The Three Perils Of Man - James Hogg Canongate Classics

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am almost ruing the day that I ever saw you. I have had letters, newspapers, and magazines poured in upon me… The country is full of impatience. No-one has any right to publish aught in my name without consulting me… It is confoundedly hard that I should be made a tennis ball between contending parties. If you can find out by the writ or otherwise who the shabby scoundrel is that writes the enclosed, pray return it to him in a blank cover.

      Wilson could be even more direct. In 1821 he wrote:

      Pray, who wishes to know anything about his life? Who indeed cares a single farthing, whether he be at this blessed moment dead or alive? Only picture to yourself a stout country lout, with a bushel of hair on his shoulders that had not been raked for months, enveloped in a coarse plaid impregnated with tobacco, with a prodigious mouthful of immeasurable tusks, and a dialect that set all conjecture at defiance, lumbering in suddenly upon the elegant retirement of Mr. Miller’s back shop… What would he [Hogg] himself have thought if a large surly brown bear, or a huge baboon, had burst open his door when he was at breakfast?

      Wilson’s statement about the country lout lumbering in on a scene of elegant retirement represents polite Edinburgh’s heartfelt attitude to Hogg. And Hogg in his turn was bound to clash with the Edinburgh Literati. Of the trio who wrote the ‘Chaldee manuscript’, he alone managed to stay friendly with the Whigs who were satirised therein. Of an older generation, straightforward and without affectation, he was incapable of snobbery. This is charmingly revealed in the description by a contemporary of a typical Hogg gathering of the kind he used to hold in later life whenever he came up from the Borders to Edinburgh: Grassmarket meal dealers, genteel and slender young men from Parliament House, printers from the Cowgate, book-sellers from the New Town, all rubbed shoulders.

      Hogg’s first fiction appeared in his magazine The Spy, which began in 1810 and lasted for only a year. In a way that is reminiscent of the polarised English and Scots roles adopted in their work by Ramsay and Burns, he wrote in a dual persona. In one role he was ‘the Spy’, inventing a background of gentle birth fallen on evil days, taking an observer’s interest in psychological quirks, showing already his acute interest in morbid thought and action. Here also, however, was a contrived point of view, which, in its attempt to be at one with polite Edinburgh, produced unconvincing stories of rakes’ progresses and vice punished. But defiantly another persona quickly foIlowed, that of the robust and honest teller of country tales, ‘John Miller’, the Nithsdale Shepherd. Insecurity about his social and cultural position had created a form of split creative personality.

      Criticism of Hogg’s magazine followed shortly. It was considered too coarse; when girls were pregnant Hogg said so directly. This, amongst a lot of lively as well as hack writing, is all that can be found to account for the desertion of Hogg’s generally deserving magazine by his subscribers. He admitted his mistake in one of his autobiographical accounts.

      I despised the fastidiousness and affectation of the people … the literary ladies in particular agreed … that I would never write a sentence which deserved to be read.

      And in the final number of The Spy he wrote that

      The learned, the enlightened, and polite circles of this flourishing metropolis disdained either to be amused or instructed by the ebulitions of humble genius. Enemies, swelling with the most rancorous spite, grunted in every corner … Pretended friends … liberal in their advices … took every method in their power to lessen the work in the esteem of others by branding its author with designs the most subversive of all civility and decorum …

      Thus from the beginning of Hogg’s fiction adverse criticism was to inhibit his instinctive creativity. Already critics had adopted an attitude to Hogg which accepted his pleasant country songs, his moments of poetic genius, his sketches of the shepherd’s life, but advised him not to attempt more. But Hogg was resilient in these early years in Edinburgh. He decided not to give in to the literary ladies and sensitive gentlemen, and between 1810 and 1821 added to and amended the early Spy stories for his collection, Winter Evening Tales. It is fascinating to compare the later with the earlier versions. Ghost stories are cut down to a stark simplicity, and their sense of threatening mystery deepened. And a recurrent theme emerges of dark inscrutable forces, powerful and aristocratic, surrounding and trapping an innocent protagonist. This may echo Hogg’s own feelings about a ‘conspiracy’ of the gentry against him; but it could be argued that Literati criticism of Hogg’s work and personality for once (and accidentally) contributed positively here, as it is predominantly this sense of inexorable and unknown powers conspiring against a vulnerable protagonist which makes so many of his stories compelling, from The Justified Sinner to An Edinburgh Baillie.

      One story is remarkable for its time. Hogg extensively added to a Spy story called ‘On Instability in One’s Calling’ to create the short novel Basil Lee. This was the tale which had caused most offence with its frank declaration of pregnancy. It illustrates admirably the direction Hogg was moving in, and should have been encouraged to move in. The original was a short description of the misadventures of a young fellow psychologically incapable of settling to any one job. Hogg capably linked a genuine interest in abnormal psychology with a very funny anti-romantic account of how his anti-hero continually dreams of new roles. Basil sees himself as a shepherd, taking lassies under his plaid, making up songs, living an Arcadian tradition – but the rain pours down, the job proves a dirty one, Jessie slaps his face. He tries life as a grocer – but sells vitriol by mistake for whisky. After trying many jobs, exhausting his father’s patience, Basil gets sent abroad. He meets a beautiful young lady on the ship – who turns out to be an Inverness prostitute. Hogg reversed all conventions here by sensitively and effectively making her the most genuinely dignified person in the story and defining her relationship with the braggart Basil with a delicacy of control and insight unusual for the time.

      In other ways, too, Basil Lee mocks the conventional romance. Basil becomes a hero of the American Wars when he gets entangled in the British flags while fleeing. He tries to kill the standard bearer, and when the smoke of battle clears he is mistaken as the saviour of the colours and promoted for valour. And much of this spirit of subversion, parodic mockery and satiric fun lies behind The Three Perils of Man, with its fundamentally anti-romantic bias. But Edinburgh was not ready for a story where the ending had the prostitute as the real heroine, redeeming a worthless good-for-nothing, with the pair squabbling happily ever after. The Winter Evening Tales (1820) in which this appeared were not unsuccessful; but invariably Hogg was reproached for the ‘indelicacies’ of stories like this, and applauded for the collection’s simple Border anecdotes of the shepherd’s life, with the occasional ghost story permitted. Social satire and rumbustious anti-heroics were not appreciated by literary Edinburgh.

      By this time Hogg must have begun to wonder if there existed a significant prose form in which he could succeed; for in 1817 his first major novel had appeared (although it was in fact written after most of the stories which became Winter Evening Tales). The Brownie of Bodsbeck tells of Claverhouse’s atrocities during the ‘killing time’. The action is terse and vivid, the horrors described in a realistic, shocking and dramatic style, while the Border characters are as good as anything of the kind created by Scott. Moreover, Hogg experimented with techniques nowhere else found so early

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