EDINBURGH - UNESCO City of Literature
By Clark McGinn
Clark McGinn on a fascinating literary heritage tour of Edinburgh: UNESCO City of Literature.
For me, Edinburgh is a totally different place – not so much of festivals or stones but a place of words and pages and so what joy that Edinburgh is now crowned the UNESCO City Of Literature. It’s well deserved - this after all is a city who has a railway station and a football team called after novels – but writing runs deeper in Edinburgh’s essence than that!
Writers are cemented into the city’s fabric so come and wander round the books and byways.
A Tour of the City’s Literary Haunts
Let’s start at the Castle where you’ll pass the close where Boswell entertained Samuel Johnson (or was it the other way around). The great dictionary man was famed for an anti-Scottish wit that nowadays would cause a riot yet there’s a plaque there to mark him. A few hundred yards down the Royal Mile you’ll find the remembrance of Robert Burns – up on the Lawnmarket, or better still above the door of the Beehive Tavern on the Grassmarket where you can imagine our poet with tankard in hand, composing impromptu verse to the delight of the tavern folk. More formally, down on Princes Street, Sir Walter Scott stares out from his monument towards his old house while of course all Scots carry his image close to their hearts - on the Bank of Scotland’s banknotes!
“Who indeed, that has once seen Edinburgh ... but must see it again in dreams, waking or sleeping? Do not think I blaspheme when I tell you that your great London, as compared to Dun-Edin, ‘mine own romantic town’, is as prose compared to poetry, or as a great rumbling, rambling, heavy epic compared to a lyric – brief, bright and as vital as a flash of lightening.” Charlotte Brontë (1850)
Come down through the steep steps of the closes and the vennels and emerge in the paradise of parallels that is the New Town. Here you’ll find garden gates embellished with the initials ‘RLS’ for the grandson of the Lighthouse builder who became a beacon of adventure for so many. And here and there tablets on the walls commemorating the editors and essayists of the great Enlightenment times. Cut back past the galleries, up the Mound and find the stairs to Lady Stair’s Close and the Writers’ Museum – you’ll know you’re getting warm for the flagstones are carved with great quotations from Scots writers through the ages. You’re back at the Royal Mile, in the museum and safe in the comfort of the companionship of Burns, Scott and Stevenson, ideal bedtime stories.
It’s a city of libraries too: from Edinburgh university to the gem of the Signet Library. When you are walking across the Bridges, passing between the National Library of Scotland and the Central Library stand still and hear the rustle of the manuscripts and the book-trapped voices yearning to tell you their tales. In the daylight hours you can participate in readings at the Scottish Poetry Library, or the Scottish Storytelling Centre, or join the queue in one of the myriad bookshops to meet an author and get an autographed copy for your library at home.
Today’s Writing Talent
Edinburgh’s literary fame isn’t just in sandstone and gravestone. There is remarkable living talent today.
Have a cup of coffee and as you sit down, look around for a young blond woman with a notebook – JK Rowling carries on as she started – the invention of Harry Potter exploded from mind to pen to paper to page to screen and it started here in a true fairy story, sustained by coffee and a bun in one of the coffee bars near the University. Now her own franchise is as large as Starbucks and her talent means that she is the richest and most recognisable woman in Edinburgh (except for the week the Queen stays here!).
Also recognisable is the ubiquitous Alexander McCall Smith – until recently he taught at Edinburgh as Professor in Medical law. The brightly coloured success of his No 1 Ladies Detective Agency brings the bright skies and heat of Botswana into our hearts but I’ve always thought that Mma Ramotswe owes a lot to a particular type of Edinburgh lady – with sensible shoes and a practical mindset that anyone with a Scottish granny will remember. A prolific writer and columnist, he also is reputed to be one of the worst bassoonists in the world.
Another local, although a darker writer, in dress as well as genre, is Ian Rankin. He dominates crime fiction with DC Inspector John Rebus set in real time in real parts of the city. The latest book sees Rebus retiring but we all hope that while the DCI has hung up his notebook and pencil, his creator will hang on to his and carry on.
These three writers sold millions of copies last year across the world yet they live in the same area of Edinburgh – a district now know by the local wits as ‘Writers’ Block’.
The Characters of the City
For me, though, it’s not the writers living, forgotten or dead that make this beautiful city alive to literature. It’s the characters who live in the City at the edge of our consciousness.
The best way to experience this is to have a wee dram in your favourite bar and then walk the streets just as the twilight is settling on a clear evening. The sound of people enjoying themselves, the sunset light kissing the stone of the buildings, the damp smell of hops from the brewery, let it all relax your mind then look.
See – here’s Miss Jean Brodie cycling with her crème de la crème along the street, going fast downhill as always. The whole opera of Walter Scott’s characters are outside St Giles, lead by Jeannie Deans, about to walk all the way to London to seek justice. Hear the rattle of a carriage as Clarinda escapes the amour of Robert Burns. The devil in Deacon Brodie – magistrate by day and burglar by night – can be heard in the quiet crack of a broken lock and the slight noise of a fine Georgian sash window slipping up. While if we peek in some other windows – there is Rebus’s pint at the bar of The Oxford, the man himself is probably outside having a smoke, and here is John Buchans’s Dick Hannay having a quick dozen oysters and a pint of champagne in the Cafe Royal Oyster Bar before running to catch the night express to adventure. James Bond, en route to a Fetttes old boys’ reunion, relishes a fine malt at the bar of the Scotsman (he always preferred a real drink to a martini).
That is why Edinburgh for me is the living library. Whether walking alone, or reading, or debating with friends, or participating in the Book Festival each August, wherever I walk in Edinburgh, I walk on a foundation of books.
Congratulations on your award for inherent in it is the recognition that this capital of Scotland, a small city at the head of a small country, has through its writers changed the world forever and for everyone.
Clark McGinn, born in Ayr and educated at Glasgow University now lives and works in London where a career in banking pays the family bills, but allows time to write, speak and lecture on Scottish themes across the world. One of the leading speakers at Burns suppers, his book ‘The Ultimate Burns Supper Book’ is a popular guide to our national celebration and his new book: ‘The Ultimate guide To Being Scottish’ is to be published by Luath Press in November 2008.
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