Alan Riach: Reflections on Dante's Divine Comedy and Robert Louis Stevenson

Whatever your preference of spirit might endorse, it sounds awfully familiar. It’s a long road to independence, pilgrims.

We marked the occasion with an online symposium opening enquiries into the translations by Alasdair Gray of Dante’s Divine Comedy, starting with that Scottish connection – Alasdair’s last great work – and the Italian master. 

Where’s the water? Well, it’s one of my most lasting memories, the image when Dante is boarding the boat of Phlegyas to cross the Styx in The Inferno, Canto VIII, lines 20-28. Here’s Alasdair:

My leader stepped aboard the ancient craft
then beckoned me. Unused to heavy freight
it settled lower with my weight, was rowed
much, much more slowly to the other shore
then, from the stagnant fen beside the boat
a muddy figure rose and said to me,
“Who are you, coming here before your time?”
“I am not here to stay, but who are you?”
said I, “One who must weep,” was his reply.

That sense of the actual solidity of a living being having weight and substance unrecognised in the land of spirits stuck with me ever since I first read it in Italian as a schoolboy. We who are living need a sense of our own weight and presence if we are to do justice to the dead, and think of the children of the future.

Of all our writers, maybe Robert Louis Stevenson has helped more generations enjoy the exhilaration of childhood, and there are three senses of water that seem to me supremely evoked in his work: the quickness and power of its movement and the depth of its oceans and seas.

First, that most dangerous leap Alan Breck Stewart must encourage David Balfour to make, in Kidnapped (1886), to escape from the Hanoverian troops, across the torrential river to the security of the rock in the river, and from there to the other bank. (Think of it as an allegory: from being hunted and oppressed to make the jump towards freedom, independence. Some folk need the encouragement.) Then how about this, from Treasure Island (1882), when young Jim Hawkins shoots Israel Hands off the ship’s mast: “Owing to the cant of the vessel, the masts hung far out over the water, and from my perch on the cross-trees I had nothing below me but the surface of the bay. Hands, who was not so far up, was, in consequence, nearer to the ship, and fell between me and the bulwarks. He rose once to the surface in a lather of foam and blood, and then sank again for good.

An image from Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson

“As the water settled, I could see him lying huddled together on the clean, bright sand in the shadow of the vessel’s sides. A fish or two whipped past his body. Sometimes, by the quivering of the water, he appeared to move a little, as if he were trying to rise. But he was dead enough, for all that, being both shot and drowned, and was food for fish in the very place where he had designed my slaughter.”

Or try this, from The Master of Ballantrae (1889). In this novel, what seems certain becomes increasingly questionable. The principal narrator, the factor Mackellar, seems to be a reasonable and reliable witness, but Stevenson is assiduous in indicating that there is more to it than that, and if the sinister figure of Secundra Dass takes the role of the familiar companion to the ostensibly “evil” James, Mackellar stands in the same relation to the ostensibly “good” Henry. So the tale of the two brothers Durie is far from unambiguous.

Stevenson, hypersensitive to the attractions and compulsions of evil, keenly aware of the vulnerabilities of virtue, knew exactly what humanity is capable of. His work is as vital now as it was a century ago.

This is Mackellar’s view of the Master of Ballantrae in Chapter 9 and shows the ambiguity of the figure literally ascending and descending in a constantly shifting perspective. They are on board the ship aptly named Nonesuch, crossing the Atlantic, and the sea is rising and falling: “Now his head would be in the zenith and his shadow fall quite beyond the Nonesuch on the further side; and now he would swing down till he was underneath my feet, and the line of the sea leaped high above him like the ceiling of a room.

"I looked upon this with a growing fascination, as birds are said to look on snakes... [The Master’s] tale, told in a high key in the midst of so great a tumult, and by a narrator who was one moment looking down at me from the skies and the next peering up from under the soles of my feet – this particular tale, I say, took hold upon me in a degree quite singular ...”

Dante gives us an immense metaphoric understanding of the world, across the spectrum, from what in our limitations we term “good” and “evil” or in certain dispositions, “blessed” and “sinful”. But his central poetic understanding of humanity is essential.

Stevenson’s study of the characters in Kidnapped, Treasure Island and The Master of Ballantrae is psychologically acute, even when he’s writing for younger readers. And his method is realistic, even when the narrative is fantastic. Stevenson’s seas and oceans are vividly realised, immediately visual.

Without this sense of being in touch with what’s real, we have nothing. And at the heart of it is what life is, our life, lives, livingness, the unpredicted work of nature we are part of, the wild, the wilderness, the blood and tissue, water, air, earth and leaves.

When Gerard Manley Hopkins visited Inversnaid on the shores of Loch Lomond, he was prompted to create a poem which is one of the essential co-ordinate points of understanding the value of water, wetness and wilderness.

He conjures the particular location at the end of the road on the east side of Loch Lomond. You can see the hotel from the west side north-bound road, but it takes determination to get there either by car or on foot. The poem gives you not only the place, but also the principle – the principle of the wild. You remember it?

Of course. Most of you will know it by heart!

INVERSNAID

This darksome burn, horseback brown,
His rollrock highroad roaring down,
In coop and in comb the fleece of his foam
Flutes and low to the lake falls home.
A windpuff-bonnet of fáwn-fróth
Turns and twindles over the broth
Of a pool so pitchblack, féll-frówning,
It rounds and rounds Despair to drowning.
Degged with dew, dappled with dew
Are the groins of the braes that the brook treads through,
Wiry heathpacks, flitches of fern,
And the beadbonny ash that sits over the burn.
What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

I mentioned last week that in the little Borders town of Langholm a major effort is taking place to build up funds to buy for the people who live there, and for all of us, and future generations, and all the living flora and fauna that might flourish naturally there, the broad stretch of wilderness that has come to be known as the Tarras Valley Nature Reserve.

The Langholm Initiative is a project every reader of The National will be interested in, taking place as it does in the context of the long-term change in ownership of the land, of Scotland itself, which must be the basis – the rock-solid basis – of an independent nation. Norman MacCaig’s poem, “A Man in Assynt”, asks the essential question:

Who owns this landscape?
– The millionaire who bought it or the poacher staggering downhill in the early morning
with a deer on his back?
Who possesses this landscape? –
The man who bought it or I who am possessed by it?

MacCaig, in his own way, claimed the territory around Lochinver in the north-west of Scotland, not as property owned, but as landscape loved, inhabited and shared, first in its actuality and then through his own writing of it.

Since MacCaig wrote that poem, the successful buyout of the land around Lochinver has gone ahead. That part of Scotland is secured for future generations in a way it wasn’t before then, and is written about, painted, evoked and imaginatively occupied by new generations MacCaig might have imagined but could never have foreseen.

“Everything changes” says Bertolt Brecht: “The water you mixed in the wine cannot be extracted now.” We might say, “The pollution you’ve put in the world, the plastics, the toxins, the nuclear poisons generations to come will be living with, if they’re lucky – you’ve done these things, according to your noxious priorities.” But: “Everything changes. With your very last breath, you can start again…”

Langholm is nestled in the Conservative-governed southlands of Scotland. Will people such as Alister Jack, David Mundell, Finlay Carson and Oliver Mundell ever change? Perhaps not. But they can. And the people who voted for them can change. They are human beings too. It is possible. Well, forgive me my optimism, but the poems do show how awareness can begin. Sensitivity has to start somewhere. And if the understanding of poetry and the value of the Tarras Valley remains beyond the capacity of Conservative politicians it is not beyond us.

Meanwhile the Langholm Initiative needs all the support you can give. The Tarras Valley Nature Reserve is – and will be – for those of us possessed by the land. Our ownership changes the meaning of ownership. “Love live the weeds and the wilderness”!

Here’s the link to the Langholm Initiative page: www.langholminitiative.org.uk/

And click HERE to go to direct to the donations page.