|
A.
N. Wilson (aka Andrew Norman Wilson)
THE LAIRD OF ABBOTSFORD: A VIEW OF SIR WALTER SCOTT Reviewed by Patrick Killough I. REVIEWED for barnesandnoble.com REVIEW TITLE: "THE SUPERFICIAL IMPRESSION ... IS BY FAR THE DEEPEST" (G.K. Chesterton on Walter Scott) Reviewer's rating of THE LAIRD OF ABBOTSFORD * * * * * FIVE STARS THE LAIRD OF ABBOTSFORD' is one title by which Walter Scott (1771 - 1832), Scotland's greatest novelist, is known. 'Wizard of the North' is another. He won the former title by being named an hereditary Baronet ('Bart.') No one had a stronger sense of family and the individual's personal indebtedness to his ancestors and responsibility to descendants than Sir Walter Scott, Bart. And he hoped to pass along his dream manor, Abbotsford, for his heirs to live in for the next 500 years. Andrew Norman ('A. N.') Wilson is a distinguished novelist, biographer and achiever of many other things. He is unashamedly a booster of Walter Scott, both as great writer and as morally good, congenial human being. Wilson's book is 'an
attempt to read Scott's life and work as complementary to each other' (Preface). 'This book has been an attempt to trace
the relationship between 'Scott the writer' and 'Sir Walter Scott the
Scottish petty aristocrat' (Ch. 10, p. 181).
In ten crammed chapters A.N. Wilson relates Scott's earliest narrative poems (beginning with THE LAY OF THE LAST MINSTREL) to Scott's passion for ballads and lore of the Scottish borderlands. He also probes the surprising passivity of Scott's fictional heroes (starting with Edward Waverley in 1814) and relates it to Scott's way of growing up and doing professional work in the law courts. Another theme: Walter Scott had lifelong friends from every layer of society and weaves them into novels such as GUY MANNERING, THE ANTIQUARY, ST. RONAN'S WELL AND REDGAUNTLET. Walter Scott was not a great churchgoer. But he was raised a severe Calvinist, turned sunny Episcopalian at his wedding and read Sunday services for family and servants at his country home Abbotsford. He was willing to die a martyr for his Christianity. He probed in fiction the Reformation in Scotland, both its fanatical beginnings and increasingly fanatical aftershocks starring Covenanters and others. Calvinist excesses included the much lamented destruction of monasteries and iconoclasm of Roman Catholic church art. Wilson rates particularly highly Scott's two related 'Benedictine' novels of early Reformation Scotland, THE MONASTERY and THE ABBOT (Ch.5) Wilson, furthermore, selects a half dozen Scott novels (and romances) for lengthier dissection, including OLD MORTALITY and THE HEART OF MIDLOTHIAN (Ch. 6). Walter Scott, dutiful son, onetime passionate but rejected lover, the husband and the loving father of sons and daughters, is the focal point of Chapter 7, as his life spills over onto his heroines in THE BRIDE OF LAMMERMOOR and KENILWORTH. Chapter 8, 'Scott's Medievalism,' on display in IVANHOE and elsewhere, is very rich and Wilson reminds readers of the Laird's debt to Miguel Cervantes and DON QUIXOTE. 'The Gurnal' (daughter Sophia's quaint spelling of 'Journal') is what Chapter 9 is about. Here Wilson pulls together the unity of Scott's personal moral life and the similar morality on display in his novels. In the Journal we see a Scott beaten down by family and financial losses and increasingly horrible health. But he rallies. 'He has set out to live by a set of rules,
and he finds that they work.' '...he had, almost consciously, been
rehearsing for the part for the last fifty years' (p. 169). 'He was at
last in the position of a hero who can only be saved by his own efforts
... like the Bailie in ROB ROY' (p. 171).
In Chapter 10, 'Scott and His Critics,' A.N. Wilson pulls together Scott's life and fiction. Nothing can be added after: 'We
encounter in Scott's novels the greatest diversity of realistic human
characters outside Shakespeare; we discover from reading his biography
one of the most genial men who ever lived' (p. 185)
A page earlier Wilson had cited
approvingly G.K. Chesterton's famous essay on Scott noting how Scott's
greatest scenes instantly move the reader emotionally. Is this quality
superficial? Chesterton thinks not:
'The
very word superficial is founded on a
fundamental mistake about life, the idea that second thoughts are best.
The superficial impression of the world is by far the deeper' (184f).
If you are ever marooned on a desert island with only twenty books by and about Sir Walter Scott, then A. N. Wilson's THE LAIRD OF ABBOTSFORD is one you have to include among them. It is masterly, vivid, unforgettable. - OOO- OTHER BOOKS RECOMMENDED: Iain G. Brown, editor ABBOTSFORD AND SIR WALTER SCOTT: THE IMAGE AND THE INFLUENCE Donald CARSWELL. SIR WALTER: A FOUR-PART STUDY IN BIOGRAPHY (Scott, Hogg, Lockhart, Joanna Baillie) Gilbert Keith CHESTERTON. "The Position of Sir Walter Scott," in TWELVE TYPES Donald DAVIE. THE HEYDAY OF SIR WALTER SCOTT. Black Mountain 04/06/2007 ===-=-====-==-=-=-=-=-==- II. Reviewed for amazon.com TITLE OF THIS REVIEW: "PATIENCE, COUSIN, AND SHUFFLE THE CARDS." RATING OF THE LAIRD OF ABBOTSFORD: ***** (Five Stars) Andrew Norman (A. N.) Wilson in THE LAIRD OF ABBOTSFORD: A VIEW OF SIR WALTER SCOTT showcases a dozen or so aspects of his hero's life as that life spilled over into books. It was a life full of bad health, beginning with a right leg forever lamed by polio at age 18 months, losses of family and friends and culminating in six years of near financial ruin. Yet throughout Sir Walter Scott's basic philosophy was life-affirming. Over and over he would pick himself up after setbacks and throw himself into his great literary work. He wrote in his journal late in life when all looked particularly bleak, that amid 'all these vexatious circumstances of politics and health ... the blue heaven bends over all.' Things were always going to get better, Walter Scott believed. From advice in Cervantes's DON QUIXOTE he took to heart and repeated in his own works and Journal the image of a player losing at cards who knows that sooner or later his luck will turn. Thus in QUENTIN DURWARD the hard pressed King Louis XI of France says, "But patience, cousin, and shuffle the cards, till our hand is a stronger one." Scott loved in turn three women. The first affair was pre-University puppy love. The second woman rejected him. With the third he built a rational, calm, friendship-based marriage and family. A. N. Wilson traces the overflow of these loves into such novels as THE HEART OF MIDLOTHIAN, THE BRIDE OF LAMMERMOOR and KENILWORTH. Scott hated fanaticism and superstition in the religions of Scotland but did their adherents justice in OLD MORTALITY, THE MONASTERY AND THE ABBOT. He also produced the most convincing array of three-dimensional "characters" in literature after Shakespeare. Wilson's THE LAIRD OF ABBOTSFORD deserves reading over and over. If you have never read a word of Walter Scott, this book will give you a jump start into knowing what "Scott-Land" is all about. And the more poems, histories, romances and novels of Sir Walter that you read, the more penetrating and personally salient will the insights of A. N. Wilson become to you. -OOO- 04/08/2007 =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- III. Review for ebay.com* TITLE OF THIS REVIEW: Scott "always managed to make the truth exciting" (A.N. Wilson). Ranking: Five Stars ***** A.N. (Andrew Norman) Wilson's THE LAIRD OF ABBOTSFORD is about Scotland's great poet and novelist, Sir Walter Scott (1771 - 1832). Sir Walter Scott had a life that fascinates. He overcame childhood polio, climbed trees, hiked (using a stick) up to 30 miles per day, was a champion rider, became a lawyer, married, had children and built his dream castle near the border with England. He collected Scottish ballads, edited editions of Dryden and Swift, wrote eight long poems and 27 novels. He wrote novels for only 15 years, but he read novels for 50 (he was not much beyond sixty when he died in 1832). He loved life, loved books, had hundreds of friends and maintained a sunny, outgoing disposition throughout a life of ill health and personal sorrows. A.N. Wilson relates factual patterns of Scott's biography to imaginative patterns and characters in his poems and novels. Other critics of Scott had tried to make a rigorous distinction between "Sir Walter," the Scottish petty aristocrat and "Scott," who made words as easily as Mozart made music. Where they perceived disconnects, Wilson sees Sir Walter Scott's art imitating life and vice versa. Scott had friends and wrote a supremely great but quite implausible novel of friendship, THE ANTIQUARY. The plot revolves around how an old humorless pedant could manage to win the respect and admiration of a much younger, energetic man. Scott's narrowly Presbyterian lawyer father had no sympathy for his son's love of poetry. So Scott revisited the subject over and over of such sons and fathers in novels like WAVERLEY and REDGAUNTLET. Walter Scott thought that the Reformation in Scotland, on balance, had been a good thing, perhaps even intended by God. But not all that John Knox's Reformation replaced in ritual, architecture and art was worse than what succeeded it: Presbyterian iconoclasm, physical tearing down of monasteries and the fanaticism of the Covenanters and their kin. Scott developed deep insights into history and how literature could tell its truth. "What Scott discovers ... in his novels is
that if we respect the past, it is impossible to take sides. Time
changes sides; ... the issues of the present are determined by the
past." (Ch. 3, p. 45)
He saw religion dividing brother from brother. Scott also portrayed fanatics whose only home was "a last ditch" in which they would inevitably perish, to be replaced without a tear by their conquerors. Why are so many of his heroes so passive? Why do almost all of them "do time" in prison or are otherwise deprived of their freedom? Wilson shows how these qualities of fictional characters flow from Scott's own life. Much of his fiction, ROB ROY, THE MONASTERY, THE ABOTT and others, serves to show that the old wild, free, cruel, loyal, Royal, Roman Catholic Scottish highlands were going to expire, that they simply had to die. For all their possion and courage, they were inevitably going to be beaten by a plodding, calculating, peaceful, Hanoverian-dynasty-serving nation of shopkeepers. But the highlanders had been grand in their day and when they passed, something good was lost forever. Or maybe not lost forever. For Scott, history's losers had a way of keeping something of their spiritual genes marching forward through time. Walter Scott had been raised in a severely Calvinist family in Edinburgh. He took in Scripture through a photographic memory. He became Episcopalian when he married a French woman who had been raised Huguenot. Sir Walter exulted in the religious diversity of his ancestors including Catholics, Presbyterians and even Friends (note the Quakers in REDGAUNTLET). Nor are the women in his novels such as THE BRIDE OF LAMMERMOOR unrelated to the infatuations and romances of his youth. His medievalism comes from his love of Border history and his veneration for knightly ancestors. Wilson then displays the medieval component of Scott's personal biography work in IVANHOE, QUENTIN DURWARD, COUNT ROBERT OF PARIS and elsewhere. Says Wilson: Scott "always managed to make the the truth exciting." -OOO- * NOTE: This is the first book review I have done for http://www.ebay.com. I had planned it for http://www.epinions.com. But the best epinions could do for me was to refer me to ebay. -OOO- Greenville, South Carolina 04/07/2007 . |