Home-grown andflourishing

INthis quartet of short stories and essays, Ali Smith comes as close to autobiography as she’s ever done. Bookended by two conventional short stories – that’s conventional as understood by Smith, not by the general ruck of humanity – Shire is a mixture of droll whimsy and a tribute to two significant northerly Scottish women, one a poet, one an academic, whose lives overlapped with Smith’s, and in so doing changed her.

The collection’s title, Shire, is taken from Helena Shire – “blonde-grey and bright at the eye” – who taught Medieval Literature at Cambridge, and under whose inspirational and generous wing Smith and her friend Sarah were taken. When asked to recall her first impressions of this charismatic figure, Sarah said: “I remember her then like I remember my first visit to the university library – something monolithic that I had no idea how to use.”

But this work’s name refers also to Smith’s response to the geography – all the shires – that lie between her home town of Inverness and the university of Cambridge, where she went to study as a postgraduate. “Cambridge: an affectation and a place,” she writes. But it was not long before she was falling under its spell, “and I’m surprised at myself secretly, in spite of where I’m from, for really actually quite liking it here, not that I’d ever say so to anybody.”

Smith has lived there ever since, as has Sarah Wood, whose photos and drawings illustrate this curious book. Throughout her career, Smith’s work has carried more than a hint of her northern roots, an air of directness and clarity, of free-speaking no-nonsense, not to mention an eerie playfulness reminiscent of George MacDonald Fraser and JM Barrie.

Nowhere, however, has she written anything that so plainly lays out her feelings for her native country, or her origins. Shire is thus not only an homage to two women who have influenced her, but a quiet appreciation of her homeland, its literature, but, above all, her family.

It is a work that seems to begin with a sense of homesickness, albeit of the sort that no return can ever slake. Part of Smith’s sense of separation is not merely physical distance, but stems from the death of her parents. With their loss, it appears, the old Scotland that nurtured her, and the writer in her, has retreated.

The first of the two factual tales here, Poet, describes beautiful young Olive Fraser, born in 1909, a ferociously intelligent and free-spirited girl from Nairn who excelled at Aberdeen and Cambridge universities – unlike Smith she hated Cambridge – yet dwindled quickly thereafter into a frail creature dogged by ill health, both mental and physical. Only thanks to her friend Shire, with whom she was a student at Aberdeen and Cambridge, has she been remembered. Shire collected her poems in The Wrong Music, a couple of years before her own death in 1991.

Smith’s portraits of these women, into which she weaves her own yearning to write, can be read as a meditation on what it takes for a woman, particularly in the middle of last century, to find her artistic voice.

But for “woman”, one could also substitute the word “Scot”, given how lowly a place Scottish writers have been allocated on the cultural ladder over the centuries.

IN a rare flash of fury, Smith recalls a radio programme in which she was horrified at a fellow guest, a TV executive from Big Brother, whose disdain for Grassic Gibbon’s Sunset Song was staggering. “Why should I have to read something so very Scottish?” he said, “I’m just not interested in it.”

Smith was ashamed at not being quick enough to demolish his argument. “In truth I’ll sit there with my mouth hanging open, too taken aback to do anything but stop myself swearing out loud on Radio 4.”

Illuminating though it is to catch a glimpse of Smith’s background and her feelings for the north, the standout piece is the opening story, The Beholder. It could be read as a calling card for Smith, typifying her