SMITH, Iain Crichton

Pseudonym for Iain Mac A'Ghobhainn. Nationality: British. Born: Glasgow, Scotland, 1 January 1928. Education: The University of Aberdeen, M.A. (honors) in English 1949. Military Service: Served in the British Army Education Corps, 1950-52: sergeant. Family: Married in 1977. Career: Secondary school teacher, Clydebank, 1952-55; teacher of English, Oban High School, 1955-77. Lives in Argyll. Awards: Scottish Arts Council award, 1966, 1968, 1974, 1978, and prize, 1968; BBC award, for television play, 1970; Book Council award, 1970; Silver Pen award, 1971; Queen's Silver Jubilee medal, 1978; Commonwealth Poetry prize, 1986; Society of Authors Travelling scholarship, 1987. LL.D.: Dundee University, 1983. D.Litt.: University of Aberdeen, 1968; Glasgow University, 1984. Member: Fellow, Royal Society of Literature. O.B.E. (Officer, Order of the British Empire), 1980; Scottish Arts Council, 1985-91.

Publications

Short Stories

Burn is Aran [Bread and Water] (includes verse). 1960.

An Dubh is an Gorm [The Black and the Blue]. 1963.

Maighstirean is Ministearan [Schoolmasters and Ministers]. 1970.

Survival without Error and Other Stories. 1970.

The Black and the Red. 1973.

An t-Adhar Ameireageanach [The American Sky]. 1973.

The Village. 1976.

The Hermit and Other Stories. 1977.

Murdo and Other Stories. 1981.

Mr. Trill in Hades and Other Stories. 1984.

Selected Stories. 1990.

Listen to the Voice. 1993.

Thoughts of Murdo. 1993.

Novels

Consider the Lilies. 1968; as The Alien Light, 1969.

The Last Summer. 1969.

My Last Duchess. 1971.

Goodbye, Mr. Dixon. 1974.

An t-Aonaran [The Hermit]. 1976.

An End to Autumn. 1978.

On the Island. 1979.

A Field Full of Folk. 1982.

The Search. 1983.

The Tenement. 1985.

In the Middle of the Wood. 1987.

The Dream. 1990.

An Honourable Death. 1993.

Plays

An Coileach [The Cockerel] (produced 1966). 1966.

A'Chuirt [The Trial] (produced 1966). 1966.

A Kind of Play (produced 1975).

Two by the Sea (produced 1975).

The Happily Married Couple (produced 1977).

Colum-cille (produced 1994).

Lazybed (produced 1994).

Radio Plays:

Goodman and Death Mahoney, 1980; Mr. Trill, 1988;The Visitor, 1988.

Poetry

The Long River. 1955.

New Poets 1959, with Karen Gershon and Christopher Levenson. 1959.

Deer on the High Hills: A Poem. 1960.

Thistles and Roses. 1961.

The Law and the Grace. 1965.

Biobuill is Sanasan Reice [Bibles and Advertisements]. 1965.

Three Regional Voices, with Michael Longley and Barry Tebb. 1968.

At Helensburgh. 1968.

From Bourgeois Land. 1969.

Selected Poems. 1970.

Penguin Modern Poets 21, with George Mackay Brown and Norman MacCaig. 1972.

Love Poems and Elegies. 1972.

Hamlet in Autumn. 1972.

Rabhdan is rudan [Verses and Things]. 1973.

Eadar Fealla-dha is Glaschu [Between Comedy and Glasgow]. 1974.

Orpheus and Other Poems. 1974.

Poems for Donalda. 1974.

The Permanent Island: Gaelic Poems, translated by the author. 1975.

The Notebooks of Robinson Crusoe and Other Poems. 1975.

In the Middle—. 1977.

Selected Poems 1955-1980, edited by Robin Fulton. 1982.

Na h-Eilthirich. 1983.

The Exiles. 1984.

Selected Poems. 1985.

A Life. 1986.

An t-Eilean is an Canain. 1987.

The Village and Other Poems. 1989.

Collected Poems. 1992.

Ends and Beginnings. 1994.

Other

The Golden Lyric: An Essay on the Poetry of Hugh MacDiarmid. 1967.

Iain Am Measg nan Reultan [Iain among the Stars] (for children). 1970.

River, River: Poems for Children. 1978.

Na h-Ainmhidhean [The Animals] (verse for children). 1979.

Towards the Human: Selected Essays. 1986.

Moments in the Glasshouse: Poetry and Prose by 5 New Scottish Writers. 1987.

On the Island (for children). 1988.

George Douglas Brown's The House with Green Shutters. 1988.

Editor, Scottish Highland Tales. 1982.

Editor, with Charles King, Twelve More Scottish Poets. 1986.

Translator, The Permanent Island. n.d.

Translator, Ben Dorain, by Duncan Ban Macintyre. 1969.

Translator, Poems to Eimhir, by Sorley Maclean. 1971.

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Bibliography:

in Lines Review 29, 1969; A Bibliography of Smith, Grant F. Wilson, 1990.

Critical Studies:

interview in Scottish International, 1971; Smith, 1979; Literature of the North edited by David Hewitt and M. R. G. Spiller, 1983; New Edinburgh Review, Summer 1984; Douglas Gifford, in Chapman, 34; Carol Gow, in Cencrastus, 35; Smith: New Critical Essays edited by Colin Nicholson, 1991; Mirror and Marble: The Poetry by Carol Gow, 1992.

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Iain Crichton Smith comes from the island of Lewis, in the Outer Hebrides. He is bilingual, writing in both English and Gaelic. First and foremost, he is one of the most distinguished poets of his generation. He has written plays in both languages. Two of his novels in English, Consider the Lilies and The Last Summer, are regarded in his own country as classics. Of his 11 collections of short stories, several are in Gaelic.

In Smith's first English collection, Survival without Error, the importance of threatened regional languages and cultures are asserted, sometimes through studies of separation and alienation. A son watches his mother die and can do nothing about it. An exile returns home from America to the Highlands and finds that he is being constantly interrogated: "What have you done with your life?" That is the question people, without realizing it, put to him simply because he chose to return. It is also the question that he himself wants answered.

Both Smith's novels and his short stories are filled with flashes of imagery and poetic insight, as, for instance, when the Highlander Kenneth writes home to his mother about his university experiences. He goes to church where, he reports, the minister "Mr. Wood isn't very impressive. He is a small stout man who seems to me to have nothing to say. The church itself is small and quite pretty and fresh. But it's his voice that I find peculiar, as if he could be thinking of something else when he is preaching. He is not in his voice."

One of Smith's recurring preoccupations is the tension between the old dogmatic narrowness of religion in the Highlands, something he must have experienced as a boy, and the challenge of modern thought and behavior. In "The Hermit," the title story of one of his collections, the narrator is constantly urged by his mother to stick to his books, to be able to get away from it all through study, as Smith himself did.

There is another of his deftly drawn pictures of grim Highland ministers in this story: "a very thin man with a cadaverous face, one of those faces that Highland ministers have, grained and deeply trenched so that they look like portraits of Dante in old age." The story deals with the mysterious presence in the community of a strange bicycling hermit, an innocent man who is reluctantly tolerated. When the narrator seduces a local beauty, the story is set about that the "quite harmless" hermit has attacked her.

In "The Missionary" a Christian minister goes to Africa to convert the heathen, where he seduces a native girl, Tobbuta, and invokes all manner of superstitious disasters. The minister believes that "murder and death" had been "a plague around him simply in order that Tobbuta would be saved," an attitude throwing a condemning light on the sophistry of religion against the claims of common humanity.

Though the contrasts and conflicts of narrow, localized religion versus worldly modernism, often represented by common sense, are deeply ingrained in Smith's work, his range is refreshingly wider. He can rival Roald Dahl with surprising horror endings, as in "Macbeth," where a jealous actor playing the title role lusts after the young African wife of the actor playing Duncan, a liaison encouraged by the older actor to secure a more passionate stage performance from the younger man. When he discovers the delusion, the murder of Duncan on the last night of the run is real.

A concern for common humanity rings through all that Smith has written, in poetry as in prose but nowhere more so than in the hilariously funny story "The Professor and the Comics." Professor MacDuff addresses his students on the psychological differences between Desperate Dan and Korky the Cat. His serious-minded students are outraged, while others, including Stephen Mallow, think that the professor has at last aligned himself with contemporary literary values. The local television station eventually invites MacDuff to appear on a talk show, which he agrees to do only if a student of his choice, Mallow, appears with him. After allowing Mallow his say, the professor discusses basic human values. Of the "aargh"-like sounds the comic characters emit, he says, "They are like the sounds we would make when we came out of the slime…. Shall I tell you something? It's the people who write comics who look down on the working man. They are saying, that is what the working man is like. This is what he prefers. He can't do any better than this. Give him any rubbish." It is more or less the profitable philosophy of commercial television.

Smith's short stories encompass characters and situations that give them an identity and an entity of significance far beyond the bounds of Scotland. While his first importance is undoubtedly as a poet, his short stories make a distinctive contribution to the European genre.

—Maurice Lindsay

See the essay on "Murdo."