Jessie Kesson (1916–1994)

A short, elegant rural tragedy, set in the 1950s in a farming community somewhere in the north of Scotland (around Aberdeen?), pivoting on the long-standing rivalry between Hugh Riddel, a steady, reliable agricultural worker, employed as dairyman on a large farm, and his sometime schoolfellow Charlie Anson, who has ambitions to get into local politics and has been seen hanging around Hugh's daughter. When Hugh is invited to give the "Immortal memory" toast at the Burns Supper and the text of show more his address gets into the local papers, Anson is burning with jealousy, and trouble seems inevitable.

Kesson takes an odd approach to structuring the story, where we start in the aftermath of the trouble and then loop away into the back-stories of characters indirectly involved in it — Hugh's cattleman father; Sue Tatt the shameless village "woman of shame" (based on Kesson's mother?); the Vicar; Hugh's social-worker daughter Helen (Kesson herself?); the gossiping Greek chorus of farmworkers in the dairy — and she tells us a lot about conditions of employment in agriculture, the social structure of villages, the misguided way youth work is organised, the eccentricities of Scottish local buses, and so on. We keep feeling that we are losing our grip on the story just at the point when she swoops back to where she was meant to be and we suddenly see how relevant it all was. In the background throughout is the figure of Robert Burns, as a farmer and as a lover, his experiences contrasting with and sometimes paralleling the lives of the modern farmworkers. But there's also the important symbolic presence of a hill with a Pictish horse on it, and of a modern mental hospital: neither ever quite enters into the story, but they are both clearly essential somehow.

I also loved the way Kesson quite naturally and undemonstratively reaches for a Scots word whenever that expresses what she wants to say better than standard English could. She doesn't write in dialect, but she ends up with English prose that feels unmistakably Scots.

Wonderful stuff, it seems to pack something like the breadth and scope of a Thomas Hardy novel into 150 pages... show less

Glitter of Mica was my introduction to the novels of mid-twentieth-century Scottish writer, Jessie Kesson. It’s a novel I admired rather than enjoyed. Set in 1959, mostly in the fictional village of Caldwell (with some scenes occurring in the city of Aberdeen), the story revolves around Hugh Riddel, the head dairyman of a large farm called Darklands.

As the novel opens, the reader learns that Hugh has acted in a dramatic and shocking way. Before revealing what he has done, the author moves show more backwards in time to provide details about her main-character’s early years as the only child of an itinerant Scottish farm worker—a “cottar”—and his wife.

The Scottish farm-labour system is described in some detail and reminded me of the practices Thomas Hardy describes in The Mayor of Casterbridge and Far From the Madding Crowd. For that matter, Kesson’s chorus of labourers nattering on about other people also put me in mind of the rustic set that populate a number of Hardy’s novels, though Kesson’s characters seem more censorious by a long shot than his—but perhaps my memory serves me poorly. Although it’s been many years since I read The Mayor of Casterbridge, it also struck me that Kesson’s protagonist, Hugh Riddel, is temperamentally cut from the same cloth as Hardy’s mayor, Michael Henchard. Both are angry men, obsessively fixated on another ambitious man. Impassioned, prideful, and ruminative, both are also shown to be the makers of their own tragedies. (SPOILER) In Hugh’s case, his brutal bullying of the younger Charlie Anson in childhood and his ongoing contempt for the adult Anson—though seemingly warranted, as the man is indeed a scoundrel—comes back to bite him. Anson achieves revenge by becoming sexually involved with—and impregnating—Hugh’s daughter. (END OF SPOILER)

In Hugh Riddel’s father’s time, if farm workers were fortunate enough to be considered reliable and competent, the farmer might ask them to stay on year after year. Others, like the unlucky Riddel Sr. (who was known to pilfer from his employer), were silently let go and had to find new situations at the hiring market on one of two “term days” each year. The loss of a job was serious business for agricultural labourers, for it also meant the loss of a home, as a cottar was assigned lodging on his employer’s property. Part of his fee—pay—included foodstuff.

We are told that in 1939, Hugh’s father was taken on at Darklands, a large mixed farm in a bleak area of Aberdeenshire. There he finally proved his worth and was named head cattleman. With the advent of World War II, conditions improved markedly for farm labourers, who were declared essential workers and not sent off to war. Job security greatly increased and term days became a thing of the past. Hugh has reaped the many benefits of all this change. Now—with his parents gone, two decades after his family’s arrival at Darklands—he is head dairyman, making almost ten times as much money as his father. He has a day off a week, a weekend off a month, and will even receive a pension.

Still, Hugh is a dissatisfied, intensely angry man, one with an ever-recurring pain and no one in whom he can “confide . . . [his] deeper agony.” Evidently commanding and intelligent, he chafes against the hypocrisy and rigidity of Caldwell’s social hierarchy. Nowhere, writes the author, is “‘keeping one’s proper place’ so strictly adhered to as in our shire.” Kesson’s characters do no end of talking and gossiping about her main character and his family (his wife, Isa, and 25-year-old daughter, Helen) whom they regard as having gotten well above themselves, the ultimate sin.

Hugh’s marriage is one source of his disappointment and resentment. He doesn’t merely dislike his wife, Isa, he feels rage towards her for her sexual coldness. Sex is only “bequeathed [by her] from duty” and is as “cold as charity.” “Your hunger for it left you altogether,” he broods, “and appetite itself turned to distaste, so that even if it were offered to you now, you couldn’t stomach it.” He suspects that his might be a common enough plight among his fellows; however, for him it’s “beyond enduring.”

According to the conservative standards of the time, Hugh’s wife, Isa, is ostensibly a proper and respectable partner—“a quiet decent lass” in his mother’s words—but he has learned that “a good wife could bind you prisoner forever, with the swaddling bands of her goodness.” As a boy, he’d been certain he “would grow much greater than the man he had become”; the pleasures of manhood anticipated in youth have not materialized. He ends up seeking the services of the local prostitute, Sue Tatt, who lives alone with her children, the progeny of different fathers. Kesson’s humorous and colourful depiction of this woman is generous indeed, likely springing from the author’s experiences with and love for her own single mother, who took to prostitution. I thought the author’s description of Sue’s charms were somewhat indulgent, and I did not find this character to be fully credible. However, I’ll grant that it’s easier for Sue to sympathize with the rough men of Caldwell than it is for the wives who have to live with them.

While Kesson’s aggrieved protagonist is impressively represented, it’s to the author’s credit that her Isa and Helen, Hugh’s despised womenfolk, are equally well portrayed. In a skillfully rendered scene in which Isa journeys home by train to Caldwell from Aberdeen, the author highlights in a few strokes the loneliness and emotional poverty of Isa’s marriage. Sitting across from a commercial traveller, the woman engages in a conversation with him. Kesson observes: “she hadn’t spoken so freely to anyone in years—and the man a complete stranger to her at that. The very realisation brought her to a sudden silence. The wonder was the man was sitting there listening, as if all she said was sensible enough, and even waiting for her to go on.” Later, Isa attempts to tell her husband about the man on the train, “knowing that anything she said would be wrong, but always hoping to find something that would be right.” In the end, she evidently apprehends how it is with her husband and herself: “All his attitude and actions [were] that [sic] of a man who was isolated within himself. An isolation as complete as her own.”

Early in the novel, Hugh reflects that he’d never once heard his father use the word “love”. There’s certainly nothing to suggest that the word has ever crossed his lips either. His disdain for Helen rivals his contempt for Isa. He displays not an ounce of affection for her. A promising student, Helen had received a bursary to attend university, but she disappointed Hugh by failing to earn a degree, settling instead for a diploma in social science. Now twenty-five, she is a social worker at a youth centre in Aberdeen, travelling home on weekends and, for a time, spouting sociological jargon that only enrages her father. It’s unclear if Hugh simply finds Helen’s talk pretentious or whether there’s a deeper resentment of the young woman for having raised herself above him, underscoring his unacknowledged feelings of inferiority. Whatever the case, Hugh can’t believe he’s produced such an unsatisfactory specimen. He knows nothing of Helen’s disillusionment with her work or her own sense of isolation and disappointment.

When he happens upon his daughter in flagrant delicto with the opportunistic and exploitative upstart, Charlie Anson—a “weasel” for whom Hugh feels the utmost contempt—Hugh’s simmering rage comes to a head. To say his reaction—fuelled by shame, disgust, and rivalry—is dire would be an understatement. Intrapersonally blind, he apparently never grasps that he is the author of his own misfortune.

For me, Kesson’s novel, while insightful and stimulating, was less than a pleasure. I found the Scottish dialect hard going at times, and I made frequent use of the online Dictionaries of the Scots Language website. There’s no question that Kesson excels at revealing character through realistic dialogue and gossipy conversations, but I admit to sometimes finding them tedious. Kesson leavens the grimness of her content, particularly in the middle section, with dollops of humour and irony; however, the conclusion of the novel, after Hugh Riddel’s violent act—the culmination of years of contempt for another man—is indeed bleak. I can’t say I enjoyed being in the protagonist’s head. show less

Kesson’s autobiographical novel The white bird passes tells the story of a young girl growing up in a slum district of a Scottish small town (Elgin) in the years after World War I. It could easily have been the Scottish A tree grows in Brooklyn, but that’s not the way Kesson wants to go: her heroine is a wonderfully sharp observer, refreshingly free of any sort of conventional morality. She revels in the way her neighbours - whores and petty criminals - somehow manage to maintain their show more dignity by defying authority and supporting each other at times of trouble. Of course, we readers get to see a bit further than little Janie, and realis e the adult misery behind the defiant attitude, and the way no-one in the community is really strong enough to maintain the mutual support when their own survival is at risk. It’s not an uplifting story, in the usual sense, nor is it a story of triumph over adversity - in Janie’s world, it’s pretty clear that adversity will get you every time. But it is a magnificent, very Scottish, account of how important it is to be proud of being human and keep on struggling for the impossible. show less

In an autobiographical novel about her early life in a 1920s Scottish slum lane, Kesson elicits considerable sympathy for her sensitively rendered protagonist, Janie, and even Janie’s neglectful prostitute mother, Liza. The third-person limited POV restricts itself to what Janie, the child, sees and experiences but does not always understand. Therefore, the reader is provided with no backstory to explain Liza’s fall into prostitution. As neglectful as Liza is, there is love between show more mother and child, and it is wrenching to see the little girl removed from her “Mam” at age eight-and-a-half and sent to a training home for orphans a hundred miles away in Skeyne (Skene) Aberdeenshire.

Many readers love this novel and state that the Scottish dialect was no barrier to their experience of it. For me, this was not the case—either with this book or Kesson’s Glitter of Mica, which I read last month. Reading both, I made regular use of online dictionaries of Scottish, which was helpful. However, I think other idiosyncrasies of Kesson’s diction created problems for me. I often wasn’t convinced that I was fully taking in the author’s meaning.

Additionally, in spite of a joyous child at the centre of this novel, the subject matter is unrelentingly sad and grim. I tend to think that even lovers of the novel, those for whom the story resonated, wouldn’t call it “enjoyable”. The most I can say is that I appreciated it intellectually, that it allowed me to enter a world I otherwise might not have. Overall, however, my sense is that Kesson is not the writer for me. show less