DEAD POETS SOCIETY
Andrew O’Hagan is one in a long line of Ayrshire’s fine literary sons
The landscape and language of Ayrshire entered my childhood ear and just never left. All the sights and sounds of Ayrshire, from the views of Ailsa Craig, across the Firth of Clyde, to Arran in snow and in summer, the sense of all the coastal towns, that great curved region that goes from the hills down to the sea. That amphitheatre is one of the most beautiful, natural bay areas in the world, I think: the trees and the beaches and the woodlands.
We moved to Ayrshire when I was two years old in 1970 from a Glasgow tenement – I don’t think we even had an inside toilet. My dad was a joiner and my mum a school-cleaner. I had three older brothers. We always felt we were quite near the countryside as we had the sea on one side and the lochs of Dalry and the Garnock Valley on the other. There were built-up areas, housing estates and so on but we were bang in the middle of the most beautiful natural place.
I grew up in Pennyburn – a housing estate in Kilwinning built in 1970 to house the so-called ‘Glasgow overspill’. It was a big adventure for us arriving in this semi-rural place with brand new houses with indoor bathrooms for the first time. We had come from a Glasgow tenement to somewhere very rural and felt holiday-like. People from Glasgow went to the coast for their holidays: Saltcoats, Irvine, Troon, Ayr. These were holiday places for my people, so we thought we were going on a permanent holiday.
The reality was very different. A lot of the old traditional Ayrshire industries were closing down, especially coal-mining and the steel works, with a great loss not only of jobs but a sense of community. So there were definitely struggles; it would be ludicrous to suggest growing up there was some sort of rural idyll. It wasn’t. Scotland is a place of many landscapes and sometimes in the one landscape there are a lot of clashing experiences.
We felt Scottish in a way that was rather various and very rich. There was so much going on in Scotland. There was not only the landscape and the folk memory and the stories and the songs, and the literature; there was also just the social change; the fact that Scotland was a changing country. It still is. It is such a volatile, brilliant place, never boring.
As the youngest of three brothers, I think I was more sheltered and able to pursue my own interests. They all loved football but I loved music, drama, dance. I was one of those kids who read every book in the local library. I was a bit of a dreamer, my eyes always slightly on stalks. I loved local history, loved the notion that the world is much bigger than where you are now – and part of that was from reading.
And of course, I discovered Burns – he was part of the common air. People sometimes think of themselves as having a national poet or writer that represents them, and he exists for people in Ayrshire in a very unusual way. It can only be rivalled by Shakespeare. Burns is not just a tourist attraction, he is a belief, a feeling. So much pride is invested in it. He seems to speak for everyone. He is in touch with humanity. Not just people from Ayrshire but all of humanity in a way that makes local people feel part of the world. So when I first discovered
‘ It was a big adventure, arriving in this semi-rural place with brand new houses’
those poems – and I was very young, still at school – I could not believe how magnanimous and benevolent and inclusive and full of fellow feeling they were. And this man had grown up just ten miles away from where I had, working the same fields I recognised and those trees and animals and shrubs and sense of nature that I had. This guy made world-class literature and spoke to not just his own generation but across the centuries to people all over the world. So that was deeply inspiring.
James Boswell came later. You have to be a bit older to appreciate Boswell, who wrote The Life of Samuel Johnson and diaries about 18th-century Edinburgh and London. It’s much more self- conscious, there are more smoke and mirrors. Boswell was a self-invented person in a different class – literally – from Burns. He was a nobleman full of adult contradictions. That’s why people warm to Boswell, I think. A lot of ideas and contradictions he carries in his writing and himself can be identified with. He was very proud of Auchinleck, his estate in Ayrshire, and his family and heritage. But he was also a dreamer who wanted to be away from it all and free. He wanted to be in London with Dr Johnson and the great men of his age. So he was a brilliant, two-minded person. A real Jekyll and Hyde who brought honesty and detail to the depiction of a private life. Long before the generation who were used to seeing anything in print here, he was discussing sexual life and the life of the mind, of clashing desires with such personal relish and detail. For me, he invented the modern biography, and at the same time invented a way of writing about the self, which we are still living through. I was inspired by Boswell and Burns but the literary life was not a designated path for me.
There was nobody close to me growing up who had been a writer or explained to me what the writing life would be like. I found my own way to it and sometimes I think that is the stronger way. It became a kind of vocation. I found my way to uni, even though none of my brothers went. I studied English at the University of Strathclyde. Then I went to London and became deputy editor of the London Review of Books. In 1995 The Missing, my first non-fiction book about children who go missing, won the Saltire Scottish First Book of the Year Award. My first novel Our Fathers was nominated for
‘I wanted to write about subjects and places that had never appeared in literature before’
the Booker Prize in 1999. In 2003 I was selected by the literary magazine Granta for inclusion in its list of the top 20 young British novelists.
I didn’t have an architect’s plan of what I would write or how I’d write it or how things would develop – writers never do – it’s as haphazard a life as any. On the other hand, I did know I wanted to write about subjects and places that had never really appeared in literature before. Yes, we had writers like Boswell and Burns but they hadn’t written of the comprehensive school or the modern church ( Be Near Me, 2006) or today’s young fame-seeking celebrities today ( Personality, 2003) or a troop of soldiers – some of them from Ayrshire in a modern war situation – as I do in my latest novel, The Illuminations. So you take your own time and chase your own values as a writer.
I often go back to Ayrshire in my books. Every writer has a landscape of imagination. Thomas Hardy had Wessex, Jane Austen had Hampshire, Dickens had London. You just do, you have almost a favoured place which is almost like a constantly changing map that you want to go back to again to look at its landscape, its history and how people live there. It is just a habit of art. Why parachute yourself into Toxteth when you don’t really know anything about the patterns of speech or the habits of life there even although it is a couple of hundred
miles away? Accuracy is the friend of the writer. I have visited Afghanistan as part of my journalism (and role as a Unicef ambassador) and soldiers in Northern Ireland for my latest book, as well as returning again and again to Ayrshire.
I feel it is my responsibility to go back there because modern life is endlessly changing the place that you know and the place that you love. The industry has changed and the sense of community has changed, people have satellite boxes now, a sense of the world coming into their daily lives that they just didn’t have before. A war happening abroad involving local soldiers is much more internationalised now than it would have been when I was growing up. You see the war on television, you have a sense of the impacts, you have instant access to battle images and social media keeps people in touch with the world so the globalisation of even the tiniest places has changed life quite a bit. It’s a global village now. You see every imaginable change that would come from that. In some ways – audio-visually – living in Ayrshire is the same as living in New York.
I still have family in Ayrshire and a house in West Kilbride, although my main residence is in London where I have an 11-year-old daughter. I love to be in Ayrshire and go for long walks on the beach. It is the landscape of my childhood but also a place I see a lot now. I have watched the changes. I have kept in step with life there because that is my family home.
It’s great to see the Boswell Book Festival coming to the area, especially in a setting like Dumfries House. Holding it in these rooms restored to their 18th-century glory gives a real
sense of continuity. Boswell and his fellows would be delighted that human ingenuity was being applied and people would come from far and wide to essentially a country festival celebrating ideas and human nature in all its guises.
The Boswell revival is in full spate and the festival is only a joyous part of that. He would have got festival goers drunk or pregnant; he was a great convivialist. It is also a celebration of personal writing, confessional and biographical. He inspired a lot of modern writers, including Hilary Mantel, Muriel Spark and Ernest Hemingway, to use their own lives in their work. It is something I have always done naturally.
In 2014 I ghosted the biography of Julian Assange. At first it was a very precise, controlled project and I was interested in what he was doing with Wikileaks. But given the subject’s behaviour and neurosis it became more complicated. I guess it was a Boswellian experience.
I am currently writing a biography of Alexander Boswell, James Boswell’s son, that I have been working on for 20 years, although my next book to be published will be a great social novel set between London and Scotland. I am Editor at Large of Esquire and London Review of Books and a creative writing fellow at King’s College London.
I love work. Work is the salvation. I could be like one of those po-faced Scottish ministers telling everyone the only road to salvation is hard work. Work and laugher are the two big things. What else is there?
‘ Work is the salvation. Work and laughter are the two big things’