Jane Oliver

THE BLUE HEAVEN BENDS OVER ALL:
 A NOVEL OF THE LIFE
OF SIR WALTER SCOTT (1971, 1992)

Reviewed by Patrick Killough

  I. Review for barnesandnoble.com

The Blue Heaven Bends over All


Here is how your review will appear on the title page:
        Patrick Killough (patrick@thekilloughs.com), preparing a survey course on Scott, March 27, 2007, Five Stars * * * * *
   
Title of this review: A Perfect Wedding of Fiction and Biography


Jane Oliver took the title THE BLUE HEAVEN BENDS OVER ALL: A NOVEL OF THE LIFE OF SIR WALTER SCOTT from Scott's own late-in-life JOURNAL. In March 1831 Sir Walter had less than two years to live. He was a widower, crushed by a huge debt to pay for his great country home Abbotsford and to repay losses of his publishing firm. He was in bad health, harassed by his critics. And a strong wind has almost blown him off his horse that day. But he remained at heart a cheery soul, who embraced the philosophy of the stoics. So he wrote, that after

'all these vexatious circumstances of politics and health ... the blue heaven bends over all.'

And that was his attitude throughout life: above all the little meteorological blips there was always a blue sky above. Walter Scott took the long view, always, saying, 'But the blue sky bends over all.' How much more upbeat than Robert Service's resigned
 'It's looking like hell, but -- you never can tell: Carry on, old man! Carry on.'

Which surfaces a mild subterranean concern of mine with this excellent book.

That is, THE BLUE HEAVEN is called a novel. It is supposed to be primarily FICTION. But it is not. It is 99% biography, with obvious attention by the authoress to sources, dates, places and coincidences. The fictional element, I am guessing, is limited to a few personal assessments of character and conversations. One thinks especially of the always comically accented English of Charlotte Scott, Sir Walter's French-born wife. For example, at a party before their wedding, it is time to sup. Charlotte Carpenter, nee Charpentier, then only the future Mrs Scott, says,
 'Ah, ze suppaire. And Mr Scott. I am starr-ving. We go now, yes?' Scott apologizes for not speaking French very well. Charlotte replies,
'Sir, that matters not. I speak yours vorse. So we are quits.'

THE BLUE HEAVEN BENDS OVER ALL is a weak novel but powerful, lightly fictionalized biography. Very well done, indeed: a story well worth telling. For Walter Scott was a titan of letters, no mean lawyer, a man with a huge appetite for work, a creative subconscious as powerful as Mozart's, blessed with a photographic memory, language- learning skills and on and on.

Jane Oliver recounts his life fully enough but notably briefly compared with Scott's major biographers. And this is a real service. There is admittedly a place for the huge works of Scott's son-in-law Lockhart and the more recent Johnson's 1400 pages. But for most mortals, Oliver's THE BLUE HEAVEN BENDS OVER ALL is just right in length. It selects, highlights and underlines what is important.

We remember the things that Jane Oliver highlights very well. By the time young Walter (Wattie) was four, his mother had already lost seven children. And Wattie's left leg had been paralyzed by polio at 18 months. He became a great walker (using a stick) but life had not begin that way. He taught himself to walk by leaning against the size of Marion, a shetland pony not much bigger than a Saint Bernard dog.

By temperament Wattie grew into a natural scholar, researcher, antiquarian, tale teller and writer. Jane Oliver shows him doing these things as naturally as breathing, while he was also paying close attention to Napoleon, the printing and publishing trades, marriage, children and grandchildren. His health was bad all his life. He never would have made it to adulthood without the love and care of mother, aunts and siblings. It is all there and it is worth reading about. -OOO-

    Also recommended: Sir Walter Scott, THE JOURNAL OF SIR WALTER SCOTT. Edgar Johnson, SIR WALTER SCOTT (two volumes). David Hewitt (ed.), SCOTT ON HIMSELF. D.W. Jefferson, WALTER SCOTT: AN INTRODUCTORY ESSAY. Donald Davie, THE HEYDAY OF SIR WALTER SCOTT. A. N. Wilson, THE LAIRD OF ABBOTSFORD: A VIEW OF SIR WALTER SCOTT.
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 II.  Review for amazon.com

TITLE OF THIS REVIEW: "My own right hand shall pay my debt" (Sir Walter Scott), April 2, 2007

Reviewer: T. Patrick Killough (Black Mountain, NC United States) - See all my reviews
  
In its way, this is a perfect book. A biography of Scotland's greatest novelist by a well qualified woman writer of Scotland. Compared to the vast biographies by John Gibson Lockhart (Scott's son-in-law) and by Edgar Johnson (nearly 1,400 pages), Jane Oliver's THE BLUE HEAVEN BENDS OVER ALL (384 pages) is of manageable proportions. Yet it covers well the Laird of Abbotsford from birth in 1771 to death six decades later. It is especially good in explaining Scott's needlessly heavy involvement in the printing and publishing ventures of his friends, that led him to the brink of financial ruin. The hell of his last half dozen years, impoverished, in debt, widowed, in wretched health is superbly clarified. Walter Scott accepted not one penny from anyone to pay off his 100,000 Pound Sterling obligation. He vowed to satisfy his creditors by writing his way back to solvency, saying "My own right hand shall pay my debt." Yet the world was clamoring to give him all he needed, with no strings attached.

Just two aspects of this close-to-perfect work give me pause.

First, its subtitle: "A NOVEL of the LIFE of SIR WALTER SCOTT." The ratio of biography to novel is at least nine to one. The fictions are pretty much limited to imagined conversations and an occasional mistaken date, including the one day error regarding what part of Scott's JOURNAL the title is taken from. This is a solid, accurate, vivid, credible, immensely valuable biography. As a novel it is merely negligible.

My second regret is that the author or the publisher has not provided a glossary of such Scots language terms as "fash" (annoy), "haugh" (river meadow) and "clarty" (dirty, sticky). Jane Oliver appears, without a glossary, to be writing only for residents of Scotland or the English Border counties. Yet the book brings Sir Walter Scott alive for readers of all countries. -OOO-

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III. Review for epinions.com



TITLE OF THIS REVIEW: "Fancy with fact is but one fact the more" (Robert Browning)
by aohcapablanca, Apr 02 '07

If you have time to read only one of the many biographies of Sir Walter Scott, then make it THE BLUE HEAVEN BENDS OVER ALL. But wait! Doesn't the subtitle claim to be A NOVEL OF THE LIFE OF SIR WALTER SCOTT?

It does.

But how can a novel be biography, believably true and accurate? It can if it is 90 percent or more biography and ten percent of less rigorously controlled fiction, as this book is. As a novel I would rate THE BLUE HEAVEN one star, as biography five. For the fiction is mainly a scattering of imagined conversations among Scott, family and friends. All are plausible. None is designed to falsify our factual appreciation of Scotland's greatest novelist. None of the fiction is "alternative history." This book perfectly encapsulates, in my opinion at least, Robert Browning's reflections in his long poem THE RING AND THE BOOK on the relations between fancy and fact, "Fancy with fact is but one fact the more." This splendid medium-length biography of Walter Scott is fiction uniquely in service to and reined in by known facts.

And the facts of the life of Walter Scott are known. He is no shadowy Pythagoras or elusive Shakespeare. The great biographers of Scott, his son-in-law John Gibson Lockhart and more recently Edgar Johnson (two volumes, 1400 pages) can, when they feel like it, pick virtually any day of any year and tell us almost hour by hour what their hero was doing and where he was doing it.

By contrast, Jane Oliver in 384 pages tells us all we need to know of Scott's entire life from 1771 to 1832. She dwells on his schoolmates because so many remained his friends for life, most dying before he did. And we are appalled by the many deaths of the young among Walter's siblings and children. The author also tells us enough about Scottish and English publishing and printing industries and the way they were financed to make us understand what a bad mistake Scott made in becoming entangled with them. Jane Oliver shows us the increasing but unintended marginalization of Scott's French wife, Charlotte Carpenter, nee Charpentier. How madly they were once in love, then more and more just good affectionate friends as his genius soared and she became absorbed with his (and derivatively her) rise into Scottish rural petty aristocracy. Charlotte would have her phaeton, then her coach and driver, then her shopping excursions for so many pretty things: wall hangings, carpets, furniture.

THE BLUE HEAVEN is very convincing in its portrayal of a morally good man who wrote as naturally as Mozart composed or Picasso sketched. He loved history, venerated the old aristocracy and was determined to leave a great, expensive estate to his son, where Scotts would live for centuries to come. (With sad irony only one girl among Scott's grandchildren produced heirs.) In recent years Scott's last two direct descendants, both female, have died. This leaves very much in doubt the fate of his grand little Gothic estate "Abbotsford" some 40 miles southeast of Edinburgh.)

All the facts we need to know about Sir Walter Scott, Baronet, are in this book: his love of dogs and theirs for him, his photographic memory, his ability to take up novel writing in his 40s and dash off 27 of them (including IVANHOE and ROB ROY) in less than two decades. Oh, by the way, before he did that, Walter Scott had been the most widely read poet (THE LADY OF THE LAKE, THE LAY OF THE LAST MINSTREL) in Europe. There is good news and bad news in the fact that, like Scott himself, author Jane Oliver is a distinguished Lowland Scotch writer. When she writes Scots language, she is authentic. But she seems to be writing only for Scotchmen when, providing no glossary, she tosses in words like "thole" (endure, put up with), "pawley" (sly, cunning) and "guddle" (catch trout with bare hands). This makes reading a harder chore than it need be.

Whence the title of this biographic novel?

It is from a line in 60-year old Walter Scott's journal. He was widowed, poor, in terrible health, with not many months left to live. That morning while riding around Abbotsford a high wind had almost blow him off his horse. (He had a lame right leg from polio at 18 months, yet he had grown up tall and broad-shouldered and, with a stick, he made himself into a prodigious walker, hiking up to 30 miles per day.) He was laboriously bringing to a close his last novel, COUNT ROBERT OF PARIS. Despite all, he wrote:
 "during all these vexatious circumstances of politics and health ... But the blue heaven bends over all."

This was Walter Scott at every stage in his life, battered but serene, knowing that above the fog or the storm there was a bright blue sky -- shining not just  over him but over everyone and all.

Pros:
Tells a beginning student of Walter Scott all he or she needs to know.

Cons:
A glossary of Scots language/dialect would make for faster reading.

The Bottom Line:
 
To grasp the life behind America's presidential anthem "Hail To The Chief" and novels like IVANHOE, read this book. It tells all that a novice needs to know.

Overall Product Rating:
 * * * *   (FOUR STARS) Above Average

Recommended:
Yes
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Black Mountain
04/02/2007