriarch trying to convey a dirty joke without admitting it.  It becomes like the Bellman in Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark (1876):

            He had brought a large map representing the sea,

                        Without the least vestige of land:

            And the crew were much pleased when they found it to be

                        A map they could all understand.

The effect of this seems to be that Jamie and Paterson survey the road to the Referendum without mention of the Church of Scotland, without which we should not have had the Constitional Convention calling together participants from all parties, religions and none.   (The Tories refused, informing the C of S that as the state religion it was supposed to do what the [Tory] Government told it, which the C of S kindly corrected by noting the Government’s confusion of Scotland with England.)   Nor would we have had the housing of the newly-elected Scottish Parliament to inaugurate itself when the Holyrood building proved as yet untenable: the Hall of the General Assembly of the Church opened its doors.

 Tom Nairn, our most profound modern political theorist of nationalism, pointed out in his Lothian Lecture under Alex Salmond’s Chairing, Professor Willie Storrar overturned previous dismissals of the C of S as mere collaborators in intellectual enslavement, and himself preached a new sense of Scottish identity, founded on the teaching of modern Scotland’s most famous Roman Catholic priest Father Anthony Ross.   To ignore the C of S as an unquestionable founder of the new Scotland is like ignoring George Washington as prime moral authority in enabling the American constitutional convention to come into being in 1787.

In both cases, moral authority was attained by the physical relinquishing of power of physical control.   Washington astounded the world by winning his country’s independence and then in December 1783 resigning its supreme command, where Gaius Julius Caesar and Oliver Cromwell had held on.   The Church of Scotland set aside her previous outlawry of Popery when the Moderator Revd Archie Craig flew to Rome in 1961 to visit Pope John XXIII, and then by receiving Pope John Paul II (May 31,1982) under Moderator John McIntyre.

 III.

Towards a God Unknown or a God Not to be Known Again? 

As though substituting a new God and his Moses, the Jamie-Paterson foreword proclaims:

            Had we known what we know now, we may have been played [sic] our hand differently.   For one thing, we had no idea that one loose remark of the late Alex Salmond’s made in the heat of the campaign — that the vote was a ‘once-in-a-generation opportunity’ — would leave us such a hostage to fortune.

            …

We maintain the absolute right of writers and artists to pursue their own artistic agendas … the consciousness-raising and nation-building of the 1980s and 90s

— with artists and writers boldly at the forefront — … led to the restoration of the Scottish Parliament.   We lived through the rise of the SNP under the late Alex Salmond, and the eventual independence referendum of 2014.

            … while the alliance between Scottish artists and Scottish independence is still a broad one, the perceived allegiance of Scottish artist to the SNP is well and truly over.

Like Moses, the distinguished editors lead a crowd and speak in its name.   They claim a formidable vocation with an assumption (however unspoken) of mission in a glorious if somewhat unspecified name.   The crowd may be appreciative but may sometimes prefer golden calves to integrity.

            Moses presumed on a single ethnicity among his followers although his successor Joshua would accept honorary ethnicity in profitable trade, conspicuously for that provident businesswoman Rahab the Harlot.   But Joshua declared identity and entitlement established by armed service in the cause he led.

Our contributors dissent from what was once a powerful Scottish Protestant participatory imperialism.   Neal Ascherson (dazzlingly effective on this as on all else) concludes ‘Scots don’t pose as an ethnicity’.   James Campbell brings sophistication to personal resentment showing his denial of being a ‘dour Scot’ finds identity in rejection of outsiders’ pigeon-holes. Among the many excruciating moments of Gordon Brown’s courtship of America was President George W. Bush’s assurance he did not find Brown a ‘dour Scot’ (by which he meant he did).

An assumption of a common ethnic culture expressing itself in identity is painfully evident in many nationalisms.   In Catholic Ireland the split leading to civil war in 1922 was vaguely associated with higher social classification for those accepting the retention of UK links, but these also exhibited more racism in their casual speech.   Arthur Griffith’s Anglophobia may have sold his newspapers but endangered his diplomacy.  Michael Collins jazzed up his militarism painfully identifying with ‘the fighting race’, whose animal urgings permeate the Irish national anthem, sometimes parodied:

Soldiers are we

            Whose wives have fled from Ireland …

Eamon de Valera’s half-Spanish parentage, his ideological dependence on the English propagandist Erskine Childers and on the Jewish businessman Bob Briscoe, and an international sense drawn from his half-American identity modified his narrow ethnicity, but the entire archipelago shrank in global consciousness as empire declined and world crusade soured, with interesting SNP exceptions.

            Neal Ascherson writes as ever with an entrancing, almost poetic, integration of international awareness and Scottish penetration, recalling his towering transformation of Scottish political reporting from 1975 to 1979.   But his final words bring small comfort:

A time is approaching when the United Kingdom will be a suffocating place that young people want to leave.  Scotland may have reconquered and decolonised itself, may even have reached a new degree of moral independence.   But to perish ‘unconquered’ and asphyxiated by a suicidal neighbour is no sort of victory.

Scottish optimism has a far richer inheritance than doomster psephology from baby Bush upward may imagine.   But some notes in our FOREWORD may warn more than is intended.   Its echo ‘the late Alex Salmond’ seems somewhere between threadbare irony and furtive disguise.   Does it seem to describe, analyse, or avoid our decade’s history?   

Does it realise his leadership was culmination rather than ‘rise’ of SNP?  

 What was the ‘perceived’ allegiance of Scottish artists to the SNP?   Who perceived it?   Several essays wallow in the miserable modernity of the cowardly passive, no names no pack drill.   The National Party of Scotland (1928-34) was certainly founded by artists — Compton Mackenzie, Hugh MacDiarmid, Eric Linklater, Cunninghame Graham — but its successor the Scottish National Party self-identified in the instruction on its first minutes that if Mr C. M. Grieve attempted to pay his shilling it was to be given back to him.   What followed showed little allegiance on either side, given high and low drama.  John MacCormick, the masterly Chair of SNP, saw the poet-artists as wayward, unreliable and firebrand.   His son Sir Neil MacCormick MEP(SNP), probably the greatest mind in the party in his time, thought its true cultural creed was MacDiarmid’s 30-page introduction to The Golden Treasury of Scottish Poetry (1940).   The party Chair 1942-1945, Professor Douglas Young, was jailed twice for opposition to conscription on Scottish nationalist principles during World War 2, poet, anthologist, and translator of Aristophanes into Scots verse.   Gordon Wilson MP declared that whenever he heard the word ‘culture’ he reached for his gun, would expel left-wing intellectuals led by Stephen Maxwell and Alex Salmond in the ’79 Group, and be forced to readmit them owing to the illegality of his actions, and, in fact, the error of his perceptions.   He seems to have suspected the 79ers of support for the Provisional IRA which apart from one (amiably dotty) they were not, passionately sharing the ethos which distinguished SNP so well from other nationalist movements:   absolute hostility to violence for ourselves and our Scotland.  

            ‘The late Alex Salmond’ as an editorial usage raises other questions.   IRISH PAGES should know the Irish-Gaelic term uisge fa thalamh directly Anglifiable as ‘water under ground’, also as ‘intrigue’.   It would seem the editors think of Mr Salmond as better dead, and thus would eliminate any reference to his trial, to the intrigue leading up to it, and to his acquittal.   The only evidence available to us points directly to an agent or agents determined to destroy the cause of Scottish independence, and as Alex Salmond was its most successful proponent to date a conspiracy was formed against him into which others were drawn for ideological, financial, and other personal reasons.  Any discussion of the case must either acquit Salmond or violate the protection of witnesses.  

            But the omission of a man and a matter so vital to understanding the fate of Scottish independence indicts the editors rather than the topic.

                                                                        IV.

The Future of the Past Leads Our Kindly Light

            Our various essayists gathered by IRISH PAGES, whatever about their numerous poets, frequently bring widely experienced knowledge of the history of Scottish self-perception, albeit sometimes seeming to proclaim the death of the subject.   Fraser MacDonald’s ‘Losing Our Religion’ suggests this, and thus has a passport into the alien corn of secularism, although his subtitle ‘A diasporic sense of self’ hints at Faith’s survival as its own ghost.

His experience is that of an Aberdonian child of a Free Church of Scotland ministry.   He concludes with ambiguities on the dangers of modernisation.   His finale deals with the original shared cup:

… the folk in the pews grew squeamish at the passing of a shared cup.  Individual cups felt safer, and more in keeping with concerns about pathogenicity, but they deprived my father of a sense of unity and connection to the past.   ‘What a privilege it is’ he wrote to me, ‘to handle a cup that links us to pilgrims who trod the same road in former day just as its contents likewise links us to the Saviour of the world.’  That cup has passed.   It belongs to a different time, and to a different landscape of feeling.   I miss it.   I don’t miss it.

Now, that is poetry.   It accords with the poetry of Stevenson’s prose whether in his fable of the man who freed himself of the gyve on his ankle and going home found his parents dead, or in Kidnapped itself beginning with the kindness of the Calvinist Campbell clergyman and ending with farewell to David’s comrade the Jacobite fugitive Allan Breck Stewart, colliding pasts destined for relegation in a ruthlessly pragmatic future and yet with memory holding their common humanity to David.

            Ambiguity sometimes makes Art and may eventuate in better theology.

            Shrinking but still faithful congregations make a dangerous bargain in modernisations.   Pews give way to modern comfortable chairs with no question of disavowal of traditional doctrine but with some intangible heritage transparent towards invisibility.    Traditionally the Wee Frees were ferociously anti-Papist and certainly Fraser MacDonald’s father would have known such a preacher in his local colleague the Reverend Willie Still in the 1960s.   Yet as a practising and self-proclaimed Papist myself I have consistently found the warmest of welcomes in the Free Church explained by ministers (former Moderators) partly as agreement in our common belief in the authenticity of Scripture.   In the future saving remnants of our church-goers may recognise all of us in practice as well as theory to be followers of Jesus Christ Whose Gospels told us to love one another regardless of doctrinal, social, and ethnic divergences.

            To find wisdom for the future we must seek history, not simply in factual accumulation and theory innovation but reading artists who wrote great history, headed by Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson.   While Scottish identity now excludes racial ethnicity other than in honourable comedy, it has arisen from the bitterness dividing Highlanders amongst themselves, Lowlanders amongst themselves, Lowlanders against Highlanders, Protestant against Catholic, Presbyterians amongst themselves, Presbyterians against episcopalians, pagans against everybody, immigrants from elsewhere in the archipelago battling amongst themselves and their hosts on all class levels.  (That Scotland is now the archipelago’s most receptive country to immigrants requires more emphasis and exploration.)

Our history must at bottom be social history as discovered by Walter Scott, a crippled boy listening to servants, beggars, shepherds and grandmothers.  James Campbell weaves an elegantly instructive historical topography of literary Scotland discovering London whose method shows him an apt Scott pupil.  Kate Molleson on music recalls Scott for immediate observation amidst international awareness.  David Wheatley rightly singles out The Antiquary (1816) although rendering its protagonist and eponymous self-satire as ‘Oldbury ‘ for ‘Oldbuck’ (its hero is the beggar Edie Ochiltree).   All stay on this side idolatry, in sharp contrast to the silly superlatives of co-editor Professor Don Paterson canonising the Scottish Enlightenment and David Hume.  

The historian and novelist James Robertson trains us all in simultaneous self-education from conflicting artists from Scottish history, such as here drawing on Hugh MacDiarmid’s evangelistic critique of Scott and expressing ‘high regard’ for both:

One of MacDiarmid’s slogans in the 1920s was ‘Not Traditions — Precedents’.   Implicit in those three words is an acknowledgement that precedents have to come from somewhere, and if not from traditions, then from where?   It’s what you do with the inheritance that matters.   Do you stick it in a kist in the attic and let it moulder, do you copy it in ever paler imitations until all you are left with is pastiche, or do you learn from it, appropriating and remaking what will be useful for your own times? Even if you want to smash it to pieces, knowing how it is constructed is handy in order to make the demolition more effective.

Edwin Morgan’s poem ‘King Billy’, from The Second Life, his breakthrough collection of 1968, ends with these instructive lines:

Go from the grave. The shrill flutes

are silent, the march dispersed.

Deplore what is to be deplored,

and then find out the rest.

We must be familiar but not comfortable with the past.

Enchanting variations on these themes appear in what may be the greatest of all the poems included here from a poet whose poems are otherwise absent — co-editor Kathleen Jamie herself — called up to conclude James Robertson’s ‘Recovery’ (subtitled ‘Not a foreign country after all’ hymning the past as future). Far too modestly he affirms she distils:

into twelve lines what has taken me more than two thousand rambling words.   Poetry may not make anything happen, but it tells you how it might.

The Tradition

For years I wandered hill and moor

Half looking for the road

Winding into fairyland

Where that blacksmith kept a forge

Who’d heat red hot the dragging links

That bound me to the past,

Then, with one almighty hammer-blow

Unfetter me at last.

Older now, I know nor fee

Nor anvil breaks those chains

And the wild ways we think we walk

Just bring us here again.