Just Duffy

by Robin Jenkins

  ROBIN JENKINS

  Just Duffy

  Introduction

  I first came across Robin Jenkins’ Just Duffy in 1989, having picked it up by chance in my local library, and was immediately captured by this suspenseful modern morality drama. For me, one of the most interesting aspects of the book – and, indeed, of much of Jenkins’ work – is the way in which it gives form to the concerns and voices of contemporary life while maintaining a continuity with earlier traditions in Scottish writing, and most especially with the fiction of the nineteenth century and its preoccupation with the forces of good and evil.

  In The Cone-Gatherers, for example one of his best-known early novels, this metaphysical theme is played out on a country estate during the Second World War where two forestry workers, the hunchbacked Calum and his brother Neil who protects him, have been sent to gather cones for reseeding purposes. Their previous happiness in their ‘Garden of Eden’ forest life is disrupted and in the end tragically destroyed by the enforced change of occupation and by the malevolence of an obsessive, frustrated game-keeper. The impact of The Cone-Gatherers with its rural setting and symbolic theme has tended to obscure Jenkins’ equally powerful capacity to capture the idioms of the West of Scotland urban scene. What is so striking about Just Duffy, therefore, is the way in which this traditional philosophical struggle between good and evil is translated into the contemporary secular world of run-down inner cities and soulless housing schemes, of an alienated teenage culture and shifting or ambivalent moral and social values.

  Like George Friel’s Mr Alfred M.A. and James Kelman’s recent How Late it Was, How Late, Just Duffy is especially relevant to a Britain which is becoming increasingly preoccupied with the disintegration of what used to be called ‘society’, with the widening of the gap between the well-off and those who live on the margins, and with a rebellious lawlessness on the part of those who feel they have no say in the running of their communities. Like Neil Gunn’s dystopian fable The Green Isle of the Great Deep, the book is also a frightening demonstration of idealism taken to extremes and of the narrow dividing line between idealism and totalitarianism, between the intention to wage war on evil to bring about good, and a subsequent ‘justified’ descent into the employment of evil as a means to achieve the original objective. In this respect, Just Duffy would appear to be a twentieth-century descendant of James Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner and its main character, Duffy, a relation of the self-deluded or evil Robert Wringhim. And as in Hogg’s novel, ambiguity of characterisation and moral ambivalence prevail throughout the text. There are no certainties to reassure us here.

  Just Duffy is set in the fictional Lightburn, a town within easy reach of Glasgow but old enough and large enough to have its own town hall, abbey ruins and ancient kirkyard, with the modern additions of working-class housing schemes and private housing estates; a town similar to Cambuslang, perhaps, where Jenkins was born, or a neighbour like Rutherglen or Hamilton, and a former mining area with Covenanting and Disruption associations. Its eponymous hero is an apparently harmless teenager, finished with school but jobless, not over-bright but polite and helpful to neighbours, the kind of youth one doesn’t need to think too much about or be wary of. He’s ‘just Duffy’, as he tells the policemen who question him from their patrol car. Initially, then, Duffy would appear to be one of a succession of ‘innocent’ characters in Jenkins’ novels, characters such as Calum in The Cone-Gatherers or Tom in The Changeling. He believes that ‘truth, at its core, was simple’ and that ‘the greatest favour you can do people is to force them to face the truth about themselves’. His single parent mother and his history teacher Flockhart try to instil some everyday common sense into him, the teacher telling him that truth ‘looks different according to the angle you view it from’ and his mother with her ‘You’re looking for perfection, Duffy, and it doesn’t exist … You’ve got to make allowances. We’re only human’. Yet, for Duffy, this last excuse is the most inexcusable of all: ‘they were only human. Yet they took for granted that they were so favoured by God that He had made the whole universe for their benefit’. Remembering his mother’s complaint that ‘he preferred animals to people’, he tells himself that ‘if he did their lack of presumption was one of the reasons’.

  As the story unfolds we come to suspect that there may be more to Duffy than appears on the surface and in consequence the title of the novel begins to take on deeper resonances. ‘Just Duffy’ is also just Duffy, who has his own code of morality and a judgemental attitude towards his fellow – and fallen – human beings which accepts no excuses. ‘What gave nations the right to declare war and thereafter claim that the killing of the enemies was permissible and legal’, he had asked the history teacher. And when Flockhart had replied in his usual somewhat cynical manner, ‘Most of them would say God’, Duffy was certain that if he ‘ever declared war he too would give God as his excuse, but with more right, for his purpose would be to save not to destroy’.

  And so just Duffy with his perception of human inadequacy becomes translated into justified Duffy, who determines wage war on ‘the defilers of truth and abusers of authority’ in order to bring them to a realisation of their sins. He paints his Declaration of War on the wall of the town hall one dark, wet night, then, like the warring nations about which he had questioned Mr Flockhart, and as in the Old Testament stories about the God who made the rivers of Egypt run with blood, he feels justified in making use of evil to bring about ultimate good.

  There is a relationship here between Duffy’s self-election as destroyer of evil and the behaviour of a Calvinist such as Robert Wringhim in Hogg’s novel. Yet, although Duffy’s campaign makes occasional symbolical references to God and Christ, it is a sublunary rather than a religious or other-worldly campaign. His mother might find that his censuring eyes remind her of a priest, ‘except that a priest would want to save my soul. You don’t give a damn whether I go to hell or not’. But neither heaven nor hell features in Duffy’s scenario. His interest is in the here and now and his aim is to force people to live the good life on earth. When his barmaid mother conveniently departs for a Spanish holiday with a well-off admirer – ‘a trial honeymoon’ as she optimistically miscalls it – the stage is cleared for Duffy to embark on his evangelistic crusade, assisted by three not altogether reliable accomplices, who join him for their own ends.

  Just Duffy is a taut novel, with a suspenseful storyline and an acute sense of place and ear for the speaking voice. Although the focus is on the deprived areas of the town where Duffy lives, there is a wider community created here, even if a community which has fragmented into layers of social distinctions from the St Stephen’s churchgoers who hold the power and who thus become the principal targets of Duffy’s campaign, through the gradations of private estates and better-class council housing to the older, but still reasonably respectable tenements where Duffy lives and, below him, to the schemes which house what the Victorians would have called the undeserving poor. Urbanised teenage working-class culture is a phenomenon much in evidence in everyday life and on the media, but one not so often given attention in ‘serious’ fiction. Jenkins’ teenagers are completely convincing in talk and activity, and the shifting narrative perspectives in the book give us changing insights into their behaviour and into the behaviour and motivations of characters from other milieus and occupations.

  Indeed, for me one of the most disturbing aspects of this novel is the way in which it unsettles our moral and social judgements, our sense of what we call right and wrong. In this regard it is quite different from the earlier Fergus Lamont, where there is also a playing out of the theme of hypocrisy and self-delusion and where Calvin’s religious Elect have been replaced by Fergus with a belief in an aristocratic election which prov
ides the justification for his actions. In this earlier novel, however, we know Fergus to be on the wrong road and that his beliefs are mistaken. And although his actions can be uncaring, or even callous, one could hardly describe them as evil, and in the end Fergus himself is the chief sufferer as a result of them. In Just Duffy, on the other hand, one cannot be certain. Is Duffy a genuine ‘innocent’, corrupted by a corrupt world? Is he a simple, backward youth who ‘wanted to be clever but hadn’t the brains for it’, as his accomplice Helen Cooley suggests, or is he a hypocrite, as his mother believes? Has he finally become insane?

  Alongside the ambiguity in the characterisation of Duffy, there is also depicted the moral ambivalence and shifting values of the late twentieth century. Duffy’s simple-minded perceptions point us towards the immorality in our society, both in the everyday world of personal and social relations, and in the larger world of international relations with its duplicity and sanctioned killings in time of war. Is Duffy ‘mad’ because he cannot or will not accept what most of us have conditioned ourselves to categorise as ‘inevitable’, ‘beyond our personal/ control’, ‘the way the world goes round’? Is Duffy mad because he has ‘expected too much’? Yet, despite his reputation for helpfulness and courtesy, Duffy is deficient in human warmth. His gods are cleanliness, order and efficiency. He cannot show or accept affection. Can such ‘goodness’ be true goodness? Is there not the arrogance of evil in his self-election as the scourge of evil?

  There is moral ambivalence in the details of the novel’s subplots also: in the characterisation of Helen Cooley, for example, the reform school girl who, despite her irregular life-style, has more clarity of judgement and human understanding than the children’s panel who condemn and sentence her; in the delight in giving sexual pleasure of the fat and educationally backward Molly, which is set against the sexual exploitation practised by her boyfriend and against the sexual abstinence of the righteous but cold Duffy. There is also the inference that today’s young people are being betrayed by their society, by its exploitative sexual mores and class segregation, by poor education and unemployment. Duffy’s mates are unattractive misfits, but we notice how those in authority automatically assume their wrongdoing, while the anti-social ‘high spirits’ of their middle-class counterparts are overlooked. Even the teacher Flockhart can be seen ultimately as irresponsible in that he gives the kind of ‘honest’ or worldly-wise answers to his low-grade class which they have not the intelligence or experience to understand fully.

  Just Duffy is an absorbing novel, which leaves us with the problem of how to create a socially just society where truth and authority are not abused and where human frailty is acknowledged and taken account of; which leaves us, too, with the philosophical problem of good and evil in human life, familiar in a previous religious context, but here re-examined in a secular world. Described by one critic as a ‘bleak masterpiece’, Robin Jenkins has written to me that he finds it ‘one of my most hopeful books’ in that ‘Duffy in the end sees the quiet everyday friendliness towards one another of the churchgoers as beautiful. You have to be an outcast like him to see it’.

  The novel has had a frustrating publication history. Written about 1984 or 1985, according to its author, it was put away in a drawer for a number of years, a practice Jenkins says he pursued in order to be able to look at his works ‘whole’ with the distance of time, something he felt unable to do in the process of creation in daily instalments over a period of weeks or months. Published ultimately by Canongate in 1988, it then went out of print, so disappearing from critical view and thus from accounts of Scottish fiction in the late 1980s and early 1990s. I’m delighted, therefore, to be able to introduce this new edition. I find it one of the most important of recent Scottish novels, significant in relation to the course of Jenkins’ own work but also in the context of contemporary and historical Scottish fiction writing. It speaks powerfully to us in the voices of our own time of an ancient and continuing human dilemma.

  Margery Palmer McCulloch

  Contents

  Title Page

  Introduction

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  About the Author

  Copyright

  CHAPTER ONE

  ‘When I come back,’ she said, ‘there could be big changes.’

  Her dressing-gown fell open, revealing her plump white breasts. She knew he hated her to expose herself to him, so she did it often. She had never forgiven him for being born sixteen years ago.

  ‘There would be no place for you, Duffy. That’s what I mean.’

  She pretended to speak sadly, but her lips, mauve with lipstick, were pleased. Like everybody else she thought her selfishness was a secret known only to herself.

  She nibbled Slimcea bread and had put a tiny pellet of Sweetex in her coffee. She was terrified of becoming fat but could not stop being greedy. Before the day was out she would guzzle chocolates and drink gin.

  ‘You’ve only yourself to blame,’ she whined. ‘If you’d done better at school you’d have got a job and been able to support yourself.’

  He knew boys who had got several certificates but were still without work. He said nothing. He never contradicted anyone. He let them think their lies succeeded.

  ‘If you’re backward, Duffy, God knows you didn’t get it from me. When I was your age I was fending for myself.’

  She had been nineteen when she had had Duffy, in circumstances that she had always refused to speak about. Though she called herself Mrs Duffy he suspected that she had never been married to his father, who had disappeared before Duffy was born. That had been in Glasgow. They had come to Lightburn when Duffy was three. She seemed to have no relatives. At any rate Duffy had met none.

  His own Christian name was Thomas but he was always called Duffy. When he had been an infant learning to speak if asked his name he had replied Duffy. Besides he had never been close enough to others for them to call him by his first name.

  She sighed. ‘Don’t think I don’t love you.’

  It was a word he had learned to distrust. He had seen people who loved their own dogs throwing stones at other people’s dogs. He had heard mothers screaming abuse at other mother’s children. He knew women whose loving husbands beat them.

  Ash from her cigarette dribbled on to the tablecloth.

  ‘You make it hard for me,’ she whined. ‘You never try to enjoy yourself like other boys your age. You’re not natural. All your teachers said so. That history teacher – what’s his name? – Flockhart, told me you were a mystery.’

  Mr Flockhart was the kind of teacher who not only asked questions, he answered them too, as honestly as he could. Once, during a lesson on the Second World War – Duffy had a great interest in war – Duffy had asked what gave nations the right to declare war and thereafter claim that the killing of their enemies was permissible and
legal. Many teachers would have rebuked him for being stupid and impertinent, but Mr Flockhart, showing his bad teeth in a bearded ironical grin, had replied: ‘Most of them would say God.’

  If Duffy himself ever declared war he too would give God as his excuse, but with more right, for his purpose would be to save not to destroy.

  His mother was staring sullenly at him. Inside her dressing-gown she was pinching her left nipple.

  ‘I disgust you, don’t I? We all disgust you.’

  It was despair he felt but there was disgust in it too. He could not help it. Often a feeling of revulsion and futility seized him unawares. At times it was so intolerable that he could not bear human company. He would crouch for hours in the shed on the rubbish dump half a mile out of town while hundreds of gulls screamed like demons overhead.

  ‘You think we’re all hypocrites, don’t you? But you’re the worst hypocrite yourself. Duffy, that wouldn’t hurt a fly. Duffy, that all the little kids like and the old women. Always a helping hand. Always a nice smile. The wee girls are safe with Duffy, though he is a bit simple. They don’t know, do they, that you despise them all?’

  She had never been able to understand him. He despised nobody though he had learned to be wary of everyone. He had seen those wee girls, whose laughter was so delightful, indulge in instant resentful rages, and those old women who fed stray cats harbour implacable hatreds, if they thought their pride had been hurt or they had been cheated out of what they considered their rights. That reluctance or indeed the inability to forgive on the part of people he saw daily in the street had terrified him as a child.

  Here was his mother, bathed, perfumed, and powdered, hair dyed blonde and permed, nails painted red, legs and oxters shaved. In an hour a taxi was coming to take her to Glasgow Airport where she was to meet Mr Harrison and fly with him to the Costa del Sol for what she called a trial honeymoon. Mr Harrison was a whisky salesman she had met at the hotel where she was a barmaid. A childless widower with a bungalow in Bearsden he was more than twenty years older than she. In Spain she intended to debase herself in order to entice him into marriage. She had shown Duffy the transparent black nightdress she was taking. If, after all that self-abasement, Harrison cast her off she would hate him and despise herself for the rest of her life.