ELSPETH DAVIE
The Man Who Wanted
to Smell Books
and other stories
Introduced by Giles Cordon
Contents
Introduction
Family House
The Spark
A Visit to the Zoo
The Snow Heart
The Colour
Waiting for the Sun
Allergy
The High Tide Talker
The Bookstall
The Night of the Funny Hats
Pedestrian
The Time-Keeper
Concerto
The Swans
Lines
Security
A Field in Space
Out of Order
Bulbs
Shoe in the Sand
Couchettes
Thorns and Gifts
Accompanists
Death of a Doctor
The Man Who Wanted to Smell Books
Choirmaster
Through the Forest
The Morning Mare
‘Finally, I would say that writers – for all that they are supposed to have this so-called and greatly over-rated “knowledge of human nature” – are not necessarily better equipped than any other persons for knowing themselves. Indeed, they need all the help they can get. The camera may sometimes provide this.’1
The stern, severe, intelligent face – intense, searchlight eyes; prominent nose; tight but wide lips; compassionate, strong chin – is topped by a sensible fringe and Mrs Davie wears a black, halter-neck jumper. Hers is a latter-day Presbyterian visage with a vengeance.
She eschewed biography, thinking it irrelevant to the work, and, perhaps surprisingly, was reluctant to reveal, at least in print, her date of birth. A touch of female vanity? I suspect rather it was a touch of reticence, modesty.
The facts of her life that she chose to reveal, here modestly embellished, are simple: born Elspeth Dryer on 20th March 1919 in Kilmarnock, she went to school in Edinburgh, studied at the capital’s university and college of art and taught painting for several years thereafter. This professional involvement with the fine arts I take to be crucial to her writing. She then lived for a while in Ireland, with her husband, who taught at Queen’s University, Belfast before returning to Scotland.
In Ireland she became friendly with a general practitioner Dr Pat Strang, later married to the poet Richard Murphy, with whom she discussed literature seriously once a week. She also knew Philip Larkin, who was assistant librarian at the university. She painted there and sold quite a few canvases, mainly landscapes in what her husband describes as ‘the French Impressionist style’. They married in October 1944 and a daughter, Anne, was born in January 1946. She didn’t, in the biographical notes accompanying her short stories in anthologies, or on the back flaps of the jackets of her five collections of short stories or four novels, reveal that her husband was George Davie, one of Scotland’s most distinguished philosophers and the author of that fundamental and key work, The Democratic Intellect: Scotland and her universities in the nineteenth century (1961).
Dr Davie told me that Elspeth’s parents were living in England until she was nine, and she went to school there. She was taught how to write but not how to join up letters, and throughout her life her meticulous, neat epistles written to family, friends and other correspondents in blue biro did not have the words joined up. When her parents (father Scottish, mother Canadian) came back to Scotland Elspeth was sent to George Watson’s Ladies’ College. She was addicted to Beowulf which she was taught at a tender age when in England. Dr Davie remarked, ‘Elspeth didn’t care much for Scottish education,’ and he told me that her comment on his seminal book was that it was ‘surprisingly well written’ for an academic.
She spent two years studying Fine Art, English and Philosophy at Edinburgh University but left then as she wasn’t up to speed with mathematics and couldn’t have taken a degree. She then took a DA at Edinburgh College of Art.
Her writing style was formed by the time she was sixteen when she began to publish short stories in the school magazine. When she reprinted some of these stories later she changed them very little. She received Scottish Arts Council awards in 1971 and 1977, and won the prestigious Katherine Mansfield short story prize in 1978 for ‘The High Tide Talker’, the title story of one of her collections. One of the judges was V.S. Pritchett, who was much taken with her stance on Presbyterianism.
In the early 1950s two Edinburgh writers were among the prizewinners of the Observer’s rather famous short story competition, and they neatly represent the two facets of ‘modernist’ Scottish writing. The winner was the stylish, mercurial Muriel Spark (born a year earlier) – Jewish become Roman Catholic; the runner-up, the Calvinist, Knoxian Elspeth Davie. The colourful Spark is today rather more widely read than the somewhat monochromatic Davie ever was, but the current (posterity is likely to regard Davie far more highly than the present does) imbalance in their readership does a singular injustice to the precision, exactitude, sly humour and socialist compassion of the latter writer. Spark and Davie are two of the best, most idiosyncratic and original Scottish prose writers since Robert Louis Stevenson.
A further parallel between Spark and Davie is provided by the fact that for many years Davie and her husband lived in a flat overlooking Bruntsfield Meadows, within view and sound of James Gillespie’s school where girls of slender means would toil under the tutelage of Miss Jean Brodie’s successors. That Davie’s first collection of stories should have been entitled The Spark was not intentionally homage to her contemporary.
She published four novels – Providings (1965), Creating a Scene (1971), Climbers on a Stair, about tenement life in Scotland’s capital (1978) and Coming to Light (1989), a kind of masterpiece of the kaleidoscopic Presbyterian consciousness, the progress of a soul in collusion with the strato-sphere. It was as a short story writer, however, that she achieved her finest results.
The
