‘… fight and argue and improve’: In discussion with Andrew O’Hagan This is the complete version of an interview conducted with Andrew O’Hagan via e-mail. We looked back at Scotland’s Shame, and discussed the issues and controversies it raised, five years on. The Drouth: James MacMillan’s eponymous Edinburgh Festival speech (of 9 August 1999) is reproduced at the beginning of Scotland’s Shame, and is generally taken as a sort of starting out point for many of the essays in that volume, and thence subjected to exegesis; analysis, commentary, approbation and denial. It also seems, however, that many of the other writers in the book had seen your essay ‘Into the Ferment’ as it is quoted and commented upon in a similar if less frequent, manner. How did you get involved in Scotland’s Shame, and at what stage of the project did you begin to participate? Andrew O’Hagan: I read a transcript of Jimmy’s lecture at the time it was delivered and just felt that he’d said something very true and necessary. The reaction to it was predictable – accusing him of exaggeration, self-pity, treason – as that’s always the way the Scottish media react to artists who speak up. It’s been happening for hundreds of years, this kneejerk hatred of well-known Scots who say anything negative about Scotland, and it’s a dreadful curse, seeing as most countries with a culture of enlightenment (most of which are much less spectacular than Scotland’s) see it as an essential property of intellectual life that artists be encouraged to step forward and criticise. Anyway, the reaction to his lecture seemed so banal, so deeply unengaged with the matters he raised, that I found myself stewing with ... well, with embarrassment, actually. MacMillan is an international figure; his work is a great adornment to Scotland’s reputation as a spirited modern culture, and yet, he puts down the baton for a second to say something very personal, and the sages of the Scottish press and academia trounce him for it. It’s just so badmannered, apart from anything else – so small in every way. Well, I was angry enough to say yes when the Sunday Herald asked me to write an essay about the matter, and that was the piece that became ‘Into the Ferment’. That
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explains the situation you describe, where other contributors to Scotland’s Shame had seen my essay beforehand. I guess they’d read it in the paper. I was then attacked of course, though not for the first time, for putting an unpopular argument forward. I should say that, at least initially, I didn’t just write the essay to defend MacMillan’s argument about bigotry – though God knows he deserved as many handers as could be mustered on that score – but to defend his right to speak with gusto and be listened to with tolerance. Mine was really an argument in favour of cultural freedom, in favour of people feeling free to speak out about a country they have experience of, and care about, without automatically being vilified there. I’m always mortified when I come across Scottish intellectuals who go on as if they could be employed by the Scottish Tourist Board. I mean, loving your country is a great and important luxury, but it shouldn’t be deployed to anaesthetise the senses. The Drouth: The tone of the opening paragraph of your contribution seems in some ways to be at odds with the otherwise and subsequently somewhat elegiac tone of the piece. Some might take issue with the summation of Scottish history which opens your contribution. John Haldane, for example, who must have seen your essay before he wrote his own, comments that ‘this is too bleak a view I think, and one hard to sustain save from afar’. How would you respond to this? Andrew O’Hagan: ‘From afar’ is simply code for London, as if being out of Scotland, and being in London, were a sort of sin against natural belonging, as if London life, indeed, were a betrayal of the general Scottish good, a view so trite as to be unworthy of much notice. Ernest Hemingway is an American novelist who found his style in Paris; James Joyce is one who expounded his great Irish subject from an apartment in Trieste. But Scottish people who apply themselves in London – whether that be Gordon Brown or W.S. Graham, James Boswell or Alexander Fleming – are open to the very Scottish accusation of betraying their roots, which leads quite naturally to the rather pious belief that intellectuals who remain in Scotland are honouring some greater truth and living out an honest penance. It’s really an exercise in the grossest vanity, because Scotland is much larger than its own borders, if only the keepers of those borders would allow it. My ‘bleak view’ is rather sunnier than that of many of my compatriots, and sunnier than it would have been if I’d sat in Ayrshire reading
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