OUTSIDE IN: SELECTED PROSE
by Alastair Reid
Polygon, 315pp, £14.99
INSIDE OUT: SELECTED POETRY AND TRANSLATIONS
by Alastair Reid
Polygon, 281pp, £14.99"FOR MANY YEARS," DOUGLAS Dunn writes in his introduction to I
nside Out, "Alastair Reid could hardly be said to have been a presence in Scottish poetry. No-one need search too hard for a reason – he simply wasn't here, but in the USA, France, Switzerland, Spain, or elsewhere in the Hispanic world."
After a childhood spent in Whithorn and Selkirk, war service in the Royal Navy, and student years in St Andrews, Reid left Scotland, and, though he has returned regularly on visits, has scarcely lived here for any length of time in the last half-century. If, as Andrew O'Hagan remarks in his introduction to Outside In, Reid has retained what Stevenson called "a strong Scots accent of the mind", and, one might add, an incomprehension amounting to distrust of England and the English, nevertheless he has lived at one remove from Scotland, even several removes. This may have been no bad thing. Obsession with nationality and national issues rarely does an imaginative writer much good.
That said, some of the most agreeable essays in Outside In are evocations of his Scottish childhood and reflections on the country he left. They were mostly written a long time ago: "The Seventh Day", reflections on the Scottish Sabbath, dates from 1962, "Letter from Edinburgh" from 1964. For older readers these have a nostalgic charm. Younger ones will find themselves discovering what is likely to seem a foreign country to them. "On the Sabbath, Scotland pulls the covers over its head, and groans away the useless silence." In some parts of the Western Isles perhaps, but nowhere else. Even the word "Sabbath" is now obsolete; if employed at all, only ironically.
The reflections on Calvinism in "Digging Up Scotland" (1981) have also taken on a faded, or at least fading, air: "What Calvin ingrained in the Scottish spirit was an enduring dualism. The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is the quintessential Scottish novel. The mysterious elixir of transformation is simply whisky, which quite often turns soft-spoken Scots into ranting madmen. Mr Hyde lurks in these silent depths. Virtue had to be achieved at the expense of the flesh and the physical world, in which we were always being judged and found wanting – the world, it seemed, had a vast, invisible scorecard that gave no marks for virtue but buzzed mercilessly at miscreants."
This is nicely put, though Scots have rarely been shy of giving themselves marks for virtue. The former Labour leader John Smith, for instance, told the journalist John Lloyd that he thought us "a more moral people than the English". Moreover, Reid finds Calvinist gloom where others may see wry humour, as in the reply to "see you the morrow": "Aye, if we're spared."
No indication is given by the editors as to where these pieces first appeared. I assume most were written for the New Yorker. Reid was long a staff writer for that magazine, and much of his prose and verse have the qualities of coolness, precision and lucidity associated with that magazine during the long editorship of William Shawn. A fine poem, "Cat-Faith", ends with this reflection:
After night-fears …
"Slowly the room arrives and dawns, and we
arrive in our selves. Last night, last week, the past
leak back, awake. As light solidifies,
dream dims. Outside, the washed hush of the garden
waits patiently and, newcomers from death,
how gratefully we draw its breath!
Yet, to endure that unknown night by night,
must we not be sure, with cat-insight,
we can afford its terrors, and that full day
will find us at the desk, sane, unafraid –
cheeks shaven, letters written, bills paid?
Reid's is well-mannered poetry, probingly intelligent, never obscure. These qualities are evident also in his verse translations of Borges, Neruda and other Latin American poets. They are always accessible, and sufficiently skilful to make the reader ignorant of Spanish think that he is getting the essence of the original.
As a young man Reid came to know Robert Graves in Majorca. They were close until Reid fell in love with Graves's latest muse and was summarily dismissed. Yet his memoir of Graves is affectionate and entirely without rancour. Indeed, it's almost too kind, for he underplays the element of the phoney in Graves and altogether ignores the intemperate, even brutal, scorn which Graves directed at greater poets, notably Ezra Pound, whom he disliked.
Much of Reid's writing has been devoted to making the English-speaking world acquainted with Latin American literature. His essays on Borges, Neruda, Mario Vargas Llosa, Marquez and Guillermo Cabrera Infante and Reinaldo Arenas are exemplary. He is a great explainer, he understands and reveals the cultural background of these very different writers and conveys his enthusiasm and admiration. The best criticism is always sympathetic. "There can," he writes, "be a vast distance between those who proclaim human rights and those who return, like the Ancient Mariner, with their tales and evidence of human wrongs. A bent for writing like that of Arenas would have been recognised in many other countries and given ample room to develop; but since he was never given any room he could count on, his enormous energy was compressed to an explosive degree."
Reid is never angry or polemical, but those who retain illusions about Castro's Cuba would do well to read his essays on Arenas and Cabrera Infante.
Scorn there is in abundance, most of the rampant ridicule reserved for Fidel Castro, whom Cabrera Infante knew and observed in adolescence. In "Mean Cuba", he "is mostly referred to, for simplicity's sake, as The Tyrant".
That "for simplicity's sake" is characteristic Reid.
Polygon deserve our thanks for bringing out these two books (despite the regrettable absence of editorial notes). Those who already know Alastair Reid's work will treasure them. Those ignorant of it have a delight in store. He writes not only with that "strong Scots accent of the mind", but with that accent at its best: polished granite.
The full article contains 1039 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
