Personal Blogs

Prior to attending an event on Saturday, this is a chance to sum up the effect on me of an introduction to, (through the work of a contemporary novelist I admire enormously, Jenni Fagan), an author hitherto unknown to me.

Jessie Kesson is no longer at all well-known – even in Scotland it may appear if booksellers in Edinburgh I have consulted are to be believed – but coming across her work has been a great revelation to me and has solved some of the mysteries[1], whilst perhaps opening up more, about why Fagan’s The Panopticon is such a miraculous novel.

It has solved some because I could find no influence to account for the wonderful novelty of the latter’s novel, The Panopticon, until I read Kesson and particularly this early great ‘autobiographical’ novel. ‘Autobiographical’ is a problematic label for a work and can lead to severe misreading – as in the case of Tennessee William’s The Glass Menagerie, which has been restored to primacy for its literary merit from that ambiguous label by recent productions not least that by the American Repertory Theatre in Edinburgh currently.

After reading TWBP first, I found myself compelled to read the rest of her small oeuvre and even the fine life by Isobel Murray and I felt as trapped by the desire to trace a life as others have done before Kesson’s novels. However, my re-reading has opened up so much more in the book’s literary resources.

In TWBP, when we are told that:

Janie was a fearty. Feared of so many things that left Gertie unafraid. Like the women when they fought. … Janie’s fear was never for the actual but for the imagined.’ (p. 36)

We are inclined to read this autobiographically, as a glance into the unexpressed in a child’s response to an almost brutally violent childhood, despite other charms. The Scottish lexis and syntax here moreover might, in some eyes, reduce this to a kind of folksy charm – especially in the metaphor of witches used to realise her fears of female power – it seems redolent to poor English readers of Burns’ Tam O’Shanter, a poem woefully under-read (in every sense) in England. But there is so much more here, that strikes through the novel’s literary resources. What Janie fears after all is not the brutality of others but that of which she believes herself capable: defending her mother would have her ‘batter the women’s faces against the cobbles,’ and more. The strength of feeling about mothers is difficult to allow to rest in merely biographical speculation, though that has its worth – it also reveals a genuine contribution of this writer to the analysis of feminine ‘affect’, a subject too often explored just by men or by women reacting to male representations of them.

Readers of Kesson cannot have missed her passion for woods – or the woods for passion (in Another Time, Another Place). That passion is complex and compact of fear as well as attraction. Yet these moments come in parts of the novels often singled out for praise for their faithfulness to a kind of ethnic Scottishness. Yet it is these parts that deal most often with what in female power and control in relation especially to the unknown in men. Leaving her grandmother’s cottage with Liza, her mother, she passes into her grandfather’s wood – a place replete with his belligerent reticence which cause Janie to wonder whether he be a ‘wild man’.

Beyond that however, Janie ‘wondered at her Mother’s easy intimacy with this country.’ Liza’s literacy edges on to her knowledge of men and to other unknowns that make up the multiple character of Liza to Janie – not least the very different ways in which the novel variously names that woman at its ‘dark heart’:

The foosty guff of an ancient wood drifted over and past in great imprisoning waves. The Hangman’s Tree loomed high in this dark heart of things. (p. 59)

The man who cannot be hanged within this wood because even the Devil would not want him inevitably segues into ‘your father of course’. But, what, does this mean for Janie. Her narrator here, hinting at an omniscience that is lessened in effect if we merely think of it as an elder woman’s knowledge of her younger self, becomes oblique in her dark suggestions and, for me, opens up quite stunning literary affect:

Those rare moods of communication between Janie and her Mother more than made up for the other things lacking in their relationship. And, yet, if these moments had never existed, it would have been so much easier for Janie in the years to come. (p. 60)

This is much more challenging a moment if we credit it with literary and narrative drive (with aesthetic function) rather than allow it to stand aside as an autobiographical intrusion into the narrative. That Lisa creates problems for her daughter by opening up areas that might better stay shut down and locked up is the puzzle of this and other Kesson novels. We should recall that the wood is potentially all affect and one associated with the locked up or that which locks up: ‘over and past in great imprisoning waves.’ There is no doubt that as a novel Kesson locates emotional transference (projective and introjected) between women as an area of potential danger – in need of governance (a theme which strikes through her interest in women who take on social work, as Kesson herself did).  

Images of security: comparative safety and imprisonment, run through TWBP in complex ambivalent moments. In the absence of men, grandmother can explore what they leave behind, ‘a legacy of freedom’ (65) but it is a freedom to catch moments ‘of an imprisoned summer’. An almost lyrical freedom in the surrounding passage is equally constrained by the ‘silent reproach’ that countenances it. The only woman securely safe is the one she hates most – Aunt Morag with her treasure chest containing scents ‘remaining forever secret’. How different the from the smells of the Lane that are recalled in Mannie, the husband of the owner of her care-home, and the consequent ‘awful smell’ on Janie herself (p. 18) that she blames on the cat pee under the beds in order to protect her mother’s reputation as ‘caring’. Look, for instance, at the ambiguous syntax in the sentence in which Liza discovers that Janie was ‘neglected, and in need of care and protection.’ (p. 91). It is ambivalent because the narrator here too could be seen as collusive with the judgement of the social workers.

In the Lane, the women are divided about their competence as carers and even the apparently warmest, dark Mysie with the ‘coal-black mother’, provides a way out through suicide very early in the novel. This ambivalence in Janie strikes through the contrasting hyper-themes of paragraphs on p. 80:

‘And the bairn would be better in a Home,’ wee Lil agreed. … God only knows there can be no example for a bairn up at 285. There’s no’ much of a life for any bairn in the Lane, if it comes to that.’

If Janie had heard Lil’s sentiments she would have been entirely out of agreement with them. The lane was home and wonderful. …

That conditional expression in the second paragraph with its carefully modalised verbs not only predicts a counterfactual reaction in Janie – counterfactual because it does not happen, she was not present to hear what we and the narrator hear – but labels it as a very partial judgement, one with which the reader can easily differ. Of course, Janie cannot see her mother’s openness about men, including dark men shared with Mysie, as problematic – without perpetually defending her. Defending her, whilst she exposes her too to further critique in the classic manner of ‘disclosure work’ for the social worker. In the narrative Janie’s incarceration (or is it freedom) in a ‘Home’ occurs because of her (naïve?) disclosure to a council officer – a social worker (or ‘cruelty officer’). It is a disclosure that everyone but her (Beulah but even Gertie) sees as foolhardy. It was unnecessary and suggests that Janie may not really have wanted to stay with her mother.

Liza is a strange fish – seen as both bold and vulnerable, in control or lost, and as forever ‘multiple’ in her appearances – apparently welcoming but forever standing apart and off. Bowlby would have diagnosed the inconsistent and ambivalent carer-type. Thus, Janie, just before Mysie’s suicide indirectly opines:

I can hug Mysie Walsh. And smell her hair and I can’t do that to my own mam. Though she’s much bonnier than Mysie Walsh. If Janie had been suddenly stricken with blindness she would have had no perpetual picture of her mother in her memory. … Her Mother had so many faces. (p. 16)

And Liza – beautiful but doomed - is also potentially Lucifer (the Morning Star doomed to fall) him/herself – an image replete with Shelley and Milton:

But Liza had been beautiful, Janie remembered. Almost like Shelley said. Her beauty made the bright world dim. … All the other women of the lane had been grey. Prisoners clamped firmly into the dour pattern of its walls and cobblestones. But Liza had always leapt, burnished, out of her surroundings. And in the leaping had made the world bright.’

This in the moment that Janie again naively recognises the changed appearance of her mother caused by the later stages of syphilis. Janie even imagines using the doctor’s ‘line’ declaring the syphilis to help in her mother’s case – but to help how? She knows Mrs Thane would be more loath to allow Janie to return to her mother, if it was to become her carer during a terminal illness and I think the Janie of the novel has by its end began to concur in that – to stand outside the potent memories built on her childhood defences of a Mother, before whom one must, even as a child, be quiet and wordless: ‘In moments like these it just took one word, one false move to wreck a promise’ (p. 56).

This great novel of ‘ootlins’ is, for me rightly aspirant, like Janie herself, to be: ‘As great as Shakespeare’ (p.145) and it is another sign of English ignorance of great Scottish literature that she is in danger now of being forgotten.

If we really valued Britishness over a more open and participatory nationalism, we English would do something about it. Let’s see if it ever happens that Scottish literature appears in more than the margins of the literary canon.

All the best

Steve