A deep dive into RB Cunninghame Graham’s unique literary legacy

The structure of Lachlan Munro’s book takes us through three distinctive periods of RB Cunninghame Graham’s adult life, from his work and his political views when he was in and out of Parliament from 1885-92; then maintaining a political career but publishing essays, stories and sketches and establishing a reputation as a writer from 1893-1913; and from 1914-36, taking him through the First World War and into the era of Hugh MacDiarmid and the Scottish Literary Renaissance, to his death.

The paradoxes that emerge in the study of Graham’s political positions and aspirations, and yet the consistency of his character and its expression in practical actions and advocations, and beyond these, the still-undecided quality of his achievement as a writer are our subject today.

Munro sums these up in his conclusion and if we start with that we can go back to consider its application in an overall assessment. His closing summary is astute: “In Scotland, it was his hybrid, pragmatic, cosmopolitan localism, which, albeit sporadically, distracted the nation from its sentimental, cultural, and political navel gazing, and directed that gaze towards a broader horizon, with an ambition for Scotland, mankind, and the natural world that was prophetic, relevant, and inspirational.

“On that broader horizon, his was a much-needed voice of opposition to conformity and complacency: an heroic voice of courage and independence which, in its time, excelled all others.”

This is well said.

Hybridity, localism, a rejection and refusal of unambitious sentimental self-suppression, of Scots and human beings generally: these are at the core. Courage, independence and exemplified opposition to conformist and complacent mediocrity, are everywhere in evidence in the life and the writing. This is what makes the title of the book so apt, bringing together questions of “party” (Liberal, Labour and Scottish National), prose fiction and quasi-fictional sketches or accounts of events, and the matter of aesthetics, affecting both politics and literature.

The Ipané was published in 1899

Graham’s visual flamboyance and Don Quixote-like appearance sometimes makes him seem a figure that’s easy to ridicule. But he was a great horseman – it was not a pose – and anyone who has ever ridden horses and know what they feel like, how their movements have aesthetic bearing and bring pleasure to the eye, can register his sense of their living worth.

And anyone who has become (as any sensitive person must) increasingly despondent at the state of political discourse in Scotland and England or elsewhere, either in parliaments or media, need only read Graham’s speeches and follow his engagements to be reminded that it need not be like that.

In “Snaekoll’s Saga”, Graham’s prose sometimes seems to hover between the kind of observation appropriate to fiction and what he might have said in a political speech: “The world is to the weak. The weak are the majority. The weak of brain, of body, the knock-kneed and flat-footed, muddle minded, loose-jointed, ill-put-together, baboon-faced, the white eye-lashed, slow of wit, the practical, the unimaginative, forgetful, selfish, dense, the stupid, fatuous, the “candlemoulded”, give us our laws, impose their standard on us, their ethics, their philosophy, canon of art, literary style, their jingling music, vapid plays, their dock-tailed horses, coats with buttons in the middle of the back; their hideous fashions, aniline colours ... their false morality, their supplemented monogamic marriage, social injustice done to women; legal injustice that men endure, making them fearful of the law … in sum, the monstrous ineptitude of modern life, with all its inequalities, its meanness, its petty miseries, contagious diseases, its drink, its gambling … and terror of itself, we owe to those, our pug-nosed brothers in the Lord, under whose rule we live.”

The story was published in the Saturday Review of December 18, 1897, and collected in Graham’s book The Ipané (1899), his first solo full collection after Father Archangel of Scotland (1896), co-authored with his wife Gabriela. It suggests that crucial overlap between political polemic and oblique storytelling or quasi-autobiographical sketching which was Graham’s forte. This is what I meant when I said last week that we must recalibrate literary conventions to get a measure of his quality.

‘Snaekoll's Saga” is an extended pastiche of an old Norse or Icelandic tale from anywhere between the ninth and 14th centuries. Snaekoll is a ferocious, wild-spirited horse which survives its adventurous hero master implicitly by eating him. It’s a bizarre and genuinely terrifying story of lives – human and animal – lived in conditions of extremity and violence, where tenderness is rare and virtues of courage and endurance paramount.

The other stories in the collection vary enormously in setting and tone. The title story is set in Paraguay. “The Lazo” (or lasso) tracks the use of the noosed rope from Nineveh and Persia to Vaqueros in Mexico and cowboys in Texas. “The Bolas” takes us to the Argentinian Pampas. “SS Atlas” is set on a tramp steamer in New York, travelling across the Atlantic past Rathlin Island to Mull, then Glasgow, and after a 10-day rest, back to South America with “another freight of human cattle”. The traveller introduces his fellow passengers, emigrants, and the crew, and the riotous drunken spree on Hogmanay, leaving his reading copy of The Faerie Queene smelling of cockroaches, spotted with salt water, leaves foxed and evoking not the Arthurian legends from Elizabethan England but the sounds of the sea and the engine screw racing.

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“Bristol Fashion” describes life on an island off Africa and a trading barque plying the coastal villages. Other stories take us from Gibraltar to Tangier but then “A Survival” is a summary of Scottish literature, the relation between Scotland and England, and an encounter with a reluctant but “pretty” gamekeeper. (The word “pretty” has a rather different meaning than usual, in this context.) Graham concludes that “Sloth was not altogether lovely, but prating progress worse” and “the world is to the young”. It is a bleak but not disconsolate ending.

“Heather Jock” is a recollection of another Scot, a note of whose death at the age of 82 prompts the author to reach back across his time in South America to his own Scottish boyhood and the span of Jock’s life, and its meaning, as he “would go about the world a living protest against the folly of mankind”. “With the North-West Wind” recalls the funeral of William Morris and “At Torfaieh” returns to Africa, with one of the great opening lines: “A shade of dissatisfaction crept over the dark, handsome face of Najim, the Syrian, as he sat cleaning his pistol at the door of the factory at Cape Juby.”

The preface to The Ipané admits that none of the sketches in it have any connection with each other but that readers might see there’s a possible “nexus” that Graham himself might not have thought of.

“Books have been written for many reasons – moral, religious, lewd, improving, ethical, and to make people stare – but many people think, even today, when education, which as we all know, intensifies artistic comprehension, spreading it even among the educated, is so diffused, that men write books to please a mysterious entity known as the public; that they regard this mumbo jumbo as politicians do, or as the county councillor who is uncertain if he will be a cuckold till he has duly put the matter to the democratic vote.

“Nothing more false. For the most part, all books are written from vanity, for hope of gain, either pecuniary or of some other nature, and now and then to please the writer, for it is known that some have gone to sea for pleasure, and sailors say that those who do so would go to hell for fun.”

How multi-faceted in tone, layered in irony, sustained in poise, balancing disdain and hard-headedness, is this preface! And how unlikely it is to lure the simple-minded seeking quick gratification!

It’s as if he’s already putting off prospective readers by effectively asserting an elitism of intelligence, while admitting – or seemingly admitting – that his only purpose is “gain”. It’s a clue to a deeper purpose: his intention is not gain but giving. He questions the publisher’s title in which his book appears: “Overseas Series”. And then he concludes: “I write that which is here collected to please no single being, and if my own feelings may be taken as the measure of the discerning public’s generous judgement, I have succeeded well.”

By turning his disdain upon himself, he permits his humour and his sympathy to peep through. No “single being” will be pleased by this book: any reader who might be, will be multiple, just as the stories and sketches themselves are multiple, both looking back and pointing forward. And they include some of his best, among them the now offensively-entitled “N***ers” – one of the most vehement anti-racist attacks on prejudice of more than one kind you’re ever likely to read.

Munro identifies this story as having first appeared as “Bloody N***ers” in the Marxist journal, the Social Democrat. This “ironic diatribe” was a “specific assault on bigotry, describing the world, its resources, and its peoples as having been designed by an all-wise Creator exclusively for British use.” Why had the Lord bothered to create other races, if not to be ruled by Englishmen? Here are Graham’s words: “N***ers who have no cannons have no rights. Their land is ours, their cattle and their fields, their houses ours; their arms, their poor utensils, all that they have; their women, too, are ours to use as concubines, to beat, exchange, to barter off for gunpowder or gin, ours to infect with syphilis, leave with child, outrage, torment, and make by contact with the vilest of our vile, more vile than beasts.”

The ironic twists and turns of the preface presents a style carried through in this most violent denunciation of imperialist racism. It’s such a foreign mode to most conventions of piety and politeness in the 21st century that we have to look twice – and recalibrate convention – to really comprehend the passion that drives it, the sheer opposition to injustice that lies at the heart of Graham’s vehement repudiation of any sense of imperialist, colonialist superiority and entitlement.

Graham is one of the world’s coolest polemicists and his eloquent passion underlies every one of the stories in the collection.

In his book, Munro examines Graham’s role in the founding of both the Labour and the Scottish National parties but, more importantly, his commitment beyond party politics to a society invested in wellbeing, opposing exploitation and the private-profit motive.

He was committed to national self-determination, Scottish independence, Irish home rule and equality of women’s rights with those of men – of all classes and social strata. He knew these priorities were not unconnected and if you disconnect them, each one is fatally diminished.

And the essential element of his writing is that all these aspects of his sympathy and understanding, all his paradoxes and priorities, are explored in it. This is what gives it such passion and nuance, both the violence of commitment and yet also the subtlety of sensing fallibility and limitations.

Munro sums up these aspects in the conclusion to Part Two of his book: “He is now mostly remembered for his adventurous life and his portrayal of exotic peoples and locations, but his irregular treasury of portraits, which documented the bygone characters and graces of the Forth Valley and southern Perthshire, seen through the eyes of someone who was half inside and half outside the rural community, were a unique contribution to Scotland’s literary heritage.”

In the end, “Containing little action, his Scottish works were sometimes strained and repetitious.” And yet, they have “a quiet, sad beauty”.

That evocative, poignant sense of misty evanescence is grounded in firm portraits of characters whose durable strengths were passing from the world, just as he had seen native South American Indians becoming passed by gauchos, and gauchos in turn passed by newer forms of “civilisation”, and Scots being overwhelmed by a British Empire bent on profit, rotten to its core.

His writing records the forces that lie behind such brutal successions and hold his characters in balance in the scales of human value.