Mitchell Library: telling the tale of the century

TO celebrate the Mitchell Library’s centenary, 20 books were chosen to capture 100 years of Scottish literature. The result is a gloriously erratic bookshelf

As a teenager, I was thrilled to get a copy of the Penguin Classics catalogue in what used to be James Thin’s. Having decided I was going to read all of literature, a good way to start, I reasoned, was to read the best book by every author; so I assiduously went through their list selecting books by a mixture of hearsay and whim. Fielding? Well they made a movie of Tom Jones. Sophocles? Oedipus Rex – Tom Lehrer had sung about that. Growing up, as far as I’m, concerned, has been the slow process of changing all my “Selected Poems Of” to “Collected Poems Of” to “Complete Poems Of”. But I keep a residual fondness for the arbitrary list, even while being aware that each and every list is a snapshot, not an oil painting. As such, I was intrigued by the project being launched today at Aye Write Book Festival in the Mitchell Library.

To coincide with the 100th anniversary of the Mitchell’s current site, a group of readers, librarians and academics, chaired by Rosemary Goring, have selected 20 books – two from each decade – that tell a story about Scotland’s literature over the last century, and created a free book of samples. I certainly don’t envy Ms Goring’s job. It’s not a question of comparing Cox’s with Granny Smith’s, or even apples with oranges, but more like deciding between bicycles and the idea of mist.

It was a task further complicated by the fact that Glasgow has celebrated Alasdair Gray’s Lanark and Edwin Morgan’s poetry in recent years, so both were set aside from their deliberations, and James Kelman – in his sincere and contrarian manner – asked that others writers be considered before him. The final result is a list both unexpected and predictable, conventional and idiosyncratic.

By highlighting particular books, the selection creates an intriguing narrative. Hugh MacDiarmid had to be on the list, and in a way had to be on it for A Drunk Man Looks At The Thistle. In it, he proved that Scotland could create a modernist epic comparable with TS Eliot’s The Waste Land and Ezra Pound’s Cantos. MacDiarmid’s nationalism insisted that a subordinate, un-independent Scotland could not be a “full player” on the cultural scene.

But by offering, almost as an overture, John Buchan and JM Barrie, this list made me realise that Scotland was not a literary wilderness before the “Scottish Renaissance”. The argument could be made that Scotland was already a significant cultural force – the selectors could have chosen Conan Doyle’s His Last Bow or Compton Mackenzie’s Sinister Street for the 1910s as well. Scotland did have a literature before its literary renaissance: the problem was that it was happening in London.

Another way of looking at the list is the emergence of female writers as the norm, not the exception. It’s good to see Lorna Moon being recognised – a feat not yet achieved by Wikipedia, I note in passing – and you couldn’t make a list like this without Muriel Spark, the great self-exception of Scottish (and female) writing. But for the “noughties” it must have been difficult to choose Ali Smith and Janice Galloway over Liz Lochhead or AL Kennedy or Jackie Kay or Kathleen Jamie, even while you’re worrying that you’ve left out Frank Kuppner, Don Paterson, John Burnside or Kevin MacNeil.

It is a narrative with which we can be proud as a culture: the emergence of voices hitherto suppressed. It’s also a narrative which necessarily excludes. I vow now that I won’t write another article on Scottish Literature until Veronica Forrest-Thomson, that great, strange, unfulfilled promise, is given due recognition in her native land. But it’s also curious that we create a canon in which women writers are included as precursors to, parallels with or culminations of a tradition defined by very male debates. MacDiarmid, on being asked who his favourite Scottish female poet was, famously said that there weren’t any.

By his calibration, this might even have been true. But someone ought to make the case for the writers like O Douglas, Annie S Swan and Helen Bannerman, who managed to negotiate the system of patriarchy and authorship. They’re not capital L Literature. But they managed to make a living as writers and drew more people into reading than old MacDiarmid ever did. And – another perpetual gripe of mine – where’s Mairi Hedderwick? Or Liz Laird? Or Julie Bertagna? Or, for that matter, Julia Donaldson? A part of me knows that, in my dotage, nephews around my deathbed, I won’t be remembering Kelman or Kuppner or Kennedy but whispering “silly old fox, don’t you know, there’s no such thing as a Gruffalo”.

Having Galloway and Smith as the present-day incumbents of this gloriously erratic bookshelf is, in its way, a very heartening moment, and not because they are writers without the Y chromosome. Which, of their works, would you choose? The Trick Is To Keep Breathing rather than This Is Not About Me rather than Clara? Girl Meets Boy rather than Hotel World rather than The Whole Story And Other Stories? The exciting, happy-making thing about a list like this is that authors have careers that span decades. Seeing writers like Massie, McIlvanney, Spark and MacDiarmid on this list makes me understand again that, as Richard Holloway is told in his new memoir, “NOTHING COUNTS BUT LIFETIMES”. These are, and were, not flash-in-the-pan writers, and to compare their work to our younger writers, I’m struck by how many barely sizzle, or are not even in the pan, or wouldn’t flash even if they were soaked in gull-oil and tossed onto an burning boat at Up Helly Aa.

The list also reveals – or has been constructed to reveal – a certain dialectic rather than dichotomy. Allan Massie and Iain Banks together, or Mackay Brown and McIlvanney, show that attempts to reduce Scottish writing to an ideological essence is a supremely futile endeavour. Scottish writing can encompass both the realist and the surrealist, the urban and the rural, the hard edge and the soft focus. Anyone arguing that there is a peculiar “Scottishness” – whether through birth, dialect, memory of the Clearances, glorious incorporation in the Union or aspiration towards independence – ought to have a long spell confined in the Mitchell Library to catch up on their reading.

Another lovely oddity of this list is that poetry drops out after the 1940s. When I chose to come back to Scotland in the late 1990s, one reason was that poetry here seemed so fresh. Robert Crawford and WN Herbert’s Sharawaggi was a glimpse into a new, enthused, clever Scotland. David Kinloch, Richard Price, Angela McSeveney, Donny O’Rourke and the early work of Kate Clanchy seemed to confirm that Scotland, in the 21st century, would be poetic rather than novelistic. It didn’t turn out to be so, but that moment of poetic holler ought to be remembered.

Writing about this list inevitably makes me want to make my own list. So here it is. Sinister Street by Mackenzie, Voyage to Arcturus by David Lindsay, Stony Limits by Hugh MacDiarmid, Private Angelo by Eric Linklater, The Comforters by Muriel Spark, Poor.Old.Tired.Horse, issue 25 – Hamilton Finlay’s One Word Poem collection – Alan Spence’s Its Colours They Are Fine, Emma Tennant’s Women Beware Women, Frank Kuppner’s Second Best Moments In Chinese History and Andrew Crumey’s Mobius Dick. It’s as partial as the other list so feel free to disagree.