Book review: The Edinburgh Companion to James Hogg

AT THE climax of The Queen’s Wake, his critically and commercially most successful work, there is a very curious moment which might stand as a symbol for James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd’s entire career.

The poem, published in 1813, features 12 poets competing with each other in front of Mary, Queen of Scots. The courtiers, politically, want to award first prize to Rizzio, but merit prevails and the Highland Bard, Gardyn, is acclaimed the victor. The tenth poet, the Bard of Ettrick, is distraught, and stands “like statue pale, in moveless mood; / Like ghost, which oft his eyes had seen / At gloaming in his glens so green”. Mary, affected by his disappointment, creates an unprecedented second prize for him. Hogg’s story is one of perpetually coming second.

As a “peasant poet”, Hogg came second to Burns. The publishers of The Queen’s Wake felt the need to assert it was “truly the production of James Hogg, a common Shepherd”. As a novelist, he came second to Scott: their friendship was a strange interplay of rivalries. Hogg wrote to The Scotsman to insist that his novel about the Covenanters, The Brownie of Bodsbeck, predated Scott’s The Tale of Old Mortality, even though it was published later. When the wits of Blackwood’s Magazine introduced the Shepherd as a character in their “Noctes Ambrosianae”, Hogg found himself coming second to a fictional version of himself. The work he is now best known for, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, is a twice-told tale about a second son with an inferiority complex and a double.

Although most Scots of a bookish persuasion would know the name of Hogg, and many would know his most famous book (which has been ardently supported by Louise Welsh, Ian Rankin, Irvine Welsh, James Robertson and a host of other contemporary writers), a majority might struggle to name anything else he wrote. That is why this Edinburgh Companion is such an important volume. Overall, it is an important series, providing a critical overview and detailed individual readings of specific works; but while the complete oeuvres of James Kelman and Muriel Spark attract academic attention, Hogg still languishes in the shadow of his own best book. This Companion covers his entire, prolific career, and, alongside the Stirling / South Caroline edition of Hogg’s complete works, should do much to broaden awareness of what a complex, fascinating writer Hogg was.

Hogg was not just prolific across genres – he was a travel writer, contributor of magazine pieces, poet, unstaged dramatist, short story writer, novelist, non-fiction writer, parodist, memoirist and ballad collector – he was prolific within genres. As a poet, for example, he could write brilliant lyrics (and, as a “peasant poet”, this was expected of him and his brilliance was supposedly limited to them). But – as Fiona Wilson shows in her essay here – he also wrote romance in the key of Scott (“Mador of the Moor”), metaphysical speculation (“Pilgrims of the Sun”), and Ossianic epic (“Queen Hynde”). His “Poetic Mirror” is a delight: frustrated that famous writers like Byron, Scott and Wordsworth would not contribute to an anthology he hoped to produce, Hogg set about writing their poems for them, with exceptionally pointed wit (his version of Wordsworth in his “Excursion” period is stingingly accurate, full of sonorous polysyllables and self-interruptions). It is almost as if Hogg, a superb ventriloquist, is boldly playing second fiddle to them all.

As for his novels, more attention is being paid to works like The Three Perils Of Man, and the critical debate shifts between describing how unalike Hogg is to his contemporaries and the construction of alternative genealogies for his work. A similar approach is taken in John Plotz’s excellent essay on the short stories, where he describes how the contemporary idea of a short story was only just coalescing as Hogg wrote (he cites Poe: “a certain unique or single effect”) and how Hogg’s work is more centrifugal and heterogeneous. Ian Duncan has written of Hogg’s “proto-postmodern magic realism”, which is a useful way of establishing him as something more significant that a fluke in literary history: equally useful is the more detailed reconstruction of Hogg’s literary milieu and influences. Penny Fielding, who gets the book’s star turn and writes about the Private Memoirs, makes some extremely interesting points about the culture of paranoia and espionage in the 1820s: the idea of Britain gripped by fears of revolutionary violence plays directly into discussions of fanaticism and dangerous books.

Gillian Hughes contributes a necessary piece on the afterlife of the Private Memoirs – she is, I think, a little harsh on James Robertson’s The Testament of Gideon Mack: she says it “cannot draw the reader in to share the protagonist’s paranoia as Hogg does”. It seems to me that the real influence between the books is the erosion of certainty, even sceptical, rationalist certainties. It also made me wonder if there were other influences on contemporary writing other than through the Private Memoirs. There is a gleeful scene in The Three Perils of Man where the characters tell each other stories, and gradually realise they are telling each other’s stories. That kind of narrative self-consciousness seems to have parallels with a book like John Barth’s hilarious pastiche of 18th-century novels, The Sot-Weed Factor. Ever since André Gide “rediscovered” the Private Memoirs in 1947, the lineage of Hogg has tended to be constructed around the gothic and the psychopathological. Further research might find a carnivalesque tradition emerging from Hogg as well.

There are also fine pieces by Caroline McCracken-Flesher, on Hogg and the idea of the nation, and the late Douglas Mack, on the Presbyterian tradition as a means of unlocking Hogg’s difficult politics: although Hogg has been used as a poster-boy for “working class literature” – and as a handy stick to beat Sir Walter Scott with – by writers like Kevin Williamson, despite Hogg’s own Tory beliefs and opposition to reform. Mack finds an elegant path through the conflicting images.

This Companion sent me back to Hogg with fresh eyes and a sharper mind. I can only hope that the long-overdue critical edition of the works of John Galt, and a similar Companion, will be announced sooner rather than later.

The Edinburgh Companion to James Hogg

Edited by Ian Duncan and Douglas S Mack

Edinburgh University Press, 188pp, £19.99