“What Horrors Worse Than These?”: Childhood and Adolescence in Catholic Glasgow

124 “WHAT HORRORS WORSE THAN THESE?” CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE IN CATHOLIC GLASGOW Christopher Whyte DOI: https://doi.org/10.14712/2571452X.2023.65.8 Abstract: With reference to a particular short lyric written in Gaelic, the poet discusses his origins in the Catholic community of Glasgow in the 1950s and 1960s, using the observations of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o to highlight how a predicament he had originally conceived of as utterly personal has much wider implications than he initially imagined, in terms of colonialism both linguistic and cultural. In his case, the mechanism of exclusion was twofold, as a Scot within the larger unit of the United Kingdom, and as the descendant of immigrants who were perceived as Irish rather than Scottish, foreigners in terms of their religion within the context of the city of Glasgow. Keywords: colonialism, exclusion, Glasgow Catholic, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o In a series of letters Rilke wrote from Paris to his wife the sculptress Clara Westhoff between June and October 1907 which have come to be known as “the Cézanne letters,” the poet comments on how much it matters for a painter not to grasp the full implications of what he is doing: The painter should never become conscious of his insights (nor in general any artist): without making a detour via his thinking processes, his progress should remain opaque to him, entering his work so fast he cannot identify it at the moment of transition.1 The title I have chosen may well be misleading. Perhaps it encourages you to anticipate a Joycean tirade against Catholic narrow-mindedness when contrasted 1 Paul Cézanne, Die Bilder seiner Ausstellung Paris 1907 besucht, betrachtet und beschrieben von Rainer Maria Rilke (München: Schirmer/Mosel, 2018) 52. My translation. “What Horrors Worse Than These?” 125 with the supposed open-mindedness and liberality of a Calvinist tradition somehow mitigated by the Scottish Enlightenment. Such a tirade would play into the hands of the very prejudices I aim to highlight, deepening the predicament I intend to outline as clearly as I am able. A poem I wrote in October 2020 in Olomouc, a charming and characterful town in Moravia with an admirable range of Baroque and turn of the century architecture, at a time when the second lockdown provoked by the recent pandemic was looming, has come to mean in retrospect something very different from what I originally perceived as its drift. Or rather, I could say that a different level of meaning has been added, which accounts for the relevance of the lines by Rilke quoted above. Here is the poem, followed by an English version that attempts to reproduce what the Gaelic says as faithfully as possible: Chreid mi gur subseig do-dhèanta a bh’ annam ’s a’ mhòmaid ’s an àite san d’ rugadh mi – buillsgean no ionad-seallaidh bho nach toirte fiosrachadh seasmhach, earbsach air an t-saoghal. Bha gach faireachdainn ’s gach mothachadh a thàinig orm ’na bhriseadh-lagha, no ’na dheuchainn-dhearbhaidh ann an cànan ùr nach tuigeadh neach sam bith, a b’ fheudar eadhon dhomh fhìn a ionnsachadh ’s a chur an cleachdadh. B’ e ’n cànan ud do-dhèantachd bithealas neach mar mi fhìn, a bhuineadh, a-rèir coltais, do chinneadh gun ro-aithneachadh no cead. Cha b’ ann ach beag is beag a dhearbhadh orm làn-daonnalachd m’ fheirge, mo ghairge is an iongantais a dh’fhairich mi gur ann am measg mo chosmhailean a bha mi beò. I believed I was an impossible subject, in the place and at the time when I was born – a centre or a viewpoint offering no stable, trustworthy feedback Christopher Whyte 126 about the world. All my feelings and sensations resembled breaches of the law, or else an experiment in a new language nobody could understand, one even I had to learn and start putting to use. That language was the impossibility of someone like me existing, from a species that had been neither permitted nor foreseen. Only gradually did I come to realise how totally human my anger was, my savagery, my amazement at being alive amongst others just like me. The poem was a programmatic statement, placed at the start of the second “book” of fifty in an extended sequence of poems identical in length and metrical patterning. The person speaking perceives himself as what would be termed in German a Randerscheinung, such an unusual, indeed aberrant phenomenon that no useful conclusions can be drawn from it. Its situation is the very opposite of “exemplary” or “representative.” Today the positive turn in the final quatrain, where the speaker comes to realise that the emotions and uncertainty tormenting him are absolutely and quintessentially human, can strike me as not entirely convincing. When I wrote it, it expressed my perception of myself as an outsider, in the family, at school, amongst the people I grew up with, in the place where I found myself – Glasgow in the 1950s and 1960s, before large scale demolition and depopulation transformed its appearance, not to mention the vigorous sandblasting operations of the 1970s which removed decades of grime and soot from façades throughout the city, revealing the fragile, lemon-coloured stone underneath, or the impression given by surviving, isolated buildings that the place had recently suffered a devastating enemy air raid. The syndrome of “not this place – not these people,” which can even extend to a rejection of your own personality, is one I shall call “disidentification.” Aged barely eighteen, I came upon a piece of music which expressed with almost frightening precision the sense of bottomless, tormenting alienation I am describing. I had, so to speak, been smuggled, thanks to a friend, into the room with listening booths and headphones where students of the Music Department at the University of Glasgow could gradually become acquainted with the classical repertoire thanks to vinyl recordings. The recording I chose was of an opera by “What Horrors Worse Than These?” 127 Richard Strauss composed between 1911 and 1915 to a libretto by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten (The Woman Without a Shadow) which even today is relatively rarely performed. It opens in a magical palace high in the skies. The Empress is wedded to a mortal man with whom she has a passionate physical relationship. A year having gone by without them conceiving a child, which would allow her to cast a shadow, she is informed that once three days more have passed her husband will turn to stone. The only remedy is to descend to the world of men and steal someone else’s shadow. A passionate plea to her nurse, a malevolent, misanthropic creature, for assistance in the undertaking follows, upon which, to the clamorous, deafening music of an interlude entitled “Flight to Earth,” the two women throw themselves over the battlements of the heavenly palace, hurtling downwards to the world of men, where they enter the home of a humble dyer and his wife through the chimney.2 I used a short quotation from this point in the libretto as an epigraph to “E fui calato in mezzo a quella gente,” the third item in Ceum air Cheum / Step by Step (2019),3 originally published in a second anthology of gay and lesbian writing from Scotland edited by Joanne Winning in 1992:4 “Weh, was faßt mich gräßlich an! Zu welchem Geschick reißts mich hinab?” [Alas, what grasps / hold of me horrendously? / To what fate / am I being snatched downwards?”].5 This poem’s title was in Italian not just because the words themselves came to me in that language, but because the sudden switch to Gaelic at the very start could convey the feeling of being plummeted without warning into a totally alien and unrecognised environment. Italian, in this case, would be the language used in a preceding existence. Particularly when you are on the threshold of adulthood, there are certain pieces of music, or paintings, or lines of poetry that affect you like a message, embodying as they do fundamental insights or attitudes whose meaning it may take you years fully to unravel. Many of these retain their power to inspire and disturb till much later in life. They speak directly to and of you, encapsulating in ways you cannot hope to grasp immediately, and may never fully grasp the 2 The music can be accessed in a fine performance issued by Decca in 1992, the first complete recording ever of this opera, with Georg Solti conducting. Júlia Várady sings the role of the Empress and Reinhild Runkel that of the Nurse. 3 See Crìsdean MacIlleBhàin / Christopher Whyte, Ceum air Cheum. Cruinneachadh Dhàintean nas Fhaide / Step by Step. A Collection of Longer Poems (Stornoway: Acair, 2019) 55. 4 Joanne Winning, ed., The Crazy Jig (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1992) 76-83. 5 Hugo von Hofmannsthal, “Die Frau ohne Schatten Libretto,” Opera Arias Database, accessed 31 May 2023, https://www.opera-arias.com/strauss-r/der-frau-ohne-schatten /libretto/. Christopher Whyte 128 implications of your being on earth. The opening scene of Die Frau ohne Schatten still has this effect on me. What riveted me was the notion of a “Präexistenz” or pre-existence, that before arriving in the human world you have been somewhere else, a place to which you truly belonged and from which the world of men represented an unjust and incomprehensible banishment. This was how I instinctively looked on Glasgow as a child and an adolescent. The opening two items in the sequence of poems which was the first original material I published in Gaelic, “An Sgoilear a’ Sealltainn Air Ais” (The Scholar Looks Back), beginning respectively “Fhuair mi mo sgoilearachd” [I got my schooling] and “Ach rugadh mi ann am baile cruadalach” [But I was born in a cruel city],6 describe the “before” and “after” of my predicament, which I also saw as that of Strauss and Hofmannsthal’s Empress, but without the positive aspect of the Empress freely choosing to descend into a world which is alien to her because there is something she desperately needs that can be obtained nowhere else, and which will enable her to rescue the man she loves from petrification. After all, we encounter the Empress in her previous, authentic existence which she abandons voluntarily in favour of the alienated world in which her story will be played out. I found myself in an environment for which I felt no affinity whatsoever – to the extent that I solemnly informed my classmates, aged seven, that I was not Scottish at all, I actually came from Sweden. Positing a previous existence was a means of coping with the ordeal, of giving it a meaning I struggled to locate by any other means. Though both my parents and three of my grandparents were born either in Glasgow or on the outskirts of the conurbation, I grew up in a community that was perceived as foreign in terms of religion and, comically, of race, the product of a massive immigration to central Scotland mainly from the northern counties of Ireland which got under way in the course of the nineteenth century. Being the focus of prejudice is a situation that immobilises you due to its inherently paradoxical nature. You are at one and the same time at the centre of attention, in the spotlight, and invisible. People do not see you for what you are, they see the prefabricated image of their prejudice, which they then project onto you. When age twenty-three I broke it to my parents that I believed I might be homosexual, rather than sitting me down and asking me to explain what was happening now and what had been going on with me till then, my mother characteristically went to the public library and borrowed a series of books dealing with homosexuality. What light a member of the Westminster parliament’s account of being caught under a tree in St James’ Park in the act of fornicating with a guardsman, and the consequences which followed, was capable of shedding on the issues her own child confronted remains a mystery to me. 6 Crìsdean Whyte [sic], Uirsgeul / Myth. Poems in Gaelic with English Translations (Glasgow: Gairm, 1991) 2-3. “What Horrors Worse Than These?” 129 I spent the summer of 1989 teaching at an English language school in western Edinburgh where my students were mostly Italian and Spanish. The overall programme on offer was excellent, and included talks given by figures from different walks of Scottish life, who discussed their activities and the light these could shed on the society in which the visiting students found themselves. One talk was given by a woman from the Scottish National Party in her late twenties or early thirties, so only slightly younger than myself. In the course of her discussion of the case for independence she several times used the expression “Irish Catholics” to describe people practising the Catholic faith who were resident in Scotland. When the moment arrived for questions, I put it gently to her that perhaps the time had come to prise these two terms apart. What that would have meant was, ceasing to identify a difference in religion as a national and ethnic difference, and recognising that it was feasible to be Scottish and Catholic at one and the same time, that Catholics were an integral part of the Scottish population and indeed of the nation. The woman answered that she found this inappropriate and had no intention of revising her terminology. Looking back, I would see this as a hangover from the anti-Catholic prejudice which characterised certain elements in her party as late as the 1970s or 1980s, and which can be traced back, for example, to the vigorous protest (since repudiated) made in 1923 by the Church of Scotland to the Westminster Parliament under the title The Menace of the Irish Race to Our Scottish Nationality, about how immigration was in the process of altering irrevocably the make-up of the Scottish population.7 Some ten years later I was present in the audience at a lecture given during the Edinburgh Festival by Scottish composer James MacMillan entitled “Scotland’s Shame,” in which he lambasted the ongoing prejudice, discrimination and abuse to which Catholics in Scotland were subjected, not least at football matches between the two opposing Glasgow teams, Celtic (pronounced always with an initial “s”) and Rangers. At the end, I went up to him and told him how strongly I supported the denunciation he had offered. He looked at me with a startled expression and asked: “Oh, so you think I am right then?” Apparently he had been urged in several quarters on no account to give the speech, or ever to address the topic in public, as the damage done to his own standing would be irreparable.8 7 The Menace of the Irish Race to Our Scottish Nationality, dokumen.tips, accessed 26 March 2023, https://dokumen.tips/documents/menace-of-the-irish-race-to-our-scottish-nationality. html?page=1. The report in question was expressly repudiated by the Church of Scotland only in 2002. 8 See in this connection Thomas M. Devine, ed., Scotland’s Shame? Bigotry and Sectarianism in Modern Scotland (Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing, 2000), and also Phillip A. Cooke, Christopher Whyte 130 Describing yourself as being, or having been, the victim of prejudice may also be unsettling because it casts you in the role of victim. What are you looking for? Pity? Revenge? If MacMillan described Central Scotland as “Northern Ireland without the guns and the bullets,” the parallels are nonetheless restricted. Irish immigrants reached Glasgow in a condition of poverty and disadvantage, whereas the Protestant settlement of Ulster at the start of the seventeenth century involved the displacement of large sectors of the resident population in favour of the new arrivals, who dispossessed them of their land. In one case the newcomers were privileged, in the other the objects of hostility and opprobrium. For me the experience was of growing up in a society and place where your right to be and belong, to define yourself as “Scottish” in any meaningful way, was constantly liable to question. Prejudice of this sort was not, of course, confined to Scotland. When I was a student at Pembroke College, Cambridge, the then Dean, Meredith Dewey, broke in on a conversation I was having at one of the musical parties he regularly held in his rooms to observe with exasperation that: “You’re just a chatty Irish Catholic!” Evidently my fluency and my readiness to discuss matters not normally touched on in polite conversation among the English upper middle classes had irritated him. It was a timely reminder that one’s fragile membership of the culturally dominant group could be revoked without warning at any stage. My Christian name and surname were not, in the Glasgow of the 1950s and 1960s, an undisguised and challenging proclamation of belonging to the minority, as happened with classmates such as Desmond Mirner, Michael Haggerty or Dermot Maguire. Another boy, born and brought up in Scotland, was called Fintan O’Reilly and, within the last decade, one of my nephews gave his daughter the name Orlagh, still tantamount to a declaration of war in a Glasgow environment. Unsavoury as the discrimination these evoked can seem, it did mean that there existed a rich and evocative “poetry of names” which it can be hard for anyone unfamiliar with that divided society and the particular species of apartheid practised there to understand. One strategy groups suffering from prejudice develop to defend themselves is cutting themselves off, creating an attentively policed haven within the larger society to which only they can gain admission. Gay men and women still do this today. I remember how in the Edinburgh of the 1990s the question “Will it be a mixed party?” implied “Are any straight people going to be there?” The underlying issue was one of territoriality. Catholics in Scotland benefited from having state-funded schools, both primary and secondary, which were The Music of James MacMillan (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2019), in particular Chapter 6: “Raising Sparks – ‘Scotland’s Shame,’ Politics and a Scotch Bestiary.” “What Horrors Worse Than These?” 131 specifically confessional and offered teachers a career structure where the discrimination they were exposed to elsewhere was absent. I want to emphasise the protective nature of these boundaries. My father’s sixty-fifth birthday party was the first occasion on which Catholics and Protestants of my parents’ generation were simultaneously present in the family home at one and the same time. Never before had any of his golfing companions crossed the threshold with their spouses. Even then, spontaneously, as if by a tacit accord, Protestants congregated in one room, Catholics in another. Effectively a “double colonisation” affected Catholic Glasgow in the years when I grew up. The colonisation I have in mind was not political or economic in nature, though no doubt both those aspects were active, but primarily cultural. Both were a product of imperial, colonialist dynamics active within the British Empire from the eighteenth to at least the mid-twentieth century. The local Protestant bourgeoisie had a distinct position, given the opportunity they seized for acting in partnership with England and the London core of the Empire when it came to the benefits of industrialisation and of exploiting the colonies. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o has tellingly suggested that what we speak of as “the modern” would have been inconceivable without the advent of the Industrial Revolution which, in turn, was dependent on the long-term theft of material resources from colonies both within and beyond Europe: “There is no region, no culture, no nation today that has not been affected by colonialism and its aftermath. Indeed, modernity can be considered a product of colonialism.”9 When it comes to distinguishing the respective positions of Catholics and Protestants, Ngũgĩ’s analysis is again highly relevant, when he speaks about “the centrality of the Irish experience to the colonial question, especially as it relates to language, culture, and social memory. Ireland was England’s first colony, and it became a prototype for all other English colonies in Asia, Africa, and America.”10 It is possible to look on the obsession with toxic forms of religiosity, whether with Catholicism or radical brands of Calvinism, as a reaction to the twin traumas of, in Scotland, the suppression of the Gaelic language and the large-scale eviction of the peasant population and, in Ireland, the suppression and loss of Irish and the years of the Great Famine. The memory of the Penal Laws against Irish Catholics meant that loyalty to the Catholic Church could function as a declaration of hostility towards the London power centre, in a manner not dissimilar to the role practising as a Catholic bore in communist Poland after the Second World War. 9 Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Something Torn and New. An African Renaissance (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2009) xi. 10 Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Something Torn and New x-xi. Christopher Whyte 132 Cultural colonisation meant that, at school and at university, practically the only literature made available – the only literature whose existence was acknowledged – was English literature. Still today in Britain and Ireland, it is customary to refer to a university degree in literature as a degree in “English,” as if there were no useful distinctions to be made between the two. “Scottish” people were denied access to literary products which they could meaningfully identify as their own, to which someone else could not lay a prior claim. What does it mean to have a culture “of your own”? Various factors come to mind. One is geographical, an explicit link to a location or locations to which a person has a lived, personal connection. Another is that their “own” culture bears unmistakable traits of the circumstances in which a person grew up. Glasgow even today is a stunningly rich phenomenon in linguistic terms. When I was a boy, people claimed to be able to identify the neighbourhood of the city from which a person came according to the way they spoke. Visiting foreigners today may find it impossible to engage in meaningful dialogue with people on the street because their speech is so distinctive and hard to understand. This experience of a multilingual background is an integral part of growing up almost anywhere in Scotland, yet was not reflected in the English cultural products then made available. Educated, cultivated people in Glasgow speak a form of English significantly different from what is used in the south-east of Britain. I have not forgotten how, when I was working as a lector at the Faculty of Languages of Bari University in Pùglia in southern Italy in 1976, a manual of English pronunciation was thrust into my hands, and I was informed that I would be teaching a pronunciation course from the following day. I had to abandon the lesson after about twenty minutes when it became clear to me that, in phonological terms, the English I spoke, which today would be classified as Standard Scottish English, differed radically from what was described in the book. And that was without taking into consideration a form like “amn’t,” or the absence of “shall.” Moreover, placenames like Garthamlock, or Gartcosh, or Carnwath indicate the presence of a very different language stratum, apparently embedded in the land itself and absent from mainstream English culture. A culture “of your own” is also a culture towards which you acknowledge a responsibility greater than that any other community carries, responsibility for its study, its maintenance, and its continuation. If Scottish people struggled to view the imposed English cultural products as “their own,” members of the Irish immigration suffered a double colonisation because they were similarly absent from products identifiable as Scottish. There was no trace, for example, of the experience of toxic religiosity in its Catholic form so evident in a Bildungsroman such as A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce. “What Horrors Worse Than These?” 139 BIBLIOGRAPHY Cézanne, Paul. Die Bilder seiner Ausstellung Paris 1907 besucht, betrachtet und beschrieben von Rainer Maria Rilke. München: Schirmer/Mosel, 2018. Cooke, Phillip A. The Music of James MacMillan. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2019. Devine, Thomas M., ed. Scotland’s Shame? Bigotry and Sectarianism in Modern Scotland. Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing, 2000. Gordimer, Nadine. Living in Hope and History: Notes from Our Century. New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1999. MacIlleBhàin, Crìsdean / Whyte, Christopher. Ceum air Cheum. Cruinneachadh Dhàintean nas Fhaide / Step by Step. A Collection of Longer Poems. Stornoway: Acair, 2019. MacIlleBhàin, Crìsdean. Dealbh Athar. Leaganacha Gaeilge le Gréagóir Ó Dúill. Dublin: Coiscéim, 2009. Muir, Edwin. 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