Alan Riach reminds us of the aim of The National’s essay series

In addition to myself, these columns have been taken by various splendid guest writers, most recently over the last few months by my friend John Purser, whose vignettes, anecdotes, stories and sketches from episodes in his extraordinary life have offered a panorama of illuminations and insights.

Many of those episodes recounted would be almost unimaginable in today’s world. All the more reason, then, to commemorate them!

Other contributors have included the artist Alexander Moffat. Sandy and John and I gathered together a selection of the first year’s essays to form the book Arts And The Nation: A Critical Re-examination Of Scottish Literature, Painting, Music and Culture (Luath Press, 2017).

READ MORE: Husam Zomlot thanks people of Scotland in speech to SNP conference

There were a dedication and an epigraph. The dedication was to Callum Baird, Richard Walker and Roxanne Sorooshian and all the editorial team at the newspaper.

Today, that would include Laura Webster, Jane Cassidy and Stewart Ward, and in fact the whole crew, for their untiring work to do what they can in the face of pretty heavy odds stacked against us.

The epigraph was: “‘The National is the worst newspaper in the world’ – Michael Gove.”

The world might seem sometimes full of monsters, fools, degenerates, horrors, but people usually turn into such liabilities by transforming themselves from their own small-mindedness and fearful incapacities. They’re especially inclined to do so when they’re in unwarranted positions of power. Which is only to say that they are, most essentially, twerps.

The condemnation of twerps is accolade enough to go on. In any case, we have more important things to do than pay much attention to such people. There are a few notes I’d like to mark here simply to remind us that there are, indeed, still some good things in the world.

But let’s go back first to the start of these columns. This is from the preface to Arts And The Nation, an essay entitled The National and the Arts of Scotland: “When a new daily newspaper was launched in the wake of the Scottish independence referendum in 2014, it might have seemed doomed to failure.

“Sales of hard-copy papers were sharply declining throughout Britain and The National, displaying on its front page, ‘The newspaper that supports an independent Scotland’, branded it, for some, as a political cyclops. Both presumptions were proved wrong.

“The National picked up a respectable readership and published articles and letters both approving and criticising Scotland’s potential as a resumed nation state. First under the editorship of Richard Walker, then of Callum Baird, The National showed no allegiance to any political party but addressed a major democratic deficit in the press.

“In the referendum, 45% of the electorate voted for independence but almost every mass media news outlet, all the daily papers and television news programmes, explicitly or implicitly favoured the Union.”

That was the context. In January 2016, I began writing a weekly essay for the paper, covering different areas of Scottish and international literature and the arts. The first was about one of the first Scots Makars, William Dunbar, but then I focused on less familiar Scottish poets such as the Gaelic ones, Duncan Ban MacIntyre and Alasdair mac Mhaighstir Alasdair, or the first woman to publish a book of poems in Scotland, in 1603, Elizabeth Melville.

I wanted to present these writers alongside modern and contemporary international authors such as Wole Soyinka and Edward Dorn; alongside Scottish artists including JD Fergusson, Joan Eardley and John Bellany; alongside the American Alice Neel and the art of the ancient Celts; alongside composers such as John Blackwood McEwen, Cecil Coles and Helen Hopekirk.

And all of these practitioners were to be considered in the contexts of discussions of education, political and social priorities, the role of TV and mass media, different genres of writing and a panorama of ideas about nationality and culture.

The National was taking a risk to publish these essays. No other daily newspaper in Britain has covered arts subjects to such an extent and so regularly. Pause on that. Just let it sink in.

This is also from the book’s preface: “Target audiences are the object of commercial planning today to a degree unthinkable 50 years ago. Financial strategies endorse categories to help sell things: you know what you’re getting, with specific papers, magazines, films, TV programmes, box sets, online information quests, so forth.

“But what about serendipity, going into a library and finding something you weren’t looking for that turns out to be far more valuable than whatever you were trying to find?

“Boxed knowledge is what passes for professionalism these days, and we’ve always been more interested in opening things out. Unanswered questions, confident uncertainties, the spirit of enquiry, the optimism of curiosity, all seemed worth affirmation and practice.

“Newspapers don’t usually allow this degree of freedom. Maybe it’s something we can say about the movement for independence. It was certainly there in the Yes movement running up to the 2014 referendum.

“Once you are united in a common cause, and the cause is good, and once you’re among people with a degree of professionalism and expertise you can trust, you can allow things to happen in concert without micromanaging and controlling everything to such an excessive degree that paranoia rules over energy.

“The latent liability in energy is anarchy, but when it’s working in a direction with a sense of purpose like the independence movement, and according to the priorities of the arts, and not violence, there’s a lot you can do. There’s a lot of self-respect to be regained. There’s a lot of fun to be had. There’s a lot to be learned. And that’s what we trusted to.

“Our argument has always been that news of the arts is vital, the work of understanding what truths the arts can bring to people takes effort and time, is at odds with the instant gratification to which ‘rolling news’ 24/7 is not just dedicated but enslaved.

“Newspapers rarely publish material that requires more than one read-through. Even the classy weekend supplements of the self-important London-based broadsheets are usually done with by Monday.

“The distinction we were proposing, and that The National took on, was that all news of the arts, and pre-eminently literature, music and painting, would not only be helpful educationally, because most formal education in Scotland still tells pupils and students next to nothing about the nation’s cultural history, but it would also be a crucial complement to ‘news of the day’.

“Or, whatever the ‘news of the day’ is, its significance might be measured against what the arts have to tell us about humanity in its historical depth and geographical range.

“Writers from Africa or America are sometimes going to be more relevant to immediate, pressing Scottish political questions than contemporary local commentators.

“And surely, calling on such resources is more useful, literally, than the embarrassment of ‘vox pop’ soundbites TV and radio so stupidly gives us. When the newsreader says, ‘And what do the people in the street think?’, and the microphone is thrust to the mouth of someone who knows nothing but has an opinion, the only sane response is to switch off.

“But the question remains: why do the programme makers do this? And why do they edit these responses to give a micro-climate of opinion not only at odds with informed opinion but incalculably different from anything a majority or even a fair variety of people might say?

“The obviousness of the manipulation is so blatant it’s taken for granted, and as such, becomes even more dangerous.

“So we set ourselves to oppose this, in however small a degree. And The National took it on. It started with a promise to deliver essays irregularly but it quickly turned into a regular feature. And the response has been astonishingly positive, from a range of people.

“The very first essay prompted a letter to the editor: ‘How fantastic to see an article about William Dunbar in a mass circulation paper.’ One MSP commented: ‘To think we have lived to see cultural writing in a Scottish newspaper again – a time of marvels.’

“Over the first year, there were further approvals. A poet and university professor said, ‘I’m glad we have a paper capable of running such articles [especially when teaching] bewildered students who sense there is/was a Scottish culture, but know of nothing beyond the last decade.’

“Another London-based poet and librarian wrote: ‘It is incredible that work like yours can actually be published in a national newspaper. I say it with a great sense of the fragility of such discourse, and knowledge of not just the thin-ness but the disgusting assumptions of other kinds of news commentary.

“‘A lot of folk say ’twas ever thus (a phrase I particularly dislike, it seems so historically illiterate), but these times are especially different and frankly vile. Well done for work of this kind.’ Another writer emailed: ‘We don’t get enough well-thought-out analyses like [this] of the Scottish cultural and linguistic world and explanation of our myths.’ There were many others.”

Set against these the comment by the Edinburgh-born, Aberdeen-educated then Conservative MP for Surrey Heath, England. Gove tweeted to the public at 11.44pm on December 6, 2016, the message we placed as an epigraph to the book, as quoted above. Our priorities and commitments were firmly and happily reconfirmed. They remain so.

Each essay since then has been a fresh take on new and old subjects, addressed to as wide a readership as possible. They arise from the conviction that the new Scotland we might imagine and help bring into being can never be really democratic unless it gives the arts the priorities of place and attention they demand.

My own professional priority, Scottish literature, has been the subject of many essays over several years, which were later revised and form the substance of my book, Scottish Literature: An Introduction (Luath Press, 2022) The National was a testing ground for presenting my subject in accessible form, addressing a broad, non-specialist readership, a close discipline in itself.

So it seems worthwhile here, in essay 500, to pause for a moment to reaffirm what the purpose of these essays is. And to note a few things that are currently either with us or approaching.

On the horizon – Sangschaw: a reading of Hugh MacDiarmid’s groundbreaking first book of poems, Tuesday, October 21, Biggar Corn Exchange, 5pm, as part of the Biggar Little Festival, with Gerry Cambridge, Chris Grieve, Jane Grieve, Sally Magnusson, James Robertson and myself, and musical performances by the children of Black Mount Primary School, Elsrickle, and a recital of MacDiarmid’s lyrics set by FG Scott by Kirsteen McCue and David Hamilton.

With us all this year – The Northern Muse centenary: 100 years since the publication of the breakthrough anthology edited by John Buchan, establishing incontrovertibly the seriousness, depth, range, value and validity of the Scots language in the canon of our national literature.

And with us even more, as it has been for years and continues to be – The West-Eastern Divan Orchestra. Do you know of this? It is a full orchestra made up of musicians from countries across the Hispanophone world and the Middle East – of Egyptian, Iranian, Israeli, Jordanian, Lebanese, Palestinian, Syrian and Hispanic background.

It was jointly founded in 1999 by Argentine-Israeli conductor Daniel Barenboim and Palestinian-American academic Edward Said, who named the orchestra and workshop after West-östlicher Divan, an anthology of poems written by the German polymath Goethe, a lasting and continuing challenge to humanity to commit ourselves to the development of world culture.

So here’s my question: Why should the life of this orchestra not be a running headline telling everyone about both achievement and purpose in every single day’s mass media news? Its work is action that brings hope.

And this is what these columns are for. This is what the arts all work to try to bring about. I once heard the composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein say the following words as part of a TV documentary, and I’ve heard them since on BBC Radio 3 but I have no specific source for them and wish I did. Nevertheless, the words tell an important truth, so I’ll let them stand here just as they are.

I won’t subscribe or ask or assume that anyone else should acknowledge any universal meaning to the last word Bernstein utters here, but I do think what he says contains a great and irreducible truth.

And if these essays, these columns, stand for anything in the new and independent Scotland we would wish to bring into being, then they are endorsements of that truth: “Because the nature of music, of great music, great serious music, and great pop music, may I say, is a kind of investigation of the psychological geography of one’s insides in a way that no other art can do.

“I think the literary art can to a much greater extent because it uses words and can describe but music can do something more than describe what goes on.

“In other words, it can articulate certain inner movements – how can I tell you what I mean? – inner motions of the psyche that one goes through every second of life, so that you recognise your deepest, innermost life in the progress of a piece of music.

It’s a power that enables you to touch the indescribable. It’s the ultimate metaphor, for me, music.

It names the unnameable. Let me put it this way: that human beings don’t seem to get along with one another very well or to communicate very well.

“Music is one medium through which human beings do communicate on a very deep level, on a very high, also, a high level. In that sense it replaces what seems to be an almost impossible task, which is to get people to live together in peace. In that sense, it partakes of the divine.”