A Truth Lover E-Book

John Herdman

• Herausgeber: Leamington Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 160

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

Living as if an outsider, but functionally ingratiate to normal social circles, Duncan has his morality rocked by bearing witness to a violent act. Where can one land on judgement of abject behaviour when inflicted upon a person, perhaps more abject than the act itself? Pressure to testify pushes Duncan into various forms of escapism and a consequential number of captivating encounters, all whilst trapped in a brooding vacuum of self-reflection. Herdman's writerly magic is an underappreciated facet of Scotland's continually great literary output. "John Herdman's impressive first novel, A Truth Lover, is written as though it had been very well translated from the nineteenth-century Russian ... Mr Herdman and his book are much too good to be localised." P.J. Kavanagh, The Guardian "Both brilliant and very moving indeed ... If there is to be any vigorous tradition of novel writing in Scotland then this is the kind of book which will open up that prospect." Archie Hind, The Glasgow Herald ".... a very fine piece of imaginative writing .... This unusual novel whets one's interest in a new and most promising talent in the Scottish literary scene." Cuthbert Graham, Press & Journal "I find A Truth Lover the most impressive debut by a Scottish novelist for years." Douglas Eadie, Scottish International

Leseprobe

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“John Herdman's impressive first novel, A Truth Lover, is written as though it had been very well translated from the nineteenth-century Russian … Mr Herdman and his book are much too good to be localised.”

P.J. Kavanagh, The Guardian

“both brilliant and very moving indeed … If there is to be any vigorous tradition of novel writing in Scotland then this is the kind of book which will open up that prospect.”

Archie Hind, The Glasgow Herald

“…. a very fine piece of imaginative writing …. This unusual novel whets one's interest in a new and most promising talent in the Scottish literary scene.”

Cuthbert Graham, Press & Journal

“I find A Truth Lover the most impressive debut by a Scottish novelist for years.”

Douglas Eadie, Scottish International

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Contents

Title PageIntroduction IIIIIIAbout the AuthorBy John Herdman from Leamington Books Copyright

5

INTRODUCTION

In 2015, in response to Creative Scotland’s Literature Sector Report, I wrote a long-form poem in the Doric. The poem, much in the MacDiarmid style and formed in iambic pentameter, simultaneously offered a criticism on bureaucratic interference in literature in Scotland — criticism of our many Quasi-Autonomous Non-Governmental Organisations — which I coupled with personal descriptions of my own journey into and through what is now rather loftily known as ‘the literary sector’.

This personal journey took me back to 1993, which was the year I made a conscious move towards involving myself in Scottish letters. I mean to say that it was in the spring of that year when I made the decision as a young person, to write a book — the moment in fact when I decided to become a writer. In writing the poem I recalled exactly what I was reading on the day I made up my mind to write; and the four authors on my bedside the day I wrote the first lines of my first book were immortalised in the poem, as follows:

A late starter I was aged twenty five

faan I pickit up novels an typitt my first,

readin Elizabeth Smart, Todd McEwen

John Herdman and Hesiod. Thon was aa

it took tae me tae bolt fraily fae the

village kittie, gang tae wark nae mair and

become a writer in the big city. 6Like Hesiod, an individual

wi a role to play, a major source o

Greek Mythology, ferming techniques and

economic thocht. Like McEwen a

humourist o Scots naturality

an like Smart a prose poet — mysel as

subject — til which I added Herdman, pooder and

shot. I learnit tae write a published novel

fae ma readin, and drap by drib fae the

cleverality fit spilled o’er the lid o’ the crock,

cooncil fae my peers and maistly tenty weedin.

I first encountered John Herdman weeks before I began to write my novel, but there he was, and he has remained an influence ever since. These were indeed my chiefest influences that day — Smart, Herdman, McEwen and Hesiod.

It has remained a subject of fascination for me that Irvine Welsh’s novel Trainspotting was also published that year — because it was not Irvine Welsh that inspired me as he inspired many of my generation — but it was John Herdman.

The first time I laid eyes on John Herdman was at a reading of his 1993 novel Imelda at the Central Library in Aberdeen — although it would not be until around 2012 when I would meet and speak to him and have the fine pleasure of telling him what an influence he had been. In 1993, I was to read Imelda, Pagan’s Pilgrimage and A Truth Lover — three books by John Herdman — and my favourite of these was A Truth Lover. 7

Even then I could see that 1993 presented the writing community of Scotland with a fork in the road and that as a writer one could either go the way once more of the parochial voice — as many did — or they could do as I did and remain in what some might have then called ‘the European tradition’ — which in Scotland reaches from the front doors of Hogg and Stevenson, right until the 1990s and the works of John Herdman — which are in my view, much in the tradition of both Europe and Scotland.

When it came to the philosophical and social aspects of deciding to be a writer it was to the Herdman book A Truth Lover that I was drawn. I was in fact in those days, intoxicated by this book because even though I had decided to become a writer, it was my then job to mask this attempt at a career as a calling, something that A Truth Lover’s narrator Duncan Straiton, excels at.

Before I had even joined the literary scene and made friends with any writers or been to my first poetry reading, I had Duncan Straiton to inform me of what I must do. It is not often, for example, that we tell the bloody awful poets in our midst that their poetry is in fact bloody awful — and this is something that Duncan Straiton does, and is punished for. The first lesson here then, it appeared, was to lie when needed. Instead of lying however — Duncan Straiton, that exemplar of disesteem, is asked what he thinks of a colleague’s poetry at one point and he tells the truth — that the poetry is in fact no good at all. Here we find out why the truth is in fact often not worth the trouble, because the young poet despises Duncan Straiton for his truth-telling — 8verbally abuses him and is extremely upset, one of many memorable encounters in the story which build towards a kind of moral implosion which lays rightness and integrity bare for Duncan. When you tell me my book is good when in fact it stinks — you are doing more than preserving my feelings — you are telling a lie enough to encourage me to continue and maybe write a better book next time. In telling the poet the truth however, Duncan Straiton does not betray the cosmos, but like Shiva, is the standard of invincibility, might and terror. None of these are conditions fair for the human life of a writer however, and so as individuals and as a society, we tend to prop up such poor versifiers, if only for their own well being.

In fact, it’s not Shiva but Jonah that is invoked in the name of truth in A Truth Lover — Jonah who was filled with knowledge of the wickedness of the city of Nineveh, ‘intact in his own rightness’ as John Herdman says — and it was not from love but from truth that he was compelled to warn the inhabitants of the city. ‘For Jonah’s mode was the mode of truth and not the mode of love,’ John Herdman writes, ‘and it is possible that it is not given to one soul to be perfect in both truth and in love.’

When Duncan Straiton finally returns to Edinburgh at the close of part one of A Truth Lover he is firm in his resolution to be true and so he refuses a legal call to act as a witness to a violent crime and is charged with contempt of court and finds himself in prison for three months. It is curious to find out what the truth might represent in such a story as the violent incident at the head of A Truth Lover. 9

This is where I feel John Herdman may be talking explicitly about the calling of a being a writer. In prison, Duncan Straiton continues reflecting and there are more commentaries on this splendid idea — truth — and much of it is prompted by a laying aside of his pride and his reading of the Bible, as exampled in the analysis of the story of Jonah. It looks and feels like self-regard, but the calling to truth that Duncan Straiton experiences is exactly as earnest as the calling to become a writer that I — and perhaps even John, in his day, felt.

Duncan Straiton writes:

Stupidity: how pervasive is that most subtle of moral vices, from which only an exceptionally strong soul can hope to be entirely free. It must be in early childhood that the soul learns to be stupid, learns to protect itself from the truth by refusing to understand — and once that way has been chosen, how useless, how inconceivable to think of going back!

The truth is a subject that is rarely tackled head on like this, and doubly so within the realms of the postmodern where it is said that truth is entirely subjective.

To wit, Harold Pinter:

There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false. 10

One feels, however, that had Duncan Straiton assumed this from the off, he would have had significantly less trouble with the world — but yet I cannot blame him. I can’t blame Duncan Straiton for his drilling onward through the bedrock of experience, because his earnest endeavour, while frustrating for himself, is fascinating for the rest of us.

A person will never drill through that bedrock and reach a satisfactory point. Maybe the fortunate ones achieve some kind of Heideggerian endpoint where they feel they have become the thing they set out to be — but I doubt it.

A Truth Lover is in this manner something of a road-movie of a novel. The structure is pillar to post, and the narrative a series of encounters with others, broken up by reminiscent anecdote and fable, historical and biblical. There are no recurring characters, with the loose exception of Duncan Straiton’s best friend, Alan Bryce, who initially serves as a foil. Even in real life characters recur, but not in the life of Duncan Straiton, who has little to comment upon in terms of friends and family. I think I found A Truth Lover so compelling in 1993 because I was also setting out on such an earnest path — it felt earnest at the time, although for many years now, I have just had fun, and treated my work as fun — it’s much better that way. But at the start — in 1993 — I was terribly serious about my writing, and a little fervid, just like Duncan Straiton.

A Truth Lover describes such an ardent and diligent journey — a human working on a significant philosophical problem with no other tools than their own brute experience. What Duncan Straiton lacks is that which he 11commences the novel with — someone to discuss matters with. For it has always been central to the philosophical tradition to which he belongs, that satisfactory ends are achieved through debate and dialogue.

In considering one of the strangest encounters in A Truth Lover, that of the habitual liar who works with Duncan Straiton, we hack hard at another facet of truth — the existence of lies, and a person’s propensity to tell them, even when it cannot serve them in any way. This man’s tale ends in suicide and so it is highly cautionary — and his suicide is a sign that he has fallen away from everything — society, God and himself.

I am looking back on Duncan Straiton now, just as I might my younger self. All that Duncan Straiton seeks is truth, strangely. Not truth about reality, nor the truth of any given situation — but truth in and of itself, almost as if he is a philosophical lepidopterist. The objects presented to young Duncan Straiton through his senses do represent some things which are also true, insofar as they exist. But even though I have described Straiton as digging downwards through the bedrock of reality, nihilism seriously damages your health and he remains incapable of achieving his end.

Thank goodness — and thank John Herdman too — that Duncan Straiton is only fictional and that I have had his recurring example all of these years. I have never regretted not following the pack after The Fork of ’93 — and I still read A Truth Lover and my other favourite works by John Herdman, every four or five years, and I relish the quality of them and enjoy John as a prose stylist. 12

Thanks to John Herdman and the hero of this book, I have made my move — chosen my path — followed my leader. I know that for many, 1993 was the year during which the best clichés Scotland had to offer were perfected into a braw new set of tropes and similitudes. But back then, I set my sights on being the new John Herdman, as he was the person I chose to aspire to.

Did anyone else join me?

I don’t know, but I don’t meet that many Herdman readers of my generation. Maybe for me to follow John pointed to something deeper than the acceptance of a literary influence. The reason that Cartesian acrobatics don’t interest Duncan Straiton is tacitly attached to the idea of God. If the world were perhaps only to exist in his mind then he and the world would be one and the same, and the resulting issues would not be changed. In this way, Dr Johnson would rap him on the knuckles and say: ‘Thus I refute you!’

Like Duncan Straiton, and maybe like John Herdman himself — I have been quite alone, quite content to be alone — and I am a truer artist for it.

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A TRUTH LOVER

15

I

Freedom: by definition, what has not been attained.

Today, which should have been a long stocktaking of freedom, found me instead becoming aware of new fetters, fetters which I am not yet able to define. It is probably to be desired, now that my student days are ending, that I should begin to keep a journal; one day free from obligations has already been enough for me to apprehend a creeping sluggishness on the move in my skull. All day I seem to have stood around torpidly, feeling disillusion eroding the light-headedness of the relief which came with the completion of exams. I had projected activities for this time: swimming at North Berwick, walking in the Pentlands, even lazing in my bed. In the event I have done nothing but roam the streets of the city with Alan Bryce, as always when I have better things to do. Today I had a searching argument with Bryce. The subject, religion.

A fine June afternoon after finals, yet I felt disturbed. We drifted without direction, following schoolgirls for amusement; we could not be bothered talking much. Alan was in a sort of daze, I thought, whereas I felt fidgety and full of unease. My disturbance was accentuated by the balmy, slightly sweaty weather. I find heat physically uncomfortable; give me a cool, grey day when I can walk long distances by myself, fast but without sweating, and later read or just stand about in my room with a clear conscience. Such a day makes no demands upon one. I rather fear and dislike good weather; it oppresses me, I suppose, with the 16sense of the many opportunities it offers which somehow I always fail to take. Whatever activity I choose it seems the wrong one, and always I am sure I would have been happier elsewhere. And now that my life is to be my own at last I see that the same problem faces me permanently and on a much larger scale: faced with a riot of possibilities how shall I be able to choose between them, how determine upon any single form of action which will give shape to my outward life; how above all will I give a form to my obsessional resolve to live by the code of truth?

The coming divergence of our paths seemed to lie heavily on Alan and myself this afternoon. Perhaps that is why I tried to force certain things into the light: I was gritting my mind, too, feeling for a rough pathway which my feet might grip amid the deserts of my will. I seemed possessed by a purposeful negativism. We spoke desultorily of the future: I said that I would neither read law nor write a thesis. ‘Perhaps I should have been a philosopher like you,’ I said, and Bryce replied that he only played at philosophy. This displeased me somewhat, his words rankled in me. He asked me how I intended to live, and I could answer only that something would doubtless emerge in time. It is rare for Bryce and myself to find each other irritating. I considered whether it was not the conscious viciousness which we have in common which had made us friends.

Bryce was eating out of a paper bag those boilings to which he is addicted. He told me once that he enjoyed taking a bagful into the National Library with him, where he would sit clacking them against his teeth and cracking them 17loudly to the fury of those around him. As we walked along he suddenly punted one of these sweets into the middle of the street, where it bounced on the roof of a car with a loud ping. I watched him with amusement, scuttling along beside me, a small sturdy nimble man, his expression deadpan but his mouth smiling faintly. He has always to bustle to keep up with my long strides, because of the shortness of his shanks. Our minds, though, are very similar. I was in a sour frame of mind, and experienced a perverse desire to provoke my friend. Progressing at one stage in the afternoon along a narrow stretch of pavement in the Canongate, we found our path partially blocked by the slow progress of an extremely bent old woman and by the actions of her walking-stick which splayed out at an angle of forty-five degrees to the pavement. ‘Jostle her into the gutter,’ suggested Bryce, and made as if to do so, but he dodged past her on his rugby player’s toes. This small incident initiated a conversation which has much disturbed me. For we began to consider in our customary sardonic manner the desirability, from the economic and social standpoints, of the abolition of old folk by means of the painless destruction of all citizens over seventy years of age. ‘I can see,’ said Bryce, ‘the psychological barriers against actual killing. We cannot expect such a radical degree of enlightenment to come quickly. May I suggest this solution: the employment by the state, on a subsistence or rather below subsistence diet, of all registered old folk in rough manual labour—as dustmen or stone breakers, say, or in pulling milk floats. This method would speedily accomplish 18