The Red Door Read Free

in’. He describes waiting for Donalda to visit his flat with a joyfully simple and
affecting beauty:
    In his flat in Combie St, he would listen for Donalda’s footsteps on the stone stairs. In her yellow dress she was like an actual physical ray of sunshine
     entering his house.
    Indeed, Iain fully recognised how important Donalda was to his well-being, how centrally important she had become to his happiness.
    Having long understood that meeting Donalda was ‘a turning point’ in his life, he married her in July 1977, a month after he had retired from teaching. (Crichton Smith had actually
tried to leave teaching on two previous occasions, ‘but had lost his nerve’). Donalda and the two boys, Peter and Alasdair, moved in to the flat. Iain settled in to a routine of writing
in the morning, preparing the boys’ lunches, then writing again in the afternoon, still driven, as he had always been, by a very
Leòdhasach
Protestant work ethic.
    Crichton Smith’s marriage precipitated a new joy in his work – an energetic delight at the spontaneous beauties of nature, for example, although his writings have always had an
undercurrent of darkness, sometimes nudging at the reader’s mind and sometimes quite overwhelming it. One of his best novels,
In the Middle of the Wood
, charts the breakdown of a
married writer whose paranoia necessitates a spell in a psychiatric hospital. If the novel’s tone seems disturbingly autobiographical, there is a good reason for that, as Edwin Morgan has
pointed out:
    Smith has said that the whole story is true, and if this is so, it is a most remarkable example of how an artist will use the material of his life, no matter how
     terrible it may be, and perhaps achieve the double function of exorcising some of his demons and presenting his readers with a highly dramatic story.
    Thankfully, Iain recovered from the breakdown and went on to write some of his greatest work.
    By the time of his death in 1998, Iain Crichton Smith had become one of Scotland’s best-known and best-loved writers. His rich
ouevre
won him a great many accolades and honorary
degrees. He was awarded the OBE in 1980.
    There is no doubt, therefore, that Iain is a major Scottish writer. But it is at this pertinent juncture that I wish to raise –and subsequently attempt to demolish – another popular
misconception: that Iain Crichton Smith was a great poet who ‘also wrote prose’. Undeniably, close scrutiny reveals a degree of inconsistency in his stories (just as in his poetry), but
I wish to argue that Iain was, on balance, a much better short story writer than he is usually given credit for. Indeed, some of his stories are so tightly charged with evocative imagery and
intensely appropriate wording that they constitute prose-poems.
    Sorley Maclean’s comments are representative of a general attitude that has arisen among some critics with regard to Crichton Smith’s writings:
    In spite of at least one most moving novel,
Consider the Lilies
, several generally fine volumes of short stories like
Trial without Error
[sic], many
     brilliant plays both in English and in Gaelic and much reviewing and lecturing, Iain Crichton Smith is primarily a poet even if he spends more time at the other literary work than at
     poetry.
    Crichton Smith confessed in an interview for
Books in Scotland
that he did not think of himself as a novelist, saying: ‘I am not a novelist, but I like challenges in that
form.’ He also said, revealing just how important the short story form was to him, ‘What I really see myself as is more a short story writer and a poet.’
    In ‘The Necessity of Accident’, an excellent, insightful essay appraising Crichton Smith’s English-language fiction, Cairns Craig writes:
    [It is]tempting to look upon Crichton Smith’s prose writing as the workshop of his poetic imagination – an outlet for a creativity which cannot cease from
     generating words rather than the mode in which his imagination