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Owen Dudley Edwards
i n for m a l
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I My mother-in-law (before she took on maternity) was camping in Jackson Hole, Wyoming and made friends with a fellow-Philadelphian, a Himalayan mountaineer’s wife originally from high society and subsequently hash-slinging for her husband and friends in the more inaccessible high spots of Wyoming, Tibet, &c. She found herself briefly back in Philadelphia one summer being interrogated by an aunt: ‘Bernice, do you prefer the formal or the informal table?’ The aunt was not including the amenities of Jackson Hole, K2, &c under either heading: hash-slinging, Wyoming style, was far beyond the limits of her imagination. What she meant by ‘the informal table’ probably received its most instructive diagnosis when Dorothy Parker reviewed the latest edition of Emily Post’s Etiquette (New Yorker, 31 December 1927): ‘Mrs Worldly… Mrs Post’s heroine… writes: “Dear Mrs Neighbour: “Will you and your husband dine with us very informally on Tuesday, the tenth, etc.” Whereupon the Neighbours arrive, he in a dinner coat, she in her simplest evening dress, and find a dinner of fourteen people and every detail as formal as it is possible to make it. …In certain houses – such as the Worldlys’ for instance – formality is inevitable, no matter how informal may be her “will you dine informally” intention.’
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As you might expect, Emily Post proclaimed the Dynamics of Informality as camouflage no less than as convention. She was born Emily Price in Baltimore in 1872, married the New York banker Edwin Main Post in 1892, and divorced him in 1905. Etiquette’s first edition was in 1922. No whisper of the unseemly darkened the Emily Post pages. But the divorce had been primarily occasioned by Edwin Post’s pursuit of chorusgirls, and the faintest whiff of it haunts the final lines of the Parker review quoting from the book before the Parker coup de grace:
ROSE: ‘Hush, dear aunt, for thy words pain me sorely. Hung in a plated dish-cover to the knocker of the workhouse door, with nought that I could call mine own, save a change of baby-linen and a book of etiquette, little wonder if I have always regarded that work as a voice from a parent’s tomb. This hallowed volume [producing a book of etiquette], composed, if I may believe the title-page, by no less an authority than the wife of a Lord Mayor, has been, through life, my guide and monitor. By its solemn precepts I have learnt to test the moral worth of all who approach me….’
‘“If after being introduced to you, Mr Jones … calls you by a wrong name, you let it pass, at first, but if he persists you may say: ‘If you please, my name is Stimson.’”
Historians have dated popularity of Secularism from the decade before Ruddigore which was clearly proclaiming it a target as vulnerable as Religion. In the opera, the etiquette book proved little defence when a bad baronet of Ruddigore is trying to fulfil his daily dose of dastardly deeds while ostentatiously ready to exploit his occasional reformation:
‘No, Mrs Post; persistent though Mr Smith may be, I may not say, “If you please, my name is Stimson.” The most a lady may do is to give him the wrong telephone number.’ Similarly, Mrs Parker sardonically saluted one of Mrs Post’s headings ‘Informal Visiting Often Arranged by Telephone’: – ‘and a darn good name for it, too’. There was, after all, something synthetic – at least informally synthetic – about Emily Post’s Etiquette. The real thing was on tap in London or Paris and had been guyed in Gilbert’s and Sullivan’s Ruddigore (1887) when Emily, as yet unPosted, was a Baltimore lass of 15. Rose Maybud appears at the outset reproving her Aunt Hannah’s ‘where true love is, there is little need of prim formality’:
ROSE: When a man has been a naughty baronet, And expresses his repentance and regret, You should help him, if you’re able, Like the mousie in the fable, That’s the teaching of my Book of Etiquette. The potentially invisible distinctions between formality and informality are evidently attempts to lock the stable door when the baronet has done his worst. In fact, if you follow the plot of Ruddigore closely enough, Rose is evidently the product of Sir Roderick Murgatroyd’s seduction of Aunt Hannah (aunthood being a longstanding formality to respectabilise the effects of the informal). As Wilde (profiteer from Patience) might have said, Emily Post’s Etiquette was yet another instance of Nature imitating Art. Informality may certainly be required in other conditions of aristocratic delicacy, as Noel Coward pointed out in ’The Stately Homes of England’: Though the pipes that supply the bathroom burst, And the lavatory makes you fear the worst, It was used by Charles the First, Quite informally … 69
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II The appearance of Thomas Muir of Huntershill – Essays for the Twenty First Century edited by Gerard Carruthers and Don Martin (humming earth) raises questions of Informality in what seems a more profound way, though that may not be its intention. It is primarily concerned with Scotland’s most famous judicial victim of counterrevolutionary repression in the 1790s Thomas Muir (1765-99), and brings together some of the scholarly and sacred writings discussing and dissecting him for his quarter-millennium, although at times it seems a volume in the collected writings of Professor Carruthers, festooned with appropriate appendices. He is author of one-fifth of the text, beginning formally with his essay ‘Thomas Muir of Huntershill in Memory, Culture and Literature’, whose p. 7 refers the reader to Professor Carruthers’s next essay in this collection, and to footnote 10 which advertises ‘a forthcoming essay by Gerard Carruthers’ and associates. Footnote 16 announces a ‘Carnegiefunded project’ to run 2016-2018 ‘led by Catriona Macdonald, Kirsty Blair and myself’. Footnote 21 moves from the indicative to the subjunctive: ‘The editors of the present volume are currently considering a project to collate the various versions of Muir’s trial, in an attempt to compare and test their veracity.’ By this stage the reader may be remembering another Scots writer (Kenneth Grahame) whose convict (like Muir) escaped from durance vile as recorded in The Wind in the Willows (1908). Toad devises a programme for the party celebrating his return, beginning SPEECH by TOAD (There will be other speeches by TOAD throughout the evening) ADDRESS by TOAD MR TOAD’S SONG (Other songs will be performed by the COMPOSER) &c &c But his friends Badger, Rat, and Mole persuade him to abandon the formal programme.
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peacefully, his judges headed by the learned and Professor Carruthers’s anxiety to leave us in no brutal Lord Braxfield whose culmination of his shortage of his own writings, or intelligence of charge to the jury was quoted as saying of the their possible future epiphanies, leaves him with popular audience to whom Muir had appealed: less energy for more objective editorship. There is an extensive bibliography but, extraordinarily, it What right had they to representation? He fails to mention the entry for Muir in the Oxford could have told them that the Parliament would Dictionary of National Biography in the clear, never listen to their petition: How could they comprehensive, and conscientious prose of think of it? A government in every country Professor Harry Dickinson, of Edinburgh, giving should be just like a corporation; and, in this its readers the scholarly historiographical state country, it is made up of the landed interest, of the art and thus every fresh scholar’s first rewhich alone has a right to be represented. source. The omission is the more startling since Specifically the courtroom battle raged over the the bibliography does include a major scholarly right of petition, acknowledged by all however article by a contributor to the Carruthers-Martin grudgingly, but whose advocacy Braxfield collection, Gordon Pentland, in a Festschrift deplored and whose advocates (notably Muir) for Professor Dickinson edited by Dr Pentland. he gladly transported in durance vile to Australia. The Pentland contribution to our present book In several ways this brings Muir and his (‘Thomas Muir and the Constitution’) is martyrdom down to our own day. The championexemplary in lucidity and profundity. As a ship of democracy by Prime Minister Theresa professional historian he is less ready than some May and insistence that the adoption of a hard contributors to conscript Muir as apologist for Brexit is the will of the UK people (whom she various present-day beliefs, though elsewhere ominously restricts to ‘British’) is coupled with he declared publicly in favour of Scottish independence. His narrative here as well as those her apparently implacable hostility to the use of democracy, notably her attempts to avoid votes in of other contributors make it clear how great a Parliament back into which the law courts have service Professor Carruthers and associates will do if they can produce a better text of Muir’s trial repeatedly thrust her, kicking and screaming. Muir held that Braxfield’s outlawry of extending than present versions allow. But on the basis of the evidence as we have it, Muir emerges more in the constitution could, perhaps would, result in harmony with the American Revolution than with its destruction. Beyond this, and basic to it, is radical belief in peaceful revolution. In Scotland the French. The basic division is clear enough: we are the inheritors of that doctrine, forever the most learned American intellectual rebels rejecting violent revolution. The Queen shaking acted from belief in history, the French rebels hands with the convert to constitutionalism abolished history (and its chronology). That Martin McGuinness personally forgiving his was basic to Edmund Burke’s empathy for murder of her cousin Mountbatten is an example the Americans and enmity to the French for us all, but neither she nor we can condone his revolutionaries. Dr Pentland shows that Muir evangelisation of violent revolution and its as far as trial records show defended himself in accompanying horrors against humanity. the light of English and Scottish historical tradition, to that extent hostile to Thomas Paine’s We may forgive what we will never endorse. famous denunciation of Burke The Rights of Man There is inevitably some danger of mutual but not directly since with the book outlawed in misunderstanding when essayists are animated England, Muir did not want to encourage more by the present without sufficient previous Scottish persecutors. (Much was made, in the immersion in history as read and written. state’s case, of Muir’s supposed championship of Professor Carruthers in kickstarting us speaks it, but witnesses made it clear that he had indeed (p. 9) of Muir’s ‘Christian idealism, an importantly disagreed with it and so advised his supposed real aspect that ought not to be forgotten in the attempted converts.) The unwritten British formation of his “democratic” outlook. Muir’s ‘constitution’ became a battleground, Muir radically active, idealistic perspective is not the claiming the right of its defenders to enlarge it result of contemporary secular thinking only, the 71
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ideas of Thomas Paine, for instance (undoubtedly when in March 1793 (which the editors should have corrected from ‘1792’) Muir was influential on Muir though these are) …’ ‘unanimously expelled from the Faculty of This is well meant but a little misleading. Advocates and his name struck from the Muir’s Christianity is not an ‘aspect’; it is not Register’ (p. 40). The expulsion was effect, not even habitual clothing: it is his life’s blood. cause, of Muir’s arrest in January 1793, and was But Paine can no more be pigeonholed as in fact moved by the radical Henry Erskine who ‘contemporary secular’ than Theodore Roosevelt’s was ready to defend Muir in court but insisted classification of him as ‘that filthy little atheist’. that the conduct of the defence should be in his (In fairness to the present incumbent of 1600 hands. This variation from possible allies to bitter Pennsylvania Avenue he has had his Presidential opponents needs pursuit, and does not get it here, antecedents, and not merely the most Irish of all although the book is invaluable in Professor US Presidents Andrew Jackson.) Paine set the Carruthers’s groundbreaking researches mass reading public on fire in Philadelphia with Common Sense (1776) evangelising the American showing the profoundly religious basis of Muir’s radicalism, evangelical and popular. Erskine was Revolution by demolition of the Divine Right Dean of Faculty, although his own hostility of Kings through first-class Biblical analysis, to government repression and the war with quoting God’;s expressions of utter disgust revolutionary France led to his ouster in 1795–6. with the institution of monarchy (1 Samuel 8). It is a particular pity that the Muir-Erskine We might say that Paine’s outstanding value relations have been ignored here (except for as a revolutionary evangelist was that he used notice of fictional versions) since Professor CarruReligion formally in argument but informally in thers’s masterly exposition of Muir’s wars against contextualisation. It struck deeper, that way. Enlightenment Moderates in the University of The best sermons don’t call themselves sermons. Glasgow and in the Church of Scotland provides The book contains texts of lectures by Alex a much clearer background than hitherto for all Salmond and Sir Thomas Devine. These of their common hostility to the Francophobes have apparently been treated as inviolable of their day: it was difficult to build bridges historical documents. Sir Thomas’s text of his between the two French spiritual gurus Calvin lecture before the Faculty of Advocates opens and Voltaire. But regardless of their respective ‘Many thanks, Mr Dean, for your generous mutual antipathy, Muir and Erskine reaffirm an introduction’ and readers furth of Scotland might interesting tradition of anti-war Scottish witness need to be told that this particular Deaconate is and belief in constitutional expansion pioneered no mere ecclesiastical or bureaucratic dignity but in the great anti-Enlightenment anti-Moderate has always been the expression of opinion of the John Witherspoon who after emigration to AmerAdvocates as to which one among them is the ica headed the future Princeton University and pre-eminent, such that government counsel like signed the Declaration of independence. Professor Lord Advocate and Solicitor-General could find Carruthers’s vast knowledge of Robert Burns themselves confronting their profession’s choice shows how the poet’s Moderate sympathies of for its head as their opponent in court however the 1780s set him against Muir, with whose impoverished the defendant. The world would political radicalism in the 1790s he then found have done better to take more note of the poetic common grounds. peculiarities of Scots law than it does, since from Mr Salmond‘s lecture has been criticised for time to time it shows itself preferable to seeing in Muir’s messages and martyrdom the other systems. (The late John Lord Cameron, stuff of Scottish nationalism. But his quotation Scotland’s senior judge in the 1960s and 1970s, of Muir’s last known words (when a fugitive highly conservative, was a rabid Anglophobe outlaw increasingly friendless in France) is when he contemplated the way English apposite: ‘We have achieved a great duty in these legislators were chipping away at the structure critical times, after the destruction of so many of Scots law.) The Faculty of Advocates might be taken to show democracy, at least of the medieval years, we have been the first to revive the spirit of our country and give it a national existence.’ guild variety, in such survivals, and they also Was that country Scotland or Britain? It can be exhibited democracy of the lynch-mob variety 72
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Scots. One of Braxfield’s earliest cases as Lord either, it can be both in varying priorities, but Justice-Clerk, Rex versus [Deacon] William the obvious answer here is that the country Brodie and George Smith (1788), featured several Muir meant was the one whose advocates had explosive altercations between Braxfield and expelled him from their ranks and whose judges John Clerk counsel for Smith had sentenced him to transportation to Australia, according to the unique legal system in which (Brodie’s was the then Dean of Faculty, Henry he had served. Mr Salmond’s informality as Erskine). But the trial report renders Braxfield in intellectual is refreshing, infectious and possibly English, apart from an occasional roar of ’gang even capable of trickling down through cracks on, sir’. Small wonder that Dr Pentland has his in some Unionist minds, and appropriately he doubts and Professor Carruthers so far will only brings into focus the unmatched informality of consider collation of the ‘various versions of tyranny clothed in legal genius thundered from Muir’s trial’. The original court reporters, such the Bench against Muir by Lord Braxfield. The as they were, professional, amateur or interWelshman Sir George Jeffreys Lord Chief Justice ested parties, were canny as to what they might and then Lord Chancellor of England in the publish and how far they might risk sentences for previous century was equally famous for blunt contempt of court if the Scots they declared the speech, occasional song, legal acumen, ferocious judges had spoken seemed insufficiently dignibullying, toxic informality, and brutal sentences, fied, so that we get raw Scots from the Bar more but never attained Braxfield’s intellectual heights than from the Bench. At the very least Professor and depths, and was fundamentally a courtier Carruthers might produce or inspire an annotated on the rise, not a judge at the height of his handlist of the editions of the trial which won profession. Jeffreys died aged 43. Robert international celebrity for Scottish injustice. MacQueen, raised to the Bench as Lord A second edition from a New York publisher was Braxfield aged 54, became Lord Justice-Clerk demanded within a year of its appearance, a fact at 65 and died in office at 77. Jeffreys’s bloody which underlines how much Muir in Scotland assizes were discharged in the assumption that was more a product of Revolutionary America the King would review the sentences; Braxfield than Revolutionary France. knew himself to be the final decision, towering over his colleagues in authority as in intellect. But will that tell us how Braxfield really spoke? Alex Salmond’s informality is more austere than Alex Salmond’s sense of humour is far too Braxfield’s, but on Muir and subsequent Braxfield good to be dismayed by the thought of warfare on civil liberties it approaches its target Braxfield himself as a Scottish cultural perhaps closer than customary academic nationalist. You won’t find it in this book, but austerity: the English radical Maurice Margarot, Muir’s fellow-victim commemorated with him in ‘Braxfield is the classic villain in this tale, the the Calton Hill monument, improved the man who appears to want to be hated. shining hour with Braxfield starting his trial Yet Braxfield is also the pithiest contributor to by demanding ‘an interpreter to make me this story, and my favourite Braxfield remark is understand what your Lordship says’. Suddenly his repost to one of Muir’s co-accused, Joseph we are confronted by self-made Scots laddie Gerrald. When Gerrald pointed out to the court derided by English snob. Nor does there seem that Jesus Christ was a reformer, Braxfield to have been any attempt from Braxfield to cap growled in reply, ‘an muckl guid it did him, this little jest by punishment, corporal or he was hangit’. otherwise, for contempt of court. This presents us with a textual crisis. It is If he was determined to sentence a prisoner he certain that Braxfield perpetually spoke in court seems to have been generous in providing rope. and out of it in the Scots tongue, in which it In Muir’s case Braxfield’s intent still reeks of its seems agreed nobody was more apposite or more appalling frankness. The Muir trial for sedition deadly. He was the spear of Informality. But trial rent many holes in the Lord Advocate’s case reports as we have inherited them are in English, for the prosecution but Braxfield’s last words lightened very occasionally by the faintest of (however originally Scots) to the jury were: 73
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‘The tendency of the pannel’s conduct was plainly to promote a spirit of revolt, and if what was demanded was not given, to take it by force. I have not the smallest doubt that you are, like myself, convinced of the pannel’s guilt, and I declare you to return such a verdict as would do you honour.’ Nothing testified against Muir came anywhere near this turning an audience into fellow-conspirators. Then translate it into broad late eighteenth-century Scots, purred confidentially to jurors firmly if informally thus admitted to your collegiality, your wisdom, your justice, your patriotism, at two o’clock in the morning after continuous trial throughout the preceding day and night. Braxfield’s intent was simple enough. Muir’s actual guilt was irrelevant. His innocence was in fact more useful than his guilt would have been. The fact that he was sentenced so savagely for such doubtful sedition would be, as the law liked to pronounce, a deterrence to anyone comparably tempted in time coming. Braxfield was not always so ruthless in denying any reasonable doubt. When winding up his charge to the jury in 1788 before they withdrew to find Deacon Brodie guilty, he told them that he thought Brodie guilty but if ‘you are of a different opinion, and do not consider the evidence against Brodie sufficiently strong, you will separate the one from the other, and bring in a verdict accordingly’. He clearly thought nobody could think Brodie’s accomplice Smith was innocent, and there showed his firm view that alternative beliefs in guilt or innocence were reasonable when dealing with bourgeoisie or squirearchy, the class into which he himself had risen, since judgment should provide for the concerns of middle-class critics while ignoring lower-class misgivings.
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Brodie’s jury agreed with him, and in sentencing Brodie Braxfield told him (as Anglified for the record) ‘God always listens to those who seek Him with sincerity’. The famous Scots criminologist William Roughead (whose essay on the Muir-Skirving-PalmerMargarot-Gerrald trials is another extraordinary omission from the bibliography) took that sentiment as proof of Braxfield’s piety and therefore inability to utter so blasphemous a sentiment in allusion to Jesus as reform evangelist ‘Muckl guid it did him, he was hangit’. Roughead was a late Victorian product and liked judicial (and criminal) religious epiphany dressed up respectably. But Braxfield lived in the hard-bitten eighteenth century. That Christ had died despite his good works was a matter of fact, and was yet another precedent for the discouragement of comparable radicals in time coming. If he did mutter it, it could have been sorrow more than sneer. But whatever he thought, he thought it in Scots.
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III Professor Carruthers follows Braxfield literature (whether he cites it or not) by ascribing posterity’s harsh verdict on Braxfield to Henry Cockburn’s posthumous Memorials (1856) in which Braxfield was damned as ‘without any taste for refined enjoyment’, [while his] strength of understanding, which gave him power without cultivation, only encouraged him to a more contemptuous disdain for all natures less coarse than his own’. If true, it makes him a man for 2017, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, DC, USA. Professor Carruthers also cites Cockburn ‘But I fear that no impartial censor can avoid detecting, throughout the whole course of the trials, not mere casual indications of bias, but absolute straining for convictions.’ For ‘course’ read ‘coarse’, in fact. Defences of a kind might be made for Braxfield, but if our time-machine could win him to the impossible indiscretion of frankness he would indignantly agree. He was saving the country a French Revolution by sending these hotheads away across the world. Being a humane man, he was not sentencing them directly to death although some would never recover from transportation in the hulks.
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He stressed that Muir had been close to crimes requiring capital punishment. But by exemplary repression of innocent radicals, Scotland – and, of course, England, now you mention it – would be saved the guillotine. Martyrs of 1793, were they? The first martyr of 1793 was Louis XVI, and while Braxfield lived and judged he would have no British counterpart. Whether we damn him or thank him, Braxfield is over two centuries dead, sharing his deathdate of 1799 with Thomas Muir, though not their country. What immortalises Braxfield is not history, but fiction, specifically the title-role in Robert Louis Stevenson’s unfinished Weir of Hermiston. Professor Carruthers somewhat entraps, not to say, guillotines himself: ‘One wonders if this version of Braxfield, channelled by Stevenson and before him Cockburn (very much representing the Whig interest), is actually a bit fictitious, the product of propaganda rather than being entirely true to life.’ The village idiot may answer the professor by saying that a novel, however unfinished, is supposed to be ‘a bit fictitious’. But it is true that Braxfield has remained alive as Weir of Hermiston, as he could not have done left to himself however aided by Cockburn. Unfinished though it is, Weir of Henderson is one of the greatest of Scottish novels, by one of the greatest of Scotland’s writers. And for all that he set the novel in the first years of the nineteenth century while retaining too many manners and customs from the late eighteenth, Stevenson made it very clear that his Weir was Braxfield. He used their names interchangeably. But that was his way. He constantly associated Long John Silver with the crippled English poet W. E. Henley, at least until their devoted friendship was smashed into toxic atoms by Henley’s jealousy of Stevenson’s wife, a transition from love to hate effectively anticipated by Silver once more proving the Wilde thesis on Nature’s imitation of Art. Stevenson’s reaction on reading the first Sherlock Holmes stories was ‘Can this be my old friend Joe Bell?’ But it wasn’t: Bell’s ability to deduce personal occupations, careers, characters from clothing or callouses was but one of the half-dozen preliminary reminiscent portraits of models whence Sherlock Holmes first came to life, rapidly becoming his own man when his cases 75
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unfolded. ACD and RLS never formally met (informally, they shared the same pub, Rutherford’s of Drummond Street) but they deeply influenced one another, and in the last chapters of Weir Stevenson fixed the limits of one character (the book’s intended corpse, but RLS was a corpse on 3 December 1894 before he could create Weir’s): ‘They knew nothing of Sherlock Holmes in these days, but there was a good deal said of Talleyrand.’ That was in fact a good instance of Stevenson’s ability to chart the limits of a character, throwing in a very shrewd historical judgment on the way, for when one thinks of it Talleyrand for all his style and skill is inferior to Holmes. One has only to see it in his self-made clone Henry Kissinger. There is more and less than Henley in Silver – his other models must have included Edinburgh Old Town publicans encountered by RLS during his very first bewildered expeditions out of his far more respectable native New Town. And there is more and less than Braxfield in Weir of Hermiston. The great Irish-American novelist Edwin O’Connor (author of The Last Hurrah) wrote an unsuccessful final novel All in the Family which used the Kennedys as models given purpose by an impossible plot: that one Kennedy would if necessary have his brother certified unjustly as insane in order to preserve the family’s political power. Similarly Weir of Hermiston put a somewhat anachronistic Braxfield (mixed in with other models including Stevenson’s father) into a plot intended to eventuate in Hermiston, contrary to all legal custom, presiding at the trial of his own son for murder, sentencing him to death from which the son escapes but the father dies. Here it is less the power in the story as the power with which the tale is told that dominates the text. Its fate as an unfinished symphony clings around its readers. Stevenson had already written of Raeburn’s portrait of Braxfield in his Virginibus Puerisque (dedicated to Henley in 1881):
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If I know gusto in painting when I see it, this canvas was painted with rare enjoyment. The tart, rosy, humorous look of the man, his nose like a cudgel, his face resting squarely on the jowl, has been caught and perpetuated with something that looks like brotherly love. A peculiarly subtle expression haunts the lower part, sensual and incredulous, like that of a man tasting good Bordeaux with half a fancy it has been somewhat too long uncorked. From under the pendulous eyelids of old age he eyes look out with a half-youthful, half-frosty twinkle. Hands, with no pretence to distinction, are folded on the judge’s stomach. So sympathetically is the character conceived by the portrait-painter, that it is hardly possible to avoid some movement of sympathy on the part of the spectator. And sympathy is a thing to be encouraged, apart from humane considerations, because it supplies us with the materials for wisdom. It is probably more instructive to entertain a sneaking kindness for any unpopular person, and, among the rest, for Lord Braxfield, than to give way to perfect raptures of moral indignation against his abstract vices. He was the last judge on the Scottish bench to employ the pure Scottish idiom. His opinions, thus given in Doric, and conceived in a lively, rugged, conversational style, were full of point and authority. Out of the bar, or off the bench, he was a convivial man, a lover of wine, and one who ‘shone peculiarly’ at tavern meetings. He has left behind him an unrivalled reputation for rough and cruel speech; and to this day his name smacks of the gallows. …
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This from ‘Some Portraits by Raeburn’ is a perfect example of the superiority of the informal. The mingling of art criticism and biography, the necessity of the artist’s hint of fraternal affection, and the spectator’s sympathy, makes insidious entry upon the reader’s judgment while rejecting the formality of judicial verdict, and judging judgment itself, Braxfield superior in erudition and understanding and yet using his informality to conscript his jury or his audience where austere professional English shudders away from conquest of the emotions. Stevenson surveys the might of Braxfield’s judicial majesty as fact in Raeburn’s portrayal simultaneous to the historical reality, and makes us hear the painting, a device for formality to scorn and informality to relish: His summing upon Muir began thus – the reader must supply for himself ‘the growling, blacksmith’s voice’, and the broad Scottish accent: ‘Now this is the question for consideration – Is the panel guilty of sedition, or is he not? Now, before this can be answered, two things must be attended to that require no proof: First, that the British constitution is the best that ever was since the creation of the world, and it is not possible to make it better.’ It’s a pretty fair start, is it not, for a political trial? A little later, he has occasion to refer to the relations of Muir with ‘those wretches’ the French. ‘ I never liked the French all my days’, said his lordship, ‘but now I hate them’. Informal, ultimately is naked humanity, formal is clothing, arming, lying.
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Stevenson has been justly served in Ernest Mehew’s eight-volume edition of his letters, and in the book-length essays by Chesterton, Daiches, Jenni Calder, Ian Bell. For various reasons he lacks a satisfactory biography: the informality of his essayists triumphing where the formality of the birth-to-death workers doom their enterprises in one way or another. Chesterton, noticing some of the earliest, recalled the infant Stevenson telling his mother ‘I’ve drawed a man. Shall I draw his soul now?’ and damned the biographers critically and, as it has proved, prophetically: ‘They have not drawed his soul.’ There is, I think, one exception, maybe the most informal biography ever written. Stevenson’s stepson, Lloyd Osbourne, for whose entertainment as a boy he had created Treasure Island, wrote an uncollected life of RLS in a series of introductions to some volumes of the Tusitala edition in 1924. His evidence introducing Weir of Hermiston is almost horrific: how Stevenson in Samoa read his family the beginning of Weir, how Lloyd could not speak a word in comment, how bitterly Stevenson reproached him: Put yourself in my place; try to imagine my feelings; I who had been so carried away by Weir that this was the ironical climax! Oh, that idiotic silence! What had possessed me? I had known all the while it was inexcusable – yet I had sat there looking at the ceiling, oblivious of the author and thinking only of the book. Then I tried to tell him the truth, but with difficulty, realising how unpardonably I had hurt his pride, which was really much more concerned than the question of my judgment. That it was a masterpiece; that never before had he written anything comparable with Weir, that it promised to be the greatest novel in the English language.
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We were in the dark. I could not see his face. But I believe he listened with stupefaction. The reaction when it came was too great for his sorely strained nerves; tears rained from his eyes – and mine, too, streamed. Never had I known him to be so moved; never had I been so moved myself; and in the all-pervading darkness we were for once free to be ourselves, unashamed. Thus we sat, with our arms about each other, talking far into the night. Even after thirty years I should not care to divulge anything so sacred as those confidences; the revelation of that tortured soul; the falterings of its Calvary. RLS put Weir aside for a time but returned to it. Essentially he died in childbirth. It is the ultimate informality.
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INFORMAL THE DROUTH ISSUE 58 SPRING 2017
The Drouth The Electron Club Centre for Contemporary Arts 350 Sauchiehall Street Glasgow G2 3JD Email: thedrouth@yahoo.co.uk Website: www.thedrouth.org EDITORS Mitchell MIller Johnny Rodger EDITORIAL BOARD Dorian Grieve Gerry Caruthers Stephen Davismoon Owen Dudley Edwards Ruaridh Nicoll Emily Munro Elke Weissmann David Archibald Miriam Ross EDITORIAL ASSISTANTS Alisdair Craig ONLINE EDITOR Emma Lennox PRINTING The Clydeside Press DESIGN GraphicalHouse © The Drouth ISSN 1474 6190
Cover Artist: Patricia Cain
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Issue 57:
Change? (Critique – Owen Dudley Edwards, Theatre – Chris Deans ‘Sauna Lads’) Translations (Theatre – David Harrower ‘Woyzeck’, Prose – Yusef Szafki and Gogol) Authenticity (Critique – Gerry Carruthers on Burns, Film – Enrico Cocozza) Death, Dissolution and Decay (Theatre – Pauline Goldsmith ‘Bright Colours Only’) Festival Special: Generations (Edwin Morgan, Angus Calder, Gowan Calder et al.) Fact? (Film – Jonny Murray on Grierson, Critique – Ritchie Robertson on Kafka) Complexity (Music – Stephen Davismoon, Angus Calder, Burhan Wazir) Panegyric (Jenni Calder, Gavin Stamp, John Macinnes) Law (Lockerbie, Women in Hollywood, Edward Said, Heston’s Hair-do) The Word (Tarantino, Shakespeare, Zapatistas, George Monbiot) Monument (Picasso, War Memorials, 9/11, Castro & Stone) Bigotry (Andrew O’Hagan, Arabs in NY, Ernst Toch, Travellers) Intelligence (Chris Harvie, Grigor on Miralles, Hamburg Cell, Jake Mahaffy) Land (New Scottish Art, Ruaridh Nicoll, Andy Wightman, Donald MacLeod, Chain) Consensus & Revision (Andrew O’Hagan, David Stenhouse, Super-Size me, Margaret Tait) Didactic (Mohammed Idrees Ahmad, W. Lewis and Kissinger, Frank Kuppner) Form (Toby Poterson, Simon Manfield, Diane Periton) Class (Ken Currie, Peter Mullan, James Kelman, Willy Maley, New Orleans) Dialect (Mark Neville, Kovesi on John Clare, Carol Baranuik, Tsotsi, subtitles) Image (Alasdair Gray, Bill Griffith, John Calcutt, Nahid Rachlin, Mark Cousins) Document (Gordon Brown, Covenanters, Ossian, Jonny Murray, Aaron Valdez & The Trouble with Tommy) Utopia (Sheila Dickson, Stephan Klenner-Otto, Ken Simpson, AI Gore’s Film career) Deviant (Mark Cousins, John McShane, Neil Mulholland, Louise Galea) Skin (Nick Broomfield, Gordon Motto Clark, Michael Foot, Robert Davidson) Epic/Lyric (Louis Macneice, Michael Longley, Borges Robert Graves, Adrienne Scullion) Collect (Malcolm Dixon, Nick Barley, Andrew Lee, Burns & Slavery, D Archibald’s Blackwatch) Pure (Norman McLaren, John Kay, Stuart Murray, Kovesi’s Kelman) Establishment (Tom Nairn Feature, EIFF, John Goodridge, Molly Maguire, Gareth Vile) Union (Steve Ovett Effect, Abu Ghraib, Burns and sexuality, 1707 and all that . . .) Public (Noam Chomsky and James Kelman, Thatcher Feature, Burns and Phrenology) Rhetoric: James MacMillan, Elliott Carter, Hollywood’s Ancient World, Cuba Moral: Il Divo, Jen Birks, Stephen Healy, Hamish Henderson, Tennessee Williams Solution: (Tom Nairn and Colin Kidd, Roman Polanski, Kibberd’s Ulysses, Chris Dooks) Lost: Nairn on Rudd, McKean on Castles, Rhona Brown on Fergusson, Burns and Excise Process Ireland and the UK election, Robin Yassan-Kassab on Israel, Scottish drama-queens, 3D film, Guest Ed Simon Kovesi Guest Artist Roddy Buchanan Decline American Road Trips, Sexualities, Zizek, Berlin in Fragments, Surviving Sundance. Guest Ed Miriam Ross, Guest Artist Graham Fagen Licence Licence, on Pat Lally and Ian McCulloch, Arthur Koestler, EIFF, Emma Lennox, Ross Sinclair Foundation Alan Williams, Chris Leslie, Peter Watkins, Robert Kellie Douglas, National Youth Orchestra of Scotland Control Artemis Manouki, Election Result 2011, Brando’s Last Tango, Susan Bier, The Ecumenical Organ, Roddy Buchanan’s Bandsmen Decade Sarajevo, Chris Leslie; James Kelman in Urban Space; Michael Mersinis; Ruth Paxton; Thomas Reid Graphic Graphical House, Frances Robertson, Cornelius Cardew, Spiegelman’s Maus, Georgette Heyer, Ken Neil, Madmen, Clark McGinn Strategy Red Road, Alison Irvine; Miles Glendinning; Ken Neil, Politics Tactics; Andrew Tickell; Carol Baraniuk; Raymond Burke Margin Derek McLuckie, Glue Boys, My big Fat Gypsy, East Timor Drama, Studio KAP, Ireland’s House Party, Richard McLean Tension Andrew Tickell, Gerry Carruthers/George Smith, Jorge Smith, Megan Coyer, Johnny Jodger, Owen Dudley Edwards, Mitch Miller, Madaleine Schmoll, Lars Kristensen, Dave Sutherland Frame George Square, Catriona Macdonald; Linden Bicket on G Mackay Brown, Stravinsky and Schoenberg 100; the Basques; Mariusz Tarkawian. Intention Monuments & the Third Reich, Niels Bugge, Varosha, Stephanie Misseri, Finding Tito, Peter Geoghegan, Artistic Intentions, James Clegg. Close Andrew Tickell, Contemporary Chilean Cinema, Maria-Paz Peirano, Rachel Gannon, Marc Baines, Ross Sinclair, Egon Riss, Frances Robertson. System Glasgow Games Monitor, Chris Leslie and Paddy’s Market, Films of Finlay J MacDonald, Geoghegan’s Catalonia. Choice Hannah McGill; Dhivya Kate Chetty; Dee Heddon, Daunderlust; Arianna Introna, Veneto; Alex Niven; Bosnia; John McTernan. Flux Ciara Phillips, Muhammad Idrees Ahmad’s ‘Neoconservative War’, Catriona Macdonald, Toby Paterson’s ‘Ludic Motif’. North Dominic Hinde, Claire Biddles, Simon Donald, Alex Massie, Arianna Introna, David Murphy, Aidan Kerr, Mark Ryan Smith Contemporary Lionel Ruffel, Kathy Li, Helen Jones artist, Frances Robertson, Francis McKee, Peter Geoghegan, Andrew Tickell Territory Jessica Ramm, Scott Hames. Goenawan Mohamad, Scriabin, Bolivia, Syria, Queer Cinema Interstices Photography issue: Nina Bacos, Ben Rush, Scott Caruth, Jolanta Dolewska, Jim Harrold, Jenny Brownrigg, Alison Phipps Radical Radical Film Festiva , Carl Lavery, Poppy Kohner, Michael Higgins, Josh Durnan, Cardross, Chelsea Birks, Craig Richardson Strip Comix issue: John McShane, Olivier Crepin, Letty Wilson, Nyla Ahmad, Woodrow Phoenix, Chris Murray, Donna Leishman, Kathryn Briggs Resonance Stewart Smith & Elodie Roy; Silja Strom, Jon Dale, Communal Leisure, DIY, Laurence Estanove on Glasgow music, Mark Vernon, Claire Biddles & Frances Morgan.
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SPRING 2017
ISSUE 58
INFORMAL ISSUE 58 SPRING 2017
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