Scottish Culture and the Lost past

Scottish Culture and the Lost pastAuthor(s): George WatsonSource: The Irish Review (1986-), No. 8 (Spring, 1990), pp. 34-45Published by: Cork University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/29735511 .

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Scottish Culture and

the Lost Past

GEORGE WATSON

I

Though Hugh MacDiarmid and Edwin Muir disagree profoundly about many

things, particularly the use ofthe Scots language, they agree as to what are the

critical points of Scottish history: the Reformation (which took a very Calvinist

tinge in Scotland), the Union of 1707, and industrialisation. And, indeed, these

(with the Highland Clearances) are the shaping forces ofthe Scottish mentalit?, however forcefully they are rejected, as they are in Muir's grave and magisterial

critique in his poem 'Scotland 1941' (in The Narrow Place, London: Faber and

Faber, 1943):

We were a tribe, a family, a people.

Wallace and Bruce guard now a painted field, And all may read the folio of our fable, Peruse the sword, the sceptre and the shield.

A simple sky roofed in that rustic day, The busy corn-fields and the haunted holms, The green road winding up the ferny brae.

But Knox and Melville clapped their preaching palms And bundled all the harvesters away, Hoodicrow Peden in the blighted corn

Hacked with his rusty beak the starving haulms.

Out ofthat desolation we were born.

Muir presents Calvinism as breaking the continuity of Scottish culture, and in

doing so, he provides a

striking example ofthe way in which Scottish writers and

the Scottish intelligentsia again and again revert to the notion of a lost past, or of

a divorce from history, whether as a result of Calvinism (as here), or ofthe

Union, or ofthe Highland Clearances, or of industrialisation. In their treatment

of these crises, the common tone is that reflected in the Caithness novelist Neil

Gunn, who writes in Highland River (London: Faber and Faber, 1937): 'Our

river took a wrong turning somewhere!' (ch. 11)

Particularly important to Muir is his sense ofthe hostility of Calvinism to the

34



Scottish Culture 35

poetic imagination. Specifically, Muir sees Calvinism as depriving the imagin? ation of its traditional roots and of the enormous energising creativity which

other cultures had experienced by participating in the Renaissance. He writes

sardonically in his 1929 biography of John Knox:

Looking down on the Island of Great Britain in the century which followed

Knox's death, the Almighty, it seemed, had rejected Shakespeare, Spenser and Donne, and chosen Andrew Melville, Donald Cargill and Sandy Peden . . . What Knox really did was to rob Scotland of all the benefits of the

Renaissance. Scotland never enjoyed these, as England did, and no doubt the

lack ofthat immense advantage has had a permanent effect. . . even to the

present day. (John Knox: Portrait of a Cabinist, p. 309)

Many Scottish writers follow Muir in drawing battle-lines between poetry, or

art in general, and Calvinism, notably Iain Crichton Smith, born on the Gaelic

speaking and formidably Calvinist Island of Lewis:

The great forgiving spirit ofthe word

fannings its rainbow wing, like a shot bird

falls from the windy sky. The sea heaves

in visionless anger over the cramped graves and the early daffodil, purer than a soul

is gathered into the terrible mouth ofthe gale.

('Poem of Lewis')

Calvinism is also the source ofthe long tradition of double life or split person?

ality in the Scottish consciousness, treated with humorous contempt in Burns's

'Holy Willie's Prayer', and with sombre power in Hogg's Confessions of a Justified Sinner and Stevenson's DrJekyllandMrHyde, and still very much a live conven?

tion, as shown in Robin Jenkins's novel of 1979, FergusLamont. Writers also at?

tack the hypocrisy associated with Calvinism ? Burns, again, and Grassic Gib?

bon with his unsparing portrait ofthe sexual glutton, the Reverend Gibbon, in

Sunset Song\ and they attack its naysaying, its banishing of fun and sport and art.

The writers also measure the dangers ofthe doctrine of Election, most entertain?

ingly in Muriel Spark's Prime of Miss Jean Brodk (1961) when Sandy Stranger at one point thinks bitterly of Miss Brodie 'She thinks she is Providence . . . she

thinks she is the God of Calvin, she sees the beginning and the end'. Calvinism is

no mere dead theological phenomenon: it has deeply permeated Scottish life at

every level, so much so that it is even possible to interpret in its light the flashing

arrogance and gallus skill, as well as the abject disasters, ofthe Scottish national

football team. Scots always believe, despite the evidence, that their team will

win the World Cup: it is elected, it is pre-destined. In a brilliant essay called 'A

Dream of Perfection' Alan Sharp, the author of A Green Tree in Gedde,



36 Watson

sees Calvinism through the fans' eyes:

When Salvation is by Grace alone then it is absurd to imagine God in the in?

finite remotenesses of time dickering over the team selection, omitting

players out of doubt. No Willie Ormond or Bobby Brown he. He knew who

to include in the pool. Your jersey was waiting from all eternity.

. .So you're chosen, all you have to

do is want badly enough to be chosen, and if you'd been swallowing the shit

that the Scottish race had been swallowing for donkey's years you would want

to believe so badly. So they did. In a great, galvanic leap of faith, they joined,

they climbed out ofthe bogs of their real life into the Scottish soul, and the

cry rose from the terracings ofthe Scottish soul, "We Are The People" (eds, Ian Archer and Trevor Royle, We'll Support You Evermore: the Impertinent Saga

of Scottish Fitba, 1976).

Calvinism, then, gets a very bad press from the Scottish writers, though not

everyone sees the account as being entirely in debit. Craig Beveridge and Ronald

Turnbull in a recent revisionary book assert that 'moral seriousness, distrust of

complacency' and 'passion for theoretical argument' are the positive legacies of

Calvinism. Even Edwin Muir, the hammer of Knox, acknowledges that

Scotland is a more democratic country than England, that there is in it a greater sense of human equality, and traces this to Calvinism. The Disruption in the

Scottish Kirk of 1843 was not about theological beliefs, but about the people's

rights to choose their own minister, and not have him foisted on them by the

laird and his allies. What I would want to stress is that despite the deep penetra? tion of Scottish historical culture by Calvinism, to the point where as Francis

Hart remarks, 'the severest anti-Calvinist seems unable to escape a sense of its

power' (The Scottish Novel: a Critical Survey, p. 400), the literature conveys a per? vasive sense of it as a distortion of Scottish life, as a wrong turn in the river, as

somehow divorcing the Scots from their true history ? whatever that might be.

II

The breaking of the Highland world at Culloden in 1745 marks the triumphant ? and brutal ? Hanoverian consolidation ofthe Union of 1707, and, of course,

in a very straightforward way directs our attention to another lost Scottish

world, another great 'what might have been'. (For Culloden, read the defeat of

Irish Jacobitism and the marginalising of Gaelic culture.) I want to concentrate,

however, on a more complex and ultimately more significant effect ofthe Union

on the Scottish historical imagination: its neutering of that imagination, which

began to feel little or no connection between the Scottish present and the Scot?

tish past, and consequently fled to the dreams of romance rather than to



Scottish Culture 37

the ideological power of Romanticism.

Paradoxically, the key figure is Sir Walter Scott. Paradoxically, because Scott is

frequently and rightly called the father ofthe European historical novel. But, whatever Scott's exemplary status to a generation of European

? and English ?

novelists, the ' internal

' effect ofhis work is ?

yet again ? to insist on the break in

the continuity of Scottish culture. In the postscript to Waverley Scott sums up the sixty years between the action he has recounted and his own time (here again the river metaphor appears) :

There is no European nation which, within the course of half a century, or lit?

tle more, has undergone so complete a

change as this kingdom of Scotland.

The effects ofthe insurrection of 1745 ? the destruction ofthe patriarchal

power ofthe Highland chiefs ? the abolition ofthe heritable jurisdictions of the Lowland nobility and barons ? the total eradication ofthe Jacobite party,

which, averse to intermingle with the English, or adopt their customs, long continued to pride themselves upon maintaining ancient Scottish manners

and custome ? commenced this innovation. The gradual influx of wealth, and extension of commerce, have since united to render the present people of

Scotland a class of beings as different from their grandfathers

as the existing

English are from those of Queen Elizabeth's time. . . . But the change,

though steadily and rapidly progressive, has, nevertheless, been gradual; and

like those who drift down the stream of a deep and smooth river, we are not

aware ofthe progress we have made, until we fix our eye on the now distant

point from which we have been drifted.

Cairns Craig says of this in 'The Body in the Kitbag: History and the Scottish Novel':

The double sense here, of incredibly rapid change, achieving in 60 years what

England had taken two hundred years to achieve, and, at the same time, of no

consciousness of change, is striking. The image ofthe amnesiac drift of pro?

gress offers vividly Scott's underlying sense that the entry into the modern

world is an entry into a storyless environment. . . contemporary history is a

silent drift, unparticularised by name or deed; narrative can only connect

with a disconnected past. (Cenrastus, 1, 1979)

If history is connected with narrative, as W. B. Gallie argues in his Philosophy and

the Historical Understanding (London: Chatto and Windus, 1964), then Scott's

present ? and Scotland's present

? is post-history. 'To be studied as history, a

set of past human actions must be felt by members of some human group to

belong to its past, and to be intelligible and worth understanding from the point of view of its present interests', says Gallie. Scott's Scotland is certainly ofthe

past, and certainly intelligible, but only, Scott implies, in an antiquarian or



38 Watson

'local colour' aspect, 'worth understanding' from the point of view of its pres? ent, Hanoverian, British, progressive interests. Thus the wedge is driven in.

What Scott achieved, in the very decades when he was providing Europe with a

historical conception of how societies evolve, was as Craig puts it, 'the reduction

of Scottish history to a set of stories which could not form a connected evolution

but could only be used in juxtaposition with and as a justification ofthe pro?

gressive and progressively non-narratable present. The insistence was

ideological: the assertion of a separate Scottish historical impetus would have

upset the new harmonious totality upon which North Britonism was founded'.

The laird of Abbotsford would not have wanted that.

In removing 'his set of stories' from the dynamism of real historical evolution, Scott sidestepped

? and helped other Scottish writers to sidestep ? the trans?

formative power of Romanticism, which functioned in England as a critique of

the dominant economic, utilitarian and mechanistic trends ofthe time. If the

religious pressure of Calvinism debarred Scots from participating in the

Renaissance, the social pressure of North Britonism performed the same task

with regard to Romanticism: another lost what-might-have-been. Floating away in 'the now distant point from which we have been drifted', in the words

of Waverky, what Scott's Scotland did offer, or could be made to offer, was the

land of romance ? romance, not romanticism ? a land of romance relentlessly

colonised ever since, while the real Scotland lay unlooked at. Here be the misty

glens, the skirl of the pipes over the loch, dark-visaged Olivier-type

Highlanders, the stag at bay ? in short, here be tartanry and Balmorality. Tom

Nairn persuasively sums up the significance of this particular swerve in the river.

Commenting on the general relationship between Romanticism and national?

ism in the 19th century, he writes:

Scotland was a drastic exception to whatever generalities hold in this field.

There, the new freedom of expression and the discovery of folk-culture could

scarcely be the precursors or the supports of a new nation in the making (as in

Italy, Hungary, Germany), nor the accompaniment of triumphant national?

ity (as in England and America). The Scottish nationality was dead. Scotland

was once more severed from those real conditions which should have lent

meaning to her culture. No revolution against the humiliation ofthe Union, no Scottish 1848, was to furnish a historical counterpoint to Robert Burns

and Sir Walter Scott. The romantic consciousness too, therefore, could only be an absolute dream to the Scots. Unable to function as

ideology, as a mov?

ing spirit of history, it too was bound to become a possessing demon.

Elsewhere, the revelation ofthe romantic past and the soul ofthe people in?

formed some real future ? in the Scottish limbo, they were the nation's

reality.



Scottish Culture 39

Ill

I am trying to describe a difficulty, in my view relevant to Ulster writers, that

Scottish writers have felt, for a variety of reasons, in getting a

purchase on

history. History they feel as fractured by Calvinism or distorted by Scott's

Enlightenment progressivism. History also poses problems for the writers ofthe

Highlands and Islands; but before I develop that point, I should stress the

degree of cultural diversity and fragmentation in so small a country. At times it

seems as if there is not one Scotland, but many. Thus, to go on the briefest of

literary tours, it is arguable that there are at least seven different literary regions: the Orkney of Edwin Muir and George Mackay Brown, with their sense of Scan?

dinavian links and obsession with the archaic rituals of farming and fishing, is a

long way ? and not just geographically

? from the working class novels ofthe

West of Scotland, represented by James Kelman, Gordon Williams, and William

Mcllvanney, and transcended in Alasdair Gray's splendid Lanark; there is the

Gaelic world ofthe islands as reflected in the poetry of Iain Crichton Smith, Derick Thomson and Sorley MacLean; the enclosed rural world of North-East

Scotland reflected supremely in Grassic Gibbon, and sustained by a still vigorous Doric dialect; the more Anglicised writing of those with strong links to Edin?

burgh, such as Muriel Spark and Allan Massie; the mainland Highlands ex?

plored by Neil Gunn; and less reputably, but still important, that never-never

land of the small village or burgh which is geographically located in what is known as the Kailyard. If we add that the writers have to make an ? often con?

tentious ? choice between three languages, Gaelic, Scots or English, then there

may well be a case for saying that, in literary terms at any rate, Scotland is less a

nation than a collection of regions. The regionalism of Scottish literature, its diversity and even fragmentation

? if

that is what it is ? might well function as a

strengthening example or ally to us in

Ireland as we contemplate our own divided society and its differing imaginative constituencies. It is certainly possible to argue that the concept of region is more

tangible than the concept of nation, and that it flies by those dangerous nets

constructed of essentialist, or idealist, or exclusivist concepts of nationhood.

Tom Crawford takes three well known formulations about nationalism: '

What*

individuals feel in their hearts is the nation' (the Jewish writer Achad Ha'am) ; 'a

nation is a soul, a spiritual principle' (Renan) ; 'it is nationalism which engenders nations, and not the other way round' (Ernest Gellner, Nations and

Nationalism). Crawford changes these to: 'What individuals feel in their hearts is

the region'; 'a region is a soul, a spiritual principle'; 'it is regionalism which

engenders regions' ; and remarks, ' I do not think I am

speaking in the spirit ofDr

Johnson kicking the stone when I say that these statements seem to me almost

nonsensical' ('The View from the North', in ed. R.P. Draper, The Literature of

Region and Nation, 1989, pp 108-24).



40 Watson

IV

I want now to turn to Neil Gunn, one of Scotland's best novelists, to illustrate

the Highland attitude to Scotland's past. In Gunn's novel, The Serpent, the pro?

tagonist muses over an archetypal rural scene:

Changes often appeared to be violent, and indeed were so frequently enough, but it was remarkable how, little by little, change was accepted in the lifetime

of a man so fully, so fatally, that bitterness itself was forgotten. Children ofthe

dispossessed, grown into men and women, reap, and sing as they reap, on the

lands taken from their fathers ... he saw figures singling their turnips in be?

tween the green cornfields on the narrow cultivated lands behind the houses.

With their slighdy bent heads they moved so slowly that it was easy to get the

illusion of an inner meaning or design that never

changed, (ch. 1)

The 'inner meaning or design that never changed', underlies, for Gunn, the

surface accidents of history. It is, indeed, hostile to history. Gunn remarks in Off in a Boat; 'The Scots are pretty good at history which, perhaps, is why most of

them mistrust it. For it is full of facts, most of them ugly'. And in The Serpent, Tom reflects to his shepherd friend:

History has so far been a remembering ofthe dirty business rather than an

understanding ofthe arts and the way of life ofthe peaceful generations. I

remember Alec Wilson getting a

hiding in school one day because he couldn't

remember all the high-up intrigues behind the bloody Massacre of Glencoe.

The history ofthe Highlands to us as boys was a sort of enlarged massacre of

Glencoe, and we had to remember the bloody bits or get walloped. (ch%. 14)

The opposition between the 'way of life of peaceful ("prehistoricai") gener? ations' and the 'bloody bits' of history is fundamental in Gunn's vision, and

leads to a dismissal of history and a corresponding celebration ofthe historyless

community, ofthe archaic, and ofthe folk. This belief in the supreme value of

the experience ofthe folk in turn is related to Gunn's vision, shared with Grassic

Gibbon, of the Golden Age. Future and past are linked here, and history

obliterated, in the timeless vision, and in this respect Gunn's imagination has

clear affinities also with those of Edwin Muir and Mackay Brown.

For any Highlander, the Clearances are of course one ofthe really 'bloody bits'

of history, and the effects are everywhere tangible. In one sense we can say Gunn

is the most impressive historian ofthe Clearances, in Butcher's Broom and The

Silver Darlings dealing with the subject head-on and in considerable detail. The

former novel leads up to, the latter follows upon the event, but in both what we

experience is the crashing intrusion of history on the timeless community. What

is of critical interest and significance here is that sense of intrusiveness, where



Scottish Culture 41

history is felt to be simultaneously powerful yet ? in a fundamental way

? irrele?

vant. These two novels have a narrative dynamism rarely encountered in Gunn's

other fiction (this is especially true of TheSilverDarlings, and may help to explain

why that work is Gunn's most popular book), and this narrative dynamism comes from the drive of history; and yet even here, we can perceive that Gunn

seeks to look beyond history. His characterization, for example, moves con?

sistently from the particulars of time and place towards the archetypal and legen?

dary, as in the famous sentence from Butcher's Broom:

In the centre of this gloom was the fire, and sitting round it, their knees drawn

together, their heads stooped, were the old woman, like fete, the young

woman, like love, and the small boy with the swallow of life in his hand

(ch.2).

(We may recall here Gunn's remark to Francis Hart that 'there is very little ofthe

Clearances in Butcher's Broom. The tragedy is the destruction of a way of life, and

the book is more about what is destroyed.') And in The Silver Darlings,

something analogous occurs in the association of Catrine with the land and the

past, and of Roddie with the sea; and beyond that, as Alexander Scott says, 'the

characters appear as archetypes because they see one another as such'. (For

Hart's memoir and Scott's essay, see (eds) A. Scott and D. Gilford, Neil Gunn:

the Man and the Writer, 1973.) The two novels, then, use history and yet seek to

deny its ultimate significance.

V

The horrors ofthe Industrial Revolution and its aftermath in 19th and 20th cen?

tury Scotland need no rehearsal. The photographs alone are eloquent in T.C.

Smout's recent social history, A Century of the Scottish People, 1830-1950,

(London: Collins, 1986) ? in particular, those ofthe children with rickets. Dur?

ing the 19th century, Scottish literature signally failed to get to grips with these

horrors ? in this, unlike (some) Irish writers' efforts to deal with the Famine. In?

stead, there was the Kailyard literature of Maclaren, Crockett and J.M. Barrie, the author of Peter Pan. Kailyard literature, with its snivelling sentimentality and

cosy parochialism, is not only the parent of Dr Finlay's Casebook but represents also yet another swerve away from historical reality: in it, Scotland is seen as

rural, peopled almost exclusively by lads o' pairts, tolerant and avuncular

ministers, tolerant and avuncular dominies or teachers, and tolerant or avun?

cular doctors ? much needed because of the frequent heart-rending death

scenes which spatter the texts like guano. In understandable reaction, twentieth

century authors have made good the deficiency, so much so that the major thrust of Scottish writing, certainly in the last 30 years, has been the creation of a



42 Watson

literature of working-class life. This has naturally been associated particularly with the west of Scotland, and especially Glasgow, both in terms ofthe settings ofthe poems, plays and novels, and in the provenance ofthe writers. I have no

space to do more than mention the work of Gordon Williams, James Kelman, Archie Hind, Alan Sharp, Tom Leonard, John Byrne, William Mcllvanney, Liz

Lochhead, and many others: the general point is that the conditions ofthe Scot?

tish cultural situation have produced a remarkable oddity: 'a literature in which

working-class experience is the centre, middle class experience the periphery'. It

may be going too far to say that 'in Scotland the only class which could be a focus

for a national culture is the working class, since the middle classes are but an echo

of English culture' (see Cairns Craig, Cenrastus, 6,1981, pp 19-21), but there is a

large element of truth in that.

While it would be overly reductive to see it as a working class novel, what is

truly original about Alasdair Gray's Lanark is that its experimental formalism

transmutes the determinism which accompanies the realistic mode, the medium

of most Scottish fiction about the working class. By fusing the real Glasgow with

the fantastic allegoric city of Unthank, what Lanark reveals is not merely the

need for us to imagine the city if we are to live in full consciousness of it, it is that, as Craig points out, we need to make it real to ourselves in imagination if we are

to realise the possibility of changing it. Gray's novel, in a curious way, enacts

Edwin Muir's distinction between the 'story', the merely contingent happen?

ings of time and history, and the 'fable', a legendary tale which reveals the true

meaning of those events.

The presence ofjoyce and ofFlann O'Brien is felt in Gray's novel, though they are totally assimilated and Caledonianised. What is not present, mercifully, is

any whiff of the Kailyard, whose odours I at least find penetrating some west of

Scotland working-class literature. That is to say that there is a perceptible

cosiness, a rather sentimental self-regardingness in some portrayals of the

working-class experience. It emerges in the tone ofthe presentation of Glasgow: hard men, and the macho life ofthe pub, are celebrated as proof of authenticity, as is a hard-nosed wisecracking (highly derivative from Raymond Chandler)

whether in the authorial voice ? 'a pub to a Scotsman is like an oasis to an Arab'

or in that ofthe characters: 'See Glesca? In Glesca they pick their noses wi' razor

blades. ' Frequently, the characters are too busy admiring their own jauntiness in

the face of communal deprivation to permit the author to mount any intelligent

critique ofthat deprivation: indeed, fatally, the dole, wisecracking Glasgow wit, the pub, the bare knuckle and a contrived and artificial emphasis on the warm

vitality of the tenement are identified as the badges of true Scottishness.

Another wrong turn in the river.

Surprisingly at first sight, even the convulsions of the experience of in?

dustrialisation are often presented in this literature of working class life in an



Scottish Culture 43

elegiac way: here is another lost piece ofthe past. The tone is marked in the

novels of William Mcllvanney, especially in Docherty and The Big Man. I'd like to illustrate the point, and to draw together other themes I've touched on, by

quoting from an excellent essay by Ian Jack from his book Before the Oil Ban Out, a set of essays on Britain during the Thatcher years. The essay, called 'Finished

with Engines', is about his father, a fitter in the various engineering factories of

the industrial belt of Scotland during the earlier part of this century, and very much a representative of a traditional, skilled working class. His son's memoir

beautifully catches the persistence of Scottish stereotypes deriving ultimately from Scott, the subdued resentment at Anglicisation, the tensions between dif?

ferent regions of Scotland, the pride in the industrial tradition, and, in its con?

clusion, the melancholy realisation that that tradition too is, in Scott's words, a

'now distant point from which we have been drifted':

Throughout the Fifties he took . . . aim at the nearest approach to a class

enemy: Edinburgh Scotsmen. It was a phrase of denunciation, like kulak,

aristo and Uncle Tom. Leeches and perverters of history, off with their heads.

Edinburgh Scotsmen did not necessarily live in Edinburgh, but the city sym? bolised their way of life. It had largely escaped the industrial revolution, its

elegant terraces and squares were filled with lawyers, insurance men and

generally people who 'did not get their hands dirty' and 'lived off the back of other folk'. They dressed their children in kilts but sent them to public schools based on the English model, where their accents were flattened out . . .

Edinburgh Scotsmen did not make anything, other than wills, and yet it

was their romantic and partial notions of Scottish history and Scottish dress

which captured the world's imagination; a Scot became a mean man in a kilt

who drank whisky and supported a lost cause. They had 'made a fool out of

Scotsmen'. The brightness of their kitsch obscured the dark complexities of a

great industrial nation and the lives of people like himself. Or so my father

thought, in the days before cranes and tall chimneys joined the clan system and Bonnie Prince Charlie in the pageantry of an old romance.

VI

Now, clearly, history has happened in Scotland. History is like taxes and death:

you can't stop it happening. But if there is any truth at all in the evidence I have

presented, many Scottish writers, from a variety of perspectives, feel that the

history of Scotland has been distorted, or lost, or is an unwelcome intrusion, or

is totally fragmented. There is no agreement about what Scottish history is, in

Gallie's sense of a 'set of past human actions . . . felt by members of some

human group to belong to its past, and to be intelligible and worth understan?

ding from the point of view of its present interests'. Yet clearly the search for a



44 Watson

comprehensive history, for the fable behind the mere story, is a kind of obses?

sion in Scottish writing. Why? Undoubtedly, in my view, this pressure on the Scottish imagination is due to

the proximity of the auld enemy, England, which by contrast seems totally secure in its sense of its history, a history made up, in Tom Nairn's words, of

'sonorous past achievement, enviable stability, and the painted folklore of

Parliament and Monarch'. Althusser points out that the most potent ideology is

the one so totally internalised that it is not even perceived by those in the grip of

it as an ideology: rather, the values and beliefs are felt to be as natural as

breathing. The English ideology is based on 'Churchillism', on the fact that State institutions ?

Monarchy, Parliament ? are regarded as synonymous with

the nation itself, and on a psychic location of Englishness in an idealised coun?

tryside (village pub, cricket on the green, the church clock still at ten to three

and honey still for tea), despite the fact that most ofthe English live in cities. As

for Churchillism, here is Harold Macmillan in 1967 describing the spirit of 1940, when, as he puts it with that familiar elision which the peoples of Scotland,

Wales and Northern Ireland have become wearily used to, 'England stood

alone':

Even the humblest could feel that they were taking part in the making of

history. As the new Armada was being prepared against us, we seemed indeed

the heirs of Queen Elizabeth and her captains. All the great figures ofthe past ?

Drake, Raleigh, Marlborough, Chatham, Wolfe, Pitt, Nelson, Wellington ? seemed alive again and almost standing at our side. The unity ofthe nation

was complete and unshakeable. (The Blast of War, p. 140)

The ideological furnace is working full blast: the furnace which also operated

during the Falklands conflict.

The Muse of History is called Clio. The English, I think, would picture her as of an abundant, amply curved Rubensesque floridity, adrip with lactation. By contrast, Clio would be seen by many Scots as anorexic. She isn't, really, but

Clio in her tartan would be seen as pretty skinny ? and maybe, Neil Gunn, Ed?

win Muir and George Mackay Brown wouldn't even want to let her near the tea

table.

Are there suggestive analogies here to Irish problems? The history of Irish

nationalism, and ofthat part of our island we now call the Republic, whatever

else it is, is dramatic and flamboyant. Yeats, realising that turbulent history as it

unrolled during his life time, looks back in 'The Municipal Gallery Revisited' on 'an Ireland / The poets have imagined terrible and gay', and speaks of'that tale /

As though some ballad teller had sung it all'. By contrast, the Ulster Clio, at least

until recently, looked a bit like the skinny match girl excluded from the table, Clio Anorexia yet again. I'm thinking of all those poems by Tom Paulin where



Scottish Culture 45

he sees Ulster as a strange museum, possessed of stillness but not history, waiting in the long lulled pause before history happens. I'm thinking too of Derek

Mahon's mushrooms, abandoned by 'the expropriated mycologist' ofhis 'lost

tribe', and ofhis tins in their melancholy apotheosis on the margin of history. I'm thinking of John Montague fumbling the broken shards of a lost tradition.

I'm thinking of Brian Moore's Belfast newsvendors 'calling out the great events

ofthe world in flat, uninterested Ulster voices', beside the forgotten memorials

of City Hall. I'm thinking ofKavanagh's Patrick Maguire: 'That was how his life

happened. / No mad hooves galloping in the sky, / But the weak washy way of

true tragedy ? / A sick horse nosing around the meadow for a clean place to die'.

And I'm thinking of a TLS reviewer who, not so long ago, confidently

distinguished between abundant Clio and anorexic Clio, in a review of Robert

Kee's The Green Flag: the reviewer speaks of

the superior attraction for the cultivated mind ofthe winding caravan oflrish

nationalism with its poets, assassins, scholars, crackpots, parlour revolu?

tionaries, windbags, mythopoeic essayists, traitors, orators from the scaffold, men of action, emerging from so long and so great suffering ofthe people to

impart an almost mystic quality to their often futile and often brutal deeds ?

the superior attraction ofthat to the hard, assertive, obsessive, successful self

reliance ofthe Ulster Protestant which has about it as much poetical imagina? tion as is contained in a bowler hat (TLS, 26 May 1972).

Even in this horribly oversimplified stereotyping, there may be an element of

truth. Scottish and Ulster writing have perhaps suffered from an inferiority com?

plex generated by their measuring of themselves, consciously or unconsciously,

against the apparent abundance of historical traditions, and an apparent historical certitude, in their near-neighbours. I think that for Northern Ireland

to recognise that Scotland, mutatis mutandis, shares some of its cultural prob? lems, may be a step forward, at least in this sense, that it shows that it is not

alone, not a freak in history. Like the Scots, perhaps even through the Scots, Northern Irish culture may shake off its historically-generated inferiority com?

plex. For there are many cheering aspects of cultural life in Scotland today,

especially an energy of debate about the issues I have tried to deal with here. On

this side ofthe water, the stresses and strains ofthe last 20 years have, at very

least, provoked an equally lively cultural debate, north and south ofthe border, as revisionist writers have begun to question the hitherto impregnable myths of

Irish nationalism and of Ulster dourness. What is going on in Ireland and

Scotland ? and in this respect I think we are very much more advanced than the

ideologically-inured English ? is a necessary deconstruction of a weighty and

encumbering accumulation of myths, a clearing out which may enable the

various populations ofthe British Isles archipelago to begin to live a little closer

to reality, as we approach the 21st century.



Documents

Scottish Culture and the Lost past