This essay was originally published on 20 April 2021 for subscribers to our newsletter.

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Surviving is not typical of Allan Massie’s prolific literary output. There are, by his own admission, a few pot-boilers out there, but there are also important novels which will stand the test of time, most particularly those set in or just after some of the twentieth century’s most tragic moments (the Second World War, terrorism in Italy, etc.). The position of Surviving in this oeuvre is unclear. As far as I know, this is the only case of a novel by Allan Massie that must have at least some autobiographical elements. It is set in the 1970s and concerns a group of anglophone alcoholics just about getting by in Rome, where they have washed up often out of pure chance; some are just passing through, while others have found a new home where they may live the rest of their lives (I have always thought that most people who emigrate do so not to arrive in a particular place but rather to leave their own country behind them – and perhaps to rebuild themselves with a new personality that isn’t the result of traumatic events in the past).

When I published this book in 2009, I had to read it several times, but it always seemed to be the same book because all these readings were at roughly the same time. When I read it again for this newsletter, it felt like a new novel and that is definitely something in its favour. Good works of fiction are flexible and engender different reactions in different times – and places. Back in the day, I perceived the AA group as a courageous bunch who are very different from each other but united by the curse of alcoholism (some are dealing with it better than others). Partly this was because of the ending, which demonstrates unity in a fairly uplifting scene (but not overly so). This time I was struck much more by the fragility and manipulativeness of the relationships. This is not to say that they are not generous and sincere, but they are also ones of dependency: more like the relationship between a drowning man and the life belt someone has thrown into the sea. This is even the case in possibly the closest friendship in the novel – the one between Belinda and Kate (the former has perhaps given up on life, though she is still capable of falling in love, while the latter is an ambitious writer whose iron will consciously pushes her beyond sensible behaviour – both character traits that can lead to alcoholism). When Kate’s work creates a difficult situation (which is the hub around which the plot revolves), Belinda’s first thoughts are about the future of this important friendship which is one of the anchors in her frail existence. This is wholly understandable, and typical of the psychological insights that pervade the narration and often refer to the real protagonist: alcoholism itself.

Surviving is not a moral tract. Far from it, and in this it is similar to the English-speaking alcoholics who populate this novel to which Rome provides a backdrop of grandeur and normality (of a kind). Their behaviours are not governed by morality but a harsh practicality. They are close, even when they dislike each other, which is quite often. But that closeness has to take precedence, and thus creates a de-facto morality (a code based not on moral strictures but on the struggle to survive – a heroic struggle at that).

This suffuses the work with a detached melancholy in which the narrative voice posits such questions as “could criminal behaviour be the making of a better person, like alcoholism?” and “Who among us hasn’t known his promised land, his day – days? – of ecstasy and his end in exile. Conrad wrote that somewhere (I think).” Characters too can dispense comments that add to this meditative aspect of the alcoholic on the wagon: “There’s no story so horrible it can’t be true.”

One of the characters, Bridget, is based on Caitlin Thomas whose autobiography, My Life with Dylan Thomas: Double Drink Story, I read some time in the late nineties. The wife of the great Welsh poet provides us with some very interesting observations about alcoholism. One was that alcoholism is like a job (probably true of any addiction), and drinking is taken as a serious business. She and Dylan used to clock in punctually at 10 o’clock in the morning, and it continued all day. A.J.P. Taylor was so concerned that he gifted their family with a house (they had three children if I remember correctly), and if nothing else, that suggests that the belief in the importance of poetry was much stronger then. The drama reached its peak when Dylan Thomas toured the United States and ended up in hospital where he died. She describes the tragic scene with brutal accuracy, particularly brutal when it comes to her own behaviour, confirming Massie’s adage that no story is so horrible that it can’t be true (while in fiction the same scene could well be considered unbelievable). She also observes that when alcoholics go abroad, they find a bar near to the hotel and spend all their time in a that bar, so they may as well have stayed at home. Massie, with the superior and more flexible tools of fiction, is more exhaustive in his analysis, but both authors are stressing the all-embracing nature of this condition, but Massie is also adding that this is also true of the alcoholics who haven’t drunk for a long time. The fragility remains, if fragility is the right word.

Surviving is not only about alcohol. It is about many things, such as the nature of friendship. But perhaps in second place after alcohol, it is about literature, and on this matter we have the most melancholy statements of the entire book. If there is a character that represents the author or the author’s previous self, it is Tom Durward. This was suggested by one of the author’s relations at a launch event, but Massie never confirmed this – not at the event and never since as far as I know. Why indeed do we search for the autobiographical in novels? But I do it here because in the following quote, I’m sure that Tom Durward’s thoughts are in fact also those of the author: “when I was young, I often thought: if I can write one book that is really good and true, it doesn’t matter what sort of a mess I make of my life otherwise. Which was nonsense. Sadly. A book written was something consigned to the past, far more completely than the affairs of your non-writing life which stayed alive to delight or disturb or haunt or pain you. Whereas the written book was dead to its author. He had indeed brought off once, maybe twice, what he had aspired to do. And now, these books meant nothing to him. They had been thrown into the world, and, if they mattered at all, it was to other people that they mattered now.”

Occasionally Massie uses free indirect discourse, and through this technique he puts these words into Durward’s mind when he is thinking about literature: “But what a sad business it is: excavation really.” That was one of the quotes I put on the back cover, and I believe that it is something that authors must always hold at the back of their minds, but never accept if they are to continue to write. And he is also right to suggest that writers want a book to be published in order to discard it from their minds. This is the thought process of a successful author in old age, and I believe that Somerset Maugham said something similar but left it to his deathbed. It could be said of any activity, but because writing is such an eminently human activity, being closely related to speaking which sets us apart from all other animals, we value it less. We wonder what exactly good writing is, in spite of all the savants say. It probably isn’t any one thing (thank God).

I wouldn’t want the reader of this newsletter to think that Surviving is all alcoholic melancholy. It is certainly that, but it is also wit and survival to enjoy company in spite of it all. I have purposefully declined to provide much information about the plot, but now I will admit that there is a killing (the murderer is immediately known to the reader, so it is not a crime novel as such). There are intricate connections between the characters, and all this leads towards a settling of accounts more suggestive of comedy than tragedy. In other words, this short novel is a unique late work of one of our leading Scottish novelists, and well worth the read.

Allan Cameron, Glasgow, April 2021