Edinburgh Literary Pub Tour

The McEwan`s 80/- Edinburgh Literary Pub Tour

By Moira Burgess, The Scottish Literary Tour Company
Edinburgh, said the writer Robert Louis Stevenson, is what Paris ought to be.

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On the McEwan`s 80/- Edinburgh Literary Pub Tour, a lively crash course in Scottish literature conducted while walking round central Edinburgh, information and entertainment are supplied by two articulate Edinburgh characters, Mr. Clart and Mr. McBrain. The many people who have already discovered the tour find at the end that they have both enjoyed themselves and learned a lot, but even they may not be sure why it works so well. It’s clear that Edinburgh, home of Scott and Stevenson, host to Burns and heartland of the Scottish Literary Renaissance, is a good place to learn about Scottish literature, but why does the tour take the form it does? Why do we need both Clart and McBrain?

The answer lies in the idea of duality, something which observers have found recurring throughout both Scottish literature and Scottish life, perhaps throughout the Scottish character itself. East and west, Highland and Lowland, city and country -- these are everyday opposites in Scotland. Hugh MacDiarmid, the major Scottish poet of the 20th century and leader of the Scottish Literary Renaissance between the two world wars, used the phrase ‘the Caledonian antisyzygy’ for the duality which he found in the Scottish soul, suggesting that such oppositions gave a creative tension to Scottish literature.

And Edinburgh is a city of duality. It was so in the early 18th century, the period in which the tour begins. The Union of 1707 had, politically, joined Scotland to England -- another notable opposition -- but, retaining its university and the country’s legal profession, Edinburgh still had a rich intellectual and cultural life.

However, like any city, it also had its manual workers, and its beggars and prostitutes. The different groups mingled in the streets and in the high “lands” or tenements where all social classes lived together, and met, too, in the city’s many taverns. In Lucky Middlemass’, Rob Gibb’s or Lucky Wood’s, the two sides of Edinburgh were clearly to be seen.

As the 18th century went on, the two aspects actually became visible in architectural form, with the gracious terraces of the New Town rising across from the dark lands of the Old Town. There was a division too between those who kept to the old Scots tongue and those who affected the newly-fashionable English. And the two worlds of Edinburgh continued to meet in the pubs, where judges and beggars still drank side by side. Along with them drank writers and poets, as Mr. Clart makes clear for us in the Tour.

These writers themselves had a dual purpose. We are grateful to them for their vivid descriptions of the colorful scenes around them, but they were there in the first place to have a good time. It’s true that they didn’t always write about pubs, nor spend all their time drinking: Allan Ramsay (who started his working life as a wigmaker, but soon took up more literary pursuits) was an all-round man of letters who opened the first lending library in Britain, kept a bookseller’s shop near St Giles, and wrote tender nature poetry. His verse play The Gentle Shepherd, set in the countryside outside Edinburgh, was much admired:

See yon twa elms that grow up side by side,
Suppose them, some years syne, bridegroom and bride;
Nearer and nearer ilka year they’ve prest,
Till wide their spreading branches are increast,
And in their mixture now are fully blest.
This shields the other from the eastlin blast,
That in return defends it frae the west.

But there were two sides to Ramsay, as there were two sides to his Edinburgh. A sociable man, he founded the Easy Club, one of many clubs which met in taverns the better to allow for both drink and discussion. He wrote mock elegies on Edinburgh tavern-keepers and madams, and has also left us these vivid lines:

Fou closs we us’d to drink and rant,
Until we did baith glowre and gaunt,
And pish and spew, and yesk and maunt ...

You don’t need to be completely fluent in Scots to recognize an eighteenth-century binge.

Only a few years later another poet, Robert Fergusson, was another who saw and described both intellectual and roistering Edinburgh. During his brief life he was an enthusiastic member of the Cape Club, another drinking society, and appreciated the comforts of the taverns:

When big as burns the gutters rin,
Gin ye hae catcht a droukit skin,
To Luckie Middlemist’s loup in
And sit fu snug
O’er oysters and a dram o’ gin,
Or haddock lug.

But he had a more spiritual view of his city too: his long poem Auld Reekie compares the sight of Edinburgh from the Fife shore to the vision of heaven enjoyed by the saints.

He died at the age of 24, but was not forgotten. His mingled emotions, his sensibility and sensuality, were understood and appreciated by other poets in the next 200 years. Robert Burns thought of him as “my elder brother in misfortune, by far my elder brother in the muse,” and, when he visited Edinburgh, had a stone set up on Fergusson’s grave in Canongate churchyard. Robert Louis Stevenson too felt a kinship: “so clever a boy, so wild, of such a mixed strain ... and, as I always felt ... so like myself.” And when Fergusson’s grave was rescued from neglect in the middle of the 20th century, the contemporary poet Robert Garioch wrote a sonnet recalling the associations of the place: “Here Robert Burns knelt and kissed the mool.”

Burns came to Edinburgh for the first time in 1786. The Kilmarnock edition of his poems had been praised by the novelist Henry Mackenzie, and Edinburgh society was eager to see this “heaven-taught ploughman.” Burns enjoyed the genteel attractions of fashionable Edinburgh and was society’s favorite for a time. But, this being Edinburgh, there were other sorts of attractions too, and he was introduced by William Smellie to the Crochallan Fencibles, yet another drinking club. Smellie himself was a two-sided man. Self-educated, he worked on the first edition of the greatly respected Encyclopedia Britannica, but entertained his friends at night with a vast repertoire of bawdy songs.

On his second visit to Edinburgh, in 1787, Burns met Mrs. Nancy McLehose, who became Clarinda to his Sylvester in an exchange of courtly love-letters. But there was a difficulty in the fashionable drawing-rooms, another opposition, country versus city. The two worlds had met but could not merge. The relationship between Burns and Nancy probably remained platonic, but it resulted, when he went back to Ayrshire, in the lovely farewell poem “Ae Fond Kiss.”

The next giant on the Edinburgh literary scene, Sir Walter Scott, also knew two worlds. Though born in Edinburgh, Scott was of Borders descent, and following an attack of polio in early childhood, he spent much time with his grandparents near Kelso. His first literary interest was in the collection of Border ballads. As a lawyer he was part of Edinburgh society, and he too enjoyed nights in a drinking club, called simply The Club, which met in Carrubbers Close for the consumption of oysters, claret and rum punch; but when he turned to writing on his own account -- first epic poetry and then novels -- his themes were often those of an older, more romantic world.

His first novel Waverley, when published in 1814, bore no author’s name, and later novels were presented as by “the Author of Waverley.” Whatever Scott’s reason for this, the device -- hinting again at a double life -- caught the imagination of readers, and the identity of “the Great Unknown” was debated for some years. (It was a fairly open secret, however, by 1827, when Scott himself, at a dinner in the Assembly Rooms, announced it to applause.)

Meanwhile another country-bred writer had come to Edinburgh from the Borders. James Hogg, “the Ettrick Shepherd,” was, like Burns, taken up by society and made much of in literary salons. He features as a character in the series of sketches called Noctes Ambrosianae, published over some years in Blackwood’s Magazine. The editor of the magazine, John Wilson, wrote as “Christopher North,” and his duality extended to his appearance under that name in the sketches, many of which he wrote. Though he was nominally a friend of Hogg’s, his jokes at the expense of the Shepherd’s rough appearance and country ways are cruel, and the mismatch between country and city is very clear.

Hogg, however belatedly, has had his revenge. His novel, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, is now recognized as a work of genius, and there is no work of Scottish literature which so clearly presents the question of duality, both in its form -- with its varying and conflicting narratives -- and in its story of the central character and his companion, who may (or may not) be a projection of his own mind.

And duality can be seen in both the life and the work of Robert Louis Stevenson. Son of a secure middle-class family, and expected to become an engineer like his father and grandfather, Stevenson cut his lectures at Edinburgh University to explore the city in all its aspects. As interested as Fergusson and Burns in Edinburgh’s “low life,” he became a regular visitor to the brothels and pubs of Lothian Road and Leith Walk.

Strained relations with his family and continual ill-health took him away from Edinburgh, eventually to the South Seas where he died at the age of 44, but images of the city and the nearby hills recur throughout his work.

He too gave Scottish literature a masterpiece of duality. Like most Edinburgh people, he knew all about the 18th-century citizen Deacon Brodie, by day a well-respected councilor and a cabinetmaker (a handsome piece of furniture made by Brodie stood in Stevenson’s family home), by night a burglar who was eventually hanged for his crimes. The double life of Deacon Brodie may have inspired The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, duality once again made flesh, though it may also reflect Stevenson’s fascination with the two faces of Edinburgh, genteel and disreputable.

Scottish literature at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th tried to ignore the disreputable side of life. The writers of the Kailyard School had their day, but their rose-tinted world, shattered by World War I, was finally banished between the wars by the movement known as the Scottish Literary Renaissance. Spearheaded by C. M. Grieve (Hugh MacDiarmid), the Renaissance sought a national identity for Scotland in both political and literary arenas. The movement further led, after World War II, to another great period in the life of literary Edinburgh, still led by MacDiarmid and centered to a large extent in Edinburgh pubs like the Cafe Royal, the Abbotsford, and Milne’s Bar. A painting by Alexander Moffat, “Poets’ Pub,” though carried out in 1980, evokes the period of the late 1950s and early 1960s: In a smoky city bar are gathered Norman MacCaig, Sorley MacLean, Hugh MacDiarmid, Iain Crichton Smith, George Mackay Brown, Sydney Goodsir Smith, Edwin Morgan, Robert Garioch and Alan Bold. Some of these poets were perhaps only passing through, and are more strongly identified with other parts of Scotland, but Sydney Goodsir Smith, for one, is inseparable from the story of literary Edinburgh, and its pubs turn up again and again in his long poems Under the Eildon Tree and Carotid Cornucopius.

Robert Garioch also saw both sides of Edinburgh, and knew that he was not the first to do so. In “To Robert Fergusson” he suggests that Edinburgh life has separated into curds and whey, marked out by ‘coorse’ and anglified speech, and addresses Fergusson:

Whilk is the crudd and whilk the whey
I wad be kinna sweirt to say,
but this I ken, that of the twae
the corrupt twang
of Cougait is the nearer tae
the leid ye sang.

Norman MacCaig’s poetry itself has two aspects, since he had strong connections with the Highlands and much of his work reflects that landscape, but he lived in Edinburgh and celebrated its varied richness:

City of everywhere, broken necklace in the sun,
you are caves of guilt, you are pinnacles of jubilation.

So far we have not mentioned one major duality, the male/female question. The place of women writers in Scottish literature is at last being acknowledged, after centuries during which they have been marginalized, and in recent years Edinburgh has been home to many distinguished women writers: Elspeth Davie, Joan Lingard and Dilys Rose are only a few of these. MacDiarmid considered Rebecca West’s The Judge, set in Edinburgh, to be one of the finest of Scottish novels.

Muriel Spark was born and educated in Edinburgh and the city supplies a background for her novel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Tensions and contradictions abound in her characters, both in the schoolgirls and in their enigmatic teacher Miss Brodie, who pointedly claims to be a descendant of Deacon Brodie and, in her public respectability linked to private passion, displays all the dualism associated with his name. Spark depicts the contrasts of Edinburgh between the wars -- the gulf between the well-brought up girls and the unemployed men in the streets -- just as, more recently, Irvine Welsh in Trainspotting presents the underside of the modern city, but never lets us forget that it is only a few streets away from tourist Edinburgh:

Ah remembered somebody sais that it wis the first day ay the Festival. Well, they certainly got the weather fir it. Ah sat oan the wall by the bus stop, letting the sun soak intae ma wet jeans.

This is the dualism in Scottish literature, and in Edinburgh, which underlies the McEwan`s 80/- Edinburgh Literary Pub Tour and is brought to life by the arguments of the roisterer Mr. Clart and the intellectual Mr. McBrain. But as you read the script or follow the tour, you will find that by the end these two have almost exchanged viewpoints. Finally they agree that they are “two sides of the same soul.” In a sense they are the same person, who can be both riotous and respectable, sensual and spiritual, like so many real and imaginary figures in our story, from Allan Ramsay through Stevenson to Miss Jean Brodie. That’s why, in an account of Scottish literature, we need both Clart and McBrain.