A Personal Appreciation

BRIAN MORTON recalls the life and work of his former teacher and subsequent friend and neighbour, novelist Robin Jenkins.

HE TOLD ME once in a letter: “You’ll know when you’re writing, really writing, when you come across something you published a while ago, read it and enjoy it, and then look to the end to find what clever fellow had all this to say, and find your own name there . . . with absolutely no recollection of having written those words. That’s the best part of it, putting something in the world that is yours utterly but which has a life and a meaning entirely apart from you.”

Those words acquired a slightly poignant significance the last time I saw Robin Jenkins, an ailing and increasingly frail neighbour on the Cowal peninsula. He was sitting by his window with the familiar shock of white hair and heavy-rimmed glasses; what was unusual was the pile of books on the table in front of him.

They were his own: titles like The Cone Gatherers, A Toast to the Lord, Fergus Lamont. I must have looked slightly puzzled, for Jenkins wasn’t a man who dwelt on his own achievements. He waved one of the books at me – it was The Tiger of Gold – and said with heartbreaking simplicity, “I’ve been reading some of these, and do you know?” – a look of delightful surprise – “some of them are really rather good.”

They are, of course, rather better than rather good. Until his death last month, aged 92, Robin Jenkins had every good claim on that ambiguous position: “Scotland’s finest living novelist”.

“It was his passionate belief that a writer found his material everywhere and near-at-hand and that reading experiences were often as powerful as so-called “real life”.”

It usually came hedged with an apologetic or evasive adverb, “arguably”, “probably”, because Jenkins never quite commanded the affection of a reading public the way many a lesser figure did. He was no stylist. It would be hard to abstract a paragraph from any of his books and hear an unmistakable voice. Only late in life did he acquire a (totally unexpected) comic touch. His themes were dark, his method unfashionably straightforward, his conclusions – if such they were – disconcertingly ambiguous.

In an age where the novel is expected to be playful and capricious, he retained a tone of deep seriousness. At a time when moral symbolism became unfashionable, when fiction built around a crisis of faith seemed hopelessly Victorian, he practised both with a doggedness that was easily mistaken for out-of-touch conservatism.

John Jenkins was born in Cambuslang in 1912. He adopted the pseudonym ‘Robin’ for his first novel, So Gaily Sings the Lark, in 1951. By present standards, that makes him a late starter, but from then until his death, he averaged a novel every couple of years. The only significant gap is between The Sardana Dancers in 1964 and the ambiguous “homecoming” of A Very Scotch Affair in 1968.

He was brought up by his mother on her own and with very little money. He was always moved when he came across heroic images of women in literature or in life. He once sent me a tiny clipping from the paper, a news item about a mother in the Australian outback whose car breaks down and who walks twenty miles in the searing heat to bring water to her children. “I bet some writer somewhere has cut this out and stored up the idea. You might as well be first. It’s the mother, you see, who makes it important . . .”

He was amused – and encouraging – when I changed the setting to Scotland in the snow, the car running out of petrol, and that I allowed just one of the children to survive. They had all died in the original news story. But he helped get it published, this in the days when the Glasgow Herald published a Saturday story.

It was his passionate belief that a writer found his material everywhere and near-at-hand and that reading experiences were often as powerful as so-called “real life”. He thought, for instance, that that story would have been more effective in its original setting and scoffed at my feeble protestation that I hadn’t been to Australia and didn’t know how an Aussie mother might sound.

“Cowal became Jenkins’ home but also the focus of his imagination.”

In shades of Laurence Olivier’s advice to the grimly authentic Dustin Hoffman – “Try acting, dear boy” – he said, “That’s what your imagination is for. And when it comes down to brass tacks, it doesn’t make much difference where a story is set. It’s the characters and their struggle that matters. It’s about morality, not geography.”

It’s been a criticism of Jenkins’ work that for all his own exotic settings, he lacks a sense of place. The Cone Gatherers is set in an unreal, edenic world. It may be his best-known book, but is is scarcely typical. Elsewhere, he takes considerable pains to establish a physical context for his characters. It might be more accurate to say, though, that whatever the apparent setting, Jenkins really only ever wrote about Scotland and its curious paradoxes.

There’s no mistaking the vividness of the Drumsagart slums in The Thistle and the Grail, his 1954 football story. They were an echo not so much of his own upbringing, but his experience as a trainee teacher in the East End of Glasgow. Jenkins went to Hamilton Academy and then to Glasgow University. When the war began, he registered as a conscientious objector and spent 1940 to 1946 working for the Forestry Service in Argyll. The Cone Gatherers may be allegory, but it has experience behind it.

Cowal became Jenkins’ home but also the focus of his imagination. The war also politicised him and he became a member of the Independent Labour Party, a lost moral force in British politics. He was delighted when I found a reference to American Communism as being “neither in nor of the world”.

“That is exactly what we were like. It all seemed delightfully rarefied, as if the world we talked about wasn’t quite real and the problems we were trying to solve imaginary. I don’t think I was ever really political. I think I’m a moralist, through and through. Very Scotch.”

That tiny echo of one of his own titles is interesting. A Very Scotch Affair marked a cusp in Jenkins’s career. It’s the story of a man who leaves his wife for an exotic mistress and then tries to come back.

“John Jenkins was a better teacher after I left school. For the most part, his classroom manner was hapless and disorganised”

The longest gap in Jenkins’ writing life was when he taught at the Gaya School in Sabah, Borneo, spending four years there with May – he’d married Mary Wyllie in 1937 – and their children. Before that, he’d held British Council teaching posts in Kabul and Barcelona, all setting which made their way into his work. It’s no coincidence, though, that his greatest creation should bear a Cowal name. When Jenkins returned to teach at Dunoon Grammar School in 1968, he was confronted by Lamonts in just about every class roll.

Fergus Lamont was to be the most taxing book he ever wrote. It sparked another gap in that patient succession of books and it left him, as he wrote to me, “a bit emptied out, it’s as if everything you know goes into a book and when you’re finished you don’t know anything at all”.

Significantly, his next book was to be his one and only historical novel, a tale of the Disruption of 1842 and of one man’s struggle to choose sides. The Awakening of George Darroch is all the more typically “Jenkins” for being set in what feels like his natural chronology. It is also squarely directed at his main theme, which is – crudely – what does it mean to be good in a bad world?

“It’s the hardest thing of all, you know, to create a genuinely good character who’s also interesting. You remember when we were studying Paradise Lost? You don’t forget Satan, but you do forget Jesus in Paradise Regained . What a milksop!”

John Jenkins was a better teacher after I left school. For the most part, his classroom manner was hapless and disorganised; we called him “Harry Worth” after a television comedy actor. He groaned over the syllabus, but with every offhand comment sent me looking for something else – Rob Roy? (“his worst – what you need to do is read all of Scott, one after the other – ideally break your leg in some lonely cottage where that’s all there is to read – oh, and start with A Legend of Montrose“), Julius Caesar (“why can’t we do A Winter’s Tale or The Tempest instead?”).

Milton, though, fired him up. The idea of paradise obsessed Robin Jenkins. He must have glimpsed it in Sabah, but what drew him was how you lived in it once the fruit had been tasted. Perhaps the most telling title in his whole output is A Would-Be Saint, where Gavin Hamilton is a kind of living affront to those around him, ordinary people compounded of weakness and need, faced with a man who seems to rise above all that, the way Calum in The Cone Gatherers has a Christ-like innocence and purity.

“Prolific, grave, troubling, blackly comic, Robin Jenkins gave off the impression of a man who hadn’t stopped speaking yet, hadn’t quite formulated the complex idea he was searching for.”

What rescues both stories from allegorical crudity is the level of ambiguity Jenkins builds into his telling. Calum is good but also deformed and it is his presence which ironically precipitates the collapse of Lady Runcie-Campbell’s estate. From a certain perspective, the “evil” gamekeeper Duror is merely an ordinary man. In a similar way, doesn’t “would-be” sound slightly bogus? Is Gavin really all he seems or claims to be?

“You have to be very careful. Always watch out for who’s telling you the story and what his motives are. Think of Fitzgerald. The hero of that book isn’t Gatsby. It’s the chap who’s telling the story . . . whose name I can’t remember for the moment! But don’t be afraid of forgetting things. That’s how you learn and that’s how you come to re-read effectively. Often the least important parts of a great book are the ones you remember, which means that its meaning often lies in the bits you forget.”

Such a view was typical of Jenkins’ effort to write in and about a fallen world. We ate of the Tree of Knowledge and washed it down with the Ale of Forgetting. In latter years, his own memory lapses grew more frequent and not always any kinder. He was haunted by the premature death of May (which inspired a rare foray into poetry), and of his son Colin. But he also had the strange pleasure of reading the books he had forgotten.

I think I understand why he’s been overlooked, even in his homeland (or rather especially in his homeland; most of the graduate students who came to talk about his work were American). Prolific, grave, troubling, blackly comic, Robin Jenkins gave off the impression of a man who hadn’t stopped speaking yet, hadn’t quite formulated the complex idea he was searching for. His delightful hesitancy in person, his diffidence about praise (whether taking it or giving it), his unease with fixed critical categories were all part of a deep instinct that everything is unfinished.

He taught me so much that it became a special delight to please him with some found idea or thing. I sent him a wry old Jewish joke: in the city of Chelm a boy is employed to stand at the gate and watch for the coming of the Messiah; the years pass, the boy ages and becomes a man and then an old man; a young stranger stops one day; ‘How can you do this year after year with no prospect of success? It might be that the Messiah never comes’, ‘I know’, replies the old man, ‘but it has been steady work’.

Came the reply on a postcard, “That’s it! That’s it exactly!”

© Brian Morton, 2005