Dialogue: Andrew O'Hagan - '...fight and argue and improve'

‘… 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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the Scotsman all these years. My essay was polemical – a show of temper and of argument – and I just happen to believe that, in writing, the truth is not always immediately amenable to the literal-minded. I simply wanted that paragraph you mention to carry a certain, deeply felt dismay at the low tone of the debate about sectarianism in Scotland. People who accuse me of disliking Scotland do me a great injustice, the injustice of reading me very poorly, or of not reading me at all. I like Scotland enough to yearn for it to have a great and improving conversation with itself; I like it enough to want the best of its cultural traditions to enlarge themselves in the modern world; I like it enough to oppose its tendency to turn parochial in the face of its imagined foes, ‘from afar’. I like it enough to want to be part of a generation that extracts itself from the exhausting historical condition of being addicted to injury and defeat. I like it enough to seek to indulge in the truth about it instead of the myth. I like it enough to hate the populist chants that have long-since impoverished the country. And I like it enough not to mind very much when people in Edinburgh think that people like me should be sent back across the Irish Sea in a punctured canoe.

The Drouth: Is there perhaps a sense in which the title Scotland’s Shame may itself be a bit unfocused?

Judging from the subject matter and the focus of many of the contributions, this is largely a West Coast centred debate – many from the East and North would, and indeed did, take issue with the way it was framed.

How do you feel sectarianism relates to the rest of the country – or indeed, does the rest of the country relate or contribute to sectarianism in the West?

Andrew O’Hagan: I had no part in choosing the title of that collection. Religious bigotry is not the biggest problem in Scotland; there’s more of a problem with women-hating than anything else, but the fact remains that Scotland has shown a tolerance of intolerance, if you like, or a willingness to let religious affections work for some people and against others, which is certainly shaming in its own way. I’ve heard it often over the years, this thing about bigotry being a West Coast thing, meaning, I suppose, that there are more Irelandderived people on the West Coast. But many people in Edinburgh know everything there is to know about intolerance: John Knox was born in East Lothian. And the Highlands and Islands – with its attitude to ‘incomers’ – is hardly the world’s main source of the milk of

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human kindness either. I think it’s a sort of class insult, to insinuate that religious bigotry is a workingclass trait only to be found amongst the great unwashed of Clydesdale, when James Macmillan’s original point was about such bigotry’s institutional character, the way it was preserved in the judiciary, the economic system, the parliament, the arts, and the media. None of these, so far as I know, could best be described as a working-class stronghold.

The Drouth: Do you think the title implies some kind of Establishment is at work – and if so, what in your opinion, might be its form(s) and agenda, if indeed they can be summarised?

Andrew O’Hagan: I can’t summarise them. I can’t even confirm them. It would be like trying to summarise and confirm the influence of Texas oil barons on US foreign policy: everyone knows it exists, and they can point to single decisions and individuals and effects relating to that influence, but trying to describe the machinations of the Establishment is like trying to catch running water with one hand. You can’t contain the water, you can’t estimate the volume, but you know that your hand is wet. In Scotland, there are attitudes against Catholics (and not only Catholics, but against Pakistanis, for instance, much more explicitly) which denigrate their intellectual capacities, or their honesty, hard-workingness, and reliability. That was certainly how things were understood (and practised) at the Glasgow Herald until recent years. The Scottish Civil Service worked similarly, and, until my generation, you could count the number of published Scots Catholic novelists on one hand. I merely offer these as examples: we could spend hours citing examples from the business world.

The Drouth: Looking at recent developments in Scotland – particularly in Glasgow, with the Asylum Seekers dispersal programme and the profusion of different cultures now found within Glasgow, and especially with the Catholic community here seen very much in this context as an integral part of the ‘host community’ – could one – or indeed ought one to – revisit – or even revise the nature of the debate now? And if so, how might that be done?

Andrew O’Hagan: It’s really too early to say.

So long as one young man is being murdered for wearing a Celtic (or a Rangers) scarf, then it will be fair to say there is a problem with bigotry in Scotland. People can argue about what degree of problem that is, but to me it is a vile and traditional affliction in Scotland, one that is promoted by the Daily Record and cheered on by the criminally-minded elements in the Scottish churches. What Scotland needs is a long summer of love – a hiatus from hatred – and I suppose that can only arrive through education. The smarter children get, the quicker and more deeply they realise how they can individuate themselves not by the donning of colours and the issuing of tribal chants, but by using their imagination

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to live tactfully and carefully and beautifully with other people. We are back with the great questions of the Scottish Englightenment: how do we live well and morally and happily? Those questions never stop being the right questions – in Scotland today, perhaps more than ever.

The Drouth: Scotland’s Shame elaborates a multifaceted and sustained defence of state-sponsored schools for Catholic children. While to some outsiders looking on, the heat generated by this debate may seem quaint and anachronistic, it is nonetheless the single issue that appears to be at the emotional heart of sectarianism here. Should the same rights, guarantees and protections extended by the state to Catholic schools be extended to Islamic, Jewish, Sikh, Buddhist and other faiths, including, of course, Presbyterians? And why do you think there is no longer the same level of debate about the appropriateness of state funding (charity status, grants, etc.) of private schools?

Andrew O’Hagan: I feel two fairly opposing things about this, and I feel them at the same time and in equal measure. The first is that denominational schools are a nightmare. I went to one, a perfectly good state Catholic school in Ayrshire, but I’m certain the atmosphere was less academic than tribal. Most of the teachers were good – they managed to get me to university, which was no easy task at the time – but I was always troubled by the way religious devotion was prioritised when it came to any understanding of what constituted a moral education. I have to say, personally speaking, that I don’t feel I had, as a child, the benefit of a true moral education: I had an education in Catholic mythology and various tribal arts (none of which are dismissible), but I don’t think I left my Catholic education with much idea of how to live a good life. We felt sectarianised and proud of it.

On the other hand, in a place like Scotland, there’s a lot to be said for the particularity of a belief-fuelled education. Don’t laugh, but I’d say all my universalising notions, any sense of tradition and ancientness, my love of ritual and beauty, come from my time at that Ayrshire school, from the nuns and priests who used to drive me mad, and who I drove mad in turn. The worst kind of childhood would be an empty one, and what I’d like to call my ethnic-minority education gave me, every day, a sense of who my people were and what they were trying to do. The fact that it only made me want to run away can only be to the credit of the establishment: a good education should always make you want to run away. But seriously, I’m divided about this. I think all denominations should have their own schools, and be funded by the state to have them, if they can show that people want to attend and want to maintain educational standards that meet national goals. But we must be vigilant about it becoming a seedbed for tribal apartheid – Scotland has been divisive enough in the past, and the task is to see it become a country in which difference is a natural and creative force in society as opposed to a hateful excuse for depravity.

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To complete (and complicate) my answer, I asked my friend Robert Davis about this. He is Head of the Department of Religious Education at Glasgow University. ‘It seems clear that the Muslim community has powerful claims on state support for Islamic schools,’ he said. ‘But we would encourage Presbyterians, Buddhists, Hindus, Ecumenists, Humanists, Existentialists to set out their visions of schooling and education. Again – other mature democratic societies can support diversity. I visited a school once in New York called (quaintly perhaps) The Ethical School. It had been set up as an inner city project school and was based on a manifesto of values and character-based principles for the education of teenagers, none of them particularly religious. It was a roaring success. Interestingly, the one place where we do experiment in this way is the pre-5 sector, where we have nurseries run on the philosophies of Reggio Emilia (a region in Italy famous for its nurseries), Montessori and Steiner. Why can’t this be extended to the monolithic school system?

The Drouth: As has been remarked, women and Scottish Catholicism are a notable omission from the book – and indeed, a total absence of women from the debate. What do you make of that?

Andrew O’Hagan: Women have been absent from the debate, and that’s baffling to me, given the implications for children at all levels of their lives, and the fact that Scottish women have generally been more involved in their children’s lives than Scottish fathers ever have. I think if Pope John Paul II spent less time canonising saints and more time ordaining women priests, then women all over the world would suddenly feel more profoundly included in these matters. As it is, in Scotland especially, with its homoerotic culture of male camaraderie and power-mongering, women must feel, in relation to this question, as if their intellectual efforts are suspended. One of them told me recently that the question of Catholicism in Scotland was a matter for ‘men in robes and football hooligans, the first of which groups knows nothing about women’s bodies and women’s needs, and the second of which essentially hates women and sing songs about it from the terraces.’

But you wouldn’t want to mistake lowered voices in the debate for a lack of commitment on the ground.

Scottish women everyday are making Scotland’s Catholic community a different world from the world of their grandfathers. Here’s Robert Davis again. ‘We’ve got Catholic education in the vanguard of curricular change, opening the sciences and technologies to girls in schools. We also have the networks of Catholic women involved in the Labour and Trade Union movement, the health professions and the voluntary sector. Nowadays, we see Catholic women at the heart of the service ethic on which Scotland still prides itself – for example, the appointment of Kathleen Marshall, a prominent Catholic laywoman, as Scotland’s first Children’s Commissioner.’

In attacking the culture of bigotry in Scotland, I joined in what I believed was an attempt to speak of the

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place I come from as a seat of betterment, a place where the past would not repress the future but be made to enable it. We called attention to anti-Catholic feeling as a scar on the country’s modern face, but that did not represent any unwillingness, so far as I’m concerned, to look at the way Catholicism itself can be troubled and scarring. Faith is not a matter for the faithless: religion, if it has any genius, should be the higher form of idealism, and in Scotland it should match and outrun those other forms of idealism that have long made us fight and argue and improve.

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