The Red Door Read online

  THE RED DOOR

  Iain Crichton Smith was born in Glasgow in 1928 and raised by his widowed mother on the Isle of Lewis before going to Aberdeen to attend university. As a sensitive and complex poet in both English and Gaelic, he published more than twenty-five books of verse, from The Long River in 1955 to A Country for Old Men, posthumously published in 2000. In his 1986 collection, A Life, the poet looked back over his time in Lewis and Aberdeen, recalling a spell of National Service in the fifties, and then his years as an English teacher, working first in Clydebank and Dumbarton and then at Oban High School, where he taught until his retirement in 1977. Shortly afterwards he married, and lived contentedly with his wife, Donalda, in Taynuilt until his death in 1998. Crichton Smith was the recipient of many literary prizes, including Saltire and Scottish Arts Council Awards and fellowships, the Queen’s Jubilee Medal and, in 1980, an OBE.

  As well as a number of plays and stories in Gaelic, Iain Crichton Smith published several novels, including Consider the Lilies (1968), In the Middle of the Wood (1987) and An Honourable Death (1992). In total, he produced ten collections of stories, all of which feature in this two-volume collection, except the Murdo stories, which appear in a separate volume, Murdo: The Life and Works (2001).

  Kevin MacNeil was born and raised on the Isle of Lewis and educated at the Nicolson Institute and the University of Edinburgh. A widely published writer of poetry, prose and drama, his Gaelic and English works have been translated into eleven languages. His books include Love and Zen in the Outer Hebrides (which won the prestigious Tivoli Europa Giovani International Poetry Prize), Be Wise Be Otherwise, Wish I Was Here and Baile Beag Gun Chrìochan. He was the first recipient of the Iain Crichton Smith Writing Fellowship (1999–2002).

  This eBook edition published in 2013 by

  Birlinn Limited

  West Newington House

  Newington Road

  Edinburgh

  EH9 1QS

  www.birlinn.co.uk

  First published in 2001 by Birlinn Limited

  Stories copyright © The estate of Iain Crichton Smith, 1949–1976

  Introduction copyright © Kevin MacNeil, 2001

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form without the express written permission of the publisher.

  ISBN: 978-1-84158-160-6

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-85790-716-5

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  Version 1.0

  Contents

  Editor’s Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  SURVIVAL WITHOUT ERROR AND OTHER STORIES

  The Ships

  Survival without Error

  The Exiles

  Close of Play

  ‘Je t’aime’

  Goodbye John Summers

  The Black and the White

  Sweets to the Sweet

  Murder without Pain

  The Adoration of the Mini

  Home

  On the Island

  Joseph

  The Idiot and the Professor and some others

  THE BLACK AND THE RED AND OTHER STORIES – PART I

  The Dying

  At the Party

  In the Station

  An American Sky

  After the Dance

  The Telegram

  The Wedding

  Getting Married

  The Little People

  God’s Own Country

  By the Sea

  The Black and the Red

  THE BLACK AND THE RED AND OTHER STORIES – PART II

  A Day in the Life of . . .

  The Crater

  The Fight

  In Church

  Through the Desert

  The Return

  The End

  Journeying Westwards

  The Professor and the Comics

  THE VILLAGE

  Easter Sunday

  Sunday

  The Old Woman and the Rat

  The Delicate Threads

  The Conversation

  I’ll Remember You

  The Ghost

  The Red Door

  The Blot

  The Vision

  The Phone Call

  The House

  The Painter

  The Existence of the Hermit

  Fable

  The Old Man

  The Prophecy

  The Letter

  Jimmy and the Policeman

  After the Film

  Moments

  Old Betsy

  UNCOLLECTED STORIES

  Mother and Son

  New Stocking for Young Harold

  The Scream

  The Angel of Mons

  The General

  Incident in the Classroom

  The Hermit

  The Long Happy Life of Murdina the Maid

  The Injustice to Shylock

  In the Maze

  The Meeting

  Waiting for the Train

  In the Café

  On the Road

  Publication Acknowledgements

  Editor’s Acknowledgements

  First of all, I would like to thank Donalda Smith, whose support during my period of tenure as inaugural Iain Crichton Smith Writing Fellow has given me some idea as to why she was such an inspiration to her late husband.

  I want to express my most sincere thanks to the following for their many, many efforts on behalf of this book: Neville Moir, Stewart Conn, Helen Templeton, Andrew Simmons, Hugh Andrew, Gavin Wallace, David Linton, David McClymont and Morna Maclaren.

  Grant F. Wilson’s A Bibliography of Iain Crichton Smith has been indispensable.

  I must also thank the staff of the National Museum of Scotland (Edinburgh), the Mitchell Library (Glasgow), and the Scottish Poetry Library (Edinburgh) for their helpfulness.

  Every effort has been made to track down all of Iain Crichton Smith’s English-language stories, but, given how phenomenally prolific Iain was, I must accept the possibility that these volumes are not quite complete. If any reader knows of a story by Iain Crichton Smith that is not included in these volumes (other than those stories in Stewart Conn’s recent edition of Murdo: the Life and Works) I would be most grateful if they would get in touch with me via the publisher, in order that any such story might be included in future editions.

  Finally, I want to acknowledge that working on these volumes has been a genuine labour of love and I wish to dedicate my own efforts to the late Iain Crichton Smith.

  Introduction

  Iain Crichton Smith (1928–1998) was one of Scotland’s greatest literary phenomena. A voracious reader and a tremendously prolific writer of English and Gaelic poems, plays, novels, short stories, essays and reviews, he was legitimately described by Sorley Maclean as ‘one whose imaginative and creative fertility and energy were to become the wonder of literary Scotland.’ His success was not – and ought never to be – confined to literary Scotland; for a writer of Crichton Smith’s imagination, intelligence, and humanity demands a readership that is as wide-ranging as his work.

  It is perhaps inevitable that some misconceptions should arise concerning a writer whose work harnesses a great many seemingly contradictory impulses. Iain’s writings are by turns confrontational and subtle, crafted and spontaneous, irreverant and thought-provoking, darkly ambiguous and redemptive. The very titles of many of his works suggest opposites.

  One misconception – sustained by some of his editors, publishers, and readers alike – is that Iain was born on the Isle of Lewis. In fact, as he pointed out in the elegy You lived in Glasgow, he was born in that city, albeit to a mother and father who we
re from Lewis, the island on which Iain was subsequently raised:

  I left you, Glasgow, at the age of two

  and so you are my birthplace just the same.

  However, Iain, a Leòdhasach through and through, was to say that during his childhood Glasgow ‘was as distant to me as the moon’. By contrast, he said in an interview for The Scotsman in 1985 that Lewis ‘follows me around wherever I go, a sort of question mark at the back of my life’.

  His father having succumbed to tuberculosis, Iain was raised along with his two brothers on Lewis by a mother who, like the island itself, is a profound and dominating presence in his writing.

  Like his peers, Iain spoke Gaelic as a child (except, of course, in the classroom). A bookish boy, keen on football but given to reverie, he was often kept off school by his protective mother, prone as he was to attacks – and suspected attacks – of asthma and bronchitis. The village in which they lived, Bayble, on the Point peninsula, was home to a small, close-knit, and tightly Presbyterian community, aspects of which can be traced in many of Iain’s writings.

  At eleven years of age Iain won a scholarship to study at the island’s principal high school, the Nicolson Institute, Stornoway. This set an attitudinal as well as an actual distance between Iain and his fellow villagers:

  When I left the village community in order to attend the secondary school in Stornoway I felt as if I was abandoning the community. There was a subtle alteration to me in the attitude of my contemporaries who were not taking the road of education but would work on the land or on the fishing boats.

  A sense of abandonment (of abdication, of exile, of being different) recurs throughout Iain’s work.

  The classes he took at the Nicolson and the teachers who taught him there were to influence Iain greatly, not least of all by instilling in him a love of the Classics. He was also to write a number of Nicolson Institute characters and incidents into his stories many years later. He whiled away his lunchtimes in the local library, poring over magazines that described a world entirely different to that of his village. Iain’s mind was already assimilating the necessity of duality: between Gaelic and English, between rural and ‘downtown’, between the insular and the cosmopolitan, between the suffocating restrictions of dogma and the multifarious freedoms of art.

  Apprehensive but excited, Iain made his way to the University of Aberdeen and an environment that afforded him greater freedom (and therefore a greater breadth of experience). The city of Aberdeen appears often in Iain’s poems and short stories, a glittering place of new learnings, of lodgings, cinemas, students, pubs and beggars. In a celebrated essay ‘Real People in a Real Place’, Iain writes:

  It is far more difficult to live in a community than to live in a city, for in a community one must have an awareness of the parameters beyond which one cannot go . . . One of my clearest memories is at the age of seventeen arriving at Aberdeen Railway Station and finding sitting there a beggar in black glasses with a cap in front of him on the pavement and in it a few pennies. Such a sight would have been unheard of in an island community. The beggar’s blatant economic demand and his overt helplessness, this individual throwing himself on the mercy of chance, would have been a contradiction of everything that the community represented. The shame of dropping out of the community to become pure individuality in a void would not be a concept that a community could sustain.

  This compassionate attempt to understand one who is different, this fascination with the individual, the outsider, is a typical theme in many of Crichton Smith’s stories. Of his own sense of alienation, Iain would say: ‘I have made the choice, I have forsaken the [island] community in order to individualise myself.’

  Aberdeen granted him the space to discover – and individualise – himself. He immersed himself in poetry (Auden and Eliot being influential favourites) and philosophy (Aberdeen’s light was so clear that he ‘could see for miles as if it were into the essence of existentialism’). Nonetheless he enjoyed the social aspects of student life. The anonymity – the freedom – of Aberdeen contrasted sharply, excitingly, with the curtain-twitching claustrophobia of a small island village. In his droll, perceptive, and self-deprecating Life of Murdo, Iain (writing of himself in the third person) says:

  He [Murdo, i.e. Iain] thanks Aberdeen for giving him these days after his unhappy childhood of poverty and salt herring. His mother stern and loved and at times wild loomed over the Minch. But Aberdeen was inhabited by many characters, whom he recalls with affection, even the shrivelled ones, the city itself a cage of light.

  Iain also mentions that Murdo, his autobiographical alter-ego, ‘had the nerve to write for the University magazine Alma Mater’. As if taking the second word of the magazine’s title as a cue, Iain’s earliest published story in this volume, ‘Mother and Son’, deals with a central Crichton Smith character type: the domineering, principled, powerfully magnetic but wholly demanding mother figure. ‘Mother and Son’ – while far indeed from being one of Iain’s best stories - is interesting in that even at this young age he was considering the influence a mother can have on the mind of a sensitive son, an influence of which Iain was to say near the end of his own life:

  This complication and intricacy of emotional attachment [between ‘Murdo’ and his mother] Murdo has studied and it appears in one or two of his poems. He was much closer to his mother than boys normally are.

  The sense of a young man at university finding himself, and therefore finding himself loosening his ties with both island and mother, is well evoked in the secular epistles of ‘The Black and The Red’.

  After university, Iain lived with his mother and younger brother in a tenement flat in Dumbarton, and he would regularly visit Helensburgh to be near the sea. ‘The sea, monster and creator,’ he would later write, ‘has remained with me as a well of fertile symbolism. I think of the many dead – some I have known – drifting about in it, being refined there forever.’ He attended Jordanhill College to do his teacher training (‘Murdo cannot convey the death to the spirit which is to be found in a Teachers’ Training College . . . ’).

  Iain was no happier during his period of National Service. Never regarding himself as a man of solid practical skills and easy conformity, he felt that the world of the army was entirely alien to him. Musing on his army days, he writes with a mixture of honesty and tongue-in-cheek self-scrutiny:

  O how clumsy Murdo was. He could not fit into that social organism. He heard his boots on the square with trepidation. He taught himself to iron but at great expense of spirit. He broke like others the ice on the surface of the water buckets in winter in order to shave. He polished his cap brooch and his belt buckle. But Murdo was not a soldier nor a phantasm thereof.

  Iain nonetheless was promoted to sergeant in the Education Corps, and his duties now included lecturing (on NATO, on the UN) and teaching (for the Forces Prelim and other exams). A diligent teacher, he found himself unexpectedly enjoying teaching Maths, a subject that had eluded him in his own youth. However the rigidity, the ‘mad logic’ of the army did not suit him and this was an uncharacteristically fallow period in his development as a writer:

  Murdo felt that Virgil was being squeezed out of him so that many men might become one man. Murdo was afraid. He couldn’t write nor did he read. He was too busy suffering punishments. He was too busy aligning his knife and fork correctly on top of his bed for inspection.

  In 1952, after completing his National Service, he moved to a new flat in Dumbarton with his mother and younger brother. He got a job teaching at Clydebank High School and was to remain there until 1955. He was not entirely happy, as he found that teaching academic (rather than non-academic) pupils was his forte, and it was generally the less academic classes that he, as a new teacher, was delegated.

  While his mother was happy in Dumbarton (she had the Free Church and a circle of friends), Iain himself did not feel at home there, considering the town ‘ugly and anonymous’. He missed the sea and the beauty of the Highlands and fe
lt that his writing was suffering because of this.

  Iain moved to Oban in 1955, where he ‘felt instantly at home’. He took up a teaching post at the high school there, a job he would retain until his early retirement twenty-two years later. Iain’s writing prospered in Oban. He wrote his best-known novel in just eleven days during an Easter break, the modern Scottish classic Consider the Lilies (known in America by its alternative and less suitable title The Alien Light). Certainly one of the best works of fiction concerned with the sorely inequitable Highland Clearances, Consider the Lilies has been widely and deservedly praised, despite anachronisms that would no doubt constitute wincing blunders in a lesser work. It is a measure of Iain’s writing skills that the presence of postmen, dungarees, grandfather clocks and melodeons at a time when these did not exist in the Highlands in no way detracts from the power of the novel. In an interview for Books in Scotland some years later he was to dismiss any criticisms regarding historical inaccuracies: ‘I think the anachronisms are trivial. They don’t really affect what I was trying to do . . . There are a lot of anachronisms in Shakespeare and in other writers.’

  As well as teaching and writing, Iain’s energies were also directed towards domestic matters. His mother had come to live with him in his Oban flat in the early 1960s:

  This as it turned out was not a good idea though many people were very kind to her. It was not a good idea for Murdo either: he would no longer be able to go out drinking. Indeed he spent practically all his nights in the house. This had one good result, that he wrote an enormous amount, of stories and poems in both English and Gaelic.

  Indeed, he was prolific – arguably too prolific. Perhaps it is inevitable that a degree of inconsistency should creep into the writings of one who produced such an abundance of material. This is true of Crichton Smith’s stories, as it is of his poetry. In an interview for the Glasgow Herald in 1988 he said: