Hunting Captain Henley
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Hunting Captain Henley Ken Pratt M.A. VOLUME 1: Scotland’s Fascist Voice - a commentary. VOLUME 2: Hunting Captain Henley - a novel. Submitted for the degree of Ph (D) to the University of Glasgow, Department of English and Scottish Literature and Language. © Ken Pratt 2009. Abstract The term post traumatic stress is routinely used to describe the psychological experiences of soldiers returning from war. It is used here to describe the effects it has on the families of PTS victims, in particular children. Hunting Captain Henley is a novel which explores the long term effects of a father’s post traumatic stress on a son’s (intellectual) development. It tracks the progress of the narrator from childhood to adulthood as he sets about tracking down the (English) Royal Signals Captain who allegedly bullied his dad into shooting Arab civilians during the Ismaelia police uprising at Suez in 1951. In his 1919 book Scottish Literature: Character and Influence G. Gregory Smith first coined the phrase Caledonian Antisyzygy to spotlight the zigzag of contradictions at the heart of Scottish Literature, especially under the stress of foreign (in particular English) influence. The term has since been used to point at the schizophrenia at the heart of Scottishness. The novel considers the dual influences of the English (language) on Scottish writing and families. As a prologue to the book a commentary is provided. Scotland’s Fascist Voice addresses the unexplored area of the present-day fascist consciousness in Scotland. It does so by firstly acknowledging Scotland’s role in the creation of the British Empire then delineates a developing contemporary identity borne out of that imperial experience. It examines the significance of The Raucle Tongue, hitherto uncollected prose by Hugh MacDiarmid, in particular his Plea for a Scottish Fascism. The remaining chapters of the commentary explain the significance of a form of cultural repression at work in Scottish society and showcase the fascist style mindset and its incumbent voice. It is concluded that as both victims and perpetators of Empire Scots must now acknowledge this duality of experience and carry forth its impact on both our language and identity into the 21st century. Table of Contents Title........................................................................................................................... Abstract..................................................................................................................... Table of Contents.......................................................................... Acknowledgements........................................................................ Volume One Introduction.................................................................................. 1 Chapter 1: Scotland’s Empire..........................................................14 Chapter 2: Cultural Repression.........................................................27 Chapter 3: The Fascist Voice...........................................................38 Chapter 5: Renaissance Scotland......................................................52 Chapter 6: The Gramski Perspective.................................................63 Conclusion.....................................................................................75 Volume Two Chapter 1: A Womb With A View....................................................87 Chapter 2: Into Enemy Territory.....................................................102 Chapter 3: Party Politics.................................................................117 Chapter 4: Uncle Ron’s War............................................................132 Chapter 5: Ivory Tower Blues..........................................................152 Chapter 6: Skating In George Square................................................167 Chapter 7: Tracking Lance..............................................................180 Chapter 8: Firewall Banter..............................................................194 Chapter 9: A Snippet of Fact...........................................................209 Chapter 10: Down to The Auld Nick................................................225 Chapter 11: Ayr in Winter...............................................................246 Chapter12: Away Past Barlinnie.......................................................272 Chapter 13: And Up To The Raj.......................................................282 Chapter 14: Back To The Future.......................................................299 Chapter 15: Nagpur Sunrise..............................................................316 Chapter 16 An Agreement Between Men............................................319 Appendix A: Our Secret War............................................................325 Appendix B: Class War In Clydebank................................................326 Appendix C: Child Killers of The Congo...........................................327 Bibliography:..................................................................................328 Acknowledgements I would like to thank my supervisors Alan Riach, Alan Bissett and Willy Maley. Alan Bissett in particular for his endurance and patience with this project, Alan Riach in particular for his insights into Hugh MacDiarmid and Willy Maley who first inspired the idea of turning this into a Ph (D) and stayed to the end. To my mother for listening to my lunchtime rants about the book’s progress and, of course, to my father, for his late night war stories. Thanks also to my wife Janey for clearing up the mess I left behind during construction work and to my girls Aimee and Alexis for their smiles and hugs. Hunting Captain Henley Ken Pratt M.A. VOLUME 1: Scotland’s Fascist Voice - a commentary. Submitted for the degree of Ph (D) to the University of Glasgow, Department of English and Scottish Literature and Language. © Ken Pratt 2009. Critical Component Introduction THIS CRITICAL component is a commentary on a novel entitled Hunting Captain Henley which is about a young Scots boy traumatised by his dad’s British Army experiences in Suez in 1951.The novel is split into the childhood narrative (1st person) shifting to the adult narrative (3rd person) as he sets about tracking down the Royal Signals English Captain who allegedly bullied his dad into shooting Arab civilians during the Ismaelia police uprising. I will demonstrate how to use Caledonian Antisyzygy to create a novel that works equally across the genres, as a study of a man’s moral and mental disintegration, a state-of the-nation address and a political thriller. By jarring the genres and coalescing the discordant voices of standard English and colloquial Scots, as well as shifting through the first, second and third person narrative voice, the novel attempts to take New Scottish Renaissance Literature into fresh psychological territory: one which addresses the unexplored area of the present-day fascist consciousness in Scotland. It is partly, as Deleuze & Guattari argue in Anti-Oedipus, “the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behaviour, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us.” The term ‘Caledonian Antisyzygy’ was first coined by G.Gregory Smith in his 1919 book Scottish Literature: Character and Influence. Smith described Scottish Literature as “remarkably varied” and said it becomes, “under the stress of foreign influence, almost a zigzag of contradictions.” It has also been used to point to the schizophrenia at the heart of Scottishness (The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, 2004 ). While it could be argued that the union of opposites, of holding contradictory positions together in one mind, can be traced to 1 poets from Blake to Coleridge, it is at the very edge of the ‘Z’ in Scotland’s literary ‘zigzag’ where the thrust of this critical component begins. Hugh MacDiarmid used the term to express his desire to be “whaur extremes meet.” It could be argued it was MacDiarmid himself who first connected the idea of ‘Caledonian Antisyzygy’ to his ‘Plea for a Scottish Fascism.’ It is, as I will attempt to demonstrate in the course of this thesis, from the mist of a contradictory temperament, that clear fascist thinking emerges. But while the debate about ‘Caledonian Antisyzygy’ has, to date, been confined to literature, I have attempted to widen its context to examine its effects on a specific part of the Scottish population: the collaborationist working class, those described by one of Kelman’s protagonists in The Busconductor Hines (1984) as “ a bunch of bastarn imbeciles” (p.180). In essence Hunting Captain Henley attempts to create the literary voice of Kelman’s imbecile: fuelled by ‘Caledonian Antisyzygy,’ it becomes the educated, often bizarre and bewildering voice of Scottish fascism. Billy Queen is symbolic not only of the micro-fascism of everyday life: of the band, the gang, the sect, the family; but also the ‘emotional fascism’ brilliantly described in Mabel Berezin’s Making The Fascist Self: The Political Culture of Interwar Italy (1997). In the creation of Billy I have attempted to demonstrate how the narrator’s straight sense of childhood Scottishness gets corrupted as the full details emerge of what happened to his father, resulting in the adult narrator developing an almost schizophrenic sense of national identity which oscillates between Britishness and Scottishness. On the one hand Billy feels revulsion at empire,