Bog Myrtle & Peat

William Soutar was fascinated by Gauguin. It seems like an odd connection, but one of Scotland’s finest Twentieth Century poets just couldn’t get the artist out of his head. Reading Gauguin’s journals from the South Sea Islands, Soutar was staggered by the Frenchman’s approach to creativity, which seemed to pursue the brightest and most passionate threads of artistic thought; his devotion to truth and beauty; his almost reckless pursuit of colour and wonder and joy. And in registering the divide between French and Scottish imaginations, Soutar exposed a crucial anxiety in his own psyche – a division which he viewed in terms of the conflict between Mary Queen of Scots and John Knox. These two figures struggled for power in the sixteenth century court of Scotland; the passionate credulous beauty of Mary’s French Catholicism versus the dowdy, self-effacing grimness of Knox’s terrible Calvinism. 

Soutar believed that until this point, Scotland had always been a fine blend of both creative personalities. But we all know that Knox won, and his victory spelled the start of Scottish modernity in ways which go far beyond a battle between Presbyterianism and Catholicism. After Knox, the Church of Scotland effectively took control of the state. The national character was deliberately and forensically altered, and the fall-out led to the creation of a fervently puritanical nation which bears direct comparison to more recent regimes in Iran or Afghanistan. For the centuries which followed, Scotland was embedded in suspicion and self-denial – almost every vestige of Scottish Catholicism was expunged and deleted – particularly those threads which had embraced more upbeat and imaginative strands of ancient folklore, culture and mysticism. 

Following the path laid down by John Knox, there was only one way forward for Scotland, and that lay in the simple understanding that the world itself was a kind of hell – a place to be ignored, deflected and defended against. There was no beauty or pleasure to be found in anything but the word of God – and if good things happened, they were to be thought of only as a reflection of Satan’s terrible work on earth. This shift was Scotland’s experience of Reformation, and it almost singlehandedly invented the stereotype of the dour, penny-pinching Scotsman which found its finest distillation in the character of Private Fraser in Dad’s Army, who believed that nothing could ever come to any good, and that we’re all doomed, after all.

You can follow this victory of dowdiness through generations of Scottish artists and writers; the natural human urge to be imaginative and thrilling which is always felled by an opposite compulsion towards the grim and the silent. It’s telling that Romantic poets like Burns, Hogg and Scott felt this particular imbalance so keenly that they attempted to rebuild a sense of pre-Reformation Scotland. Some of their writing has become the core of a new national canon – Tam o’Shanter, The Queen’s Wake and the Lay of the Last Minstrel attempt to fill a gap which was expunged by the Calvinists, but these are just the work of individual men. They feed into a wider desire for brightness and culture, but they cannot replace the slow, organic accretion of words and song which was so noisily burnt alive in the 1500s. We have no Scottish Mabinogion or Táin Bó Cúailnge to remind us of ancient Scottish imaginations. And it’s almost pathetic to realise that when the 18^th Century Poet James McPherson discovered fragments of “ancient” poetry written by the Gaelic poet Ossian, Scottish audiences consumed the idea with tremendous excitement – even though it was obviously a hoax from the outset. We just wanted it so badly.

In Gauguin, Soutar had run up against a creative lifeforce which contained a complete and continuous vocabulary of human experience which had been uninterrupted by reformation and self-denial. Nowadays, we can easily see that Gauguin went too far in his pursuit of creative purity – and perhaps he deserves to be rebranded as one of art’s greatest villains – but even today his journals are radical and passionate and pure. They describe a worldview which made Soutar gasp in wonder and something like envy, because it was everything he felt lacked himself as a Scotsman. 

One of Soutar’s most famous poems is The Tryst, which describes a moonlit visitation from a kind of succubus. It’s as close as any Scottish writer’s come to producing erotica, but it’s couched in language that is hauntingly cramped and ambiguous. The Tryst is a strong poem because it successfully creates space for tenderness and sexual gratification. Embracing the limitations of culture and tradition, it’s not trying-and-failing to fulfil itself in a moment of red-hot ecstasy – it’s framing that experience in the language of arrival and departure, pointing to everything that can’t (or mustn’t) be said. In that sense, it’s even more vivid and alluring than some of Gauguin’s troublingly raunchy work – which often flew straight to the sweat-soaked heart of the matter. 

But to some extent, we get the language we need. Gauguin’s France is dazzling and sumptuous, and even that was insufficient to match his vision. It follows that his experience of Tahiti is migraine-inducingly bright in ways that I find hard to handle. Beyond a pattern of Colourists, Scotland feels more suited to Soutar’s subtlety and allusion. Scottish thought is mapped upon Scottish experience; the day-to-day routine of wet streets and a devastating easterly wind. When I’ve thought about the language and imagery of French wolves in recent months, I’ve been pursuing a perfectly luminous combination of stimulus and response. And it’s hard to match that thrilling fall-out against the realisation that as a Scottish writer, I am often preoccupied with rats. 

That’s not to say that rats are an unworthy subject, but they’re certainly a rich vein of thought in a world of thin gleanings and rainswept pastel shades. Rats are no more or less deserving of our attention than wolves, but they’re a useful tool to examine a Scottish experience of disgust, disorder and disturbance. If the Calvinist dream is of purity and efficiency, rats are the definitive spanner-in-the-works – and how we react to these animals can be as helpful to me as the evocation of wolf packs hunting in the Cevennes. I haven’t chosen to follow an each-to-their-own approach, but I have found myself preoccupied by the complex and furtive scurry of dirt in the rafters – and it’s useful to examine that.

The Wigtownshire writer Alastair Reid spent most of his working life in latin America, translating great works of poetry and drama into English. His collected prose Outside In shines a brilliant light on Scotland from the perspective of a Gauguin figure; a man who threw away his ties to Scotland for the sake of simple breathing space. And his writing helps me to realise that while so much of my time is spent looking ever closer inwards, Scotland’s note is valid and proud – it’s for me to pursue it as cleanly as I can – but our pent-up frustrations should never clash against a greater richness of sound in the world.