On What The Angel of History Might See
Niall Campbell writes a first part on private histories
This week a friend introduced me to a quote by Walter Benjamin about his idea of the Angel of History, the being who surveys and weighs the actions of the past. It is only a slice of Benjamin’s vignette, but here are the select lines he sent:
‘…the angel of history. His face is turned towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe…’
The extract almost shivered on the first reading, possessing that little vibration common to all things that are alive. Benjamin was said to have been inspired by Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus (1920), that odd and not entirely appealing monoprint. Reading the extract, I was reminded how we are always looking for ways to understand the past, and this figure felt instantaneously apt; I imagined it large and looming over all our important incidents.
For me at least, the resonance was only momentary, and I found by the second reading of the lines that my heart disagreed. Would any Angel of History really see overarching catastrophe? I have my doubts. I think it is the human habit, rather than any angel’s, to see catastrophe everywhere.
How would I alter the line? I would risk outlining it as this: ‘…the angel of history. His face is turned towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of catastrophes, he sees one single act of…’ What? Beauty? Grace? Something like this? I think so.
The terror is that this angel would see a chain-link of sadness after sadness and would perceive not a whole sorrow. How incomprehensible to us. This is the terror, and the hope – that all this suffering is not just suffering. But maybe it would be best to look at a particular example – or, better, a particular life that started, ended, and was scattered through with an element of, if not catastrophe, then at least tragedy. It is a family story, and one my previous essays on the islands might help explain. The life is that of my maternal grandfather.
He was born on the island of Eriskay in the 1920s. For once technology might help us get a flavour of this place and this era, because a German tourist visited the island in 1934 with an early camcorder. Here is the video of the island he encountered:
Electricity would not arrive on the island until after World War II. We see an absence of tarred roads; all paths in view are desire lines, those lines made by the natural flow of people, leaving the grass worn down and the land beneath firm and compacted. There are bothy houses, ‘blackhouses’, dark inside from the scarcity of glass and therefore windows; we also see peat, and wool being beaten and waulked, dyed and coloured. We see a small, religious community. The church, St Michael’s, was built by the locals in 1903 and is situated on the hill that overlooks the main island village.
My grandfather was born in late March. By this time of year, the days had lengthened, and darkness would not fall until after 7 p.m. With no hospital, no maternity ward, his mother gave birth in an upper bedroom of an aunt’s house that rests high on the hill at Rubain, to the north of the island, a short distance from the main village. On his birth, there was little celebration in the house. It being early spring, storms were still frequent, and so perhaps the windows were beaten with rain. Later, I would spend part of my childhood in this house and so know how any wind will whistle through the windows all night.
He was called Donald, and it is both appropriate and important that we begin with his name, since his name was the root of the first part of the sadness of his birth.
When I grew up on the Outer Hebrides in the 1980s, if someone asked my name, it was actually a subtle shibboleth. The first part of it was knowing that my name was not my name. If I answered Niall Campbell, then that was one-third of the answer that was really being asked for. My true name was Niall, Domhnall Iain, Niall Mhòr. Meaning, Niall, son of Domhnall Iain, who was son of Niall Mhòr. It was understood that in your name you carried the smallest branch of your family tree. The male line. Three generations. Which was enough to size you up.
When he was a young boy, my grandfather would have been asked the same question, and each time he had to answer, Donald, Catherine, Roderick. Not three men – but himself, his mother, and her father. It is hard for us now to understand what it meant to be an illegitimate child in a small community. Investigating around this, I found sermons that detail the shunning of such children, and the closing off of even the prospect of marriage, certainly among those women on the island. There is something about how the practice of naming on the Western Isles made his illegitimacy reassert itself every time he was asked his name. It would have been there in every schoolbook and register. The heartbreak and the misery. Every new encounter, every new meeting, was a new potential source of shame. How could you not help but grow up to be a quiet child in such circumstances?
Preparing this piece, I searched the family tree database for his birth certificate. Donald was born in the parish of Bornish in the year 1926. His mother was classified as a ‘Domestic Servant’. His biological father, Neil MacKinnon, was already married with children of his own and had the profession of ‘Fisherman’. Later, there would be court proceedings to allow Donald to claim this man’s surname. Donald would also marry, but even the wedding day would be surrounded by its own disaster, with his new wife being disowned by her family. This can wait for now. In the records, I also found his death certificate. He died on 10th December 1966. He fell from the deck of a boat called Britannia. The report describes ‘Fracture of skull’ and ‘Asphyxia, inhalation of blood’. He was forty, and by coincidence, I am forty as I write this today. His death is now nearly sixty years ago.
This short piece was intended to serve as a type of beginning, and so I have no answers or firm conclusions. I have just the idea of this angel, and the outline of what seems a sad and troubled life – and the question of what we call a life that began as an outcast in the closest of closeknit communities – and ended, still young, bleeding on the deck of a ship? A series of tragedies, we humans might call it. I hoped at the start of this piece that any Angel of History, his face turned towards the past, might see it differently. Writing as an act of giving notice to personal histories and events, as an act of preservation, is not what seems needed here. If we are to cling to anything, it is not preserving – but salvaging, with all its implications of protection and the endowing of a second, different course.
He was born in the house at Rubain. Its front door opened onto a small field with a stone byre topped with a corrugated iron roof. Beyond this stood the church. The nearest neighbour had three daughters whom she named Mary, Mary, and Mary, since ‘if it was good enough for the mother of her Lord then it was good enough for her children’. Only one window in the house faced west, looking out onto the spreading Atlantic and the nearby uninhabited islands. Around the house were potato beds. He would continue to live in this house when his mother gave him up.
A thread straight from the heart, beautiful embroidery staring to emerge. There’s a quote by Margaret Atwood that I love, part of it says…’ we all become stories’.
My father's father was born out of wedlock - not in an island with the same religious severity as Eriskay. In many respects, he fared better than Donald, Catherine, Roderick, keeping up the crofting life until a few weeks before his death from natural causes in his mid eighties. Your grandfather is honoured by your writing, here and in your wider ouevre. Thank you for bringing his tale to the light.