Culture Minister Michael Russell - Literature Working Group - Beachd bho Roger Hutchinson

(Beurla a tha seo - English article from Roger Hutchinson,West Highland Free Press) Does Scottish literature need help? On the debatable assumption that it does, a Literature Working Group set up by Culture Minister Michael Russell met for the first time earlier this month. The working group has no actual powers. Its function is simply “to recommend a new approach to support for literature in Scotland” to Mr Russell by the end of this year. The Literature Working Group has nine members. It is convened by The Herald’s literary editor Rosemary Goring. Ms Goring’s eight charges are: Hugh Andrew, the publisher of Birlinn, Polygon, Mercat Press and John Donald. Hugh has published and republished more books on the Highlands and Islands than anybody else in history. He is also my publisher and we are normally on good terms, so before writing this I thought I’d hit him for some inside information about the Literature Working Group. I was told to go away and boil my head. Rody Gorman is a former sgriobhadair and librarian at Sabhal Mor Ostaig and still lives in Skye. A published poet who has also translated Bob Dylan into Gaelic, he has at least one attribute that should get him onto every literature committee going. If you throw the first line of any of the Yeats canon at Rody, he can instantly complete the whole poem while standing at a bar. It defeats me why this remarkable facility was not trumpeted in the working group’s press release. The rest ... well, there’s a genuine old-school heavyweight in the novelist and critic Allan Massie. There’s Valentina Bold, whose “interests include the literature and oral traditions of Scotland, particularly poetry, storytelling and song but also customs and beliefs”. There’s The Sun’s political correspondent Andy Nicoll, who has also written a novel. There are the poets Jen Hadfield and Don Paterson. And there’s Matthew Fitt, a novelist, poet and translator who co-founded Itchy Coo, the Scots Language imprint for children and young people. Fitt is also Director of Scots Education Resources and UK Secretary of the European Bureau for Lesser-Used Languages. Gaelic literature does have a presence, then, in the person of Rody Gorman. I suspect that Matthew Fitt, with his background in Scots publishing and his job at the Lesser-Used Languages Bureau, is there to balance the ticket. If so it doesn’t wash. Whereas Gaelic is quite evidently a unique and venerable language in its own right, Scots is a dialect with no more claim to philological distinction than, say, Northumbrian Geordie. Robert Burns can be understood even at his broadest by any imaginative literate English speaker. Sorley Maclean cannot. It is way past time that the Scottish Government and the Lesser-Used Languages Bureau and the various arts agencies had the courage to admit that fact. In short: if Scots merited one seat on the Literature Working Group, Gaelic deserved four or five. Instead we’ve got four or five poets on the working group, and that also troubles me. Clive James reckons that most people who write poetry these days do so because they can’t be bothered to master writing prose. He’s right. It’s not so much that we don’t need more poets. We don’t - but nobody should lose any sleep about the future of poetry in Scotland. There are tens of thousands of poets out there. You cannot keep them down. I’m not suggesting that we should keep them down (not violently, anyway). But I am suggesting that they don’t need any more encouragement, grants, bursaries, writerships-in-residence, and certainly not recommendations from this year’s Literature Working Group to the Culture Minister that our poets require propping up. So what can our committee suggest to Mr Russell which would “map out a strong future for literature in Scotland”? Very little that is within the remit of the Culture Minister. The strongest, surest future for Gaelic and English literature in Scotland would be obtained by giving children good educations in both languages - but that is not Michael Russell’s department. If it is not to have been completely worthless, at the end of a process like this there has to be money spent by Michael Russell’s culture department. Every penny of it should be spent solely and simply on the publishers. From Acair and Ur-Sgeul to Black Raven, Sandstone, Mainstream and Birlinn, book publishers offer easily the best and most reliable investment in the future of Scottish literature. Money given to publishing houses automatically seeps down to writers - printing, marketing and paying writers is what publishers do. Publishing houses operate with one eye on the marketplace and the other eye on their own literary preference, which means that if you have enough independent publishers around a nice balance exists between risk and success, poetry and prose, good and bad. Publishing is not having an easy time now. Several small and medium-size publishers need support. They should be given it in the form of increased targeted subsidy for individual books. Without Scotland’s many book publishers, serious Scottish writers will melt away like snow off a dyke. Without a healthy commercial publishing industry, Scottish literature will not have a future. Copyright © Roger Hutchinson and West Highland Free Press, 2009