Arts and the Nation E-Book

Alan Riach

• Herausgeber: Luath Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 428

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

A panorama of ideas about nationality and culture, Arts and the Nation arose from the conviction that Scotland can never be really democratic until it gives the arts the priority of place and attention they demand. This book is a fresh take on subjects new and old, with multifaceted ideas of nationality and culture. Those featured include: William Dunbar, Duncan Ban MacIntyre and Elizabeth Melville are read alongside international authors such as Wole Soyinka and Edward Dorn. J.D. Fergusson, Joan Eardley and John Bellany are considered with American Alice Neel and the art of the ancient Celts. Composers like John Blackwood McEwen, Cecil Coles and Helen Hopekirk are introduced, amongst discussions of education, politics, social priorities, the mass media and different genres of writing. What was the real reason Robert Louis Stevenson dedicated his dark masterpiece to his cousin Katharine de Mattos? Why was Katharine's own tale of duality published under a pseudonym? When Fanny Stevenson 'stole' another story idea from Katharine, why did RLS explode with Hydelike rage at the cousin for whom he had once been 'the one that loves you – Jekyll, and not Hyde'? Featuring the full text of Katharine's tale of duality, Fanny's stolen story and another tale revealing Katharine's grief at losing her cousin's love forever, Mrs Jekyll & Cousin Hyde sheds new light on one of the greatest Victorian authors.

Leseprobe

ALAN RACH is a poet and the Professor of Scottish Literature at the University of Glasgow. He was born in Airdrie in 1957 and studied English at Cambridge University 1976–79. He completed his PhD in the Department of Scottish Literature at Glasgow University in 1986. His academic career has included positions as a post-doctoral research fellow, senior lecturer and Associate Professor at the University of Waikato, New Zealand 1986–2000 and he has been a visiting lecturer or keynote speaker at universities around the world. His most recent books of poems are The Winter Book (2017) and Homecoming (2009).

ALEXANDER (SANDY) moffat rsa is an artist and teacher. Many of his paintings grace the walls of Scotland’s National Portrait Gallery, including the wellknown Poet’s Pub and other portraits of significant Scottish writers. Born in Dunfermline in 1943, he studied painting at Edinburgh College of Art. He was the Director of New 57 Gallery of Edinburgh 1968–78, later joining the staff of Glasgow School of Art, where he became Head of Painting 1992–2005.

JOHN PURSER is one of Scotland’s most important cultural ambassadors. His award-winning radio series and book, Scotland’s Music, is widely regarded as the essential authority on the subject. He is an award-winning composer, playwright and author, as well as a champion of Scottish Gaelic, and continues to bring new passion to the Scottish cultural landscape.

First published 2017

ISBN: 978-1-912147-10-6

The authors’ right to be identified as author of this book under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 has been asserted.

The paper used in this book is recyclable. It is made from low chlorine pulps produced in a low energy, low emission manner from renewable forests.

Printed and bound by Bell & Bain Ltd., Glasgow

Typeset in 11 point Sabon by Lapiz

© Alan Riach, Alexander Moffat and John Purser 2017

For Callum Baird, and Richard Walker and Roxanne Sorooshian, and all the editorial team at The National.

The National is ‘the worst newspaper in the world.’ – Michael Gove

Contents

Preface: The National and the Arts of Scotland

Introduction: Making Sense of Things

PART ONE: Authors and Literary Contexts

Not Burns – Dunbar! So who was William Dunbar?

Not Burns – Duncan Ban MacIntyre!

Not Burns – Alasdair Mac Mhaighstir Alasdair!

Not Burns – Elizabeth Melville!

Modernist Montrose: Scotland’s 1920s Capital of Culture!

Modernist St Andrews: What Really Happened in the 1930s?

Modernist Shetland: The Measures Taken in the 1930s

As Others See Us: John Keats, Herman Melville and Arnold Bax

Jackie Kay: Scots Makar

PART TWO: Artists and Exhibitions

J.D. Fergusson – Art and Nationality

John Bellany, Elsie Inglis and the Scottish Women’s Hospitals

Modern Scottish Women Painters & Sculptors 1885–1965

What Can We Learn from Alice Neel?

Two Friends, Two Major Artists Revalued: William Gillies and John Maxwell

Joan Eardley

PART THREE: Scotland’s Music and Composers

National Music

Scotland’s Music: Alexander Campbell Mackenzie

Scotland’s Music: Hamish MacCunn

Scotland’s Music: John Blackwood McEwen

Frederic Lamond: A Soaring Talent that Wretched Poverty Could Not Keep Down

Helen Hopekirk: Romantic, Poetic and Tinged with Gaelic Folk Music

Erik Chisholm: The Pacifist who made Music in the Thick of War

The Tragic Silence of Composer William Wallace

Cecil Coles: A Genius and a Hero

PART FOUR: Mass Media

Scotland: The Promised Land

The Most Deadly Weapon in the World: The Power of Mass Persuasion

Scottish Literature, Mass Media and Politics

Scottish Literature and New Media

PART FIVE: Scotland International

What Can We Learn from Edward Dorn?

What Can We Learn from Wole Soyinka?

Nationalism and Art: Unanswered Questions in Germany

Europe, Scotland and the Celts

An Excursion to India

PART SIX: Towards a Manifesto for the Arts: Education and the State

A National Policy for the Arts: What the State Can Do

Hugh MacDiarmid on Education

Notes Towards a Manifesto for Uncertain Times

Full List of National Articles, January 2016–February 2017

Preface: 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. Also, the distinction of The National, displayed on its front cover, ‘The newspaper that supports an independent Scotland’ branded it, for some, as a political cyclops. Both pre-sumptions 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.

In January 2016, Alan Riach, professor of Scottish literature at Glasgow University, began writing a weekly essay for the paper which has now appeared every Friday for more than a year, covering different areas of Scottish and international literature and the arts, sometimes in collaboration with the artist and former Head of Painting at Glasgow School of Art Sandy Moffat, sometimes introducing work on Scottish composers of classical music by composer and musicologist John Purser. This book gathers a selection from the first 12 months of them. Each is printed here as they were first published, except for a few minor corrections. The article on Jackie Kay was not a Friday essay but commissioned as a salutation on her appointment to the post of Scots Makar, or poet laureate of Scotland, and because it indicates the complementarity of present and historical cultural practices, it seemed worth including. The Hugh MacDiarmid essay is published by permission of the MacDiarmid Estate.

The first essay is about one of the first Scots Makars, William Dunbar, but then less familiar Scottish poets like Duncan Ban MacIntyre, Alasdair Mac Mhaighstir Alasdair and Elizabeth Melville, are considered alongside modern and contemporary international authors such as Wole Soyinka and Edward Dorn. Scottish artists like J.D. Fergusson, Joan Eardley and John Bellany are introduced along with American Alice Neel and the art of the ancient Celts. Composers like John Blackwood McEwen, Cecil Coles and Helen Hopekirk are there beside 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.

We’d like to acknowledge the risk taken by The National in publishing these essays. No other daily newspaper in Britain has covered arts subjects to such an extent and so regularly.

Let that sink in.

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 practise. So the arts essays might be, but wouldn’t have to be, prompted by an important event, an exhibition, the release of a CD, the publication of a book, a birthday or a death. They might just be something we fancied writing about that week. Who knows what next?

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 referendum in 2014. 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 into 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 Member of the Scottish Parliament commented: ‘To think we have lived to see cultural writing in a Scottish newspaper again – a time of marvels.’ Over the 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 Westminster Conservative Member of Parliament for Surrey Heath, England, Michael Gove, ‘tweeted’ to the public at 11.44pm on 6 December 2016 and placed as an epigraph to this book, and our priorities and commitments are firmly and happily reconfirmed.

So for taking the risk, staying with it, and making great use of illustrations and layout in their paper, we’d like to say thanks to the editor and the editorial team, as noted in the dedication.

Each essay in this book is 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.

As Ed Dorn said of his shorter poems, ‘Take them in the spirit of the Pony Express: light but essential.’

– A.R.

Introduction: Making Sense of Things

Alan Riach

THE FIVE SENSES are our first modes of perception: hearing, sight, touch, smell, and taste. Together, and in language, intellectual apprehension of the world becomes possible. They connect. They are different things, but not entirely separate from each other, just as the arts are different things, but never entirely cut off from each other. Writing and reading employ and evoke all five senses, literally. Words on the page are visual signs, and read aloud carefully they become structured musical notations. Classical music might evoke scenes, as in Beethoven’s Pastoral or McEwen’s Solway symphonies, or embody qualities that have no necessary literal visualisation implied, as in Nielsen’s fourth symphony, ‘The Inextinguishable’, Sibelius’s string quartet, ‘Voces Intimae’ or Mackenzie’s ‘Benedictus’. Paintings and drawings might represent narratives, offer visions that hold forth aspects of nature beyond specific locations, or depict locations in ways that allow us to see them more deeply, or sharply, with greater understanding. All the arts involve writing and reading, in the widest sense: writing as in composition, creation, production, publication, and reading as in attentive analysis, interpretation, conversation, comparisons and contrasts. Specialists abound in each specific area, but we should never overlook the connections between all the specialisms, the fact that they arise from our common human being, our senses and our sense.

So much may be to state the obvious, but the obvious is easily overlooked, and if we want to keep our critical faculties working, we don’t want to neglect, or be diverted from, the fact that nowadays the arts are addressed to everyone. In some cultures, in certain historical periods, their primary audience was defined by church or court or class. This is no longer true. Specialist knowledge might have to be acquired to get the full wealth of some works, but none are exclusive. All are open to our best approaches. Some are harder work than others but all are there to yield understanding.

John Berger famously began his seminal work, Ways of Seeing (1972) by noting that seeing comes before words. But hearing comes before seeing. If there is a normal natural sequence of biological development in human sensual sensitivity, it has to be from sound, through visualisation, to verbalisation and the use of language. This is not to suggest hierarchies of authority, but it is to root our intellectual work in the physical and creatural reality of our humanity.

Touch, taste, and smell, are literally immediate, but hearing, seeing and reading meanings – whether in literature, musical compositions or paintings – admits metaphoric understanding, analogy, simile, metaphor: in short, connections between literal things. These connections might emphasise the differences between things, or they might demonstrate the affinities between things, and sometimes they’ll do both.

All this is to explain partially why, at the heart of this book, pre-eminence is given to three forms of creative expression: literature, music and painting. Each embodies a vital aspect of human creativity, each arises from common human creatural life, and each connects to the others in ways we often take so much for granted that we forget the complex investment required in experience and education to make good sense of them.

The modern world is dense with signals: constant streams of sounds and images, information false and true: these water-board us all the time. Most of them are decoys. Most distract us from the real. Art commands its own time, our submission to its lasting authority, our healthy appetite to engage with its manifestations directly, to ask questions of it, both irreverently and respectfully, to learn what it has to give. That’s the essential difference between art and advertising: the latter is designed to take, the former to give – but you have to learn how to get the most from its gifts.

This book is a collection of essays in appreciation, thankful introductions and interpretations of works and creators of literature, music and art, and further speculations on the roles of education and the state in helping to make these works not only available but appreciated among the people of a country. The country is Scotland, and the particularities of this country’s national condition inform all the essays in the book.

That national condition is multiple and slant. Multiple, in that it’s multi-linguistic, connected through the English language not only to the southern neighbour but to the western continent of North America and other former colonies of Empire, connected though the Scots language to vernacular idioms internationally, and through Gaelic to different traditions again; slant, in that these traditions and co-ordinates have lasted through history and into the prehistory of the Celts, and this connects us to Europe and all that entails. If Scotland is a deeply European country, whatever the political imperatives of the era, for better or worse it’s also been a major component part of the history of the British Empire. Scotland has had a foot in both camps and in 2014 the people of the country were more cautious than bold. The essays collected here all appeared in the aftermath of the 2014 referendum on Scottish secession from London rule, when 45% of the electorate voted for independence and 55% voted to remain part of the U.K. Nothing ended at that point, of course, and a great deal of rethinking and reconfiguration of priorities and purposes has been taking place since then, and continues to do so. These essays are part of that continuing process.

Our title – Arts and the Nation – might suggest a comprehensive overview or a coherent single argument but this is a selection of individual essays, discretely arranged, rather than consecutively ordered. There are major areas of pre-eminent activity in the arts we haven’t addressed, including plays and the work of theatres, or traditional music and storytelling, or film and television, practices that might be deemed central in the cultural production of any modern nation, and of key importance in Scotland. Partly, this is because our focal areas, classical music, literature and painting, are at the core of all these activities anyway. Stories and songs, mass media broadcasting, everything produced in theatres, visualisation of any kind are impossible without them and their history. And the oral tradition runs under all these things, the carrying stream.

Moreover, our own areas of expertise are what we rely on, professionally in our various roles in education, personally in our preferences and dispositions. And the book is only a selection, and maybe a different selection made sometime in the future will extend into other areas, or include essays by writers whose greater experience and knowledge lies there. The important point is that while we believe our chosen subjects are at the heart of any sense of what the words of our title mean, that meaning is decidedly not exclusive. In the essay on Modernist Montrose in the 1920s, for example, it’s imperative to understand that not only poetry and literature, but music, painting and sculpture (in the still vastly undervalued work of F.G. Scott, Edward Baird and William Lamb), the whole range of creative activity at the highest level is the essential thing. Openness is always necessary, and possible, but sometimes it has to be fought for.

John Berger, in his essay ‘Steps Towards a Small Theory of the Visible’ (1995), asks, ‘Consider any newsreader on any television channel in any country. These speakers are the mechanical epitome of the disembodied. It took the system many years to invent them and to teach them to talk as they do. No bodies and no Necessity – for Necessity is the condition of the existent. It is what makes reality real.’ Today, ‘Necessity’ no longer exists: ‘All that is left is the spectacle, the game that nobody plays and everybody can watch. As has never happened before, people have to try to place their own existence and their own pains single-handed in the vast area of time and the universe.’

So what does the ‘work’ of art (in this case, painting) offer?

Berger answers: ‘Painting is, first, an affirmation of the visible which surrounds us and which continually appears and disappears. Without the disappearing, there would be perhaps no impulse to paint, for then the visible itself would possess the surety (the permanence) which painting strives to find. More directly than any other art, painting is an affirmation of the existent, of the physical world into which mankind has been thrown.’

We might describe music from a different corner, paraphrasing Berger: Music is, first, an affirmation of the invisible which surrounds us and which continually appears and disappears. Music never really ends, though, it simply becomes inaudible, then it rises again from the depths like the beginning of Sibelius’s Seventh Symphony, or comes to you as if with the dawn, light slowly rising out of darkness, emptiness and space, as in the opening of Wallace’s ‘Creation’ Symphony, or it comes at you suddenly, unpredicted, unexpected, like the opening of Mahler’s Third Symphony, with the great god Pan awakening, or of Chisholm’s ‘Pictures from Dante’, taking you through the gates of Hell and down. Without the invisible movements of sound and what we take as silence, there would be perhaps no impulse to compose, for the rhythms, counterpoints and all the complex relations within musical composition could not be structured. More directly than any other art, music is an affirmation of the potential which such movements enact, of the immaterial world we can sense beyond, and crucially through, the material world of performers, conductors, concert halls and audiences, real people in real places with real instruments, working.

Literature, poetry especially, but all stories and songs, partake of both that permanent sense of the visible that painting affirms, and that equally – perhaps even more – permanent sense of the invisible movements we can hear affirmed by music. It is both still structure and always moving, always at play.

In the same essay, Berger goes on to say something crucial that applies to all artists, composers of music, writers of literature, alike: ‘The modern illusion concerning painting (which post-modernism has done nothing to correct) is that the artist is a creator. Rather he is a receiver. What seems like creation is the act of giving form to what he has received.’

The great Irish artist Jack Yeats said something similar in more vernacular terms: ‘The novelist who respects his workshop more than life, can make breasts heave, and arms wave, and even eyes flash, but he cannot give his people pulses. To me, man is only part of a splendour and a memory of it. And if he wants to express his memories well he must know that he is only a conduit. It is his work to keep that conduit free from old birds’ nests and blowflies.’

This book is in the service of that freedom.

Part One: Authors and Literary Contexts

Not Burns – Dunbar! So who was William Dunbar?

Alan Riach (Friday 22 January 2016)

‘NOT BURNS – DUNBAR!’ was one of two slogans Hugh MacDiarmid came out with in the 1920s, advising all Scots they’d be better off spending time reading the poems of William Dunbar rather than indulging in the annual monster-fest of self-indulgence commonly known as ‘Burns Night’.

He was right then and even more so now.

Many Burns suppers have as little to do with poetry as they can get away with, and nothing to do with Scottish poetry at all. If you find yourself at a bad one, the best you’re likely to get is a potted biography of the Bard, an exaggerated recitation or two, a plate of offal and a washout of whisky. I speak from experience.

Of course, the best Burns suppers deliver real illumination, songs that take you deep into the words and the meanings of the words, poems that give the Scots language full rein, where you can hear what range Burns has, from the most intense sympathy to devastating satire and from utmost tenderness to bodily humour of the coarsest kind. He is the quickest poet there is, shifting nuance and insight brilliantly or wielding the scalpel of scorn with surgical precision.

But there’s more to it than Burns, and more Scottish poets worth your attention, and some just as good – or even better!

William Dunbar is one of them. He is not simply to be read as a poet of the distant past, irrelevant to modern times, but rather as a major figure at the foundations of Modernism. Just as Charles Rennie Mackintosh went back to the architecture of medieval castles to design the Glasgow School of Art, just as the artist J.D. Fergusson in Paris from 1907 to 1914, embracing Cubism, looking at Picasso and Braque, stated boldly that Modernism was simply a matter of getting back to fundamentals, and went looking for copies of Dunbar’s poetry to read in this context, just as Stravinsky’s quintessential Modernist work, The Rite of Spring, is subtitled ‘Pictures from Pagan Russia’, going back even further than Dunbar, the great artists, writers and composers of the Modern movement regenerated their work through return to their earliest sources.

Dunbar lived from around 1460 till around 1513. He was a churchman, a chaplain at the great Renaissance court of James IV, widely travelled in England, France, Denmark and elsewhere. His poems range just as widely as Burns. Formal poems for state occasions, squibs and satires of daily life at court, playful, topical, colloquial poems, verbally dexterous, ‘enamelled’ verse or vulgar, down-market rhymes of more popular purpose. He moves from the flippant comedy of ‘How Sir John Sinclair Began to Dance’ (one foot always gets it wrong) to the steady, heavily-paced ‘Lament for the Makars’, a lengthening list of predeceased poets and friends, written in the pressing knowledge of his own mortality. From the most carefully poised love poem: ‘Sweet Rose of virtue and of gentleness, / Delightsome lily of every lustiness, / Richest in bounty and in beauty clear / And every virtue that is dear / Except only that you are merciless...’ to the Quentin Tarantino hell-dance vision of the Seven Deadly Sins, from the sexually explicit ‘Twa Marriet Wemun and the Widow’, where three ladies discuss the relative merits of men, to the sheer ferocity of the religious poems in praise of God and condemnation of evil.

Sins are awful realities in Dunbar’s poems, and their meanings apply today as much as ever. When temptation rises, prompting greed, lechery, drunkenness, violence, the threats are as much with us now as in the 16th century. Date rape, drunk driving, bullying, gluttony. The sensual apprehension of the attractiveness of self-indulgence is vivid in Dunbar, and countered by the shields of self-knowledge and active defence against its allure. This is central in his poem ‘The Golden Targe’, where male desire is roused by the approach of a host of beautiful women. The conflict is as intense as any you’ll see in Star Wars. The force awakens, indeed!

The value he puts upon the ideals of social justice is central to ‘The Thrissil and the Rose’, the poem he wrote in celebration of the marriage of King James to Margaret Tudor of England in 1503. The union he affirms can only be maintained, he says, if the king himself is virtuous, as the lion, king of beasts, the eagle, king of birds, or the thistle, crowned above all plants. He must ‘do law alike to apes and unicorns’ and is in Dame Nature’s charge, at her ultimate command. With hindsight, of course, we know how that union failed, James leading his army to slaughter at Flodden in 1513. But the ideals remain, brilliantly expressed in Dunbar’s poem.

When MacDiarmid recommended Dunbar back in the 1920s, he was saying that not only is there another poet of vision and technical brilliance equal to Burns, but that there is a whole history, a tradition of Scottish poetry that opens its doors to all sorts of human experience. To celebrate only one poet in this tradition is not good enough. It’s a big world, pilgrims, so come on, take a big bite!

More than that, he was indicating a rich culture in Scotland that common popular currency neglects or ignores, or even suppresses. When was the last time you heard of Dunbar anywhere in the mass media?

In his 1943 book, Modern Scottish Painting, J.D. Fergusson described his attempt to buy a copy of Dunbar’s poems: ‘I went to every bookshop in Paris, London, Glasgow and Edinburgh, and got the only one existing at a reasonable price in Edinburgh, and of course not at all complete. This means that the Calvinists have kept the work of Dunbar from the poor student of Scottish poetry, from the time of the Reformation till the time I asked for it – from say 1565 till 1914.’

It’s not only Calvinists who suppress one’s knowledge of the arts, though.

In 2014, the politician George Galloway and the former NATO chief George Robertson publicly derided the very idea that there was such a thing as Scottish culture. That position is too easy to assume. As Paul Kavanagh has pointed out to readers of The National (‘There’s nae need tae cringe’, 9 January 2016): ‘The most common complaint about Scots is that it’s not a language at all. People whose knowledge of linguistics fills a dictionary from A to Aa all of a sudden turn into Noam Chomsky when the subject is Scots.’

In MacDiarmid’s beautiful poem, ‘Homage to Dunbar’, he notes that anyone can visit the graves of Burns or Walter Scott, but nobody knows where Dunbar is buried, lost in an older Scotland, abandoned, unexplored. Like Atlantis drowned beneath the ocean, Dunbar and his Scotland remain almost unknown. And yet, as if from the bells of the cathedral under sea, sometimes a strange and haunting sound can indeed be heard across the distance: ‘Still, like the bells o’ Ys frae unplumbed deeps, / Whiles through Life’s drumlie wash your music leaps / To’n antrin ear, as a’e bird’s wheep defines / In some lane place the solitude’s ootlines.’

There is even more than that. The phrase, ‘Not Burns – Dunbar!’ suggests a different way of approaching poetry, culture, and all the arts. As a medieval and early Renaissance poet, Dunbar lived in a world where all art was didactic. Paintings, music, architecture, poetry: all art was made to teach, seriously. Serious lessons all folk need to know, about what virtue is, about what hurt and pain will come when certain temptations are surrendered to. The arts, in this understanding, are not merely entertainment. Underestimate their worth at your peril.

This is neither pious nor solemn, neither sentimental nor sanctimonious – as some of the worst Burns suppers can be! Rather, it is an affirmation that poetry and all the arts are there to help people to live, to tell us things we need to know about immaterial life. Economic realities are not the only ones. There are these qualities of what, for want of a better word, we might call the spirit. They can raise things up, as in ‘high spirits’ (and Dunbar can be a very funny poet indeed), they can help with formal occasions of great moment, or they can help us deal with grief at times of irreparable loss. And they’re not just with us one night every year, they’re essential to all of us, every day.

Burns is a great poet and songwriter – praise him, enjoy, and learn from his best work – but don’t neglect the whole inherited world that helps make Scotland so rich a nation. Burns didn’t. He honoured Robert Fergusson and many more, emphatically. To do Burns justice, we should learn from his example.

William Dunbar’s ‘To a Ladye’ is a different kind of poem from Burns’s ‘My love is like a red, red rose’ but it’s every bit as poignant, sharp, yearning, and subtle in its suggestion of material and emotional realities. ‘Rew’ is a pun on the word ‘rue’ or sorrow, regret, pity, and the same word meaning the evergreen garden-grown herb, supposed to repel venomous snakes, diminish amorous desire in men, and encourage it in women. The phrase ‘that I of mene’ signifies, ‘of which I speak’.

To a Ladye

Sweit rois of vertew and of gentilnes,

Delytsum lyllie of everie lustynes,

Richest in bontie and in bewtie cleir

And euerie vertew that is deir

Except onlie that ye ar mercyles.

In to your garthe this day I did persew.

Thair saw I flowris that fresche wer of hew,

Baithe quhyte and rid, moist lusty wer to seyne,

And halsum herbis vpone stalkis grene,

Yit leif nor flour fynd could I nane of rew.

I dout that Merche with his caild blastis keyne

Hes slayne this gentill herbe that I of mene,

Quhois petewous deithe dois to my hart sic pane

That I wald mak to plant his rute agane,

So confortand his levis vnto me bene.

From: The Poems of William Dunbar, edited by Priscilla Bawcutt, 2 volumes (Glasgow: Association for Scottish Literary Studies, 1998)

Not Burns – Duncan Ban MacIntyre!

Alan Riach (Friday 5 March 2016)

IN THE YEARS after the Jacobite rising of 1745, Culloden in 1746, and the violent reprisals against the Highland clans that followed, two Gaelic poets produced two long poems that should be familiar to anyone who cares about Scotland: ‘Praise of Ben Dorain’ and ‘The Birlinn of Clanranald’. Especially in the light of Trevor Royle’s new book, Culloden, they should be reappraised. These poems are among the great works of world literature.

I have loved them for many years but I have no Gaelic and no access to them other than through English translations. I read as many English-language versions of both poems as I could find, including that by Hugh MacDiarmid, made with the help of Sorley MacLean. All have fascination. None of them work. Or, they work in part, in different ways. I read essays, historical accounts, critical material relating to both poems and their authors, and went through them both with people who knew Gaelic, and who knew the poems and what they are about.

Their authors were older contemporaries of Burns (1759–96): Donnchadh Bàn Mac an t-Saoir or Duncan Ban MacIntyre (1724–1812) and Alasdair Mac Mhaighstir Alasdair or Alexander MacDonald (c.1693/98–1770) but you couldn’t imagine three more different poets.

During the Jacobite rising the two Gaelic poets had been on opposite sides. The older man, Alasdair, fought with the Jacobites. The younger, Duncan Ban, fought on the Hanoverian side but reluctantly: he had to, as he was employed by the Hanoverian Campbells. At the battle of Falkirk, Duncan Ban had had enough, though, and famously discarded his sword, which had been lent to him by his chief. He would fight no more.

Duncan Ban MacIntyre was born and grew up in Glen Orchy, near Ben Dorain. He had no formal education. He could neither read nor write. From 1746 to 1766 he was a gamekeeper for the Earl of Breadalbane and then the Duke of Argyll, working among the hills and woods of the area. By 1768 he and his family had moved to Edinburgh; he joined the City Guard (the police), like many Highlanders. Robert Fergusson (1750–74), who was there at the same time, called them ‘the black banditti’. Here in Edinburgh, his poems were written down, published and sold well. In 1786, as Robert Burns’s poems were being published in the Kilmarnock edition, Duncan Ban and his wife were back in the Highlands and islands. As Burns was being lionised in Edinburgh, Duncan Ban was being warmly welcomed in the north-west. He returned to Edinburgh, left the City Guard in 1793, and was a soldier with the Breadalbane Fencibles, though now in his seventies. He retired in 1806, died in 1812, and he and his family are buried in Old Greyfriars churchyard. In 1859, a monument designed by John Thomas Rochead (1814–78), who also designed the Wallace monument at Stirling, was erected in the hills near Dalmally, overlooking Loch Awe.

Duncan Ban was in Edinburgh precisely when James Macpherson, Henry Mackenzie and Adam Smith were flourishing, Enlightenment and proto-Romantic writers. There is almost no recognition of Duncan Ban’s work or indeed of contemporary Gaelic literature in their writing. To English-language readers, the Highlands were becoming recognised – or branded – through the work of Macpherson and later, Walter Scott.

This division of perception is one reason, perhaps, why ‘Ben Dorain’ and ‘The Birlinn’ have been neglected. Yet there is another division implicit in ‘Ben Dorain’ itself, between the vision of the mountain and its plenitude of riches and the traditional Gaelic praise-poem for clan and clan chief. As the clans themselves had been violently put down after Culloden, so the ascendancy of English-language writing, and the gulfs between English, Scots and Gaelic worlds were opening up. These gulfs were not unbridgeable – Duncan Ban’s contemporary, Alasdair Mac Mhaighstir Alasdair was familiar not only with Burns’s work but also that of James Thomson, whose The Seasons (1730) was the most famous Scottish poem of its time and effectively triggered the tradition of English-language pastoral poetry. However, ‘Praise of Ben Dorain’ is very different.

Remember: Duncan Ban was illiterate. The poem was composed as a song in the poet’s mind before it was ever written down on a page. The ‘original’ is not the written or printed version, nor any of the English-language translations, but something Duncan Ban made in his own head, that he would have made into sound through his own voice. There is no way to get back to that, and no way to replicate it. But when I decided to try to make my own English-language version of the poem, that’s what I was trying to represent.

I was cautioned severely. If you don’t know the language, what impudence, to think you could translate from it!

Well, yes. Sometimes you need impudence, to approach an immortal. It was a risky business, I knew, but the poem itself would not let me go. It had gone into my mind so deep, it seemed that the thing itself demanded expression.

Work like this should not be so hard to imagine. Bagpipe-players learn tunes through ‘translating’ them from sounds that can be sung by the human voice (canntaireachd) into music played on the pipes. Thus the accuracy of replicating written or printed annotation is of secondary importance to the primacy of conveying meaning through the music, whether in bodily human voice or a fashioned material instrument. This also relates to the teaching or transmission of a tune without written manuscript. So, I argued, the same might apply to the poem.

Its shape is essential to its meaning. It was composed to the musical structure of a pibroch – in Gaelic the spelling is piobaireachd – the classical music of the Highland bagpipe. It is also known as ‘ceol mor’ or ‘big music’ or ‘great music’. The word for music, ceol, has nothing to do with the muses: it signifies sound made by breath moving through tubes or pipes, imagined or physical, constructed, bodily.

It is in eight parts, a base theme and variations on, or journeys around, it. (1) The opening gives the main theme or ‘urlar’: the mountain, the deer, and the first-person singular narrator of the poem, a young man who will hunt the deer, not for sport but for the nourishment of himself and his people; (2) then the first journey takes each of the preceding three main component parts and extends, expands, or elaborates some aspects of them; (3) then there is a return to the main theme; (4) then the second journey; (5) then the main theme once again; (6) then the third journey, or variation; (7) and then the main theme is returned to for the last time; and finally (8) there is the culmination of the entire poem, its crowning or bringing together of all the elements in the onslaught of the hunting dogs and the killing of the deer. In the last few lines there is a confirmation that the poem as given is not enough, and never could be, to encompass everything it sets out to describe.

Seen in this way, there is a cyclical, or seasonal, sense of repetition. The main theme is given four times, each time followed by a transitional ‘variation’ or journey between them, and at last the ‘culmination’ brings things to a conclusion, but with the promise of further repetition or regeneration – although, obviously enough, not for the particular individual deer killed in the last section. Yet at the same time, this structure, once experienced, may be read or listened to again and again with an increased awareness of tension. Even on a first reading there are clues that the end will be bloody and climactic. This balance or combining of a regenerating, cyclical structure and a linear, increasingly suspenseful, narrative, is stunningly achieved, and appreciated more deeply after several readings.

The question remains, whether ‘Praise of Ben Dorain’ may be read in the 21st century as a poem not only of praise, but also of sorrow, resistance and anger, a permanent protest against the devastation some folk bring upon others. This is not explicitly depicted in the poem, but its historical context implies it: after Culloden and before the denudation and exploitation of the mountain and the land all around it. In the 21st century, most of the deer and the forests, the natural plenitude of Ben Dorain, has gone. It is a beautiful, but bare mountain. In this, perhaps, it is comparable to that other great poem of sorrow, the persistence of memory and the demand for justice, Sorley MacLean’s ‘Hallaig’.

And that gets us to the question of land ownership in Scotland, which, as readers of The National know only too well, is in urgent need of redress.

So perhaps in the 18th century Gaelic poem there is an implicit political significance here for us now. ‘Praise of Ben Dorain’ is a register of loss: not a praise poem for a chief, hero, leader or clan, but a praise poem for a non-human source of economic health and human well-being, a politically balanced ecology, a mountain that is not simply the ‘earth-mother’ myth idealised but a reality, a promise of what health is, what regeneration requires. It is sublime, but it is also utterly realistic.

Let it be a manifesto for land-ownership in Scotland. Let it be read and held in mind and mortal memory. It warrants such, repays as much, every bit as richly as any songs of Burns.

The opening of ‘Praise of Ben Dorain’ by Duncan Ban MacIntyre, translated by Alan Riach

1. Urlar: The Main Theme

Praise over all to Ben Dorain –

She rises beneath the radiant beams of the sun –

In all the magnificent range of the mountains around,

So shapely, so sheer are her slopes, there are none

To compare; she is fair, in the light, like the flight

Of the deer, in the hunt, across moors, on the run,

Or under the green leafy branches of trees, in the groves

Of the woods, where the thick grass grows,

And the curious deer, watchful and tentative,

Hesitant, sensitive: I have had all these clear, in my sight.

A herd of the deer: each startles at once,

And they leap, as if one, and it starts!

The bounding of bodies, the weight in their forms,

In movement away, their white rumps up, bobbing,

Away in a spray, an array:

They are grace, in their movement, yet skittish.

Prompted by fear, carried by muscle, charged by instinctual sense;

Equally so, the shy, sombre stag,

In his warm brown coat,

The russet of fur, his antlers raised high,

Stately and slow, he walks by.

‘Praise of Ben Dorain’ by Duncan Bàn MacIntyre, the original Gaelic poem and the English translation by Alan Riach, is published by Kettillonia: www.kettillonia.co.uk

Not Burns – Alasdair Mac Mhaighstir Alasdair!

Alan Riach (Friday 12 February 2016)

AT FIRST READING, ‘The Birlinn of Clanranald’ is very different from ‘Praise of Ben Dorain’, the poem we looked at in the previous essay in this series. This is a poem which describes a working ship, a birlinn or galley, its component parts, mast, sail, tiller, rudder, oars and the cabes they are nestled in, the ropes that connect sail to cleats or belaying pins, and so on, and the 16 crewmen, each with their appointed role and place, and it describes their mutual working together, rowing, and then sailing out to sea, from the Hebrides in the west of Scotland, from South Uist to the Sound of Islay, then over to Carrickfergus in Ireland. The last third of the poem takes us through a terrible storm, and we make it – only just – to safe harbour. It was written sometime around 1751–55 and first published posthumously in 1776.

Its author, Alasdair Mac Mhaighstir Alasdair, also known as Alexander MacDonald, was a teacher and soldier, a Jacobite officer during the rising of 1745 and Gaelic tutor to Prince Charles Edward Stuart. His father was an Episcopalian Church of Scotland minister, who taught the boy and introduced him to Greek and Roman literature. He knew about sea voyages literally, in the Hebrides, but he also read about them in the poems of Homer and Virgil. In his poem, there is clear evidence that the author had experienced the sea, but there is also a supremely literary sensibility at work, especially when we come to the storm, where a wealth of poetic resources of hyperbole and imagery are drawn upon. The modernity of this passage is startling, and it could almost be described as psychedelic or surrealist.

Alasdair attended the University of Glasgow and grew quickly familiar with contemporary and classical literature and culture, Scots, English and European. In 1729, he became a schoolteacher, an English teacher, working in various parts of Moidart and the west of Scotland. In 1738 he was teaching at Kilchoan, Ardnamurchan. One of his most famous songs of this period was the lyrical, ‘Allt an t-Siucar’ / ‘Sugar Burn’. In 1741, Alasdair’s A Galick and English Vocabulary, effectively the first Gaelic-English dictionary, was published, commissioned by the anti-Catholic, anti-Gaelic, Society in Scotland for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge (SSPCK), to help spread the English language and extirpate Gaelic. Alasdair had worked on it in the belief that it would help take Gaelic forward, but he soon came to oppose everything the SSPCK stood for. Making this book, if anything, confirmed his own commitment to his language and culture. His poems took on increasingly sharp edges. Called to account for satiric and inappropriate writing, it is said that he abandoned his teaching to join the Jacobite rising, and that he was among the first at Glenfinnan when the flag was raised on 19 August 1745. Many of his poems and songs openly extol the virtues of the Jacobite cause and satirise the Hanoverians and their Scottish supporters, the Campbells. He was a captain in the Clan Ranald regiment, in charge of 50 recruits, and taught Gaelic to the Prince himself. He converted to Catholicism, perhaps at this time, but perhaps much earlier. After Culloden, he and his family were fugitives. His house was ransacked by Hanoverian troops.

He and his family settled on the island of Canna in 1749 and stayed there till 1751, when he travelled to Edinburgh to publish a book of his poems, Ais-Eiridh na Sean Chánoin Albannaich / The Reawakening of the Old Scottish Language, replete with satires on the Hanoverian succession. In the poem, ‘An Airce’ / ‘The Ark’, he promises that the Campbells will be plagued and scourged for their treason to Scotland, while he himself will build a ship of refuge for those Campbells true to the Jacobite cause, and all moderates who, after swallowing an effective purgative of salt sea water, would be willing to reject allegiance to the British crown. The authorities were outraged.

Aware of the threat of prosecution, he moved to Glen Uig but then moved again to Knoydart, then to Morar and finally to Sandaig, in Arisaig. He often visited South Uist, where his friend Iain MacFhearchair (John MacCodrum) was bard to Sir James MacDonald of Sleat. The MacDonalds and Clan Ranald were his people, and their family connections extended throughout the west of Scotland and to Ireland, to Carrickfergus.

On his deathbed, his last words were addressed to friends watching over him, who were reciting some poems of their own. Alasdair awoke, corrected their metres and versification, showed them how to do it with some verses of his own, then quietly lay back and drifted away. He is buried in Kilmorie cemetery, Arisaig.

The poem is so visceral and grainy in its depiction of realities, it almost seems hostile to metaphoric interpretation, but, as with ‘Praise of Ben Dorain’, the historical context in which the poem was written suggests one.

As noted, both poems were composed in the aftermath of the Jacobite rising of 1745 and the massacre at Culloden in 1746. The poems, perhaps, reflect upon this social and human disaster in ways that go further than their literal meanings.

‘Praise of Ben Dorain’ gives us a mountain, deer, and the hunt for the deer, in a world in ecological balance and a self-replenishing, self-sustaining economy. ‘The Birlinn’ presents a clan and a crew of men working in extreme co-ordination, disciplined and intuitive, in conditions of knowledge drawn from experience, but they and their vessel are subjected to a storm of unprecedented violence, a natural imposition that calls up inimical forces from well beyond anything that might have been predicted.

In ‘The Birlinn’, the courage and skills of the crew and the strength of the ship carry them through, but at a cost, and without any sense of inevitability. The safe harbour they come to connects the Celtic worlds of Scotland and Ireland. In ‘Ben Dorain’, the skills and stealth of the hunter on the mountain carry him through to the kill, but the beauty and treasure of the deer are valued at their true worth, in a world of natural balance sustained by both self-conscious design and intuitive understanding and sympathy.

The journeys that both poems take us on are, also, signals of an ancient kinship, across differences, of the Celtic peoples, of the human needs of all people, and of the relations between these and sea, earth and nature.