Alan Riach: RB Cunninghame Graham is a man of original genius

“Don Roberto & Scotland: International Perspectives” at the Stirling Smith Art Gallery & Museum, on Dumbarton Road, Stirling, on May 11-12 will consist of two days of talks and visits marking the life, travels and vision of RBCG.

Cunninghame Graham (1852-1936) should be a familiar figure to readers of these pages, but I still wonder how appreciated – or under-appreciated – he is.

Widely known as “Don Roberto”, he must surely be best known as the co-founder, with Keir Hardie, of the Scottish Labour Party, forerunner of what is now the Labour Party. Later, he was instrumental in founding the National Party of Scotland and became the first president of the Scottish National Party.

But in a long and remarkable life he was also an adventurer, a horseman, a world traveller, a political visionary, an internationalist and humanitarian, and above all, to literary scholars and good readers anywhere, he was a wonderful writer.

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This two-day event brings together specialists in different aspects of his life and work to build a complex, multi-faceted portrait of one of the most curious, yet still too easily overlooked, figures of late 19th and early 20th-century Scottish, British and international political and cultural life, and to ask the question: what can we learn from him today about Scotland and the wider world?

The weekend is organised by the Cunninghame Graham Society, hosted by the Stirling Smith Art Gallery & Museum and generously supported by Foundation Scotland, the Andrew Tannahill Fund for the Furtherance of Scottish Literature at the University of Glasgow, Gartmore House and Gartmore Heritage Society.

What is there to look forward to? Saturday’s programme begins at 10am at the Stirling Smith Gallery with an opening address by the novelist James Robertson, “Cunninghame Graham – a personal response”.

James is well-known as a novelist, poet and editor. He grew up in Bridge of Allan, studied history at the Universities of Edinburgh and Pennsylvania, and his novels include Joseph Knight, The Testament of Gideon Mack, And the Land Lay Still, and most recently News of the Dead, which was awarded the Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction.

He notes that with a writer such as RBCG, there is often a personal story about how individuals first meet him or encounter his writing, usually outside of the educational establishment or social media worlds of popular discourse. You often encounter him by accident. Other participants will respond to this proposition and consider “the Cunninghame Graham ‘moment’”.

After coffee or tea, a panel of speakers will open up various aspects of RBCG’s work and life. Conor Jameson will talk about RBCG and the nature writer, naturalist, ornithologist and novelist WH Hudson, a great friend of many English men of letters, including Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, Edward Garnett and George Gissing.

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Conor is an award-winning writer and naturalist himself, the author of the recent biography Finding WH Hudson. His other books include Silent Spring Revisited, Shrewdunnit and Looking for the Goshawk. He lived in Dunblane as a child, then came back to Stirlingshire to study. He was later married on Inchmahome island, where RBCG and his wife Gabriela are buried. He now lives and works in Norfolk.

From the details of natural world observed closely and at first hand, we turn to a bigger picture, with Carla Sassi’s account of “RBCG and Empire”. Carla, Professor of English at the University of Verona, was the Convener of the International Association for the Study of Scottish Literatures (2020-23) and in 2021 was awarded the title of Honorary Fellow of the Association for Scottish Literary Studies.

Among her publications are Why Scottish Literature Matters (2005) and the co-edited volume, Empires and Revolutions: Cunninghame Graham and His Contemporaries (2017).

Then Laurence Davies will introduce RBCG’s relationship with the great Polish novelist Joseph Conrad. Laurence is Welsh by origin, though he now stays in Blairgowrie. He co-authored Cunninghame Graham: A Critical Biography (1979) and more recently served as general editor of The Collected Letters of RBCG’s close friend Joseph Conrad.

In his free time, Laurence tells us he cooks, writes microfictions, walks the hills, and seeks out mushrooms. Unlikely as it seems, Conrad and RBCG were great friends, Graham the miniaturist, Conrad the epic novelist, Graham the socialist, committed to feminism, independence, workers’ rights, liberty in all directions, Conrad the conservative, the pessimist, the visionary of Empire’s “Heart of Darkness”. This promises to be a highlight of contrasts and friendship against the odds.

After lunch, the novelist, playwright and poet Chris Dolan will talk about RBCG as an inspiration for new writing, a lasting example of what might be done, both in an encompassing social and global vision, and in the writer’s determination to keep his works on a small scale, in short stories and sketches.

Although his original work is on a small scale, RBCG also wrote big biographies of some extraordinary people, including South American dictators and the Jesuits in Paraguay. In fact, his first book, Notes on the District of Menteith (1891), opens with the assertion: “All rights reserved, except in the Republic of Paraguay”.

Chris himself has been writing for page, stage, screen and radio, and teaching creative writing (mainly in Scotland and Spain) for over thirty years. A splendidly rich and fast-moving memoir of a journey by bicycle across Spain, Everything Passes, Everything Remains was published in 2020.

His radio play, The Golden Key, imagining a meeting between Don Roberto and Gabriela Cunninghame Graham, Keir Hardie and James Connolly, was broadcast on BBC Radio in 2023. Then we have Helen Smith, an Honorary Lecturer at the University of East Anglia, where she taught non-fiction and modern literature for more than 20 years, whose biography, The Uncommon Reader: A Life of Edward Garnett was published in 2017 by Jonathan Cape in the UK and Farrar, Straus & Giroux in the USA.

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Helen will talk about RBCG’s relationship with the publisher’s reader Edward Garnett, an extraordinarily crucial figure in the business of making connections, refining good writing and fostering a critical sensibility in the literary world. Garnett was one of the most valuable people in a literary culture that prized difficulty and challenges in a way we’ve almost entirely forgotten about today.

Rob Gibson will speak about RBCG and the Highlands. Rob was born in Glasgow and lives in Easter Ross. A former teacher, he was an elected MSP from 2003 to 2016.

Interested in Highland land issues, he is a traditional singer and organiser. Publications include The Promised Land, The Highland Clearances Trail, Toppling the Duke, Crofter Power in Easter Ross, Reclaiming Our Land, and Highland Touchstone for RB Cunninghame Graham.

Jamie Jauncey, author of the new biography of RBCG, and I will round off proceedings with a consideration of RBCG and women, with Jamie talking about Graham’s rather mysterious relationship with his wife Gabriela, and my own readings of two of his most remarkable stories, “Un Monsieur” and “Un Autre Monsieur” which may – or may not – supply essential background information to what Jamie will have to say.

Saturday’s talks should end around 4.30pm but we won’t be done yet. They Sunday promises a trip to the Cunninghame Graham ancestral home of Gartmore, an introduction to the house and grounds and a talk about the family history from Robin Cunninghame Graham.

Robin is the family genealogist/historian, a role he took over from his grandfather some 40 years ago.

A Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland and a member of the Scottish History Society, Robin is Don Roberto’s great-great-nephew.

And then Lachlan Munro and Robin together will introduce the book they’ve been working on for some years now, A Careless Enchantment: The Complete Scottish Sketches of RB Cunninghame Graham, and Lachlan will talk about the new Cunninghame Graham archive at the National Library of Scotland, which he recently completed, a magnificent achievement which will be invaluable to anyone doing further research on RBCG.

Lachlan’s doctoral thesis, Cunninghame Graham and Scotland, since published by EUP, was shortlisted for the Best Scottish History Book of 2022. He is also the editor of An Eagle in a Hen-House: Selected Political Speeches and Writings of RB Cunninghame Graham (2017), one of the most indispensable books of the last 10 years.

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After a light lunch, those who wish to may make their way by boat across the Lake of Menteith to Inchmahome island and visit the ruined priory and the graves of Robert and Gabriela. In good weather, it’s a magic place.

And in mist, it can be spooky and wonderful.

Presiding over the weekend are Jamie Jauncey and Gerry McGarvey. Jamie is the author of several novels and, most recently, a major new biography, Don Roberto: The Adventure of Being Cunninghame Graham. Jamie grew up in Perthshire where he now lives. A former board member of the Edinburgh International Book Festival, he is chair of the organising committee for this weekend. Jamie is Don Roberto’s great great nephew.

A Gartmore resident, Gerry has been a Cunninghame Graham aficionado for more than 30 years. He brought similarly minded people together by initiating the original RBCG dedicated online presence and the organisation and promotion of RBCG events. This work culminated in his co-founding of the Cunninghame Graham Society in 2013. With so much good work and interest in the multi-faceted life and writings of Cunninghame Graham, the mystery remains: why is he so under-appreciated?

At the end of the Preface to his book, The Ipané (1899), he said: “I wrote that which is here contained to please no single being, and if my own feelings may be taken as the measure of the discerning public’s generous judgement, I have succeeded well.”

He has never been a really popular or canonical writer, either in studies of modernist Anglophone literature or in Scottish literature.

I think the answer may be found in Helen Smith’s book An Uncommon Reader: A Life of Edward Garnett, Mentor and Editor of Literary Genius. Garnett worked as a publisher’s reader, liaising between writers and publishers, spotting talent, or indeed genius, and nurturing it, editing some works and emphasising the virtues of others.

This was an especially valuable practice for writers as sensitive and vulnerable and full of self-doubt as, for example, Joseph Conrad, or reluctant, as Graham was himself.

Smith tells us: “Time and again in his critical writing, Edward maintains that the purpose of art is first and foremost to reveal; that the majority of readers determinedly avert their eyes from the resulting picture merely confirmed Edward’s belief that the English were essentially antipathetic to fine writing.”

Now, if we apply that perception to the history of British culture since the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when Garnett was working and Cunninghame Graham was writing, we can see the truth in what followed.

Who, among all the politicians of England or Scotland since the end of the Second World War, has encouraged and subsidised the arts and literature in acknowledgement that their purpose is to reveal the truth of the world?

Who among readers, generally, has wished to find such revelations in literature? And who, among writers, has prioritised that purpose?

Perhaps being unpopular is the price that must be paid.

And yet we have so much to learn from Garnett and Cunninghame Graham. Smith goes on to insist upon Garnett’s cosmopolitanism and eclectic tastes, as he represented writers from America, Australia, England, Germany, Norway and Russia, as well as WH Hudson, Charles Doughty, DH Lawrence, Conrad and Graham.

Similarly, Graham’s stories and sketches are set all over the world, from South America to New Zealand, from Iceland to London, and centrally in Scotland.

In his criticism, Edward Garnett’s most prized qualities are, like Graham’s in his original writing, very clear: “The ability to suggest the intangible from the palpable; a willingness to shake the reader out of his or her settled perceptions, and the facility to make a small, apparently insignificant detail reveal the depths of a situation.

“The aptitude to draw nature not merely as a savage or picturesque backdrop, secondary to human will, but as integral to life and yet indifferent to it, so indicating the vast forces at play in the universe and placing man and his affairs in their true perspective is something Edward also prizes highly, as are ‘veracity’, originality and an unflinching readiness to show people what they are. [As does Graham.]

“The last two characteristics in particular are, in Edward’s opinion, precisely those that will immediately snuff out any hope of a writer winning acclaim or posterity.”

Smith is in no doubt about what Garnett saw as the obstacles confronting the advancement of the literary cause in Britain: “commercialism, the insularity of the English, their demand that literature should merely endorse prevailing social norms and conformities, the expectation of ‘healthy optimism’ and a happy ending, and the indifference, bordering on contempt for writers as a class, who, Edward argues, are ‘kept … as a set of dilettanti, apart, ministering to scholarly aestheticism or drawing room culture, and are disregarded in the central stir of worldly activities’.”

And yet, Garnett insisted, the great writers and artists “form an indispensable bridge between the talent and the public at large, and on their measure of insight and sincerity it rests whether a man of original genius can fight his way through to favouring recognition.”

It remains to be seen whether Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham will ever win that fight in the end, but we’re doing what we can to help. Please if you can, come along to the celebration in Stirling and make up your own mind!

Tickets at £33 are available here.