Things Written Randomly in Doubt Page 16

  Virginia Woolf, to my mind the greatest English-language novelist of the twentieth century, set up Hogarth Press with her husband Leonard in 1917, while humanity was killing itself on an unprecedented scale. I expect that he did most of the work, although that assertion is based on nothing more than ill-informed opinion – my feeling is that her fragile brilliance was unsuited to the rigours of the publishing world. I may well be wrong. This publishing company published all her great works, and their joint management survived until 1938 and her husband’s until 1946 when it became an imprint of Chatto & Windus. It survives to this day as one of Penguin Random House’s many imprints. It had all the hallmarks of a great literary concern: a combination of dilettantism and extraordinary literary talent. Many such ventures fail quickly: perhaps because they ought to or perhaps because they were too good, too innovative or too short of funds. The problem facing arts councils is which ones are which. This model involves engaging with other authors and creating a resource – perhaps a local resource – for literary innovation. In my opinion, they all provide something, even if it’s training for more publishers and writers. Naturally this form of self-publishing has more staying power than the purer Proustian model, which however also makes a valid contribution. Self-publishing should not be hidden; it should not dress itself up as something else. It has nothing to be ashamed of.

  The question is, however, whether self-publishing in either model is second best. I would say that in part it is. But it is often necessary, as can be seen from the names we would be deprived of without them. We would presumably also be deprived of many minor talents as well. On the other hand, we had better get used to it: just as poorly produced samizdat was the inevitable release of literary talents in the Soviet Bloc, there appears in the shadow of the corporations to be a return to the unity of production in the first century of printing, during which writer, printer and publisher could be different men working together under the same roof – in the same crowded workshop. Publisher and printer are unlikely to come back together in the case of what we now call “physical books” (although the wealthy but impractical Woolfs bought themselves a printing press). These roles are divided by technology, at least for the foreseeable future, but the distinction between writer and publisher may become less distinct. Some time ago, Timothy Mo, finding courage not to be redundant at least in literature, struck out for independence and produced his own books in spite of being well-established as an author. He was the first to see that modern technology had made publishing much more accessible, and that was before the e-book, which makes it so much easier for writers to become their own publishers and in a sense their own “printers”. But let me stop you short just when I’m starting to convince you of a literary dawn about to break across our harsh and arid cultural desert: we can produce the books and e-books, but selling them remains stubbornly difficult. Particularly in the Anglo-Saxon economic model, small businesses are extremely difficult to sustain, and most of them are probably agencies that have taken over tasks originally provided directly by the state, and are therefore dependent on a culture of nomenklatura. Small publishers have few channels for selling their wares to the public.

  So writers can be publishers, but are they likely to be good publishers? Clearly the skills would appear to overlap, but writing requires reflection and detachment, while publishing requires involvement, collaboration, understanding and organisation. For someone who has scarce organisational skills, publishing is so all-consuming that it leaves little room for writing anything except fragmented works: short stories, essays, aphorisms and poetry. But the novel’s the thing, and that is still the preferred form for most writers today.

  My detractors, many of whom have not met me or even read me, will be pleased to know that I am going to go silent and start work on a historical novel that takes Machiavelli as an opportunity to examine intellectuals and their various foibles. It should take two or three years, but may never be finished. Publishing has its demands and it has its pleasures, as does writing. Where there are shifts between the two, writers gradually become publishers or the publishers writers. It is unlikely that the two can coexist in perfect balance for a long period of time.

  A writer is an intellectual in the restricted sense of a harebrained person who in their muddled existence sometimes comes up with original ideas, as a child can see the idiocy of adult certainties. Intellectuals worthy of the name should be able to stand their ground and are always in a minority, because they disagree promiscuously and therefore can never develop a network that can protect them. They would be fools to try. Machiavelli and Winstanley, the first constantly revisited and the second almost universally ignored, were both courageous enough to stand their ground and not complain about their sufferings, but both foolishly deluded themselves that they could make a difference in their own times. That these two excellent political thinkers dedicated their most famous works to powerful men (the former to Lorenzo de’ Medici whose uncle had had him tortured and the latter to Cromwell, no less) demonstrates the stupidity of intellectuals – their foolish trust in power and in the power of reason and reasoned argument.

  Intellectuals are fools, but their great merit is that they’re also dangerous to the powerful (an intellectual in power is dangerous, but this time to the powerless – an intellectual in power is an aberration). Intellectuals should acknowledge their foolishness and use it sensibly. And sensible intellectuals do not even seek power, conscious that it would corrupt their single virtue – their ability to stand outside certainty and undermine accepted truths.

  I admire polemicists and publish them gleefully, but when I write, I argue constantly against myself, and often don’t know which side I’m on. I’m not an advocate in court; I’m the member of the jury who abstains. This is why I like writing fiction. If x is the commonly held opinion and I appear to suggest y, I would like the reader to say, “Yes, x cannot be right or wholly right, but y, which this confused author appears to believe in, is also wrong. Surely it must be z,” where z equals as many opinions as there have been readers.

  And these last few paragraphs are a case in point. I was uncertain whether to put them under publishing or produce yet another essay on writing. On balance, the essay on publishing seemed more appropriate because, although publishing inhibits my writing, it may well do what I want my writing to do, only better. Through publishing different things, I can generate a mass of conflicting ideas more effectively than through anything I could write. I find it easier to believe in other people’s writing than in my own. I feel that if I’m ever going to be a footnote in the history of Scottish literature, then it will be for my publishing and not my writing. There you have it: an intellectual’s vanity.

  On Nation, Polity and Cosmopolity

  When a small country comes up against a large country, the small country pays a high price, whatever happens. If it rebels, it pays disproportionately in defeat and is crippled in victory. If it succumbs to pressure to avoid the pain of a onesided military encounter, it is treated with greater contempt, because it is not feared. Vietnam defeated the United States, but continues to pay the price for its audacity and courage. Afghanistan continues forever to fight off invaders, but is reduced to a pulp of misery and hardship. In the fifties Egypt and Hungary sought autonomy without firing a shot, and were invaded, did shoot and were humiliated. The legacy of those days remains today, particularly in the case of Egypt. In 1968 Czechoslavakia gave in, as Dub?cek wisely avoided a battle that was lost before it was fought; ancient Czech independence of spirit was lost, possibly for many generations.

  Two films – Neil Jordan’s Michael Collins and Ken Loach’s The Wind that Shakes the Barley – were good in their own way but too partisan. Each film blamed the other side in the Irish Civil War for Ireland’s continued misery in that war. They missed the more interesting story: both sides were right, or at least at the moment war broke out the arguments were finely balanced. Always supposing that you believe in the use of violence to obtain
justice from a more powerful force, there was no simple solution to the fact that Ireland in that moment could not defeat Britain, while Britain, if it had wanted to pay a high price, could have defeated Ireland. Collins correctly argued that, in such a situation, a partial victory was better than no victory at all, a pragmatic acceptance of the balance of forces. De Valera correctly argued that, having fought, Ireland had to fight on for complete independence of all its territory, otherwise it might remain divided, as it has.

  Given that De Valera himself would very soon become the long-standing Taoiseach or prime minister, and gradually dismantle the imperial link by 1937 (though cautiously leaving the final declaration of the republic to the opposition in 1949), it may be said that he proved Collins right – that what could not be achieved by force could be achieved by stealth. But it could equally be argued that if there hadn’t been part of the IRA willing to continue the struggle, the British would not have conceded enough levers of power to Collins to create a situation in which either Collins or De Valera could gradually achieve more powers by stealth. Politicians act within the real world and are obliged by the balance of power to choose between unpalatable options. Some intellectuals and politicians who have never tasted power delight in their moral purity and fail to distinguish between those who have choices and those who don’t. Only the great powers have real choices, and generally they get them wrong and must take full moral responsibility for them, as in the case of Britain’s brutal suppression of the Kenyan rebellion, America’s war in Vietnam, the Soviet Union’s treachery and repression in Poland, China’s unremitting strangulation of Tibet and Russia’s obliteration of Chechnya. You could add to these Burma’s annihilation of its minorities, once almost half the nation, and Israel’s war in the nineteenth-century style against its indigenous population guilty of having being born in their own land. Even small nations can be brutal to smaller and weaker nations. Good and evil are universally human.

  Ireland, or rather Ulster, suffered a terrible event that heralded centuries of future suffering that would spread out from Ulster. It was inflicted by an English court under the first king of the united crowns who used his English power to implement a Scottish policy aimed not so much at the suppression of Catholicism as the protection of Scotland’s western seaboard from the Gaelic or “Erse” world that straddled Ireland and Scotland, and which James VI now considered foreign to Scotland. His grandson, James VII, would one day seek and obtain the support of those Catholic Irish who were dispossessed by the ethnic cleansing of the Fife Adventurers, but long before that another grandson, not yet crowned Charles II, sought and obtained the support of Gaels on Scotland’s western seaboard. Such are the paradoxes of history. Needless to say, Charles did nothing to assist his loyal subjects when he did become king, a lesson entirely lost on generations of that bloody and absurdly romanticised political movement, Jacobitism.

  From the very beginning of that union, then, Scotland has been more privileged and less oppressed by the English than other dominions. It retained its institutions, and its own elites, subordinate now but surviving in some form, which was not true of Ireland and Wales. Scotland became a headless state.

  Scotland is by European standards quite an old nation, but one constructed out of five different “ethnicities” (or perhaps language communities might be a better term). Those ethnicities were the Gaels, the Britons, the Norse, the Angles and the Picts. The first four language communities were definitely not part of the original peoples, who presumably were subsumed into them. In this it was like almost every other European country. The dominance of Gaelic came on the back of the spread of Christianity, also a common feature of early nation-building. Gael, or Scotus to use the Latin term in surviving records, originally applied to someone or a community living in any part of Britain or Ireland, which sometimes meant what would become northern England, just as other ethnicities had large or fragmented communities north of the current border. Gradually, through the usual misery of military conflict, a nation was randomly formed and Scotus no longer meant those belonging to the culture that came over from Northern Ireland and instead meant those living within a certain unified territory under the rule of a king. In other words, Scotland is a historical construct, which like every nation, is an abstraction that exists precisely because people believe that it exists. This does not mean that it is not real; ideas are as hard as steel, even if they’re intangible and have no spatial reality.

  Ideas have to be maintained from one generation to another, and can be greatly assisted by power, although they may also be revived by the abuse of power, as in the case of Scotland. It is common in our homogenised media today to claim that Thatcher’s introduction of the poll tax one year earlier in Scotland had no influence on the rise of what is a little misleadingly referred to as Scottish nationalism. Everybody knows the story, but I think it is worth restating, because it is so stark and so obvious. Thatcher had promised to introduce this tax, and had been elected overwhelmingly in England at least in terms of seats. Instead of introducing it there, she decided to do so in Scotland where the electorate had rejected her politics even more overwhelmingly (the Tory vote dropped by 4% and 11 seats to 25% of the vote and 10 seats in 1987). The tax was introduced by her Secretary of State for Scotland, acting like a governor in a subject province. Scots campaigned by non-violent means for a year and were not listened to, but when the poll tax charges fell through letter boxes in England, riots in London and Birmingham lost Thatcher her premiership and the poll tax was withdrawn. Should anyone be surprised that this had a lasting effect on the Scottish electorate? There are those who point to the fact that the Conservative vote in Scotland held up in 1992, but the important change in that election was the SNP increasing its vote by around 50% thus affecting Labour. It is true that the poll tax affair only accelerated the increasing divide between the political cultures of Scotland and England, which started perhaps with the disappointment of the devolution vote in 1979 (due to the 40% rule), and without doubt as a result of the brutal deindustrialisation under Thatcher’s first government. However, there is an argument for saying that the poll tax pushed the discontent more firmly in the direction of nationalism, because it divided the experience in Scotland from that of other deindustrialised areas in the UK, namely Northern England and South Wales. Nationalism was rekindled after an extended period in which Scotland’s cultural and linguistic identity had been losing ground quite dramatically. In other circumstances, there might have been convergence, and the current situation, which offers Scots great opportunities if they have the courage to grasp them, is a creation of British politics over the last thirty years and the blindness of the British establishment (including New Labour) to the crisis it inflicted on Scotland over the same period.

  Peoples come together and quite often they divide again. It is pointed out that Britain was united during the Second World War. This was undoubtedly true, as it was of many other states that no longer exist, including the Soviet Union, which had extended Russian as its lingua franca over its entire territory except, perhaps, in the Soviet Socialist Republic of Armenia. When it all fell apart, the British establishment was perhaps the loudest in its applause, but few of the states created by this tectonic shift had anything like the durability of Scotland, including the Baltic states, whose previous existence was limited to the interwar years. Two years after the Union of Parliaments, Peter the Great defeated the Swedes and wrested from them the Baltic nations along with many other territories. Before the Swedes there were the Danes and before them the Teutonic Knights, although the story is complicated by the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, a vast state facing southwards and nearly reaching the Black Sea, which lasted for three centuries. Scotland may have suffered, but in the slaughterhouse of history, it comes out as lucky on the global scale as it was on the local one.

  However the longevity of a nation is not necessarily an argument for its revival. A dangerous word in debates on nationalism is the word “forever”. Forever is th
e enemy of doubt and implies an unchanging nation in the past as well as the future. The eternal nation can be suppressed like the Jews in Babylon, but eventually it will return, as though it were a single entity that can quickly be revived. Nations are inconsistent on just what eternal means. Germany claimed French territory such as Lorraine because in the Middle Ages it had been German-speaking (indeed the cradle of German literature), but in the east it claimed Polish and Czech territory because they had become partly Germanspeaking in relatively recent times. Nations are constantly in flux. The argument that the state created by the Treaty of Union should be kept solely because it has been around for a long time is irrelevant. Three centuries is more than the average lifespan of a state, and if a state ceases to have legitimacy amongst its citizens or citizens of one of its constituent parts, it will not last. Equally there is no reason to believe that Scotland will exist forever. Apart from the likelihood sooner or later of a federal solution for the European Union, this coming century could be as brutal as the last, if the slow build-up of xenophobic forces in the continent continues because the economic system is incapable of maintaining the social rights people have become accustomed to. Europe is at a fork in the road: it could become more liberal and socialist or more authoritarian and racist. But then these have perhaps always been the two conflicting spirits of Europe. Nation is not about ethnicity and never has been. There are so many ways you can approach this argument, but let us just take one curious example. The untypical sometimes instructs us on the typical by virtue of its extremes. In her fascinating book, Captives, Linda Colley provides an interesting account of how Irish troops dealt with the problem of English desertions from the garrison in Tangier, then an English possession: “During the siege of 1860, Irish Catholic soldiers and officers defending one of Tangier’s forts on behalf of the Kind of England were obliged to call out instructions to each other in the Gaelic language, so as to avoid being understood by some English Protestant renegades who were serving with the Moroccan forces outside the gates.”1 This historical gem conjures up the idea of English deserters continuing their service to the Sultan long after the inevitable defeat of the army they had abandoned, and their descendants walking the streets of North African towns and cities. At the same time the descendants of the Gaelic speakers now are, in all likelihood, speakers of English in Ireland, England, America or Scotland (where they might speak Scots). History is chequered with these complex exchanges that make nonsense of ethnic myths. Given this precedent, it is difficult not to be disappointed with Linda Colley’s brief work for the referendum year, Acts of Union and Disunion. What had held the UK together – and what is dividing it. The historian has not proved to be as adept when dealing with the present day. She has no understanding of the political debate in Scotland, which is driving the independence question and, perhaps worse, she appears to have made little attempt to understand it.