Political commitment exhaustion is not new, and can be helped

In his book RB Cunninghame Graham and Scotland: Party, Prose, and Political Aesthetic, Lachlan Munro tells us:

“On December 11, 1919, in a letter to the dramatist, Henry Arthur Jones, Graham wrote that he had hoped that socialism would have produced the demise of selfishness and a better feeling between men, adding rather forlornly:

‘You will admit, I think, that my ambition was not a low ambition. That I was deceived, and that all the golden dreams of Morris have vanished in nine bestial and inarticulate years ... has not been my fault.’

Consequently, subsequent to the First World War, he made no statements on workers’ rights or on mass unemployment and the strikes and hunger marches of the 1920s and 1930s.”

The aftermath of the First World War must have been an exhaustion for Graham, but also something more. The melancholy of social failure is always opposed by the lasting value of art. This is not a consolation but a purpose and cause to draw strengths from their endless resources.

Exactly what those resources are in Graham’s literary legacy is our subject here. The war did not see the end of his literary work and reinforced his drive towards Scotland’s independence. Looking back over his writing, we might keep these priorities in mind.

A feeling of exhaustion is something we might recognise in the long aftermath of 2014.

READ MORE: Independence activists set to rally in Edinburgh on Saturday

In a world so given to corruption, defeatism, bias and thwart, how should we sustain and grow the depth of commitment so many of us feel still undiminished?

And in the living expression of that, what of the energy needed to share the commitment convincingly?

Perhaps we might begin with the recognition of Graham’s melancholy resignation along with his persistent optimistic faith in possibility, in the unpredicted (as well as predicted) ways the future will unfold, what it will bring beyond our comprehension.

He stands at a precise moment in the history of Modernism. One of the principal characteristics of the whole movement was, in Ezra Pound’s phrase, “Make it new!” James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man begins with the young Stephen Dedalus discovering the sounds, sensations, visions, language and politics of his Irish world beginning from infancy.

Every one of Virginia Woolf’s major works explores from inside a female consciousness, in a process of discovery and ultimately assertion. With Graham, everything begins with a sense of the long, deep process of time.

The world has seen it all before. The political commitment this delivers is in the understanding that making it new means fundamentally an act of making, a remaking, in the pathos of the epic effort.

This is the prevailing tone of all his stories and sketches and it is as profound and meaningful as anything in Modernism. It comes out of the 19th century but moves into the 20th and points to the 21st, going right through its own historical aftermath as much as it draws on its long historical past.

All his writings generate a sense of the long view. What’s measured most accurately in that view is human worth and it isn’t in the monuments or immediate gratifications we have become so used to, and that we are so immured within.

One of the most melancholy sketches of the collection Charity (1912) is “Immortality”. The title is quietly and absolutely ironic. It begins with the narrator looking at “a strange building, something like a Moorish saint’s tomb, but with a burnished copper roof, reflecting back the sun.”

It’s a “garish and vulgar” construction near an old Castilian town, on the slopes of a sierra above a deep, greenish river: “A medieval palace of warm, yellow stone, the tower of the collegiate church” with the burnt-up country stretching round it on all sides. The narrator takes a closer look: broken wheelbarrows and bent and rusty picks are lying around.

Then years go by and the narrator forgets all about it. He notes that Madrid, a mere village in the time of his youth, has become a modern town. And Seville has gone from being “a great, silent Moorish city where no one but a Gypsy or a beggar walked in the streets by day” to a new “tourist centre, with paltry little shops full of cheap fans and tambourines”.

Bilbao and Barcelona have turned into hives of industry, like Manchester or Birmingham but with great tree-planted streets.

Overall, “an air of skin-deep Europeisation had come upon the land, obscuring almost all the national virtues, in the favoured spots where it prevailed, and bringing out all that was worst in Spanish character.

He takes a train to a town he remembers and then an omnibus drawn by thin mules to an inn where, with “an air of great detachment” the owner is sitting on “a chair tilted up against the wall, smoking one of those oily, black cigars”. He asks the returning visitor, “Were you not here 10 or 12 years ago?”

The traveller books into a room and in the cooler evening, he sets out on the still hot road to where he recollects the “mushroom tomb” he’d seen so long ago.

It’s still there but now no longer the domed cupola with its yellow glass and dazzling tiles but “a Gothic structure with flying buttresses and gimcrack pinnacles”. He judges it to be even “a more foolish mushroom than the last”: “The gravelly waste still stretched around it, and the same litter of a stonemason’s yard, the picks and shovels, wheelbarrows, and chips of stone, were strewed about the walls.”

READ MORE: Pressure builds as Tory MPs call for Truss to resign

And the arid plain and the river below are as they were, with the giant sierra towering beyond, as if the building itself were a travelling circus in its ancient amphitheatre.

The tomb, whether in its former style, built to commemorate and stand as a statement of faith, or now in its revised form, the object of a different dispensation, is as ugly and absurd as any gesture of permanence made against the crush of time.

There’s a shepherd guarding his flock in immobility, a big dog with a spiked collar sleeping at his feet. They are as such living creatures have been since the days of ancient Greece. And the only “lasting traces of a man’s passage through the world” are his shadows on the earth, as the sun moves slowly round.

The story is only a few pages, but it is compelling: you don’t know where it’s going until you’re there at the end, with the rueful sense of time passing. The journeying of the narrator by foot, train, carriage, through years of life comes to the point of pausing only to imply the question, what’s to show in the end but a sense of mortality?

If there is a moral, it might be: Value that, and build accordingly. But nothing so clear is spelled out. The beautiful poise of Graham’s writing is always only to imply, never to insist. The delicacy of his touch is matched by the strength of his purpose. The unsentimental facts are unalleviated by anything more wishful.

The story is in some ways typical of Graham’s work. It has a narrative propulsion but is pervaded by a sense of stillness, perpetuity. Futility and human drive, vanity in the hope of fulfilment, the quality of endurance and small mercies, are noted, savoured, never lingered on too much.

There isn’t space to comment on every story or sketch he wrote in his 17 or so books (leaving aside the biographies and historical accounts), but we should be able to highlight some of the most lasting, haunting, powerful and beautifully sustained of them. And hopefully we can deliver a sense of the arc of the collections, across his career from the 1890s to the First World War, and after that war until his death in 1936.

In Father Archangel of Scotland (1896), republished in Photographed on the Brain: The Cunninghame Graham Collection Volume 1, edited by Alan MacGillivray and John C McIntyre (Kennedy & Boyd, 2011), Graham has nine pieces and his wife Gabriela four.

The title story, “Father Archangel of Scotland” begins with Graham wandering through a small town in northern Spain and finding an old book in a little shop, idly bargaining for it and discovering that it is in fact an account in Spanish dating from 1737.

READ MORE: We're offering a year-long subscription – at any price you can afford

It’s a biography by Father Francisco de Ajofrin of a priest named George Leslie, a Scot from a Calvinist family, a convert to Catholicism, who had been expelled from England, preached in Italy and returned to Scotland as a missionary attempting the conversion of the Presbyterian Scots to their earlier faith before his death in 1637.

It’s story of futile aspiration and doomed commitment. Within the tale, there are miniature stories sketched, his relationship with his mother – she “cuts him off” insisting that “no Catholic shall sing the mass at her lug” but ultimately forgives his waywardness – and there are more sweeping depictions of the religious ethos of national cultures, Scots, English, Spanish – but at the centre is this simple figure “who did his duty as he thought he saw it” just for its own sake, “and not for honour or reward or hope of heaven, nor yet for fear of hell”.

The pathos of his life’s commitment is an enigmatic centre to the tale. How do we – or Graham – judge his actions? Hopeless, or humbling? An example of religion’s stupidity or of human endurance?

Supposing all the efforts towards an independent Scotland continue opposed not only by injustice and the machinations of exploitative governments and the hypocrites in ermine but by a mass of unpersuaded people, converts to a faith considered bad?

Supposing all attempts to help them see the light come to nothing, what then? Would our efforts at conversion be as futile as Father Archangel’s? And should we then abandon them?

The subtext in our own time is even more pressing when we read another tale in this collection, “A Jesuit”.

The opening is subtle, quiet, insinuating: “It was, I think, at the little port of the Esquina in Corrientes that he came on board. A priest at first sight, yet not quite similar to other priests, at least to those whose only mission is for mass and meat.

“A Spaniard too, at first sight, with the clean-cut features of Old Castille, the bony hands that mark the man of action, and feet as square as boxes. Withal not commonplace, though unassuming, but with such a look of that intensity of purpose which many saints have shared with bulldogs.”

READ MORE: Wellbeing case puts Scottish independence vote at 61 per cent, bombshell poll finds

On the slow journey up the Parana River, from Argentina towards Paraguay in inland Brazil, it emerges that he has been working at a mission deep among the Guasarapo Indians, who have killed all the other priests.

He alone went back to Buenos Aires and telegraphed Rome. The message he got was one word: “Return”. And when they reach his destination, he disembarks, a solitary missionary, “and walks into the forest”.

A modest but misguided fool? Or a quiet warrior of God?

Subtract all the religious orthodoxy and you still have a human being, with a commitment beyond reason and a belief in humanity that goes further than the murderous intent of others. Should we not endorse such hope? Is it a duty to approve it? Or does realism insist we find another way forward?

The questions might apply to more than one faith.