A Box of Toys: Robert Louis Stevenson and Andrew O'Hagan more

Scott Hames A Box of Toys Robert Louis Stevenson and Andrew O’Hagan In the vast flotilla of quotations press-ganged into Operation Hugh MacDiarmid, just one from the greatest Scottish writer (by far) of MacDiarmid’s lifetime (just barely): ‘As matters stand we are condemned’, wrote R.L. Stevenson, ‘to avoid half the life that passes us by…They give us a little box of toys and we play with that and avoid real life – except in private.’ Or nearly. The unmusical phrase ‘and we play with that’ gives away the misquotation. Lloyd Osbourne’s An Intimate Portrait of R.L.S. has his stepfather say: ‘They give us a little box of toys, and say to us: “You mustn’t play with anything but these.”’ No mention of ‘real life’, for which, unseasoned, Stevenson had little appetite. His version bridles at the prudish restriction of play; not the toybox but its littleness. It is a crucial and suggestive difference. For Stevenson, play of the largest and boldest kind is central to the romance of the self. His essay on ‘Child’s Play’ dwells on its atmospheres of separateness and self-sufficiency: Two children playing at soldiers are far more interesting to each other 132 than one of the scarlet beings whom both are busy imitating … ‘Art for art’ is their motto; and the doings of grown folk are only interesting as the raw material for play. Like the work of art, play for Stevenson is a turning away from reality to ‘pursue instead an independent and creative aim’ (‘A Humble Remonstrance’). This may be one reason for his muffled legacy in Scottish writing. With authenticity the leading passion since MacDiarmid’s time – all that hot vituperation against sham bards, followed by the chill strictures of Kelman’s ‘facticity’ – Stevenson’s toyful and romantic influence has been almost nil. His posthumous critical battering didn’t help matters. But this, we should note, was linguistically patchy. In 1931 Edwin Muir wrote ‘Stevenson has simply fallen out of the procession. He is still read by the vulgar, but he has joined the band of writers on whom, by tacit consent, the serious critics have nothing to say’ (The Modern Scot). Yet in 1927 Proust has Swann declare (in all seriousness) that Stevenson ‘is a really great writer … equal to the greatest’; in the same year, the young Jorge Luis Borges numbers Stevenson’s ‘grandiose romances’ among ‘the greatest joys I have experienced’. By then Leonard Woolf had already marked ‘The Fall of Stevenson’, declaring in 1924 that ‘a false style tells most fatally against a writer when, as with Stevenson, he has nothing original to say’. But style is an end and occasion unto itself; it can no more be false than true. To grasp Stevenson at all, rid yourself of the notion that something of greater dignity or worth lies beneath the reading experience itself. As Stevenson writes: All our arts and occupations lie wholly on the surface; it is on the surface that we perceive their beauty, fitness, and significance; and to pry below is to be appalled by their emptiness and shocked by the coarseness of the strings and pulleys. (‘On Some Technical Elements of Style in Literature’) The lissom pleasures of the surface were enough for Italo Calvino: ‘I love Stevenson because he gives the impression he is flying’. For the later Borges, his writing belongs among tokens of the antique kept fresh by their sheer evocative allure: ‘My taste runs to hourglasses, maps, eighteenth-century typefaces, etymologies, the taste of coffee and the prose of Robert Louis Stevenson.’ 133 Very few current Scottish writers meet Stevenson, as Calvino and Borges do, on his own diaphanous ground. And only one notable figure leaps to mind as a possible inheritor. Though highly accomplished as an essayist of the world, Andrew O’Hagan is fundamentally a prose stylist. His writing grows in power, grace and drama as it unmoors itself from the actual and the seen. Like Stevenson, his narration is always better than his dialogue. He opens his essay ‘England and the Beatles’ with a sentence whose high ambition as statement, effortless music as utterance, and thrilling poetic finish Stevenson would surely have envied: There is something very English in the marriage of boredom and catastrophe, and the England that existed immediately after the Second World War appears to have carried that manner rather well, as if looking over its shoulder to notice that lightning had just struck a teacup. Charm of Stevenson’s kind would sound arch and dear-readerish today, but O’Hagan’s cadence of easeful observation plays a similar role in making the discursive good to taste. In The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, and of his friend Marilyn Monroe (2010), O’Hagan has a bookish Skye terrier describe the street where Frank Sinatra lives: Frank lived in a Tuscan villa at the top of the lane, next door to a French chateau. On the other side of Nimes Road there was a mini-White House with Greek colonnades, and further down, in the direction I wandered, was the perfect example of an English country cottage, covered in ivy and roses. The real difference between humans is that some care about authenticity and some don’t care at all. The people in Bel Air don’t care. To them, Frank’s villa was nicer than any genuine villa ten miles from Lucca. If one were to speak of the Californian vernacular, I wouldn’t, personally, by speaking about adobe fincas in a beanfield: I would be talking about that wee English cottage with its perfect symmetry and its apple trees. There was something beautifully real, something essential and human at the core of its inauthenticity. Dogs have always lived comfortably with that kind of reality. There really was a Maf (a gift from Frank to Marilyn), but he is only a scarlet 134 being, an incitement to dreaming. The handsome unreality of O’Hagan’s Maf is borrowed from Stevenson’s essay ‘The Character of Dogs’: The number of things that a small dog does naturally is strangely small. Enjoying better spirits and not crushed under material cares, he is far more theatrical than average man … in the elaborate and conscious manners of the dog, moral opinions and the love of the ideal stand confessed. To follow for ten minutes in the street some swaggering, canine cavalier, is to receive a lesson in dramatic art and the cultured conduct of the body; in every act and gesture you see him true to a refined conception; and the dullest cur, beholding him, pricks up his ear and proceeds to imitate and parody that charming ease. For to be a high-mannered and high-minded gentleman, careless, affable, and gay, is the inborn pretension of the dog. To be sure, high artifice and love of the ideal needn’t mean falsehood. Shiver with recognition at this portrait of a father occupied, as Stevenson counsels in ‘A Humble Remonstrance’, ‘not so much in making stories true as in making them typical’: His standards were not especially high, just especially precise and rigid, giving one the impression that a netherworld existed beyond shoepolishing and bed-making, a region he had come to know about in his life’s travels, a terrible hell for people who did not know how to live and who had no gratitude. He doubted the arts and anything remotely ‘airyfairy’, content to live, as he did, in a world of concrete objects and brown English likelihoods. (O’Hagan, Be Near Me) That several of O’Hagan’s most memorable sentences are drawn to the notion of national style is suggestive, though his native land seldom comes off well. Who could forget his scorching vision of post-devolution Scotland, as ‘a delinquent, spoiled, bawling child, tight in its tartan Babygro, addled with punitive needs and false-memory syndrome’? Images of this super-vivid stamp, and O’Hagan’s enthusiastic conflation of ‘the West’ of John Galt (the West of Scotland) with the frontier mythos of the USA, bear out a taste for answering myth with myth, of trafficking, like Stevenson’s junior redcoats and Sinatra’s Tuscan villa, on the autonomous 135 plane of the ideal. It is a sensibility perfectly suited to American cinema, where Maf will shortly have his day. Stevenson would have adored the movies. His 1882 ‘Gossip on Romance’, with its plea for ‘fit and striking incident’, smacks more of the screen than the page (‘in the highest achievements of the art of words, the dramatic and the pictorial, the moral and the romantic interest, rise and fall together’). The overcoloured world stirred up by ‘tale’ or ‘legend’ he places far above novelistic realism, evoking the early Hollywood epics and their plunder of old-world marvels: It is one thing to describe scenery with the word-painters; it is quite another to seize on the heart of the suggestion and make a country famous with a legend. It is one thing to remark and to dissect, with the most cutting logic, the complications of life, and of the human spirit; it is quite another to give them body and blood in the story of Ajax or of Hamlet. The first is literature, but the second is something besides, for it is likewise art. The theme if not the idiom is also present in O’Hagan’s novels. Seen backwards via Maf an abiding interest in the legendary becomes clear, an attraction to local fable and the adventure of being spoken about. His most moving work on this theme, Personality (2003), nudges media celebrity in the direction of myth, setting its post-war bearings near ‘the place where Charles Edward Stuart met Flora Macdonald at midnight’. Children are shown to have a special attentiveness to what’s at stake in the matter of fame. In the 2003 Afterword to his first book of essays, The Missing (1995), O’Hagan recalls the delinquent boys from Glasgow he grew up alongside: What I remember most about them is the sheer depth of their wish to be remembered, not to fade properly into the shadows of a system they couldn’t properly see or understand… They hated their immediate confinement, but more than that they hated being away from the world at large: they couldn’t bear the thought of life passing them by, of other people being remembered and spoken about and them forgotten in an Ayrshire borstal at the edge of the greenbelt. This unchildish fear of being forgotten, of the world’s hurtful indifference, 136 fuels the operatic gusto of the boys’ efforts to make an impression. For the edge of the greenbelt (or in Personality, the Isle of Bute), read the land of counterpane: raising the everyday self into ‘something remarkably striking to the mind’s eye’ is the essence of Stevensonian romance, founded on a similar sense of estrangement from ‘the world at large’. O’Hagan’s gift as a writer is to convey this apartness while fully inhabiting the interior world of the spokenabout, from a novelistic viewpoint which somehow never surrenders otherness and glamour as it gains in intimacy and texture. In Maf we glimpse Marilyn’s lowest, most private moments, but encountered strictly as performance, as beautiful entrances and exits, through a gauze of classical allusion and Hollywood lore. We are behind the curtain, and all we see is acting. Stevenson understood that atmosphere, costume and gesture are not mere decorative garnish, but the very meat of public imagining. The lambent mildness of ‘A Plea for Gas Lamps’ is not mood lighting, but the element of a sharable domestic mythology. God bless the lamplighter, Stevenson writes, for the term of his twilight diligence is near at hand; and for not much longer shall we watch him speeding up the street and, at measured intervals, knocking another luminous hole into the dusk. The Greeks would have made a noble myth of such an one; how he distributed starlight, and, as soon as the need was over, re-collected it; and the little bull’s-eye, which was his instrument, and held enough fire to kindle a whole parish, would have been fitly commemorated in the legend. Stevenson recoils at the ‘permanent lightning’ of the electric future (‘such a light as this should shine only on murders and public crime, or along the corridors of lunatic asylums, a horror to heighten horror’). But he could have bathed in the fabular potential of the lights in Maf: There was a neon halo over Times Square. The puddles were lighted pink and the bulbs made a cartoon beauty of Midtown, pulling shadows and poor men out of the alleys. The snow was falling and bright commerce took advantage of the dark, the changes in colour feeling like events, the battle of noises seeming like news. In the middle of all those twinkles, you might wonder if people even had a chance of spending their lives wisely. 137 Maf draws on the public reservoir of filmic memory in slightly disorienting ways, handing icons of American culture bit-parts in the movie of their own legend. No fresh impression of Sinatra, Natalie Wood, or even Marilyn herself is assembled, but there is deep pleasure to be had in watching each live perfectly up to type, vividly inhabiting their role in the collective mind. The novel is preoccupied with the typecasting of performers’ real lives – Marilyn the sex doll, Frank the mafia groupie – and its strongest scene makes the enactment of childhood memory the height of artistic invention (Marilyn as a fearless method actor). Marilyn feels trapped rather than validated by the Pop aesthetic of stereotype and ‘cartoon meaning’, but Stevenson, devotee of Skelt’s toy theatre, was custom-made for an American style in which ‘laughter and colour are the only answers to modern life’, and ‘lightness is the new profundity’. Always game for aesthetic debate, Maf takes sides against the Disney principle that ‘animation should mimic cinema reality, an imitation of real life’, favouring a style that ‘lets comedy and politics have a romance, you see, on the plane of new design, new character, graphic freedom’. Small wonder that Maf traces his parentage to ‘the park railings of Heriot Row, right across from the house of Robert Louis Stevenson’. O’Hagan very generously replied to my suggestion that his lineage as a writer points to the same address: Maf the Dog is my little avatar, a happy fictional embodiment of what notions I have about style and sensibility. He is a Stevensonian dog: at the level of his genes, he cares about the small dramas of invention, of self-invention, as Stevenson understood them himself. I’ve always felt Stevenson was the best of the Scottish prose writers, because he understood how sentences themselves could embody the very weight and measure of human invention. As a writer he is all mind, all heart, all light and air – a musician of the confected thing. I grew up loving that, and next to that love was a memory of reading about his first dog and the sense that it might embody the finer feelings. Stevenson’s point about dogs was also a point about himself: he knew that fictional prose was perhaps the greatest vehicle of consciousness, and he had the generosity of spirit not to exclude the possibility that everything (including a dog’s mental manners) could be carried in sentences. That was of course deeply inspiring to me. 138 The much-travelled Maf is touchy about his origins, and seems to elect being Scottish mainly for reasons of heightened mystique (‘“I’m not English”, I said. “I’m Scottish. An ancestor of mine is known to have licked the face of his dead owner at Culloden”’). What happens to this theatrical sensibility between Stevenson and O’Hagan? To attempt for a moment to gauge the cost to Scottish writing of its long abeyance, a change of scene. I was walking across a moor in Rosshire one summer afternoon. There wasn’t a soul in sight, hardly an animal, only a bird or two… Suddenly among the heather I spied a yellow glove. It was almost brand-new, did not look as if it had been worn at all. I picked it up and as I did so I heard a clicking noise inside it. I took it by the tip of one of the fingers and shook it gently – and out fell four fingernails and a thumbnail, the complete set of nails from one hand. They were perfectly clean like sea shells. What mightn’t Stevenson have made from this bewitching donnée, as tantalising as the realness of Marilyn’s canine witness? Here is what the imagination of Hugh MacDiarmid does with it: However they had come off it had quite obviously neither been through any disease or violence. It was impossible to conceive a man drawing off his glove and nails with it, tossing them into the heather, and walking on unaware, or, if aware, as if nothing had happened. I found it – and find it – impossible to imagine the state of mind of a man who a few miles further on discovered he had done just that… I should have thought in such a case a man would have reported the matter to the police or discussed it with friends and that somehow or other news of such an extraordinary occurrence would have got round and out, and even into the papers. I made all sorts of inquiries and found that nothing was known or could be discovered about the matter. I enquired of medical friends and found that no known disease could account for it and that no similar case was cited in any medical or scientific book known to them. I have never succeeded in solving the mystery or getting any light on it at all. (‘The Dour Drinkers of Glasgow’) ‘To seize on the heart of the suggestion and make a country famous with a 139 legend…’ Faced with the seductions of romantic speculation, the great visionary turns to medical textbooks and the police. The makar refuses to invent. In ‘A Note on Realism’ Stevenson warns of the readerly mind become ‘pampered upon facts’. Here, and in MacDiarmid’s later poetry of the known, it is positively glutted. To be sure, there is a certain metallic fancy involved in MacDiarmid’s pursuit of ‘the inoppugnable reality’ (‘On a Raised Beach’), present also in the poetry of Iain Crichton Smith. But we are far from heroic Protestant truth-facing in the matter of the yellow glove; this is an utter, whimpering, almost perverse failure of imagination. The closest MacDiarmid comes to handling the unaccountable mitt is to render it a ‘parable’ illustrating ‘the self-suppression of the Scot’: ‘the way he has sloughed off his literature, history, native languages, and much else’. But this feeble mode of anti-dreaming is a symptom of a more fundamental suppression: of the imaginative faculty on which any sense of shared culture depends. According to a popular cliché, Calvinism made the imagination impossible for Scotland. Nearly every line of Stevenson’s work demolishes and refutes this notion. Why, then, has his influence been so tiny on later generations of Scottish writers? One difficulty was critics deciding that Scottish literature qua Scottish literature is realistic, insofar as it is ‘reflective of Scottish origins and experience’, in Francis Russell Hart’s formulation. But the rage of MacDiarmid’s generation against myth and romance – against Scott and his legacy – has done the more lasting damage. If O’Hagan draws the line at making the country purely legendary – wary, in ‘Scotland’s Old Injury’, of those ‘who are more taken with essence than experience, those who, for good reasons not bad, wish for an overarching grandeur, a galvanising truth, something in the Scottish character that can live up to the landscape’ – he embraces the role of the romantic imagination, and all its sordid props, in the confection of a sharable cultural reality. Even if Scotland, in his fiction, remains largely immune from dramatic transformation, confined to the method actor’s palette of previously authenticated states, O’Hagan’s thrilling prose style and zest for the humanly inauthentic may yet succeed in re-opening Stevenson’s toybox, helping to make the ‘real life’ of Scotland eligible for fiction’s highest purpose. In Stevenson’s words: fiction is to the grown man what play is to the child; it is there that he changes the atmosphere and tenor of his life. (‘A Gossip on Romance’) 140 Endnotes My thanks to Andrew O’Hagan, Rory Watson and Stuart Kelly for their generous replies to various queries. Stevenson’s essays are cited from the following volumes of the Tusitala edition of his collected works; place and date of original publication is also noted. Memories and Portraits (XXIX): ‘A Humble Remonstrance’ (Longman’s Magazine, December 1884); ‘The Character of Dogs’ (English Illustrated Magazine, February 1884); ‘A Gossip on Romance’ (Longman’s Magazine, November 1882); ‘Selections From His Notebooks’. Virginibus Puerisque (XXV): ‘Child’s Play’ (Cornhill Magazine, September 1878); ‘A Plea for Gas Lamps’ (London, April 1878). Essays Literary & Critical (XXVIII): ‘On Some Technical Elements of Style in Literature’ (Contemporary Review, April 1885). Andrew O’Hagan’s ‘England and the Beatles’ and ‘Scotland’s Old Injury’ appear in his collection The Atlantic Ocean: Essays on Britain and America (2008). Hugh MacDiarmid’s ‘The Dour Drinkers of Glasgow’ (1952) appears in the Selected Prose, edited by Alan Riach (1992). The opening quotation is from MacDiarmid’s The Company I’ve Kept (1966); virtually the same passage appears in Lucky Poet (1943). On Stevenson’s posthumous reputation, especially beyond the English-speaking world, see Richard Dury’s invaluable ‘RLS Archive’ (www.robert-louis-stevenson. org), Paul Barnaby and Tom Hubbard’s chapter on ‘The International Reception and Literary Impact of Scottish Literature’ in the Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature, Vol. II 1707–1918, edited by Susan Manning (2007), and Alex Thomson’s chapter on ‘Stevenson’s Afterlives’ in the Edinburgh Companion to Robert Louis Stevenson, edited by Penny Fielding (2010). For a much fuller account of Stevenson’s place in the Scottish literary tradition, see Alison Lumsden’s chapter on ‘Stevenson, Scott and Scottish History’, also in the Edinburgh Companion to Robert Louis Stevenson. 141