Poverty Castle

John Robin Jenkins was born in 1912, one of four children, in the village of Flemington, near Cambuslang. He studied English at the University of Glasgow. When World War II broke out, he registered as a conscientious objector and was directed to work for the Forestry Commission; he used this experience in the acclaimed novel,
The Cone-gatherers
. In 1957 he moved abroad to work in Spain, Afghanistan and Malaysia. In 1968, he settled in Dunoon where he remained for the rest of his life. In 2002 he received the Saltire Society's Award for Lifetime Achievement. He died in 2005.

Alan Warner was nominated by
Granta
magazine in 2003 as one of the Twenty Best of Young British Novelists. He is the author of five novels:
Morvern Callar
(1995);
These Demented Lands
(1997);
The Sopranos
(1998);
The Man Who Walks
(2002); and
The Worms Can Carry Me to Heaven
(2006).

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Introduction

Part One

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Part Two

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Part Three

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

I
AM AFRAID
I do not enjoy novel introductions which, in analysing the work, haplessly reveal every plot and character detail, so I wish to beg indulgence and state personally what the work of Robin Jenkins has meant to me.

The first Robin Jenkins novel I ever read was
The Cone-gatherers
. When that beautiful and ominous parable, first published in 1955, was brought back into print by a London publisher, containing a new introduction by Iain Crichton Smith, I was a seventeen-year-old in Oban. It was 1981 or maybe 1982. Though a recent reader of Penguin Classics and of science fiction, I then held the curious teenage assumption that living novelists simply did not exist in contemporary Scotland. For me, isolated below the mountains of Argyll, living Scottish writers were something that must surely have vanished from our modern society, like tuberculosis or railway steam engines. I had no excuse for my ignorance. I attended high school, my family was affluent, we owned two colour televisions and we subscribed to newspapers. Not that there was much about Scottish novelists on television or in the papers then. Today I blame the antiquarian tastes of Sir Walter Scott, whose tomes were so very well represented in our local tourist-orientated newsagent. For an impatient teenager, the cult of Sir Walter added to that ambience of Scottish novels being in some way situated in the past, irrelevant and all ‘'tis so-many years since . . .'.

I can still recall the absolute physical shock of spotting Alasdair Gray's
Lanark
in hardback edition, swirling in the necromancy of its own austere artwork. Here was a remarkable
new novel by a living Scot! Equally awakening though, was that introduction to
The Cone-gatherers
, for at the very bottom of the page, it was signed off ‘Iain Crichton Smith. Oban'.

I had to face up to it and grant corporeal existence to contemporary writers not only in Scotland but stomping my very own Argyllshire turf. Suddenly I was rooting out the works of those Scottish authors on day visits to second-hand book (and record) shops in Glasgow. Sometime soon after, I shyly approached Iain Crichton Smith himself on the Glasgow train as it rolled down the Pass of Brander. He was patient and kindly as he listened to nervous ramblings about my then university-less status and my dodgy ambitions to write. I showed off about my latest reading: the poems of Edwin Morgan and W. S. Graham, novels of Fionn MacColla, George Friel and of course Robin Jenkins'
The Cone-gatherers
. I recall after our enthusing about these works, Iain very generously wrote down his own as well as Edwin Morgan's home addresses. He also gave me Robin Jenkins' address, in South Cowal, close to Dunoon. I soon exchanged letters with Iain and eventually with Edwin Morgan. Today – however presumptuous on my own part – I very much regret that I never wrote to Robin Jenkins, to say thank you.

*

In 1984 I had taken off for college to a London in the clutches of Thatcherism; the miners' strike collection buckets rattling outside tube stations. For those first months in London, I often awoke with the lush summer hills of home going out like blown light bulbs in my mind. Choked with a pathetic nostalgia, my pathological homesickness shocked and embarrassed me. As a palliative, I now recognise, I devoured Scottish literature, ordered through Ealing Central Library which was situated in the midst of a new shopping mall. I remember reading Gray, Owens and Kelman's anthology
Lean Tales
which was a revelation to me. But I also read Robin Jenkins'
The Awakening of George Darroch
, which had just been published, as well as Jenkins' older novels which were much more difficult for the librarians to track down in far-flung home-county branches:
The Thistle and the Grail
,
Dust on the Paw
,
A Would-be Saint
and
Fergus Lamont
. At that time I also read Iain Crichton Smith's latest (now out-of-print) novels,
The Tenement
– set in a mildly disguised Oban – and
The Search
.

I myself was searching then: what was this country of mine called Scotland?; who were its artists?; and where, if at all, could I ever fit in? I am not trying to flatter myself that Jenkins' novels eventually influenced my own future novels – in fact my generation of Scottish novelists could be seen as reacting savagely against both Jenkins' understated style and his urbane approach. But those Robin Jenkins' novels which I read back then very literally sustained me and allowed myself at least the illusion that, homesick in the midst of London, I was part of a culture to the north. I was lucky to have read them at that time which was a crossroads for so much.

*

How I groan today when I read reactionary Scottish critics – our very own unelected Town Councillors of Literature – determined to insert the knife into the recent efflorescence of Scottish literary activity. Do these critics actually remember the Scottish bookshelves in 1980–82? It was then that the historian Christopher Harvie, in
No Gods and Precious Few Heroes
, had understandably pondered: ‘Perhaps the (Scottish) novel was dying and there were other ways of analysing the Scots predicament?' I do remember the bookshelves then. For the reader of current Scottish novels it was a grim and dull lull before the relief of a great storm. Note how it was in the second-hand book shops, like an archaeologist, I had unearthed more recent Scottish literature. Until
the liberating arrival of Alasdair Gray and James Kelman, this was a time when the Scottish fiction section of John Smith's in Glasgow contained most of the works of Sir Walter Scott, of Baron Tweedsmuir (John Buchan), of Sir Compton Mackenzie (including all
The Four Winds of Love
) and most of Dame Muriel Spark. These works are part of Scotland's culture but often there were simply no other novels – especially more recent ones. Even the Scottish novelists of the 1960s and 1970s, like Robin Jenkins, James Kennaway, Elspeth Davie, Gordon Williams and Alan Sharp, were very difficult to find, their books going through a semi-permanent black spot with regard to being in print; though Kennaway was soon handsomely reprinted but to resounding indifference. At that time Scotland lacked dynamic publishers which, thankfully, it now has. Back then contemporary Scottish novels seemed to fall out of print and vanish all too swiftly from the shelves. The early 1980s was still a time when, for me, the aspiration to become a Scottish writer seemed as likely to be fulfilled as an earlier ambition of mine to become an astronaut.

It was also a time when after
Fergus Lamont
in 1979, Robin Jenkins found it impossible to get his new novels satisfactorily published in Scotland. I can only presume he was being offered such very small payments, if any, that he was convinced his novels could never be properly distributed. Hence one of Scotland's leading novelists was finally denied both a wage and an outlet for his work in his own country. This is still not an extinct phenomenon. However, Robin Jenkins continued writing during those years. He truly became an autonomous author. It is well known that he accumulated a whole series of novel manuscripts, including
The Awakening of George Darroch
and
Poverty Castle
during the late 1970s and into the mid-1980s. That former novel, with the noble assistance of Harry Reid, finally did find a publisher in 1984 and afterwards, through a variety of differing publishers, Robin Jenkins began to release a steady flowering
of late novels right into his very old age. An interesting description of all this is given by Reid in the welcome republication of Jenkins' bitterly funny 1954 ‘football' novel,
The Thistle and the Grail
(Polygon).

*

The act of publication and the act of writing are completely separate actions. Often painfully so. Only modernity itself has fused them together in our minds. Though it should not be romanticised, it can still be overlooked that almost every novelist, with no guarantee of glory, has toiled away on their first manuscript as a pure act. Nobody asks for or pays for all these first novels to be written yet all of them still are. Jenkins was the same, even denied an outlet; the Sisyphean task continued and he worked upon these late manuscripts as he must have once worked in obscurity on his first novel.

These all-too-real circumstances are very apparent in the novel-within-a-novel structure of
Poverty Castle
, one of those late works, first published in 1991 when Jenkins was approaching the age of eighty. Although the majority of the narrative concerns the middle-class and now wealthy Sempill family and the plot later veers to take in their nemesis figure – working-class student Peggy Gilchrist – the abiding presence in the novel is the figure of the elderly Argyllshire novelist, Donald, writing in the twilight of his days what may be his last novel. Unsurprisingly, Donald seems a closely autobiographical figure. Like Jenkins', his work is neglected in Scotland. A native of Kilmory, near Tarbert – Jenkins was from Lanarkshire though long resident in Argyll – Donald is of ages with Jenkins and, like the real author did, lives near Dunoon in South Cowal, complete with the intimidating, diurnal passages of nuclear submarines.