I was once asked to visit a school to give advice on the writing of poetry to some pupils taking the sixth-year “creative writing” option. I told them that in my opinion creative writing had nothing to do with schools, that because educational institutions took to do with creative literature this did not mean that literature had, or should have, anything to do with educational institutions. This last sentence I repeated, as it pointed to a distinction that has become blurred in many people’s minds, who think that the highest acclaim a writer can expect is to be “set”—as they say of concrete—in an examination; nor is it a distinction that some teachers seemed keen to accept.
The advice I gave was this: since all subjects in schools are exam-centred, then the first thing to do with the “creative-writing” course, as with any other, is to go to the past papers, to see what the anonymous examiners want. I had had a look at some of the past papers myself, in my preparations for my visit to the school. It seemed that what was required was a poem in the style of an established twentieth-century Scottish poet—eg MacCaig, Morgan, MacDiarmid in Scots; this poem should be on a theme of the type usually asked for each year; and the poem should be written from a generally liberal-Christian point of view—at any rate some previous questions had seemed to assume this as the standpoint of the person setting the exam.
The pupils should compose such a poem as soon as possible at the start of the course, learn it by heart, and dump it down when it came to the big day. The idea of actually writing a poem “under exam conditions” was an obscenity, an absurdity, and the whole idea had more to do with how certain educationalists fancied one should regard the status of literature in schools than it had to do with the reality of the creative process—or anything else. By even considering it possible to create a poem in an exam, the pupils would be insulting Art, insulting their own existence—and all to flatter some anonymous people who thought that in their own quiet, modest way they were perhaps just carrying out the next logical step in the management of the course of Literature.
I was trying to be practical though, not simply dismissive. Having got their “exam poem” out the road, pupils could spend the main part of the course time actually trying to do some serious writing. Whether or not they could physically do the writing in a classroom, nonetheless the weekly setting aside of time for writing could be a good stimulus and discipline. If the writing was done at home, then the time at school could be used to hold writers’ group discussions (the chairperson’s role being in rotation) assuming enough were doing the course to form a group. The extent of the teacher’s involvement, if any, would depend on individual circumstances. Some teachers might be a help, others could be an impediment. If the pupils were serious about writing, they had to realise that they themselves were in control: if need be the writers’ group should take a vote on whether or not the teacher be made welcome to attend.
But besides meaning teaching people how to write poetry, the phrase “teaching poetry” can mean teaching people to read it, and teaching them what you think is worth reading. I’ve already writtten elsewhere (e.g. in “The Proof of the Mince Pie” Scottish International 1973) that I see “English Literature” exams in schools and universities as central anti-creative rites in which Art is turned into property and students compelled to be witnessed in an act of acquisition. The property derived from the work of art is sold as a commodity to the examiner, who places a value on it and ultimately offers in return a bill of currency. The devaluation suffered by this currency in times of high unemployment does not alter the principles on which the exchange has taken place. This is not to mention either the effect the exams have in deciding the range of poetry that is held to be “serious”, ie that which is most suited to examination marking. A “real” poem is one which can be seen as a kind of treasure chest of valuables, which the student should remove one by one and display to the examiner. Most valuables are wrapped in “figures of speech”. Those traditions of poetry that have abandoned that way of composition since before the First World War, tend to be treated as “marginal”. One reason is because examiners haven’t yet worked out a gradeable vocabulary of criticism.
So far, so negative—though it’s what I believe, in these aspects. Yet all I am trying to articulate, here as in other essays, is how the philosophic basis of the system of teaching literature within schools and universities cannot but reflect the philosophic basis of the society of which these institutions are a part. That basis of our society is:
object = property = commodity
which is extended to include
human = object = property = commodity
which, by the way, is the “reasoning” behind the current mass closures planned in Strathclyde.
What Art offers as refutation of this last equation, through and in a work of art, is
human = object = human
by which I mean the relationship between writer writing and reader reading.
What I’m talking about, then, is Art as Encounter. But the teaching of Literature as I have experienced it consists of the teaching of a theology of encounter by which people are rewarded according to their ability to speak convincingly of a personal encounter that has not usually taken place. It has not usually taken place because such an encounter can only occur where the self has the freedom not to have this encounter if it doesn’t want to, and not to speak of this encounter if it actually has occurred. There are generations of people who have been reared to think that Art is something that exists in order that people might pour torrents of critical opinion over one another, and that the person who is reduced to silence by the presence of a work of art is either an ignoramus or a fool. But the first right that ought to be maintained in the presence of a work of art is the right to silence, though this right to silence is precisely what the present educational system attempts to reject. A “candidate” of course though still does have the right to be silent if he or she so chooses: after all, a person can choose to have Nothing Out of Ten, which is the going rate for silence on the educational free market. But the most worthwhile criticism that I have listened to has always come from someone who has felt the necessity, after a while, retrospectively to examine the nature of the silence to which they have been reduced.
I grew up in Pollok, a housing-scheme in the south-west of Glasgow. It was just a housing-scheme to me, in other words a mass of houses without history that had been constructed mostly after the war. Being of the Catholic tribe, I daily passed safely through three miles of Protestants and other non-Catholics on my way to Cardonald, where was to be found the nearest Catholic Secondary. I spent all my leisure time either exclusively with these tribal friends, or else on my own, doing such things as following the lemonade and beer bottles down the River Levern stream, throwing stones at them until I could record that another German U-boat had been sunk. But I have children of my own now, and I’m no longer interested in the minutiae of my own childhood. What I am interested in is the childhood of the place that I had my childhood in; I feel that the more I know of that then the more concretely I will understand the society my own children are now inheriting. It can be easy to be pessimistic, seeing thousands upon thousands of children growing up in a society wher to be under 25 years of age seems increasingly to be regarded as some kind of social crime; a society swamped with goods produced by cheap labour overseas, imported through non-union cheap labour merchant ships, sold in high street shops—whose profits have never been higher—by cheap-labour young people on what is called “training schemes”; sold to customers, many of them unemployed, through credit schemes financed from the profits the companies are making. Human equals object equals property equals commodity.
No other water in Scotland of anything like equal dimensions, we verily believe, contributes nearly so much to the manufacturing prosperity of the country, as does the Levern in its short course of some six or seven miles. A sadly tortured streamlet it is, in truth. What with dams, and ladles, mill-wheels and colouring matters of every hue, with which its bosom is fretted and stained at every turn, it has really a pitiable common-sewer aspect by the time it gets sneaking into the Cart beyond Crookston. Its pollution, however, is associated with the prosperity of the Barrhead people. Their printfields, factories, and bleachfields, are dependent on its originally pellucid waters, and without them their “decline and fall” would speedily be consummated. Long, therefore, may it continue a willing and useful drudge! Lackadaisical poets may whine over the decay of sentiment, and puling painters maunder about the destruction of the beautiful; but to our mind the most interesting of streams is that on the banks of which exists an industrious, a comfortable, and an intelligent population.
So writes Hugh MacDonald, in his Rambles Round Glasgow of 1854. Peter MacArthur’s “Levern Water Revisited” from his Musings in Minstrelsy (1880) seems to be the type of “whining” MacDonald had in mind:
All now seems changed; yon pearly clouds, high on their azure way,
Look dimmer now, and yon far hills seem veil’d in darker grey;
The cottage where my fathers dwelt—“the auld thack house”—is gone;
Where round my mother’s feet I play’d there’s no remaining stone;
Gone are the bow’rs where Age repos’d; or Youth, with whisp’ring tale,
Sat, when the gloamin’ hours were past, beneath the star-light pale,
Though still with chiding wail,
The Levern winds by brake, and loan,
And fills my ear with sorrowing moan.
But all literature is evidence and information. Who were MacArthur’s models? When did printed poems first arrive in Pollok? Who had the first libraries? Who had access to them? Which of the plants and animals mentioned in poems are still there? What did the poets do for a living? What did the land look like before all the council houses were built? Who didn’t have leisure to write?
I think that poetry should be used as a source of material information, and the aesthetic experience be left private to the individual. I think that people should be given the confidence and the means to construct their own place in the history of the world and its literature, setting out from what is within sight and touch of their own physical being. I would like it if teachers in schools were somehow taught, or were required to find out, the application of their particular discipline to the particular locality in which they teach. I mean that the school should be in fact a centre of local learning and information about the ground on which teachers and pupils walk, what was on it before the school and the surrounding houses were built, and what the people in that locality did, wrote, and made as far back as the history of that locality can be traced. It’s from what people see, hear and touch, from where they physically are that the educational process should begin, from where people can be “led out”—and given the means to choose their own history. Without this, I think a person’s sense of history may be restricted to an isolated Story of their Own Childhood, and passivity and a mythology of inevitabililty about societal change be the result.
I want schools to get away from the idea of literature as a reservoir of characters” from whom “we” derive “our” sense of moral values and knowledge of LIfe: this assumes that the moral values, and the knowledge of Life, is such as has already been discovered by the teacher and the anonymous body of examiners. It assumes a fixed core of values which the literature is thought to exemplify, and a fixed core of knowledge at which teacher and examiner have safely arrived. This kind of complacency leads for instance to the blanket pre-eminence given to George Orwell in the literature curriculum in schools, even in classes where very few novels are read. I believe his centrality is as a powerful maker of frightening allegories that are generally used to teach young people What Our Society Is Not, ie “what the other half of the world is”. Only by recognising how many thousands of children each year receive this message can one begin to ask whether the societies depicted by Orwell are in such striking antithesis to our own.
*
A boy is walking by the banks of the Levern. He remembers that a book he was reading says the origin of the word was in “Levernani”, a Pictish tribe. There’s been some argument about that though. How long after the Ice Age would that be? Pollok was full of those drumlin things when you looked around: the hill up Leithland Road down past the chapel, the hill at the back of the school, the hill over the Green Bridge at Braidcraft Road.
He looked left from the Green Bridge to the tower that was all that was left of Crookston Castle. Of course Mary Queen of Scots couldn’t have seen the Battle of Langside from there as Scott had her do; but she’d have been able to see up past Househillwood alright, where that Covenanter was killed. The boy’s grandparents wouldn’t have known about him, since they’d been brought up Catholics. How horrible it was the way people in the twentieth century had hugged their tribal histories to themselves. No wonder they had never been able to unite, and them on the same land.
He thought of Tannahill’s poem to Crookston Castle. Over beyond the Castle around Paisley Road West would be where Hogg and Tannahill parted company shortly before Tannahill killed himself. The boy turned away and looked down Brockburn Road past the roundabout.
Beyond the woods on the left was Pollok House. When was it exactly that the Maxwells first got the land, and why? He wanted to check it out. For a long time theirs must have been the biggest library in the district. The people who were able to visit too, like that religious writer Thomas Erskine of Linlathen—who had influenced Coleridge the poet, his father had told him.
Of course there were the people who wouldn’t have got using the library at all. The boy thought of his favourite local poet, David Wingate of Cowglen, going down the mines when he was nine, less than a mile from where Maxwell’s house and library was located. It was Wingate who wrote poems about letting children have a day in the country, because they needed the fresh air away from their work. At least now there were none of Maxwell’s gamekeepers to disturb the boy’s walk.
In the whinny slopes o’ Cathkin
Or on Pollok’s woody knowes
He already roams in fancy
Where he kens the haw-tree grows.
On the bitter blast that’s brewin’
He looks West wi’ hopefu’ ee
For he kens the woods frae keepers
In sic weather will be free.
(whinny/furze-covered; knowes/hills;haw-trees/hawthorns;ee/eyes;sic/such)
It was good to read poetry out loud. Your voice was a good thing, wherever you came from. He had enjoyed reading out Dunbar and Gavin Douglas the week before. He knew that although he couldn’t understand the words at first, he had been able to say the sounds very easily once he had had a few things explained; words might have gone, but the sounds had still been passed by word of mouth over five hundred years. “Never mind stopping to get every word,” his teacher had said to him, “if you like it enough you’ll want to find out what it means.”
That was the teacher he had seen looking upset sitting reading a book. The boy had meant to sneak away unnoticed, but the teacher had called him back. “I’m not ashamed to be found upset reading a book,” he’d said, “and I hope you never will be either.” He told the boy he was reading Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, and the bit that always overcame him was the bit where Leontes’s wife, as a statue, comes back to life. The play was about a man who was jealous when he had no reason to be, who treated his wife as an object, and, in the last act, she appears on the stage as one—a statue. But then the man saw the difference between an object and a human being, and he saw what a unique human being his wife had been, and how he wished she was only alive again. And then the statue moved.
In a way it was a story about a really basic thing, about how you can wish that someone you loved who has died could only come back for five minutes, if only to tell them that you’re sorry for something you did while they were alive. But at a deeper level it was one of Shakespeare’s great statements about Art, that he knows he’s doing this for you, he knows that you know it, and what he’s saying is that Art is so precious because only in it can an object come to have human life in your presence.
