Masters of the fine art of literary fiction

That’s not to say that money can’t be made from it. Walter Scott was paid by the word. Serialising Dickens’s fiction brought financial rewards. And the fiction of George Friel, Fred Urquhart, Jessie Kesson and Ian Niall, like that of Scott and Dickens, arises from a crafted mix of lived experience and imaginative understanding. It invites readers to engage patiently, not to seek instant gratification but to take time to understand human desires and motivations, conflicts and resolutions, failures and triumphs, and to enter worlds with different character and ethos.

The urban contexts in Friel; the personal relations in Urquhart; the contradictions and oppressions of class, gender and propriety in Kesson; and the necessities of farming and country life and how human beings are creatures inhabiting a natural world with all its tenderness and violence in Niall, all these themes and concerns are written about with deliberation and care, rather than exploitative immediacy.

Friel (1910-75) published only a handful of books. The Bank of Time (1959), The Boy Who Wanted Peace (1964) and Grace and Miss Partridge (1969) are lucid, even-toned, carefully balanced works, but then we come to Mr Alfred M.A. (1972), his final novel. Here Friel brings realism and nightmare into conjunction, the former gradually giving way to the latter in a horrifying vortex of inadequacy, evil, despair and tragedy.

The pathos of a hopeful, optimistic but vulnerable, very limited teacher catches the reader’s sympathy from the start, but then we see him confronted by a satanic figure of inflexible opposition. The trap closes inexorably. Both the descriptions of school life and the anguish of the novel’s conclusion are utterly convincing, visually and metaphorically emphatic. It begins in a realism reminiscent of the 19th century and ends in a world as terrifying and unredeemable as anything in Kafka.

Edwin Morgan, in Twentieth Century Scottish Classics – published by Book Trust Scotland (1987) – describes the book as a “study of the decline of a pedantic, old-fashioned, alcoholic and totally inadequate middle-class teacher” gripping the reader with its “specific detail, whether grim or funny”.

He goes on: “The background of Glasgow’s young gangs and their graffiti runs a thread through the book which leads to Mr Alfred’s final mugging by some former pupils, and his subsequent mental crack-up, signalled by an interior dialogue with a mysterious youth who is in fact Satan, architect of anarchy.” Morgan appropriately sums it up as “not a ‘social problem’ novel, but a vigorous, grotesque, bitter piece of imaginative writing”.

The novels and stories of Fred Urquhart (1912-95) are constantly impressive and diverse in tone, setting, mood, irony, compassion and range of characters. Edwin Morgan singled out his first novel, Time Will Knit (1938) as his best, but noted: “It is in the short story that his touch is surest.” They are various “in settings and moods, contemporary and historical, racy and deliberative” but a central and recurring characteristic is his placing of women as pivotal figures: “the Rabelaisianly slatternly but irrepressible heroine of Dirty Minnie; the brilliant squabbling of the women washing in the steamie in Dirty Linen; the jilted TB girl in the hospital in We Never Died in Winter. He also drew attention to “the sombre study of a bachelor farmer and an Italian prisoner in English in Three Months.”

Urquhart’s short stories are collected in I Fell for a Sailor (1940), Selected Stories (1946), The Clouds are Big with Mercy (1946), The Last GI Bride Wore Tartan (1947), The Year of the Short Corn and Other Stories (1949), The Last Sister (1950), The Laundry Girl and the People (1955), Dying Stallion (1967), The Ploughing Match (1968), Proud Lady in a Cage (1980) and Seven Ghosts in Search (1983). His novels also include The Ferret was Abraham’s Daughter (1949), Jezebel’s Dust (1951), Palace of Green Days (1979) and A Diver in China Seas (1980). Jessie Kesson (1916-94), in her unique novels The White Bird Passes (1958), Glitter of Mica (1963), Another Time, Another Place (1983), and the stories collected in Where the Apple Ripens (1985) fictionalise aspects of her own life, growing up as an illegitimate child in north-east Scotland. She also wrote more than 90 plays for radio and television.

Isobel Murray’s biography of Kesson is carefully judged and her selection of Kesson’s early stories, poems, radio work and autobiographical reflections was published as Somewhere Beyond (2000). Morgan said of The White Bird Passes: “The heroine, Janie, is brought up in the slum tenements and wynds of a north-eastern Scottish town in the 1920s, and from there goes to an orphanage, triumphantly surviving these environments in her determination to make something of her life.”

NOTABLY absent are tones of miserabilism, whining or complaint, as the liveliness and energy of the central character lifts and sustains the narrative and invests vitality, gusto and smeddum in the prose. Norman MacCaig, poetic master of lucidity and brevity, gave his praise succinctly: “Beg, borrow or steal this book.” Compton Mackenzie said: “She can make the printed page alive.”

Glitter of Mica gives us a hard, lonely farming community, exploring its characters, concentrating on the Riddel family, a dairyman, his wife and their college-educated daughter, their humour and animosities, loyalties and jealousies, evolving over 30 years. It’s a story of hardship and struggle but also of the indomitable spirit that was the essential character of its author.

The novels, autobiographies and “nature writings” of Ian Niall or John McNeillie (1916-2002) maintain sharp focus on rural life, unsentimental encounters with animals, women and men. He grew up in Galloway and moved to north Wales in the 1940s and from there to England, but the landscapes and lives of south-west Scotland inhabit some of his best writing.

His first novel, Wigtown Ploughman (1939) introduces us to Andy Walker, son of an abusive father who goes off to the First World War and is never seen again. Andy finds work on a farm but his temper is short, he’s eager to pick fights and his attitude to women is brutal and blunt. He is forced to move on from one place to another, always a victim of his own character and making victims of others, remorseless and increasingly ugly in his moral turpitude. The book was serialised in the Glasgow Sunday Mail and caused a scandal. As a portrayal of the lives of agricultural labourers and the homes they inhabited, it prompted a public inquiry into the living conditions of farm workers and reform through the Rural Workers Housing Act, the matter being raised in the House of Commons.

McNeillie admired Emile Zola and John Steinbeck, and a reviewer noted that Wigtown Ploughman was “a vigorous counterblast” to Burns’s pious poem The Cottar’s Saturday Night. The author’s son, Andrew McNeillie, has written of the novel: “Its plotting is minimal, its trajectory sweeping and full of dark and light, earth and sky.”

It was published in the same year as James Barke’s Tolstoyan epic of farm life in the same territory, The Land of the Leal, and McNeillie notes: “The two books might not share scale but they occupy neighbouring and related terrains and have much in common as to the depiction of agricultural life and its associated hardships”. It is also in the literary company of Lewis Grassic Gibbon, J MacDougall Hay, George Douglas Brown and Neil Gunn, not to mention Thomas Hardy, Patrick Kavanagh, Seamus Heaney and RS Thomas.

Using different names for different works, John McNeillie/Ian Niall went on to publish more than 20 books, including the novels Glasgow Keelie (1940) and Morryharn Farm (1941) and as Ian Niall, No Resting Place (1948), Foxhollow (1949), The Deluge (1951). Niall’s “nature writings” are among the best of that genre, from The Poacher’s Handbook (1950) to Fresh Woods (1951) and Pastures New (1951). The latter two were republished in one volume in 2012, where Andrew McNeillie notes in his introduction that their titles derive from the great English poet John Milton’s Lycidas:

And now the sun had stretched out all the hills,

And now was dropped into the western bay;

At last he rose, and twitched his mantle blue:

Tomorrow to fresh woods, and pastures new.

There is also a warm, affectionate autobiography A Galloway Childhood (1967), The Galloway Shepherd: A Story of the Hills (1970) and the posthumously published My Childhood (2004). All yield treasures, as does the biography by Andrew McNeillie, Ian Niall: Part of His Life (2007).

George Friel, Fred Urquhart, Jessie Kesson and Ian Niall: four authors whose works are well worth searching for, discovering or rediscovering. As with all great literature, the more you read them, the better they get.