Sir Alexander McCall Smith is a world-renowned author, best known for The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series, which has sold over twenty million copies. He’s written and contributed to 100+ books, including academic texts, novels, short stories, and poetry collections. Here, we’ll be asking him about his passion for poetry, from his love of Auden to where he finds inspiration. The following are transcribed excerpts from our conversation; enjoy!
LB: You were once a Professor of Medical Law at Edinburgh University, and served as chairman for the Ethics Committee of the British Medical Journal. Now, you write full-time. What encouraged you to make that change?
AMS: In an author's life, there are often events which one may not anticipate, which change everything. There's a great deal of luck, to put it bluntly, involved in life as an author, and indeed in life in general. You never really know what is going to happen with the books that you write. And it may be that many books sink without trace. I have a friend who wrote a book that sold only eight copies. You always have to be prepared for obscurity with respect to what you write.
I had always written, and I'd written in my spare time when I was a university professor. Then I wrote the first book in The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series. Initially nothing happened. We had some generous reviews, but nothing really spectacular occurred. They did a reprint, a small reprint, published by a small UK publisher. I was asked to write a sequel and a sequel to the sequel. It was after I'd written about three or four of these that the books were imported by Columbia University Press in New York and put at the back of their catalogue. Again, nothing much happened. Then the New York Times did a full-page article on them. That changed everything. I was approached by very large publishers in New York, the Random House Group, and they brought out these books in the United States, and the books took off in a rather overwhelming way and then were translated into many different languages and whatnot.
That's the point at which I found that my life was becoming really a bit complicated in that it was difficult to do two things at the same time. So I took a leave of absence from the university thinking that I would go back to my academic career, but that became impossible. The books, as I say, took off in a big way throughout the world. I was doing a lot of touring, really rather too much. In fact, I was rather overwhelmed. But it did give me the opportunity to become a full-time writer, which is quite a difficult thing to do. Many people would very much like to be a full-time writer, but you have to keep body and soul together. It's hard for people to do that. But I had this opportunity.
The success of that particular series of books also meant that I could write what I wanted to write. To be given the freedom to write books that you believe in without having to have one eye on the literary marketplace is quite an interesting thing. I'd written a number of books of great obscurity about three German professors called the Portuguese Irregular Verbs series, about Dr. Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld and his friends who were philologists at the University of Regensburg. I was able to go back to those and write more and have them published in the mainstream, which wouldn't have been possible had I not had this particular success with The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series. Very conscious of my good fortune, I was given a real opportunity to write what I really wanted to.
LB: That’s amazing. You mentioned that your novels have been translated into many languages: over 45, I think! I wondered if you’d had any of your poetry translated?
AMS: That's a very interesting question. Some of my poems have been translated into other languages, in particular the poems that I put into my 44 Scotland Street books, because I always have a poem at the end, which I say is written by one of the characters, Angus Lordie. So it finishes off the book in that way. Here's the latest Scotland Street book, which isn't quite yet published yet. [shows book] It's called Bertie's Theory of Ice Cream. That has a poem by Angus, which he gives at a dinner party, where he's talking about the heart as metaphor. So when these books are translated - into Italian or French or whatever - those poems are translated as well.
Poetry has an interesting life in the days of the web, in that poetry can migrate to extraordinary places. We get very frequent requests from people who want to read the poems at some sort of public occasion. We do a good line in weddings and funerals. Sometimes, indeed, I write specifically for people. I was on tour in the US last year, and when I was in Baltimore or somewhere down there, this couple came and said: “we're getting married next year, would you write us a poem?” So I've done that, I've just sent it off. Poetry has a public existence, as it should, actually. You'll be aware of that. If you look at something like the Odyssey and the Iliad, they existed in the mouths of the oral guardians. Poetry was really part of the oral tradition.
So, translated… yes, they have been translated. A couple of years ago, somebody translated a whole collection of my poetry into Scots, which was very interesting because I like the Scots language and I write a bit in Scots, but he was really using a very old form of Scots, which will send most readers of contemporary Scots off to the dictionary!
LB: Still no translations into Latin or ancient Greek though, right?
AMS: If that's an offer from you, Louis, you have my permission.
LB: Awesome! Thinking about the writing process, where do you find the inspiration for your poems?
AMS: It tends to come quite quickly: sometimes there's a trigger, a phrase or an idea. I’ll give you an example. I was in Sri Lanka a couple of years ago for the Galle Literary Festival. It’s a wonderful literary festival in southern Sri Lanka, a beautiful old Portuguese and Dutch merchant town. I was staying in this really nice small hotel with beautiful grounds, where there were Frangipani trees and all sorts of lovely vegetation. I said to the woman who ran it: “how do you irrigate this? Do you have a borehole?” She said: “no, we've got the main supply, which we call here government water.” And I thought, what a wonderful phrase, government water. So I wrote a poem called Government Water [extract below], how water initially belongs to us all, but then it becomes government water in government pipes and so on. That's where an idea or some sort of association triggers. Then the poem comes very quickly. I may then fiddle about with it and divide it into stanzas, but usually it's a single session. I'll write it when I'm travelling, wherever I am. Sometimes I have to wake up and quickly get to the notebook to write it down before it goes.
It falls as rain, at times of its own determining,
Persuaded into monsoons in normal seasons,
Obedient to the patterns of the past,
But inconveniently, at times, as if to prove
That nature, ultimately, is neither
A contractor nor employee, but a force;
In veils, or stair rods, or metaphors less common
The rain falls across the waiting land,
On highlands, on tea and eucalyptus equally,
Along the coast on palm and frangipani,
On paddy, and rock, and winding roads
That have nowhere special to go to;
A country's rain is its clothing, its modesty,
Forgiving of past misbehaviour or ingratitude,
Not interested in settling old scores
But beginning again each season
As if nothing had happened.
- Alexander McCall Smith's Government Water, first stanza (watch him reading the whole poem to me here)LB: I love that. And after you’ve written a poem down, do you have other people looking over it before publication?
AMS: No, not really. I might send a poem to friends, but there tends not to be any editorial process. Then I put the collection together and it goes to the publisher and the poetry editor. There doesn't tend to be much editorial feedback. I think poems are quite personal, are quite carefully crafted. Poems are different from, say, the narrative of a novel or a short story where an editor is likely to say: “could you bring out such and such a character?” or “you haven't explained the situation adequately,” comments of that sort. A poem is rather like a piece of music. You don't say to a composer: “could you put in a few more C-sharps in that piece?”
LB: I’m curious about your influences. Are there any poets you admire?
AMS: Oh, yes. My major literary influence is W.H. Auden. He’s absolutely magnificent. There's the most wonderful range to his work and a marvellous humane voice. I wrote a book on Auden called What W. H. Auden Can Do for You. Auden was very interested in landscape and old lead mines, geology. He wrote In Praise of Limestone, which is the most magnificent poem. I've got a very major collection of Auden here [turns camera around to show me the shelves in his study]. You'll see that shelf there behind the shade. That's all Auden. Without question, my major literary influence.
Within Auden there are a number of poems I really like. I like the poem he wrote in memory of Sigmund Freud, where he talks about the liberating effect of psychoanalytical theory [extract below]. He also wrote a very short poem, which contains in its few lines what could be an entire philosophy of life. It’s called The More Loving One, and says it all about what we should aspire to in this life: “If equal affection cannot be, / Let the more loving one be me.” It’s interesting because he’s saying we all want the world to love us, but the world may not be able to do that to our satisfaction. Our love may be unrequited, but don’t let that defeat you; show more affection for the world than the world may show for you. It’s a tremendous moral precept.
All the time the characters tend to quote Auden. Isabel Dalhousie goes on about Auden. In fact, I had a wonderful letter a few years back from W.H. Auden's literary executor, Edward Mendelson, who's a Professor of English at Columbia University. He wrote to me because he'd seen me quoting Auden; he wrote and he said that he thought that W.H. Auden would have agreed with Mma Ramotswe, my Botswana hero, 100% of the time. So I said: “well, that's great to hear from you. It's the next best thing. Obviously, Auden can't write to me because he's dead, but hearing from you was great. Let's meet for lunch when I'm next in New York.” That was the beginning of a great friendship. I said: “in my next Isabel Dalhousie novel, I'll include you, Edward.” So I gave him a role, a little cameo role.
When there are so many we shall have to mourn,
when grief has been made so public, and exposed
to the critique of a whole epoch
the frailty of our conscience and anguish,
of whom shall we speak? For every day they die
among us, those who were doing us some good,
who knew it was never enough but
hoped to improve a little by living.
- W.H. Auden's In Memory of Sigmund Freud (1940), first two stanzasLB: It’s interesting that your characters quote Auden. Have you memorised poetry yourself?
AMS: When I was at school I had to learn ten lines or so of poetry a day, most of it pretty awful stuff. The Daffodils, for example: “I wandered lonely as a cloud / That floats on high o'er vales and hills…” I don’t know whether you had to memorise that but people have had to learn it. That’s a very useful way of inculcating a sense of the rhythm and the richness of works.
Another major influence on my prose was listening to excerpts from the King James version of The Bible and The Book of Common Prayer, when I was carted off to church. The Book of Common Prayer uses wonderful English, Cranmerian prose. The English language was at its height when that was put together, so there are these gorgeous resonances. Absolutely beautiful. Of course, the Church of England has abandoned that literature, largely in favour of a sort of computer-speak, which takes all the mystery out of the language.
Interestingly enough, the influence of the King James version is to be seen throughout the world. African English has that slightly Old Testament song to it. That’s because they’ve learned English as formally a second language, and they’ve heard the language in that context. That’s part of the background of English. Similarly, Shakespearean English… Shakespeare is the DNA of good English.
I don’t think that contemporary English brings much to the table, because it’s become far more functional. It's stripped of the richness of metaphor. It's stripped of its poetry. There are also all sorts of extraordinary intrusions, such as the word ‘like’: “I was like.” Now, if you look at that particular phrase, they're using it as a shorthand for expressing an internal sentiment, a thought. Rather than say “I thought that” or “I believed that” or “I felt that” which is subjective language, it all becomes “I was like.” So there's a great deal of richness in English that's been lost, which is a great pity. I'm very keen on the poetic possibilities of prose. I like to write long sentences. Metre within prose.
Now, in the emails that you sent me - which were beautifully expressed, I must say - I was really pleased, Louis, to see you use the semicolon. Let’s form a Society for the Protection of the Semicolon.
LB: Thank you, and I agree!!
One final question, what do you think poetry offers that prose doesn’t?
AMS: It offers a boiling down, a distillation of experience. Poetry is a particular experience or a particular thought concentrated, reduced in a sense, the way in which one would reduce a sauce: you boil off all the surplus and you end with something which is very concentrated and rich. Poetry directs one to the essence of a thought or experience whereas a longer piece of prose is is a different process, a narrative with all sorts of things coming into it. Poetry is seizing a particular moment, a particular thought, and subjecting it to real analysis. For example, that poem Government Water looks at the nature of water. W. H. Auden also wrote a wonderful poem called Streams [extract below], which you might like to take a look at, where he talks about our relationship with water.
DEAR water, clear water, playful in all your streams,
As you dash or loiter through life who does not love
To sit beside you, to hear you and see you,
Pure Being, perfect in music and movement?
Air is boastful at times, earth slovenly, fire rude,
But you in your bearing are always immaculate,
The most well-spoken of all the older
Servants in the household of Mrs. Nature.
- W.H. Auden's Streams (1953), first two stanzas