An Edinburgh way, but an Edinburgh of Stevenson’s youth, of the last half of the nineteenth century. It has been too easy for critics knowingly to place R.L.S. in an historical category, by Victorian reckonings. […] The Industrial Revolution, no less the Romantic Revival, no less the Symbolist Movement, will not altogether explain the R.L.S. temperament. These may help to explain his voluptuous gestures, but not his meditative serenity of attitude (which was in no way a manifestation of ‘apostasy’ from a bohemian order of life); they may explain his imagination’s twilight and sinister colourings, but not his scrupulous artistry.
[…]
Exactly what environment formed Stevenson? An environment in which the manners and modes of the eighteenth century still loitered; where Calvinism remained obdurate in the city’s bloodstream, where the element of contrast, clear and unequivocal, was apparent in the whole civic design.
‘Outwardly,’ wrote Moray McLaren in his Stevenson and Edinburgh, ‘the eighteenth century had gone, but it lingered on even now in the manners and mannerisms of the people just as, in the faintest possible way, it lingers today’ [1950]. If the eighteenth century was dying hard in Stevenson’s Edinburgh, it is not quite dead yet. There are ‘fashionable’ streets in Edinburgh within a few yards of the streets of the poor; but unlike most European cities, Edinburgh does not merge her grandeur into her squalor with impressionistic vagueness. You have to turn a definite corner to move out of Castle Street into Rose Street, just as an eighteenth-century writer ‘turned’ his phrase and swivelled his thought.
[…]
Edinburgh people were either sane, eccentric, or plain mad; they were not neurotic. That, too, is a mark of the eighteenth century – neuroticism springs from a nineteenth-century germ. Stevenson was eccentric, but he was not neurotic; he was his own man. His attachment to the strange, the sinful and the misplaced among humankind, was always strong in him; yet, while those choice plants of neuroticism, the Decadents of the ’nineties, were languishing in the feverish climate of exotic speculation, Stevenson was hurling forth his Open Letter in Defence of Father Damien.
If I seem to digress from McLaren, it is because I wish to formulate a point that he wisely only suggests. That is, Stevenson reflects in his life and work the classical and romantic synthesis of Edinburgh. McLaren is wise in avoiding these terms, since they perhaps mean too many things to mean precisely what he demonstrates when he so skilfully invokes the atmosphere of Heriot Row and Princes Street a hundred years ago, and pits them against the villainous aura of Stevenson’s youthful night-haunts in Leith Walk.
[…]
What will impress those who are acquainted with most of Stevenson, is the variety of his achievement, the variety, not only of subject but of style. This is an aspect of Stevenson not fully realised until his work is seen in a miscellany.
Possibly the most neglected of his work remains his poems, more especially the poems of childhood. Despite the patience that has been lost over his anthology pieces, the most impatient critic must concede the evocative sweep and rhythm of ‘To S. R. Crockett’; but the poems of childhood have been considered childish things. Yet they, I believe, show most saliently how careful and devoted a craftsman was Stevenson, even under the more exacting stress of verse. They are models of form and balance within their unpretentious limits:
Spring and daisies come apace;
Grasses hide my hiding-place;
Grasses run like a green sea
O’er the lawn up to my knee.
There is something here of a miniature Marvell. There is something in this group of poems which possesses both the classical and the romantic temper. True, it is classicism without intellectual persuasion, and romanticism without passion, but the accents of both are there.
[1950]
Robert Louis Stevenson
This is an occasion of great pleasure to me. I was born and lived all my early youth in Edinburgh. As a child I often used to go to play with my best friend Frances Niven at her parents’ house at 10 Howard Place, which was exactly next door to No. 8, the birthplace of Robert Louis Stevenson, and in those days a Stevenson museum. Both Frances and I were ardent admirers of R.L.S. As we grew up we came to know all his works. But as children, it was our delight to slip through the hedge dividing the two gardens to Robert Louis Stevenson’s territory, although in reality he had been little more than two years old when his parents moved house. Still, we felt he meant that spot when he wrote:
… it is but a child of air
that lingers in the garden there.
Stevenson was superb at his craft. It had the particular persuasiveness of the just and haughty Edinburgh temper. How greatly the success of his novel, The Master of Ballantrae, depends on the narrative style: it is a story of wild scenes and high passions soberly and reasonably unfolded. Only a very subtle artist could combine these two ideas: that of a dramatic theme and that of a cool and limpid prose, to create such a rare and strange effect. That was the essence of R.L.S. No artist, no writer, who knows R.L.S can fail to have been influenced favourably by him.
He often made fun of monuments. But I think we all know how much he would have appreciated this simple and good memorial executed by Ian Hamilton Finlay, who has in all senses so appropriately described R.L.S., and who has placed our act of homage to our Man of Letters in so delightful and so leafy a corner of his city.
Robert Louis Stevenson wrote of his feelings as a native of his beloved Edinburgh: ‘… the place establishes an interest in people’s hearts; go where they will, they find no city of the same distinction; go where they will, they take a pride in their old home’.
[1989]
Celebrating Scotland
Culture is something that grows and matures from its native soil. A great deal of culture arises from the idea of leaving it alone. ‘Strategy’ is anti-culture. A ‘Scottish’ culture would be the natural expressiveness of everyone to whom the land of Scotland has actually contributed. Scottish Italians, for instance; Scots of West Indian origin; Scots of English and Irish descent. These, if they are Scottish by formation, all make up the sources of Scottish culture. The ‘Caledonian Society’ view of culture is amusing, but not deep enough, and most unlikely to survive. It travels only as Scotch whisky and tartans travel, no more and no less.
In the field of literature with which I am mainly concerned I would like to see more, far more, writing about Scotland in general and Scottish domestic life in particular. I see no point in a dialect that the average intelligent reader in Essex or Worcestershire cannot understand. I see no point in offering Scots dialects (which in any case are not regionally constant) to the intelligent readers in the United States or in Australia. The object of art is to diffuse intellectual pleasure, which includes the appreciation of tragedy as well as comedy. (In the case of a work written naturally in Gaelic or a specifically Scottish tongue that is different: it should be offered for translation abroad.)
The main task in literary achievement is simple, expressive, atmospheric and yet precise writing. The Scots have always been among the finest English-speaking writers. Their best language is English. The practice of English by Scots cannot be too seriously promoted. As regards ‘culture’ itself, I recommend Notes Towards the Definition of Culture by T.S. Eliot. It is a golden book, irreplaceable.
[1999]
The Books I Re-Read and Why
The question I have been asked (which books do I re-read and why) makes me realise that the books I go back to are not necessarily those I admire the most. A great many books that have delighted me remain vividly in my memory; I don’t feel any desire to re-read them. Then there is the category of books that I keep on the shelves for reference purposes – a quantity of poetry, the classics – Plato, Machiavelli – I go to them when I want to check up – what was that passage, how did it go? When I’m away from home, staying with friends, I can always content myself with a volume of Henry James or Jane Austen, however familiar.
But at home, there
are two works that I do re-read continually, neither of them belonging to English literature. When I want to relax and get into a thoughtful mood invariably I take down a volume of Proust’s A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. Any volume, any page: the magic works, sinuous as a snake. Normally, what would one care about an old degenerate like Charlus, or Swann with his airs, or the Duchesse de Guermantes in her self-satisfied felicity? But Proust makes these people matter through the sheer force of his style, his extraordinary time-manipulations. It is his style that is the drug for the Proust-addict.
The other book which I re-read with unfailing pleasure is the Bible, especially the Old Testament. I don’t read it so much for religious consolation, as I was brought up to think proper, as for sheer enjoyment of the literature. So much poetry, so many literary forms, such wonderful stories. And, from a novelist’s point of view, what clearly delineated characters. God himself with his attitudes of I did this, and I made that, his Thou shalt perish, and his I repent, Thou shalt survive and prosper. Intrigues, thunderbolts, smiles… A character so true and yet so contradictory. He basks unashamed in his own glory, and in his anger is positively blasphemous. Few works of world literature contain so many great, wild and precise characters as appear in both the Old and the New Testament. Students of creative writing should study them.
There is one set of books that I never re-read: my own. They bother me; they put me right off my future literary plots and plans; they cloud my creative joy. I don’t keep them on my bookshelves; I put them in a cupboard. It’s not that they embarrass me intellectually; I just don’t want to re-live those books at all.
[1983]
London Exotics
I could not actually say that I had seen them turning a somersault in the streets of South Kensington, but any night now they might do so. They sported the regalia and attitudes of the eternal acrobat. The other night I had seen one of them make a leap and a half-turn which surely was to prefigure the full cart-wheel to come. It was the spring of 1952. They were young boys and girls drifting in little bands of five or six, already forming themselves into a phenomenon.
There was a time, before our time, when they would be observed gliding through Chelsea only. Then ‘exquisite’ was the holiest and most advanced adjective. It was the time when Aubrey Beardsley, wizard-supreme of the Aesthetic Ideal, not content with the proper fame of his drawings, was moved to perpetrate some prose:
The Abbé Fanfreluche, having lighted off his horse, stood doubtfully for a moment beneath the ombre gateway of the mysterious Hill, troubled with an exquisite fear lest a day’s travel should have too cruelly undone the laboured niceness of his dress. His hand, slim and gracious as La Marquise du Deffand’s in the drawing by Carmontelle, played nervously about the gold hair that fell upon his shoulders like a finelycurled peruke, and from point to point of a precise toilet the fingers wandered, quelling the little mutinies of cravat and ruffle.
Yes, but now in the early ’fifties there was a new autumnal tide, and these little bands of exotics had been overflowing from the river at Chelsea when evening fell. By the spring of 1952, they had seeped westward, and would turn up at midnight everywhere in the streets adjacent to the London parks. In Cromwell Road they capered by fours and fives. You would see them standing akimbo beneath the lamps of Old Brompton Road. And there, more or less, they have been ambling since, slender, contemptuous and very young, as far inland as Bayswater. It is a phenomenon to blend reality with memory, and merge the tenses of contemplation.
I doubt if they are professionals. They are too old-fashioned for television, and much too insolent to get jobs on the stage. Where they come from and where they go, it seems absurd to wonder, it is like contemplating the past and future of a flame. They arrive in their own portable environment, and likewise they depart, bearing their strange excitement away with them. And like a little flame, each one gives out a flickering nervous hilarity, expressed only by these giddy antics; for their faces are quite grave and they seldom speak to one another. Sometimes, while crossing a road, diagonally and at leisure, one of them might cast an obscure high fluting trisyllable at the traffic, but the real eloquence and hullabaloo comes in terms of motion, with a triumphant pirouette on the opposite pavement. They are dressed with ceremonial care and beauty. I may be, or may have been, touching them up a bit as I warm to the subject, but on my artistic word, these boys and girls have been wearing apple-green duffle coats, amethyst blouses, birettas of burnt-ochre since 1952. They wear tights of scarlet and black, in which their legs are forever carrying on like a pair of compasses which someone is absent-mindedly twiddling.
The fact is, that these apparitions of 1952 have become, in the London year of 1966, an established social reality. Everyone knows that English girls and boys in their teens and twenties are dressing up like elegant unsmiling pierrots and doing proud jerks in the streets. The fashion designers have got the whole idea under control. But those few of the early nineteen-fifties were more of a wonder.
One night of early summer, before the light had quite failed, I sat in a motor car in the Old Brompton Road waiting for a friend to emerge from a flat. A woman with a dog floated by. She was a woman of resignment to weary, lonely wealth and the dog was a dachshund. She floated – for already, at a short distance, I could see approaching a set of four or five of the new exotics, and the mere sight of them altered the behaviour of the environment. The woman was etiolated, like an El Greco painting. Her face was pale. I thought she was an elegy in a country churchyard all unto herself, and wondered what she was doing in London.
The group of boys and girls had come up to her. I looked through the windscreen. The street lights went up and the woman cast a sharp, long mauve shadow; her dachshund cast an awkward blur. The young people silently encircled her in their bright clothes, moving slowly like somnambulists hand-in-hand. They cast no shadows.
That is all. I have no corroborative evidence.
It was the absent-mindedness of one of these harlequinades that made me think of Rilke’s acrobats, those of the Fifth Elegy, a compound of his beloved Parisian somersaulters and his beloved Picasso, Les Saltimbanques. Rilke was moved by them, as he would have been by these Kensington pernoctators. He observed unreality and pathos in their performance. Swinging and smiling with automatic precision, those equilibrists of the Fifth Elegy have got their facile tricks by heart; the first and real inspiration of their act, mastered with an effort of concentration and sacrifice, has been done for by habit. They do their turn with blank-eyed perfection; their performance is a ‘fake fruit of boredom’.
Boredom. It insinuated itself into the clever contortions, the whirlwinds and arabesques, executed on the London pavements. It is 1952. All these delightful things are done in a daze. Why do the acrobats seem sadly affecting? They are jauntily pleased enough with themselves, they appear to have no cares. Why are their purple blouses so pathetic? Because boredom has got them young, and where Rilke’s professionals degenerated into apathy, rehearsal by rehearsal, year by year, these lovely Bayswater fly-by-nights were born with the thing. It precipitates them forth to this desperate nightly ritual. Rilke’s acrobats are bored because they perform, but ours perform because they are bored. Ours are in a worse predicament. What is boredom? It is the absence of curiosity, for one thing. In boredom, the world lacks possibility, and is pre-ordained.
Now, on the London streets, it is difficult for me not to see in the conscious practitioners, the half-submerged performers of my memory. It is when they appear hand-in-hand, that their plight seems keenest. These hectic tribes were united by isolation. While Picasso’s saltimbanques are exclusive because of their common calling and purpose, these employ their skill in order to cultivate exclusiveness. Exclusiveness was really the tragic art they practised. For their weird and wayward talent lacked inspiration; and half-asleep, they embraced the choice aesthetics of the past.
In their capacity as mimics of the past, though, they were seen at their best. How like they were, in the
ir defiant irresponsible prancings, to Proust’s ‘little band’, his amoral darlings of the Balbec shore! And as Gide’s ‘little band’ in his Faux-monnayeurs, they uphold the proper solemnity, the stylish antinomian confidence, and were quite the part.
To have taken them as they wanted to be taken, as original material, as a jubilant cult of inspired splendour: nothing doing. Even then, they had come too late, to me and my like. We regret to say, my captious like and myself, that we prefer the splendid originals in the books. But as curious imitations arriving late on the market, they were welcome indeed. For it was a kind of comedy and a kind of tragedy, and altogether a wonder, to watch this young scornful Priesthood of the Aesthetic Ideal advancing in pontificalibus up the Old Brompton Road.
[1953]
A Drink with Dame Edith
It was a summer day in 1957. I had published a novel, The Comforters, with some critical success. In the literary world of those days I had become the new young thing. In fact, I was not very young. I was in my late thirties. I had already published poems, stories and reviews, a critical biography of Mary Shelley and a work on the then poet laureate, John Masefield. But it was the novel The Comforters that established my name. It was greatly praised by reviewers, especially by Evelyn Waugh. It was immediately transformed into a radio play on the then prestigious Third Programme. I had been given a contract for the novel by Macmillan – a lousy contract in which they controlled radio and film rights. I was poor, very poor, with a dependent son. I had therefore to find myself an agent. I had also, during the crowded year prior to the publication of The Comforters, started my novel Robinson, to be published in 1958.