IAIN CRICHTON SMITH
Listen to the Voice
Selected Stories
Introduced by Douglas Gifford
Contents
Introduction
The Dying
The Adoration of the Mini
At the Fair
On the Island
Napoleon and I
What to Do About Ralph?
The Play
Survival Without Error
The Hermit
Listen to the Voice
The Black and the Red
The Old Woman, the Baby and Terry
Murdo
The Wedding
An American Sky
The Professor and the Comics
By Their Fruits
Chagall’s Return
‘Listen to the Voice’ insists the title story of this collection, and Iain Crichton Smith, one of our finest writers, has always been engaged with the world of private and public voices. This has taken him from the existential bleaknesses of silence to the reviving and hilarious comedy which he finds in the oddness and banality of everyday speech. Some of his stories, like ‘The Black and the Red’ or ‘The Professor and the Comics’, suggest that following the promptings of an inner truth can lead to self-discovery and change. In others, however, as in the title story itself, the ‘voice’ listened to emerges as repressive, intolerant, or even mad.
All the evidence of Smith’s poetry and fiction indicates an author deeply divided as to whether human experience has validity or not, and the reader of these stories will discover a disturbing and unsettled world. Lonely people in sterile relationships struggle with the bonds of monotony and ‘duty’. Religion, culture and even daily village life, can suffocate, or make one an exile in one’s own country. And beyond the village, the world at large all too often appears no better, a realm of bourgeois pretension, banal obsessions and the materialistic images of television. Significantly, for someone brought up on Lewis, (an island many would consider to offer beauty and tradition), Smith finds little consolation in landscape, in myth and legend, or in local culture. His are not the characters of a Neil Grain or Grassic Gibbon, but of a bare, anonymous northern territory of unfriendly villages and dull towns, where, if nature intrudes at all, it is unknowable or alienating, as in the frequent imagery of an uncaring, heedless sea. If individuals triumph, it’s not via the promptings of natural beauty, but through the assertion of self or the acceptance of fallen humanity.
The final hallmark of all Smith’s work is his unremitting emphasis on the need to recognise the ordinary, weak, tragic, but vital nature of undistinguished people. This did not come easily to him, with his Free Church background, his dominating mother’s insistence on education, his Aberdeen University study of Classics and English Literature. The creative tension between a persistent respect for an élitist and academic British tradition and an opposing and radical love of the mundane is everywhere in these disturbing short stories.
The collection also reflects the tension in Smith’s fiction and poetry generally, that is, between the Lewis and Gaelic influences of childhood and the first half of his life, and the concerns of his maturity with the wider world, and particularly with issues of an existential and philosophical nature. The stories range from mundane local community concerns, where conformity matters so much, to fables such as ‘Chagall’s Return’, with its recognition that home and the local may be a coffin as well as a nest to the artist.
‘An American Sky’, ‘The Wedding’, and ‘The Black and the Red’ clearly define the claims and the failures of one’s home, village, island. ‘The Black and the Red’ was the title story of a 1973 collection, and it is an important semi-autobiographical account of Smith’s university transition just after the war, from mother-dominated past to involvement with ideas and issues radically alien to Lewis and the Free Church. The story is cleverly constructed so that it has a first part dominated by Black, with eight sections or movements, conveyed through the letters home to the mother, still tied up with concern for church and her opinions, and the second, increasingly Red, with five rapidly developing sections/letters showing rebellion and final epiphany and transformation. It is important, however, that the reader does not fall for a simplistic Black/bad–Red/good dichotomy. From the opening red rawness of the dawn sun over Skye, redness is new life—but also associated with the scavenging gulls, the uncertainty and vulnerability of George the sceptical student, and the brittle assertiveness and passion of Fiona. Yes, ‘red’ can be affirmative—it is blood and life after all—but it can also be wounding and pain. Even so, it is still immeasurably superior to the black, grey and ghostly deadness of the church bickering of Lewis, the mother’s implied reproaches and complaints, the disillusioned academics with their dead ideas from disappointed teaching.
‘An American Sky’ offers a warmer balance of the two; John MacLeod returns at sixty from America to a changed Lewis, of TV and motor bikes and laconic youngsters who are disconnected from oral tradition, Gaelic culture, even family and village. Chinese restaurants and bingo jar with his memories, so that in the end neither past nor modern worlds dominate or offer value. The ‘epiphany’ of this story lies in the enigmatic and repeated imagery of the swarm of midges:
They were rising and falling in the slight breeze. They formed a cloud but inside the cloud each insect was going on its own way of drifting with the breeze. Each alive and perhaps with its own weight, its own inheritance. Apparently free yet fixed, apparently spontaneous yet destined …
Doesn’t the reference to predestined life, with its exact balance against freedom, tell us much about Smith’s tension of Black and Red at this point? Similarly ‘The Wedding’ offers an initial downward estimate of island quality, in the way the father of the bride is shown up as clumsy, predictable and anachronistic amongst the young Gaels; but the story balances his banal wedding speech and the bride’s embarrassment by allowing him to blossom in the later singing, when only he can sing with authority and memory of the old songs. Significantly, the ‘I’ author finds the wedding strangely ‘authentic and false’—so that the nett effect of these Gaelic-based stories is to question both worlds. One can become an exile from the world as well as from one’s home, and Smith finds his main tension between acceptance of the bleeding world and alienation from it.
Concomitant with these stories of roots are the many stories exploring duty towards bleak and authoritarian parents. ‘The Adoration of the Mini’ and ‘The Dying’ show a movement from simple repudiation of repressive bonds to complex evaluation of what exactly ‘love’ and ‘duty’ amount to. ‘Hate’ and ‘fear’ are interwoven with them; yet while Smith nearly always concludes that new life is unquestionably superior to custom-based servitude, he shows always the paradox of pain resultant from self-assertion and love. The pregnant daughter of ‘The Adoration’ says farewell to her dying father; but ‘what she was included her father’, and she pities her unborn child, knowing that life may repeat her father yet again. This refusal to allow unqualified human love is taken to its ultimate conclusion in ‘The Dying’, where the relationship of the dying person to the watcher is reduced to one in which the human body becomes ‘the breathing’, ‘the grey hairs around the head’, ‘the voice’—and finally, ‘the log’, inert, dead matter, a cold factuality alongside a living grief. Death is unknowable.
This reduction of the human connection to the anatomised