The Red Door (4 page)
Authors: Iain Crichton Smith
Slowly the sun disappeared over the horizon and darkness fell and he felt the pressure of the maze relaxing, as if in a dream of happiness he understood that the roads
were infinite, always fresh, always new, and that the ones who stood beside him were deeper than friends, they were bone of his bone, they were flesh of his disappearing flesh.
(from ‘The Maze’)
As with much of Crichton Smith’s work, a sinister intellect hovers about these stories. Many of these pieces are as unshakeable as the grip of a vivid dream that haunts without necessarily
yielding its meaning. Images shift and coalesce according, it seems, to their own secret agenda.
‘Through the Desert’ is dreamy as a Dali painting and is a very fine example of this kind of surrealistic writing, despite a deficient ending. Its tremendous energy, its vivid
movement, its colour and its life, are admirable. Images somersault across the page and land on the right side of disorientated sense, quirkily standing up to sympathetic scrutiny:
‘ . . . it was always day and there were no clouds, only a sun which hammered on a steel anvil like a giant at the opening of a film.’
‘ . . . a river with dark water which made the sound of crossed telephone conversations.’
‘Getting Married’ has the feel of an experimentally surreal piece – nicely written, and ‘The Little People’, too, is an unusual story, like a nebulous fairy tale.
Its engaging mixture of realism and absurdity is both alluring and discomforting.
I feel that many of these surrealist stories seem to prefigure, describe, or subsequently attempt to understand Crichton Smith’s own breakdown. In a later work, ‘In the
Asylum’, reality bends ‘like plasticine’ as the author struggles with his place in the world: ‘I do not feel authentic.’ Undeniably, however, much of the nightmareish
imagery Iain utilised throughout his career feels both authentic and convincing.
Surrealism is actually evident, in varying degrees, throughout his
oeuvre
. ‘Goodbye John Summers’ is pure Iain Crichton Smith, a story that enigmatically ponders the thorny
issue of how well we can actually
know
a person (and, in this case, a person who seems undistinguished almost to the point of invisibility). Like many of his stories, this meditation on
death, Christianity, ambiguity, and communication is shot through with strange and imaginative (dream-like but graspable) images and ideas: ‘It was a fine bright glittery day when they buried
him. I stood at the graveside and stared at the coffin as if I wished to make it transparent, but I was confronted by an opaque yellow hexagon.’
While some of these narratives interweave realism and surrealism, others move inexorably from one to the other. ‘In the School’ is hellish and yet magnificently minimalist. Its
characters are delineated with little decoration – like fine fingerprints they are tidy and self-explanatory. The story glides from dark realism to dark surrealism with an accomplished
register. Its imagery revolves around cinders, sparks, fire, ideas of power and leadership and mental health.
Sometimes the departure from strict realism manifests itself as an irruption of the supernatural into the everyday world. ‘The Brothers’ was initially published in an anthology of
literary ghost stories. It is a moving – and chilling – insight into the mind of a writer who has shunned a significant part of his linguistic and cultural heritage. The narrator is a
writer from the Highlands who has moved to Edinburgh to write his (English-language) stories and novels. ‘The Brothers’ feeds off many of the tensions Iain himself explored in his
fabulous version of the Old Testament story of Joseph. (And yet it is not without its humour, for surely its mentioning the ghostly but more accurate typing implies a tongue-in-cheek reference to
Iain’s own typescripts, which were legendarily erratic). The story is propelled by a terrifying and insightful imagination:
My eyes pierced the door which was like skin and on the other side I saw my brothers broken by defeat and starvation but still human and rustic and brave. It was to
them that I must offer myself, not to the alien kings and an alien land.
The ending seems happy, though it is tempered by the notion that yellow often signifies a kind of sickness in Crichton Smith’s work: ‘I sat in my yellow robe at my yellow typewriter
in the yellow room. And I was happy. I overflowed with the most holy joy.’
Crichton Smith’s huge mind also bred story after story concerning exile, an understandably common theme in Highland literature. ‘The Exiles’ features a disapproving, religious
cailleach
, a familiar character-type in his work. This story is not, however, predictable. The old lady has a refreshingly unsentimental view of her native Highlands. As jaded and
unenlightened-to-the-point-of-racism as she seems, the relationship that develops between her and the Pakistani salesman/student is touching and plausible.
‘An American Sky’ is a longer story, concerned with another popular Iain Crichton Smith character-type: the returning exile. This story carefully considers the issues that assail the
return of a long-exiled Lewisman – the ‘implicit interrogations’, the hard realities of homeland change. John Macleod, like many before him, comes to understand ‘One always
brings back a judgement to one’s home’. He decides to return to urban America, or, in Crichton Smith’s remarkable and characteristic phrasing, suggesting rapid change and a lack
of adequate communication, ‘the shifting world of neon, the flashing broken signals of the city’.
The semi-autobiographical ‘The Black and the Red’ is a story to which many islanders, in particular, relate, concerned as it is with the transition from closeted (or at least
insular) life to greater maturity and freedom. Kenneth, writing letters to his mother, reveals how much of university learning occurs outwith the university itself, as he loosens the ties between
himself and an oppressive, overbearing mother (and island):
I think it’s time you went out amongst people more. I think it is time you depended less on me, although I shall never abandon you. It is time you looked at the
facts. I do not want this burden of guilt. It is time we laughed more – high time.
Ultimately, Kenneth even comes to the realisation that his illnesses have been to some extent psychosomatic: ‘I mean that: I’m not going to be sick again.’ He is still his
mother’s loving son, but he is an individual now, aware of his potential and his freedoms.
One of the most appealing features of Iain Crichton Smith’s stories are those occasional and cherished instants of intelligent, lyrical, unforgettable epiphany, usually at a story’s
conclusion. Such moments of epiphany, knitting agreeable, legitimate, and meaningful correspondences together, make for supremely pleasurable reading, no matter that the perceived message behind
the images might be shadowy or negative.
‘Moments’, for example, is an eloquent analysis of those instants of clarity triggered when seemingly unrelated events appear to reveal an unguessed-at synchronous relation in a
profoundly meaningful way. A quotation from the episode about the second ‘moment’ may well apply to the endings of some of Crichton Smith’s own stories: ‘And that is the
thing with “moments”. They illuminate but at the same time they don’t necessarily lead to what you call understanding. And in any case one man’s “moment” is
different from another man’s.’
A number of the stories end on a note of admirably equivocal epiphany – ambiguity is a common feature. For example, nothing seems clear-cut in ‘The Exorcism’, a story that
hinges upon interpretations of Kierkegaard’s philosophy, on which Crichton Smith dwells frequently in his stories and poems. (He was attracted to him partly because Kierkegaard was a poet as
well as a philosopher). Ideas and opinions in this story form a spectrum of merging colours – hues and tones that themselves often change as they are being regarded. Devils and saints,
realists and fantasists, the possessed and the overpowering encircle each other . . . and the result of the exorcism is satisfactorily problematic:
I looked at him for a long time knowing that the agony was over. It was a victory but an empty victory. And even in the midst of victory how could I be sure that this was
not indeed a second Kierkegaard, how could I be sure that I had not destroyed a genius? How could I be sure that my own harmonious jealous biography had not been superimposed upon his life,
as one writing upon another, in that wood where the birds sang with such sweetness defending their territory? I looked down at him white and exhausted. The exorcism was over. He would now
follow his unexceptional destiny.
Some of the stories (such as ‘The Angel of Mons’) employ experimental narratorial devices. Because Crichton Smith’s stories rarely offer neat conclusions, preferring instead to
scrutinise the world through highly subjective spectra, these devices often tend to be appropriate and satisfying.
‘The Ghost’ (from
Selected Stories
– not the same ghost that appears in
The Village
!) throws a shifting light on the ambivalence, the ambiguity, that can
underpin inherent inex-plicabilities of human existence – and the different ambiguities that can remain after an explanation has been offered, while the final story in
The Village
ends strongly but ambiguously: ‘After a while our ambitions, thank God, grow less.’ The implication is that the villagers are limited, kept in their place; and their place is, simply,
the village.
Some of these stories also explore an inherent duality in the human mind reminiscent of
Jekyll and Hyde
– for example ‘Mac an t-Sronaich’, the title of which refers to
a Lewis bogey-man, a dreaded character based upon a real-life murderer who stalked the moors of Lewis at one time and stalked the imaginations of storytellers and children just as effectively
thereafter.
‘The Old Woman, the Baby and Terry’ harks back to the theme of ambiguous survival, with an undertow of selfishness running strongly throughout. Even the baby in the womb has an
implied sense of innate manipulation: ‘The baby moved blindly in her womb, instinctively, strategically.’
Love is imperative: ‘ “I love you,” she said. “There’s nothing else for it.” ’ It is a source of their strength that many of Iain Crichton Smith’s
stories conclude with a unification of seemingly irreconcilable opposites in a single (and sometimes wholly enigmatic) dualism.
Naturally, one of the most pressing themes in the stories is that of education: the nature of education and of the institutions and individuals who decide what and how to teach. ‘Murder
without pain’ introduces us to Mr Trill, a name Crichton Smith calls upon in a number of stories and poems. Indeed, Trill represents an archetypal Crichton Smith figure: the principled
bachelor, a man so dedicated to routine his life seems to have shrunk all about him.
Trill is a devotee of the Roman intellect. He is such an admirer of the Classical contribution to culture that the reader feels he is almost out of place in the modern world. Disciplined, cool,
patient, respectful of that which he deems worthy of his respect, he feels threatened as his world-view is challenged by events at his school. The ending of this story – sometimes dismissed
as melodramatic – is confessedly and classically dramatic, as Trill decides to execute a form of justice that is ‘Greek to its very essence’.
‘The Ring’ is based upon an actual event that Iain witnessed during his own schooldays. It is told from the point of view of a pupil, but with the later revelation that the pupil
grew up to become a teacher. It is enticingly narrated and is, I think, one of Crichton Smith’s finest stories. The pupil’s attitude is clear: ‘After all, teachers were invincible
beings who appeared at the beginning of a period and left at the end of it . . . they were not human beings . . . like the rest of us.’ The adult’s subsequent attitude towards teaching
is clear, too, if more cynical:
It seemed to me that the best thing about geometry was it never lied to you, which is why I myself am a mathematics teacher as well. It has nothing to do with pain or
loss. Its refuge is always secure and without mythology.
‘The Play’ is an excellent and hugely engaging story that is also based upon a real event, this time when he was teaching at Oban High School. The girls in the class have ‘. .
. a fixed antipathy to the written word’. The teacher decides that if they will not read or write (‘Shakespeare is not necessary for hairdressing’ as he wryly concedes) then the
girls can involve themselves by acting out dramas. The story is an uplifting and a memorable one. Crichton Smith’s responsibility is to the human – not to the régime – to
individuality and not to conformity. The real-life drama of the original incident that inspired the story resulted in an astonished and pleased school inspector: meanwhile we empathise with the
teacher completely as he broods upon Miss Stewart’s snobbish dismissal of the pupils’ (and teacher’s) achievements:
You stupid bitch, he muttered under his breath, you
Observer
-Magazine-reading bitch who never liked anything in your life till some critic made it
respectable, who wouldn’t recognise a good line of poetry or prose till sanctified by the voice of London, who would never have arrived at Shakespeare on your own till you were
given the crutches.
This story of triumph
is
a triumph.
The Black and the Red
collection modulates into a new key with the masterful final story, ‘The Professor and the Comics’, an excellent narrative that melds the serious and
the humorous to great effect. The aptly named Professor Black’s comment that ‘Everything is different in spring . . . except history’ is dry and thought-flipping, like a Wildean
phrase.
The sinister shadows that lurk around many of Crichton Smith’s stories are often tempered by a humour that is clever, offbeat, punny or satirical. ‘By their Fruits’ runs in
parallel with Iain’s (posthumously published) narrative poem, ‘My Canadian Uncle’ and draws inspiration from a trip Iain and Donalda made to White Rock (Canada) to meet
Iain’s uncle, Torquil Campbell. It brings together a number of very Highland themes – exile, religion, and humour. It is both thought-provoking, subtle, and witty