The View from Castle Rock

axis, and journeying around the sun…
    … for a number of years bygone he talked and read about America till he grew perfectly unhappy, and at last when approaching his sixtieth year actually set out to seek a temporary home and a grave in the new world.

    James Hogg, writing about his cousin James Laidlaw.
    Hogg poor man has spent most of his life in conning lies…

    James Laidlaw, writing about his cousin James Hogg,
    poet and novelist of early-nineteenth-century Scotland.

    He was a gey [very] sensible man, for a’ the nonsense he wrat…

    Tibbie Shiel, innkeeper, also buried in Ettrick Kirkyard,
    speaking about James Hogg.

    James Hogg and James Laidlaw were first cousins. Both men were born and raised in the Ettrick Valley, a place which had not much use for their sort-that is, for the sort of men who do not take easily to anonymity and quiet lives.
    If such a man becomes famous, of course, it is another story. Alive he is booted out, dead he is welcomed home. After a generation or two, it is another story.
    Hogg escaped, into the uneasy role of the naive comedian, the bumpkin genius, in Edinburgh, and then he escaped, as the author of
Confessions of a Justified Sinner,
into lasting fame. Laidlaw, lacking his cousin’s gifts, but not apparently his knack for self-dramatization and his need for another stage than Tibbie Shiel’s tavern, made some mark by hauling up the more docile members of his family and carrying them off to America-actually to Canada-when he was old enough, as Hogg points out,
to
have one foot in the grave.
    Self-dramatization got short shrift in our family. Though now that I come to think of it, it wasn’t exactly that word they used. They spoke of
calling attention. Calling attention to yourself.
The opposite of which was not exactly modesty but a strenuous dignity and control, a sort of refusal. The refusal to feel any need to turn your life into a story, either for other people or for yourself. And when I study the people I know about in the family, it does seem that some of us have that need in large and irresistible measure-enough so as to make the others cringe with embarrassment and apprehension. That’s why the judgment or warning had to be given out so frequently.

    By the time his grandsons-James Hogg and James Laidlaw-were young men, the world of Will O’Phaup was almost gone.

    There was an historical awareness of that recent past, even a treasuring or exploitation of it, which is only possible when people feel themselves most decidedly removed. James Hogg clearly felt that, though he was so much a man of Ettrick. It is mostly his writings I have to thank for what I know of Will O’Phaup. Hogg was both insider and outsider, industriously and-he hoped-profitably shaping and recording his people’s stories. And he had a fine source in his mother-Will O’Phaup’s eldest daughter, Margaret Laidlaw, who had grown up at Far-Hope. There would be some trimming and embroidering of material on Hogg’s part. Some canny lying of the sort you can depend upon a writer to do.
    Walter Scott was an outsider of sorts, an Edinburgh lawyer now appointed to a high post in his family’s traditional territory. But he too understood, as outsiders sometimes do better, the importance of something that was vanishing. When he became the Sherriff of Selkirkshire-that is, the local judge-he began to go around the country collecting the old songs and ballads which had never been written down. He would publish them in
The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border.
Margaret Laidlaw Hogg was famous locally for the number of verses she carried in her head. And Hogg-with his eye on posterity as well as present advantage-made sure he took Scott to see his mother.
    She recited plenty of verses, including the newfound “Ballad of Johnie Armstrong,” which she said she and her brother had got “from old Andrew Moore who had it from Bebe Mett-lin (Maitland) who was housekeeper to the First Laird of Tushielaw.”
    (It happens that this same Andrew Moore had been Boston’s servant and that it was he who had reported Boston as having “laid the ghost” who appears in one of Hogg’s poems. A new light on the minister.)

    Margaret Hogg made a great fuss when she saw the book Scott produced in 1802 with her contributions in it.
    “They were made for singin and no for prentin,” she is supposed to have said. “And noo they’ll never be sung mair.”
    She complained further that they were “neither right