Typically, the most controversial, and potentially most interesting, question came at the end of the event, when there wasn’t really any time.
To explain, I was at a “breakfast” reading at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, featuring Scottish writers Des Dillon, Anne Donovan and Alan (I’m not stalking him, honest!) Bissett. They each read from either published or it’ll-be-published-next-year novels, and, as samples go, each author acquitted themselves well, displaying a satisfactory mix of humour and serious reflection.
Eventually, as is the way of these things, the Q&A session was opened out to the floor. Most of the questions seemed fairly innocuous — even mine which confirmed that Dillon and Donovan absolutely loved writing short stories and had only ended up producing novels sort of by accident. As Bissett pointed out, though, the bad thing about short stories is getting them published — even fairly successful authors have to bribe their publishers with the promise of further novels just to get a collection of their short stories published at all.
Anyway; back to that last question. I didn’t see who asked it — I was fascinated by the expressions on the authors’ faces rather than turning round to see what the questioner looked like. But in my head I have to say I imagine a relatively solid, mature woman, quite possibly from the mythical Morningside of popular misconception. Certainly, she was someone in the grip of a literary Scottish cringe which hinted at some quite serious cultural consequences.
Her opinion — I’m not criticising her, beyond her seeming inability to challenge herself — was that, while she had enjoyed all three readings, she personally found it difficult to take seriously any book written in a Scottish vernacular, and wondered whether the authors felt this seriously curtailed the appeal of the books in general. Given that all three writers are chiefly known for writing in various degrees of non RP, non BBC English (be it that found in Glasgow, Ayrshire or Falkirk), the woman’s question suggested — intentionally or not — that the writers were doing themselves no favours by choosing not to write “properly”.
Hmmm. Bull. Red flag. Lots of waving. Perhaps, in retrospect, it was a good thing this had been the last question.
Dillon pointed out that one of his novels had won an award — in Russia — while Bissett suggested out that Americans (well, at least some of those in New York) found his use of the English language exciting and radical. I couldn’t help but think that all three writers were left a wee bit uggit by the whole question.
So Scotland, so very Edinburgh — but it’s hardly surprising. For decades, for centuries even, there’s been a cultural assumption that Scots, Scottish English or whatever might be acceptable in the playground, but it wasn’t what teachers wanted to hear in the classroom — that if you wanted to get on, to better yourself, you had to speak proper. And that, as a writer, “the vernacular” was sort of OK for light, inconsequential comedies, but if you wanted to be taken seriously — or to discuss serious issues properly — you had to write, to speak, in the “proper” language of the world, the language of the ruling elite. Which, in the UK, means the Queen’s English aka RP aka BBC English.
Many Scottish authors — James Kelman certainly comes to mind — have faced this problem for many years; indeed, a lot of his work has provoked howls of derision in some quarters, not all of them London-centric, damning him for even daring to use the language of the common people, and spending time (or at least using a word processor) counting the number of times he uses the word fuck.
Kelman has had some success, of course, and has paved the way for many other writers to express aspects of modern Scotland in a way seldom seen before. Irvine Welsh brought forward a new literary side to Edinburgh, and even if he still strikes me as a one hit wonder who just happened to be lucky, Trainspotting remains an important book. There’s nothing wrong in approaching the language of the people; hell, how many people dismiss Huckleberry Finn because it’s not written in the Queen’s English?
And yet, I sort of understand where that woman was coming from; having been brought up, essentially, as part of middle class Edinburgh, I’m well aware that relatively few Scots words made it into my vocabulary, although I treasure those that do. That’s fine; that’s my dialect, my accent. What is worrying, though, is that at an emotional — if not an intellectual — level, I still find some local accents and Scots dialects (particularly those on the west coast) literally cringe-worthy.
I’m not particularly proud about that.
© paul f cockburn
