Bandits!

I'm guiltily conscious that during the present lead-up to my exams I've been neglecting this blog to focus on procrastination. Here, then, is something I'm working on: not finished, as usual, but perhaps even as much as half-done.

Eric Hobsbawm, who is the best, was on the radio the other day and the interview set me after some books by him and others. At length (who even puts Eric Hobsbawm in psychology? Fortunately it was on the short-loan shelves so I didn't have to visit their floor; I mean, who knows what they keep up there?) I unearthed his classic study Primitive Rebels. He said of this in the interview that, although almost everybody in it now disagrees with him, he feels proud to have pretty much founded the history of how the anonymous masses of ordinary people thought about society, justice, resistance, and rebellion before the invention of modern politics.

One of the things he explores in the book is the noble or 'social' bandit. Every culture has got one of these and as one of the prototypes for all heroism, his shadow is everywhere. Humble-birth-foreign-war-return-family-wronged-blood-vengeange-outlaw-steals-rich-gives-poor-got-swagger-good-life-sense-humour-strong-drink-superhuman-skill-band-outlaws-huge-sidekick-jolly-priest-daring-escape-royal-pardon-betrayal-last-stand-but-escaped-disguise-and/or-sleeping-under-mountain; the English-speaking example is of course good old Robin Hood.

The narrative pattern is staring us in the face: the more controversial assertion of the book is that while you can't entertain any illusions about them - they certainly weren't revolutionaries, and they sometimes were really ruthless criminals who made a show of acting this way because of the power of the story - such people very often actually existed; until very recent times, in countries like Italy. They embodied an early kind of social protest: they were, arguably, a force for good.

This brought to my attention a bit of laxity in my thought and language. When roused to politics by my revolutionary chums I'm awfully fond of the word 'bandit' as a term of abuse towards the Parasite Exploiter Class; and yet as a good Marxist dedicated to the nationalisation of the boat-race, the abolition of Yorkshire pudding, and the overthrow of all that the Daily Mail holds dear I have rather a good opinion of actual bandits. Ho-hum.

So I did what any sensible person would and started to write a story about it.

I am rather pleased with ‘Langdreen’, which means, approximately, Longsuffering. It is located in Scottish Myth and Legend somewhere between Auchenfankle and Balwearie.

Nithsdale in the West March of Scotland, on a moor nearest to the farm-town of Langdreen. About 1570.
It was a day of fog, grey and cold as iron, piling up on the horizon until there was no horizon but only the ghosts of hills - perhaps low and close, or perhaps far away and towering. It was a wet, clammy day: the very air seemed to grope and grip. It was a short day: it fell at the soggy end of Winter, that grimmest season of the year when the snow has retreated to expose the black nakedness of the exhausted earth. To cap all this it was a day nearing its end.

Sunshine, then, for bandits!

Down the moors they went: pistols and sabers clattered like teeth shivering in the cold. They were stout little men on stout little nags: all gristle and bone, no fat to spare between them. The faces of the riders were drawn, silent, and alert under their steel bonnets; but below each face as it came out of the fog and briefly into view was the face of his weary, wild-eyed horse. They seemed made to contrast with one-another, like the masks of comedy and tragedy.

There were riders there from up and down the March country. They came from Scotland and from England, but then, those grand old names mattered little here. What mattered were the harsh, unwelcoming names of all the valleys with their old grudges, all the villages strung out along rushing rivers between the dark shoulders of the hills. What mattered were the names of the families, and the men. There were Laidlaws, Armstrongs, Hunters, Stampers. Grim old Hirplin Watt was there, and Skellit Harry who had sprung him out of the castle of Carlisle and, on another occasion under different circumstances, shot him through the knee (this being why he hirpled). Although the documents clearly show that he was at this time in Ireland, serving a life-sentence as a soldier as punishment for his crimes against the Queen’s Majesty, Nebless Tom was nevertheless there. So was Jack Pott the Bastard, who was in a similar condition except that it was the King’s Majesty and he’d been hanged.

There were no cattle with them, nor any torches lit: this was a raid, and on its way out.

Down the moors and up again: as the fog and the dark gathered and stirred thickly together, it became impossible to distinguish one ridge from the next. Down and up again went the riders; down and down went the sun. But just as vision grew useless it sent a few final rays over the horizon - like men laying an ambush where their raid has retreated – and showed in silhouette the rievers’ destination.

It was a tower: there were a lot of towers in the border-country, then, and this one was much like the rest. Stark, square, and black, it had no grace or beauty or even much in the way of showing-off. It proclaimed only this: that a man had had the wealth and power to have it built and that, come what would, he meant to keep them.

Swords were drawn, but without that satisfying ‘shing!’ noise which is actually, I believe, produced by cleaning a kitchen-knife with a damp flannel; without even so much as a steely glint, since polishing with sheep-grease had given the blades a dull bronze colour. After all, this was all clearly taking place long before the age of Hollywood. Clearly.

Finnieston, Glasgow, Scotland. About now.
The Crowne Plaza Hotel glowered across the Clyde. Stark, square, and black, it had no grace or beauty or even much in the way of showing-off. It proclaimed only this: that a man had had the wealth and power to have it built and that, come what would, he meant to keep them.

After all, the people able to stay there didn’t need it to be beautiful, because they didn’t have to look at it. They stayed in it, protected by its mirrored sides, and looked at the rest of the world: there was even a glass lift for this purpose. The appalling tower-blocks of Glasgow were being busily blown up so that they wouldn’t spoil the view for the people in the equally appalling high-rise hotels; they were to be replaced with more high-rise hotels.

In the function room, representatives of LifeSunTechGrowLife Private Equity were busy acquiring a controlling share in the utilities of Bolivia. Of course they didn’t look terribly busy: they sat around a table with representatives of that distant and beautiful country (one of whom, by an astonishing coincidence, was himself Bolivian!) and the World Bank; and listened to long speeches recited partly in numbers and partly in that special coded language known as advertising-copy. They could, in the conditions of complete privacy for which they had paid a good deal, have been frank about what they were doing - but habit is powerful. And the view from the windows, as the lights of the city winked on like eyes, would have made them uncomfortable.

Busy as they apparently were, at least one of them was profoundly bored. Peter Laidlaw was discreetly trying to build a tripod out of his fountain-pens, without success. It was the wretched rounded ends, he was sure of it. He was a great picker-up of fountain pens. He was probably a rich man these days – of course the thing about being rich is that, no matter how much money you receive on a monthly basis, there is always less after you’ve finished spending it – and still he refused to buy his own pens, instead picking them subtly off other people’s desks. Perhaps it was a kind of cosmic defense. Were he ever to confront his namesake saint at the celestial gate and be asked about his sins, he could cite his habit of stealing pens. This saved him from pondering just how he’d gotten his money, and whether it was possible to steal something from the other side of the world.

Outside the dark gathered, stirred thickly together with the fog from the Clyde.


A lone nag, shaggy and long-suffering and clearly wondering why it put up with his sort of thing, wondered into the car-park of the Crowne Plaza. It shook itself and whinnied irritably.

Hearing this in his booth, the duty guard looked up from his reading and stared. He was a Glasgow boy, and had never actually seen a border-nag in the flesh, never mind in the car-park. He regarded it as it was about to explode.

Jack Pott grimaced. A decent watchman who knew his part in the proceedings would have chosen this moment to run out into the dark to restrain the stray animal and been clouted neatly over the head. But clearly standards had declined.

He urged his own pony up to the barrier, drew a pistol from under his oily cloak, and fired it lazily in no particular direction.

‘Staun’ tae! Haunds ower yer hied!’

Ah, good. At least they still understood the basics.


Peter Laidlaw’s mind was already on the way home, so it is hardly surprising that he was the first to hear the noise being made by the unexpected guests that it met on the way out. Like the unfortunate security guard now trussed to his swivelling chair, he for a while did nothing about it, since it almost certainly didn’t exist.


Hirplin Watt hirpled into the glass lift and glared suspiciously at the control panel.

‘Aicht,’ said Nebless Tom helpfully, and prodded the appropriate button with his pistol.

‘Why for thare’s no ony thriteen?,’ said Watt.

‘It’s ill-luckit,’ said Nebless Tom, who’s job it was to know this sort of thing.

Watt wrinkled his nose. ‘Are thay daft here?’

‘An anither thing,’ said Skellit Harry, attempting to work himself a corner, the iron sewn into his shirt clanking unpleasantly. ‘Gin this is the Crowne Plaza Hotel, whaur’s the Crowne Plaza?’

Nebless Tom sighed – causing an odd, unsettling noise to come from the hole where his nose had been. ‘We daed confabble anent this. It’s cried efter the fowk that awn it.’

There was a contemplative silence, broken by Jack Pott. ‘Crowne Plaza? Bluidy stupit name.’

On this, at least, there was general consensus, and the lift completed its journey in silence.


Peter Laidlaw had just succeeded in erecting his tripod. Most unfairly, the conference did not choose that moment to end. And now it’s droning was accompanied by an intensification of those odd noises from outside: clattering metal and harsh raised voices. Wasn’t this place supposed to be four-star?

From the Glasgow stage, we present...

Just back from Student Theatre At Glasgow's production of Cinders; mah-juck! (as we say in Glasgow, dear).

Since my small readership aren't in a position to go and see it, I won't dwell on the details of the production over-much and will merely say that everybody excelled: the stars, the small roles (but!, I hear you cry, there are no small roles; quite right, of course), the tech, the music, the make-up people (everybody was gaunt and blear-eyed, *shiver*...); everything clicked together so precisely, in such an intimate space, that it became very difficult to consider the play as a production at all. So I won't! You come here for the Dark Forests of the Slavic Soul.

The play concerns a girls' reform school in 50s Poland: a film-crew are making a documentary around a production of 'Cinderella' by these hardened - or apparently hardened - juvies. I wondered early on whether time and place particularly mattered - I knew that the playwright was Polish, but not the context in which he'd written it - and whether you couldn't have put the same story in a similar institution in, say, Ireland. But somewhere in the second act I knew this wasn't the case, and the reason why hit me during the applause. Indulge me a reading: this is only looking at a very complex work from one angle, of course, but I like it. After a year of squeezing texts in medieval instruments of torture to yield up thematic life-blood, its nice when a thesis just hits you. I shall try and avoid spoiling.

The setting is very low-key: a bored party official we only see at the start, short references to the war, 'Ah... only before socialism...'. And indeed the play makes fun of the direct approach to making horror out of totalitarianism, and at the people who fall for it: '"Hitler shot my father and laughed as he did it", I can't use that!' get's a guilty laugh. This is a very self-conscious play all through, and it takes a bloody good playwright and an equally good production to squeeze your bleeding heart with a play about the dangers of squeezing bleeding hearts. But it triumphs, and as the boundaries of the play-within-the-play break down, so do those of the outer play until in the last scene people wanted to jump onto the stage and do something, dammit.

But I realised at the end that, although you probably could have the same characters and events in any country, they'd signify something quite different. Here we see very different two men - a teacher and the film-director, the latter idealistic to the point of fury and the former tragicomically neurotic - who have both become so obsessed with creating something that it's become more important than the mere humans caught up in it. And in the end, as will inevitably happen, losing sight of the harm they're doing for principles makes them lose sight of principles as well. We are in fact witnessing the story of communism in the 20th century.

Anyway, go and see it if you ever get the chance. Of course it won't be as good as STAG's: nothing ever is (at least before socialism).

Of magic and Marxism

I’m a socialist, you may have gathered from some of the stuff down there: it’s out of some mixture of ardent desire for world justice and Morningside belief that everything is just so untidy the way it is. I’m not any good at parties, economies, issues etcetera and hope never to be elected to anything, but I have my convictions and I stick by them, and I occasionally feel the urge to write something on behalf of The Movement.

So for some time past I’ve been turning an idea over in my mind. It’s something that troubles me a lot about fantastical settings and which – fantastical settings not being a byword, in the English-speaking world, for literary seriousness – nobody seems to bring up. All modern people of goodwill, whatever their opinions about parties, economies, issues and all that sort of thing, would surely accept the principle that every person ought to come into the world the same kind of human being with the same rights and duties and chances. There is no room for slaves and masters in a civilised country.

In our world we know that all the mechanisms set up to divide people into real people and, you know, them – race, class, gender, the whole sordid heap – are made up in an attempt to fend off 'that dreaded, hated thing, a world of free and equal human beings' and it is part of the job of literature to show this. But hang on, in worlds where some people have magical powers, the assumption on which our notion of a just society is based is out of the window. People aren’t equal. What kind of a society do you get, then, according to Ye Aulde Marxisme, when the means of magical production are in the hands of this small class, who are obviously going to hold gigantic power in society? And is it a society in which your or I would want to live?

I thought further about this. A lot of the time, magic just sort of happens to you around puberty without any obvious reason. Surely that means that somewhere, sometime, the people on the bottom of the sordid heap of history are going to find themselves in possession of some undiluted magical whizz-bang? And that’s not going to end well: you don’t ask slaves to be reasonable to the slavers, we can’t all be Nelson Mandela. Magic, it seems, is just like capitalism: doesn’t solve any problems, just moves them about.

So for a long time I’ve been meaning to do something with this idea. I’ve got a sketch. Magic is coming back into the world (again like capitalism, magic operates on long waves which nobody really understands) just as a country whose name isn’t important is undergoing a hodge-podge of my favourite revolutions. And it nearly all seems to be coming back into one particular chap, our protagonist, an illiterate boy from some obscure hinterland scoured by slave-takers. Everybody wants to get their mitts on him, of course – surely there needs to be a mechanism for finding and indoctrinating magical people if a society is to stay up – but the Revolution gets there before the Dastardly Enemies of the People.

And then? I don’t know. There’ll an ensemble cast of bespectacled revolutionary heroes, defiant prostitutes, good-hearted White Guards; and gallons of blood, of course. I feel it might veer towards a sympathetic treatment of our protagonist as he himself veers into being a sort of magical Stalin (you never ‘veer’ into anything pleasant); because in the end, I am firmly convinced, no good ever comes of damn magic. But it must have an ending sufficiently ambiguous to pass as happy. The Revolution can’t fail; it’s an aesthetic necessity, dammit! The main thing is to approach this kind of setting with a concern for power and society that's generally absent.

And it’s all Dreadfully Serious, though the narrator doesn’t always succeed in keeping a perfectly straight face because my narrators don’t. So here, dwarfed by the explanation of them, are some odds and ends I did. Nobody has any names yet, so forgive the confusing proliferation of pronouns.



Space-time is a frightfully complicated thing which I won’t pretend to understand. But probably it wouldn’t be lying to tell you that, in the world concerned by this narrative, about three-hundred years have passed since its end. A great many books have been written about these events. You could learn all about how they affected the production of fine pottery in the countries where they took place, if you like that sort of thing. My book, the latest on the pile, is neither cutting-edge research nor authoritative summary, and if you are a serious student and somebody has put this on your reading-list you should protest.

No, my ambitions are small: I don’t propose to tell you why any of this happened, only that it happened, and that it happened to living people and not to a series of names, dates, blobs of ink on maps. My sources were cherry-picked, my biases show, and I took artistic liberties with the translation. But oh well: my humble hope is that, if it is not certifiably true, and in fact not very probable, and in fact not even terribly plausible, my history is at least believable. And one cannot believe in fine pottery alone.

Anyway, I really cannot stand introductions of more than a page.


The wind made waves on the heather: a brown sea, under a grey sky. The effect was completed, improbably, by a ship on the brow of the moor, a very fine ship, sleek, painted, and carved with a dragon’s head. On its deck, a sacrificial goat bleated its last strangled bleat, as if aware of the necessity of the proceedings but wishing they could have been a bit more professional. The blood on the deck looked brown as well.

It was spring, but you wouldn’t have known. Winter had been long, and only persons of naïve and sentimental disposition will tell you that a long cold winter means a long warm summer. After all, there is only so much year. No, a cold winter, in melting, soaks all the other seasons and you end up with a sodden summer and a sodden spring like this one. The young grass was sad stubble on the muddy chin of the world. The new flowers smelled like death.

[The start, at a funeral. The protagonist comes from a sort of Norse-Gaelic-looking setting, but they're the victims of something much like the African slave-trade. People making up fictional worlds that are supposed to be recognisably like our own often transplant historical societies in poor imitation of Tolkien, I gather. But the Searing Light of Marxist Science tells us that cultures and so on are all just built on geography and economy, so change the geography and you change all the cultures and their relations to each-other. In other worlds, why should the 'white northern Europeans' be the most successful at world-banditry just because they were in our world? I’d like to challenge some assumptions.]


His voice was not loud; it demanded quiet from others. It was not his mouth that did the work at all, but his eyes. You looked into them and knew they weren’t looking back; they were fixed on something invisible to you. He couldn’t hear your noise, either, and his obliviousness made everybody feel that talking would be futile. He was in fact slightly deaf: a childhood in the printing-shop had done that to him. It had done more than that. Metal-forged words had crashed daily down around his young mind, and in that mind their sound became the sounds of cannon, and toppled empires crashing to the ground.

Probably – even the omnipotence of the historian has got its limits, I’m afraid, when it comes to some things – it was at this moment that she fell in love with him. If people fall in love in measurable moments, which they clearly don’t; but then gross oversimplification is the whole business of the historian. So she fell in love with him, in her dogged pugnacious way. When you have lived a life full of people worn out, broken, vanished, hardly seen, well, it must be easy to fall in love with a mind like a red-hot printing-press. Perhaps she felt that a mind like that could love as well as it hated, if it was given the chance.

[I promised you bespectacled revolutionary heroes and defiant prostitutes. You were sold a bill of goods.]


He heard the sound of stars, saw hopes and fears, tasted love and hate, and felt himself shaken by the heavy-footfalls of time. I’m making this sound far too fun, amn’t I? No: it was without a doubt the most horrible thing that had ever happened to him.

[Our protagonist warns kids that this is your brain on serious magic.]


He stood perfectly still and looked intently over the fields, as though they were a piece of writing he was determined to memorise before it was snatched away. But in fact it was the same view he had seen often enough before: of the fields clambering up to the iron-grey horizon and sliding away into the mists and ghost-shapes. There were the same fences, the same rich blacks and subdued greens, the same skeletal smudges made by the bare trees.

There were far more beautiful countries in the world, of course, and he knew it: as a young boy he’d gazed long and hard at the illustrations of any book of travels passing through the printing-shop. But quite suddenly, he felt that these weary hills were worth any hantle of majestic mountains: partly it was the gladness of regaining something you thought lost, and partly the keen attachment people feel to an heirloom from the dead, and partly the pride in something made by the work of their hands. The land he had always known had become his, somehow.

[B.R.H, a patriot after all. The haircuts will be French, the inability of anyone to stop being tooth-grindingly dramatic for the shortest time will be Russian, I hope; but the scenes I take from our iron-grey island. Bagpipes on cue at this point. Lovely!]


Spring came again, and came as a surprise. It had been another long winter, and a winter of hardship and death, and a winter when rumours and lies circulated at parity with the truth owing to shortages; and truth to tell people had begun to doubt whether the long-promised spring would ever turn up. Had there been spring before the war? Wasn't it all another malicious propaganda trick?

But the world must spin on around its axis, else we should all inevitably fall off. Spring came. Frozen rivers buckled, cracked, burst the ice and resumed their courses. So did History, and we come to the final phase of our narrative.

Meanwhile, in the Dark Forest of the Slavic Soul...

So I was having a poke around in Slavonic Studies in the library today, as it feels sufficiently close to doing my Russian project to fool my guilty conscience, and I found the adapted-for-stage version of Bulgakov's The White Guard in the English translation by Glenny, the same chap who did the novel so well. I did not even know such a thing existed!

It's a great read. A lot more direct and in-your-face than the novel: in large part this is the nature of the form, and of course the hand of the Soviet censors is visible in places. The past - both of the characters and of their society - has been largely cut out, the subplots removed, and several characters merged. Everything has been made explicit that in the novel was mouthed suggestively, and of course we've lost the gorgeous dream-sequence history of the civil war in Ukraine. But the fierce, embattled humanity of these flawed and noble souls shines through just as clearly. The play makes up for what it can't do by putting the spotlight on what was only one feature of the novel, the sheer energy and sometimes fun of the characters interacting: Alexei and Nikolka discharge much the same roles as in the novel, but Elena has considerably more crap not to take because she doesn't take any crap, and Myshlaevsky gets even more zingers. You have to love Myshlaevsky. He knows he's trapped in The Tragedy Of A Nation and he's not going to let it spoil his fun.

I want to see it now! (In a clear demonstration of the basic rottenness of our capitalist system, it was on in Edinburgh about two years before I'd ever heard of Bulgakov.) But here is a thought. In Shakespeare's day it seems to have been customary on the English stage to represent two separate nations by giving one lot the broad Scots accents just made familiar by King James. In the particular historical context Scots as Ukrainian seems to me spot-on: a language or dialect with its own history and literature but considered by educated society to be slightly ridiculous in the mouths of anyone but the Unwashed Masses. And of course the prospect of watching fuzzy-hatted cossacks striding about the stage shouting in Taysidese is its own attraction.

Surely this means that our White Guards, who disguise their Ukrainian origins and connections by adopting authorised Russian elite culture more fervently than any mere Russian, can only possibly be played with southern Edinburgh accents as thick as treacle? The fact is, our tribe need more cultural exposure. I have the greatest possible admiration for both The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and Maisie MacKenzie the Morningside cat; but we need to be cast out of type, and a setting so soaked in blood, vodka, and white wine is about as far from type as you could get without losing the things so essential to our brand: black comedy and acute bourgeois neurosis.

So how about it, then, lads?


(No fiction? No. I had a vague idea of creating Maisie Comes to Kiev, in which our young feline heroine goes to stay with her cousins the Purrbins and their friends such as Meowshlaevsky and Whiskervinsky, fighting against the Ukrainian nationalist forces of Petlyura, who history has already furnished with an absurd cat pun. But I couldn't make myself do it. I too had a childhood, you know,)

Sonnet

Here is a sonnet. My, what a twist! It made me £12.50 and is thus, for so long as the capitalist system prevails, the best thing I have ever written.


'Sonnet: To Orkney'

The whispering wind makes waves across the moor:
Brown waves on land, and grey-green waves on sea.
In times of doubt and pain, how glad I'd be
To sit and watch them on your quiet shore,
Where I have sat so many times before.
You islands are a haunted place for me,
But yours are ghosts I'm ever glad to see:
The ghosts of happy times to come no more.
How strange to think that you have ever been
The world's last land, the seat of warlike kings,
The battlefield of clashing heathen hosts!
And now the bloody memories you've seen
Join with my own: all insubstantial things,
The windy, whispering voices of your ghosts


Something that came up the other night in pub-discussion with Prof. Riach, Chairman of Scottish Literature at Glasgow and, less impressively, the world, was the very local nature of much Scottish literature - two small examples of which I humbly contribute above. So many people following the trail blazed by MacDiarmid have belonged identifiably of a particular place. Edinburgh had Garioch and, in another way (though she'd be livid to be seen in this sort of boozy masculine company), Spark. Being a Glasgow poet is practically a profession of its own and I still can't believe Edwin Morgan's really dead! *sniff* Ahem. Orkney or course has Muir and Brown; Skye, and all Gaeldom, MacLean. MacCaig and Crichton Smith were both between Highlands and Lowlands, each with a particular bit of each.

Sue me if I missed your favourite, but the point is that these direct links with actual communities and cultures are a very effective antidote to the sort of ridiculous Victorian nationalism that Prof. Riach gives the splendid name of "haggis-vomit".

We thought perhaps that if the construction of Jerusalem in England's green and pleasant land is ever to be finished (danger of burning gold; hard-hats to be worn by order) there will have to be a discovery of the local there, as a way of breaking the hangover of an imperial culture and literature. Scotland and England have both been distorted by that imperial legacy in their separate ways, for all that it has put us in touch with such a magnificent worldwide literature in the English language.

Scotland's problem is that, with Scotland such a recognisable brand (although to be fair many foreigners make the justifiable assumption that it's not really real) there is only one academic department studying literature made by Scots in Scotland in the world. England's problem is that, with English the common language of earth, there's apparently none at all studying literature produced by English people in England.