Precious Literary Letters

My cohort of teachers in our Finnish language school.
I'm the very dark girl with the 'Purdey'' haircut and the red sweater, at the back.
Photo courtesy of fellow teacher, Wladek Cieplinski.

Next week, Lyon and Turnbull in Edinburgh are holding a Rare Books and Manuscript Sale.  Among much else of a vastly rarer nature, (letters signed by Mary Queen of Scots herself, no less!)  they are selling two little bundles of letters written to me in the 1970s. 

Lot 64 is a correspondence from Ian Hamilton Finlay, and Lot 65 is a collection of autograph (i.e. hand-written) letters from George Mackay Brown. Back then, I was a young writer, just starting out on my career, and they were both friends and mentors. The letters were precious to me, and I have kept them for fifty years, but now the time has come to let them go. I began to be afraid that when I'm gone, they would finish up in a skip. Since they are such a reflection of their time and place, an insight into two great poets, I wanted to see them preserved and archived.

The letters from Ian, ten in all, are closely typewritten, often on both sides of his headed paper, and annotated by hand in his own frank, energetic and inimitable style. They talk about various topics, and include observations about his building work at his amazing garden at Little Sparta.  'We have raised the level of our loch and I am building, with great labour, a little island,' he wrote. I had been a fan of his work as soon as I learned about it, and visited the garden. He calls me one of the 'last letter writers' in the world, and perhaps I was. 

I first met George when I spent a summer in Orkney, cycling about, visiting innumerable neolithic passage graves, writing poetry, and spending time with Strathclyde Theatre Group, who were performing there. His correspondence is 'warm, personal and detailed' as Lyon and Turnbull describe it, and has a great deal to say about Orkney life and events there, his friendships and his BBC work - kindly and encouraging for me, gold dust for any scholar.

In 1975, I moved to Finland to teach English as a Foreign Language. You can read about that time in a previous post, here. But it was then that my correspondence with these two Scottish greats dwindled, although George and I exchanged Christmas cards for many years. I simply had too many letters to write. I was sending fat, newsy letters to my parents just about every week (no Facebook Messenger back then) and I was keeping in touch with various university friends who were also travelling, or starting on new and exciting careers. Besides that, I was teaching for long hours, and enjoying it very much, doing my own writing whenever I could, and accepting a great many invitations from my students. I loved Finland and only left because I wasn't really making enough money to carry on living there, and saw no career pathway that I could follow. 

After that, I spent a year in Poland, teaching English at Wroclaw University. By the time I came back to Scotland, my own creative career, writing commissioned drama for BBC Radio, some television and the theatre - as well as writing fiction and working as a community writer for the Arts in Fife - was taking off and absorbing all my time. 

These two bundles of letters are, therefore, two little jewels or precious fossils: a slice of time that will never come again. I even kept the envelopes. I loved my work and I loved my writing back then. Not the struggle to make a decent living (vain hope!) but the sheer pleasure of exploring and communicating, of shaping words and ideas. In these days of creative writing degrees, the constraints imposed by the internet and academic judgments, I sometimes wonder if young writers can ever feel that same intense pleasure in exploration, the freedom of it. I hope so, but I have my doubts. 

I was lucky enough to be mentored by real, practising writers whose work I admired. Whatever else she was doing, the hopeful girl you can see in the picture above, with her 'Purdey haircut'  always wrote unselfconsciously and took immense pleasure in the work. Now, much older, but not a lot wiser, I hope to find a way of rediscovering that joy.

You'll find full details of the forthcoming (18th June) sale at Lyon and Turnbull.

Robert Burns's Funeral, 25th July 1796.

On this day, in 1796, Scottish poet Robert Burns, who had died only a few days earlier in his Dumfries home, was buried. He had struggled to return from Brow Well on the Solway, where he had been taking a 'water cure' that can only have hastened his end from acute endocarditis. Once home, he had to be 'oxtered' into the house, where he took to his bed and never left it again.

The funeral was a very grand affair at mid-day at St Michael's Kirkyard, in Dumfries. As a member of the Royal Dumfries Volunteers, he was given a military funeral, thus ignoring one of his last wishes. 'Don't let the awkward squad fire over me,' he had said, but they did it anyway.

While her husband was being buried, his wife Jean was giving birth to his last child, Maxwell.

I wrote about it in my novel: The Jewel, published by Saraband.


'On the morning of the funeral, before she could even dress, her pains began. It was clear that she could not leave the house. An hour after they had come to carry Rab away, her waters broke, streaming onto the stone floor. She went into labour and gave birth to his last son, Maxwell, on the same day. Few people perceived or even cared how terrible that was for her: to be in such pain and distress at that time. Jessie perhaps, although Jessie had no weans of her own yet. Mary Armour might have offered her some comfort, but Mary was in Fife and word had only just reached her. Rab's heartbroken mother would know what she was feeling. Nobody else. No man would have fully understood the darkness that engulfed her during the hours that she laboured for love of him on such a day. 

Jean told only a few people that the night after the funeral, as she lay in their bed, wrapped up in blankets, aching for the warmth of her husband's body beside her, with the shape of his head in the pillow still, and a few dark hairs attached to it, he had come to her. The whole house was quiet, Maxwell swaddled in her arms. She had been singing to the new wean until he slept, and she saw Rab coming into the room. He was as bold and clear as though he had still been in life and, she thought, rather more healthy than the last time she had laid eyes on him, a gleam in his eye and a flush of sunlight on his cheek. 

She was not afraid.

When had she ever been afraid of him except just that one time, in the stable, in the Back Causeway? Rather she felt the wee bubble of laughter that she had so often felt with him, laughter even in the most serious of situations, at the general absurdity of everything, even the very worst of things. She looked up at him while he gazed down at her and, in particular she thought, at the  baby. Well, why not? He had aye loved the weans best, loved the curve of their cheeks, the soft, vulnerable place at the back of the neck, their perfect wee fingers and toes. Then he shook his head sadly, as though regretting that he could not stay, and disappeared, so suddenly that it seemed like a snowflake, melting away in your hand.'

Three Common Misconceptions About Jean Armour's Husband - and the Probable Truth.

In among various conversations about The Jewel, Jean and Robert Burns, over the past few months, both with individuals and with groups, I’ve realised that three misapprehensions about the poet are still current. These are beliefs I thought had been disproved by more distinguished academics than me years ago. Let’s look at them.

So many people have repeated the judgement 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 in 1796 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 a prodigious amount of alcohol might be consumed by the gentry perhaps even more than the poor. Partly this was because in the cities at least – less so in the countryside where houses might 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 occasionally led astray by 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 inflammation of the heart muscle – which would certainly have been a challenge to his ‘constitution’, especially for a man involved in hard physical work in all weathers. Then, in Dumfries, he had a painful tooth abscess, and it’s now thought that the resulting massive infection, at a time when there were no antibiotics, would be 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, 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 beset him during his last few weeks.

Finally, 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 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 ever violent towards any of the women with whom he was associated.

Who knows just what went on with Jean in the stable in Mauchline when the couple were, frankly, at their lowest ebb in a great many ways. Was it overwhelming passion or something verging on assault? 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 Rab hadn’t chosen to brag about it himself. We have the fact that Jean was struggling with a mass of intractable problems not least a second unwanted pregnancy, and she went into labour very soon after the incident. But even then, she undoubtedly loved this man. 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. My interpretation may be slightly shocking, but I suspect it may be closer to the truth than the poet’s version. Of course we should remember at all times that we are reading and writing about an 18th century man. Laddish he may have been, but for his time, the poet’s ability to project himself into the minds of the ‘lassies’ – to defend them and appreciate them and befriend them – 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.