Recollections of early days at Scottish Pen and of a Writing Life

I felt very honoured to be invited to become the next Honorary President of Scottish Pen and was delighted to accept.

I published my first adult novel, Liam's Daughter, set in Ireland and France,in 1963. When my second one, The Prevailing Wind, firmly placed in the Marchmont district of Edinburgh, came out the following year the publisher, Hodder and Stoughton, decided to give me a party in a venue in Queen Street. This event helped to change my life.

I was young, I had two children under the age of three, with another due later that year, I lived in the small village of Temple, twelve miles from the city, which I seldom left, and I knew nothing of 'the writing life'. I had met briefly only a single author,one of Scotland's finest novelists, Robin Jenkins, who was a friend of a man in the village. I lacked people to talk to.

Two other Hodder authors were invited to my event. Nigel Tranter, who was then president of Scottish Pen, and James Allan Ford, a member of the committee. They descended on me immediately crying 'You must join Scottish Pen!' I had never heard of it. I joined and my life opened up.

Pen predominantly meant friendship for me. Friendship with other writers to whom I could talk and exchange ideas. We met in Gladstone's Land, a magical atmospheric place in which to gather. Many of those writers I met in the sixties are no longer with us, sadly some whose names would not even be recognised by members today. Oswald Wynd, Tranter, Jim Ford, Marie Muir, Lavinia Derwent, Cherry Drummond in whose castle, Megginch, we had many summer parties, Ronald Johnston, Cliff Hanley, Douglas Young, John Calder, and others whose names escape me. We had evenings with special guests. MacDiarmid. Helen Cruikshank. Chinua Achebe. Heinrich Boll. Saul Bellow. I remember vividly the evening with Bellow. Half a dozen of us sat in a small circle with him in the back room at Gladstone's Land. He talked and we listened, entranced. One person who was a stalwart member then and still remains so is Mary Baxter, who has given so much to Pen over the years.

In the late 60s a group of us from Scottish Pen and the Society of Authors got together and initiated a festival for writers which we ran during the Edinburgh International Festival. We felt writers had been ignored. We began in a modest way, with one event per morning for one week. None of the authors got paid in the early years. We were mostly Scottish. With the help of some finance from SAC we rented a room in the Carlton Hotel to begin with, moved on to the Balmoral, then the George, and finally, for a few years, to the Roxburgh. We drew in some well known names. Martin Amis,  Antonia Fraser, Salman Rushdie (before he became famous) Rose Tremaine, Jane Gardam, amongst others. The festivals were small, intimate and friendly.

At the beginning of the 80s I was chairing the book festival committee as well as serving as a council member of SAC and its literature committee, now defunct. The idea of holding a festival - a more official, well-funded one - in Charlotte Square gardens gradually grew out of our events in the Roxburgh, and so in 1983 the Edinburgh Book Festival, as we know it today, was born.

When I look back on those years I don't know how I got time to bring up three children, serve on various committees and write books, but somehow or other I did. In 1970 I published The Twelfth Day of July, set at the time of the Troubles in Northern Ireland and was launched as a children's writer. I continued to write adult novels as well as plays for television. In those days producers actually approached you and invited you to write for them. I learned the ropes by writing first for the soap High Living and went on to write for one-off play slots like Play for Today that no longer exist. I was then invited to dramatise my four novels about a Glasgow girl called Maggie in 18 episodes, which went out on BBC Two over two years.

When I got my first contract from Hodder I was asked if I would be prepared to give talks in bookshops or libraries and give press and radio interviews. Totally naive, I answered no to all of them! How times have changed! You wouldn't be taken on by a publisher now unless you were prepared to 'support' your book. Writers are expected to go out and sell themselves, which is something I deplore. I am glad I started a career as a writer when I did. Times were saner then to my mind. Writers were valued for the quality of their work as well as how many books they could sell. I continue to write. How can I stop? I began when I was eleven years old. Writers never retire.

Scottish Pen has changed in many ways since I first became a member. More emphasis is placed on supporting Writers in Prison, which is admirable. I am fully in support of that and have been happy to read at EIBF events in support of it when I have been able to.

A writer's life is full of ups and downs, highs and lows, but I feel fortunate to have been free to write what I want to write  and not to have the restrictions placed upon me that so many less fortunate writers in other parts of the world have.

Joan Lingard

Read more about Joan Lingard at her website

WHAT PRICE THE NOBEL PEACE PRIZE by Jean Rafferty, WIPC

        

The Nobel Peace Prize is generally accepted as one of the highest honours a human being can win, a recognition of exceptional courage or integrity, affirmation that you have lived your life honourably and decently. But sometimes it's even more than that. It's currency.

Publisher Ragip Zarakolu is currently in a high security prison in Turkey, along with terrorists, drug dealers and other scary people. After his arrest at the end of October last year, he was deprived of the lifeblood of every literary person¾books. But now that he has been nominated for the Nobel, the authorities are realising they were perhaps a little hasty. He has been given permission to visit the library and to use a computer once a week.

In prison, values tend to be the reverse of those in society and the tougher the criminal you are, the more kudos you get, but the Nobel nomination has boosted Ragip's standing and he is now looked upon as a leading figure in the prison.

'Everybody knew about the nomination, and that changed the conditions remarkably,' says Eugene Schoulgin of PEN International, who campaigns tirelessly on his behalf. 'Even the guards wanted to assure the visitors that they took good care of him.'

It's hard to under-estimate how important such affirmation from the world outside is to a political prisoner like Ragip. Letters of support and friendship from all over the world have helped keep his spirits up, though he often has to wait to receive them as the prison censors mail and there isn't always an officer on hand to translate them.

F-Type prisons like Koceali, where Ragip was moved from Istanbul, have been criticised by both Amnesty International and the Human Rights Foundation of Turkey for their harsh regime. Prisoners are often kept in isolation and many are subjected to 'harsh and arbitrary disciplinary punishments.'

Ragip appears to be allowed to associate with other inmates¾ he sent out photos of himself with two of them¾and has access to a small radio. The prisoners are able to watch television for short periods in the evening and the prison pipes its own music channel into the cells. Sometimes it's even Ragip's much loved classical music. 'He said that when he listened to Bach's Brandenburg concerto he cried for the first time since his imprisonment. (If you start to cry listening to the Brandenburg you are actually in a worse shape than you think, if you ask me!),' jokes Eugene Schoulgin.

Most of us would cry long before we heard Bach. It seems surreal to us that in a purportedly civilised society someone can be locked up arbitrarily for protesting about injustice, as Ragip did about the Kurds. Few writers or publishers in Britain would be able to stand it, and given the amount of self-censorship that goes on for economic reasons in UK newspapers, you can bet that few would continue to speak out. (If you don't agree, just check out the comparative number of articles about foreign affairs and about celebrities.)       

The irony is that here we actually hire professional rabble-rousers to express strong opinions. Can you imagine how Jeremy Clarkson would cope if his obnoxious comments about striking public sector workers had led to detention in prison? How many times would Jeremy Paxman have challenged Michael Howard in his famous interview on Newsnight if he knew it would lead to being accused of insulting the British state?

But then neither of the two Jeremys is ever likely to be in line for the Nobel.

To support a petition calling for the release of Ragip Zarakolu please follow this link: http://chn.ge/vu4AxI

Elizabeth Jennings

Elizabeth Jennings (1926 – 2001) was a beautiful poem-maker, always low-key, careful construction, often with rhyme and metre, and deep-seated passion.

I have several of her books of poems, mostly published by Carcanet, and her Collected Poems 1967, published by Macmillan.

Tessa Ransford

Here are the last few lines of a poem called ‘Against the Dark’:

Nobody really knows where poems come from

But I believe they must praise

Even when grief is threatening, even when hope

Seems as far as the furthest star.

Poetry uses me; I am its willing scope

And proud practitioner

and from the sestet of Michelangelo’s sonnet XXX1V

It is the same with me when fierce desires

Reduce me to pale ashes, dry and cold:

I am not lost but find new life indeed.

If I can rise from ashes which seem dead

And come unscathed from these consuming fires

I am not forged from iron but from gold.

Photograph courtesy of Elizabeth Jennings website, where you can find out more about her life and her work

Special Delivery - Le Facteur Cheval

Palais Ideal

Tom Hubbard

Special Delivery

You can stumble and tumble upon it while you’re engaged with everyday banalities. It’s the incident, small in itself, which can lead to a triumph of creativity. It happened to a provincial French postman, Ferdinand Cheval, during one of his rounds: he lost his footing against a stone which he then picked up and admired for its strange shape. He decided to take it home to his yard. Cheval – or “Facteur  [postman] Cheval” as he’s best known - continued to collect more stones as he went about his business, and resolved to make a reality of a long-nurtured fantasy. In that open space by his home at Hauterives, south of Lyon, he would construct his Palais Idéal – his ideal palace – working on it for as long as it would take.

It took him over thirty years, from 1879 to 1912. It’s the oddest building you’re ever likely to visit in a lifetime, let alone within thirty-odd years. For some it has been an eyesore, the creation of a village crank. For André Malraux, the French minister of culture in 1969, it deserved the status of a national monument, as the world’s sole example of “architecture naïve”. Sole example? What about follies, such as Jack the Treacle-Eater in Somerset, or  Scotland’s own outsized Pineapple at Airth near the Kincardine Bridges? When I lived in Leixlip, Ireland, I was within walking distance of Co. Kildare’s ziggurat, the “Wonderful Barn”, and there was a Gothick lodge and a circular temple in the ample grounds of nearby Castletown House. Most of these weird structures owe their existence to aristocratic or otherwise landed whimsy.  Cheval’s was no dilettante production;  it was a working-man’s quest for meaning, and if it could be described as “naïve” it achieved, paradoxically, the kind of sophistication that often eludes the consciously sophisticated.

Read French novels of the decades leading up to Cheval’s masterpiece, and you frequently encounter the stubborn provincial intent on conquering the capital. But Cheval had no knowledge of, or interest in, Paris. He was unaware of those great movements in art that we cluster together under the term post-impressionsm. Art nouveau? The Palais Idéal shares some of the features of that movement – the representation of organic growth, the plant and animal forms that seem to defy their objectively static condition. Symbolism? Again, there’s common territory – the hauntingly atmospheric nature of the building, both of its parts and of its whole: if, as Walter Pater maintained, all art aspires to the condition of music, Cheval’s Palais Idéal is “Symbolist” inasmuch as it is art aspiring to the condition of dream – except that the terms “Art nouveau” and “Symbolist” would have meant nothing to Cheval, and his case was rather that of dream aspiring to the condition of art.

The Palais Idéal is a meeting place of the various arts, a powerfully integrative vision. It is sculpture as well as architecture, again as regards its constituent parts as well as its totality – a diversity-in-unity. It is theatre: your approach to it from the village, even via its custom-built entry-point, reveals a spectacle in both the French and English meanings of that word. You reach the upper level of the Palais Idéal, by a choice of winding stairs, and find yourself on a terrace that suggests a stage – a stage that demands all France, and the world beyond, as its audience. It’s also literature, for Cheval had a predilection for mottoes, scraps of poetry, and his own gnomic pronouncements, all of which he inscribed on his walls, not least those of the vaguely unnerving “labyrinth” within the ground level of his eldritch castle.

               Pour mon idée, mon corps a tout bravé,

               Le temps, la critique, les années.

               La vie est un rapide courrier,

              Ma pensée vivra avec ce rocher.     

In itself it lacks one art: music. Even here, though, help is at hand – at least in the summer months when open-air performances take place in front of the monument.

Palais Ideal - detail

The Palais Idéal has attracted the attention of later artists such as the Surrealists, for whom it became a place of pilgrimage: their Parisian equivalent would be the Buttes-Chaumont Park with its sinister caverns carved out of a former quarry. Antonio Gaudi is often plausibly compared with Cheval. 

        

Two of the English-speaking world’s most eloquent writers in art, Robert Hughes and John Berger, have come here and paid homage. Hughes has written of “a palace of the unconscious” built by a “proud and certain man”. Freud and Jung may indeed be hovering in and out of the structure, as well as Marx: Berger resists psychologising the work, preferring to stress the dialectical energies of the peasant-workman’s interaction with his materials. (These materials, it should be added, are not only of stone – Cheval also collected and deployed shells, and sculpted with mortar: in his time he had worked as a baker, and kneading the dough proved itself to be a transferable skill.)

I suggested to the students in my aesthetics class at Grenoble that architecture was the one art you couldn’t escape: it was all around you. Moreover, rather than you containing it, it contained you. Music might enter your body; your body must inevitably enter a building. Berger rightly maintains that books and even films about the Palais Idéal can never be a substitute for actually being there and inside it: “You do not look at it any more than you look at a forest. You either enter it or you pass it by.” Nevertheless, as well as the books, I showed a DVD of it to my students: such a medium could reach the parts (of  the building, and of human sensibility) that the best books couldn’t reach. The new technology could at least offer an appetiser for the original’s three-dimensionality; when I lectured on Cheval in my art college and evening class days, I had only slides to hand.  Yet these images, for all their inadequacy, were what led me to explore this monument in all its existential palpability, this seemingly unlikely creation of the dour postman of Hauterives.     

Below: photograph of “Le Facteur” Cheval.

Jean Meslier, Priest and Atheist

‘My dear friends, seeing that I would not be permitted and the consequences would be too dangerous and distressing for me to tell you openly during my lifetime what I think about the government of men and about their religion and morals, I have decided, at least, to tell you after my death  …’

So (in the 2009 translation by Michael Shreve) begins Testament: Memoir of the Thoughts and Sentiments of Jean Meslier, Parish Priest of Etrépigny and Balaives, three copies of which were apparently found in signed manuscripts in Meslier’s house after his death (he had planned to register the work with the clerks of his parishes beforehand, to be communicated to his parishioners).

                                                Parish Church of Etrépigny

The work circulated in manuscript throughout the eighteenth century and beyond, but was not printed in its original form until 1864. In the meantime, Voltaire had brought Meslier to the attention of a wider audience in his Extraits des Sentiments de Jean Meslier, a sanitized Meslier who was neither revolutionary nor atheist, but an anti-Catholic deist, much like Voltaire himself.

The real Meslier (1664-1729), while carrying out the duties of a Catholic priest until his death, categorically stated ‘there is no God’. He saw religion as a political tool for oppressing the masses and quotes with approval a man whose ‘wish was that all the rulers of the earth and all the nobles be hanged and strangled with the guts of priests’!

Meslier advocated a communitarian society in which all men and women in a given community ‘should live peacefully and in common together, having the same or similar food and being all equally well clothed, well housed’ and in which marriages could easily be dissolved and new partners taken. All that was needed for human happiness, in his rather simplistic view, was to throw off the yoke of the aristocracy and the Church.

No wonder, with all this fermenting inside him that Meslier, who became a priest, he says, to please his parents,  ‘was never without pain and extreme loathing for what I was doing’ and ‘hundreds and hundreds of times on the point of indiscreetly bursting out with indignation.’

This tension in him struck a chord in me, the product of a devoutly Catholic upbringing, who had many times in the past, before I learned to trust my own instincts, forced myself to believe things I felt could not possibly be true. I came to Meslier through a play by David Ball, performed at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2006, and he simmered in my mind for four years before I felt ready to write, like Voltaire, my own version of the atheist priest. I still would not have done it without the warm encouragement of Donny O’Rourke, my mentor.

Anyone wanting to find out what Meslier thought should read what he himself wrote. What I was interested in – especially as a PEN member -  was how it might feel to rigidly suppress your true opinions and, still more, to be in a profession where you had to express the exact opposite of what you believed. The result is Fr Meslier’s Confession (published by Oversteps Books, http://www.overstepsbooks.com/)

which will be launched at a reading by three Scottish PEN members – myself, Tessa Ransford and Morelle Smith – at Blackwells bookshop on 1^st March.  It should be an intriguing mix of voices, not least Meslier’s own.

A C Clarke

BIRD OF PASSAGE, The Genesis of a Story




 

When I was twelve years old, we moved from Leeds to South West Scotland where my scientist father had taken a position in a research institute. Dad had come to England with the army at the end of the war and stayed on as a refugee, marrying my half English, half Irish mother. My early schooling had been at a small Roman Catholic primary where we sang ‘Hail glorious Saint Patrick, dear saint of our isle’, never realising that it wasn’t our isle we were singing about.

It was when we moved to Scotland that I first came across the tattie howkers – the Irish workers who came over, mostly from Donegal, to help with the potato harvest. They were welcomed as hard workers, but – like the Polish refugees in Leeds – otherwise viewed with suspicion. Back then, their living conditions were not good, although they were certainly better than when Patrick McGill wrote Children of the Dead End, a piece of autobiographical fiction which depicts, among other things, the treatment of the tattie howkers in early 1900s Scotland.

As an adult, I wanted to write about the tattie howkers myself and tinkered with the idea in plays and stories, but it wasn’t until I wrote my recent novel, Bird of Passage, that I really tackled the subject. The central character is a young Irish agricultural worker called Finn O’Malley, sent to work in Scotland, but throughout my early drafts I realised that I had created a character about whom I knew very little. Finn was clearly a damaged individual but however many revisions I did, he remained obstinately silent. Writers don’t always know the whole story. Sometimes we know the beginning and end, and we write to find out what happens in between. But in this case, it was as though the character himself couldn’t remember either

I set the novel to one side and concentrated on other things. But it nagged at me, and I came back to it a couple of years ago. About that time, I also came across related issues about which I knew shamefully little. I had always been aware that a small minority of Irish people living in the UK had problems. Unlike the members of my own family, people who had migrated, settled, integrated, they often seemed to be single men with alcohol and behavioural problems. They had gravitated to cities and there they stayed, living in lodging houses, working casually. Nobody ever seemed to question who they were and what had turned them into the damaged individuals they had become.

In the past few years, there have been acres of newsprint about sexual abuse within the Catholic church, but very little seems to have been written about the scandal of the Industrial Schools of Ireland, and a group of people whose lives were blighted by state sanctioned cruelty. These schools were Victorian institutions which persisted in Ireland long after other countries had closed them down. There have been a number of excellent books and documentaries about the Industrial School system and you should certainly read the words of those who experienced them. I can especially recommend The Irish Gulag by Bruce Arnold and Suffer the Little Children by Mary Raftery and Eoin O’Sullivan

Essentially, these schools were set up in the mid 1800s to care for the ‘neglected, orphaned and abandoned.’ They were institutions to which children could be committed if they were deemed to be beyond parental care and control or otherwise at risk. They were committed by the courts against whom there was no appeal, and the schools were run by religious (although I use the term loosely) orders. Children could be committed for ‘crimes’ as minor as stealing apples or for no crime at all, but because a parent was deemed neglectful. Once within the system, they had few rights. These schools ran in parallel with the notorious Magdalene Laundries. The inspection system was inadequate. Corporal punishment was commonplace, extreme physical abuse was rife and there is plenty of evidence that sexual abuse occurred too. As one ex-inmate pointed out, a prisoner in gaol had far more rights than these children. The state paid a ‘capitation’ sum in support of each child, so it was clearly in the interests of those running the schools to cram in as many as possible and living conditions were reputedly appalling.

Once a child reached the age of sixteen, they would be out of the door as quickly as possible since no more state payments would be forthcoming, although even then, the young people might not really be given their freedom, but might be sent to work on farms, for low pay, unaware that they didn’t need to stay. As they grew older, these individuals might eventually escape to the UK where at least some of them – poorly educated and traumatised as they were – found work as navvies, but also found it difficult to integrate into society.

The fact that this system was still in existence in the 1960s and 70s came as a shock to me. I had visited Ireland in the early 70s, and loved the country and its people (as I still do, very much) and had worked there over several student vacations. The Commission to enquire into child abuse in Ireland was only set up in 2000. The conclusion of the report, issued in May 2009, was that over a period going back at least to the 1940s, many children in Industrial Schools in the Republic had been subjected to ‘sustained physical, sexual and emotional abuse.’

Bird of Passage - cover

It was this information which allowed me to fill in some of the blanks, both for myself and for my main character, Finn O’Malley. What had started out as quite a gentle love story, turned into Bird of Passage (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Bird-of-Passage-ebook/dp/B006RB2H3Y) which makes some attempt to explore these extremes of cruelty, and how the resulting trauma affects not just the victim, but everyone who comes into contact with him or her for a whole lifetime.

Catherine Czerkawska

www.wordarts.co.uk

Catherine Czerkawska

Look, no Borders!



Strasbourg, evening light



La piste des forts is the name of the bicycle path that goes from Strasbourg, in France, over the Rhine and into Germany. It's well named. If you were not strong before you started you will be less so once you've done it. Huge trucks barrel along the main road and while the cycle path is off to one side, I still get showered with murky moisture from the puddles that sprayed out from the truck wheels. But it's only a few kilometers, to the border, over the Pont de l'Europe, and I reach Kehl, the small town on the German side.

The first time I went to Kehl I stopped for a coffee in the town centre, where there's a near empty square, with dried leaves scuttling across it, caught up in snatches of wind like fitful half-remembered prayers. Bright lights on one side of the square announce a Euro shop. There's a café bar in the middle, with outside tables underneath large awnings. Only one client sitting outside, an elderly man drinking coffee and looking out over the empty square. Next to him is one of these admirable heaters for outside clientèle, but it's not on. When the friendly waitress brings me my coffee she also places in front of the man a large dish of ice cream, layered in white, cream and caramel colours.

The next time I visit Kehl, in the heart of the holiday season, the town square is totally deserted - even the euro shop is closed. No more garish yellow blinking lights with signs saying Jedes Teil €1 against the bright red background paint. The tourist information office is closed as is the café-bar where the elderly man sat, eating his dish of ice cream.

The chill wind cuts icily into my face as I cycle along. Only one person in sight, a man leaning out of a window, smoking, above a large sign that says Kehler Zeitung. Perhaps he's the editor gazing out across the empty streets, looking for signs of any life at all, anything to write about in his paper. But he saw nothing - apart perhaps from a woman on a bicycle, heading for the piste des forts, which has turned into fahhradweg den forten, now that we're in Germany. The cycle path goes beside a canal and then slips under a bridge past a marshy pond where a group of white herons with black tails have gathered. Mountains in the distance, streaked with snow on the peaks. One or two joggers, a few people on bikes, along the way.

Passerelle over the Rhine, joining France and Germany

And coming back through Kehl an hour or so later, I find there is one hub of activity - the Döner Merguez, with three tourists buying doner kebabs. I go up to it and ask if they have any coffee. They do. Later, one of the tourists takes a photo of the Doner Merguez. I'm glad when my drink is served, though it can barely be called coffee. I idly wonder how they could make something that tastes so little of what it claims to be. But I don't really mind for at least it's hot.

And when I leave, cycling past the Euro shop to head for the passerelle, the pedestrian and cycle bridge over the Rhine, I pass another shop, closed of course, an ice cream shop displaying a sign, Lust auf Eis. Remembering the elderly gentleman's heaped dish, I have a sudden longing for ice cream.

Morelle Smith