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If you are a genius then it is wonderful, of course, but it is never advisable to develop any genius for writing short stories. The writer Fred Urquhart, who was born in Edinburgh in 1912, offers a solemn lesson in this.

The strenuous official celebration of Scottish talent by devolved institutions should surely switch on a green light for Urquhart to be read widely today. The many carefree references to homosexuality in his stories would also probably help. Urquhart sometimes resembles a time-travelling special agent from our own period, who is equipped with our own advanced relaxation about homosexuality and who has thrillingly infiltrated those previous decades when being gay was illegal.

By now, there should be a Fred Urquhart Prize for young gay writers and a Fred Urquhart quotation tattooed across a flank of the Scottish Parliament. But Urquhart had calamitously adopted that half-journalistic strategy in which the short story does not pose with any grand literary value and it instead peeps out informally, from magazines and journals. He had indeed written for and about working people, half-journalistically as it were. Even worse, he had been a humourist. Humourists had finally gone extinct throughout literature with the death of Tom Sharpe in 2013 and there are only fossils and loose bits now around today.

Rather like the poet Norman MacCaig, Urquhart did not confirm to how a Scottish writer should ideally conduct themselves in our era of corporate cultural Scottishness. Scots is used superbly throughout his fiction but it is always framed, offset or even curated by a BBC English. To devolved readers such a relationship probably smacks too much of a union to be gratifying. Even more unwisely, Urquhart had bunked off to England for over forty years, living with his partner, Peter Wyndham Allen, down in the Ashdown Forest in Sussex. He had himself conceded that, “I don’t think that some of the stories are very popular in Scotland…”

Today one can find many admiring references to Urquhart online. His own Wikipedia page, for example, insists that he is “considered Scotland’s leading short story writer of the 20th-century.” But almost all of the available writing about Urquhart is biography and I am yet to uncover any committed critical appreciation of his fiction. His stories are praised on a couple of occasions in George Orwell’s reviews. You might wistfully wonder what Orwell would have produced had he been somehow forced to sit down and write a whole page about Urquhart. Otherwise, the best that I can dig out is a set of online instructions for children at Glasgow’s Rosshall Academy, on how to complete a homework assignment on Urquhart’s story “The Bike.”

A notably resonant line that occurs in Urquhart’s review of H.E. Bates’ fiction, from the New Statesman in 1939, could be almost turned back on him. “An ordinary working man or woman would understand and appreciate the difficulties of Bates’s young farm-girls and stolid labourers much better than they would understand the spiritual hunger of the inhabitants of Bloomsbury.” You are infinitely more likely to encounter a biography of Urquhart online today than an essay puzzling over, say, the cuckolding of his coal miner Dan Cunningham. It would be far fairer for literary criticism to remember the richness of Urquhart’s working-class characters, with a concomitant acknowledgement of his skill as an observer of their lives and circumstances.

Somewhat troublingly, the one example of a complete story of his that I can find online is in the archives of the right-wing magazine the Spectator (namely “The Loony” from 1940). No previews are enabled on the Google Books editions of his works and the copyright for his fiction is still active, meaning that fans cannot post his stories on blogs. Other publications that Urquhart had written for, such as the New Statesman, are yet to digitalise their historical archives. So literally the only way that you can now instantly access a Fred Urquhart story is with a Spectator subscription. If it is any consolation, “The Loony” is characterised by some gamesome abuse of the ruling class.

The sense of Urquhart being neglected or not given his proper due also haunts my own writing. I had taken out The Dying Stallion, a 1967 volume of Urquhart’s stories, from the Edinburgh University library on the 23rd September 2015. I know this exact date because when I withdrew the same book again this year, my original receipt was still inside it (along with the receipts for other books that I had withdrawn on the same day). Clearly no reader has opened The Dying Stallion since I had returned it seven years ago.

In 2015, I had been following a tip from Twitter’s Edwin Moore. I have a memory of him recommending Urquhart to me but either Twitter has since misplaced this tweet or else I had just imagined it. Instead, I have found Moore commenting about Urquhart on the Lallands Peat Worrier blog (now deceased). I sometimes think that in its erudition LPW is the furthest that Scottish nationalism has ever gotten in any direction and on the day of Moore’s comment, in 2012, it had been moonlighting as a literary salon:

Writers get forgotten. James Campbell wrote recently in the TLS about Fred Urquhart, whose short stories about working-class (and gay) life in Glasgow were praised in the highest terms by the likes of Orwell and V S Pritchett – try mentioning him to your book-loving chums – few have ever heard of him. So it goes. His works are available POD [print on demand] – I strongly recommend them. Orwell was right, Urquhart is a master of the short-story form.                

When I had read Urquhart in 2015 there had been a massive freshness to his fiction or a kind of springtime perkiness to it. Perhaps it is because writers these days no longer really know what to do with humour. A traditional and prominent source of light within fiction now tends to be always covered with a damp cloth. But in 2015 I had thought “I must write about Fred Urquhart” and I had then immediately drifted on to something or somebody else.

Next to the historian Owen Dudley Edwards. He had mentioned Urquhart by chance when I was speaking to him recently and for a moment Urquhart was there again, shaking his gory locks at me. I saw that I had left him in the lurch. 

Although I had never written about him, less explicable to me is why I had stopped reading him. There are many short stories and novels all laid out for the reader to explore and presumably, where things get even more exciting, missing stories to identify and to collect from journals. This is, in short, the kind of author who I like to write about. As with Dr William Maginn, W.F. Harvey and A.J. Alan, the lack of a handy Collected Works makes reading them all the more an adventure trail. As with these writers, the lack of any established academic consensus over which are the major stories and which are the minor will relieve the critic from having to constantly react to other people’s judgments.  

So I am going to incorporate writing about Urquhart into what I do. This will not be a formal series and it will instead progress from story to story and from book to book, with its head down and at rather a plod. Anyone who is interested on this writing is advised to check up on it on a yearly rather than a monthly basis. As with my work on W.F. Harvey, I will buy books and read them and reread them and write about them only when I can discern some irony worth exploring in them. If Urquhart’s fiction stands today as a ruined cottage then my commentary will creep gradually all over it like ivy.

[Previously on Tychy: “A Word on William Fryer Harvey.”]