Out of sight ... into literature

According to Walter Benjamin, every work of art is a record of barbarism. The literature of a city tells two tales. Invariably, the sound of the suburbs drowns out the cries out the poor. Edinburgh is a case in point. The capital's laurels rest on its lower cases. Ben Jonson saw Edinburgh as a lookout post for empire, calling it "The heart of Scotland, Britain's other eye", but the heart of Midlothian is the heart of a heartless world where the eye sees only what it wants to see.

The Literary Companion To Edinburgh, first published by Canongate back in 1992 as The Edinburgh Literary Guide, is essentially a walking tour around local literary landmarks. Its author, Andrew Lownie, is described in the accompanying publicity as a literary agent who "frequently visits Edinburgh". Like all visitors his view is directed towards particular sites.

A former Scottish Conservative party spokesman on the arts, Lownie is best known for his well-regarded biography of John Buchan, one of the many major writers who learned their craft in Edinburgh or mapped out a muse while domiciled there. The subtitle of the Buchan biography, The Presbyterian Cavalier, captures succinctly the double life of Edinburgh, where dirty laundry is hung on the outskirts of the city. The line drawings by Richard Demarco help convey a city of shades and tones, in sharp contrast to the cover photograph, which is straight out of a tourist brochure.

From Scott's Waverley novels to Trainspotting, from Sherlock Holmes to Rebus, from Deacon Brodie to The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Edinburgh has provided the setting for writing of the first rank, at the expense of its lower ranks. A city of right hand justified sinners who don't know what the left is doing, Edinburgh, perhaps more than any other town, is home in equal measure to penmanship and penury, giving rise to repressed figures who harbour guilty secrets or dark desires - Deacon Brodie, Dr Jekyll, Jean Brodie.

That peculiar penchant of the professional for a bit of rough trade, some sly slumming on the side, is nowhere more evident than in this Athens of the north. Like its southern counterpart, its spirit and letters are distilled from the grapes of wrath and the sweat of the labouring classes, both at home and abroad. The frisson of literature is located between the burbs and the backstreets.

Raised on industry and empire, the capital invests in commerce and culture. The city loses its memory, forgets itself, becomes a brochure, a business plan, a shopping expedition, a town of towers and tourists, of aerial shots and skylines that keep your eyes off the flies. In Trainspotting, Begbie's blood boils at the backpackers who see the sights of the city centre but are blind to the blighted landscape of its surrounding schemes.

Of course, there was cynicism about Edinburgh's image before Welsh came along. Daniel Defoe found 18th-century Edinburgh overcrowded and insanitary. In his Tour Through The Whole Island of Britain (1727), he says the city "suffers infinite Disadvantages as if the People delighted in Stench and Nastiness." In his Scottish Journey of 1935 Edwin Muir characterised it as "a city of extraordinary and sordid contrasts". Muir shared Begbie's astonishment at the ability of visitors to overlook the city's poverty: "The tourist's eye is a very specialised mechanism capable of such apparently impossible feats as taking in the ancient monuments and houses of Edinburgh without noticing that they are filthy and insanitary. Yet the historical part of Edinburgh, the part most frequented by visitors, is a slum intersected by ancient houses that have been segregated and turned into museums and training-colleges. Most of the Canongate is a mouldering and obnoxious ruin."

Muir was fascinated by Edinburgh's failure to conceal its flaws and likened the city to "a very big and inefficiently yet strictly run house. The work in this house is done in the most haphazard way; good servants are ill-treated and badly paid, and dishonest servants praised and coddled; and the refuse which every big house continuously produces is not decently disposed of and hidden away as it is in most big houses, but barefacedly dumped some distance away in full view of the public yet where the master is not likely to stumble into it".

The city centre has been spruced up a bit since Muir's day and the poor have been swept unceremoniously out into the peripheral housing estates that fringe the city. These outlying "schemes" - Granton, Leith, Muirhouse, Wester Hailes and Pilton - are east of the town centre, the back of beyond and way beyond the Fringe. Tourists, literary or otherwise, only have their eyes on the prize and the price. Give them the Inch and they'll take the Royal Mile.

Robert Louis Stevenson, JM Barrie and Arthur Conan Doyle all attended Edinburgh University at around the same time. The three-ply name of the creator of Sherlock Holmes captures the contradictions at the heart of the city. Arthur stands for the seat of empire, the sword of Britishness. Conan is the barbarian at the gate, waiting for word of an uprising. Doyle, in keeping with the writer's Jesuit education, signifies an Irishness in hibernation, unlike its more wakeful western alter ego.

Conan Doyle studied medicine, doing his PhD on the pox. As self- divided an individual as Dr Jekyll/Hyde, Conan Doyle had harsh words for his alma mater: "The university is a great unsympathetic machine, taking in a stream of raw-boned cartilaginous youths at one end, and turning them out at the other as learned divines, astute lawyers and skillful medical men. Of every thousand of the raw material about six hundred emerge at the other side. The remainder are broken in the process." Lownie, citing this passage, remarks that "Conan Doyle was perhaps being rather unfair. The university was cosmopolitan, with a large intake from England and the colonies". One of the colonies was Scotland. These days, the university operates a system of selection that is the envy of Oxbridge and many raw-boned cartilaginous youths are broken on the altar of inaccessibility.

Muriel Spark, arguably Edinburgh's greatest living writer, described herself as a "constitutional exile". Her birthplace instilled in her "the conditions of exiledom". For Spark, "the puritanical strain of the Edinburgh ethos is inescapable". Equally inescapable is the ethos of inequality. That shadow that walks beside every writer is the blasted life from which their texts are woven.

The clotted "crme de la crme" milked Edinburgh for all she's worth. The best the rest left on the doorstep can hope for is the same sour consolation accorded Greyfriars Bobby: "At the suggestion of Queen Victoria the loyal terrier was buried close to his master in the churchyard." What more could a faithful literary companion, a guide dog for the literary tourist blind-in-one-eye ask for, than a bone to pick? Gnaw, naw!

Copyright 2000
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved.