The Red Door Read Online Free PDF Page B

and humour. It is both thought-provoking, subtle, and witty
    Many examples of Iain’s gleefully absurd or knowingly sharp humour can be found in these volumes:
    ‘I thought that if the poet who had climbed the lamp-post had fallen down we might have had our first concrete poet.’
    ‘She was an incomer from another village and had only been in this one for thirty years or so.’
    Sometimes the humour relies less on punch lines than on wider social observations. ‘The Travelling Poet’ is a wickedly funny portrayal of the egotism and the artistry involved in
being a poet and there are flashes of great wit and insight in this marvellous tale. ‘Mr Heine’, too, is winningly sardonic, his tone of voice almost simultaneously gratifying and
sarcastic.
    ‘A Night With Kant’ returns us to Crichton Smith’s infatuation with philosophy, but it is also very witty. When a prostitute offers to show Kant ‘a very good time’,
his reply is amusing: ‘ “The time is seven o’ clock,” said Kant mildly. “It is neither better nor worse.” ’ As she ‘totters’ away, Kant is
‘stirred by a regretful desire’: ‘And at that moment the Categorical Imperative was very distant indeed.’
    These stories have not generally received the recognition they deserve and it is impossible to give a complete and fair critique of them in the limited space afforded by an
introduction. In any case the most convincing demonstration of their quality is to be found within the stories themselves.
    Read these stories because they deserve wider critical and general appreciation than they have hitherto been granted. Read these stories because they greatly help us understand why Iain Crichton
Smith was not only one of twentieth-century Scotland’s
best
but also one of her most
important
writers.
    Read these stories because some of them offer ideas for surviving a world that can be more powerful and sinister than one might reasonably have expected. Some explore the interaction between the
mind and the shared world of ‘reality’. Some face squarely, questioningly, the connections between the causal and the casual, revealing how identity, contingency and synchronicity
impinge upon life. Some teach us valuable lessons about the human condition, about our lives, or about the lives of people we have met (albeit met, perhaps, in a dream). And if some of these
stories leave you with no more certainty, clues, or logic than a dream might, then this is because life, surely, is not always clear-cut, and circumstances will sometimes hint at significances
touched upon but not grasped (just as the significance of these stories has not previously been grasped).
    Read these stories because they are stylistically diverse – variously realistic and hallucinatory, humorous and philosophical, formally complex and naturally, unadornedly simple.
    Read these stories because they were created by one of the most humane, eloquent, humorous, productive, scrupulous, lyrical, and uniquely imaginative literary minds of our times.
     
    K EVIN M AC N EIL
    Summer 2001
    Colombia-Malta-Isle of Skye

from
    SURVIVAL WITHOUT ERROR
    and other stories

The Ships
    The grey ships on the far horizon loomed out of the early morning haze, bastions of our lost Empire, the aircraft carrier pregnant with missiles, the other lesser ships
receding from her towards the open sea. The foreshore was deserted except for one man who was making little forays into the water, salvaging planks and broken boxes, and stacking them carefully
against the sea wall which edged the long strip of green where, later on, the wasp-coloured deck-chairs would be set. Now and again he would stop and look out towards the massive ships whose
combined destructive power could blast the small town out of existence in one blistering microsecond.
    As he walked, one could see that he was lame in the right leg and, when he bent down, the stiffness of his body was evident. He had rolled his trousers up to his