The Beatles, The Brontes and Opinionated People.

 

It's an odd feature of social media - I notice it particularly on Facebook, but I suspect Twitter is much worse - that when somebody posts an interesting conversation starter, and people weigh in with reminiscences and contributions and disagreements, some individual will occasionally add an opinion that simply amounts to 'you're wrong' - but often couched in much more robust terms. It happened recently, not to me, but to somebody else. It's so commonplace as to be instantly recognisable. I've deleted whole threads because of it - not because I dislike a good debate, but because I'm damned if somebody is coming onto my page to browbeat my friends. It is, let's face it, deliberately designed to do two things: draw attention to the person posting it, and close down any further debate. Like those exclamations in CAPITALS with FACT written after them.

This particular conversation was about the film A Hard Day's Night, and the music of the Beatles. It reminded me that I first saw the movie with my late mum. We had moved to Scotland a year or two before and the Beatles were my saviour during a time of intermittent misery. I loved Scotland, but hated my school. My mum and I went to see the film, and stayed in to watch it all over again. 

Even at the time, and young as I was, it seemed extraordinary; it seemed utterly unlike anything we had ever seen before - and when you look at other British 1960s movies, you can see why it was so striking, both musically and visually. I didn't know why I found it so wonderful, I just knew that it was. 

Many years later, I started to try to analyse why so many of us were so captivated and and why we remain so, watching it all over again. But because there's no point in trying to reinvent the wheel, here's a superb analysis from Colin Fleming in the Atlantic, from 2014, of The Deep Art of A Hard Day's Night.  'No band, maybe no artists ever, had a greater capacity for displaying and inducing wonder. And here we have that wonder made visual.' 

As Fleming points out, citing reasons, this isn't just any old rock and roll film - it's a Dick Lester film. A Dick Lester film that manages to capture the magic that was the Beatles. 

Pondering the phenomenon of the aggressive take down, though, it struck me that it existed long before social media. I remember a literary agent writing to tell me that one of my novels (this one, in fact) was 'a library novel fit only for housewives' He could just have said 'not for me, sorry' - but this grossly self entitled old man felt the need to take down a woman for writing a love story, while insulting other women and libraries along the way. What a tosspot. (More about this odd contempt for the love story as written by women in future posts.) 

In a similar vein, I vividly remember a certain middle aged male Scottish writer telling me loudly and angrily that the Bronte sisters were 'a bunch of daft wee lassies, with a crush on Byron'. It was one of those occasions where you spend several days afterwards thinking of suitable rejoinders, but it also coloured what had, until then, been an amicable relationship. I had considered him a friend. Afterwards, I never felt the same way about him. It wasn't just his misogyny showing as clear as day. Of course he didn't have to enjoy the books. Not everyone does. And there were many arguments he could have made. But it was the way in which he thought that his opinion mattered far more than mine, and was - moreover - indisputably right. Nothing I said would have made any difference. 

I'm happy to debate the relative merits of the Brontes and their various novels till the proverbial cows come home - as I'm happy to debate the extraordinary phenomenon that was the Beatles, especially since I experienced it at first hand. 

But sometimes the only response to an aggressive 'this is shit' is to shrug and walk away. 

Which is fortunately, easier to do on Facebook than in real life. 

Meanwhile, here's something to wake you up! 

 

                                           

Happy Birthday, Rab

 

I'm reblogging this post - with a few changes - from 2016, when the Jewel, my novel about the poet's wife, Jean Armour, was first published by Saraband. After all, it's the right time of year, even if the only Burns Suppers we'll be attending will be online. I never thought I would miss book events as much as I do but I miss meals with friends even more, and that's what a Burns Supper is, after all - a meal with good friends. And poetry. And song. Mind you, it's probably my least favourite meal of the year, given that the only parts of the menu I like are the oatcakes and cheese at the end. 

After many conversations about Jean and Robert Burns, with individuals and groups, I’ve realised that some misconceptions about the poet are still very much in existance. These are beliefs I thought had been disproved by more distinguished academics than me years ago.

So many people have repeated the notion that Burns was a drunkard. He wasn’t, but it goes back a long way. A mean spirited Dumfries draper called William Grierson attended his funeral and wrote that the poet was ‘of too easy and accommodating a temper, which often involved him in scenes of dissipation and intoxication, which by slow degrees impaired his health and at last totally ruined his constitution.’ 

Well, he was as fond of a drink as the next man, at a time when the next man often consumed a  prodigious amount of alcohol, the gentry even more than the poor. Partly this was because in the cities at least – less so in the countryside where many houses would have a well – fresh water was at a premium and it could be safer to drink ale, although ‘small ale’ contained very little alcohol. 

Actually, Rab was probably less inclined to overindulge in hard liquor than most, although he certainly had his moments. But when you look at the body of work he produced, alongside a vast amount of clever, entertaining, thought provoking correspondence, as well as hard physical work, first as a farmer and then as an exciseman, riding some 200 miles each week, winter and summer alike – and being a loving father to a great number of children - you can see that the occasional spree is much more likely than any persistent problem. 

He was a social drinker on high days and holidays. He also thought the odd ‘session’ contributed to his creativity, as perhaps it did. He was sometimes led astray by wealthy men who ought to have known better. And during his last grave illness, alcohol seems to have given him some slight relief, if only as a painkiller. But it wasn’t what killed him. 

He didn’t die of the drink, and he didn’t die of consumption either. The evidence seems to point to a diagnosis of endocarditis: chronic, although not necessarily fatal, inflammation of the heart muscle. This would certainly have been a challenge to a constitution already weakened by rheumatic fever in his youth. Here too was a man who was involved in hard physical work in all weathers.

In Dumfries, his health already deteriorating, he developed a painful tooth abscess, and it’s now thought that the resulting massive infection could have been enough to trigger acute endocarditis. He became gravely ill, with all the symptoms of that painful condition, and died the following summer. During his last few weeks, with his illness exacerbated by the 'cure' of seabathing in the chilly waters of the Solway, he seems to have been able to eat nothing. Milk mixed with a little port wine was all that gave him any relief. But the ‘flying gout’ diagnosed by the doctors of the time was only a way of describing the dreadful widespread pains that must have beset his attenuated body during his last few weeks. 

I’ve been asked more than once if I thought Rab was a violent man. Well, I reckon he was a lover not a fighter. Fond of fishing, he was no fan of shooting and once took a neighbour to task for wounding a hare on the borders of his land (and wrote a scathing poem about it afterwards). He loved his children and was happy to work with them playing around his feet. Not for him the retreat to the study and the writerly hush. He was by all accounts an indulgent father who appreciated a little mischief. 

He was, nevertheless, a man of significant presence, physical and intellectual. He was a better friend than an enemy and was known to threaten to ‘skewer in verse’ anyone who overstepped the mark, like the Celtic bards of old. But his reputation was always for non-violence, for tolerance and good humour and there is no evidence that he was violent towards any of the women with whom he was associated. 

Except for one notorious occasion.

Who knows just what went on with Jean in the stable in Mauchline when the couple were at their lowest ebb? Was it overwhelming passion or something verging on rape? We have Burns’s own version in a letter to a friend, bragging about a coupling he had persuaded himself Jean enjoyed as much as he did. But Rab was a chameleon and could write what he thought might most impress an individual correspondent. We would know nothing about this episode if the poet hadn’t chosen to brag about it himself. 

We know that Jean was struggling with a mass of intractable emotional problems, not least a second unwanted pregnancy, and she went into labour very soon after the incident. She undoubtedly loved this man but she can't have been anything but shocked and hurt by his behaviour. We also sense that the poet was ashamed of himself, in spite of the bragging letter. He was the son of a highly moral father, and it seems significant to me that during this second pregnancy, with Rab in Edinburgh, Jean had taken refuge near Tarbolton with the family of Willie Muir, a friend of Burns senior, as much if not more than Rab and the Armours. 

The tension between desire – theirs was clearly an intense mutual physical attraction – and Jean’s obvious vulnerability presented me with some problems as a novelist. All the same, I suspect my interpretation of events may be closer to the complicated truth than the poet’s version. May be closer to Jean's perception of it as well. 

Finally we should remember that we are reading and writing about an 18th century man. Very different times, and not always comfortable to contemplate, but we can't rewrite history or historical attitudes to suit our own sensibilities. Laddish he may have been, but the term 'sex pest' belongs in 21st century tabloids. 

For his time at least, the poet’s ability to project himself into the minds of the ‘lassies’ – to defend them and appreciate them and befriend them, older women as well as young  – is one of the things that most endeared him to me when I was writing the Jewel. 

I suspect Jean loved him for it too.

New Year, New Editions

Bird of Passage is finally out in paperback. It's print on demand only, and you'll have to go to Amazon to find it, but once book events begin again, I'll have a few more copies to distribute myself. 

I've blogged about this book a few times, but you can read a longish account of its history, here, written back when we were first in lockdown. And here we are again. This is one of two or three books from my past that somehow or other, even though I've also been happily traditionally published, slipped through the net. It's also, oddly enough, one of my favourites among all the books I've written. 

The book had been edited to within an inch of its life, so I had very little trouble in publishing it as an eBook, in which format it has been available for some time. I still wanted the satisfaction of holding a paperback copy, but I knew I wasn't up to the task of doing the necessary design and formatting, even though I wanted to maintain control over it. 

Hunting about online,  I found a small, well reviewed Scottish business called Lumphanan Press. I can wholeheartedly recommend them. They did an excellent job of designing and formatting a PDF, at a very fair price and when a couple of sample copies of the book arrived from Amazon, I was very happy with them. The upload process on the site is pretty simple, but what was reassuring was the way - as the software went through various important checks - each box was ticked. I can only imagine the chaos if I had tried to do this formatting all by myself. Sometimes we have to know our own limitations and employ professionals! 

I could, of course, use this same PDF to have other copies printed elsewhere, but for the moment, in the middle of this second lockdown, I'm happy enough. 

Meanwhile, I'm working on a new book called The Last Lancer, hopefully for my publisher, but I'm also doing a little editing of two more novels that never saw the traditional light of day: The Amber Heart and Ice Dancing. The Amber Heart has, if anything, an even more chequered past than Bird of Passage! 

Ice Dancing, on the other hand, is an unashamedly contemporary love story, and yet it isn't really a conventional romance. It's an odd, quirky novel, about love at first sight, and inadvisable attachments and painful pasts, and about Scottish lowland village life. Those who like it seem to like it a lot. I'm not surprised. I'm still very fond of my two main characters. Another one I plan to get out in paperback this year. 

So. Lots to do. Between the state of the UK (horrible) and the US and the virus, I'm keeping myself reasonably sane here in Scotland with lots of writing writing, playing the piano and learning Spanish. Soon it will be spring and I'll be able to get into the garden again. It all feels a bit like those visits to the cinema in the olden days where you would sit down in the middle of the B movie and then stay on till you thought 'Oh - this is where we came in.' 

Our local medical centre has just flagged up that vaccines are coming. My husband will be in an earlier cohort than me. Bring it on. Can't wait. 

Not here just yet - but they soon will be!