LETTER FROM SCOTLAND

The buzz at the Edinburgh Book Festival last month was devolution, an appropriately ungainly word that describes Scotland’s sudden adolescence. Having recently elected its first Parliament in nearly 300 years, the country finds itself at odds over who and what it should be.

Writers, no strangers to identity crises, were comfortably thrust upon the stage, and people came in droves to listen to them. By the end of this 17-day extravaganza, nearly 70,000 visitors had passed through the festival entrance, located just off George Street in the plane tree-shaded Charlotte Square.

Five-hundred events, nearly 370 author appearances and the same question kept arising: Will Scotland’s push into the world--and the world’s push into Scotland--dilute its unique vernacular?

While its most famous exports--whisky, wool and Harry Potter--seem to be holding their own, the country is under siege. Take a stroll down Princess Street, the grand promenade that overlooks the majestic escarpments of the Edinburgh Castle and the city’s prime retail space, and you will better understand what is at stake.

The Body Shop, Nine West, The Gap, McDonald’s, Burger King, Virgin Megastore and Laura Ashley have planted their flags here, and not far away, on the bus route into town, we saw a billboard for the local affiliate’s broadcast of Howard Stern. “A man who is ugly and hasn’t any money,” it said, “might as well cut off his penis.”

If it’s not the pocket book, then it’s the language that faces the first assault of globalization.

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Poet Edwin Morgan, whom many Scots call their poet laureate (with nary an apology to Andrew Motion), spoke at the festival. Jay Leno, he told us, had called, having picked his name off the Internet. They needed a Scottish poet, and would he fit the bill? Morgan believed he would and is still waiting for the callback.

He wasted little time, however, with the chit-chat of the late-night circuit and in seconds drew a grand picture of Scottish writers carrying their writings and vision into the world. Without mentioning the city’s favorite itinerant son, Robert Louis Stevenson, he toured distant times and faraway countries, concluding, perhaps most surprisingly, in the 1950s in San Francisco where Helen Adams, the daughter of a Presbyterian minister from northeast Scotland, had moved to live and write with Allen Ginsberg and Robert Duncan.

“It would be good for Scotland if we at last claimed her,” Morgan challenged us. “That is particularly true today when there is such a marked sense of wanting to gather up all our forces and make something of what politicians and referendum have delivered. . . . We do not want a global porridge, a happy-clappy postmodern pluralism; we want serious writers who are able to be faithful to something in their country which feeds or fascinates them and at the same time to jangle the universal nerve.”

Credit the work of director Faith Liddell for the jangling that came out of this year’s book festival. “People are so hungry for an event that makes them think,” she told us. “The electronic media is one-way. A book encourages a two-way process, a dialogue, and we just expand upon that idea.”

Out of that process, abetted by an international cast, including Tim Parks, Ian Rankin, A.M. Homes, Magnus Mills, Beryl Bainbridge, Vikram Seth, Vivian Gornick and Richard Popkin, came just the discussions Liddell had hoped for: What is Cultural Identity? What’s Wrong with Cultural Elitism? Is Higher Education Dumbing Down?, to name a few.

(And lest you think it was all serious, J.K. Rowlings herself made an appearance in a tent full of her first-form Harry Potter fans, who peppered her for an hour with questions about her books and her life: “When did you start writing?” “When I was 6; it was a story about a rabbit who got the measles and was visited by a pig.” “What’s in the next book?” “Dudley goes on a diet.” “What’s your favorite wizarding object?” “The Sneakoscope.”)

Whether under cloudy skies or in late-afternoon sunlight, with a coffee or a pint in hand, the buzz at the Edinburgh Book Festival resoundingly confirmed what book festival-goers--such as those in this city--already know: The intellectual ambition of everyday people has been vastly underestimated by the culture at large.

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Liddell’s most inspired event, her breakfasts with Scottish writers, drew consistently large crowds. One morning we caught up with poet and novelist Andrew Greig, who, in the process of reading from “When They Lay Bare,” his lyrical novel about the Borderlands, assured us that the vernacular will stand strong against the rages of commonplace idiom.

It’s the poetry of the prose (and of the poetry) that accomplishes this: the use of Scots dialect, punctuated by English words, to guide the imagery and intent, to cleanse the language itself. We have heard it before in the writings of James Kelman and Irvine Welsh. It may border on gimmick, but the passion--to wield language as a banner for nationalism--is straightforward and keen, the tradition as honored as Robert Burns himself. Here’s Alison Kermack: “Ah startid thinkin mare aboot thi langwij hyrarky an how its dafty say . . . wun wau i speekinz mare impoartint thin anuthir wy . . . like yi wurny aloud tak tok aboot litrichur unless yi cood yooz big wurdz, which iz nonsins uv coarse.”

We found Kermack in an anthology of Scottish poets, recommended by Greig after his reading, in which we also stumbled upon W.N. Herbert’s “Dingle Dell,” a poem that succeeds more on the merits of sentiment than word-play in railing against the commercialization of Scottish culture:

There is no passport to this country,

it exists as a quality of the language.

It has no landscape you can visit;

when I try to listen to its vistas

I don’t think of that round tower, though

only two exist in Scotland, though

both are near me. There are figures on

An aunt’s old clock, cottars; Scots

as marketed to Scots in the last century:

these are too late. I seek something

between troughs, a green word dancing

like weed in a wave’s translucence,

A pane not smashed for an instance. . . .

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It was in search of a green word dancing that we left Edinburgh and headed north into the Highlands, and though we may not have found such translucence, we did discover the Achins Book Shop (https://www.scotbooks.freeuk.com), which must be the most remote bookstore in the United Kingdom. If you want to reach it yourself, take the road from Loch Inver; otherwise it’s bumpy going from the south.

Lying in the shadow of Mt. Suilven in the parish of Assynt at InverKirkaig, the bookstore is close to the Kirkaig River in a grove of birch and hazel trees. It is owned by Alex and Agnus Dickson, he a civil engineer and she a nurse, who purchased the shop in 1983 from the retiring Welsh owner. If remote is charming, the Achins Book Shop has it and a fine collection of Scottish literature as well.

Independent bookstores seem to be surviving, perhaps even thriving, in the United Kingdom. (Witness the imminent appearance of a second Simon Finch Rare Books (https://www.simonfinch.com), scheduled to open next month in London’s tony Notting Hill district. Billed as the “rare book shop for the 20th century,” this new antiquarian book store, less an oxymoron than it may seem, proves--as does the Achins Book Shop--that the pleasure of shopping for a book quickly outweighs the convenience of the Internet.)

Although we were told that a new Borders had opened in Glasgow and that it seems to be drawing business from the neighborhood Waterson’s, the retail book wars have yet to be waged on the scale we have seen in America, which makes the Achins shop--surviving on library sales and tourists such as ourselves--so spectacular.

Here among the sheep that seem more numerous than people in this far-flung region, we felt oddly confident that the polysyllabic wolves of “postmodern pluralism” stand well at bay. *