As a late friend once said to me, the expected and the shocking are often the same thing. Allan Massie, an erstwhile contributor to these venerable pages, died yesterday aged 87. I always thought Allan might be immortal. He was the chief literary reviewer for the Scotsman for 50 years, but also a keen-eyed correspondent on rugby (as a loyal follower of Selkirk it must have been quite a melancholy task), and a perceptive columnist, who did not shirk from questioning the status quo. There were times when his byline would appear in the main newspaper pages, the sports pages and the review supplement all at once.
I first met Allan in 1988, in Old Gala House, where he was a guest speaker at the small day out for the sixth formers doing literature, and spoke about Chekhov’s ‘The Lady with the Lapdog’. That day he said something to me that stuck and struck. ‘If you want to be a poet,’ he said, ‘have a second job.’
I did not become a poet, but I did follow in his footsteps as a reviewer. He once chided me for saying I was a critic, when ‘in fact you are just a reviewer’. He then passed me a Gitane. Those were the days when I still smoked.
As a critic, Allan was always generous, sometimes wryly tetchy and piercing even when praising. He knew why books were good, which is a rare capacity. He admired subtlety and inference, the hint of things, the quiet surprises. It may seem old fashioned, but he had a bristle about the gleeful nostalgie de la boue in contemporary fiction.
His novels are a quiet treasure of modern writing. When A Question of Loyalties was republished, I wrote that he was the unacknowledged postmodernist of Scotland, which was slightly and knowingly cheeky, given Allan’s views about postmodernism. But that novel is full of double bluffs, errant recollections and sleights of hand. There was always a buried complication in his work. The Death of Men is equally problematic, dealing with the complications and compromises of idealism, the nature of political violence and the fractiousness of the post-war world.
Looking over his career, his Roman novels seem to me to encapsulate his politics. Reigning is not the same as ruling. These books, again quietly, take on Robert Graves and his I, Claudius. Massie offers a version of Rome that is more political and less sensational. In many ways it ought to be compared to Gore Vidal’s novels of American history. They are – and he would upbraid me for using such a word – kratological books, concerned with the nature of power, how it is gained, how it is abused, how it is lost.
His late quartet of books – the Bordeaux sequence – are a homage to Simenon and as elegant. More than that, returning to his fascination with Vichy, they are about how one lives in the shadow of defeat. They have a moral complexity missing from much of what we call ‘tartan noir’. Allan always commended the work of another much-missed figure, William McIlvanney, because of the manner in which he used genre to make the novel a surreptitious ‘moral engine’.
One friend recently told me about the joy of re-reading Massie’s work, and there is a re-readable quality about him. That said, the idea of a Collected Works of Allan Massie would be an utterly unfeasible proposition. How on earth might anyone collate all the reviews, the sports writing, the opinion pieces, the anthologies, the non-fiction works and all the novels?
He most resembles one of his predecessors, Sir Walter Scott
In that respect he most resembles one of his predecessors, Sir Walter Scott. His novel, The Ragged Lion, is a portrait of Scott, and in some ways a self-portrait. His Scott is successful and strangely regretful, a haunted figure and yet someone who insists on being generous. He is – a word used frequently about Massie himself – underestimated and ubiquitous at the same time.
One abiding memory is of Allan and I being on the same bus – the X95 from Edinburgh to the Borders, since neither of us ever learned to drive – and him enthusing about re-reading Joseph Roth. They had the same complexity and fascination with ambiguities. But more than that, sitting next to me, ash burn on his sleeve, was a proud Scotsman who was alert to the wider world. Nobody would mistake Allan for a nationalist – indeed, he once suggested to me, not wholly in jest, that we should repeal Holyrood – but he was heir not just to Walter Scott and John Buchan, but to the polymaths like Andrew Lang and James Frazer. He was a gentleman and a gentle man, and impishly remained a lad o’ pairts like none other. Il miglior fabbro.
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