Carl MacDougall, who has died in Glasgow one day short of his 82nd birthday, was a novelist, television presenter, journalist, editor, reviewer, songwriter and a leading figure of late twentieth and early twenty-first century Scottish writing.
Born in 1941, he became a copy taker with The Daily Express, where he became the point of contact Bud Neill, and rose to become a journalist. When the newspaper closed, he chose redundancy and began his lifelong journey in freelance writing. His early years were spent fighting for every commission, but in 1972, at the age of thirty, he experienced an upheaval in his life which ultimately led to a new freedom and confidence in his abilities. His first book, A Cuckoo’s Nest, a collection of lesser-known folk tales, followed two years later. Soon, he began to publish regularly in a variety of genres. A Scent of Water (1975), also folk stories, was illustrated by Alasdair Gray. Elvis is Dead (1986) was a collection of nineteen short stories written over eight years. These early publications hinted at the contents and themes of many others that came later. But he was also capable of producing work that had nothing to do with seriousness, as his co-authorship with Ron Clark of the folk ditty Cod Liver Oil and the Orange Juice, once roared out in every folk club, proves.
Carl’s impact on Scottish writing can only be fully appreciated by looking at his achievements across many fields. In 1977, he launched Words magazine in Fife, and was soon publishing new work by Alasdair Gray, James Kelman, Tom Leonard, Joan Ure, Norman MacCaig, Iain Crichton Smith, Aonghas Macneacail, Russell Hoban and many others. In 1991, he put together the first major collection of Scottish short stories, The Devil and the Giro, which mixed classic and modern Scottish short tales and became a set text for schools. He went on to edit other small magazines such as Cutting Teeth, and three editions of New Writing Scotland, the annual short story collection, with Zoe Strachan and Alan Bissett. He reviewed other writers’ work regularly and was The Herald‘s fiction reviewer for fifteen years.
As an organiser, Carl created Glasgow’s Glasgow: The Words and the Stones, a major exhibition/performance at The Arches Theatre, which was part of the European City of Culture in 1990. In that role he had the painful experience of being criticised by many writers he thought friends. As an educator, he held Writer in Residence posts and teaching fellowships in virtually all the Scottish Universities, including Glasgow, Strathclyde, Dundee and Aberdeen. This was a source of pride to a man who, as he often pointed out, had no formal qualifications himself. Later, he became a television scriptwriter and presenter, helping create two major television series for BBC2, Writing Scotland, and Scots: the Language of the People, both of which became books.
Carl’s novels for the London-based publisher Secker and Warburg were probably the apex of his publishing career. Stone Over Water (1989) purports to be the memoir of Angus McPhail, who has no idea of his true identity and sets off to find out who he is. The Lights Below (1993) pieces together ex-prisoner Andy Paterson’s search for a new start and his need to remake his fractured past in a Glasgow devastated by economic change. The Casanova Papers (1996) is a mystery that drifts from Glasgow to Europe in its search for the legendary lover, and finds him an elusive, tragic figure.
Carl became President of Scottish PEN in 2016 and for four years led the organisation through a time when, as current President Ricky Monahan Brown writes, it experienced ‘a difficult period for freedom of expression’. He bore the brunt of the pressure caused by controversies over gender recognition and the resulting storms on social media, yet continued to guide the organisation with ‘measured authority’, according to another former president, Jenni Calder. His period as the leader of the Scottish arm of the international organisation was marked by willingness to listen and openness to debate.
Although his rate of publication fell in the early 2000s as fashions changed, he continued to compose new work. In 2017, he broke through once more with a new collection of short stories, Someone Always Robs the Poor, published by Freight Books, which was greeted with praise throughout Scotland. He was still planning new work and further publications when he died. It is hard to believe that his amazing energy and commitment to Scottish writing has gone, but his legacy may live on in a new book, a non-fiction work with the prophetic title Already, Too Late: a boyhood memoir, scheduled for release by Luath Press in the near future.
Scottish PEN will miss his lively presence, his wide experience and his determination to drive forward through any difficulty, summed up in his favourite phrase: ‘On we go’.
- Written by Dave Manderson, Trustee, Scottish PEN