A Salmond's A Salmond For A' That

WINTER 2010/2011 ISSUE 38

THE DROUTH

SALMOND’S A SALMOND FOR A’ THAT WE ARE THE DEADEST PEOPLE IN EUROPE. I make this statement as no part of a Jeremaic lamentation, intent on provoking earthly repentance or heavenly retribution. I simply report a news announcement from the BBC at 8.00am today, 14 December 2010, to the effect that according to a study or survey or poll carried out by somebody, we in Scotland have the lowest life expectancy in Europe.

67

68

THE DROUTH

WINTER 2010/2011 ISSUE 38

Owen Dudley Edwards

This may of course merely mean that we are modest in our estimates of our own survival, or it may be that the responsible poll-scratchers and surveyors are off their collective trollies, or it may be part of the catastrophic decline in the broadcasting media nominally serving Scotland undevolved.

It is presumably unconnected with the deathnotice for Scotland so spectacularly posted by Tom Nairn some 43 years ago, especially since he has testified to its subsequent resurrection with benefit of clergy. But it invites the question of how dead are we?

Hugh MacDiarmid proclaimed cultural paralysis at various times, but notably some forty years before Nairn, in A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle, taking Burnsnichts as his overture in a masterpiece which from time to time implied that Walpurgisnachts were warmer and more human, cheerier and more nutritious. Scotland can of course plead in extenuation that Burns in ‘Tam o’Shanter’ witnessed a comparable occasion, but one where the Undead, if present, were hoofed into oblivion by the Cutty Sark and other living hierophants. And we lack a dead symbol like the dodo. Or Queen Anne.

Queen Anne will only do as ‘British’ on the basis of being English-born and one-eighth Scottish by descent, but she left a Union behind her whose life expectancy is what? Is it life expectancy in inverse proportion to that of Scotland? Much energy has been spent in recent years in the invention of Britain, but we need to enquire whether the United Kingdom, or its vulgar fraction, Britain, can only survive provided Scotland is terminated. To aid us in this enquiry, we have two recent publications, Professor Nigel Leask’s Robert Burns and Pastoral (Oxford, ISBN 978-0-19-957261-8) and Mr David Torrance’s Salmond Against the Odds (Birlinn, ISBN 978 1 84158 914 5). The first is a masterpiece, so much so as to make the reviewing of almost any other work in the same essay an act of cruelty.

The second is an exceptionally detailed report on the public life of the present First Minister, who is himself enough of a masterpiece to impair the success of his competent but hardly brilliant biographer. Burns has waited over two centuries for a book as good as this one, and Mr Torrance may thus take some comfort. Assuming the world still includes literate humans in two centuries’ time, will it want a biography of Alex Salmond? It may.

The odds are better on its doing so than for any other politician of these islands of Mr Salmond’s public lifetime. (Any other politician per se, as opposed to any politician who mastered other arts, as did Michael Foot or Neil MacCormick or Conor Cruise O’Brien: 2210 will be pitiable if it is not still reading them.)

WINTER 2010/2011 ISSUE 38

THE DROUTH

That Salmond is a figure of potential historical significance is the greatest drawback of David Torrance’s book. If the subject had only been small enough, the book might have been big enough.

Inextricably intertwined with this gallant failure is Mr Torrance’s frank inability to understand Mr Salmond. The last chapter, the only one to be unnumbered (as subtle a point as the book can make), is entitled ‘Will the real Alex Salmond please stand up?’ Mr Torrance is as honest as a Tory hagiographer of George Younger can get, but a more accurate title for chapter and book would have been Salmond for Beginners. The real Salmond must depend on how real he can make Scotland. Where he will finish demands better field glasses than Mr Torrance can supply.

First Minister, Annabel Goldie gracefully saluted the unobtrusive Moira Salmond in the gallery and told her she (Ms Goldie) looked forward to taking over the job of keeping Salmond in order while in session, so that when some considerable time later she rose with a total po-face to demand, in delicious parody of Westminster procedural questions, when would the First Minister next speak to the Prime Minister?, the stage was set.

Salmond arose with a grief-stricken countenance, moaning ‘He never writes, he never phones’, the wail on the last word convulsing the entire chamber. Even Labour could not stop laughing.

Instead of a snub, or an insult, or any other grievance to be deduced from the situation, Salmond and his accomplice had responded with a yell of laughter at the fatuous Blair’s expense from the entire Scottish Parliament. What Scottish nationalism needed was not exploitation of bad British behaviour, but a good laugh. This is why Salmond may one day lead an independent Scotland. It is not that Mr Torrance is inaccurate – he seldom is- it is simply that he misses the real point.

Other than sheer malice, the justification for reviewing the Leask Burns alongside the Torrance Salmond is that Burns really does give Scotland one existence beyond the international norm, and Salmond is trying to give it another, in some ways not too different. For instance, laughter is one vital key to them both, for which Professor Leask is adept, and Mr Torrance... well, to take an expample (p.248): In the House of Commons the Labour MP Anne Moffat compared Salmond’s election (as a result of PR) with that of Adolf Hitler in 1933, while Tony Blair was less offensive but almost as rude. ‘He has been to Washington and Iraq and has been rather busy’ said his official spokesman, explaining why Blair had yet to congratulate the First Minister [for becoming First Minister]. As Salmond put it during First Minister’s Questions at Holyrood: ‘He never phones, he never writes.’

First of all, with all due derision for the Labour party’s sourness at defeat in a system they thought had been rigged to keep the SNP permanently out of office, Anne Moffat was not typical, as her ouster by her East Lothian constituency party would show, she having shown a somewhat eighteenth century attitude to rewards from public service. Secondly, the fact that Blair had been to Washington and to Iraq and had been rather busy was in fact one reason why Salmond had become First Minister, so the official spokesman, whether he knew it or not, was actually explaining why Blair ought to have been congratulating, not why he wasn’t congratulating. But the real point was that the event was gorgeous, and to crush it into ‘As Salmond put it’ was akin to reporting Burn’s ‘A man’s a man for a’ that’ as ‘Burns said the male anatomy was male’. When Salmond had become

69

It really seems caddish to take these two books together. Professor Leask has contextualised line upon line of Burns’s poetry with the finest precision instruments, showing exactly what the agricultural background was to Burns’s creativity, how deeply read he had to be to produce what he did, where his very satire against Excisemen was a formal part of his search for promotion, and so on, endlessly. Has economic history ever been pressed so hard into literary service? By his wealth of knowledge, so infectiously administered to his readers, he draws even greater beauty from Burns’s poetry that anyone could have thought it had yet to provide. Academe so often seems to assume its vocation is to blight enthusiasm for works of art, that the reader can hardly believe how much richer professor Leask makes our appreciation. He has taken well-loved poems such as ‘To a Mouse’ and shown the supreme value of individual lines hitherto downgraded by some of its most enthusiastic votaries. It turns partly because he posits a learned Burns, instead of an enchanted illiterate. He has taken longderided poems such as ‘The Cotter’s Saturday Night’ and made us see to what gems attempted sophistication blinded us as we read. We may occasionally be prompted by him to add a twig or two to the refreshing forest through which he takes us. For instance he takes the two verses where Burns has the cotter reading first the Old and then the New Testament, viz.:

70

THE DROUTH

The priest-like Father reads the sacred page, How Abram was the Friend of GOD on high; Or, Moses bade eternal warfare wage, With Amalek’s ungracious progeny; Or how the royal Bard did groaning lye, Beneath the stroke of Heaven’s avenging ire; Or Job’s pathetic plaint, and wailing cry; Or rapt Isiah’s wild, seraphic fire; Or other Holy Seers that tune the sacred lyre.

Perhaps the Christian Volume is the theme; How guiltless blood for guilty man was shed; How HE, who bore in Heaven the sacred name, Had not on Earth whereon to lay His head: How His first followers and servants sped; The Precepts sage they wrote to many a land: How he, who lone in Patmos, banished, Saw in the sun a mighty angel stand; And heard great Bab’lon’s doom prounounc’d

by Heaven’s command.

WINTER 2010/2011 ISSUE 38

juxtaposition of ‘Father’ with ‘Abram’ who was certainly God’s friend, but who let his sons Ishmael and Isaac both go to what he thought would be their deaths. Job also recalls the injustice of his own fate. David and Absalom deserved what they got, Burns seems to agree, but the overall effect makes the New Testament rise above the Old as Christian compassion was supposed to rise above retribution. As for ‘The Cotter’s Saturday Night’ in general, Professor Leask makes a great case for its subversive attacks on social and political order above all in its conclusion by invocation of William Wallace, carefully removed in attempts by Tory bowdlerisers after Burns’s death so as to have his work shanghaied for order and repression in utter contrast to Burns’s coupling of God, Wallace and himself in the final verse: O THOU! Who pour’d the patrtiotic tide, That stream’d thro’ great, unhappy WALLACE’ heart; Who dar’d to, nobly, stem tyrannic pride, Or nobly die, the second glorious part: (The Patriot’s God, peculiarly thou art, His friend, inspirer, guardian and reward!)

O never, never SCOTIA’s realm desert, But still the Patriot, and the Patriot-bard, In bright succession raise, her Ornament and Guard!

Professor Leask calls the end of this verse ‘rising to a Miltonic sublimity’. No finer judgment could be given. There is something unearthly which Burns in that verse shares with Milton alone.

Professor Leask puts in one of his invariably apposite footnotes: Burns may have had theological qualms about some of those texts, like other ‘rational’ Presbyterians: for instance, Moses genocidal extermination of the Amalkites, or (in the New Testament) Christ’s atonement, clearly spelt out...The allusion to David’s seduction of Bathsheba possibly refers back to the ‘amorous stanza’ 10, and Burns’s ‘remorse’ for his own seduction of Betsey Paton.

‘Heaven’s avenging ire’ is of course David’s being saved from his son Absalom, but at the cost of Absalom’s life to David’s terrible grief and knowledge that this was his punishment of having had Uriah placed in the front of battle so that David could wed his widow Bathsheba. Burns’s contrition for his own injuries to others led him to recognise his part in adding to the human sins for which Jesus Christ dies in atonement. But there is, I think, a progression implicit in Professor Leask’s argument, that Burns is keeping the Old Testament under ironic control which is allowed to rise with Is[a]iah and the other Holy Seers who will foretell Christ’s advent and suffering. Yet before Isaiah as Professor Leask says Burns’s tone seems sufficiently satirical on Moses and what was certainly genocide to contrast sharply with his sublime devotion to Christ, and his final salutation to Christ’s beloved Disciple, St John, witnessing the Apocalypse from Patmos. I think myself this initial ironic undertone is also present with the

II. It is petty of me, yet appropriate, to point to the Britishness of television punditry in this context.

Mr Jeremy Paxman, of BBC 2’s Newsnight, is the premier interviewer, assessing his victims with the aura of King, Emperor and God. He usually does his work with quality not entirely limited to entertainment value. He is in that sense the voice of Britain, the vehicle of Britain’s judgment of Scotland. And he regards Burns as a mere purveyor of doggerel. It neatly encapsulates the failure of broadcasting for Scotland since devolution. Paxman is Britain when enthroned, and a Britain for whom Burns has no meaning.

Scotland as a country is distinguished among earthly nations by finding its cultural identity in the cult of a poet. There is no point arguing here that Burns, extolled by Professor Leask and a myriad of others, demands Mr Paxman’s agonised reappraisal. Mr Paxman is what he is, a Britain in which Scotland finds no place. Salmond of course, embraced this situation with the air of St George gratified at the size of dragon or, if he prefers it, of St Andrew glad to battle with an outsize fish.

He genially expressed pleasure in interview by Paxman on the ground that both them wanted

WINTER 2010/2011 ISSUE 38

THE DROUTH

to get rid of Scotland from the Union. He ‘relishes jousts with media heavyweights like Jeremy Paxman’ notes Mr Torrance laboriously. ‘For a Nationalist, this is a paradox’. Nice nationalists, one feels Mr Torrance is telling us, should run away from Big Brits. Whether or not Mr Salmond should stand up, Mr Torrance feels he should know his place. And part of that place is evidently a dutiful respect for the media, which Salmond seems to lack. Professor Leask happily epigraphs his chapter ‘The Deil and the Exciseman’:

part in a Left-wing (‘79’) group exposing him to high heidyin hostility partly to facilitate accommodation with Sillars and his former Scottish Labour Party followers for which Salmond ultimately was brutally if illegally expelled from the SNP, Sillars and his future wife Margo McDonald (despite the latter’s founder membership of the 79 Group) kept far away from the courageous Salmond, Stephen Maxwell, Kenny MacAskill and other victimes of intra-party witch-hunt, Salmond on his readmission to the SNP worked to advance Sillar’s prospects in the party as much as he could, Sillars gave Salmond virtually nothing save poisonous abuse in horsedoctors’ doses after Salmond’s election as party leader. Sillars has also taken credit for the party’s profitable acceptance of identity in the European union, which was in fact the legacy of Winnie Ewing whose European apostleship fixed the SNP irrevocably in the Eurodemocratic ranks, an emotive commitment demanded by her with great tactical skill, ideologically fleshed out (as Mr Torrance half-seems to realise) by George Reid and Neil MacCormick, although otherwise he makes nothing at all of MacCormick, the SNP’s intellectual giant constitutionalist, legalist, philosopher and Europarliamentarian whose influence on, and value to Salmond, were as significant as Sillars and his bile were irrelevant.

Yet for all of Torrance’s constant scratching open Sillar’s Sun scabs, we hear not a word of his homophobe campaign in that journal while Salmond, firmly supportive of gender preference, is tarnished by Torrance because his party received a donation from a homophobic millionaire.

Torrance even assigns a fraternal ‘analogy’ to Sillars and Salmond in order to support a childish

A chield’s amang you, taking notes, And, faith, he’ll prent it.

Mr Torrance evidently thinks any such person requires our due deference. He even treats the Sun as a reputable newspaper instead of being soft porn flourishes of ladies’ exteriors tricked out with the contents of Mr Rupert Murdoch’s interior and posterior.

In particular, Mr Torrance appears fixated by the Sun columnist Jim Sillars as an appropriate commentator on Alex Salmond, whom he frequently terms Sillar’s former ‘protégé’. Mr Salmond was no more Mr Sillar’s protégé than Robert Burns was the protégé of William Wordsworth. As Professor Leask shows, Wordsworth was the beneficiary of Burns’s achievement, while being himself a different beastie. Alex Salmond was in the SNP from the mid-70s, Jim Sillars from about six years later, Salmond made a natural entry into the party and won credentials in student politics, Sillars came via bitterly hostile Labour party membership, propaganda electoral campaigns and Parliamentary warfare, Salmond had the courage to take

71

72

THE DROUTH

allusion to them (by Charles Kennedy) as Cain and Abel. He salutes Mr Kennedy’s foolishness as ‘eerily prophetic’ as though they were destined to rebirth from a single womb. And even if they were, is Abel as homicidal as Cain? Salmond is but one of Sillar’s targets for capital punishment, and Sillars himself more than the country can bear.

On mature reflection, I am right to couple the two books. If David Torrance would read Nigel Leask’s book he might learn how to evaluate influence and measure sources. It may seem unkind to contrast his ineptitude with Nigel Leask’s finely measured assessments, since few writers on any level could hope to rival the multi-scholarly expertise of Glasgow’s Regius Professor of English Language and Literature, but Torrance is a journalist in good standing, and his book almost entirely fails to judge the value of journalistic verdicts and testimony. The supreme imbecility arises with the Scotsman. For part of Salmond’s story the Scotsman was the foremost authority on the politics of nationalism, hostile to independence but increasingly supportive of devolution. Then the paper was sold, and after some delay, its editorial loyalties were handed over to Andrew Neil (merely mentioned once here, to be identified simply as ‘the journalist’). At the very time when the Scotsman’s long held policy of a devolved Parliament came into being, its columns were turned into endless tirades against the legislature its readers had been taught to yearn for. The results became evident in the collapse of its circulation, but anyone unaware of this gets not the slightest inkling of it from David Torrance. The casual reader will assume it to be the same paper, although its transformation was to pole as far from pole as Margaret Thatcher was from Michael Foot. Many of the countless journalists cited here may be worth quoting, but it seldom occurs to David Torrance to tell us why.

Unfortunately for them, the general effect is one of Gulliver being described by Lilliputians, since soundbites without credentials are ant-bites, possibly the result of industry but of no obvious value save to the ants.

It would clearly be asking too much of David Torrance (but a greater biographer for Salmond will have to tackle it) to assess the Scottish nationalism of Banff, Buchan, and Gordon as against that of Salmond’s native Linlithgow, since this is to face the question of how nationalistic Scottish nationalism is: how far was Salmond a product of West Lothian and St Andrews able to meet not only the existing nationalism from the very different priorities of Banff and Buchan, but what did he possess which previous nationalists

WINTER 2010/2011 ISSUE 38

had lacked in order to convert Gordon? It is idle to confine oneself to parroting journalistic clichés about nationalistic urban victories today and losses tomorrow. We need to work out the political geography initially along the multidisciplinary lines Professor C.W.J. Withers, of Edinburgh, has been using to transform the geography of literature. The first long term SNP hold on a Westminster Parliamentary seat was in the Western Isles; this shaped the party Salmond ultimately won, and the seat lost in 1987 and now regained, has much to tell us of the meaning of Scottish nationalism.

Professor Leask with his transformation of the whole ideal of pastoral from affectation to real-life literature knows how to sink his readers’ feet in Ayr and Dumfries and know the difference, but perhaps even he has a further step to go in thinking of the Gaelic background to Burns.

There are strange footfalls from invisible companions in some lines of Burns. Professor Leask manages obscenity with the judicious skill he brings to everything else, and embeds it (presumably the right verb) in discussion of Pastoral with particular effect for the internally rhyming ‘When maukin bucks...’, but the poem’s use of classicism has a resonance of Irish Gaelic verse. ‘Latona’s sun’ (following James Kinsley’s admirable text, I agree, but should not that be ‘son’ since Latona is Apollo’s mother?) ...westward flies To roger Madame Thetis.

That is to say no more than many a more insipid pastoral has observed, viz. the sun setting in the sea. But what interested me particularly was ‘Thetis’ being classical Pastoral for the sea, she being Achilles’s mother (famous for failing to include her son’s heel in his river-run immunisation) and a sea-nymph to trade. In strict Greek theology she is not the sea, that being Poseidon (Neptune to the Romans): hence so many of the delays on Odysseus’s long voyage home after he has blinded Poseidon’s son Polyphemus. But this use of Thetis for the sea is clearly demanded to suggest copulation of sun and sea (passing over Apollo’s ambidextrous achievements elsewhere).

How frequent is it? My own experience is limited to finding it at the beginning of the Irish-Gaelic Rosc Catha na Mumhan (The Munster Battle Song) ascribed to Piaras Mac Gearailt, Piers FitzGerald, hailing the expected return of the exiled Stuart king, and beginning (I translate)

WINTER 2010/2011 ISSUE 38

I myself, not lying to you, knew the cold, And that Thetis lay close to the harbour...

This is actually to return to Professor Leask’s main argument, that Robert Burns was a very learned poet, and to agree that the same approach, the same enlargement of our horizons, seems required for deeper understanding of the sources and resources of Gaelic poets, in Ireland and, it would seem, in Scotland as well. Despite the illiteracy of Hugh Trevor-Roper alleging (with an error of 1,100 years in the process) that Scots Gaelic poetry was inferior to Irish Gaelic, we should allow for a great deal of common ground between them, as we must for common mythological folklore. And we must also be ready to see the possibility of Burns drawing on postGaelic sources, perhaps with very little separation in time in what he heard in translation and its Gaelic original (and he might well have had some Gaelic). It all adds up to agreement with Professor Leask that a great poet drew much of his greatness from learning, and we can agree with our co-editor Mitch Miller that much learning is (or at least was) assimilated on the hoof. (see Miller and Lennox’s Boswell in Space) The Burns we grow to know from these pages is one whose many disciplines become themselves a kind of music as Leask conducts one to resonate against another. Everything Professor Leask touches in Burns he enriches, ‘Tam o’Shanter’ obviously among them. His fascinating discussion on its horrific relics (and that is surely the right word) laid out in what he calls ‘an inventory of the satanic offerings’ may have relevance also in counterpoint to the landmarks encountered by Tam on his road to Kirk Alloway. As Leask points out the music being Satan’s ‘charge’ in some degree imprisons him, but it throws us back to contemplate the music of the poem itself, and in particular to the poetic device of repetition with sinister effects from transposition to a minor key.

In fact the original music for the ride might be minor and the disgusting litany of the offerings to Satan a savage major key. And the same Odyssey for Tam beginning By this time he was cross the ford, Whare, in the snaw, the chapman smoor’d... (a nice reminder of the poem’s first line when we were all sitting much more comfortably) is I think most successfully parodied, or echoed (it doesn’t matter which) in G.K. Chesterton’s The Flying Inn where the three in the motor car are singing songs to explain all twists and turns of the road, and Humphrey Pump drives his companions mad by knowing the reason for each

THE DROUTH

73

turn of the road. The same ‘Songs of the Car Club’ include the rolling English drunkard making the rolling English road (somewhat anachronistically seeing it preceded the Roman’s coming to Rye) But the wild rose was above him when they found him in the ditch and then, some dozen years later, Hugh MacDiarmid, invoking Chesterton in an early rude line, showed that in Scotland, a drunk man looks at the thistle. These additional descendants from Burns point where and how Scottish nationalism derives (it really is unfair to poor Torrance) Chesterton having shown his Scottish nationalist credentials by withdrawing from the Glasgow University Rectorial election in favour of the Scottish Nationalist candidate, Compton Mackenzie, who would return us to the Hebridean base of the S.N.P. And, when we settle down, let us pursue Professor Leask’s vindication of Pastoral into what is essentially the same tradition in Gaelic verse.

Nigel Leask near the end of his book quotes Leith Davis’s essay on Burns’s early biographer James Currie, ‘if Burns is the undertaker of an independent Scotland, Currie is the doctor of a united Britain, offering a cure for the kind of “National Enmity” that continues to erupt’.

Currie thus sacrifices the ‘genius of Burns on the altar of Scottish amour propre ‘the Scottish difference’, to ensure a more successful integration of her own terms, into the British union.

Leaving Currie aside (until you take up Leask’s wonderbook yourself), is this it? MacDiarmid’s Drunk Man always had at back of it the suspicion that Burns suppers were funereal baked-meats.

Tom Nairn extended it in ‘Festival of the Dead’ however much he may have had subsequent hopes of doubt. Is the inability of David Torrance to see more in Alex Salmond than a successful politician, to whose career he can bring no meaning for want of belief in a living Scotland, a true mirror of where we have reached? Is the ‘he’ with no meaning Torrance or Salmond? Is Salmond’s readiness to serve his country pro tem opportunism or a promise of real existence? Is the fundamentalism spouted against him hisw critics’ comparable realisation that our ultimate lies with Godot? Does it all become like Mad’s perception that the fugitive must not capture the man he pursues nor his pursuer apprehend him since that would end their lucrative series, the

74

THE DROUTH

fundamentalists in their way being even more convinced self-terminators than Salmond, who is at least doing something? Is David Torrance writing a Sartrean play disguised as a conscientious if banal biography of a lead whom Torrance judges by short-term trivia since the long-term hopes can have no real meaning? Will the real David Torrance stand up?

And this brings us to our obvious point, Professor Nigel Leask is wonderfully learned, and, thank God, he has the gift of making his diffusion of his learning relevant and fascinating. The book is a joy to read, and another joy to assimilate, question, memorize and contemplate. But foremost among its recommendations as a research tool and as a communications medium is its sense of humour. It would be impossible to reach its excellence without laughter. The worthy (and he really is) Mr Torrance knows that a sense of humour is important, and he has conscientiously determined that Alex Salmond has two forms of response: a) funny, and b) not funny. The difficulty is that it is Salmond who calls the shots. Mr Salmond very kindly laid down a couple of ground rules for Mr Torrance: a) not to meet him, b) to permit anyone else to meet him.

Into this vacuum rushed Mr and Mrs Sillars and various other persons anxious to put their pennies in Mr Torrance’s slot. But Alex Salmond really does have a sense of humour, and it is horribly evident that Mr Torrance is not his only victim, and is sometimes the victim of a relay race, or chain explosion. Moreover, this is the main reason for confidence in Scottish Nationalism. Burns laughed, and gave his identity to the people of Scotland so that they might be happy, always understanding that Burnsian satire required them to pretend to be Holy Willie, Auld Nick, mice, lice, mountain daisies, the Cotter on Saturday night, etc, etc, etc. Salmond laughs, lest we take ourselves too seriously, and so we may be alive. But the British are evidently deader than the Scots, and we need quarantine before deadness proves contagious.

WINTER 2010/2011 ISSUE 38