J. I. M. Stewart on

the laird of Abbotsford

There is a point in Quentin Durward at which the hero seeks to impress the Count of Crevecoeur with the consequence of his ancestors, the Durwards of Glen-houlakin. The Count says that we are all descended from Adam, and that the status which Quentin seeks is ultimately a matter "of rank, fortune, high station, and so forth." The passage is a key to Walter Scott's career. His father, the Writer to the Signet, was as capable as such people in Scotland invariably are of claiming kinship with the territorial classes of a former age. Still, when Sir Walter's heir jibbed at marrying Miss Jobson (whose fortune came from pickling herrings) he had to be reminded sharply by his father, a first baronet, that the Scotts .themselves were only cadets of cadets. Nevertheless this was a start, and of further and greater weight was the fact that Scott's maternal grandmother was a Swinton, a family of very high antiquity indeed. The young Scott was unimpeachably gentle. He had only to possess himself of ' rank, fortune, high station' and no Count of Crevecoeur could treat him as other than an equal.

Johnson in his life of Congreve mentions Voltaire's disgust at the " foppery " of the dramatist's "desiring to be considered, not as an author but a gentleman," and Birkbeck Hill, annotating the passage, cites Scott's declaration: "I began with being a gentleman, and don't mean to give up the character." Scott often said or wrote similar things. Rising from the Great Unknown's writing-table at noon, he would exclaim, "Out, damned spot, and be a gentleman." He liked to suggest that his days were spent coursing hares and his nights spearing salmon when in fact he was at grips with his inkpot. Wordsworth was to record disapprovingly that Scott, "attached less importance to his literary labours or reputation than to his bodily sports, exercises and social amusements." When his elder son Gilnockie (romantically so nicknamed after a Border ruffian later to be celebrated in John Arden's Armstrong's Last Goodnight) was asked why his father was judged remarkable the boy replied, after some thought, "It's commonly him that sees the hare sitting." This, it may be said, is Scott as he wished to be seen: a landed proprietor, simple and unaffected but of ancient lineage, devoted to field, sports, arboriculture, the care of his tenantry — yet moving, too, because sufficiently wealthy, in a wide society alike of people of high rank and of intellectual eminence.

Miss Oman's long, enthusiastic, and most attractive book* stresses this Scott in a manner perhaps not wholly designed. This is principally because she ignores, if not the writer, at least his books. "Descriptions and criticism of the novels and poems," she writes, " . . should ideally form a separate publication," and she adds, "I hope I am right in that I have not attempted to impose the novels on a generation with whom they are not yet popular." We are thus kept fairly steadily in the company of the social Scott and the vision of Abbotsford; there are stretches of the biography, indeed, in which we inhabit a world like Proust's, save for the fact that it is as prolifid in dogs as dukes and duchesses. The dogs, it is true, were as important to Scott as was the higher nobility; they had to appear in every portrait not only of the laird himself but of his children as well; it is the largest of them, a six-footer called Maida, that figures, on a colossal scale, in Edinburgh's Scott Memorial. Dogs and men are even apt to get mixed up. Percy and Douglas present themselves at Scott's cottage at Lasswade, and because the writing is a little disjointed we may suppose for a moment that here is the Bishop of Dromore (already known to Scott, and perhaps with fresh ballads in his pocket) accompanied by that Dr Robert Douglas who was minister of Galashiels. We are corrected when we reach the end of the paragraph and learn of a window "always left open for Percy and Douglas to leap in and out of at their pleasure." We retain a faint irresponsible image of episcopalian and presbyterian cavortings, all the same.

Yet Miss Oman's following of her subject in close detail through innumerable occasions of polite intercourse has a justification which her sensitive writing amply reveals. Scott was unimpeachably gentle in a deeper sense than that attaching to a pedigree. As a young man he had no doubt carefully studied the manners of the better sort among the youths of good family whose company he was enabled increasingly to frequent when he had persuaded his father to let him switch from becoming a mere solicitor and instead read for the Scottish bar. But it was not because of this that Maria Edgeworth was to judge him one of the most well-bred men she ever saw; in matters of comportment, social amenity, considerateness as host or guest, it came instinctively to Scott never to put a foot wrong. Moreover, although he told himself in his Journal that he was "by nature a very lonely animal," it was in the sphere of friendship, and of affections diffused over wide family relationships, that the whole soul of the man was most freely in activity. His marriage, he confessed in a letter, had been "something short of love in all its fervour "; he was not in the narrow sense a passionate man, any more than he was a contemplative or introspective man. Sanguine, active, ardent, he was perpetually busy in the world.

Miss Oman is nowhere better than when evoking the most bustling scene of all the more so since she so detectably shares a sense of its high comedy with Scott himself. In 1822 George IV visits Edinburgh, and in this crisis of their national fortunes his loyal subjects turn precipitately to the most famous of their countrymen. Scott has to arrange everything, from the ordering of processions in which much has to turn upon just whose ancestor had been positioned just where at Bannockburn, to the cut of a button and the embroidering of a cross. Scott garbed himself in Campbell tartan "in honour of a great-grandmother," and the Monarch afforded gratification and occasioned merriment by appearing in what he conceived to be full Highland dress. The vast pantomime nevertheless had its serious side for the author of Waverley. A certain Mr Mash, sent north from the Lord Chamberlain's Office to see that all went by rule, was disposed to make much of how matters had been ordered in Ireland during a royal visit in the previous year. Scott spoke. "I beg, Mr Mash, to hear no more of Ireland. Ireland is a Lordship; when His Majesty comes amongst us he comes to his ancient kingdom of Scotland, and must be received according to her ancient usages." Scott was in fact making up at least some of the usages as he went along, and in The finest spirit of imaginative antiquarianism, But Mr Mash was properly subdued.

There are other Scotts besides this prominent figure in the social life of his country. One of them was perhaps sufficiently exhibited by Grierson in his biography published in 1938: the Scott of bold, even rash commercial enterprises, living, years before the actual disaster of 1826, upon credit taken upon books not yet written, seldom commanding any ready cash to speak of, endlessly perpending the problems of bills to be cancelled and bills to be renewed. It was, of course, all in aid of his style of living, but one feels that there must have been for him a positive enjoyment in risk as well. Something of the sort peeps out in the first chapter of Rob Roy, when Frank Osbaldistone describes the character of his father:

He would have been a poorer man indeed, but perhaps as happy, had he devoted to the extension of science those active energies and acute powers of observation for which commercial pursuits found ...occupation. Yet in the fluctuations of mercantile speculation there is something captivating to the adventurer, even independent of the hope of gain. He who embarks on that fickle sea requires to possess the skill of the pilot and the fortitude of the navigator, and after all may be wrecked and lost, unless the gales of fortune breathe in his favour.

They-failed so to breathe for Scott; that he possessed fortitude he was to prove nobly enough; but skill was another matter, and in believing that he commanded it he was exhibiting a strain of selfdeception which crops up several times in his story. When mortally ill at Naples in the last year of his life he shocked his younger son Charles and others accompanying him by falling into delusions of restored prosperity. Yet he had more than earned any comfort thus gained. "My own right hand shall do it," he had splendidly said when first confronting the mountain of debt he must remove, and it was indeed his own right hand that broke the back of the task.

That there is a great deal of Walter Scott in the Waverley Novels is a point which Miss Oman's plan necessarily obscures. Nor does she, perhaps, fully penetrate through the man's story to the man. What was the master pulse in the machine? Scott was a writer. It is impossible to believe that he would not have been that, and powerfully and abundantly, had the lure of wealth as the open sesame to landed dignity never presented itself to him. He might even have become, as he did, an obsessional writer. It was before his marriage that his vehement real life, of that instinct to relate men to the pressures of tradition and of the political, social and religious influences around them, which Balzac was to distinguish so admiringly as a large part of the genius of the Wizard of the North. bride-to-be, who was certainly not clever, came to believe that he wrote too much. We know what started him off: a fashionable antiquarian craze for collecting songs and ballads which was all the more commanding because it involved scouring the Highlands and Lowlands on the horseback he loved. From this there developed naturally his own versifying in mediaeval modes. But here Byron, as he says, bet him out of the field, and so — as he told James Ballantyne — "since one line has failed, we must just stick to something else." The something else turned out to be not a line but an empire.

He may genuinely have thought little of his poetry. His daughter Sophia, closest to him of all his family, was not encouraged to read The Lady of the Lake. "Papa," she reported to Ballantyne, "says there is nothing so bad for young people as reading bad poetry." His own favourite poems were London and The Vanity of Human Wishes — for the settled view of this man who moved apparently so much at ease in the sunshine of civilised social intercourse was sombre. He had hoped to learn from his wife "to take a gay view of human life "; in 1825, with the shadows gathering round him, he confided to his Journal the judgement that "life could not be endured were it seen in reality." And although he supported religious observances in his household he distrusted religion, or at least its fervours; to marry a very religious woman, he declared, was to head wantonly towards family misery.

The novels, to the extent that they are romances set over against reality, may be seen as a desperate search for a gay and gallant view; even as the frivolous flights into fantasy which both Carlyle and Peacock's Dr Folliott took them to be: nuspiam, nequaquam, nullibi, nullimodus. But this never-never theory, in itself harshly reductive of the values of romance, further ignores Scott's strong impulse to work as much from experience as from the imagination. Whenever he is at his best we are in the presence of All the characters search for hidden meanings and deeper significances in whatever they see, but their search for the ultimate source of life is only half serious. Far more, their mysticism and pseudomysticism is a vehicle for worshipping this Infinite Goof.

The best of the Californian writers — and on the evidence of this novel I would put Mr Robbins among the very best — share an idiosyncrasy of perception and a vivid use of language which can only be explained in terms of a cultural renaissance. II wonder if Governor Reagan is aware that his term of office in Sacramento will be equated in years to come with that of Lorenzo the Magnificent in Florence. Certainly he shows few signs of any such awareness.

Amanda's love of butterflies leads her to try and smuggle the larvae of every known species of butterfly into the United States. Unfortunately she chooses the musical instruments of an itinerant band for the purpose; customs officers discover this deception and imprison the band:

And almost immediately a rumour swept the land that butterfly eggs would get you high. The woods and fields were overrun by unlikely looking entomologists, and a sudden demand arose for nets, tweezers, magnifying glasses and the other trappings of zoology's most vast and gentle branch.

The author, you see, is no goof. He invites us to laugh at it all, as well as be moved to pity, tenderness, lust or whatever. No doubt the reality is not nearly so delightful. No doubt California is full of real goofs, such as one can see in the hippy encampments in the West of England: dirty, half-witted people with their mouths hanging open and dead fishlike eyes, able to communicate with each other only in grunts and with the outside world not at all. All I can say is that the Californian novelists have used their intelligence, their wit and their extraordinarily sharp perceptions to make something beautiful of it all.

Almost every page has an arresting phrase or sentence in it. The hero, called Ziller, was born in Africa and reveals that the hyenas ate his after-birth. On meeting Amanda, he had the stink of Pan about him, and Amanda hears the telephone ringing in her womb. When they are united we learn that the butt-end of a rainbow filled the tiny room. After lovemaking, Amanda smells like the left-overs of an Eskimo picnic. Some gherkins are seen as "a jar in which pickles lounge like green Japanese in a bath."

Throughout the narrative, we have a constant stream of semi-serious homespun philosophy which should make the solemn platitudes of English and near-English novelists blush for shame: A sausage is an image of rest, peace and tranquillity in stark contrast to the destruction and chaos of everyday life.

Consider the peaceful repose of the sausage compared with the aggressiveness and violence of bacon.

Like a drunken Irishman, people will say. And so it is, with the same undercurrent of whimsy, much as one dislikes to use the word in the context of anything so fresh and vital. But the great difference between the Californian school and the drunken Irish school is a total absence of rhetoric and bombastic exhibitionism, which one sees in even the very best of drunken Irish writing — Donleavy and Joyce, let alone Behan — and which the pure sweet sunshine of California seems to have cauterised.

The story is not easy to summarise without parody. Suffice to say that there is a rich and intricate plot, revolving round the discovery of Christ's mummified body in a catacomb where it has been hidden by the Catholic church, with sinister right wing Catholic monks able to command the obedience of the FBI and the CIA opposed by a tiny handful of Goofish adventurers who seek only to cultivate butterflies and copulate in peace. The whole tenor of the book is admirably set in its opening pages which, despite a very few sterner moments describing miscarriage and sudden death, is maintained throughout: Down by the waterfall, Amanda pitched her tent — it was made of willow sticks and the wool of black goats. Having filled the tent with her largest and softest paisley cushions, Amanda stripped down to her beads and panties and fell into a trance. "I shall determine how to prolong the life of butterflies," she had previously announced.

However, an hour later when she awoke, she smiled mysteriously. " The life-span of the butterfly is precisely the right length," she said.

Either one is enchanted by it all, or one is not, of course. However, anyone who has not yet tried the Californian novel could scarcely do better than to start with 'Mr Robbins's tale, which I found quite completely delightful, and by far the fullest and easiest introduction to the charm of the Infinite Goof I have yet seen. Perhaps California is the only place to be writing novels nowadays. William Cooper makes it the setting for his new novel about a strange acting company — I may have forgotten to mention that Mr Robbins's was largely taken up with describing a strange circus and musical group which becomes a wildlife preserve, just as Brautigan's last described a strange library. It is noticeable how the drop-out awareness embraces the need for institutions. Mr Cooper's novel, which is the account of the love affair between an actor and a beautiful girl called Sasha who works as a waitress in an organic food restaurant, also satirises what might be called the Californian Thing. Although his target is much less outré, being the familiar wide-eyed, highly moral American Girl updated rather than the true drop-out beauty, it is described with equal affection by a cynical visiting Englishman.

Its characters discuss seriously among themselves whether they should be frivolous about revolution. They ask each other earnestly what is their thing:

"That's what I'm searching for, Marti." I knew she would accept that. Privately my answer was different — more like doing nothing.

A hatred of President Nixon is seen as the one unifying force in the Federation. It is an affable book, written with good humour and moderation. If I found it less exciting than Mr Robbins's novel, there may be many English readers who will enjoy it more.