In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

5 The Scotsman’s Return from Abroad Margot Fonteyn was dancing at Covent Garden the year I lived in London. When they weren’t doing ballet they were doing opera,and I cut my teeth onVerdi, the “Anvil Chorus” in IlTrovatore. It made my heart leap when I was young.Also that year I discovered Mozart. Crossing the river, I paid a shilling to hear him at the Festival Hall. If I waited until the last moment, I could see a play of Shakespeare’s for sixpence.Thinking about that time, my annus mirabilis, I smell coal smoke on the air, mingling with the smell ofWoodbines, a cheap cigarette. Before leaving the States I had got married, too young, I realized later, but many in those days did as I did.After the incandescent time it was all “You said,” “No, it was you who said that,” and I cringed for the man I’d turned into. Sad how the perfect thing always bids us adieu, youth and its expectations, romantic love, not least the “beautiful physique” that goes with it. But time, though intolerant of all that, as Auden’s poem tells us, has a soft spot for writers. Unlike athletes, whose professional life is finished when their legs go or their TedWilliams vision gives way to bifocals, they have a hole card.This is their writing, and if they stick to it, it gets better as their body gets worse. Young writers look inward, at their navel. If you believe them, the world began today.Age, perhaps understandably, disputes that. But if wisdom comes with it,the yield is a skimpy one,like 2 percent on your investment .There is this to say for getting older,though—it forces you to realize that you aren’t one of a kind. Before you came crying hither, others acted out your scene, smarted with the same fears, quickened with the same hopes. Knowing that induces humility, something I hadn’t been big on. the scotsman’s return from abroad 77 Like most Americans, I set my face toward the future.What happened in the past, of interest to antiquarians and the DAR, wasn’t of interest to me. But age is a great mixer-upper, running together yesterday and today. As the past turned into the present,“old unhappy far-off things and battles long ago”became signposts on my road,pointing me back to the beginning. I never knew my grandfather Russell, stern patriarch of my father’s family and dead not long after I was born.The stock market crash wiped out his business and cost the family their place on East Hampton. But copybooks he’d made, inflected with “the strong Scots accent of the mind,” were still there in the attic for a small boy to wonder at. In a precise , even elegant hand, he wrote out lesson plans in civics and geography for his nine children. He made them memorize the Bill of Rights,America ’s rivers and mountains, the capitals of our forty-eight states, all the presidents down to FDR. Grandfather died embittered,“turning his face to the wall,”my mother said. I’d like to redeem his misery, and so gratify my newfound affection for the ancestors. Not by fiddling the truth, of course, as when we hear that the good end happily, the bad unhappily. Gresham’s law holds for life as much as economics, and the not-so-good drives out the good. But in the ideal country where every writer lives part-time,a man’s reach is honored , never mind that his grasp always falls short.  I am the Scot I write about, but my title is secondhand and comes from the poem by Robert Louis Stevenson. Living much abroad, at the end of his life in romantic Samoa, he grew up in Edinburgh near Charlotte Square. Coolly classical buildings stand around the square, the work of Robert Adam. Stevenson’s poem breathes a different spirit, though, and its comic hero is a music-hall Scot. Gargling his English, he swallows some letters, elongating others. “Noo,” he says, when they ask him for money. Borrowers and lenders alike come to ruin,“an’ they themsel’s ken it weel.” But Jekyll needs Hyde, and the closefisted man has a wild streak. Returning to Scotland from “far outlandish pairts,” he greets the hills of home, birches in the Highlands, the bonny kirks— But maistly thee, the bluid o...

Share