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PAPER 1 ‘Shouting Too Loudly’: Leslie Mitchell, Humanism and the Art of Excess by William K Malcolm ASLS Conference Paper, 9 June 2001
One of the keenest passages of self-analysis by James Leslie Mitchell/ Lewis Grassic Gibbon occurs in the course of a letter written to his friend Helen Cruickshank, dated 18 November, 1933, written at the peak of Grassic Gibbon’s popular success.1 This famous letter begins with him thanking her for accepting the dedication of Scottish Scene and providing an update on his latest publishing plans. Having dispensed with the formalities – charmingly modulated, as ever – Mitchell then proceeds to more intimate literary matters, in a highly sensitive paragraph whose very sensitivity he himself acknowledges immediately afterwards when he describes it as witnessing him ‘pouring forth my soul abroad’. This letter has frequently been quoted – unfortunately sometimes in dilute form – in major critical writing upon Mitchell. However, I believe that detailed deconstruction of this passage - a passage with which readers have perhaps become over-familiar - yields vital keys to an understanding of Leslie Mitchell’s creative approach and, more pointedly, to his achievement as a supreme humanist, and indeed humanitarian, writer. At the beginning of this meaty paragraph, Mitchell responds with quite uncharacteristic equanimity to Helen Cruickshank’s negative comparison of his recently published historical novel Spartacus with the work of Naomi Mitchison. He lightly dismisses the actual criticism by pointing to the invidious nature of all literary comparisons, using a suitably hefty analogy : ‘rather like comparing the Bible to the Rig-veda, they’re so unalike’. His following defence outlining his motivation as an artist (and indeed as a man) develops a compelling momentum which has a psychological immediacy that gradually discloses Mitchell’s mature literary mindset. Initially, Mitchell picks up on a misgiving expressed previously by Helen Cruickshank. He comments fairly blandly about his general progress (‘It’s going very well’) before adding the apparently simple rider, ‘in spite of the pathological horrors’. The conventional view that he subscribes to here, then, is that his success and popularity have been achieved despite his mental preoccupation, taken to an unhealthy pathological extreme, with unspecified ‘horrors’. However, he immediately turns this qualification on its head, musing, ‘Or probably because of them….’. This shift from ‘despite’ to ‘because’ is fundamental to an understanding of Mitchell’s motivation as a writer: the ‘pathological horrors’, the demons that he cannot escape in his mind are, by extension, a strength in his art, rather than the supposed weakness. From here, Mitchell moves on to generalise about his personal obsession with acts of cruelty, confessing, ‘Yes, horrors do haunt me’, before directly attributing this condition to his humanism, reasoning: ‘That’s because I’m in love with humanity’. Now fully warmed to the topic, he embarks upon a sweeping trawl of historical atrocities first abroad and then at home which he personally feels blot out corresponding wonders, itemising his betes noires with captivating parallelism: ‘Ancient Greece is never the Parthenon to me: it’s a slave being tortured in a dungeon of the Athenian law-courts; Ancient Egypt is never the Pyramids: it’s the blood and tears of Goshen; Ancient Scotland is never Mary Queen: it’s those serfs they kept chained in the Fifeshire mines a hundred years ago. And so on.’ The next logical development is to update the picture, but with the striking addition of an awareness of the communal responsibility for this perceived malaise : ‘And so with the moderns: I am so horrified by all our dirty little cruelties and bestialities that I would feel the lowest type of skunk if I didn’t shout the horror of them from the house-tops [my emphasis].’ Then comes the most revealing sentence in this whole moral tirade: ‘Of course I shout too loudly.’ That assumptive and presumptive ‘of course’ is crucial to Mitchell’s declaration, elevating it to a kind of strategic mission statement, demarcating deliberate intent on his part. Overstatement is not just a temperamental habit; he is not just confiding his unchecked propensity to rant and rave; overstatement is recognised as a necessary part of his considered literary response. Circumstantial justification for this disposition is subsequently laid at the door of his contemporaries who have become distracted from the pressing social issues of the day and who have turned towards consideration of specious aesthetics, bound up in Nationalist politics. The broken syntax degenerating to an untypically vague catch-all reflects the writer’s animation: ‘But the filthy conspiracy of silence there was in the past! – and is coming again in Scotland, in a new guise, called Renaissance, and Objectivity, and National Art and what not.’ Finally, Mitchell loses his poise and directs unwarranted invective at the Mediaeval Makars, condemning his peers for ‘Blithering about Henryson and the Makars (whoever these cretins were) and forgetting the Glasgow slums….’ Mitchell regains self-control for the remainder of the letter, but his splenetic outburst in this central paragraph highlights an inescapable truth about his art as a whole: it is predicated on the belief that the artist inherits a moral obligation for the realistic positing of human suffering - in past, present or future - at the very core of his aesthetic. This grim perspective, ineluctibly homing in on the egregious flaws in man’s behaviour, is very much a tragic vision, where human nobility is all but undermined by life’s darker forces. To quote Mitchell’s crony Hugh MacDiarmid, ‘deep surroondin' darkness…/ Is aye the price o' licht’.2 Similarly, Leslie Mitchell was much more deeply absorbed by the social, moral and spiritual darkness of the twentieth century than by the apprehension of the wan light beyond. And his neo-tragic predilection to ‘shout too loudly’, Lear-like, as a voice from the darkness, lies, I contend, right at the heart of Leslie Mitchell’s achievement as an imaginative writer. Mitchell's emotional humanism, frequently manifested as a passionate humanitarianism, is all-pervasive in his writing. In his hugely revealing essay on ‘The Land’, Mitchell even forges his personal mantra, proclaiming ‘Humanity right or wrong!’3 This natural engagement with the welfare of ordinary folk can be traced from his school essay books, penned at thirteen years of age, brimming with wry and touching cameos of local and historical characters. And of course this simple preoccupation is most vividly captured thereafter in the characterisation in his mature writings, most prominently in LGG’s affectionate relish of foibles and quirks and eccentricities saturating the vibrant pages of the Scottish novels and stories. The peculiarities of Mitchell's background conditioned his move towards an outspoken forthrightness. Beyond his natural sesitivity, he was very much isolated within his family (with largely uncomprehending parents and half-brothers), at school (by virtue of his academic ability and disposition) and even within the community at large, where the smothering northeast farming conservatism traditionally undermined basic human rights (for example with regard to the female role), and where the prevailing political fatalism painted a bleak picture for the crofters' welfare. Protest against such a stifling background had of necessity to be trenchant. Mitchell's innate humanism, intensified by environmental circumstances, naturally led to his consistent and dogged pursuit of left-wing causes throughout his life, from his schoolboy rebelliousness through his early adult radicalism (galvanised by the outbreak of the Russian Revolution and, closer to home, the first hand - and probably hands-on - experience of Red Clydeside). From this, the noble ‘history of a revoluter’ (as he concisely described his socialism to Naomi Mitchison 4) moved through a douce anarchist phase, encompassing an interest in pacifism and diffusionism, to finally, a thrawn acceptance of the necessity of Marxist militancy and CP activism. This positive political ideology was underpinned by a series of formative shocks in Mitchell’s personal life. His own family experience of the grinding drudgery of crofting life confirmed that the city certainly did not have a monopoly on poverty. However, his six months spell living in post First World War Glasgow certainly disclosed a panoramic tableau of damning social conditions of positively Hogarthian ugliness. This was compounded by his later army experience which developed further images of human degradation and brutalisation a la Ewan Tavendale as well as of physical mutilation. And even in his personal life, tragedy erupted in the form of the near fatal miscarriage suffered by Ray in 1925, an event which scarred him so deeply that vignettes recur in his writing depicting the pains of childbirth, extending from his personal poetry to his very first novel Stained Radiance through to A Scots Quair itself. Subsequently, Leslie Mitchell can be seen forging his own individual brand of 'litterature engagee' which is absolutely in keeping with the definition of the French Marxist Louis Aragon, involving clear social commitment dependent upon the personal 'inner necessity' of the artist. Max Adereth's explanation from his influential essay from1967, 'What is Litterature Engagee?' throws valuable light upon the relationship between the radical writer's personal principles and his artistic credo: ' "Litterature engagee" is the application of commitment to the special field of literature. Its one and only requirement is that the writer should take part in the struggles of the age, and it urges him to do so, not because it is presumptuous enough to decree where his artistic duty lies, but, more modestly, because it knows the value of such a source of inspiration. Committed literature has no special themes, styles or methods - it is distinguished only by greater realism and by the author's attitude to life. These do not, by themselves, create a work of art, but they do enhance its quality. They help literature to make us aware of our true condition and to increase our sense of responsibility. In addition to providing aesthetic enjoyment, "litterature engagee" fulfils a "social function".' 5 This concept, then, preserves the notion of the author's living social commitment and of the realistic character of his artistic response within a more flexible framework than the severe dogma of 'socialist realism' which Leslie Mitchell was strongly influenced by - though never completely thirled to. In Leslie Mitchell’s own 'litterature engagee', it is his searing protest at social and moral injustice that is most true to his 'inner necessity', and which time and again dominates his writing. In his most mature essay on the role of the revolutionary writer in Left Review at the end of his life, Mitchell took this theory a step further, when he spelled out the revolutionary writers' collective function as being to constitute ' a shock brigade of writers'.6 His own strategic tendency to ‘shout too loudly’ thus repeatedly bursts to the fore in his non-fiction, achieving an all-embracing conviction, as in LGG’s famous indictment of the Glasgow slums. Here, the moral outrage again totally swamps all the finer sensations of human prowess, of art, of truth, of beauty. The author's fierce moral commitment culminates in an ideological trade-off between social and aesthetic values as finally he declares unequivocally: 'There is nothing in culture or art that is worth the life and elementary happiness of one of those thousands who rot in the Glasgow slums.' 7 The darker manifestation of Mitchell’s humanism – the concentration upon acts of violence and suffering – even obtrudes in his historical writings. The painstakingly researched academic works on the Maya revolve around imaginative empathy with the ordinary indians and their poor lot in the ancient Mayan theocracies, which inevitably involves physical torture and blood sacrifice. Again, this makes for very unsettling reading; and yet while Mitchell’s erudition per se counts for little nowadays, his imaginative humanism illuminates his recreation of the ancient world. However, it is in his fiction that Mitchell’s predisposition to ‘shout too loudly’ is most marked, and indeed most convincing. While the optimistic epiphanies of his early stories and novels are moral props largely incorporated for the indulgence of commercially interested publishers who had warned Mitchell about the unpopularity of the ironic tone of his first novel, the essential JLM remains the bold realist who grapples directly with images of life's absurdity - indeed, with images of a truly grotesque character. Image and Superscription and Spartacus, two of Mitchell's mid-period novels in which he yokes his humanism to a representational style that I would term 'the art of excess', provide an illuminating comparison as experiments in 'litterature engagee' - the first adopting a picaresque form, the second that of the historical novel. Image and Superscription was conceived in the early thirties as Mitchell's second novel. However, much of this early draft was plundered for The Thirteenth Disciple, his second published novel, to which he transferred the autobiographical Scottish passages.8 Finally published in March 1933, Image and Superscription thus stands at the very core of his oeuvre between Sunset Song and Cloud Howe and cries out for further exploration, as an almost completely neglected novel whose integral strengths on the one hand and whose structural defects on the other indicate the true wellspring of Mitchell's artistry. The book follows a familiar pattern in Mitchell's fiction as a symbolic pilgrimage representing the quest for light in the darkness of modern life. In its picaresque sweep, however, Gershom Jezreel's tale discloses a comprehensive conspectus of human atrocities, from gory ancient Mayan statues and tales of barbarous cruelty perpetrated by Vercingetorix's men to the eye-witness account of a Ku Klux Klan lynching in modern Kentucky and the horrific slaughter orchestrated in the trenches on both sides during the First World War. The early portion of Gershom Jezreel's narrative constructs a biography shaped by darkly ambivalent forces, with a tyrannical and brutalised father - John Guthrie taken to an extreme - tormenting a warmly sympathetic mother whose inevitable departure is preceded by Gershom's aptly ironic insight: 'But his father, and his father's shadow, conjoint, half-lit in the flickering candle-low, bending in threatening attitude over his mother - it was inexplicable, it was terror. And it came in time to be all the dark, wild, dreadful things of human life, it came to be humankind itself on the darkened stage of the universe. The Image became for him Man, it is his story and his story's leitmotif.' 9 Gershom cannot but believe in his grandfather's atheistic philosophy, therefore: 'There was no order at all in the universe, no plan, no threat, no law, nothing but a fight to feed the stomach and plant the seed of the genitals.' 10 Gershom's own philosophy wavers between the pagan and the absurdist. He perceives the earth as a 'bonnie broukit bairn': 'It flowered its greenery of spring, this little planet, a skin and a fairy feathering, it blossomed white as with down in the apple-blossom and the cherry-blossom, it darkened to autumn's slow brown, it grew bare and it rose to green again. And amid this lush growing and dying, florescence and fading, a piping of little voices rose unending, unbeginning, a maggot-imagery and a maggot-swarming questioning the white hands of space….' 11 Gershom finds relief from this bleak prospect in his love with Ester and in a diffusionist understanding of the accidental evolution of civilisation and its attendant maladies. Yet ultimately, his discovery of faith in human nature is offset by a more deeply etched consciousness of human suffering. In a narrative which moves swiftly between settings as disparate as Chatham, Palenque, the Gulf of Mexico, Kentucky, and various European locations from Paris to Mitchell's home base of Welwyn, global scenes of selective cruelty cry out in vivid agony - in the exotic forms of a sacrificial statue in a Mayan temple and the symbolically aggressive roar of the jaguar, or in the domestically humdrum - yet even more shocking - physical persecutions of an abusive father. Two viscerally realistic scenes stand out in this torrent of human brutality. Firstly, the report of Ester's traumatic witnessing of a particularly savage Ku Klux Klan killing - involving the sadistic murder of a victim's widow and her unborn foetus - gains additional shock-effect from Mitchell's authorial gloss affirming its factual basis. The second peculiarly potent example of Mitchell's 'art of excess' focuses on Gershom's suffering at the Front in the First World War. The specific experience of the trenches is in fact tackled much more directly here than in Sunset Song, with the protagonist's own physical and mental torture being accompanied by graphically observed battlefield scenes, centring upon the excoriating sight of a dead Saxon soldier suspended on the barbed wire, 'like Saint Peter of legend, crucified upside down and with head to earth'. 12 The moral charge developed in these scenes fully sustains a vision of the grotesque character of life as a whole, a vision possessing a bracing integrity which hasa strong affinity with Chris Guthrie's 'philosophy of Change' : 'Life was no flower, it was mindless, the crawling of a mindless fecundity, changing and passing, changing and passing. Man was a beast who walked the earth, snarling his needs and lowing his fears, and with other beasts he would perish and pass, a ripple on the cosmic mind that itself was mindless….' 13 The book's idealistic resolution, with Gershom finding personal romance and 'salvation' in the sanguine affirmation that 'Man's a hero, not a beast by nature 'n' intention' 14 is correspondingly slight and ineffectual. Thanks to the author's piercing cries of protest, the earlier Image of human barbarity remains largely undiminished and largely unsuperscribed at the end of the book. The outstanding success among Mitchell’s English novels is Spartacus, published only five months after Image and Superscription. So what makes the difference? The historical novel succeeds, as the author tacitly suggested to Helen Cruickshank, precisely because it fulfils more fully than the others his literary objective to ‘shout too loudly’. Dorothy Tweed, the book's dedicatee and the staunchest supporter of her writer friend JLM, even told me that she herself couldn't bear to pick the book up after her first encounter with her presentation copy. Mitchell’s historical novel is indeed nothing like Mitchison’s smoothly delineated sagas, but an unavoidable cry of pain and of rage. This superb novel represents Mitchell's most articulate channelling of his moral indignation and humanism. It is also his single most balanced and perfectly integrated work of 'litterature engagee'. Interestingly, Naomi Mitchison herself didn't like Spartacus, complaining that the novel lacked true historical veracity.15 Yet this is to misunderstand Mitchell's actual intentions in the novel. Over sixty years after its first appearance, the author's focus now appears thoroughly modern. The concentrated narrative exclusively promotes the slaves' viewpoint, unflinchingly probing incidences of individual and mass cruelty perpetrated by men upon fellow men. Casual or organised acts of the utmost savagery are commonplace, from the original rebellion at Capua through the epic encounters in what Elpinice accurately classes as 'a war' 16: the bloody defeats of armies of Clodius and Furius in Campania, of Cossinus in Salenae, of Varinus in Lucania, of Manius outside Mutina; the retreat south from the cusp of conquering Rome itself. The brutality continues unabated in the saga of the unsuccessful exodus to Sicily and the final heroic defeat by Crassus at Calabria, culminating in the stomach-churning reprisals of the Romans with mass crucifixions along the Appian Way. All the correct political responses are elucidated paradigmatically in the course of the slaves’ battle for freedom. Yet ultimately the novel’s power rests upon the balanced way in which the moral indictment standing at the heart of the book is sustained. The use of Kleon's consciousness as the emasculated victim of the Roman empire allows for objective but painstakingly accurate rendering of acts of the extremist violence. As 'there were no tears in the body that had lost its manhood',17 the institutionalised cruelty of Roman society subsequently is relayed with little emotion. This counterpoints with Spartacus himself. Introduced initially as a 'bandit' who kills a retiarius in gladiatorial training in sheer mindless rage,18 he does learn to shed tears, in increasing abundance. His sensibility, like Ewan Tavendale's in Grey Granite, is the one that 'shouts' with uninhibited moral and emotional fervour. Spartacus, indeed, assumes the role of symbolic avenger, heroically pitted against the forces of oppression. Yet he is also 'the Voice of the voiceless'19 - the custodian of the conscience of the oppressed slaves throughout their 'orgy of hate'.20 His own aggression is tempered by a generous humanitarianism which embraces the mixed races among the slave army and even extends to conquered enemies. Accordingly, while the brutality in Spartacus is realised with shocking intensity, it is not gratuitous but firmly yoked to Mitchell’s moral and political objective to dramatise the full horror of the human capacity for cruelty – and subsequently to affirm the full extent of the redemptive force required to counter and to conquer it. The magnificent closing image of the novel - a close up of Kleon’s individual death agony – is clinically conceived. Mitchell systematically traces his physical deterioration in the pain of his individual wounds, his dehydration and defecation to his increasing vulnerability to scavenging beasts. The disjointed and slowly diminishing stream of consciousness is equally scabrous, with his mental montage of their dramatic escapades graduating into a closing apotheosis fusing Spartacus's martyrdom with Christ’s suffering. This climactic vision denotes a dynamic authorial engagement with the ‘pathological horrors’ of human history. For here, in contrast to Image and Superscription, Mitchell also moves towards achieving a genuine imaginative exorcism of the horrors. In Spartacus, in fact, Mitchell's humanism coalesces beautifully with his Absurdism: within the spiritual barrenness of life, Spartacus's nobility is absolutely radiant, as Kleon finally 'went into unending night and left them [Spartacus and Christ] that shining earth'.21 The same phenomenon of the author’s demonstrable capacity to ‘shout too loudly’ is also in evidence in the most famous Grassic Gibbon fiction - although it is generally more understated and subtly synthesised within the realistic form. Sunset Song, Cloud Howe and Grey Granite all draw their inner strength from the author’s moral protest at harsh social conditions prevailing in the Scottish countryside, in the town and in the city. Sunset Song perhaps convinces most in the intimately crafted individual tragedies of the crofters – ordinary people caught up in malevolent forces of which they have no understanding. The lasting power of Sunset Song lies in the capping of the rumbustious humour of the earlier sections and the lyrical nature-loving sensibility of Chris Guthrie with the gut-wrenching pathos of Ewan Tavendale’s fate, a modern tragedy given fresh immediacy by the catharsis undergone vicariously by LGG’s heroine, and with Chris’s own invigoratingly fatalistic apprehension of the overarching principal of universal change. And in terms of ‘shouting loudly’, Robert Colquohoun’s closing threnody for Long Rob, Chae Strachan, John Guthrie and Ewan Tavendale is eloquently wrought in its rhetorical construction as a sermon. But even this is not enough for the author, who embellishes the whole effect with the lyrically achieved rural setting and the poignancy of the accompanying bagpipe lament. This crafted synthesis arguably shows Mitchell fulfilling his artistic aim to ‘shout too loudly’ most convincingly, with the overwhelming sense of human waste and loss finally punching forward purposefully towards the future. The specific techniques employed in the second and third volumes of the trilogy emulate the success of the first, with again a strong predilection for literary overkill. The social commentary upon deteriorating social conditions throughout the twenties is sharply presented in Cloud Howe through individual melodramatic anecdotes largely attesting to the spinners’ continuing misfortunes, but also including emotive agit-prop style episodes such as the parable of the Kindness family's almost biblical rejection by society at large. And of course the personal trauma of Chris’s miscarriage reflects metaphorically the collapse of the General Strike, with Robert’s own individual demise – dramatically obliterating the pages of the pulpit Bible in a gush of crimson blood – capturing with near- hyperbole the full import of his personal political failure. Mitchell again deploys Robert’s ministerial function through his dying sermon to give a rhetorical flourish to his novel’s climax. Grey Granite again sees the author attempting to ‘shout too loudly’, but this time in a voice and a literary style tempered to deal with the austere social and political circumstances being addressed in the urban novel. Young Ewan Tavendale obviously emerges as the author’s main political vehicle; it is through his moral empathy and his accelerated political apprenticeship that the novel’s key political themes are represented. The parallel with Spartacus is instructive, with Ewan’s increasing militancy being shaped by his sensitivity to signs of squalor and deprivation amongst the proletariat at large. His heightened social conscience, expressed in a series of powerful interior monologues, is clearly the author’s main means of expressing his austere political theme – that hard-line Communist activism represents the sole prospect for the ordinary people to win improved social conditions. In ‘shouting too loudly’, Ewan’s moral homilies and political apologias develop a growing fervour and provide convincing counterbalance to Chris's peasant fatalism. Mitchell borrowed techniques from the European novel and particularly the Russian socialist realists to develop the art of his urban novel. He is still sadly underestimated for his use of Eisenstein-like political montage, for the translation of his rural folk narrator into an anonymous communal urban voice and for the introduction of the highly imaginative Marxist symbolism employed judiciously throughout the book to capture the desirability of the Marxist ideal. Yet it is Ewan’s plaintive - and desperate - humanitarianism that pulls the whole novel together. While Chris struggles to find meaning beyond 'the fleshless grin of the skull and the eyeless sockets at the back of life' in the regenerative powers of the natural world,22 Ewan seeks his destiny in more prosaic political activities. Ironically his entirely mute disappearance on the road to political oblivion – or martyrdom - constitutes the single most telling authorial cry in the whole trilogy. As a humanist, Mitchell directed his work towards clear moral, social and political ends – most forcefully in the works where he shows a propensity to ‘shout too loudly’. An ironic side-effect of his intense humanitarianism was a concomitant lack of belief in the whole force of art itself, including his own. He poured scorn on Henryson and the Makars as ‘cretins’, purely because he felt they were being revived at the wrong time, a time when more pressing social and political issues were crying out to be addressed. In his polemic on 'Glasgow' he even goes so far as to proclaim a willingless to sacrifice all art for just the tiniest possibility of some kind of social relief . Yet, paradoxically, it was precisely in this absolute dedication to the overriding aim to ‘shout too loudly’, to sublimate his art to the articulation of the austere vision of the revolutionary writer, that Leslie Mitchell found his true literary voice. Louis Aragon has observed that the truly committed writer should aim to leave of himself 'une image vraie', a true image. In this sense, Spartacus and A Scots Quair embody Leslie Mitchell's true humanist profile. Leslie Mitchell’s death at age 34 means that his writings are wholly, by definition, those of a young man. His search for solutions to moral problems, to social problems, to political problems, to philosophical problems also had the urgency of a young man. In the final analysis, Mitchell's 'litterature engagee' is more compelling in its dramatisation of the Image of the 'horrors' of life themselves than in its almost desperate efforts to Superscribe them. ‘Of course’ he shouted too loudly. And of course we appreciate why he did so. We still heed, and need, his voice today.
Notes
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