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The full facts about debauched lives do not make happy reading, but authors from Robert Louis Stevenson to Hunter S Thompson offer thrilling reading without concealing the cost
JAMES HOGG defies categorisation. A prolific poet, songwriter, playwright, novelist, short-story writer and parodist, he wrote with equal skill in Scots and English.
Labelled the Ettrick Shepherd, the former Borders farmhand, whose life spanned the 18th and 19th centuries, befriended many of the great writers of his day, including Walter Scott, John Galt and Allan Cunningham.
Even though he was celebrated off and on in his own lifetime, some details of the author’s life remain unclear. Records place his baptism on December 9 1770, but Hogg long believed that he had been born on January 25 1772 Burns Night, no less.
This complicates attempts to commemorate his 250th birthday, unless we embrace his fantastical world view. Fiction mattered to him more than fact. Besides, Hogg’s sestercentennial will inevitably be overshadowed by Scott’s own such celebration on August 15 this year.
Despite little formal education, Hogg wrote one of the finest novels in Scottish literature, a disturbing tale of the divided self that still resonates.
WHEN lockdown hit us all back in March, Scots filmmaker Robert Sproul-Cran had to put on ice a project to bring to the silver screen James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. So, he turned to using movie-style computer-generated imagery (CGI) to create images of the birthplace of the Scots poet and writer at Ettrick, in the Scottish Borders. That stimulated his grey matter and he began to explore the wider uses of CGI in bringing the past to life. “Living in the Borders I know that there are stunning locations never used on the big screen, with the bonus that these are the real settings Hogg features in his novel,” Sproul-Cran told The National.