Barcelona, March 12th 1997

Dear Ronnie

Our last meeting, over lunch the day before I left, was rather hurried. I promised you then that, once I got here, I would try to explain to you, in however irrational and idiosyncratic a way, something of what Catalunya means to me. Here goes.

First, a grammar book bought nearly twenty years ago, and a sense of disappointment because the language was not diffrent enough. At that period my voracity for words (no single language has enough of them) had let me towards Breton and Polish. Catalan was tto familiar, recognisable and lacking in strangeness to engage my attention for long. Next, an Italian anthology with originals facing the translations. An epigram by Carner whose closing promise of guiltless plenitude my thoughts returned to ceaselessly: «és la possessió més pura que el desig». How un-Catholic! The news, as of distant war, or a land whose existence had been unsuspected till then, of the Elegies de Bierville. Hurried photocopies in a university library, a reckless, exhausting stab at translation. How can you reproduce elegiac couplets in English? A Catalan student, a summer visitor to Edinburgh, pale-skinned, spotty, uneasy, agrees to send me dictionaries when she returns to Barcelona. Those books on my shelves, germinating silently across the years, preparing a blossom whose timing no-one can predict.

When I set foot in the country, it was a last minute decision, a compromise solution to the problem of a summer holiday. The man I travelled with, who is no longer mine, needed rest. I needed rest ans stimulus. With a sense of being cheated, I let him guide us from the airport directly to Sitges. Only days later, like a mole emerging into daylight, or a prisoner tunnelling his way out of a camp who discovers to his delight that he is bang on target, did I climb up from the underground station on Passeig de Gràcia and encounter the wonder of the Apple of Discord, Gaudí's crazed imaginings glinting fish-like in the strong September sun.

I exhausted myself combing the bookshops that day, and dithered more than half an hour before acquiring Moix's El sexe dels àngels. Going by the back cover blurb, its plot was so similar to a project of my own I was affraid to read it. I need not have feared. You know how much I detest Romantic ideas of autorship - that bloated, strained, originating masculine ego. I prefer to think that texts exist subliminally, demanding to be bodied forth, like the water in a fountain with many spouts, gently brimming over, gurgling in the spring sunlight. Individuals are the spouts but the water is not theirs. And so I found in Moix's book (perhaps the only text of his I like!), not what I expected, but a portrait of a culture, a society, a people, more affectionate than satirical. A country which could have been, but was not Scotland, as his novel could have been, but in the end was not my own.

That connection gave my nascent love for Catalunya academic respectability, or at least an academic pretext. The kind of thing that helps you arrange bursaries, sabbatical leaves, conference visits to act as cover for the real work going on. The real work was a particular angle of the light in Carrer de l'Hospital, as I walked to the Biblioteca de Catalunya on a January morning, or a flurry of scared pigeons scattering like hurled grain across Plaça de Catalunya, a single movement, though the pigeons are multiple. Maybe that is what being human is like. Is it a poem that needs writing, not yet written?

Al around, two languages, two cultures. When a mouth opens, I cannot tell which language will emerge. On the bus from Besalú back to Girona, the driver bids each passenger farewell, knowing, without prompting whether to speak Catalan or Spanish. And when we sit to dinner at a table in the Rambla of Girona, I put my head in my hands and cry, because the language makes me safe. How am I to explain that? If I say that, to me, languages are animate entities, that I can no more remain indifferent to them than I can to human beings, and that, in Catalan, I find a being that protects me, I do not expect you to understand. Yet that is how it is.

My commitment to Scotland changes with each year, each, season. I left this country at the age of 17 because I thought I could not live here, and did not return till I was 33. On certain days even now I hate it. Moving into another country, speaking another language, can be like coming up for breath after too long a period spent beneath the surface of the water.This country does not want me, I tell myself. I am gay, a Catholic with a Jesuit education, a Glaswegian with Irish grandparents. Surrounding me are stereotypes which tell me that I am not Scottish. If I were not, I could laugh at them. The knowledge that I am binds me and infuriates me simultaneously. How dare they try to exclude me when, at the profoundest level, I am one of them?

The Glasgow I grew up in was a bicultural city. Second generation Irish immigrants lived side by side with Scottish Calvinists, our religion making exiles of us, inspiring a longing for Europe which was appeased when, stil an adolescent, I wandered into Italian churches and recognised a world. Or when I slept with an Italian man and understood that, for all our distances, our sexual idioms were related. Rediscovering that double world in Barcelona may be what makes me love the place so much. And as Glasgow, with its racial, religious and linguistic impurities, was for so long accused of not being Scotland, so Barcelona is considered insufficiently Catalan.

During my longest stay there, in spring 1996, I was working on a novel about a warlock, at the same time gathering material, in my mind, for a book of stories, told around an Edinburgh dinner table. That was how I realised that different stories inhabit different cultures, that Barcelona lives have other patterns than those in Edinburgh or Glasgow. As if what, in Scotland, remains unspoken and unacted, in Catalunya is acted out, with all the violence and injustice that provokes. That prompted me to mourn the unlived in Scotland, everything that has only been thoght of, never done, from our wounded, mutilated sexuality to our tragic, seemingly unending political impotence.

Does any of this make sense to you, Ronnie? Probably not. Now that I am back in this city, love for the place wells up in me again, unreasoning, unreasonable. The next book is nearly completed. A Catalan happens to be seated at the Edinburgh dinner table, so that at least two stories are interwoven with the Scottish ones. Contamination? Cross-fertilisation might be a better word. I have never been a purist. Maybe that is the most appropriate way to express my gratitude for what I encounter in this place, on these streets and on the hills and shores beyond them. To weave it all into my fictions and ensure that what it gives to me is not forgotten.

CHRISTOPHER WHYTE
Poeta i novel.lista escocès, professor a la University of Glasgow
cwh@arts.gla.ac.uk