‘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 writer, 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