Barnacles by J. MacDougall Hay (1916)

 I have to approach this one very quietly, because the feeling is that its essence is delicate. Very easily loseable. Hay's only other novel, 1914's Gillespie, is regarded rightly as a Scottish classic, and has been in print permanently since its "rediscovery" in the late 70s (there was a lonely second edition back in the 60s). By contrast, this second one is decidedly not celebrated. It is very different in key ways. I think some of the appeal of Gillespie, some of what gives it its primacy, lies in the plot, which is soaked in blood and deceit - a widely approachable pathway to notions of what is 'great'. This one has some of that, as a backstory to one of the main characters, but the remainder is another kettle of fish altogether, plot-wise, and tonally. Barnacles himself is not really the subsidiary character who appears in Gillespie. That gentleman had the same skin condition which gave him his nickname, but was a slightly windy rouser of men, known for his galvanizing capacity. This Barnacles is "one of God's innocents", a gentle wanderer, with a Christ-like demeanour. He is abused by his touchy and domineering father on their farm until he can take no more. He runs away with a sheep and heads into Paisley, causing great amusement there wandering around with the animal, trying to sell it in order to pay for a violin, which he loves to play. Hay has us understand his difference by his feeling of fellowness with the creature and his strange honesty when dealing with people, a balance of seeing through to deeper things, especially those of a moral nature, and not seeing the usual worldlinesses at all, or being able to dismiss them. We are then introduced to the life of a banker he meets, who is intrigued by him and encourages him in his search for work. At his house, where he comes to play the violin, Barnacles meets a woman into whose story we are also taken. When younger, in Glasgow, she was engaged to a good young man but was a relative innocent herself. As soon as the young man's brother entered the picture, things began to go awry. The brother was a scheming manipulator, who managed to wheedle his way into the family, and turf the other brother out, replacing him in her 'affections', making the most of any hesitancies, jealousies and immaturities he can twist to his obsessed advantage. This is the closest part to the Hay of Gillespie; it's dark and savage. Barnacles in the meantime has taken up with a poor man, a carter named Skelly, his young son, Wee Kitchener, and his doddering father, Hector the sailor, in digs in the worst part of town. These three have an almost Dickensian quality of theatrical simplicity, sorrow and sweetness. Another three varieties of innocent are added to our roster. Back in the darker story, the woman marries the evil brother; the original fiancé is lost in his own personal hell, and becomes a tramp. Martha, Mrs Normanshire as she becomes, already stressed and unhappy under all the manipulation which she has endured, realises as time goes by that Ganson, her new husband, is capable of extraordinary cruelty, both physical and emotional. After enduring horror, and the deaths of several of her family, she leaves him and comes under the protection, through friends, of the banker. She ends up buying a house nearby to his in Paisley, and is a close friend of the family in some secrecy and seclusion, as she fears Ganson finding her and all hell breaking loose. Barnacles is fascinated by Martha, placing her on a pedestal of beauty and goodness in his innocence, and responding deeply to her sorrow. She finds herself, despite his simplicities, or perhaps because of their contrast to her recent experience, also intrigued by him, but hamstrung by her married status, and their common shyness (hers through hesitancy and exhaustion, his through ignorance) on the subject of love. Barnacles' job as clerk for the council, always rather tenuous, falls through. He answers an advertisement to become factotum to a religiously-obsessed woman in Brieston (the locale of Gillespie), whose scheme for the redemption of the world appeals to his ideas of how things should be. He admires her, and is slavish to her dominance and high expectations - comedy abounds in her one-eyed crazedness, and is made subtle by Barnacles' positive responses. She sends him finally on a mission back to Paisley with great plans. In his time away, his beloved Hector has died, and Skelly and Wee Kitchener are no longer in their rooms. Barnacles, in some puzzlement, with a sense of loss and the beginnings of despair, heads to Martha's, seeking comfort, still unaware of his full feelings. He slips into her garden at night, hoping to hear her sing, one of his favourite things. But she hears his steps and comes outside to see him. She lets him know something that we have already been party to - that both Ganson and his done down brother Patrick are dead. Previously, we have been witness to the dire fight between them which ends in the total burning of the house in Glasgow - a harsh reckoning, echoing the scenes in Gillespie between Eoghan and his mother, resulting in the death of both. This has released Martha from both primal fear and her tied status. She and Barnacles can finally approach understanding of one another. They marry, and Barnacles is also reunited with Skelly and Wee Kitchener - Skelly is to be married to Martha's strong but eccentric housekeeper, who adores his boy. Style is the commonality between the two novels; both are fervid and spiralling. The harsh eye of Gillespie, squarely on the world and unremitting, contrasts the view in Barnacles, with folk-sweetness leavening the mixture, creating very interesting counterpoint. I admit to the wish that Hay had lived longer, to see what might have come next, given this well-strung richness.

Gillespie by J. MacDougall Hay (1914)

 My new domicile in Shetland has brought on the wish to look further into Scotland's literature. The reading of this extraordinary novel forms the first fruits of that intention. What a first step. It is a moral tale, expressed poetically. Many novels can be described in this way, so I need a likening which will bring further focus, and the one I feel impelled to choose is Moby-Dick. There is grandness here, the wrack and twist of human greed, the impulses of fate swinging humanity around by whichever failing they leave exposed. There is something of that drench of negativity here too, like a wash applied which seeps into all the corners of the portrait, making the shadows a little darker, the fearful grey of the sea a bit more impending, the flailing of the characters under their instincts and whims a little more misdirected. It's set in a coastal town of western Scotland in the late 19th century, early 20th. It is the time when the herring trade became industrialized, or at least a lot more organized and mechanized. Gillespie himself is a grasping sort who has an unending wish to rise above the work of fishing or shop-keeping which is the usual lot of people of his class. He wants to control the fishers, command all the trade, inveigle himself into various positions of authority in the town. His attention is solely with this, and anyone who either gets in his way, or takes too much of his attention away from the core task, gets short shrift. So his wife and sons are sorely neglected in all ways except perhaps the material, but even there his growing wealth is severely protected, and enjoyment stinted. His emotional neglect though is perhaps the key arena - his wife quickly develops a reliance on alcohol, his sons' dislike of him curdles their personalities to varying extents. His exploitative career begins with the takeover of the farm of a widow after her husband's death, in league with a greedy farmer whom he eventually double-crosses. The widow realizes his perfidy too late to save her home, and Gillespie makes an enemy for life. Mrs Galbraith is a talisman figure through the whole novel, her soul soured and made duplicitous as she manipulates quietly to expose Gillespie, playing the long game. Of course, all that Gillespie does in these cases is completely within the law, and incontestable - a matter of gaining the agreement of the unaware, and then pressing his advantage home. But as he does it, again and again, the roster of those calling themselves 'enemy' grows. He has a showdown with desperate fishermen at a time of drought and plague, driving several to virtual madness. His control of ostensibly the entire fleet is confirmed, and then the desperate ones connive, against their own interests, to burn the boats that used to be theirs as they wait in the harbour, at least hoping to ruin Gillespie, echoing their own downfall, engineered by him. He is indeed seemingly laid low, and wanders the streets of Brieston disconsolately, but he finds a way to survive, and rubs their foolishness in their faces. As the novel matures we hear more of his sons as they grow up. Iain, the older and more genial of the two, becomes a fisherman and drowns in a boat which has been poorly fitted out by his father, just at the entrance of the harbour, nearly home in a storm. Eoghan, the younger, is a nervous, intelligent and somewhat religiously-obsessed boy. We see a lot from his point of view. He vacillates, torn between his growing horror of his mother's alcoholism, his wish to head to university, and his love of a cousin, Barbara, who has been tricked by Gillespie into handing over her fortune. His mind has been soured by his upbringing, unstrung between these parents. As his mother's shame turns into madness, entirely traceable to his father's baleful effect, he begins to have thoughts of killing her, to lance the family boil. In the end, in a truly horrifying scene, instead it is his mother who, unrecognizingly taking him for an enemy who will take away her beloved drink, and addled utterly, grabs a razor and slits his throat in a struggle in the dark of the house. She is killed in the process, hitting her head on the fender as he thrashes around and knocks her flying in his death throes. So Gillespie is finally undone. His entire family is gone, and his culpability in their accursed ends is manifest. Broken, he goes to visit his father, who is dying from the effects of a stroke in the family pub, around the other side of the harbour. A long-unpaid debt, which caused the rift which has separated them for many years, starts to torment him. Unable to engender a response from his father, and starting to feel the effects of lockjaw brought on by stepping in the dark on a shard of one of his wife's broken bottles, he collapses, and over the period of a couple of days, his skin going black in patches as the infection takes him over, he breathes his last in agony, tended by a somewhat chastened Mrs Galbraith, who has been caring for his father. This chronicle of single-minded greed, and its laying waste of many lives, is written with almost toppling fervour, the agitated intensity and rolling poetics recalling the grandness of Melville's restless vehemence. Some parts, particularly where Eoghan's story starts to take shape, feel episodic, almost as though this was originally a much larger opus which Constable asked Hay to cut down for its initial publication. Certainly one of the ringleaders of the fishermen's revolt is Barnacles, who forms the centre of Hay's only other novel. Was Barnacles an expansion of an excised portion of this book? There seems so little published information about Hay - I wonder if much remains of his papers. Perhaps a reader's report in Constable's archives? Correspondence there also? Now there's a flavoursome arena of research calling.

Commonplace Book

 '...he stood watching a splendid ladder of flame in the heart of the fleet. It had a rhythmic movement which fascinated the eye. Its flat, jagged head oscillated backwards and forwards slowly, like the head of a snake. This was the main sheet of flame, whose splendour and terror mesmerised. It took a hundred fantastic shapes - now like the chain mail of warriors tearing at each other with bloody hands in a cauldron; now like witches with streaming hair of flame; like ghosts in winding-sheets of Tophet; and again like a wall of beaten gold. In greater gusts of the wind the wall swayed, bellied, and broke, and great golden balloons hovered in the air. At the foot of this wall vicious tongues leapt out everywhere, seized the cordage, writhed about the masts, licking everything in their path; united and fanned upwards, they swooped across the golden wall as if fighting for life. The anchor chains were red hot; spars crackled like musketry and hissed in the sea. Stars seemed falling from heaven. The wall of flame swayed and bent, and fell across the boats like gigantic flowers...'

from Gillespie by J. MacDougall Hay (Book II, Chapter 30)

Commonplace Book

'...She had watched that wood in all seasons. Sometimes it had appeared to her in leafless winter like an army with spears watching upon the hill over against the sea; when stiff with frost it was a giant foreland, upon whose forehead had frozen the foam of the ocean. In summer Pan drove stallions through it, shaking multitudinous bells. In autumn it was an army bivouacked in blood. To-day it was beaten, slain, broken; the light of the babe eyes of spring had been quenched upon its face...'

from Gillespie by J. MacDougall Hay (Chapter 15)

Commonplace Book

'...As the sea without droned the antiphon, and the homeless wind upon the hill cried the antistrophe, he thought it was a wilding elphin thing he loved who was one with the witch-wind upon the waste, and with the changeling brumous sea.'

from Gillespie by J. MacDougall Hay (Chapter 3)