Great Scott!
Some years ago, journeying down the valley of the river Araxes in eastern Turkey — 'as one does', you might sarcastically interject — I noticed the man sitting next to me starting to show a more than merely passing interest in the book I was reading. People in those parts do not read unless they have to, and I'd become used to being an object of polite curiosity, but I was par- donably surprised when my neighbour finally asked, in excellent English, whether it was 'a serious book'.
Yes, I told him, the tale took place in Scotland long ago and concerned a girl whose sister had been wrongly accused of murder having to walk all the way from Edinburgh to London to seek justice on her behalf from the Queen. 'Jus- tice?' said the man. 'He must be a good writer if he chooses themes like that. I know about injustice, I am a Kurd,' and proceeded to detail, in something approaching a whisper, a catalogue of his people's miseries under the three nations who rule them.
The book in question, The Heart of Midlothian, figured elsewhere in our long conversation, and I wondered, not for the first time, why Sir Walter Scott, whose name my Kurdish companion wrote down on the back of an envelope, has always managed to speak most eloquently to people whose language is not his own. In England he is scarcely read at all, written off as a prosy old waffler dispensing High Toryism via the Regency equivalent of BBC costume dramas, with the aid of many a 'forsooth' and 'by my halidom'. The Scots, of course, drugged with their sterile Anglophobia, detest him for crooking the knee to George IV, but even more because he tried to explain Scotland to the English. Instead, they cry up Robert Louis Steven- son, a magazine writer of limited gifts whom we are nowadays asked to believe was the Caledonian answer to Stendhal or Tolstoy.
Neither Stendhal nor Tolstoy could have existed without Sir Walter, and both acknowledged their debt, but most of us nowadays come no nearer to him than an occasional visit to the opera, where the programme solemnly tells us that this evening's libretto is 'after Sir Walter Scott'. So decidedly 'after', in the case of Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor, that the
original is a vague blur on the horizon. Essentially his librettist, the Neapolitan Salvatore Camrnarano, filleted the book according to Romantic theatrical conven- tions, throwing away about nine-tenths of it to produce the gorgeous bel canto lyric drama which ensures the composer's place among the operatic angels.
Yet what a divine confection Donizetti might have made from the rest of The Bride of Lammermoor if only Cammarano had been a little more daring. In the original, Lucy indeed runs mad on her wedding day, stabs her newly-wed husband and dies soon after. Otherwise the novel, in its mingling of comedy and horror, its elements of Augustan political satire and Scotch folk- lore, and its ambiguous handling of both the heroine's family, the Whig arriviste Ashtons, and the hero Edgar Ravenswood, last of his Cavalier line, doomed laird of a half-ruined castle, is unrecognisable in the sanitised bromide of an Italian melodramrna.
The book Cammarano jettisoned is a work of genius with just a few, wholly for- givable flaws. Scott is always a more pro- found artist than even his most fervent admirers allow, and The Bride has much to tell us about the folly of impulse and the disasters of inaction. Lucy, passive victim of her parents' social ambition (her appalling mother, iced over with impermeable snobbishness, is one of the novelist's best creations), only springs to life when gripped by insanity, though ironically she succeeds merely in wounding rather than murdering the contemptible Bucklaw she is forced to marry. Edgar, hyperactive to the end, achieves nothing, simply by remaining the romantic juvenile lead for which life has delivered him the script. 'History', as Auden famously felt ashamed of remark- ing, 'to the defeated /May say alas, but can-
not help or pardon', and Edgar dies not just as a result of his horse blundering into the Kelpie's Flow, a notorious quicksand, but because modern Scotland, with its job- bery and glad-handing, is no place for a gentleman.
Oh dear, I've spoilt the end for you, but there's more than this to enjoy: clever flecks of symbolism like the gigantic sword Lucy's little brother Henry insists on carry- ing to her wedding, the presence of a bale- ful chorus of three clucking old village sibyls who forecast that
her winding sheet is up as high as her throat already, believe it wha list — her sand has but few grains to rin out, and nae wonder, ' they've been weel shaken,
and some brilliant comic setpieces, such as the raid on local larders made by Edgar's faithful steward, the doddering Caleb Balderstone, determined to furnish a lordly table in the crumbling halls of Wolf's Crag.
When you've finished The Bride of Lammermoor, missing out the rambling prefatory material — Scott, a dab hand with endings, is lousy at kick-offs — there are at least a dozen others in the 'Waver- ley' series to persuade you that he was as titanic a force as his European contempo- raries believed. Junk those ghastly collect- ed editions, responsible for sinking his reputation under their gilt-embossed weight, and buy yourself the Penguin Old Mortality, as perfect and original a fiction as ever sprang from the 19th century, or pick up an old Everyman of Rob Roy, noth- ing like the recent Hollywood flatter-the- Scots-to-zap-the-Brits epic, but a funny and penetrating sketch of human ambivalence in the face of historical challenges. Find, borrow or steal Redgauntlet, a novel of amazing sophistication, perhaps Scott's greatest, whose central episode is a deliber- ate non-event, a matter of history being shabbily unscrambled by its participants, a triumph of anticlimax. Violet Bonham Carter memorably said of General de Gaulle, 'What he can't forgive the English is what he owes them.' If we snub, vilify or ignore Sir Walter Scott, that is so much easier than trying to understand how much we owe him.
Jonathan Keates
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