Back in the late 1990s, if you booked a sleeper on the Flying Scotsman from Euston Station up to Edinburgh, you got an extra-special treat: on your bed, along with the wee bar of soap and the wee bottle of water, was a wee book, selected from the 60th-anniversary series of 60p Penguin Classics. In my life these wee books win the prize for the best travel freebie ever: they were just the right length for a train journey, they introduced me to a number of writers that I hadn't encountered before, and they were invariably brilliant.
The most brilliant of all was Alasdair Gray's Five Letters from an Eastern Empire, which I found so astonishing that for many years I bought every copy that I ran across, just for the pleasure of giving it to another unsuspecting friend. Gray, who died at the end of 2019, was a visual artist, a writer of poems, plays, novels and short fiction who illustrated his own works, and a fierce advocate of Scottish independence, eulogised by the Guardian as 'the father figure of the renaissance in Scottish literature and art'. Trawling through the internet, you will find his various works described as 'frightening and downright filthy,' 'a confection of self-indulgent tripe', 'one of the landmarks of 20th-century fiction', 'an almost preposterously ambitious concoction of thinly disguised autobiography, science fiction, formal playfulness…and graphic design', 'a sadomasochistic fetishistic fantasy', and 'the best account I've yet read in English of a personal appearance by a creator god in the lives of one of the created.' In short, an artist who provokes strong reactions.
Five Letters, originally published as part of Unlikely Stories Mostly (Penguin Books, 1984), was inspired by a line from Ezra Pound's Chinese Cantos: 'Moping around the Emperor's court, waiting for the order-to-write'. It has been analysed in terms ranging from its rebuttal of Plato's criticism of poetry (Joanna Kerr, Writing in Justice: Plato's 'Republic' and Alasdair Gray's 'Five Letters from an Eastern Empire') to its eerily accurate prediction of Thatcherism (David Manderson, A Letter from a Western Empire: Post Colonial- (and other '-Isms') in Alasdair Gray's early work). Ignorant of all this, I nestled into my sleeper bunk and opened my little book.
It seemed to be a sort of fairy tale; the subtitle promised to describe 'etiquette, government, irrigation, education, clogs, kites, rumour, poetry, justice, massage, town-planning, sex and ventriloquism in an obsolete nation.' The writer of the first four letters is Bohu, a young man removed from his family at the age of five and trained to become the immortal emperor's tragic poet. He has completed his education and is being brought upriver from the old capital to the new palace, where he will await instruction from the emperor to write a poem. As the emperor's tragic poet, Bohu is a member of the honoured-guest class; he has an extensive retinue, and his ceremonial clogs make him ten feet tall. The emperor's comic poet, Tohu, has only one attendant and his ceremonial clogs are a mere ten inches thick. The trip upriver is pleasant, and the travellers are allowed to discuss 'many things [that] we would not be able to say in the new palace under the new etiquette.'
Bohu accepts both his role, and the accumulating hints that not everyone thrives in the empire, with confidence and serenity: 'I knew that I would be commanded to celebrate a great act and the greatest act of our age is the building of the new palace. How many millions lost their homes to clear the ground? How many orphans were prostituted to keep the surveyors cheerful? ….Yet this building, which barbarians think a long act of intricately planned cruelty, has given the empire this calm and solemn heart….There can be no greater theme for a work of tragic art.'
He has been carefully educated, and his mind glides smoothly over disturbing undercurrents: his favourite sister had to be sold at the age of two in order to buy firewood; his gardeners are 'socially invisible' and the poor are simply 'unnecessary'; in the garden of irrevocable justice, disobedient people have things removed that cannot be returned, such as eyes and limbs, whereas in the garden of revocable justice, good people receive gifts which can be taken back, such as homes and pensions.
And yet there are small moments of autonomy: once, for example, Bohu slipped through the fence of his academy, and saw his parents standing on the far side of the river, gazing longingly at the academy walls. The sight 'enabled me to believe in love while living without it' and ensured that his education, 'which made some of my schoolmates go mad or kill themselves', did not destroy him. He is allowed to write to his parents when he feels lonely, and to include 'unconventional thoughts' in these letters without fear of reprisal.
The order to write a poem, when it finally comes, is deeply shocking: the old capital has been destroyed. It was full of 'unnecessary people', who rebelled, or, at least, 'we are so sure that there was [a rebellion] that we did not inquire about the matter'. It has been burned to the ground and all of its inhabitants, including Bohu's much-loved parents, are dead. Bohu is instructed to write a poem celebrating the emperor's irrevocable justice.
Initially he refuses, but he is assured that even the death of his parents was necessary: 'If they were still alive your poem would be an ordinary piece of political excuse-making. Anyone can see the good in disasters which leave their family and property intact. But a poet must feel the cracks in the nation splitting his individual heart.' Still, Bohu is implacable, and asks permission to die, which is granted. The fourth letter tells how he and his retinue travel to the pantheon of the poets, where each tomb has an underground room large enough for the retinue to die in comfort. Somewhat to Bohu's surprise, when he arrives there, he finds his poem in his mind, 'waiting to come out.' It is not the poem that the emperor wanted, and Bohu expects that no one will read it. But he dictates it to his secretary, and lies down for his final sleep 'in perfect satisfaction.' The poem is called The Emperor's Injustice. Its first two lines are:
Scattered buttons and silks, a broken kite in the mud, a child's yellow clogs cracked by horses' hooves…
The fifth letter is not written by Bohu; I will simply say that it reveals the clever and cynical way in which the leaders of the empire have manipulated him into writing 'exactly the poem we require'; it needs only the elimination of a single syllable, after which it can be sent to every village in the land.
I am always an over-trusting reader; unreliable narrators catch me off guard every single time. I am sure that my restless sleep that night was due not only to the constant jostling of the train, as it stopped in various places to hook and unhook different cars, but also to the cruel trick played on the noble and endearing Bohu, whose final act of rebellion and self-sacrifice is so shockingly turned on its head. I slept badly and was quite ill the next morning.
That was some twenty-five years ago; was I, at that time, equally over-trusting of my own government? In the intervening decades I have become all too accustomed to the shameless lying of successive administrations, and their ability to manipulate large numbers of us into believing that they are looking out for our interests while creating disasters to serve their own ends: 'Anyone can see the good in disasters which leave their family and property intact'. Outside my native and adopted countries too, people whom I regarded as political heroes have revealed themselves to have feet of clay, making excuses while citizens of their country are killed or driven out of their homes. Were these trends already there when Gray wrote, and did he simply see them more clearly? If I read the book for the first time now, would it disturb my dreams all night, or would I simply shrug with resignation? It was good to take this opportunity to re-read it; it remains for me a small and perfect fable of the totalitarian state that sweeps even the noblest souls into its maw.
Patti Whaley has been a member of SOF since 1995. She has retired from non-profit management and now divides her time between being a charity trustee, playing the organ, and trying to read Russian.