The Red Door (3 page)

Sorley Maclean’s comments are representative of a general attitude that has arisen among some critics with regard to Crichton Smith’s writings:

Crichton Smith confessed in an interview for
Books in Scotland
that he did not think of himself as a novelist, saying: ‘I am not a novelist, but I like challenges in that
form.’ He also said, revealing just how important the short story form was to him, ‘What I really see myself as is more a short story writer and a poet.’

In ‘The Necessity of Accident’, an excellent, insightful essay appraising Crichton Smith’s English-language fiction, Cairns Craig writes:

Indeed, we do a great disservice to Iain Crichton Smith’s memory by misunderstanding, or downplaying, the role of short stories in his contribution to literature.

Survival without Error and other stories
(1970) was not Iain’s first short story collection to be published, but it was his first English-language short story
collection. He had won himself considerable recognition in the field of Gaelic literature since the publication of
Bùrn is Aran
(‘Water and Bread’, 1960), a book that,
in its first edition at least, contained both short stories and poems (an indication, perhaps, of the paucity of Gaelic publishing opportunities). He had also published the story collection
An
Dubh is an Gorm
(‘The Black and the Blue’, 1963), two English-language novels (
Consider the Lilies
, 1968, and the underrated
The Last Summer
, 1969), plus a number
of poetry collections.

Iain wrote far more material in English than he did in Gaelic, but his Gaelic short stories were – and are – held in high esteem and, in contrast with critical responses to his
English-language work, his Gaelic prose is generally viewed among Gaelic speakers at least as favourably as his Gaelic poetry.

Survival without Error
contains fourteen stories, many of them set in Scotland, and many of them concerned with the ways in which diverse people manage to find their way through
life’s day-to-day impositions and demands, individuals consciously trying to cause but the minimum of fuss and controversy while negotiating the varying weathers of desire and injustice. In
negotiating life this way, the individual often compromises him- or herself to the extent that they are personally diminished, sometimes almost drained of authenticity and true identity.
Survival without Error
is partly an examination of bourgeois values and
mores
– surviving ‘without error’ seems to be an impossibility – but this fine
collection feeds off fighting tensions that are often characteristically and tantalisingly ambiguous.

The Black and the Red
(1973) is a more diverse short story collection than its predecessor, with stories taking place in, for example, hotels, universities, and World War II trenches.
Certain themes do emerge, however, especially alienation and separation. Characters, as is often the case in Iain’s stories, tend to be somewhat physically passive, though very active
mentally. They seem to be observers, not always fully engaged with their surroundings – attempting to understand, rather than change, the world.

It is a wonderful collection, and contains some of Crichton Smith’s classic short stories, such as ‘The Dying’, ‘The Telegram’, and the title story. The twenty-one
stories focus primarily, though not exclusively, on themes of identity, exile, and human interaction. The narratives are mediated through a voice that is sometimes realistic and sometimes surreal,
but always recognisably Crichton Smith’s.

It is a pleasure to make available again the stories from Iain’s subsequent collection,
The Village
(1976).
The Village
partially shares its title with
The Village
and other poems
, one of his finest poetry collections, though it seems, unfairly, to have had little of the latter’s recognition.

The Village
comprises a series of interlinked tales set in a single Scottish – and, it must be admitted, darkly Lewis-like – community. That the village changes size and
appearance from time to time in no way detracts from the collection. The stories here are concerned with many aspects of insular Scottish life: the personal tensions simmering beneath a social
veneer, the claustrophobia, the routine, the gossip, the emptiness, the conformity, the paranoia, and the paralysis.

The Village
is a marvellous achievement, breathing slow-measured life into a community that is, behind the images of stasis and decay, alive with tensions, inner voices, and stark
truths. The stories have a great deal about individual and community-wide identity within the Highlands, often creating drama out of the smallest occurrence. ‘The Red Door’ is a fine
example of the way in which Crichton Smith can make a story of human insight and development out of an apparent triviality, in this case a mysteriously painted door. Murdo awakens one day to find
that his door is no longer green but has been ‘painted very lovingly’ red. It is now the only red door in the village. This simple act changes Murdo’s life, endows him with a new
sense of self and of self-belief. The door evinces in him ‘admiration’ and ‘a certain childlikeness’. It leads him away from easy conformity to a new and purposeful door.
This story is simple, beautiful, and profound and is one of the quiet gems to be discovered in the secluded treasures of
The Village
.

Like
The Village, The Hermit and other stories
(1977) is a rather serious collection, free of Crichton Smith’s irreverent, disarming, and punchy humour; nonetheless it features
some of his best stories. ‘The Hermit’ itself is a long story based upon a novella that Iain wrote in Gaelic –
An t-Aonaran
(Glasgow University Press, 1976). The story is
essentially the same in English as in Gaelic, though certain details and linguistic nuances vary. In fact a number of Iain’s stories have bilingual versions, which are best appreciated by the
bilingual reader as being parallel versions of each other – neither identical nor fundamentally different.

Murdo and other stories
(1981) was legitimately praised on its release, critics admiring its intensity and its defiance of easy categorisation. Norman Shrapnel, reviewing it in
The
Guardian
, applauded its ‘ . . . distinguished though elusive stories . . . He treads precarious frontiers – between prose and poetry, between poetry and dementia . . . ’

The ‘Murdo’ stories are available in
Murdo: The Life and Works
(Birlinn, 2001) and are therefore not included in these volumes.

Mr Trill in Hades
(1984) is one of Crichton Smith’s strongest and most unified collections. Although the stories all centre around educational institutions and teaching staff,
their diversity is great. These stories are compassionate and grim and funny and tragic: their combined effect is to create a rich and penetrating view of human life (and afterlife).

Selected Stories
(1990) represented Iain’s own choice of his best material and is naturally an extremely strong – and typically varied – collection (as indeed was
Douglas Gifford’s selection,
Listen to the Voice
(Canongate Books, 1993)).

Many of the previously uncollected stories published now in
The Red Door
and
The Black Halo
are as good as those stories which did make it into the collections, and I suspect
many of them were omitted from the published collections for thematic reasons or because of lack of available space. They examine familiar themes but do so with a freshness that awakens alternative
perspectives and ideas, often with the full power, intense imagery and sheer verbal energy that are characteristic of the short story collections in general. They allow the reader for the first
time comprehensively to appraise Crichton Smith’s achievements as short story writer, to piece together this quite central part of his varied literary jigsaw.

It is impossible, given the limitations of space here, to give an exhaustive critique of the themes, techniques, ideas and potential interpretations of Crichton Smith’s
stories. Iain often explored and re-explored specific themes in his work that were not only important to him personally, but central to his literature, his very dialogue with humanity.

One of the most prominent of these is often, appropriately, evoked quite surreptitiously: the theme of communication (more accurately, miscommunication or a lack of communication). Many of his
stories are populated by couples who are – or have become – awkwardly but inseparably incompatible. A gulf of incommunicable difference has opened wistfully between them. Delusion and
pathos are frequent undercurrents in such stories. ‘The Ships’, for example, is situated in a typically (Oban-esque?) Scottish village and is a powerful, though often subtle,
examination of small-town ennui, loneliness, and dissemination. The narrator, Harry, limping through the latter stages of his life, has found himself in an unexceptional marriage, questioning the
meaning of his existence. He is pitiful. His children appear to have forgotten him, his wife knows all too well the kind of man he is: a liar. Perhaps his exaggerations (deliciously and skilfully
portrayed) are partly a poor man’s attempt to defeat the mundane through sheer creative invention. Bitterness, duplicity and untrustworthiness are dominant emotions in a story that
nonetheless concludes with the realisation of some sharp home truths.

‘On the Road’ also features an unhappy couple who are, naturally, out of harmony with each other:

Like a rabbit, perhaps? The story is tightly written, the images densely interwoven. Correspondences, as is often the case in these stories, shine seductively somewhere just above the lucid
communicative level of logic, hinting at something sinister and ineluctably superior. The ending to this story is compellingly irate, indignant, and resentful:

Perhaps the supreme example of a sustained investigation of communication is ‘The Hermit’, which tells the story of a loner’s arrival in a ‘bare bleak island’
village. His silent, passive, self-contained manner, far from catalysing his endearing integration into the village, leads to an agitated and quietly explosive period of unease within the (too)
tightly-knit community. While various individuals – the narrator included – empathise in various ways with the loner, they seem to see themselves in an unappealingly clear light. The
hermit, ultimately, is a scapegoat. Surely his obliquely absent presence implies he deserves much better treatment than the villagers give him, but the locals do not understand his silences, and
they read their own bigotries into his lack of communication. The story is propelled by narrow gossip and by the nagging imposition of claustrophobic convention. As in
The Village
, routine
is all:

‘The Hermit’ is, like Nabokov’s
Lolita
, more than it seems to be: it, too, is a meditation upon language. There are a great many references to language and the nature
of communication stated – and buried – within this most densely revealing of texts. One of the story’s greatest successes is to pitch the unknown, the
unsaid
(the hermit)
against the familiar, i.e. that which has been said so often it has become routinely acceptable and ultimately meaningless: ‘Language almost becomes like tobacco which is as much chewed as
smoked . . . So much of language is lying, polite lying but still lying.’

Crichton Smith’s stories often triumph by communicating to the reader that which is, to the characters at least, incommunicable. But, furthermore, some of his stories communicate something
that seems to be, paradoxically, above verbal understanding: and the fluid, surreal images of many of Iain Crichton Smith’s stories, reminiscent of actual dreams, are one of their most
recognisable features

Daydreams, night-dreams and literary dreams are surely the inspired cinema screens that brought to light many of the images and stories contained within these volumes. ‘On the
Train’, ‘The Survivor’, and ‘The Maze’ are supremely Kafkaesque, while nonetheless being Crichton Smithesque at the same time. A number of Crichton Smith’s
stories take place in a kind of Twilight Zone of shifting perceptions, a world that is recognisably ours, but one that is filtered through a sinisterly dreamlike atmosphere of paranoia,
implication, pessimism, and an inability to control one’s destiny. These surreal vignettes burn themselves into the mind like ultra-vivid paintings, fugitive in meaning but unforgettable as
works of art. Sometimes their concluding ambiguities offer a measure of solace: