Alan Riach

An Interrogation

Have you always wanted to be a writer?

No. It was originally words, just words.

I was interested in words, and at school, I remember we had a thing called Dictionary Exercises. I remember enjoying these classes immensely and being fascinated by discovering what words meant.

Very early on there was a disjunction of language in what I was hearing. My father was a Master Mariner, a seaman, and rather than stay at sea when he married my mother, who was a schoolteacher of Mathematics, he took up a post as a Trinity House Pilot on the Thames. We went from living in Lanarkshire to living in Kent.

We were back in Scotland at every opportunity, every holiday, either in Calderbank, or in the Western Isles, especially Mull, where my father had been at school, but I was always sensitive to the differences between how people spoke in one part of the world and another. Writing is at a fascinating distance from the sounds people make. So, when I write, mainly in English, I’m aware of how the writing might sound in the human voice. That’s important, I think.

But as well as the music of voices, with writing it was simply words, vocabulary. That was the first initiative.

I was always reading. I remember asking my father what he was doing one afternoon.
‘Reading the newspaper,’ he said.
‘What’s reading?’ I asked him.
‘Ask your teacher,’ he said. ‘You’ll learn soon enough.’
That was before I knew how to read but I can’t remember the actual learning process. My grandfather was a great reader and had a huge bookcase. You could almost literally climb into it! And we did. When I got to the books, they were a fascination. They were just beautiful. I mean, there were all kinds of books, leather-bound, big encyclopaedic books, Walter Scott’s novels, poems by Burns, Keats, Shelley, Boccaccio’s Decameron, Fielding’s Tom Jones, Shakespeare's plays.

When I was at school, the writing and the poetry started to come together. At university, I remember showing a poem I’d written to one of my tutors, and he read it and said he liked it and then he said, ‘There’s lots of power here and the words are actually working well, but I think it would be much better if you take the last few lines and put them first.’
My immediate thought was, ‘You can’t say that! You can’t do that to a poem! That’s what it is, a made thing, I made it that way.’

But he was right.

As soon as you put it down on paper, you have to think of the next stage: it has to be read by somebody. Then you also have to think more consciously about how it will be read.

The craft of the art form, the component of the art in writing is there as well. It’s essential. The trick is not to let the self-consciousness get through to what you can’t understand, because there has to be something you can’t control in a poem if it’s going to be any good. When it happens, it’s like it’s magic. And magic is what you cannot explain.

Critical writing, I think ultimately, is simply a matter of the intrinsic optimism of curiosity leading you to a place where you’re discovering things that you want to find out about, but then also you’re going to have to find a way to give these things to other people.

The whole purpose of education and the whole sense of the arts is that they’re there to help people to live, and it’s to be provided. It’s not a commercial transaction, it’s a cultural engagement, an exchange of provision.

It all comes back to that question about writing. The answer is still no, it wasn’t something I ‘wanted’ to do, like a career, or an ambition, but writing is what I could do. It could be helpful. I never thought of it as a career but once you’re started, yes, you might have ambitions to do better or to do something nobody else had done before, that needed doing.

Where is your favourite place to write?

Sometimes it’s not my favourite place at all.

There’s no one particular place. Something could come into your mind when you’re trying to get to sleep and you realise you have to get up and write it down. Sometimes it’s straight onto the keyboard, into the machinery and onto the screen. That happens obviously much more now than it did a long time ago.

But a long time ago, favourite places might be wherever you could use particular pens on particular kinds of paper, like the A4 pads where the lines were there, not the big thick lines, with wide spaces between them, but neat blue lines, made for fine writing. So the pen and the paper and the writing could all balance each other, quite neat and precise, focused.

The materials are important, and where and when the materials are available make the best place.

There was also writing on journeys, on trains for example. You should never read whilst driving, but you could possibly write. A great American poet, Edward Dorn, once said that you can do this if you have one hand tied to the wheel, you can manage a discernible scrawl.

If you could have any power, what would you choose?

The power to make sure that an independent Scotland was brought about in the shortest possible time.

Where is your happy place?

I could mention the particular landscapes and locations that give me sensual pleasure when I go off towards the West Coast of Scotland. When I go up towards Oban, for example, there is a particular corner that you come around by Connell Bridge and as you turn the car, you see the bridge and you know that the Isles of the West are out there.

But on the other hand, I’m quite happy where I am, the actual location of where I work, and where I live. I like Glasgow, I like the west of Scotland, the south as well as the north of Glasgow. All the way south past the blue hills of Ayrshire to Galloway and Dumfriesshire, and all the way north to Orkney and Shetland.

The East has its own attractions. Aberdeen is always a wake-up call. I’ve had very enjoyable times in Edinburgh but I’m always happier when I’m heading west once again.

What is your biggest fear?

Oh, what gives me nightmares? Anxiety dreams?

Some people have them from being in exams. But I used to have them when I was appearing in a play, and I don’t know my lines. I remember when that happened once in a rehearsal for a play, a long time ago, I did know my lines, but I do remember that fear of not only being unable to remember the lines coming up in anxiety dreams sometimes. Also, I think, because it means letting people down, whether it’s the audience or the other actors.

It’s a lesson learned: you only really start to enjoy acting once you know the lines. That’s when your interactions with others really just begin to have meaning and you really start to play, in that strict sense, of what ‘play’ is.

My biggest fear you might say is of those people who shut that element of play right down, pull the plug, close off the tap. I’ve met a few. Fools, cowards and monsters. Human beings, every one of them, but they can do a lot of damage and bring about a great deal of pain. I do fear the damage such people can do.

What was your favourite thing about writing Scottish Literature?

I started writing it as prompted by Paul Henderson Scott of the Saltire Society. I remember taking on this idea and writing but finding it rather a bit of a burden to fulfil this obligation because there’s so much literature to cover! I had to read, reread, and learn new things – many, many things! A pleasure, always, but also a weight.

But then also I started writing essays for The National – the only daily newspaper in Scotland that supports independence for Scotland, which I think is a massively disgraceful democratic deficit and illustrates how appalling mass media, newspapers, television, and almost everything to do with forms of public communication is in Scotland.

I talked to the editor and said, if I write about Scottish literature for your newspaper, the idea would be to prioritise the arts and literature in the prospect of an independent Scotland.

You’ve got to do more for literature and the arts, take them more seriously. None of the other newspapers or mass media does that to anywhere like the extent that’s needed.