Rediscovering the brilliance of John Herdman in the digital age

Scottish author’s ‘inspirational and important works’ are being republished for the e-book generation, writes Angus Howarth

Despite a five-decade publishing history, literary awards and abundance of critical praise stretching back over that same period, it’s easy to be a forgotten writer in the digital age. John Herdman’s first book was published in 1968, by The Fiery Star Press, and between then and 2013 Herdman published over 15 titles, all to acclaim. Handwritten or delivered as a typed manuscript however, and set using the customary methods of the day, Herdman is one of a generation of writers whose work does not exist in any digital format. It makes republishing these books a considerable challenge.

Perhaps we have been conditioned in the internet age to feel that what is important is what is happening now, this very hour. Publishers are always looking for the next big thing, but drop their writers after two or three books, making the idea of a career as a novelist more precarious than ever. In the decades to come we’ll begin to see how unusual a 50-year career in writing is, and how valuable too. No writer and no literature is an island, and these bodies of work even if they are not in print, are essential to anyone interested in their culture.

Peter Burnett of Edinburgh’s Leamington Books, is the originator of the new Gothic World Literature Editions imprint, and one of the imprint’s first jobs is republishing some of the key works by John Herdman.

“It isn’t about reviving the past,” says Burnett. “It’s about never losing sight of inspirational and important works that have shaped our national literature. To quote Gustav Mahler: ‘Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.’”

John Herdman belongs to a generation of writers that are loosely associated with the world left by Hugh Macdiarmid. Macdiarmid not only encouraged pride and interest in our national languages, but in our nation as an independent political entity, and Herdman began to write in the 1960s, an era when Macdiarmid’s ideas were beginning to form more popular roots. The idea of Scottish independence at that time was still strange, and deeply unfashionable – the opposite of what it is today. Despite this, Herdman was a prominent figure in the nascent independence movement of the 1960s and 70s, an era well documented in his 2013 memoir Another Country, from Thirsty Books.

Herdman’s own roots as a writer dig further back than the so-called Scottish Renaissance, however, and are planted within a wider European tradition, which has its grounds in the psychological dramas of James Hogg, Dostoyevsky,

Sheridan Lefanu as well as the exuberant narratives of Robert Louis Stevenson.

Herdman is not just the final living scion of this tradition, but its summation. His finest books, A Truth Lover (1973), Clapperton (1974), Pagan’s Pilgrimage (1978), Imelda (1993), Ghostwriting (1995) and The Sinister Cabaret (2001) are dark charnel houses of lost personalities, morbid stories of self-discovery populated by curses, faded hopes and roll replete with dream imagery. As suggested by Herdman’s own elegant and masterful study The Double in Nineteenth Century Fiction (1990), this is not a specifically Scottish world, but influenced by an entirety of far wider traditions. Tellingly, this is what first drew publisher and author Peter Burnett to the work.

“As most of John Herdman’s writing was published between the 70s and the early 2000s, and remained largely out of print, I realised there was no digital versions of his books,” he says. “I can think of many writers to whom this applies. Emma Tennant may be one such, and another may be the former BBC Controller, Stuart Hood. I think it would be a great use of time and resources to digitise these works. I took a huge interest in Imelda when it was published in 1993. Everyone else was reading Trainspotting, but for me personally, I found my calling as a writer and publisher in John Herdman’s Imelda, which was for my money, funnier, darker and weirder by far than anything published in Scotland in that decade.”

Without doubt, Scottish

Everyone else was reading Trainspotting, but for me personally, I found my calling as a writer and publisher in John Herdman’s Imelda

PETER BURNETT

Publisher and author