A new combined edition of the Dear Green Place & Fur Sadie illustrates its author�s greatness.
By John Linklater.

ARCHIE Hind died a few weeks before this edition of The Dear Green Place & Fur Sadie came out. There were three fights in his life. Serious illness drained his remaining energies in the last years, but his longer battle over four decades was with writer's block. This was a symptom rather than a cause of the struggle which afflicted his artistic life: the difficulty of being Archie Hind. Among friends he was genial, funny, clever and warm. With himself he was unforgiving both of the ambition that once drove him to write and of the fear that inhibited him from writing more.

Complexity and paradox are intrinsic to the two stories in this volume. Mat Craig, the central character in The Dear Green Place, the only novel Hind completed, is so consumed by self-loathing and doubt that he destroys the manuscript of the novel he aspires to write, yet his novel exists as the book we hold in our hands, because there is little doubt that Craig is Hind. Middle-aged Sadie Anderson, in a projected second novel, realises a long-suppressed ambition to learn the piano, but the reader never learns if this late discovery of a natural talent will lead her to a new life of fulfilment. The unfinished novel is left hovering between implicit optimism and pessimism.

It would be facile to suggest that any single event was responsible for silencing Hind. Many theories are advanced and stories told of personal grief, financial difficulties, letdowns and plain rotten luck that he suffered in the decade after he won four literary prizes for The Dear Green Place in 1966. "What are you working on now?" his overbearing father is said to have asked him at this time. Married with five children, saddled with guilt over his responsibilities as a provider, Archie Hind felt particularly vulnerable to this calculated attack on his confidence. He told his father he was working on a new novel. "No," said the old man, rustling an imaginary banknote between his fingers. "I asked you what you were working on?"

This is not to present Hind as a unique case. He was one of four Scottish novelists from working class backgrounds to make debuts in the mid-1960s. William McIlvanney's fiction after Remedy Is None (1966) reveals a similar awkwardness with justifying writing as a job, and even after a successful career he still wrestles with "the courage of our doubts". Gordon Williams followed up his early national service novel The Camp (1966) with the excellent From Scenes Like These (1968), but he is now sometimes discussed as a writer who disappeared, as though a career in television scriptwriting can be dismissed as a phantom. Neither did Alan Sharp exactly become invisible as a Hollywood screenwriter after he gave up on the projected trilogy that started brightly with Green Tree In Gedde (1965), but he never returned to fiction after The Wind Shifts (1967). McIlvanney was therefore the exception among this quartet in becoming a full-time writer of books.

This history of grudge and denial of artistic expression gives resonance to the story of Sadie Anderson. Hind planned the novel as a musical affirmation with movements to be read andante molto cantabile or with the bravura of a "wilful cadenza". It was to hit an "unquestioned high C" to transform what Mat Craig called "gutter patois" into an aria sung at concert pitch.

Tellingly, Hind appears to have been unable to decide on a title. It started out as For Sadie. Later manuscripts adapted this to Für Sadie, playing on a connection in the story with Beethoven's bagatelle Für Elise. Finally, this posthumous edition has settled for the Glasgow register of Fur Sadie, which may disappoint readers seeking erotic diversions. Sadie is no Venus and furs do not feature in her robings and disrobings, which remain as discreet as her shyly conducted marital relations permit. A mother of grown-up boys and a faithful wife, living in a tenement in the Parkhead area of Glasgow in the 1950s and early 1960s, Sadie has never complained that her life has been made narrow by social restraints, domestic stringencies and personal denials she would never think to question.

She surprises herself with a sudden impulse to buy a second-hand piano and arranges for lessons. The arrival of the piano is the set-piece which opens the novel, allowing Hind to set a gentle and bantering tone by drawing from Laurel and Hardy's The Music Box. Two delivery men demonstrate resourcefulness in negotiating gravity, physics, a narrow tenement close, a tutting lady with a pram and Sadie's flustered embarrassment. It is a big piano in a tiny flat. Her family's initial amusement threatens to turn to protest. Sadie practises only when alone. Neighbours begin to arrive at her door to complain about noise.

SHE might be forced to give it up, except for the encouragements of her piano teacher, a sceptical Govan man called McKay who is slowly won over by Sadie's determination, her remarkable gift of perfect pitch and her intuitive grasp of musical technique. A beautifully realised passage shows Sadie relating the intricacies of notation, syncopation and clusters to the skipping games of her childhood: scliff-thump, scliff-thump. McKay explains it as like breaking stones with one hand while setting jewels with the other. Sadie finds herself in conflict between the drudgery she has known and the liberation of her artistic spirit. It is the story of Mat Craig in a new key, and it provides Hind's overdue riposte to the Scot Lit scholar who lately deposited The Dear Green Place in a little parenthesis he reserved for "male-centred" fiction.

The surviving text of Fur Sadie makes 70 pages in this edition. It has a life, a generosity and a unity that transcends any suggestion of a mere literary fragment. Alasdair Gray is surely justified in describing it as "great" in his introduction and he devotes a postscript to considering how the novel might have ended. As editor, Gray has also included one of the pieces of journalism Hind contributed in the early 1970s to Scottish International magazine. His piece on the work-in at Upper Clyde Shipbuilders reminds us that Hind was already producing what would later be promoted by Tom Wolfe as New Journalism. Gray pays tribute to the historic perspective which his friend gave to his eye-witness report.

Hind appeared to have little desire to preserve his work whether it was finished or not. He either lost, or claimed to have lost, all of the scripts of the revues and stage adaptations he wrote for the Scottish theatre from the early 1970s onwards, and Gray was only able to include the surviving text of one song written in collaboration with the actor Peter Kelly for Through With A Flourish, performed at the 1971 Edinburgh Festival. A dozen short stories Hind wrote before 1966 have disappeared. The text of Fur Sadie was pieced together from a surviving photocopy and an extract published in Scottish International. Gray has arranged for an Archie Hind archive at the Mitchell Library, Glasgow, to collate more of the writer's lost texts. An appeal has been made for more material.

The colour green did not prove an easy one for Scottish novelists to follow. When considering the place of Hind in the development of 20th-century Scottish fiction it seems natural to rank him alongside George Douglas Brown. Who would have believed in 1901 that The House With The Green Shutters was a first novel, or that it was destined to remain its author's only novel? In a landscape of green trees, green voes, green shutters and the green place, it is the novels of Brown and Archie Hind which will focus the attention of future generations of readers who will recognise two classic works of fiction.