AITCHISON, James

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Nationality: Scottish. Born: Stirlingshire, 21 October 1938. Education: University of Glasgow, 1956–60, M.A. 1960; University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, 1969–73, Ph.D. 1973. Family: Married Norma Nicol in 1960; one son and one daughter. Career: Publicity copywriter, Scotsman Publications, Edinburgh; information officer, Strathclyde University, Glasgow, 1979–86; literary journalist, The Scotsman, Edinburgh, 1965–75, and The Herald, Glasgow, 1981–91; lecturer, Napier University, Edinburgh, 1986–94. Awards: Eric Gregory award, 1968; Scottish Arts Council award, 1973. Address: 10 Royal Gardens, Stirling FK8 2RJ, England.

Publications

Poetry

Sounds before Sleep. London, Chatto and Windus, 1971.

Spheres. London, Chatto and Windus, 1975.

Second Nature. Aberdeen, Aberdeen University Press, 1990.

Brain Scans. Edinburgh, Scottish Cultural Press, 1998.

Journal of Patrick Napier. N.p., n.d.

Other

The Golden Harvester—The Vision of Edwin Muir. Aberdeen, Aberdeen University Press, 1988.

Guide to Written English. London, Cassell, 1994.

The Cassell Dictionary of English Grammar. London, Cassell, 1996.

Editor, with Alexander Scott, New Writing Scotland I, II, and III. Aberdeen, Aberdeen University Press, 1983, 1984, 1985.

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Beginning with his first collection, the circumstances James Aitchison depicts in his poems, which generally involve common events and frequently the family, reveal more than they initially promise. Thus, in "Child in Fairground" the father puts his child on a horse on a merry-go-round ("roundabout") that "sails my child through the wet September evening." The child is already out of his control and the impotence of his love hinted at, but nothing untoward happens:

   The record ends and slowly the thing
   comes round again and all the beasts are still.
   He grips the chipped ear and slides down
   down from the beast and roundabout to the soft turf.

The wooden horses have become "beasts" and the merry-go-round a "thing," suggesting anonymous, threatening powers and a father possessed by anxiety. The poem ends with the line "And I cannot hear what he says as he takes my hand." Despite the final focus on the intensity of the personal experience, however, the low-key writing keeps the merry-go-round and its bored attendant in the foreground throughout:

   Sixpence, love-she shuffles them from hand to hand
   and does not see the child.

This early poem, from Sounds before Sleep (1971), indicates the direction from which Aitchison rarely deviates. The culmination of seeking to be true to the whole experience occurs when the event—place and person—seems to dictate the poem. In "On Some Islands" he writes,

   When the name is right
   it's as if the land had a will of its own
   and named itself—
   the Bay of Seals, the White Meadow,
   Island of the Burned Ground.
   …
   And when you walk in these places
   after an absence, after an illness
   then each place declares itself to you,
   and you to yourself again.

What is required is to be receptive, which depends on the given conditions. Once a person is put at the disposal of the experience, the outer world and the inward world give new perceptions. But the means of perception, words, may degenerate and so must be held up for inspection. In "Island in the Lake" the speaker has arrived at the lake with difficulty, and Aitchison writes,

   The ruined priory prompted the ruined words:
   religion, heritage and history.
   It's as if lakes and islands were outlined
   in us before we see them; they fill a space
   already mapped out for them in our mind.
   An island in a lake's a dangerous place—
   without looking for them you may find
   some other ruined words, life peace or grace.

He discerns illusions and sets aside shibboleths, and although he sets out with an objective he fails to achieve, to the patient, open mind all is gain. Thus, when Aitchison applies his criteria to the portrayal of persons, including himself, the essential experience is in the charity of his interpretations and in the awareness in his people of the marvel of merely being alive.

In "Off Season" a visitor discovers an old man in a boardinghouse—"You mean you're here the whole year round, she said." The poem catches the pitying tone of the visitor and that of the old man disclosing that he can most readily be himself during the off-season, and it concludes,

   and nothing could be lovelier than this
   December morning with a hint of sun
   and sea mist shrinking back into the sea.

It is in a self-portrait, however, "Picking Sprouts on a Winter Morning," that Aitchison puts to the test whether it was a curse or a blessing that he had "chapped hands" and that "sleet or rain / fell while I picked the crop":

   And when I tried to straighten up
   I felt the cold and the small hurts
   not as a price to pay but part
   of a blessing that's familiar
   and yet so rare, come from so far
   across the mind and from a past
   so distant the gift would be lost
   were it not for the rain and sleet,
   hands raw with frost, wood pigeons' shit
   and the wood pigeons in flight
   through winter morning's grey half-light.

Yet these poems may be seen as a trial run when set alongside "Antarctica," from the Journal of Patrick Napier. Here the impartiality of the documentary style allows the facts of the terrible journey to speak for themselves until the tone modulates to take account of the fantasies of the explorers as they develop under extreme conditions. The movement toward the suggestion of layers of meaning beyond the facts begins subtly with references to the weather:

   The snow and ice lie so deep that we walk
   not on the earth but on solid weather.
   we walk on the weather of many centuries.

Dreams of death and a predatory beast follow, but the narrator survives. The style then returns to a direct simplicity:

   And when I awoke and saw the little lamp
   And the shadows waltzing on the walls of the tent
   I thought myself in God's waiting room.
   And I felt the joy of being alive.

The final discovery in all of these poems is that the author exists within a pattern or order of life that, although beyond his comprehension, is not beyond his apprehension. In the simple act of picking sprouts the necessary gesture becomes an ancient ritual. The experience is a by-product of the subject and not within the author's planning. In "Sparrows: A Misreading of Bede" Aitchison writes that

   Without parables, without faith
   how can we prepare for the merciless places?

In "C.A.D. Imagination as a Primitive System of Computer-Aided Design," the speaker visits a place that though intended to solve problems does not do so for him. The poem begins, appropriately, with cant:

   It's mainly files of junk now: junk mail, junk
   drafts of abandoned drafts. Sometimes the screen—
   this seems to happen more and more—is blank

In the end he escapes from the dry computer air—"I fall in love with words and earth once more." Yet he knows how exposed and vulnerable are his feelings. In "Smooth Edgd Razer"

   I sat through Lears and Crucibles
   and tried to deny the rendings of the flesh.

He then plans an escape:

   I began to rehearse evasions, practised them
   until eluding the smooth edgd razer
   became second nature to me,
   until my second nature became my first.
 
 
   I take no risks, cross few thresholds.
   I am anonymous, almost invisible.

The cost of the protection is to be less than human. Its attraction is the takeover of first nature by second nature. (The title of the collection, Second Nature, helps indicate the significance of the poem.) The distinction of Aitchison's writing, however, is in the creation of characters given unexpected dimension through his compassionate understanding.

Throughout his poetry Aitchison is an explorer, asking questions about the nature of life and generally finding that though chaos threatens to destroy all a controlling order exists. In his collection Brain Scans, however, he asks questions about the "territory" in the brain of verbal communication:

   But I keep looking, trying to express
   in words the nature of the wordlessness
   that ripples through forgotten and half-known
   channels of the memory's lexicon
   where language is inchoate, and the brain
   must discover how to write again
   WORDS

In "Mr William Sloane," in the sequence "Neurological Rounds," a man is in a hospital after an accident that has almost destroyed his power of speech. With great sensitiveness Aitchison reproduces his partial recovery and discovers a new freshness in the words. He also develops a sequence with other patients. The recognition of our dependence on the physical properties of the brain for verbal communication may be depressing, but this is put in balance by the effect of the will to recover, which brings an unexpected brightness to the poem. It also marks an extension to the art of Aitchison.

—George Bruce