or to dubious memories in which the survivor can’t quite decide whether love existed or not. Or they end up in a solipsistic loneliness in which, as in ‘The Hermit’, a whole community becomes an aggregation of separate, lonely, and selfish people. ‘Survival Without Error’ introduces Smith’s concept of the final and necessary invention of the sick community, the scapegoat. His analysis of human complexity is profound here; the last turn of the introverted and loveless self and society is to create the ‘other’ who is nevertheless a version of the self and of the society. The lawyer of ‘Survival’ has to condemn Lecky, since to condone challenges him to see himself in Lecky and to deconstruct the defences he’s built to save himself from the same self-destruction. Likewise ‘The Hermit’ (worked up from a much shorter story in The Village, 1976) demonstrates the underlying bond between the retired headmaster, alone and vulnerable in frustrated age, and the self-sufficient hermit who seems to need nothing from other humans. ‘Survival’ is the less profound of the two; clearly its lawyer is inhumane and warped by national service, ambition and selfishness. ‘The Hermit’, on the other hand, disturbs more because it has a residual sense that perhaps the actions of the headmaster are sadly right, and in getting rid of the catalyst who seems to destroy people’s sense of themselves by simply being there, the web of the village has been preserved. Smith isn’t approving; but beyond the obvious petty sordidness of village affairs he suggests the darker view that scapegoats allow us our complacency, just as in ‘The Adoration of the Mini’ the dying man obscurely consoles himself by creating an enemy in his daughter, or in ‘Listen to the Voice’, a long-suppressed revenge masquerades as appalling honesty.
‘Survival’, with or without error, is another dominating idea, with two opposite implications. Yes, some survivals seem like genuine epiphanies, with hitherto quiescent or repressed protagonists asserting themselves dramatically, from the pregnant daughter of ‘Adoration’ to the amiable yet ferocious retiring Professor, or the tentative communication of Ralph and stepfather. But beyond the Red-loving student of ‘The Black and the Red’ or the reconciliation of ‘At the Fair’, several ‘survivals’ seem much more inscrutable. For example, the Canadian uncle of ‘By Their Fruits’, with his crass prejudice and vulgar easiness; is he a testimony to colourful widowerhood or a monument to selfish survival? It is almost as if Smith were asking why certain types and individuals survive when the weaker have gone under. ‘The Old Woman, the Baby and Terry’ likewise implies the question, since the answer to the social worker’s nagging speculation as to what links the aged parent, the unborn child which drains his wife, and Terry, who takes and takes again, biting the hand which helps him, is that all are survivors, instinctively taking from others, ruthlessly exploiting for survival. Often it’s the selfish who triumph, and often the strategies for survival are weird and grotesque, as in ‘Napoleon and I’, with its typical love-hate relationship, its powerful symbolism of war and classic megalomania, and the sting in the tail that the old woman can outdo her husband in selfish madness.
‘Napoleon and I’ also represents a kind of story and strategy increasingly used by Smith to handle some of his deepest perceptions of the randomness and unrelated nature of experience. It perhaps sounds odd after indicating how bleak Smith’s vision can be to celebrate his humour, but if one recalls the essential paradox underlying his work of tragi-affirmative co-existence, it may surprise less. Smith can make his reader suddenly guffaw, as when ‘Napoleon’ tells the milkman to bring up five divisions, ‘Touty sweet’. ‘On the Island’, with young Allan, Donny and William crazily and self-mockingly wandering from Louis Armstrong to ‘The Hen’s March to the Midden’, affecting accents, discovering Ossian (or was it Columba?) in the incongruous figure of the upright, old bearded patriarch in the rowing boat, or parodying philosophical and political debate, has for all its zany humour a hint of ‘the horror’. ‘Nevertheless, it’s got to be faced’, says William, a propos of nothing; and when asked what has to be faced, ‘this wilderness. Seas, rocks, animosity, ferocity. These waves all hating us, gnashing their white teeth …’, he replies.
They looked at it but their hatred was not as great as its, not so indifferent. It was without mercy because it did not know of them. It was the world before man … It was what there was of it. Nothing that was not unintelligible could be said about it.
The great achievement of this strand is the long short story ‘Murdo’. Here is agony and hilarious grotesquerie conjoined, the humour with its own bizarre Verfremmsdung effect, as Smith measures the depths of Murdo’s imminent breakdown by the goonery of his actions and declamations to astonished neighbours. Like the sad, humble, laughable figure of Mr Trill who features in several of Smith’s stories, Murdo is an extreme way of seeing the pretentiousness of culture, the naked quality of actuality, as well as being another strategy for handling the unbearable.
Of course, Smith has an opposite utterance to this; in which Art does matter, in which drama, painting, and human struggle to give utterance and to communicate, is seen positively. ‘The Professor and the Comics’, ‘What to Do About Ralph?’ and ‘The Play’ all allow epiphany through the value of therapeutic literature and art, as does the late symbolic prose-poem ‘Chagall’s Return’. Smith has always had two ways of seeing life: depending on the perspective, it can be coffin or nest, and homeland, native culture, community, and even Art itself can be equally ambiguous.
These are not perhaps the stories one might expect from one of the finest of our Gaelic poets. They are curiously un-Scottish in their un-identified and strangely de-contextualised villages and towns, with their ‘Ralphs’ and ‘Marks’. But their very refusal to deal with conventional Highland life makes its own stark criticism of what has really happened to these peripheral places of once-different traditions. There’s a great deal of oblique and implicit social criticism of what Britain has become behind the apparently localised action. Most of all, however, they are stories without parallel in their intensity of experience of the pain of loss of community, of belief in ideals, of acceptance of social value. The wonder is that Smith so often manages to discover in such pain moments of Grace, affirmation, communication, that, for all the bleakness of the human situation, there will always be a voice somewhere worth listening to.
Douglas Gifford
WHEN THE BREATHING got worse he went into the adjacent room and got the copy of Dante. All that night and the night before he had been watching the dying though he didn’t know it was a dying. The grey hairs around the head seemed to panic like the needle of a compass and the eyes, sometimes open, sometimes shut, seemed to be looking at him all the time. He had never seen a dying before. The breathlessness seemed a bit like asthma or bad bronchitis, ascending sometimes into a kind of whistling like a train leaving a station. The voice when it spoke was irritable and petulant. It wanted water, lots of water, milk, lots of milk, anything to quench the thirst and even then he didn’t know it was a dying. The tongue seemed very cold as he fed it milk. It was cold and almost stiff. Once near midnight he saw the cheeks flare up and become swollen so that the eyes could hardly look over them. When a mirror was required to be brought she looked at it, moving her head restlessly this way and that. He knew that the swelling was a portent of some kind, a message from the outer darkness, an omen.
Outside, it was snowing steadily, the complex flakes weaving an unintelligible pattern. If he were to put the light out then that other light, as alien as that from a dead planet, the light of the moon itself, would enter the room, a sick glare, an almost abstract light. It would light the pages of the Dante which he needed now more than ever, it would cast over the poetry its hollow glare.
He opened the pages but they did not mean anything at all since all the time he was looking at the face. The dying person was slipping away from him. She was absorbed in her dying and he did not understand what was happening. Dying was such an extraordinary thing, such a private thing. Sometimes he stretched out his hand and she clutched it, and he felt as if he were in a boat and she were in the dark water around it. And all the time the breathing was faster and faster as if something wanted to be away. The brow was cold but the mouth still wanted water. The body was restlessly turning, now on one side now on the other. It was steadily weakening. Something