Wild Fire: Celebrating Janet Paisley's singular talent

Her work includes the harrowing play Refuge, two novels – White Rose Rebel (2007) and Warrior Daughter – and stories in Not for Glory (2000). She was a scriptwriter for River City and High Road, and her poetry books include Reading the Bones (1999), Ye Cannae Win (2000, repr. 2004) and Sang fur the Wandert (2014).

In an interview with Linda Jackson, published in Janet Paisley: Growing and Dying (2018), she gives candid accounts of her childhood, marriage, motherhood and her growing commitment to writing. In other words, she was one of the most versatile Scottish writers of recent decades, whose priorities were founded in matters of social value, linguistic accuracy and dramatic immediacy. She never compromised that sense of human worth but was able to express it through a great diversity of literary media.

I’d like to draw attention here to Paisley’s slim collection of interconnected short stories Wild Fire. It was first published in 1993 by Taranis Books and has just been reprinted by Seahorse Publications, Glasgow (www.seahorsepublications.com).

It’s among the most insightful and compassionate books I’ve ever read, centring on a community of individuals in a small Scottish town, where families live and work with each other, supporting, abusing, enjoying, exploiting, bullying and loving each other. At its core is the structure and idea of the family.

From the ancient Greeks to Shakespeare, from Ibsen to Brecht and our own contemporaries, the family is the essential structure from which is generated almost all great tragedy and comedy. People related to each other, wanting, needing, desperate to break free, looking for solace, comfort, hope, support, and sometimes finding indifference, brutality, care, misunderstanding or intuitive love. Such populate each story in this book. We come in close then pull back to see them again defined and sometimes condemned by their actions, or else we’re frustrated and enraged by witnessing events we cannot break through and enter into, to help.

In the first story, “The Prompter”, the narrator meets the central character, a woman, at the edge of a cliff, overlooking a village. When the narrator says, “It looks small,” she replies, “It is small. Look.”

She put out her arm, pointed a finger and touched the top of the church spire way across on the opposite side of the valley. I was game. In the streets, I spotted Isa Cameron, recognisable by her wraparound pinny and her audience. Squinting down my arm, I fastened thumb and index finger on her shoulders.

‘I could do it. I could pick her up. Put her on top of the church spire.’ Is this a trick of perspective or a surrealist vision? Perception may be misjudged. Intention may be misinterpreted. But there is no rule of sin and salvation, justice and law, only human beings doing what we do, behaving as we will, sometimes hideously. Paisley’s courage in representing brutalisation, women beaten and damaged by men, a daughter raped by her father, a world of hypocrisy, unspoken guilt and shame, is unsentimentally sharp in its etched outlines. Yet these people are not in uniform perspective and the writing delivers no easy judgment. Some stories are laugh-aloud funny.

Paisley shows her characters to us in their actions and the consequences of those actions, always with the sense that these are human things are done daily by women and men. Violence has to be acknowledged and witnessed, closely, before anyone can arrive at judgement. Comedy arises just as suddenly, unpredicted.

The vulnerability in childhood, old age, and in women partnered to physically stronger men, the vulnerability of men, at times – all these are bristling concerns in every one of the 24 stories that make up the book. None is more than a few pages long. They are shards, fragments of vision, dramatic representations, each totally coherent in itself, depicting characters, moments of perception, conflict, hope, fear, different kinds of uncertainty, resolution, danger, risks taken, sometimes winningly, often disastrously.

AND yet the sheer vividness of what they lay bare, the utterly unstated compassion that sustains every one of them, the understanding born of insight, imagination and experience that emerges, is far from despairing. There is a strange, almost unwelcome, strength that builds as you read through the collection. There is variety – the stories are written alternating between English and Scots, so we see the characters forensically, moving, circling each other, in action, though sometimes in foreshortened or extended perspectives (as in the extract quoted above), and we also encounter them more viscerally, through the language they would use themselves, becoming immersed in the idiom of their own tongue, and therefore we experience in the reading itself the contagion of language, its humour, wit, spiritedness, potential for violence and revelation, sometimes comic, sometimes discomforting, sometimes repulsive.

“Sooans Nicht” is a monologue in Scots that distils to its essence the fearfully tense relationship between a wife and husband, mother-in-law, and another woman whom the husband is about to visit. A whole complexity of interpersonal feelings are made fully present with the most minimal resources of language, used to the most concentrated effect, in thoughts and feelings uttered in bulletin-like sentences, and a wealth of desires and intentions swelling beneath the words, dangerously.

“Wanting” is a bittersweet comedy, beginning like this: “Ellis needed a wife. He went to tell Morag about it.” In six short pages, we come to learn all about Ellis’s character and intentions, Morag’s hopes and plans, and then the story delivers a twist that confounds expectation, an explosive hilarity and an implosion of utmost frustration. And that’s crucial: some of these stories are hilarious and awful at the same time. Frivolity and pain sometimes go together in excruciatingly sharp writing.

“Steppin Oot” gives us a husband tempted by a young woman whose brothers come looking for violent retribution, ending with the terrifying moment when he is about to go by choice into an onslaught of violence he could almost have been helpless to avoid. The story ends on a precipice of not knowing what happens next, but fearful of it.

Pathos, humour, the inevitabilities consequent upon human desires, male and female, young and old, cruelties and kindnesses, all are so quickly, deftly given here. Nothing is lingered on, nothing indulged. These stories map a terrain we know is there, rarely want to venture into, but need to understand and acknowledge, are obliged to care about. This is a book which exemplifies the craft of writing on every page, but not only in the skill of its representation of character, narrative and social context, but also in its emotional depth and its inimitable sense of unpredictability and speed.

I KNOW of no other writer who delivers such accurate incision, time after time, and moves on without dwelling on the meaning of what has been anatomised, so determinedly leaving for readers, others who come later, the work of assessing and considering the human cost of what we have encountered, the human worth, both demonstrated, most often in potential, and squandered, again and again.

Social considerations apply. Class structures, financial deprivation, gender power imbalances, lack of opportunity – but these are words that take us away from what the stories insist that we experience. Assumptions, prejudices, limitations, oppressions, are all palpable too. But the tragedy in these stories, as all great tragedy is, is about the wasting of human potential, and it is felt beneath the skin. Perhaps only a mother could have written these stories. But there is within them an understanding of the necessity of compassion and a quality of urgency that must appeal to men and women equally, if anything to hope for might be sustained. And that quality characterises the collection in its entirety, as it did Janet Paisley’s life and all her writings.

I had the privilege of knowing and working with Janet Paisley, a little, over the years, and count that as one of the advantages life has given me. This book is there to help people understand more deeply and accurately what we talk about too often from positions of ignorance and ineptitude, whether pontificating or sentimentalising.

These stories, this collection, are among the hardest, most adamantine, most intractable works of modern Scottish literature, yet they are alive with human worth, breathe an air so familiar it should scare us at times, to recognise it as something we share. But we do, and must. Janet Paisley shows us this like nobody else.

THE WARRIOR DAUGHTER

JANET Paisley​’s final poem in her collection Ye Cannae Win is entitled Morag: Witchcraft and ends with these lines: “Oor freedoms, big an sma,/ are ay bocht dear.”

In the volume of tributes Janet Paisley: Growing and Dying, edited by Linda Jackson (Seahorse Publications, 2018), Alan Riach contributed this poem, parts of which are adapted from Janet Paisley’s poem, Arrowhead from The Hunterian Museum Poems, and from the final pages of her novels, White Rose Rebel and Warrior Daughter.

The Warrior Daughter: The Word is Freed for Janet Paisley

What young woman should not wish,
And more, intend, to hunt, one day?
And so to weigh the weapons in your hand,
To know, that flights of arrows armed
With arrowheads as sharp as those you made,
Will strike, not “some day” only, but
Tomorrow. Perhaps it seems now not enough.
You won some small concessions, even so.
Never underestimate those victories. In them,
The tide turns. Laws can be repealed, as long as
Life won’t stop. And new ways found
To live with that idea you touched,
So tenderly, and with such precision, and let go
Into the air, to fly: what else is freedom for?

Freed, then, first, from that which holds and binds;
And freed, then, after that, to do with time as we will.
Such warrior daughters make the world a possible place
For all of us, anyone still who holds belief in such as that,
That old cliché, that friend, that so much abused idea.
It is not easily touched, or held in clutch or grasp; It cannot be confined, by definition.
But there she is, like Skaaha, amazing and
Mysterious, as dark and cold as winter in her depths,
As liberating too, as spring brings summer’s
Plenitude, in time. Or as the land itself,
Assertion of resistance, always. Permanent.