ALAN Riach’s startling new book at once calls to mind, for its single-handed, multiple-minded virtuosity, Declan Kiberd’s brilliant study Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation (1996). If you haven’t read Kiberd, you should, but keep it back until you’ve bought and read Scottish Literature: An Introduction, in key and obvious ways, a very different kind of work from Kiberd’s, one in a class of its own.
Kiberd is both a scholar of the Irish language and a master of the modern Irish canon. Without that body of work (from, say, Swift and Sheridan, to Yeats, Joyce, and Beckett) what is called “English” or even “British” literature, would be less than half its shadow cast at noon, but for Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne, Milton, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Dickens, Hardy, Woolf, Auden, Orwell, Greene etc.
How interesting that the same cannot quite be said for Scottish literature, whether written in English, or in Scots (whether by Dunbar, Robert Garioch or WN Herbert – set Gaelic and Latin aside for now). Scotland is another country (I write as a native of Wales of Irish-Scottish descent).
They do things differently there and somehow what they do is largely unassimilable to “English Literature”. There is no Anglo-Scottish category akin to Anglo-Irish.
Hume, the philosopher becomes a British empiricist (and historian of England). Boswell is Dr Johnson’s brilliant dog-at-heel (and proto-Romantic). Burns, Scott, Hogg all may get a marginalised look-in in classes on Romanticism.
Perhaps the modern and contemporary novel might provide opportunities to study Iain Banks, Irvine Welsh or Alasdair Gray. But that’s about as far as it goes in the “British” university system. (You certainly won’t find Hugh MacDiarmid on the syllabus with other Modernist practitioners of major stature).
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Bizarre to think, too, how American Literature, despite the 19th-century protests of Emerson and Thoreau, is still similarly marginalised in the teaching of literature in the USA. British imperialism works in mysterious, and not-so-mysterious, ways, its wonders to perform, borne on the wings of the English Language.
It was a man called Daniel Corkery (1878-1964) who first stirred things up in modern, post-colonial Ireland, as to the idea of a specifically Irish sensibility. Kiberd quotes him as decrying Ireland’s “national consciousness” as being “in a native phrase [...] a quaking sod” that gave “no footing”. It was “not English, nor Irish, nor Anglo-Irish”.
The Republican writer Thomas MacDonagh (1878-1916), executed by the British for his part in the Easter Rising, had sought, in his posthumously published Literature in Ireland: Studies Irish and Anglo-Irish (1916), to describe a commodious vicus (an accommodating way) by which Irish Gaelic speech patterns (and so ways of thinking) shaped Hiberno-English speech and resounded within its literature, to create something that was distinctively “Irish”.
Such ecumenicalism sounds persuasive, and no doubt it has carried the day, but it was anathema to the polarising Corkery.
Riach is no polariser but heart and soul a Scottish ecumenicalist. He seems instinctively to have his finger on the pulse of what a Scottish “national consciousness” might be, and it is no “quaking sod”.
The languages question and the idea of a national consciousness in Scotland are different, and even more complex than for Ireland. But it is useful to bear the Irish dynamic in mind, and to think of Riach performing for his country a cultural task on a par with that undertaken by Kiberd for Ireland, a reconciliatory task, but in an even more fissile territory, across a far greater span of time.
Kiberd was writing in and for a (largely) post-colonial Ireland. In the minds of a large, and it seems growing, proportion of its population, Scotland remains in a colonial condition. It is (to draw on the late Boris Johnson’s lexicon) “a vassal state”. However long it remains so is Scotland’s business, although, in the sclerotic mindset of Westminster politics and its undemocratic Unionism, clearly not exclusively so.
But whether or not the Scottish people gird their loins for independence any time soon, Alan Riach’s book proves, if ever proof were needed, that its cultural independence was achieved long ago and is and has ever been organically evolving with the greatest vigour. Not, that is, without opposition and many a frustration, from both outwith and within the country.
No-one did more to get to grips with the several polarities involved in any attempt to describe or define Scottish literature than Hugh MacDiarmid. His The Golden Treasury of Scottish Poetry (1940), teasing at Victorian “Palgravism”, pioneered for poetry what Riach has set himself to do in his doorstop of a tour de force on a grander scale, seeking effectively to “invent”, or record the invention, of Scotland’s literature, and not just “modern” Scotland either but from that highly elusive concept “the beginning”, where the oral first seeps thenfloods into the written, and when terrain was more a matter of physical geography than political, when borders were as fluid as the waters of the sea, and cultural, artistic exchange organic among trading tribes.
In 1985, the historian Gwyn A Williams published a classic “History of the Welsh” called When Was Wales? Riach’s answer to the question “When was Scotland?” is more “When was it not?” Nonetheless it is true that there was a time (500-700 AD its zenith) when much of what we know as Scotland, as far north as Strathclyde and beyond to Dalriada, spoke an early form of Welsh. It was a Brythonic territory. Strictly speaking it was not yet “Scotland”.
The great poem of this era is Aneirin’s “Y Gododdin” – “Gododdin” being the name given to an area of land south of modern Edinburgh. A warrior-band from there went south to engage the “English” at Catraeth (Catterick in modern-day Yorkshire) and suffered a catastrophic defeat to which Aneirin’s poem is a magnificent dirge in the heroic mode. With surely a twinkle in his eye, calculated to raise many a Welsh (and other) eyebrow, Riach refers to it as a Scottish poem. And this is just one of his many happy provocations.
Everyone knows what MacDiarmid did for “Scots” but he also worked the other, occidental, ragged edge of the map. He had been campaigning on behalf of the Scottish Gaelic tradition at least since “Lament for the Great Music” in his 1934 Stony Limits volume.
In his Treasury we meet his contribution to the awakening he sought, in the form of his own English language versions of Alasdair mac Mhaighstir Alasdair (Alexander MacDonald)’s “The Birlinn of Clanranald” and Dhonchaidh Bhàin (Duncan Ban MacIntyre)’s “The Praise of Ben Dorain” (and his “Last Leave of the Hills”).
Surely it’s fitting that Riach, the editor of MacDiarmid’s collected works, should carry forward the great poet’s work on this front, as he has done, in his own versions of “The Birlinn” and “Ben Dorain”, versions full of vitality, widely praised, including by no less an authority than the Gaelic scholar Ronald Black.
It is an unsurprising feature of the new book that it gives extensive coverage to the Gaelic tradition, graced with some fine English-language versions by the author.
More than this, it attends also to the Gaelic present, or recent past, for which see sections 64-66 on: “Gaelic prose fiction: from the 16th to the 20th centuries”; “Gaelic prose fiction in English and the Ùr-sgeul initiative”; “Modern Gaelic prose fiction: a flood of new novels”.
That these come sandwiched between 63: “An awkward squad: from David Lindsay to Andrew O’Hagan”; and 67: “Possible dancers: Irvine Welsh, Carl MacDougall and AL Kennedy” in a chunk of the book devoted to “Authors and Works” should caution readers to hold on to more than their hats as they ride the rollercoaster of Alan Riach’s mind.
Like MacDiarmid in this, too, Riach has “no fluent knowledge of Gaelic”. His name – the word Riach – is, he tells us, a Gaelic word: “riabhach”. Colin Mark’s Gaelic-English Dictionary informs me that it means “brindled”, “streaked”, “drab, wet and grey” (of a moor).
Riach is at least three generations adrift of his Gaelic heritage. But that’s not his point. What he recognises and wants his fellow Scots to remember is that many of them share his predicament.
They have “lost the language of their names”. So whether they can speak Gaelic or not, it is their language and its literature part of their own story, and they should engage with and celebrate it.
Riach is a poet and a serious and intuitive, voracious intellectual. The mirror to his mind, his writing sings and bustles with energy and daring. It ranges far and wide across the arts, nationally and internationally, and rallies the reader to be bolder. As anyone who knows him or has heard him extemporising will tell you, he writes as he talks and talks as he writes.
So this new book is a very rare thing. It holds the reader’s attention as if she is directly in the author’s company. The rollercoaster narrative is punctuated by sharp assertions and observations: “All stories are provisional ... ” (which is to say so too is his, but how it provides!). “Let’s be possessed by the intrinsic optimism of curiosity,” he urges, then takes our breath away with the likes of: “The onset of the north European Winter invites us to encounter the metaphysics of spring ... ” He is brilliant too on story and memory.
In an important way I am obviously wrong to compare Riach’s book with that of Kiberd. As it says on the tin, Riach’s work is introductory. It begins with three challenging questions: “Why read Scottish literature?”; “What is Literature?”; “Was there ever a ‘British’ Literature?” His answers are as simply given as they are inspiring.
In a kind of counterpoint to these questions, there are in the book’s closing final, sixth part on “A Loose Canon”, some “answers” to questions raised by the idea of canonicity of which among the most salient is the assertion that “A canon is a form of cultural empowerment” – a claim that may be made without caveat for Riach’s book.
He doesn’t distract us with footnotes. He isn’t writing for scholars but for you and me and the woman in the street and for readers of The National where much in his book was first aired.
The spectacles of books are certainly at no risk of becoming a weariness of the flesh for Alan Riach. For him, Scottish literature is something to be lived in and through, to be more than cherished, to be celebrated up and down the land, in every nook and cranny and corner of the map, across and within the other arts (he is always excellent on music and the visual arts) and internationally.
His book is a rallying cry. It is exciting to read, and it is humbling. So it isn’t a scholarly production of the same tenor as Kiberd’s. But, in the end, it does the same work for Scotland as Kiberd’s book does for Ireland.
Scottish literature wasn’t written overnight and is hardly a work to be read at a sitting. Though you must read it from end to end. But perhaps before you settle in to your marathon, dip into it, to get a taste of it. Try for example, one of the traditional peaks in the landscape, the section on Walter Scott and find one of the sharpest and most inspirational accounts of Waverley anyone might wish for.
Then to sample Riach at his thoughtful, reflective and pedagogic best read him on James Robertson and Robertson’s 2010 novel And the Land Lay Still, a polyvocal epic work that travels Scotland, temporally and spatially, and profoundly, in ways analogous to Riach’s own approach.
This is surely a work destined to be a landmark in Scotland’s literary history, for all time, a classic at a critical moment in its subject’s destiny.
Luath is to be warmly congratulated on publishing it. They have made a most attractive book, one greatly enhanced by the painting reproduced on its cover, “The Cuillins, Evening, April 1964” by Riach’s uncle, John Cunningham (1926-98).
Alan Riach will be at the Edinburgh International Book Festival with Fiona Paterson and James Robertson on Monday, August 22, at 2.15pm. Book tickets here:
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