Great Scott!

There is a greater accretion of literary anecdote attached to the old John Murray premises at No. 50 Albemarle Street than perhaps to any other building. At times, when working there in the 1970s and ’80s, I felt the place might finally disappear beneath these parasitic lianas and leaves, with me buried inside, but among them there was always one orchid which I treasured, dating from April 1815, when Scott and Byron met there for the first time. A very young John Murray III was a witness and recalled much later how ‘It was a curious sight to see the two greatest poets of the age – both lame – stumping downstairs side by side.’

I am not sure whether, when I first went up and down the same staircase, I had actually read a Scott novel, but it was about then that I began, tipped off to go for those set in Scotland, within about a hundred years of Scott’s birth in 1771 – which was good advice. So I read Old Mortality, The Heart of Midlothian, Rob Roy and the rest which fell within those boundaries. In spite of the verbosity, the Scots dialect, the antiquarianism, the stilted speech of his English characters, the insipidity of too many of his women, I admired how wonderfully well they combined attachment to the old ways and the old days and a recognition that change is the essence of history. Nationalism, terrorism, state violence, religious fanaticism are all made vivid, as are the Clansmen, the Covenanters, the Jacobites. The object here is not to make their case, however, but instead to praise the journal which Scott started to keep at the end of 1825 until more or less the time of his death in 1832. Thomas Moore came to stay with Scott that October and brought with him the extraordinary diary which Byron had kept in Ravenna in January and February 1821. It was this that gave Sir Walter the necessary momentum, and that momentum must have been reinforced when he was asked very shortly after to review Pepys’s diary, which had just been published for the first time. From the point of view of posterity the timing of all this was perfect because, within days of beginning the journal, Scott’s finances started to unravel in the most dramatic fashion. A record which otherwise might have been run-of-the-mill suddenly became compelling reading. There had been a wave of speculation in England, particularly in South American government stocks and mining shares, but bust was now following boom and credit had dried up. Hurst and Robinson, the London agents of Scott’s Edinburgh publisher, Constable, were in difficulties; Constable was undermining his own position because of the support he was having to give them; and Constable and the Edinburgh printing firm of Ballantynes, in which Scott was a partner, had been underwriting each other’s borrowings. In the new year the dominoes began to fall and Scott, who at his height had a vast income of £10,000 a year, turned out to owe £127,000. One solution was for him to go bankrupt, but this course he regarded as dishonourable and so unacceptable to him as a gentleman. Luckily the Edinburgh banking community was more sensible then than it has shown itself recently, and realized that its most valuable asset was its debtor’s pen. As Scott put it: ‘This right hand shall work it all off.’ He was to be allowed to keep his income from his part-time jobs as Sheriff of Selkirk and Clerk to the Court of Session in Edinburgh, and to go on living at Abbotsford, his country house near Melrose, with the use of his library there. He wondered whether ‘the fall from this elephant’ might have lost him his popularity. In which case, ‘I may take to smoking cigars and drinking grog, or turn devotee and intoxicate the brain another way.’ Instead he would become his creditors’ ‘vassal for life, and dig in the mine of my imagination to find diamonds (or what will sell for such) to make good my engagements, not to enrich myself’. Scott’s ruin is our gain: from the start the journal has a strong line of narrative, as we follow his misfortune and then see him steadily set about trying to mend it. All the time he engages in self-examination, watching to see what the effects of his plight are on his spirits, how he responds mentally and physically to the worry, fears, imaginings and depressions, to the relentless workload which he sets himself, to his wrestlings with the creative problems arising from his writing, as well as coping with the death of his wife in May 1826. He has certain stock phrases which he regularly uses to buck himself up: ‘Patience, cousin, and shuffle the cards’ (from Don Quixote), ‘Vogue la galère’ – Keep on rowing, ‘Care killed a cat’, ‘Naboclish’ – No matter (Irish Gaelic). He is aware of his luck in possessing one particular character trait: ‘From childhood’s earliest hour my heart rebelled against the influence of external circumstances in myself and others.’ He finds that when he sets to work doggedly, ‘I am exactly the same man that I ever was, neither low spirited nor distrait.’ But he knows too the games he plays with himself: ‘Propose to me to do one thing and it is inconceivable the desire I have to do something else . . . Now if I expend such eccentric movements on this journal it will be turning this wretched propensity to some tolerable account.’ He hates having to arrange his papers: ‘I don’t know why it should be so for I have nothing particularly disagreeable to look at [this was many months after the crash] . . . The memory, though it retains all that has passed, has closed sternly over it and this rummaging, like a bucket dropped suddenly into a well, deranges and confuses the ideas which slumbered on the mind.’ His recipes for curing writer’s block and keeping the creative flow going come at regular intervals. ‘The half-hour between waking and rising has all my life proved propitious to any task which was exercising my invention. . . This is so much the case that I am in the habit of relying upon it and saying to myself when I am at a loss, “Never mind, we shall have it at seven o’clock tomorrow morning”.’ Or, ‘I love to have the press thumping, clattering and banging in my rear – it creates the necessity which almost always makes me work best.’ Or, ‘When I find myself doing ill or like to come to a stand-still in writing I take up some slight book, a novel or the like, and usually have not read far ere my difficulties are removed and I am ready to write again. There must be two currents of ideas going on in my mind at the same time, or perhaps the slighter occupation serves . . . to ballast the mind . . . and so give the deeper current the power to flow undisturbed.’ Scott knows that if his mind is to remain productive as he pushes it to the limit, he has to exercise his body too. He has the garden and the plantations which he has laid out round Abbotsford where he can refresh himself walking and playing the woodman, just as Dickens and Gladstone were to do later. September 29, 1826: ‘I wrote five pages, nearly double task, yet wandered for three hours axe in hand and superintending the thinning of the home planting. That does good too. I feel it give steadiness to my mind . . . Women are said to go mad much seldomer than men. I fancy if this be true it is in some degree owing to the little manual works . . . which regulate the current of ideas.’ Next May again he walks for three hours in the woods with a cousin and enjoys ‘the sublime and delectable pleasure of being wise and listened to, on the subject of my favourite themes of laying out ground and plantations’. As a child he preferred ‘the pleasures of being alone’ but later ‘saw this would not do and that to gain a place in men’s esteem I must mix and bustle with them’. The formula certainly worked, and even now he perseveres in his social life and his hospitality among the legal and literary world in Edinburgh, and his neighbours, relations, however distant, and friends of all degrees in the country, while he lets himself be lionized on his trips to London and Paris. There he records how one morning ‘A number of Frenchmen bounced in successively, and exploded. I mean discharged their compliments.’ He knows how important the social side of life has been for his fiction, and the same applies to his time in Edinburgh’s Court of Session, since it keeps him ‘in the career and stream of actual life, which is a great advantage to a literary man’. The tally of Scott’s writings during the years covered by his journal is prodigious: five novels, a nine-volume biography of Napoleon, a collection of short stories, a play, a two-volume history of Scotland for adults, four series of stories from Scottish history for children and two volumes of essays. On top of all that he was supplying introductions and notes for all his previous novels, which were being reissued in an illustrated collected edition – a major generator of income to pay off his debt. Then he wrote reviews regularly for the Quarterly Review as well as endless letters in answer to lunatics, to aspiring authors and poets who expected him to read the manuscripts they enclosed, and to those seeking positions. The journal also tells of his efforts in numerous public causes, such as the struggling Edinburgh Oil Gas Light Company, or the Letters of Malachi, his successful pamphlet campaign to stop London imposing damaging and unnecessary regulations on Scottish banks. He may dismiss his journal as ‘chiefly vanity, the dear pleasure of writing about the best of good fellows, Myself ’. But after reading it one comes away with an enormous respect for Scott the man, bearing up so bravely under the most outrageous and unmerited of assaults from fate, determined to do his duty whether in private acts of charity or in the generous bestowal of his time and of his wise advice. And one agrees with what Byron wrote of him one evening in Ravenna in 1821 after finishing one of his novels, for what he claimed was the fiftieth time: ‘Scotch Fielding, as well as great English poet – wonderful man! I long to get drunk with him.’

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 46 © Roger Hudson 2015