The Tales of Para Handy
“The cracked looking-glass of a servant.” – James Joyce, Ulysses
If anyone ever interviews me (and they might) and asks me about the main influences on my writing rather than why I feel uniquely qualified for this position (and they won’t), by God I’ll have a lot to say about it. I am the ultimate novelistic magpie, a patchwork quilter of poetry, a concordance of killer adjectivisation; a list of my literary influences would read like the tearful excesses of Oscar night, a long stream of shout-outs to Shakespeare and Byron and Larkin and Calvino, with my parents tacked thoughtlessly on at the end.
My family all speak lower-class Scots dialect. I don’t and never really have, learning my childhood English from books and the BBC. Yet whenever I’m home I feel obliged to perpetuate the fiction that aye-but-how-no’-jist-cos is the way I’ve always spoken, as if by some superior heft of revisionist history I can convince everyone that I am not ashamed of where I came from and never have been. Lies, lies, all lies. This paragraph too, for implying that the studied neutrality of my accent resulted from the happy accident of a hermetic childhood. Bullshit. I stomped those missing g’s and glottal stops like they were weeds in the pre-paradise of my Eden, biting back “broons” and “aboots” with relish and abandon. Ugly language spoken by uglier people. Get thee behind me!
But recently, though, I have found myself reintroducing some of those words and inflections to my vocabulary, with all the shame-faced furtiveness of a company repackaging old products as “classic”. There are reasons for this, some more ignoble than others. Worst and most true is that my past has, from being a handicap worthy of shame, become a handicap overcome, something to be pointed at and proud of, like how the word ‘alcoholic’ is a matter of self-loathing to the drunk but a badge of honour to the twelve-stepper. Still. As the twelve-stepper would say, fake it till you make it, and by pretending that I have never covered up my Scots dialect I am finding a fresh appreciation for the language and its unique kind of lilt and lyricism. Macdiarmid has entered the canon of little lyrics my mind reads to itself in repose, the inner actor on my inner stage declaiming “There’s naebody but Oblivion and us/Puir gangrel buddies wanderin’ hameless in’t.” And I see now how the apparent lazinesses of Scots, the dropping of hard sounds, the cack-handed contraction of disparate phrases, can be harnessed instead of simply overcome. But I still don’t know what to say in it that I couldn’t say just as well and better in English.
So what I am saying is that native dialects don’t have to be the grunting crudenesses of Mellors from Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Take Para Handy, for instance. I doubt that there is anything sweeter in the Scots language than these little tales of the puffing Vital Spark and its picaresque cap’n. And even these are written in English, with only the crew’s dialogue in Scots. Their words are Scots, the world they occupy, English. And so it is. Cut adrift in a foreign world of things, divided from strange times by seas and language, Para Handy and his crew have no resource but their innocence, Scots hearts, Scots tongues. And they are still out there today. We all are. But we survive somehow. We make do.