Heimat
David Craig
- A Search for Scotland by R.F. Mackenzie
Collins, 280 pp, £16.95, May 1989, ISBN 0 00 215185 5
- A Claim of Right for Scotland edited by Owen Dudley Edwards
Polygon, 202 pp, £14.95, May 1989, ISBN 0 7486 6022 4
- The Eclipse of Scottish Culture by Craig Beveridge and Ronald Turnbull
Polygon, 121 pp, £6.95, May 1989, ISBN 0 7486 6000 3
- The Bird Path: Collected Longer Poems by Kenneth White
Mainstream, 239 pp, £12.95, May 1989, ISBN 1 85158 245 2
- Travels in the Drifting Dawn by Kenneth White
Mainstream, 160 pp, £12.95, May 1989, ISBN 1 85158 240 1
Scottish nationhood never quite dies but hibernates, latent in all those millions of people and thousands of texts, ready to be potentiated by various events, some more accountable or predictable than others: the Union of the Parliaments (1707), the Scottish Renaissance embodied in MacDiarmid and Grassic Gibbon (1922-35), the flow of oil and gas from the bed of the North Sea (1977-?). It may be that our nationalism is on a par with feminism as Dale Spender sees it: for ever having to be painfully rediscovered, rather than evolving continuously from strength to strength, without relapses between those peaks where consciousness, at least, is high. By ‘nationhood’ I mean independent political status, grounded in a place, a history, a language and a consciousness, and recognised and negotiated with as such by other independent states. By ‘nationalism’ I mean the consciousness only, which may or may not reflect the likelihoods latent in the status quo – may or may not flow into a fervent political movement and reach its goal of separation.
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Letters
Vol. 11 No. 15 · 17 August 1989
From Kenneth White
It is no part of my practice to react to reviews – one has better things to do. Reviewers, like everybody else, have a right to their opinions. And, in a journal such as yours, readers can be trusted to evaluate for themselves tone and logic, and, eventually, verify, text in hand. It is only when, as in the case of David Craig’s review of two of my books, The Bird Path (collected longer poems) and Travels in the Drifting Dawn, in your issue of 6 July, the reading is altogether too hasty and superficial that some kind of protest, in the interests of decent (not to say, live and enlightening) literary criticism, must be made. That Mr Craig should identify my work with some kind of Heimat-complex, which I don’t have (in fact, I make fun of it), that his addiction to social realism should make him blind to other types of poetics, that he should ride over the reception of my work in France and in other countries (including socialist countries) and try to give the impression that it is being pushed by a small band of enthusiasts in Scotland, I leave aside. These judgments, if anyone remembers them, will be shown up in time for what they are. No, what I find both ludicrous and disquieting is that he should attribute to me lines which are not only stylistically so different from what I write that they are obviously from another context, but are, in the text, printed in italics, and constitute a kind of voice-off. In fact, they come from a tantric poem by the Indian poet Kanha, whose name appears in the epigraph.
I see that Mr Craig teaches ‘creative writing’ at Lancaster. Which is no doubt why he feels justified in offering some schoolmasterly recommendations for ‘good writing’ such as I heard myself in class when I was about fourteen, while being content to catalogue completely different strategies and topologies of writing as ‘Modernist’ and leave it at that. If he is to say anything at all pertinent about radical writing today, whose locus lies outside the habitual co-ordinates, and which organises moments and movements in an unaccustomed manner, it looks as if what he needs is a course in creative reading.
Kenneth White
Paris
Vol. 11 No. 16 · 31 August 1989
From Ian Saint-Yves
In David Craig’s review of a ‘Claim of Right for Scotland’(LRB, 6 July), he accused the Scottish National Party of a ‘bloody-minded failure to co-operate’ in the Scottish Constitutional Convention, but failed to mention that Gordon Wilson, Scottish National Party MP for Dundee East, introduced a Government of Scotland (Scottish Convention) Bill, proposing an elected Convention in the House of Commons, in March 1980, and also that the fundamental terms of the Convention envisaged by the CSA (Campaign for a Scottish Assembly) in its 1984 discussion paper – namely, that the CSA advised Scottish MPs to constitute the interim ‘Scottish Assembly’ if Westminster said no to its deliberations – were not met.
The crux of a ‘Claim of Right for Scotland’, I believe, lies in para.8.5, which states that ‘Scots must create for themselves a focus of resistance and political negotiation which rejects comprehensively the authority of existing government on matters peculiar to Scotland …’ The key words are ‘rejects comprehensively’. This the initial Constitutional Convention have totally failed to do, as they have decided to remain within a unionist system, in which an alien, English government has openly declared its opposition to any form of Scottish Devolution, and which is likely to remain in power well into the 1990s.
There are other inconsistencies in the ‘Claim of Right’. Para9.5 states that ‘Constitutional Conventions may be, but are not necessarily, challenges to government.’ It then cites two British examples which have failed. So, basically, what the Scottish people appear to have been offered was a system previously known to have failed, and also one in which the participants were scared to challenge openly the present English government.
Para 9.8 states that ‘the absence of a body which can speak for all Scots on constitutional matters presents a difficulty whichever party is in power at Westminster.’ This brings me back to the point that Scottish MPs should constitute the interim ‘Scottish Assembly’. Are Scottish MPs mice or human beings?
As the arguments for and against a Scottish devolutionary process eddy around the political and media environments, the Scottish electorate has to ask itself just how far it is willing to proceed down this road. As we have belatedly realised, any political party which owes allegiance to the Westminster unionist parliament is incapable of fulfilling Scottish aspirations.
Opposition unionist parties find themselves not only impotent within the context of the Westminster system but also totally ineffectual within the context of the present non-democratic, non-representative, Scottish system. One must ask why they continue with their support.
Ian Saint-Yves
Taif, Saudi Arabia
