It is a safe bet that Alex Salmond has no immediate plans to embrace Allan Massie as one of Scotland’s National Treasures. A Unionist in an increasingly nationalist country, a traditionalist in a time of change, an ungoogler engulfed by the internet, and an amateur of creative activities, cultural and sporting, when the fashion is for professional analysis, Massie could hardly be more out of step with the prevailing ethos of his countrymen. Yet, this collection of his Life & Letters columns for The Spectator illustrates why the larger community of readers and writers should clasp him to their collective bosom as a figure of genuine literary distinction.
As the author of 22 novels and 11 works of non-fiction, as well as a stream of journalism — literary criticism, social punditry and an authoritative rugby column for the Scotsman — Massie is evidently not prone to writer’s block. In one of these essays, he contrasts the hell that composition caused Joseph Conrad — ‘In the course of a working day of eight hours, I write three sentences which I erase before leaving the table in despair’ — with Anthony Trollope’s matter-of-fact remark,‘I finished on Thursday the novel I was writing. On Friday I started another. Nothing frightens me but the idea of enforced idleness.’ There’s little doubt which school Massie belongs to: ‘Without a book to work on,’ he writes, ‘we novelists wouldn’t know how to get through the day’ — but productivity brings its own penalties.
It has long been the business of academic criticism to tuck messy writers into neat silos of literary tradition, but that goal is frustrated by the sheer range of Massie’s fiction, from contemporary (in the late 1970s) social observation with a hint of Anthony Powell, by way of historical novels set variously in the second world war, the Roman empire, and the early Middle Ages, through an intriguing exploration of alcoholism, to his most recent, Simenonian detective books located amid the shifting loyalties of Vichy France.
For academia, the present collection of articles on the business of writing offers a solution to its problem because it affords a glimpse of the underlying purpose of Massie’s work. But, as Spectator readers will be aware, their wider appeal lies in their intelligence and a conversational style that invites you to share in his ruminations about the way different authors deal with the challenge of putting into narrative form an inchoate swirl of thought and perception.
Indeed, for would-be writers, the breadth of practical experience accumulated here would by itself make these essays invaluable — V.S. Pritchett on beginning a story with the observation of two people and the attempt to solve the puzzle, ‘What does she see in him?’, Hemingway on starting a new day by reading back what was written yesterday, Disraeli on background settings: ‘Description is always a bore’, Massie himself on writing about contemporary events: ‘Novelists need time. Novels are made in part from recollection’, and Mailer on acknowledging self-deceit, ‘a writer no matter how great is never altogether great; a small part of him remains a liar.’ That last quote is revealing. Mendacity, it turns out, helps answer a question that permeates the collection, the reason for writing at all.
The motives that Massie himself offers — ambition, addiction, pleasure, escapism — are real enough, but less convincing for himself than the one he disdains, ‘because you have something to say’. If there is a single strand running through the variety of his novels, it is the exploration of how a self-deceitful individual attempts to achieve an integrity of behaviour in treacherous times; when, in Eliot’s words, ‘Unnatural vices/ Are fathered by our heroism. Virtues/ Are forced upon us by our impudent crimes.’ Conspiracy in Rome, corruption in the second world war, subversion in Vichy France, there is no easy footing for any of his protagonists. In this sense, Massie is unmistakably a moral writer, not preachingly, but in the priority attached to individual conscience, however flawed and selfish, over public opinion, however clear-cut and apparently worthy.
It is a stance as embedded in Scots tradition as Jenny Geddes hurling her stool at a minister who presumed too far on his spiritual authority over her, and it is expressed with a vigour and a clarity of language to rival the pristine English John Knox employed in his History of the Reformation in Scotland. You may not like the idea, Mr Salmond, and no doubt Mr Massie likes it less, but it is time to stretch out your arms to one of Scotland’s treasures.
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