Scottish Stories

PREFACE

Short stories are perhaps the Cinderella of literary genres compared to poetry, the novel and drama. However, shorter fiction is as rich thematically and formally as any of these others, and this is as true for Scotland as for many other nations.

   One of the places where the short story came into being, in fact, was Scotland. In part, this had to do with the periodical press, including Blackwood’s Magazine (founded in 1817) in Edinburgh with which writers like Walter Scott and James Hogg were associated. Blackwood’s, indeed, was part of an international centre of periodical magazine production in the Scottish capital including its rival, the Edinburgh Review and Tait’s, also, from 1832, a powerful producer of the short story. Often at the cutting edge of new literary development throughout the nineteenth century, Blackwood’s was an important shop-window for new writing talent including Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Edgar Allan Poe and Joseph Conrad among many others. Stretching a point, we might almost have claimed for this anthology some of these writers in their Scottish/Blackwood’s context. Like other post-Enlightenment publications servicing a burgeoning urban population, Blackwood’s channelled the exotic and the supernatural-gothic, and in both its fiction and non-fiction articles gave readers a glimpse of alternative, marginalized, ‘primitive’ lives and experiences in general. Broadly, this context helps explain Walter Scott in ‘The Two Drovers’ comparing and contrasting different cultural ways of living within Britain (English and Scottish, which equally have their historical hinterland: Robin Hood as much as Rob Roy). Might it be, Scott asks in his text, that as we rush headlong into modern progress (a worry then as now), we do not properly consider older ways of living, diverse codes of human behaviour? His is a story that asks us to empathize all round amid this clash of cultures: we need law and order, we need civilization but we need to understand the different formative circumstances of peoples within a multifarious nation state: the United Kingdom.

   Similarly, James Hogg in ‘The Cameronian Preacher’s Tale’ asks us to take seriously the possibility of something we might usually dismiss, the supernatural. Do we believe in this or not, we – like the original readerly audience – are asked to consider. How ‘modern’ are we?  Are we post-Enlightenment people who have done away with more ‘primitive’ or ‘savage’ beliefs? The supernatural features here in stories by Robert Louis Stevenson, Margaret Oliphant, Eric Linklater, Muriel Spark, Dorothy K. Haynes and George Mackay Brown. In each of them, however, the other-worldly is insinuated within human action that is very real-worldly, and all abound with reflections upon morality, religion, human avarice and how we narrate stories. Since the Romantic period, the rise of anthropological and psychological insight in our culture and in our literature has taught us that in many ways we remain not particularly rational, progressive creatures, but rather – as so many of the stories in this collection demonstrate – tied to beliefs and prejudices that will not go away or even might be more sympathetically viewed as part of our human nature, warts and all.

   Literature following the Romantic period of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries makes much of the quotidian, the seemingly unremarkable incidents and people of everyday life. We see this in John Galt’s ‘The Gudewife’ where ordinary domestic circumstances are the occasion both for comedy and for thoughtful consideration of married life and gender (arguably, the text has feminist elements in it as it nicely reverses the scenario of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew). We might also think here of Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s ‘Smeddum’, a century after Galt, where a strong female presence - arguably a riff on mythic Mother Nature - again features in a story which is likewise powerfully comical but also profound in its depiction of a ‘common’ person. The short story genre is part of that shift in literary history where the seemingly insignificant episode or 'common' occurrence becomes of interest to us, especially if well-written and with some level of absorbing colour, tone or tension, which all of the texts chosen here exemplify.  

   The form of the short story has also lent itself very well to vignettes (or close-up, small-scale portraiture), both serious and comic, sometimes both simultaneously. Stories here by Iain Crichton Smith, Alasdair Gray and Irvine Welsh are side-splittingly funny, poking fun at their own cultures, suggesting that we wryly observe the idiosyncrasies of the human character and the humour of life as much as its gravity. James Robertson’s ‘Old Mortality’ reprises the title of a Walter Scott novel and has resonances with the nineteenth-century supernatural mode. However, it also reflects on connectedness, in this case ancestry, on how we relate to place and family both in the present and in the past. Connectedness is a concern of many of the stories here, including offering by William McIlvanney and James Kelman, brilliant stylists long associated with Scottish ‘urban realism’. The arched irony in the writing suggests as much as any supernatural literary text that ‘realism; or ‘reality’ is seldom to be consumed in straightforward fashion.

   Female experiences and writing are a prominent part of the Scottish short-story tradition. That experience is reflected in male writers such as Galt, Gibbon and Mackay Brown as well as in the work of Oliphant, Muriel Spark, Janice Galloway, A. L. Kennedy, Jackie Kay and Ali Smith. Diverse intersections between race and sexuality complicate identity here, Spark being of Jewish origin, Kay and Smith gay, Kay also black. Scottish identity as revealed through its writers and literature is no more straightforward or uniform than anywhere else. Into the mix of a Scotland that remains one of Europe’s less ethnically diverse countries comes work by Bernard MacLaverty, from Northern Ireland but resident for most of his life in Glasgow, and Leila Aboulela, Sudanese-Egyptian in her origins but based for much of her writing career in Aberdeen. Both are superb prose stylists and are adroit in the little ironies and tender poignances of human life that transcend place and nationality. Andrew O’Hagan, like Arthur Conan Doyle and (sometimes) Robert Louis Stevenson before him, is a Scottish writer writing from London and for international magazines. O’Hagan and Conan Doyle share a background of Irish-Catholic emigration to Scotland. Many of the other writers here are cradled in Scotland’s dominant Presbyterian Christianity. O’Hagan’s story takes the working-class life of Glasgow and presents it in the New York Times Magazine, exemplifying our common human curiosity about other lives and places. In a way it takes us back to the origins of the short story in Blackwood’s Magazine.

   Scottish regions with their own distinctive historic culture, the traditionally Gaelic-speaking highlands (Iain Crichton Smith) or the Orkney Islands (George Mackay Brown) or the south west (John Buchan) feature alongside ‘central’ Scotland. The Scots language (Galt, Kelman and Welsh) is on show in this anthology alongside English. History, geography, religion and politics are all contemplated in one way or another. There is no one ‘Scottishness’ that binds the writers altogether easily or at all, but every one of them has a Scottish footprint or accent. Perhaps more importantly, they are masters of their form, managing the short story to entertain and engage readers, regardless of background, anywhere the world.

--Gerard Carruthers