Grandeur and wickedness
Magnus Linklater
THE LITERARY COMPANION TO EDINBURGH by Andrew Lownie Methuen, £9.99, pp. 194 Richard Holmes, the biographer, kicked off a talk to the Edinburgh Book Festival recently with a story about the taxi-driver who had brought him in from the airport. Divining somehow that his fare was a literary gent, the cabbie told him about the origins of Robert Louis Steven- son's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Stevenson, he said, had been brought up in Heriot Row, grandest street in the New Town, where, in an upstairs bedroom, was a chest of draw- ers made by the famous Edinburgh crimi- nal, Deacon Brodie, a magistrate turned thief who had been hanged in the 18th cen- tury on a gallows of his own making. So struck was the young Stevenson by this tan- gible link with the darkness of the past, that he conceived his classic tale of good and evil. 'You'll find a lot of stories like `Let me see. . stalking. . . stalking. . that in this city,' said the taxi-driver, 'if you know where to look for them.'
Andrew Lownie has uncovered a fair number of them himself, and the theme that runs through his book is Edinburgh's schizophrenia — from the Classic precision of the New Town to the huddled tenements of the Old Town, from the respectability of Momingside to Dora Noyce's brothel in Danube Street, which was said to do good business during the annual meetings of the General Assembly of the Church of Scot- land and which only closed down when Dora died about 20 years ago. It may also explain why so many writers have loved and loathed it. Daniel Defoe wondered how the people could stick its 'stench and nasti- ness'. Thomas Carlyle described the medi- aeval squalor of the law courts, where the clerks perched high up on the walls 'like swallows in their nests,' uttering 'wildly plangent lamentable kinds of sounds ... as if in the bitterness of incurable woes'. RLS himself, shuffling down Leith Walk in search of prostitutes, with his lank hair and his patent leather shoes, shunned its respectability, but relished the seediness: 'I love night in the city,/ The lighted streets and the swinging gait of harlots,/ I love cool pale morning/ In the empty bye- streets,/With only here and there a female figure,/A slavey with lifted dress and the key in her hand,/A girl or two at play in a corner of waste land,/ Tumbling and show- ing their legs and crying out to me loosely.' Irvine Welsh, author of Trainspotting, phrased it less happily:
A dirty, cold, wet, run-down slum; a city of dull, black tenements and crass concrete housing schemes which were populated by scruffs, but the town still somehow being run by snobs for snobs.
Actually, Welsh is wrong — about the snobs, that is. As Lownie describes it, Edin- burgh has always been a clubbable city, famous for its coffee-houses during the 18th-century Enlightenment, and later on its literary pubs — Milnes Bar, the Abbots- ford, Rutherford's, Sandy Bell's and others — where poets like Hugh MacDiarmid, Norman MacCaig, Robert Garioch and Sydney Goodsir Smith drank and argued and fell out, along with their highly partici- pative audience. There were endless clubs, like the Speculative Society, to which Wal- ter Scott belonged, the Select Society, founded by David Hume, Allan Ramsay and Adam Smith (which must have looked good on the letter-head), and the splendidly-named Crochallan Fencibles, started by William Smellie the publisher, who not only edited the Encyclopaedia Bri- tannica but wrote many of its entries. Robert Burns composed his outrageously bawdy lyrics, 'The Merry Muses of Caledo- nia', for the Crochallan — the wittiest pornography ever written — and a couple of hundred years later Eric Linklater wrote a novel of the same name describing how staid old Edinburgh has a touch of summer madness when the poems are privately cir- culated round the drawing-rooms of Murrayfield. Mr Lownie might have added Puffin's to his list, a club founded by the late Sir lain Moncreiffe of that Ilk, where writers, actors and hangers-on met and drank prodigiously in the 1950s and '60s. I remember the naked mermaids on the wall, but not much else.
The only drawback to this entertaining Companion is its attempt to guide us geo- graphically round the city, area by area. It makes for an uncomfortable clash between street guide and social history, when it is the writers themselves who best sum up its strange combination of grandeur and wickedness. As Moray McLaren, author of one of the best books on Edinburgh, once wrote: 'This aristocratic, respectable old city of ours has a tradition of subterranean evil which it has not yet shaken off.'
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