‘Stuart Kelly’ the author’s note declares, ‘was born and brought up in the Scottish Borders.’ Not so, as he tells us; he was born in Falkirk, which is in central Scotland, and came to the Borders as a child.
‘Stuart Kelly’ the author’s note declares, ‘was born and brought up in the Scottish Borders.’ Not so, as he tells us; he was born in Falkirk, which is in central Scotland, and came to the Borders as a child. The publisher’s mistake is appropriate. Kelly’s Walter Scott himself is a man who was never just what he seemed to be, and who invented an idea of a country and nation we can’t escape from. He wore a mask, several masks indeed, throughout his life, and put another mask on the face of Scotland. Many Scots resent it. Nobody has managed to remove it. Some resent Scott himself, as a Tory and a Unionist, a ‘sham bard of a sham nation’, as Edwin Muir put it, though unlike Scott’s critics today, he said the same of Robert Burns. Others who admire Scott claim him as a belated and also premature Nationalist.
Stuart Kelly, as a clever 16-year-old, despised Scott as ‘a second-rate Dickens, a pale shadow of Dumas’ (though it is actually in Scott’s shadow that Dumas worked) and thought that real novels ‘involved sexual dysfunction, random violence, typographical experimentation and lots of references to books I should have read, and then did.’ In contrast, any novel by the ‘Author of Waverley’ was ‘some kind of literary trilobite’.
Then he grew up, read Scott and found, for instance, that ‘the opening pages of Waverley had the very self-awareness I had thrilled to in its more strident and jejune form in the pages of the fading avant-garde.’ He became addicted to Scott, even while accepting that he will never regain the popularity which, as late as the 1920s, had Virginia Woolf, who has mysteriously slipped out of his book’s index, claiming that ‘Scott was the last novelist to have Shakespeare’s gift of revealing character purely through dialogue’ — which gift he indeed possessed, even if not the last to have had it. Nevertheless, Scott continued to puzzle Kelly, which is as it should be, for he puzzles all his admirers.
This book is an exploration of the puzzle. It is impossible to summarise in a brief review, for it darts from topic to topic, and covers a remarkable amount of ground in doing so. But it is one that should be read, pondered and argued with by everyone who is interested in Scott — and also by many who think Scott could never interest them. It is briskly intelligent and thought provoking, even where — perhaps especially where — it appears wrong-headed to me. The argument is slippery — but then so was Scott — as slippery, in that favourite phrase of the rugby commentator, Bill McLaren, as a baggie up a Border burn.
The simplest part of a book that is never simple deals with the creation of Scott-land. The evidence of this is there for all to see, from Edinburgh with its cloud- touching monument to the author (which had Georges Simenon saying ‘Why not? — he invented us all’), its railway station and a football team, not to mention half-a-dozen pubs and hotels, named after novels, and the tartan-tourist tack, made in China, on sale in its Royal Mile, to nationwide memories of ancient wrongs and divided loyalties.
Balmoral, the royal residence that is a private house, is a characteristic emblem of Scott-land. Kelly tells us that The Bride of Lammermoor was the first novel Queen Victoria ever read, and Peveril of the Peak the one the Prince Consort was reading when he died. (He stops short of suggesting it killed him.) But there would have been no Balmoral if Scott had not built his own ‘Castle Conundrum’, Abbotsford.
It is impossible to disentangle Scott the man from the Author of Waverley. (Scott the poet is a different matter, more easily explicable.) Kelly ponders Scott’s insistence on anonymity and his creation of a team of pseudo-narrators, and comes up with no satisfactory answer. This is as it should be, for there is none. He hazards the suggestion that ‘Walter Scott did not want to be Walter Scott’ and that ‘Fiction was a way to be and a way to feel like other people.’ This will do as well as any explanation of the inexplicable or elucidation of what remains in the dark. Curiously he chooses not to quote what seems to me the most revealing remark Scott ever made: that ‘If at our social table we could see what passes in each breast, we would seek dens and caverns and shun human society’.
‘Nobody cares much about Scott’, Kelly writes, disproving this assertion on every page. Sounding an echo of his 16-year-old self, he suggests that
the way to see Scott anew, to appreciate him as his most congenial, witty and surprising, is to read the prefaces [which] form a loosely connected and playful series of sketches that interrogate ideas of history and fiction . . .
So, indeed, they do, splendidly, but I would rather advise readers to plunge in and take the novels at the gallop. And is Scott indeed so little read? Since I keep coming on people who do read him, I guess he is as much read as any 19th-century novelist except Jane Austen and Dickens.
For doubters, however, I recommend they read this book. It is the best about Scott since A. N. Wilson’s The Laird of Abbotsford was published some 30 years ago. There is the odd careless slip, but this too is as it should be. Even at his best, Scott was a confoundedly careless writer.