Authors: Iain Crichton Smith
The Red Door (2 page)
This compassionate attempt to understand one who is different, this fascination with the individual, the outsider, is a typical theme in many of Crichton Smith’s stories. Of his own sense
of alienation, Iain would say: ‘I have made the choice, I have forsaken the [island] community in order to individualise myself.’
Aberdeen granted him the space to discover – and individualise – himself. He immersed himself in poetry (Auden and Eliot being influential favourites) and philosophy
(Aberdeen’s light was so clear that he ‘could see for miles as if it were into the essence of existentialism’). Nonetheless he enjoyed the social aspects of student life. The
anonymity – the freedom – of Aberdeen contrasted sharply, excitingly, with the curtain-twitching claustrophobia of a small island village. In his droll, perceptive, and self-deprecating
Life of Murdo
, Iain (writing of himself in the third person) says:
He [Murdo, i.e. Iain] thanks Aberdeen for giving him these days after his unhappy childhood of poverty and salt herring. His mother stern and loved and at times wild
loomed over the Minch. But Aberdeen was inhabited by many characters, whom he recalls with affection, even the shrivelled ones, the city itself a cage of light.
Iain also mentions that Murdo, his autobiographical alter-ego, ‘had the nerve to write for the University magazine
Alma Mater
’. As if taking the second word of the
magazine’s title as a cue, Iain’s earliest published story in this volume, ‘Mother and Son’, deals with a central Crichton Smith character type: the domineering, principled,
powerfully magnetic but wholly demanding mother figure. ‘Mother and Son’ – while far indeed from being one of Iain’s best stories - is interesting in that even at this young
age he was considering the influence a mother can have on the mind of a sensitive son, an influence of which Iain was to say near the end of his own life:
This complication and intricacy of emotional attachment [between ‘Murdo’ and his mother] Murdo has studied and it appears in one or two of his poems. He
was much closer to his mother than boys normally are.
The sense of a young man at university finding himself, and therefore finding himself loosening his ties with both island and mother, is well evoked in the secular epistles of ‘The Black
and The Red’.
After university, Iain lived with his mother and younger brother in a tenement flat in Dumbarton, and he would regularly visit Helensburgh to be near the sea. ‘The sea, monster and
creator,’ he would later write, ‘has remained with me as a well of fertile symbolism. I think of the many dead – some I have known – drifting about in it, being refined
there forever.’ He attended Jordanhill College to do his teacher training (‘Murdo cannot convey the death to the spirit which is to be found in a Teachers’ Training College . . .
’).
Iain was no happier during his period of National Service. Never regarding himself as a man of solid practical skills and easy conformity, he felt that the world of the army was entirely alien
to him. Musing on his army days, he writes with a mixture of honesty and tongue-in-cheek self-scrutiny:
O how clumsy Murdo was. He could not fit into that social organism. He heard his boots on the square with trepidation. He taught himself to iron but at great expense
of spirit. He broke like others the ice on the surface of the water buckets in winter in order to shave. He polished his cap brooch and his belt buckle. But Murdo was not a soldier nor a
phantasm thereof.
Iain nonetheless was promoted to sergeant in the Education Corps, and his duties now included lecturing (on NATO, on the UN) and teaching (for the Forces Prelim and other exams). A diligent
teacher, he found himself unexpectedly enjoying teaching Maths, a subject that had eluded him in his own youth. However the rigidity, the ‘mad logic’ of the army did not suit him and
this was an uncharacteristically fallow period in his development as a writer:
Murdo felt that Virgil was being squeezed out of him so that many men might become one man. Murdo was afraid. He couldn’t write nor did he read. He was too busy
suffering punishments. He was too busy aligning his knife and fork correctly on top of his bed for inspection.
In 1952, after completing his National Service, he moved to a new flat in Dumbarton with his mother and younger brother. He got a job teaching at Clydebank High School and was to remain there
until 1955. He was not entirely happy, as he found that teaching academic (rather than non-academic) pupils was his forte, and it was generally the less academic classes that he, as a new teacher,
was delegated.
While his mother was happy in Dumbarton (she had the Free Church and a circle of friends), Iain himself did not feel at home there, considering the town ‘ugly and anonymous’. He
missed the sea and the beauty of the Highlands and felt that his writing was suffering because of this.
Iain moved to Oban in 1955, where he ‘felt instantly at home’. He took up a teaching post at the high school there, a job he would retain until his early retirement twenty-two years
later. Iain’s writing prospered in Oban. He wrote his best-known novel in just eleven days during an Easter break, the modern Scottish classic
Consider the Lilies
(known in America
by its alternative and less suitable title
The Alien Light
). Certainly one of the best works of fiction concerned with the sorely inequitable Highland Clearances,
Consider the
Lilies
has been widely and deservedly praised, despite anachronisms that would no doubt constitute wincing blunders in a lesser work. It is a measure of Iain’s writing skills that the
presence of postmen, dungarees, grandfather clocks and melodeons at a time when these did not exist in the Highlands in no way detracts from the power of the novel. In an interview for
Books in
Scotland
some years later he was to dismiss any criticisms regarding historical inaccuracies: ‘I think the anachronisms are trivial. They don’t really affect what I was trying to
do . . . There are a lot of anachronisms in Shakespeare and in other writers.’
As well as teaching and writing, Iain’s energies were also directed towards domestic matters. His mother had come to live with him in his Oban flat in the early 1960s:
This as it turned out was not a good idea though many people were very kind to her. It was not a good idea for Murdo either: he would no longer be able to go out
drinking. Indeed he spent practically all his nights in the house. This had one good result, that he wrote an enormous amount, of stories and poems in both English and Gaelic.
Indeed, he was prolific – arguably too prolific. Perhaps it is inevitable that a degree of inconsistency should creep into the writings of one who produced such an abundance of material.
This is true of Crichton Smith’s stories, as it is of his poetry. In an interview for the
Glasgow Herald
in 1988 he said:
One thing I do regret when I was teaching and writing was that I didn’t revise things as much as I would have liked to have done. I don’t just mean
revision; I also mean having the courage to wait, maybe for a year or two, rather than doing it very quickly.
Crichton Smith admired the restraint of writers who focused resolutely on quality rather than quantity, people such as the world-class Gaelic poet Sorley Maclean (brother of Oban High
School’s rector, Iain’s friend John Maclean, famous himself in Highland literary circles for producing a Gaelic translation of Homer’s
Odyssey
).
The balance between compulsive, honest, lyrical spontaneity and injudicious haste is a precarious one, sometimes realised in Iain’s writing as an agreeable, smooth, uninhibited and wholly
natural fluidity, but other times realised as a rashness suggestive of fingers flurrying across the typewriter at almost quicker-than-thought speed. Nonetheless it is the sign of an agile creative
mind, muscular, efficient, and concentrated, that such spontaneous literary writings can stand up to scrutiny.
Iain’s mother, a returning presence in his work, exerted a great influence on his mind. Writing about her towards the end of his own life, Iain Crichton Smith described the ‘intense
pity’ he felt for her. Her life had been a difficult one, not least of all because, widowed at a young age, she was left to bring up three sons in economically challenged circumstances (often
swallowing her ‘stubborn pride’ to borrow money ‘from villagers whom essentially she was not in tune with.’) She was very protective of Iain when he was young and he made a
number of sacrifices to look after her as she grew older: ‘There came a time when she would not leave the house, was indeed frightened to do so. Murdo therefore remained in the house as well:
thus he had very little opportunity to enjoy himself in any way.’
Iain’s mother passed away in 1969 and this had a profound effect on the writer who, four years prior to her death, had said:
I myself am fascinated with old people on the verge of leaving life. It links with my obsession with death, which really is the extreme situation. How you face it is
the test of all you are. Lawrence said every writer has to conquer death in some way before he can write or live.
After his mother’s death, however, it seemed that death might conquer
him
. . .
His mother had died. He went to the hospital and saw her dead face which seemed to have become stern and Roman. He felt as if ice surrounded him and he was trembling
all the time. He felt as if he was in outer space. It was actually the first dead person he had seen. At this point and for a long time his whole personality disintegrated. He would not
go to school. He felt as if death had destroyed his writing.
Feeling isolated, guilty, pained, Iain’s torment was no doubt exacerbated by overwork. He sought solace and diversion by visiting writer friends such as Norman MacCaig in Edinburgh and
George Mackay Brown in Orkney. It is clear that his mother’s death was a devastation from which the writer took some time to recover.
Iain’s recuperation, largely instigated by one woman, was actually the start of a period of personal and creative rejuvenation. He had begun to meet with Donalda a year or so before his
mother’s death. Eleven years younger than him, Donalda had at one time been a pupil of his at Oban High School. Now working as a nurse, she had been considering a switch to primary teaching
and had sought Iain’s help in securing her Higher English.
His relationship with Donalda developed, heralding a new period of happiness in Iain’s life:
Donalda and Murdo used to go for dinner every Saturday night to a different hotel in Argyll. Sometimes in the autumn they used to pick brambles. Murdo gradually
recovered from the death of his mother, for which he had suffered guilt and genuine grief.
In Donalda’s company, Iain began to think of Argyll as ‘the loveliest area he had ever been in’. He describes waiting for Donalda to visit his flat with a joyfully simple and
affecting beauty:
In his flat in Combie St, he would listen for Donalda’s footsteps on the stone stairs. In her yellow dress she was like an actual physical ray of sunshine
entering his house.
Indeed, Iain fully recognised how important Donalda was to his well-being, how centrally important she had become to his happiness.
Having long understood that meeting Donalda was ‘a turning point’ in his life, he married her in July 1977, a month after he had retired from teaching. (Crichton Smith had actually
tried to leave teaching on two previous occasions, ‘but had lost his nerve’). Donalda and the two boys, Peter and Alasdair, moved in to the flat. Iain settled in to a routine of writing
in the morning, preparing the boys’ lunches, then writing again in the afternoon, still driven, as he had always been, by a very
Leòdhasach
Protestant work ethic.
Crichton Smith’s marriage precipitated a new joy in his work – an energetic delight at the spontaneous beauties of nature, for example, although his writings have always had an
undercurrent of darkness, sometimes nudging at the reader’s mind and sometimes quite overwhelming it. One of his best novels,
In the Middle of the Wood
, charts the breakdown of a
married writer whose paranoia necessitates a spell in a psychiatric hospital. If the novel’s tone seems disturbingly autobiographical, there is a good reason for that, as Edwin Morgan has
pointed out:
Smith has said that the whole story is true, and if this is so, it is a most remarkable example of how an artist will use the material of his life, no matter how
terrible it may be, and perhaps achieve the double function of exorcising some of his demons and presenting his readers with a highly dramatic story.
Thankfully, Iain recovered from the breakdown and went on to write some of his greatest work.
By the time of his death in 1998, Iain Crichton Smith had become one of Scotland’s best-known and best-loved writers. His rich
ouevre
won him a great many accolades and honorary
degrees. He was awarded the OBE in 1980.
There is no doubt, therefore, that Iain is a major Scottish writer. But it is at this pertinent juncture that I wish to raise –and subsequently attempt to demolish – another popular
misconception: that Iain Crichton Smith was a great poet who ‘also wrote prose’. Undeniably, close scrutiny reveals a degree of inconsistency in his stories (just as in his poetry), but
I wish to argue that Iain was, on balance, a much better short story writer than he is usually given credit for. Indeed, some of his stories are so tightly charged with evocative imagery and
intensely appropriate wording that they constitute prose-poems.
