ELSPETH DAVIE
The Man Who Wanted
to Smell Books
and other stories
Introduced by Giles Cordon
Contents
Introduction
Family House
The Spark
A Visit to the Zoo
The Snow Heart
The Colour
Waiting for the Sun
Allergy
The High Tide Talker
The Bookstall
The Night of the Funny Hats
Pedestrian
The Time-Keeper
Concerto
The Swans
Lines
Security
A Field in Space
Out of Order
Bulbs
Shoe in the Sand
Couchettes
Thorns and Gifts
Accompanists
Death of a Doctor
The Man Who Wanted to Smell Books
Choirmaster
Through the Forest
The Morning Mare
Introduction
‘Finally, I would say that writers – for all that they are supposed to have this so-called and greatly over-rated “knowledge of human nature” – are not necessarily better equipped than any other persons for knowing themselves. Indeed, they need all the help they can get. The camera may sometimes provide this.’1
The stern, severe, intelligent face – intense, searchlight eyes; prominent nose; tight but wide lips; compassionate, strong chin – is topped by a sensible fringe and Mrs Davie wears a black, halter-neck jumper. Hers is a latter-day Presbyterian visage with a vengeance.
She eschewed biography, thinking it irrelevant to the work, and, perhaps surprisingly, was reluctant to reveal, at least in print, her date of birth. A touch of female vanity? I suspect rather it was a touch of reticence, modesty.
The facts of her life that she chose to reveal, here modestly embellished, are simple: born Elspeth Dryer on 20th March 1919 in Kilmarnock, she went to school in Edinburgh, studied at the capital’s university and college of art and taught painting for several years thereafter. This professional involvement with the fine arts I take to be crucial to her writing. She then lived for a while in Ireland, with her husband, who taught at Queen’s University, Belfast before returning to Scotland.
In Ireland she became friendly with a general practitioner Dr Pat Strang, later married to the poet Richard Murphy, with whom she discussed literature seriously once a week. She also knew Philip Larkin, who was assistant librarian at the university. She painted there and sold quite a few canvases, mainly landscapes in what her husband describes as ‘the French Impressionist style’. They married in October 1944 and a daughter, Anne, was born in January 1946. She didn’t, in the biographical notes accompanying her short stories in anthologies, or on the back flaps of the jackets of her five collections of short stories or four novels, reveal that her husband was George Davie, one of Scotland’s most distinguished philosophers and the author of that fundamental and key work, The Democratic Intellect: Scotland and her universities in the nineteenth century (1961).
Dr Davie told me that Elspeth’s parents were living in England until she was nine, and she went to school there. She was taught how to write but not how to join up letters, and throughout her life her meticulous, neat epistles written to family, friends and other correspondents in blue biro did not have the words joined up. When her parents (father Scottish, mother Canadian) came back to Scotland Elspeth was sent to George Watson’s Ladies’ College. She was addicted to Beowulf which she was taught at a tender age when in England. Dr Davie remarked, ‘Elspeth didn’t care much for Scottish education,’ and he told me that her comment on his seminal book was that it was ‘surprisingly well written’ for an academic.
She spent two years studying Fine Art, English and Philosophy at Edinburgh University but left then as she wasn’t up to speed with mathematics and couldn’t have taken a degree. She then took a DA at Edinburgh College of Art.
Her writing style was formed by the time she was sixteen when she began to publish short stories in the school magazine. When she reprinted some of these stories later she changed them very little. She received Scottish Arts Council awards in 1971 and 1977, and won the prestigious Katherine Mansfield short story prize in 1978 for ‘The High Tide Talker’, the title story of one of her collections. One of the judges was V.S. Pritchett, who was much taken with her stance on Presbyterianism.
In the early 1950s two Edinburgh writers were among the prizewinners of the Observer’s rather famous short story competition, and they neatly represent the two facets of ‘modernist’ Scottish writing. The winner was the stylish, mercurial Muriel Spark (born a year earlier) – Jewish become Roman Catholic; the runner-up, the Calvinist, Knoxian Elspeth Davie. The colourful Spark is today rather more widely read than the somewhat monochromatic Davie ever was, but the current (posterity is likely to regard Davie far more highly than the present does) imbalance in their readership does a singular injustice to the precision, exactitude, sly humour and socialist compassion of the latter writer. Spark and Davie are two of the best, most idiosyncratic and original Scottish prose writers since Robert Louis Stevenson.
A further parallel between Spark and Davie is provided by the fact that for many years Davie and her husband lived in a flat overlooking Bruntsfield Meadows, within view and sound of James Gillespie’s school where girls of slender means would toil under the tutelage of Miss Jean Brodie’s successors. That Davie’s first collection of stories should have been entitled The Spark was not intentionally homage to her contemporary.
She published four novels – Providings (1965), Creating a Scene (1971), Climbers on a Stair, about tenement life in Scotland’s capital (1978) and Coming to Light (1989), a kind of masterpiece of the kaleidoscopic Presbyterian consciousness, the progress of a soul in collusion with the strato-sphere. It was as a short story writer, however, that she achieved her finest results.
The novel, as E.M. Forster and more than a few others have suggested, tells a story, and is about people. Even at its most quixotic, moralistic, when rendered in literary form (Tristram Shandy, say, or the work of B.S. Johnson) it depicts the vagaries of individuals wrestling with life and making, or failing to make, inroads upon it. This doesn’t much happen in Davie’s novels. Her characters are stoics, their lives preserved in aspic, getting on with a mundane everyday.
Paintings do various things, one of which – unless, sometimes but not always, they are abstract – is to tell a story. Or, rather, a story – plot, narrative, situation – may be deduced from the visual images. Davie the short story writer wrote as if she were a painter. Her published stories delineate the worlds she explored to a considerable degree as if the language she used was pigment. Rather like John Berger’s important art criticism derived from a solemn sense of morality (which Davie must have been aware of), the language of the story – unlike Spark’s – is less concerned with a Firbankian elegance than a Calvinist, Cubist truth. And she was impressed (if not dazzled) by the colour and shapes, angles upon reality of the Scottish Colourists.
‘The difficulty with the artist, and particularly the writer, is that much of his work has its roots in the unconscious’, she wrote in a note which accompanies in an anthology two of her best stories – ‘Concerto’ and ‘Allergy’.
There is little to show apart from the finished product. So, instead, he may start talking and answering questions and perhaps find himself giving hard-edged and conclusive statements about things he has not considered in that particular way. He is not always at ease in this, for part of his business as write
r, in an age of form-filling and labelling, curt questions and short answers, is to see that the silent uniqueness of persons and situations, their essence if you like, doesn’t get lost amongst the files. It’s his job to recognize and preserve the more secret side of life. The writers who chiefly interest me are those who strike in at an angle to experience rather than going along parallel to it … The desolating and the unfamiliar is happening continually between our getting up and our going to bed … It is of this day-to-day business of living, its mysteriousness and its absurdity, that I would like to write.2
And she did. These sentences describe precisely the effect of her writing upon her readers. To suggest that, along with the cautious, austere Presbyterianism of her intellect she employed a fragmentary, Cubist approach deconstructing her characters by way of X-raying their consciousness, might imply a certain pretentiousness, but this is the opposite of the case: her prose is utterly down to earth. Yet there is something of Cubism in her work, the way in which she breaks down characters and situations to reconstruct and illuminate them, although this is always compassionate and ‘human’, never merely theoretical. In all her writing there is an essential fastidious balance between intellect and eye (or eye and intellect). She writes as an artist, a painter with a literary mind.
Not only is her art influenced by painters and painting, some of her best stories are about painting, or inspired by it, including here ‘The Colour’. Music also was fundamental to her and acknowledged in such stories as ‘Choirmaster’, ‘Concerto’ and ‘Accompanists’, the latter story in addition being notable for a touch of feminism (also found in the clever story ‘The Bookstall’).
Her first publisher was John Calder, and the Scottish Elspeth Davie was very much at home and in appropriate company with such French writers on the Calder and Boyars list as Beckett, Nathalie Sarraute, Marguerite Duras, Robert Pinget and, particularly, Alain Robbe-Grillet. The latter’s Snapshots and Towards a New Novel (Calder and Boyars, 1965) was the most exhilarating theoretical book on contemporary fiction in years and Davie was very much a disciple. Robbe-Grillet posited a world where to a degree human beings were dominated and ruled by objects (Davie’s first novel is about that) – by buildings, furniture, things. Davie’s characters, likewise, are restricted by their environments, physical as much as social context, preordained inevitability. She wrote less about the anxieties of the individual though than of the ways in which everyday life conspires against our best-laid plans and obsessions.
Thus she was writing in, and out of, a European tradition. As the English novelist B.S. Johnson wrote in his introduction to Aren’t You Rather Young to be Writing Your Memoirs? (1973), ‘It is a fact of crucial significance in the history of the novel that James Joyce opened the first cinema in Dublin in 1909. Joyce saw very early on that film must usurp some of the prerogatives which until then had belonged almost exclusively to the novelist. Films could tell a story more directly.’ In other words, the role of the fiction writer, the fiction writer as serious artist, whether he or she liked it or not – had changed. It didn’t make artistic sense to pretend that Joyce, Eliot and the other prophets of modernism hadn’t existed. The planet, post the world wars, had changed fundamentally and art had to reflect that. Elspeth Davie held all these concerns in her artistic credo.
Her short stories, eighty or so, were collected in five volumes: The Spark (1969); The High Tide Talker (1976); The Night of the Funny Hats (1980); A Traveller’s Room (1985); and Death of a Doctor (1992), the latter four books published by Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson, first at Hamish Hamilton, then under his eponymous imprint. Stories from all these books are represented in this selection.
It is invidious perhaps to single out one story as her best as her work has such unity as well as authority but ‘Concerto’ is superb. It is about a commotion caused by a member of the audience during a concert and the effect it has on the rest of the listeners and on the music being essayed. There is a dangerous dry humour to it as the mundane threatens the sublime. Can those merely listening to a piece of music experience the condition of the composer when he created the sounds, and if so can they hold on to this experience and temperament (emotional intelligence) when the external world is mitigating against it?
The title story of this selection, ‘The Man Who Wanted to Smell Books’, is indirect homage to another great modernist writer she admired, the Argentinian Borges. On the one hand, it mocks the way in which printed books, repositories of wisdom, can in a thoroughly ‘trendy’ way become part of a system– a library, no less – which eschews human beings and would deny them access. As I write, it is announced that a memorial to Donald Dewar, first First Minister of the Scottish Executive, will be a library in Queensberry House, but the library is likely to have the books on computer screens:
Elspeth Davie got there first, with this story (1990). She and Mr Dewar must be spinning wryly in their graves. Elspeth Davie was, as George Davie wrote in a letter to the present writer dated 1st March 1997, ‘very often scathing about modern nonsense but the strength of another story, “Family House”, is that it shows up the sense in which opposition to modern nonsense can be taken too far and so as to bring about its own undoing’. Many of her stories, and the authorial imagination behind them, are slightly sceptical of what Dr Davie calls ‘overdone modernity’.
Mercifully, Davie owes nothing to the Kailyard, or for that matter to the Scottish ‘Renaissance’. It seems extraordinary that she was producing the inspired metaphysical and profoundly moral work she was when the likes of Compton Mackenzie, Eric Linklater and even James Kenn-away were stylistically still adhering to the modes of the traditional novel in English. She would obviously never be a ‘popular’ or ‘commercial’ novelist or fiction writer. It is unlikely that readers of Irvine Welsh would take to her but admirers of Alasdair Gray, James Kelman and particularly A.L. Kennedy should, and Gray and Kelman admired her work.
And yet she is no abstractionist. Always writing in English, not in Scots, synthetic or otherwise, her characters are verily the children of John Knox, weighed down by guilt, weariness and struggling to survive, more partly living than living. The bleakness of northern Presbyterianism fills their lives with puzzling foreboding as the light and shade of Edinburgh, which she captures perfectly, lifts them up.
George Davie, in the letter previously cited, writes:
In all the stories the crucial illustration of your Knoxian thesis – an illustration capable of silencing the puzzlement which some people have felt of the association of Elspeth with Protestantism or rather Presbyterianism – is found in the story ‘Choirmaster’. It was, interestingly, the only story she ever wrote which she talked about with some satisfaction in her writing, calling it her ‘story about God’. It hasn’t been much liked by Catholics, they tend to be shocked by her treatment of Jesus whose high point to them seems to be the crucified Christ, perhaps the bleeding heart. This was very far from Elspeth’s tastes and one might venture the idea that she would be much nearer to what MacDiarmid calls ‘the saying of Christ long kept dim, that who so follows me, things of like nature will do, and greater’.
Elspeth Davie is a Scottish writer of universality and high aspiration. Unlike so many of her contemporaries and successors, she believed, albeit perhaps with a certain trepidation, that art – literature – might usefully be ‘difficult’. Yet she wrote less about the anxieties of the individual than of the ways by which everyday life conspires against the individual’s modest ambitions, hopes and obsessions, and her stories remain entirely grounded in what she called ‘this day-to-day business of living, its mysteriousness and its absurdity’.
Giles Gordon
NOTES
1 Thus the always modest Elspeth Davie in a note opposite a photograph of her in Angela Catlin, Natural Light: Portraits of Scottish Writers (Paul Harris Publishing, 1985).
2Elspeth Davie in Beyond the Words: Eleven Writers in Search of a New Fiction edited by G
iles Gordon (Hutchinson, 1975).
Family House
ANYONE VISITING THIS house for the first time found himself unexpectedly and uncomfortably exposed before going a step from the iron gates. Tough soles and a thick skin were needed from the moment when, turning in from a soft, country road, he would find the thickly-sown, cutting little stones of the drive working their way over the tops of his shoes and through his shoelaces. And if, while removing them, he were to raise his eyes, he would meet the unbroken, aggressive glare of rows of unscreened windows. For there was no hiding from this place. The gravel was not only harsh but also noisy underfoot. There were no soft bushes to screen the visitor while he made his way to the front door, and nothing about the place made a concession to nerves, withdrawals or second thoughts of any kind. It was a large house – not distinguished by age or design, but formidably plain and square, built in a smooth, grey stone which had begun to take on the polish of marble simply through the care spent on it since it was first built. No one, after meeting the people who lived in it, could think of it again as a house which was owned. It was not owned, but painfully served. It existed not for shelter or comfort, but to announce its own immense gravity and the fact that it was packed from top to bottom with a massive deposit of possessions. The foundations of any ordinary house would have sunk askew, the walls and roof, long before this, have bulged and cracked under the strain.
A family of five lived there – two sisters and three brothers who had been together since they were children. Although the men went back and forth to offices in the city and the women went down to the village with shopping-bags like other housewives, they had no real communication with anyone else, but remained in their tight group – all five of them – thin, anxious people who, like their parents, uncles and aunts before them, had hurried up and down in service to the house. The brothers – Joseph, James and Edgar Findlay, seemed to have effaced themselves so completely in the world that they had become almost indistinguishable to outsiders. They were tall, gaunt men – dark without being interesting, and with a melancholy so grey and unromantic that people did not in the least wish to enquire what might be behind it. There were a few years between them in age, Joseph, who was fifty-nine, being the eldest, but they might have been triplets for all the interest that was taken in them as separate individuals. They were seldom described by name or profession, and any epithet, good or bad, which came their way, did for the three of them and sometimes for all five. The women were never apart and were not expected to need the luxury of their Christian names, Edith and Clara, to distinguish them. They were conveniently known as the Findlay sisters and could be told apart, when necessary, by the fact that Edith, who was oldest of the family, had grey hair, streaked with black, and Clara, who was the youngest, had fairish hair, going grey.
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