Death and Literature In Edinburgh

Edinburgh doesn’t lend itself to literature, but it lends itself to death.  I have lived here five years and have yet to name it in my writing, or use it to an identifiable specificity.  There are things I love about my life here: wandering down to the sea, swimming in all the Victorian pools, watching the seasons change in the Botanical gardens, seeing my orange cat sitting on the walls of the Leith path, the plentiful and kind bookshops, the old mannish cubby holes of the Cumberland bar, but I find myself eating everywhere else almost greedily when I go: an afternoon spent in Glasgow or Dulwich, a drive to Dunbar, and expulsing stories.  I have deluded myself into thinking it is a good place for a writer just to be, to recuperate and hole up and write, but after multiple summers working chaotic fringes (the ultimate celebration of mediocrity which seems to draw in the ghouls of past decades we would rather leave behind: the chuckling red faced male comedian, the guitar player, the greasy and tortured body of a Las Vegas circus performer)  to barely pay my rent, looking forward to ghastly sandwiches to go out of date at work so I could eat them as grocery prices rise, the scramble to find housing, and the unrelenting mould and vermin of most places on the rental market, the endless party atmosphere of tourists and polyamorous ogre men, I can delude myself no longer.  It’s easy to get trapped here: you make enough money to scrape by and enjoy life a little, but not enough to save up to move somewhere else. Cafe signs and tons of plastic memorabilia remind the young writer that this is the place where that author got rich, as if Edinburgh were a literary casino. Dire and mawkish poetry thrives like the black mould between my shower tiles here.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, and The Coming Bad Days by Sarah Bernstein (in which Edinburgh is unnamed but parts, like the towering high rise building of Edinburgh University or the unrelenting wind appear) are two successful Edinburgh based works of fiction. Why aren’t there more? Why do I comfort myself about my life here by thinking of Muriel Spark when she made sure to leave it? (One of the reasons I moved here was the line “Everyone who came to the house was offered a cup of tea, as in Dostoyevsky” in her autobiography. It seemed a good place for a depressive slav like myself to write dark books. On paper Edinburgh should be perfect for a writer: the history, the sublime of the hills, the seedy gingerbread quality of the port of Leith with its Dutch like buildings, the dark, but it just doesn’t seem to work except rarely. Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde isn’t set here. I live near Robert Louis Stevenson’s old family house in Pilrig park where it sits like a grey piece of cheese. Brief mentions of the city in Elspeth Barker’s O Caledonia are treasured and feasted on (“a fog- bound winter night in Edinburgh. Her father came home on leave and looked into the blue wicker basket. He stride to the window and stared out at the discreet square of Georgian houses and the snow dripping from the bare trees.”) I couldn’t get past the first page of a well-received novel that opened with the characters getting a snack from a high end and well know Scandinavian pastry shop here.

When I am in Glasgow’s west end, the experience is always illuminated by the work of Alasdair Gray, I see everything through a pair of Gray spectacles which doesn’t restrict my vision but rather gives me an idea of how I could view Glasgow through my own creativity. Walter Scott’s enormous gothic and phallic monument is no comfort at all. His work is painfully unreadable. There is no Alasdair Gray of Edinburgh, not even close.

I have discussed with a few friends (interestingly, all female)  that Edinburgh has a bad energy and that it seems to emanate from Arthur’s seat.  I once had a panic attack in one of its tunnels that never seemed to end, another time while walking to the Sheep’s Heid when I first moved to the country and did not realise it gets dark at 3pm in the winter.  The stories of women being pushed off it by their husbands and boyfriends, and how whenever I had a date climbing Arthur’s seat, it became a dark joke between me and the man. The little mysterious dolls in coffins found there. I feel there are hundreds more, buried and still undiscovered like morbid eggs.

The buildings in the New Town that seem to go on forever below street level terrify me, it’s impossible not to think some mutant half toad cannibalistic aristocrats live there in blood soaked tweeds. The feeling like the whole of New Town is a giant boxy skeleton splayed out for refined maggots to live in.

When I initially moved here I compulsively collected shards of porcelain I found near the water of Leith, broken long forgotten tea parties and suppers. I went to the Stockbridge market and ogled the dead pheasants, the jam and curds that looked like blood and bile. I was, and still am obsessed with Edinburgh’s charity shops. There is one that when it gets boxes of stuff from someone that has presumably died, puts all of it on display in the window: their bedroom wardrobe with a kilt hanging on it, their collection of tiger figurines, their canes and their tea cups. I have filled my flat with their old crockery and pictures and scrapbooks (pictured below, a child’s scrapbook) waiting perhaps for the day when I will perish and all the objects and books will slither out in a cumbersome and dusty mass and array themselves in a charity shop again.

I once was sick in the Surgeon’s Hall museum after seeing a pair of perfectly preserved baby’s feet in a jar. Graveyards and tombstones are everywhere, like a scattering of sharp toys in a child’s playroom. Splayed skins of criminals are on display like antique purses.

Death reigns here.

I never take photos of Egyptian coffins or mummies at museums, out of some sort of superstition- even the photographing of an ancient Coptic sock in the national museum of Scotland has left me uneasy (As does the vertigo inducing bird bone like fences that separate the layers of that space, to be honest)

Sometimes I feel trapped in a mausoleum, other times that something terrible will happen if I write about Edinburgh directly in my fiction like looking the sun in the eye or maybe it just doesn’t capture the eye for long enough. In my novel, Children of Paradise, based off of working in a cinema here, Edinburgh was unnamed and no more than a uncomely mist around the periphery of the cinema which could be anywhere. Fiction is mystical I think, and life making. Edinburgh is death.