If I could ask members of the public who are leaving the public gallery to do so as quickly and as quietly as possible, as we are resuming business. The next item of business is a Members Business debate on motion 10164, in the name of Miles Briggs on Sea Beyond... Sea The Lives Scotland. This debate will be concluded without any questions being put but I invite members wishing to participate to press the request to speak buttons now Os ydych chi, Miles Briggs, i ddweud o'r debat sy'n ddweud ym 7 mlynedd, Mr Briggs? Thank you very much, Deputy Presiding Officer. Can I start by thanking members from across Parliament for their support for the motion and allowing today's debate to take place? Can I also warmly welcome the campaigners and those who have shared their letters to loved ones to the public gallery today as well? I have opened and spoken in many members' debates in my time as an MSP, but this one is very different and very personal, and I know for those who will be speaking today that that will be the same. From the outset, I want to thank everyone who will be speaking in the debate today. I want to start also by paying specific tribute to Monica Lennon, because if it wasn't for her and her brave decision to speak about her own dad, Gerard, in 2017, I don't think that I would be leading this debate today and have shared my story. I think that I speak for all of us as elected representatives when I say that our first instincts, quite rightly, is to protect our families and loved ones from public scrutiny. They, after all, have not put themselves forward for the scrutiny that we rightly should have. Perhaps most critically, I think that we all want to protect our loved ones from what often will seem the negative prism of social media and strangers commenting on our family members. When I agreed to speak about my dad, Jim, my experiences growing up did concern me how people would judge him, judge me, judge my family. That is exactly why I felt I needed to tell my dad's story, because stigma faced by so many individuals and families is very real when we are supporting someone battling addiction issues. That stigma and judgment that people often face needs to be addressed if we are going to break down the barriers to people accessing help and support for our loved ones and for our loved ones to have the confidence and self-worth to come forward. Deputy Presiding Officer, I have genuinely been overwhelmed by the number of constituents, colleagues, journalists, people from across different countries who have reached out since I wrote my letter and since we launched the campaign. Like many people who experience problematic alcohol or drug use, there will often be a life event or trigger to that behaviour and any problematic addictions and issues which go on to develop. I can only imagine how difficult it was for my dad to lose my mum to breast cancer and to be left as a single parent with three children between the ages of seven and fourteen. My dad was a dreamer. He would often speak about his life, held dream of moving the whole family to live in a wooden hut in the forests of the great Canadian wilderness. I suppose I'm lucky here when he made it as far as Perthshire, to be honest, but my dad was an entertaining, charismatic person. He was arguably at his best socially in the pub or at the races and like many of us, that is probably where a problem developed and a problem with alcohol. Deputy Presiding Officer, everyone knows someone is the message behind the campaign, See Beyond, See the Lives. As today's debate will demonstrate, everyone does know someone. Launched in May by the University of Stirling, Scottish families affected by alcohol and drugs, Scottish health action on alcohol problems chap and the Salvation Army, I was pleased alongside Monica Lennon to help launch the campaign here in Parliament with fourteen other people who have shared their letters to their loved ones. Speaking to families after the event, it was telling that many of their experiences were the same as my own and my family's. There is still stigma, stigma attached to our loved ones, speaking about problematic alcohol and drug use, not only from how people talk about it but the judgments they bring to it. The notion that someone has done it to themselves or the labels which society can often attach to people, they are harmful. The conscious and unconscious bias that our loved ones must face when seeking treatment and support, sometimes even from overworked medical professionals, as crisis state in their briefing which was provided for today's debate. Stigma kills. Stigma impacts on a person's self-esteem, their mental wellbeing, limits their willingness and ability to engage with support services and ability to sustain changes in their lives. People can change, but stigma holds them back. Deputy Presiding Officer, I hope that today's debate will present an opportunity to change the conversation around alcohol and drug issues and the devastating impact the loss of a loved one to alcohol or drugs has on a family and their friends. I hope that people will visit the CBeyond website and support this campaign by agreeing to sign the CBeyond pledge and pledge to be respectful and compassionate towards those affected by substance use, including the families and friends of those who have died from alcohol and drugs. Pledge to show respect by using kind and non-judgmental language about those affected, especially our friends in the media to consider that when reporting and covering stories. Pledge to show compassion by reaching out to someone who has lost a loved one to alcohol and drugs. Deputy Presiding Officer, in Scotland many of us have an unhealthy relationship with alcohol and the role that alcohol plays in our culture and society is often at the heart of that. From wetting the baby's head to a good send-off at a wake to drowning our sorrows when times are tough, to alcohol often being at the heart of all our community sporting and social lives. Over the past 10 years, Scotland has lost over 20,000 people through alcohol and drugs. I lost my dad. I know that we can make a difference and that starts with ending stigma. Thank you Mr Briggs. We now move to the open debate. I call for Stephanie Callaghan to be followed by Jamie Greene around four minutes, Ms Callaghan. Thank you, Presiding Officer. I thank Miles Briggs for today's debate during International Recovery Month and for sharing his experiences today very briefly. I am also beyond grateful to all the organisations involved in the powerful and vital See Beyond, See the Live Scotland campaign and of course to those sitting in the gallery today too. Presiding Officer, my sincere condolences go to every person, family, partner and friend who has tragically lost a loved one due to alcohol, drugs or both. I have spoken before in this chamber about my own family's loss, so I will not go into that today, but we know that it is an issue, like Miles Briggs says, that touches all of our lives. Such deaths are preventable yet every day in Scotland we lose more than six people, six people every day. The fact is that all those people who have died recently in years gone by are people that our system has failed. Problem substance use is clearly a complex issue and it is often intricately connected to challenges around poverty, mental health and generational trauma or one-off events. It is critical to consider the social, cultural and economic drivers. The impact that deindustrialisation remains stark too and this holds particularly true for my own constituency in Erdingston and Bales hill. Once a proud centre of coal mines and steelworks Lanarkshire was sadly transformed and mass unemployment and persistent poverty descended. Too many found solace in using substances to escape the grinding reality of a life that felt was devoid of joy or of hope. The most recent local statistics recorded 76 suspected drug deaths during the first six months of this year, one of the highest recorded in Scotland. On a positive note, there are many organisations that are truly person-centred and trauma informed, as we have heard already, that focus on the whole person and their whole well-being. In my constituency, the Blue Triangle Service operates at the intersection of social care and social justice and is a system designed to fix people issue by issue. To quote them, we see the person, not their stuff, and our mission is to empower people to thrive, to provide a springboard, not a safety net. The Beacon Centre near Biblantire is fantastic too and a young woman there bravely spoke of her personal battles with mental health and substances and the stigma that she experienced. She said, I was a dancer, I had ambition, it just happened that there was deprivation, inequalities and adverse childhood experiences that got to me. Stigma is a barrier to recovery, you are so scared that you will be punished or kids taken away from you. The fear she said of losing her kids was terrifying but what actually helped her recovery was being valued, accepted and rebuilding ourselves of control and hope, not judgment, punishment or blame. Stigma and inaccurate perceptions are devastating. It shatter self-esteem and confidence and limits individual's capacity to seek the essential support and help and treatment that they need, even when they want it. The media certainly plays a role yesterday's green light for Scotland's first drug consumption room that will offer easy access to key health and support services, resulted in the social media headline, breaking UK's first illegal drugs consumption room, giving go ahead, and also first illegal drugs consumption room. Some of those headlines have already gone but the damage stays. Sadly, a life-saving policy was manipulated to reinforce criminal stereotypes and to dehumanise. Those are headlines that as leaders we must challenge. In closing, we all have a responsibility to reflect on our communication, our words and our language, to be kind, to talk about the person not the substance user, to be catalyst for kindness, change and for social renewal. Jamie Greene, to be followed by Monica Lennon, in around four minutes. Thank you, Presiding Officer. I'm very proud to be taking part in this debate with colleagues from right across the chamber who have a lot of immense respect for on the subject. Miles Briggs, my colleague and friend for being so personal and open about his own experiences, and I thank the stakeholders who brought this campaign see beyond and see the lives to this Parliament. I want to talk about the campaign itself and I'm using the title as my guide for my comments today, because I think we're very used to many debates like this. I often think that they're great debates, there's a lot of do-goodery involved and a lot of warm words shared across the chamber. But what does this debate actually focus on? What is it actually saying to us and what is it actually asking of us? See beyond, see the lives. What does that mean exactly? Well, at first glance I guess we are being asked as politicians to see beyond the substance, see beyond the alcohol or the drink or the demon, see beyond the drug addict or the alcoholic and see them as a human being, not as alkies and junkies as they too often are.  Now I don't have siblings and I don't have children but I do have a dad who was an alcoholic and a violent one at that. Now I'm now the age he was when he succumbed to his illness. In fact when I writing the speech yesterday it was so long ago you know I barely remember his funeral and I have a mum now five years sober and I'm very proud of her and she's very much alive and I don't intend to rehearse those stories in great detail today. For many of the reasons that I think Miles Briggs eloquently told us there is a still a huge amount of shame and stigma on the subject but I did do an interview with Hollywood magazine last year and it's the hardest interview I've ever had to give in politics. We all have our own personal stories known as immune or above the subject. See beyond it can be really hard to see beyond it can be so hard to see beyond as a relative of an alcoholic to see beyond the fear and the pain and the anger and the confusion that you yourself experienced, the utter despair of all more so if you're doing it on your own and more so if you're a young person or the child. It's difficult to see beyond the consequences of their drinking and the absolute mess that is often left behind for relatives and loved ones, both the deteriorating health, financial and physical, the endless desperate ringing around for help, the calls to the bank to try and block cards, the failure to secure power of attorney, attending funerals and even being at the hands of violence itself but the reality is when you strip all that away the masking effects of what the alcohol has done to that person, the pretend person that has made them deep down underneath it all, you will often find a warm, loving, helpless, desperate person who simply is crying out for help from you and from the system. The problem is it is not always there. The stigma is unbelievable when you try and help someone face this illness. In fact sometimes it's disgusting. I heard phrases like well she's just a selfish Algy. He's a monster when he's drunk. They're not worth the help. They deserve what they get. That's their choice in life. They're all adults. They chose that path or even worse they're beyond help. No one is beyond help, Presiding Officer. Because as we have difficult and even divisive debates about whether drug takers are victims of health problems or criminals, when was the last time we had a proper conversation about problem drinking? See the lives. Let's see the lives of those people through their own eyes because they know often know the damage they're doing to themselves. Because they're self-medicating far too often to deal with horrific problems and experiences. They also feel so much guilt because they often know the hurt that they're causing their loved ones. See the lives through their friends, through their relatives and the survivors, particularly those who have had to grieve. See the lives as well of those who have recovered. People do recovery and are in recovery. Let's see the difference that is different as stark as night and day in black and white when you see someone who's in recovery. When I think of my mum's own recovery and she won't mind me saying this, the thing that pleases me most is that as she emerged from the darkness of that illness, she grew to rediscover who she was as a person. She became more herself again. Her humour, her wit, her interests, her hobbies, her intellect, her emotions all returned slowly but surely. Look, we as a family take nothing for granted, Presiding Officer. Every day is a new day but if only someone in that dark deep place could look into the future and see a parallel future free of the shackles of that disease, it's not easy to imagine but it is a beautiful thing when they do. Every death is avoidable. What we can do as MSPs is complete that pledge that that campaign asks of us. I pledge, I pledge to be respectful, compassionate, non-judgmental and to reach out to someone who needs my help. I make that pledge today. Let's all make it. Thank you, Mr Greene. I now call Monica Lennon to be followed by Beatrice Wishart around four minutes, Ms Lennon. Thank you, Presiding Officer. Colleagues will know I'm not often stuck for words but Miles Briggs has made a habit of making me cry in the Parliament in recent months but I'm genuinely grateful to Miles Briggs for bringing a debate to Parliament, for bringing colleagues together, to those who have signed a motion and who couldn't be here to speak and of course to everyone in the gallery. I'm just trying not to make any eye contact right now. It's a debate and obviously what we say matters but I think it's just having a space to listen and just to have that compassion and kindness in the chamber which hopefully will resonate into our communities. Thank you to Miles Briggs for mentioning my dad, Gerard or Jerry, at the start and to hear about his lovely dad, Jim, two different MSPs from different parties, different parts of the chamber, different parts of the country and two dads who I'm sure were very different but at the end of the day we can see there's a common thread that joins us and it's a pity that we're not sitting together Miles Briggs to debate because a hug would be nice right now but when we were approached to be part of this campaign it was a huge honour. I didn't want to turn up looking like I'm right now with a runny nose in wet eyes but I suppose that's what it's about, it's about showing our vulnerability and just being honest that this is really hard, it's hard to find the word. Some days it's a bit easier than others but as they say one day at a time but really grateful to the University of Stirland, the Salvation Army and Scottish Families and SHAP for reaching out to us and thank you to those who are here in the gallery. There's a lot of good stuff happening out there and I think Stephanie Callaghan is right to talk about some of the projects and the charities and the groups that are out there doing the working over the summer since we had our parliamentary event. I've been out there in Lanarkshire and elsewhere, we're just having a chat, see what's going on and there is a lot of love and kindness and compassion out there but we need to scale that up, we need to make sure that the funding is there to do that but the barriers are real, stigma is a killer. People might say oh why are they in here discussing stigma when we should be talking about legislation and policy and funding. All of that is important, we need everything but stigma is a killer because people are frightened to ask for help, they're worried about the police at the door, social work using their substance use against them, what will the school say, what will people say at work, what might colleagues in here think of each other if we say substance use is an issue for us. The Eva Burroughs project in Canberra is one of the projects that I spent time with and they're doing amazing work to end stigma and to bring tackling homelessness into the equation and we've had a really good briefing from Turning Point Scotland and crisis on that. We know we're not doing enough, we know what we need to do more, it is a public health crisis. I, if you will indulge me because we don't have a lot of speakers near adventures but I just wanted to talk about the letter to my dad. I took ages to write it, I looked at everybody else's letter and I was just so amazed and you know impressed and I just I couldn't do it, I found it so so hard so miles completed his homework before I did but I suppose I talked to my dad, I talked to him when I visited the cemetery and so on, I know that maybe sounds weird but hey you know we need to talk about bereavement and dying and grief and all that a bit more. So I suppose it was a love letter to my dad and I won't read it all now, it's on the website people have seen the video and so on but I was really struck by Ann's letter to her friend Carol and talked about guilt and in my letter to dad I said there were times it was too difficult to be around too many days when it was too painful to run to you. On those dark days when we were apart I hope you know you were always loved because there was a lot of anger, there was a lot of isolation and distance and so on but that guilt is real and some of the stigma I experienced as a family member was in the NHS people know in here I am a huge champion of our NHS but we need that kindness not just from our politicians but our GPs our nurses our doctors and so on. I will just end if I can because this is a not for sympathy but there's so many because these are avoidable deaths there are just now so many moments in milestones that we've missed out on together and the 20,000 people who lost their lives all of their family members over that last decade will get this so for me me and my dad talking about politics debate and ideas that really influenced me in life but my dad died the year before it was elected to the Scottish Parliament and that is something that I do struggle with so in the letter I say if you'd lived one more year to see me elected to the Scottish Parliament it would have been a special moment for us to share. I'm going to stop there, thank you for your indulgence but I just want anyone who is struggling today to know that they're not alone that they can reach out get on that website get people to sign the pledge we've got a lot of work to do but we can do it together because we have to see beyond and we have to see the lives. Thank you miss Lennon I'm sure your dad would be enormously proud I call Beatrice Wishart to be followed by Finlay Carson around four minutes miss wishart thank you Presiding Officer and I thank Miles Briggs for bringing this important debate to the chamber this afternoon when I attended the sea beyond parliamentary event in June I heard moving and powerful contributions from family members and friends of people who have died because of alcohol or drugs including from our MSP colleagues Miles Briggs and Monica Lennon and I commend them both for their work on this important issue I know there are many across Scotland who sadly share this experience and I thank everyone who shared their stories at the event alcohol and drug addiction can be devastating to communities family friends and of course for the person with the addiction today might not be the time for this conversation but I observe parallels with gambling addiction the stigma associated with that addiction also causes people to hide their problems making seeking help harder it is true that everyone knows someone there are stories I could share about drug and alcohol addiction close to home but living in a small community means that people and families could be easily identified from what I might say so I obviously won't do that but suffice to say I have a great understanding and empathise with those who have experienced addiction individually or as a friend or as a family member I know that children growing up in households where there is addiction can be impacted both in the short term and long into their adult lives nobody chooses to have an addiction and we live in a world with less compassion than we would like to admit there's a long history of people with addictions being stigmatised and discriminated against and drug and alcohol addiction stigma can have serious consequences feeling judged can prevent a person seeking out support and treatment stigma can erode self-esteem and is linked to mental health problems family and friends of someone that with a drug or alcohol addiction can be affected by feelings of shame and guilt and when bereaved people can find it difficult to speak openly about losing someone to drugs or alcohol and get the support that they need organisations providing support to people with addictions are also stigmatised and communities can become defined by substance abuse causing them to feel isolated it's important we tackle stigma so that people affected by alcohol and drugs can get better and more timely support removing stigma involves effort from across society for all of us as the sea beyond pledge states committing to be respectful and compassionate to those affected by substance abuse using non-judgmental language when talking about substance use problems and reaching out to those who have been affected are important steps to take addiction is a health issue and should be treated with help and support not judgment Scotland will soon see its first safe consumption room and measure that's received widespread support and it seeks to protect some of the most vulnerable from overdose evidence from other countries shows safe consumption room save lives and can provide a point of contact with services that people with problematic drug use may otherwise face barriers in accessing there must be action on many fronts to reduce the harm caused by drug and alcohol addiction in my constituency chetland the charity dogs against drugs was set up over 20 years ago following a number of drugs related deaths in the aisles every one a tragedy it has two main activities seizure of drugs arriving in chetland by train drug detection dogs and drugs education in schools to prevent substance abuse sorry substance use recognition of the intersecting issues that contribute to a dick addiction means addressing homelessness treating mental health problems reducing poverty and ensuring that tackling stigma is integrator across all actions at the heart of everything must be the people living with addiction their friends friends families and communities thank you Presiding Officer thank you miss wish it and I call Finlay Carson to be followed by carl mokhan around four minutes mr come on thank you Presiding Officer as we know problem drinking is a an issue and sadly Scotland has a unenviable reputation across the world with alcohol being embedded right in the heart of our culture and there's no signs of that changing with over four in ten non-drinkers perceiving others think they are odd for not drinking it affects both young and old rich and poor in our towns and our cities as well as in rural and remote communities with around one in four people drinking at hazardous or harmful levels recent statistics revealed that the number of people who died of an alcohol specific death last year are minded to 36 people in Dumfries and Galloway those figures may not be the worst across scotland compared to the average but it simply can't be ignored or glossed over because as the motion states behind every death there is a family there's friends and communities who are experiencing a devastating loss according to NHS Dumfries and Galloway 30% of men and 11% of women exceed daily or weekly recommended drinking limits based on data from 2017 up to 2021 a total of 442 people were admitted to hospital in the region due to alcohol related illness these stats make for worrying reading but what is concerning however is that the number of scots gaining access to receive treatment for problem drinking has fallen dramatically and at a time when the number of alcohol related deaths is soaring and it's not only regrettable it's shameful this government has admitted that it took its eye off the ball during our drug deaths crisis and now I fear that it's doing exactly the same on deaths due to alcohol now I want to recognise the fantastic staff and volunteers who work in drug and alcohol addiction support in Dumfries and Galloway but the barrier and there's one big barrier it's the stigma which is limiting the number of people who come forward and this problem is not going to go away and it can't be brushed under the carpet it needs swift action as well as increased resources to help those at hand who need the support when they seek it are we really sending out the right message to anyone struggling with alcohol issues I don't think we are we can't simply acknowledge this issue and say well particularly when it comes under the what we've been talking about today there's a huge stigma and guilt or embarrassment so when people come forward we can't just say yep we know you've got a problem but sorry there's no treatment programme places available but we do need to remove the stigma addiction in all its forms if we're to stand any chance of addressing the issue and there has been huge efforts to remove the stigma attached to drug addiction and we need to see the same approach in alcohol the sea beyond campaign aims to reduce that stigma and you know 50 years ago my grandfather died he was a very successful and well respected businessman and it wasn't until many years later my mother admitted that he was an alcoholic up till then his illness was often referred to as problems with his nerves and he spent time in a mental hospital but the reality was he had a serious problem of alcohol abuse and it had effects on my grandmother who wasn't able to talk about it because of the stigma and that was 50 years ago but little's changed one of my very best friends died a few months ago he was an amazing musician the best of friends but he clearly had a problem with alcohol but none of us stepped in he was often what was referred to as a function an alcoholic but he was almost certainly a contributing factor to him losing his job and ultimately I believed him losing his life there was no death certificate no death notice there was no funeral there was no chance to share her grief with the family there was just silence I'd love to name him I'd love to pay tribute to him but there is quite clearly a stigma surrounding his death that his family were not able to cope with and that's not a criticism it's just a reflection of how the stigma still exists right to this day and that must change and the sea beyond are making progress just to do that today I asked the minister and this government to act swiftly to ensure that the number of scots struggling with alcohol issues their family their friends and the communities get the vital support necessary to tackle this growing epidemic ddag i mista Corson a now called the final speaker in the open debate calm walking around four minutes thank you Presiding Officer and can I of course start by thanking Miles Briggs for bringing this really important debate to the chamber and like others thank Miles and Monica for their very personal letters but can I also thank Lucy, Holly, Zoe, Fiona, Peter, Andy, Jerry, Pauline, Irene, Caroline and Philip Lorraine and I hope that I haven't missed anyone for sharing their very heart rendering stories of love loss and hope for the future it is unfortunate that we require to have this debate but it is a reality that we must do so because judgment and stigma continue as we have heard if our approach to changing this does not include accepting where we have gone wrong in the past where we are currently getting it not quite right then we are doing a disservice to those who already and or could become dependent their friends their families and their communities and so I would say to all my colleagues here in Parliament we must listen to these stories and seek to understand how and why stigma affects people and their loved ones while they are navigating an often tremendously difficult time in their lives we have heard statistics I'm not going to repeat them it's not for for today but every individual who has lost their life through alcohol or drug dependency is a loss before their time and their friends and family have lost a loved one and that must always be remembered every life lost is an absolute tragedy tragedy and this is a public health emergency and it must be treated in this way which includes being respectful respectful and compassionate to others I think the point about the way in which the media presents this is really really important and I would call on all parliamentarians to make sure that they do challenge any of that kind of language that we know affects people of course morning Collin thank you now that I've composed myself one of the points I was hoping to get to was that sometimes we get really good articles and really good features and the words are you know on point but sometimes when they get to the headlines and the photos stigma keeps back in so does my colleague Karen Mawkin agree that there's more work to do around media reporting that is not just about the the copy but the photos and the headlines thank you absolutely agree with that point and I hope that I make a point later on that perhaps crystallises that and I want to raise a point that I often do in this chamber the impact of alcohol and drug harm on our most vulnerable communities people in Scotland's most deprived communities are five times more likely to die because of alcohol related disease and around 16 times more from drug misuse and compared to those in our least deprived communities the impact of alcohol harm are wide ranging and can impact anyone but that in 2023 these harms are still felt so acutely in our most vulnerable communities I think I'm sure is something that we would all want to approach and it links to the point that Monica was trying to make that these are often communities that are already stigmatised and so it is really important that we strive to make sure that we don't stigmatise certain communities and all obviously people who perhaps have dependencies that they are trying to work with we need a strategy that underpins kindness in our approach and in concluding Presiding Officer it is imperative that we have a compassionate preventative approach that tackles the root causes of some of our problems in our communities and we make sure that we move and seek to crystallise in people's minds that we must always treat people with kindness and we must always treat people with respect and I started at the beginning of my contribution I wish that we didn't have to have this debate but we do have to have this debate and I encourage everyone who can to listen to the stories and to sign up to the pledge today thank you thank you very much miss Mocken and I invite Jenny Minto to respond to the debate minister around seven minutes please thank you Presiding Officer I too would like to thank Miles Briggs for bringing forward this motion as we welcome and support the work of Seabeyon see like see the lives campaign I spoke to you after you'd written your letter and after I'd read it and I think I said to you your honesty and courage really shone through and I thank you very much for for doing that and Monica as well when I was reading your letter I was thinking about my own relationship with my dad and waiting for him to come home and that excitement so I think it was a love letter it was a beautiful beautiful letter the minister for drugs and alcohol policy Elena Whitham was present at the event here in the garden lobby in June and I know that she too was moved by those who chose to share their own experiences as family members who have tragically lost someone due to substances including as I've just said Miles Briggs and Monica Lennon when I was preparing for this speech I this morning I watched a few of the videos on the website and again the the feeling of honesty grief but also as Carol Mocken said love and hope shone through shone out from all of them so thank you very much I also I appreciate how difficult and painful these situations are however as others have said it is only by listening to the voices of people with lived experience that we will find the right solutions and truly understand the damage that stigma does the debate today shows that we are gaining a clearer understanding of the harms of stigma and that it is necessary to work together across the chamber to tackle it since the event earlier this year I'm pleased to say that officials have been working with the coalition of partners who have delivered the see beyond campaign to support them to share this further it's such a powerful resource and we are committed to ensuring that families across the country who have lost a loved one to substance abuse use can see they are not alone as Jamie Greene said in his beautiful speech thank you no one is beyond help we have set out the principles of how we will improve holistic support for families affected by drugs and alcohol in our framework which was published in December 2021 this framework recognises that all family members need help and support both to be involved in their loved ones recovery but also in their own right to realise this we're investing more than six and a half million pounds per year to improve family support this is provided both through alcohol and drug partnerships and directly to vital frontline organisations via grant funding programme it is essential that we invest in networks of community family support to enable families to talk and support one another giving them safe and supportive platforms to reach out to others who share the same experiences yes of course Jamie Greene I'm very grateful for the minister and her kind words I mean for my own experience of living through this as trying to assist someone get on that path to recovery the reality is though is you do feel very alone and there often are far too many your signposts to so many different places most of these people are very overwhelmed they're very overstretched and some of them have just shut down they don't even exist anymore what I think really needs to happen is there needs to be a very clear central place to go to for family members of people trying to help people with substance abuse they can pick the phone up and get immediate help with somebody local to them and it's that locality and quickness and easy of access which is so important and that one-to-one contact with someone who will help them is simply not there at the moment far too many and I hope that can improve minister minister I thank mr green for that intervention and you've put it on record and I'm sure my colleague Elena Whitham will will get back to you or and her officials as well I think you make a powerful point we but we know that stigma can inhibit that vital connection with families feeling judged and isolated stigma is driven by assumptions that are not based on fact or evidence we see and see and hear the harmful stereotypes far too often this is why campaigns like see beyond are so important in bringing attention to the damage caused by stigma it can be difficult to share our painful experiences and it can be challenging to hear them but as a society we cannot turn away from this and Stephanie Callaghan in her contribution highlighted the fact that it's not judgment or blame but hope in sharing their stories the families who took part in the see beyond campaign are bravely showing other families across scotland that they are not alone it is essential that we are able to foster a culture where we can speak openly and without fear about losing a loved one due to drugs or alcohol or about one's own experiences of drug or alcohol use Monica Lennon I'm very grateful to the minister and for her comments I think it's actually good that the minister's here in her capacity which covers public health one of the organizations that I spent time with this summer was SAMH they've got an individual placement and support service in North Lanarkshire and they were stressing that employment can be a health outcome in someone's journey but I heard some worrying stories about people in the workplace if you were living with cancer you know people would be very supportive we would hope but substance use has been treated somewhat differently so some people were saying that they've been asked to sign up to basically like drugs and alcohol testing as a condition of coming back to work but when I asked them about it it didn't sound like they had fully given informed consent on that so I just wonder are there conversations that the minister could have with other colleagues in government because we do need to look at this holistically but I do feel that there's workplace stigma there's some really good employers and there's some that just don't get it so is that something that we could do some more work on minister and give you the time back oh thank you I thank Monica Lennon for that intervention and I think you raised a really important point my previous employer a while ago had very clear guidelines that everyone understood and worked towards which I thought was really positive we are working cross minister portfolios so yes I'm happy to to look at that situation together we can tackle prejudice and discrimination towards people affected by substance use let me confirm the Scottish Government absolutely recognises drug dependency as a health condition people affected by substance use should be treated with the same compassion given to those experiencing any other health condition and reflecting on what Beatrice Wishart said as well last week I was at the health and social care alliance self management awards and the keynote speaker was talking about gambling as being a public health issue as well our stigma action plan was developed with input from our third sector partners in the coming months the detail of the work will be co-produced with people who have lived and living experience including families we will target the structural and systemic stigma that is too often embedded in organisations with a new voluntary accreditation scheme member organisations will be asked to show how they are actively supporting people affected by substance use by removing barriers we will also introduce a national programme to target public stigma to challenge uninformed assumptions and highlighting that a health condition like substance dependency shouldn't be used to define or punish people or their families stigma is fed by the myth that addiction is a choice and that people can stop using drugs if only they try hard enough there are many reasons why people use drugs and alcohol for some it's trying it's to try the experience for some it's an occasional thing others use them to cope with trauma or pain no matter the reason no one chooses addiction we do have a choice however we must choose to actively fight stigma choose to respond to the drug emergency with kindness and compassion we can all learn alongside our work to support families and tackle stigma Scotland has set out an ambitious way forward for respecting and enhancing human rights and the forthcoming human rights bill will give effect to a range of internationally recognised human rights in scots law they include the right to the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health and the rights to adequate housing and an adequate standard of living the incorporation of these rights into scots law through the bill will play an important role in tackling the stigma of substance dependency across scotland by ensuring that everyone's human rights are respected protected and fulfilled presiding officer by working together across the chamber with vital organisations like those behind sea beyond and those whose lives have been affected by substance use we can end stigma every person in scotland can also play their part by reaching out with kindness providing a listening ear and treating people affected by alcohol and drugs with respect and as miles briggs said everyone does know someone thank you very much shed minister that concludes the debate and i suspend this meeting of parliament until 2 30


I'm Betsy Peck-Learned, Dean of University Libraries, and thank you all so much for coming. This is a great turnout. The John Howard Burst Junior Memorial Program includes this evening's keynote lecture. The exhibition currently mounted in the library's exhibition cases, which was curated by Professor Christine Fagan, right here, with help from Heidi Benedict, our archivist, and several other staff members in the library. It was really a team effort. It also includes a satellite exhibit at the Rogers Free Library in Bristol, reading group discussions that took place there. And for the first time this year, a found poetry writing workshop. And Susan Tassant led those discussions and the poetry workshop. Susan, can you raise your hand or stand up a little? There she is. Thank you so much. Is she ready? She's right there. The Burst program celebrates a milestone anniversary of the publication of an important work of literature. This year's selection, the Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane, is celebrating its 125th year and was selected by the Burst Committee, a group of Roger Williams faculty, staff, and students. Our Burst program donor, Jennifer Murphy over here and a representative from Rogers Free Library in Bristol, Susan Tassant, who I introduced. This committee is chaired by Professor Adam Braver, a Roger Williams University Professor of Creative Writing and also our library program director. You will meet him in a minute. And thank you very much to the Burst Committee. I know that Meg Case is here from that committee. And we had a couple of meetings, but it was a very easy selection this year and certainly a consensus by all in the committee. Tonight, we welcome Christopher Benfee, Mellon Professor of English at Mount Holyoke College, whom Professor Braver will introduce in a moment. We are hugely grateful to Robert Blaze, an alumnus of Roger Williams University in 1970. Bob, can you stand up so everybody can see you? OK, raise your hand. Who, with his gift to the university in the year 2000, made these events possible. Unfortunately, oh, I won't say it. Unfortunately, Mr. Blaze can't be here tonight because he's here. We're thrilled that Mr. Blaze is here tonight and honored that his daughter, Jennifer, has been helping us with both the Burst selection and attending all of our events. Mr. Blaze's gift to the university was in honor of his mentor and friend, Professor John Howard Burst, Jr. Professor Burst was a scholar of Herman Melville and Walt Whitman and a collector of first editions. This year's selection, the Red Badge of Courage, held a special place in the heart of Professor Burst. Bob Blaze maintains a collection of Professor Burst's research on the novel. And we believe it's a fitting selection this year to celebrate 20 years of Burst programming here at Roger Williams with this selection, the Red Badge of Courage. The Blaze gift supports an exhibition, a library book fund for collecting works related to the exhibit and a keynote lecture. In partnership with funding from the Honors Program, the donation also allows for a library-led archival visit with two students, or we call them Burst Fellows. This year, Jillian Dimiani and Emma Phipps. Are you here, Jillian and Emma? Oh, there they are. Thank you. Who visited the Stephen Crane Archive at Columbia University to select items for the exhibition. We believe this is a really great opportunity of experiential learning for our students. And if they are here. So I already said that. Sorry. For those of you who have not yet seen the exhibition, please visit the exhibit cases behind the library and media tech desks out front. It will be up until the end of March. I'd also like to point out that library staff have prepared a research guide on the book and a virtual exhibit with images of artifacts from the exhibition available on the library's website, on the Burst webpage. And there's a link from the library homepage to the Burst page, or you can simply Google Roger Williams, Burst, and it will come up. And now I'd like to invite Adam to introduce Professor Benfield. Thank you. Right, thank you all for attending. It's really a privilege to have this lecture annually, this talk annually, in part because I think it's very important that we pause and consider works of art, works of literature that have transcended the moment and in a way perhaps can help ground us through ever-changing times. And yes, we are excited that this is the 20th year of the Burst programming, but because we cannot sit still, we already are pleased to announce next year's book. And next year's book will be the 50th anniversary of Ernest J. Gaines' novel, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. And along with that, I'll add that the Burst course that accompanies the selection, we have some of the students here tonight, will be held in the fall this upcoming year, a little different than it has been in the past, for those of you who might be interested, in that it will be an experiential learning project with students researching and developing a digital humanities project that will support the exhibition, but onto the red badge of courage. As Betsy mentioned, the Burst committee, after discussing and debating so many wonderful and meaningful books, ultimately chose the red badge of courage. I was going to say, as Betsy outlined, and it was articulated in the statement from the committee, and that was celebrating its 125th anniversary. And I learned from Susan Tassin at the book group 125 years of never being out of print. So it's been consistently in print for 125 years. Stephen Crane's classic novel is known for its early modernist portrayal of the Civil War and its psychological perspectives on the myth-making of heroism and cowardice. Still, in many respects, the red badge of courage goes beyond history, suggesting relevance over a century later by speaking to issues of our day, specifically a country that is visibly divided along ideological lines, which for many may seem irreconcilable. In revisiting the red badge of courage, one can't help but be prompted to ask, is our country broken? But is it a book of war, or is it one of finding responsibility in the face of unease, or a coming of age book? To consider the book, its author and its place in American culture and letters, we are honored to have Dr. Christopher Benfy. Is the author of five highly regarded books about the American Gilded Age, including the double life of Stephen Crane and the Summer of Hummingbirds? His most recent book, If the Untold Story of Kipling's American Years, was a New York Times notable book of 2019. Chris also is a cultural critic and public intellectual, if I may, a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books and the New York Times Sunday Times Book Review. Chris is also a poet who has regularly published works of poetry and engaged in the world of letters from that angle as well. He's a Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow, and as Betsy mentioned, is a Mellon Professor of English at Mount Holyoke College. But that's it. Please welcome Chris. Benfy is the 20th speaker in the history of the BERS program. Thank you, Betsy. And thank you, Adam. And thank you, Robert Blaise, who I just had the pleasure to talk with a little bit about Meld Illustrations, a topic dear to both of our hearts. And thank you, Christine, for showing me around the lovely exhibition out there. Color meant a great deal to Stephen Crane, and I'm very smitten with that red-schemed design out there. The artifacts from the Civil War, the artifacts from Stephen Crane, and the comic book version of the Red Badger Curve. As Adam mentioned, I did write a book 100 years ago about Stephen Crane, which had a perverse argument to it. I called it The Double Life of Stephen Crane. And the argument was that Crane lived his life backwards, that he would first write an experience, and then he would try obsessively to experience it in real life. He first, with no experience of war, wrote a book about war, and then he became a really significant war correspondent. He first wrote a hallucinatory story about a shipwreck, and then he managed to get himself into a shipwreck. And he wrote The Great Story of the Open Boat. He first wrote a book about a sex worker, and then he set up Housekeeping with the madam of the House of Prostitution in Jacksonville. It's always interesting to go back to a book you loved when you were a different person. I was in my early 30s when I first became obsessed with Stephen Crane, and I was going to say my early 60s, but that's not quite true. I'm in my mid-60s now, and thanks to Adam and Betsy and Bob and the rest of you, I've been invited to go back into this book. And I teach at a women's college. This Red Badge of Courage is not an obvious book to teach at a women's college. They're remarkably few women characters in the book. And it often is thought of as a kind of a guy book, like many of our American classics. In going back through the book, though, I found something else was grabbing my attention, and that was the pervasive theme of poverty, both in Crane's life and oddly in the Red Badge of Courage. So my working title for this talk is Stephen Crane's War on Poverty. So during the spring of 1893, Stephen Crane began writing a novel tentatively titled Private Fleming, His Various Battles, about an ordinary soldier's experiences during the American Civil War. The nature of courage was not front and center in Stephen Crane's mind at the time. Crane was more concerned with getting enough to eat. A 21-year-old college dropout, Crane had been living a hand-to-mouth existence as a freelance writer for New York newspapers, mainly covering the sufferings of the urban poor and homeless, which he knew at first hand. The gap between haves and have-nots already conspicuous during the Gilded Age, widened after the financial panic of 1893 when the population of homeless and unemployed people mushroomed in American cities, and especially in New York. Crane had completed a previous novel, begun during his brief stint at Syracuse University, about a jilted Irish girl's descent into poverty and prostitution called Maggie, A Girl of the Streets, which he had published with his own money from what was left of his inheritance from his mother. During the brutal, blizzard-ridden winter of 1894, as he poured over illustrated accounts of the Civil War, and especially the Battle of Chancellorsville, Crane dressed up as a homeless man and spent a couple of nights in a lured downtown homeless shelter, writing up his findings in a vivid sketch called An Experiment in Misery. Quote, he was going forth to eat as the wanderer may eat, he wrote of his disguised protagonist, and sleep as the homeless sleep. Commenting on the story, Crane explained that he had, quote, tried to make plain that the root of Bowery life is a sort of cowardice. Perhaps he added, I mean a lack of ambition or to willingly be knocked flat and accept the licking. Scholars have noticed the apparent disjunction between Crane's immersive experience of urban poverty, his notion that only through hardship can you truly understand the poor, and his simultaneous investment, imaginative investment in war, seemingly so remote from his own experience. Ironically, as Crane's recent biographer, biographer Paul Sarantino remarks, ironically, while Crane was exploring immersion as the basis for his art, he was continuing to imagine and write about a war that had ended more than six years before his birth. And yet, Crane's seemingly heartless social Darwinist remark about the root of Bowery life as being a sort of cowardice is an early indication that the apparently disparate subjects of war and urban poverty were united for Crane by the shared theme of cowardice. To put it slightly differently, Crane conceived of war and poverty as opportunities or tests of courage. In another sketch written about the same time, Crane compared the wanderings of a homeless tramp to, quote, detailed accounts of great battles. Not an obvious connection, but an interesting connection. During these months of probation, Crane was pursuing an extended experiment in misery of his own. While both of his parents were dead, his father a prominent Methodist minister in New Jersey, his mother a crusader for the women's Christian Temperance Union. Crane's older brothers included a prosperous lawyer in Port Jervis and a teacher in nearby Patterson, New Jersey. We still wonder one of Crane's nieces later remarked, we still wonder why he went through such experiences when he was always so very welcome at both our house and Uncle Edmunds. But Crane preferred the hard-scrabble life on the margins in Manhattan. When a newspaper editor asked him in 1895 about the origins of the Red Badge of Courage, Crane said that the novel was, quote, an effort born of pain. It seems a pity that art should be a child of pain, he added. Of course we have fine writers who are prosperous and contented, but in my opinion their work would be greater if this were not so. It lacks the sting it would have if written under the spur of a great need. Crane had no secure address during this period of voluntary poverty, sporadically sharing a large studio with three artist friends. You can see some of the pictures of these studios in the show in the lobby of the library. Sporadically sharing a large studio with three artist friends in a boarding house or really a flop house in the decrepit old Art Students League building on East 23rd Street. In the topmost and remotest studio, Crane wrote, there is an old beam which bears this line from Emerson in half obliterated chalk marks, quote, congratulate yourselves if you have done something strange and extravagant and broken the monotony of a decorous age. And yet just to repeat, boldly pursuing what Emerson said was something strange and extravagant, was emphatically not what Crane was trying to do in his Civil War novel. His primary objective in taking up such a hackneyed subject was to make money. Quote, I deliberately started to do a pot boiler, Crane confessed, something that would take the boarding school element. Crane, as I said before, was too young to have had any direct experience of war. But here, too, the boarding school element came to us rescue. Crane wrote, I never even smelled, I never even, I never smelled even the powder of a sham battle. But he said he had gotten, quote, his sense of the rage of conflict on the football field.  Play football. But Stephen Crane was an artist to his fingertips. Compromise does not come easily to such temperaments. As he worked feverishly at his money-making pot boiler, Crane felt the quickening of his artistic ambitions. I got interested in the thing in spite of myself, he reported to a friend. And I couldn't, I couldn't, I had to do it my own way. In other words, he couldn't write a pot boiler. And so it was that Crane ended up writing something strange and extravagant after all. The incandescent novel we now know as The Red Badge of Courage. A masterpiece of continuous stylistic invention and visionary intensity. Is it possible, however, that the novel's conflicted origins, as pulp fiction written for money, versus a book that he made in his own way, is it possible that the novel's conflicted origins remained in the finished work in some way? That divided origin might help to explain the shockingly diverse interpretations that the novel has inspired during the century plus, in which it has remained in print, and steadily acquired the status of a classic work of American literature. We might, for the sake of convenience, sketch out three main ways, or really two plus, in which the novel has been understood during the 20th century. If we take the nature of courage as the central theme of the narrative, it will be seen that courage is treated in starkly different terms in each of these readings. First, the novel maintains its status, we might call this its boarding school status, as a book about an ancient, I'm sorry, a book about an anxious young man's passage from boyhood to manhood after surviving the testing ground of an intense battle. In his first encounter with fighting so this version of the novel goes, the young man runs abjectly from the fray, only when he has digested the traumatic experience does he return and demonstrates conspicuous bravery in leading a charge and capturing the enemy's flag. Courage, according to this narrative, is achieved by dentive facing up to danger and recognizing that bravery can win the day. In this version, the red badge of courage is a coming of age novel, a novel about how war turns cowardly boys into courageous men. A second reading of the novel is a more complicated version of the first. In this interpretation, the passage from cowardice to courage is more ambiguous, less clearly drawn. We're forced to recognize that the youth in Crane's account appears to stumble accidentally into courage, rather than grasping it intentionally. After running from battle and persuading himself that it was the rational thing to do, he is shocked to learn that his regiment was victorious after all. Deeply ashamed, he envies the parade of wounded men longing for a wound, a red badge of courage, of his own. When he tries to exact a description of the battle from a passing veteran, the veteran swings his rifle and hits the youth in the head. Thus the youth suffers a wound after all his own personal red badge of courage. And it is this wound inflicted by friendly fire, so to speak, that facilitates his triumphant return to his regiment and his even more triumphant performance in battle the next day. The supreme test is the battle itself. The youth passes the test with flying colors, sees in the actual colors the Confederate battle flag. Currents according to the second version of the narrative may be achieved in roundabout ways, but it is still the real thing. This is the fake it till you make it approach to courage. A third rating of the novel casts a colder eye on the youth's performance. This rating highlights the fact that the youth's courage is purchased by a lie. He tells his friend the loud soldier that he was shot in the head. Of course, he had suffered nothing of the kind. According to this rating, Crane sought in the red badge of courage to question the very nature of battlefield courage and treated the pompous dreams of the youth with relentless irony. What the youth achieves on his second day of battle is not maturity or a quiet manhood, but rather a momentary stilling of self-doubt. Courage according to this third version of the narrative is an uneasy blend of shame and mania. Courage is a fraud on the illusion of youth, a swindle. I don't see how we can overemphasize just how extreme the disagreements over the meaning of the novel have been. This debate about the meaning of the novel goes on to this day. It goes on in classrooms everywhere that the book is read. Imagine two people looking at Van Gogh's Starry Night. What a devastating image of oblivion one person says. All I can think of is death. What an ecstatic vision of life on earth and in heaven says another. All I can think of is the glory of existence. I was tempted to talk about Adam's crows over the wheat field which is similarly diverse interpretations. As critics argued about the red badge of courage over the years and debated Crane's intentions, a fresh piece of evidence was enlisted by the proponents of this third version. The third version, let me remind you, is that Crane viewed courage as a lie. This fresh piece of evidence was the original manuscript of the novel. It turned out on close inspection that certain editorial interventions had been inflicted on Crane's original text with the result that his irony was apparently deliberately toned down. The originalists argued that Crane had written an out and out anti-war novel, a book that critiqued all the motivations for war along with its supposed benefits, heroism, courage, maturity, manhood, and so on. So this battle between triumphalus and ironis, red badge of courage is heroic coming of age novel or red badge of courage is deeply ironic deflation of battlefield heroism. It turns out that this argument between triumphalus and ironis had played out already and in an unexpected place and without benefit of the original manuscript of the red badge of courage. In 1950, the great film director John Houston won the reluctant support of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio to make a movie of Stephen Crane's classic novel. You can see the original poster for the novel out in the exhibition in the lobby. As Lillian Ross writes in picture, her marvelous book linked the count of the making and unmaking of the movie, the MGM executives were convinced that the project would be a commercial disaster. In their view, the movie Houston had in mind, quote, had no standard plot, no romance, no leading female characters, and if Houston had his way, he would also have no stars. To which one could add no African-American characters, no mention of the Civil War or its causes and so on. Houston had bold ideas for telling his war story. He insisted on using black and white film, hoping to match some of the high contrast and visual intensity of Matthew Brady's famous photographs of the war, photographs that happened to have been a major source for Stephen Crane as well. Second, Houston wanted Audie Murphy, the most decorated American soldier in World War II but a Hollywood unknown to play the starring role of the youth not as the studio heads proposed a recognizable heartthrob like Montgomery Clift. Most importantly, though, was Houston's overall interpretation of Crane's novel. As Ross put it, Houston, like Stephen Crane, wanted to show something of the emotions of men in war and the ironically thin line between cowardice and heroism. From the start, Houston, John Houston, do we know something about John Houston, the treasure of the Sierra Madre, the African Queen, the creepy, creepy father in Chinatown, that's John Houston. Angelica Houston's that. From the start, Houston was determined to eliminate any hint of traditional heroism or tragic grandeur from his account of the youth's initiation under fire. He carefully explained to his star, Audie Murphy, that there was a humorous aspect to the youth's panic. Fear in a man is something tragic or reprehensible, you know, Audie, Houston said, but fear in a youth, it's ludicrous. To accentuate the youth's abject response to battle, Houston emphasized a second act of cowardice. The youth abandons the severely wounded and disoriented tattered soldier to his death. For Houston, this scene was the high point of the film. When Houston met with a composer who would provide a musical soundtrack for the film, he sought to reinforce this anti-heroic interpretation. The boy is afraid, Houston explained, and it is funny. Houston thought the youth's bravery was also funny. By insisting on, quote, the irony of the youth's heroic action, Houston was crafting a critique of battlefield courage. He suggested that a banjo, rather than the traditional trumpets, might reduce any temptation to view the youth in a tragic way. He told the composer, he's a banjo for the soundtrack. That'd be perfect. He shouldn't be treated tragically, he told the composer.  You're getting the point, ludicrous, ridiculous, funny. Even in the final scenes when the youth leads a charge against the enemy and seizes the rebel battle flag, Houston saw nothing but irony. Far from showing the youth's final triumph in battle, Houston aimed to express instead, quote, the pointlessness of the youth's courage in helping to capture a fragment of wall in the book, an advantage immediately abandoned by the regiment. So they capture the wall, and then they leave the battlefield. In Houston's view, Cranes' novel placed the whole notion of courage under a microscope and found it wanting. Houston's film failed with its initial previews, and Houston himself departed to Africa to film the African Queen. And various remedies were proposed by the studio. It was thought that the transition from cowardice to courage was too abrupt with nothing to indicate why the youth suddenly stops being a coward and becomes a hero. The transition it was suggested might be eased with voiceover narration drawn from the novel, so that was put into the movie. The scene of the tattered soldier's death, Houston's favorite, was cut from the film since it reinforced the youth's cowardice. At the outset, the narrator gravely informed audiences that the red batch of courage was an acknowledged literary classic. All of these were trying to sell this failed movie.  Houston's film was never the film the fixers wanted. They wanted tragedy, heroism, redemption. These were precisely the things Houston sought to banish from the film. And there was only so much that they could do to remake or unmake the film that Houston had made. In the first scene of the red batch of courage that Houston shot, a column of new recruits encounters a corpse in the road. Houston gave careful attention to the appearance of the actor playing the dead man, dousing his hair and face with multiple layers of mud and fake blood, and repeatedly reminded the bit players that this was their first corpse and that their faces should respond accordingly. For Houston, the scenes in which the youth contemplated death, the corpse in the road, a dead officer sitting against a tree in the woods, the tattered soldier dying with the heart of his film. Two of the scenes ended up on the cutting room floor. For Houston, the living contemplating the dead is the primal event of the film, towing the ironic line between cowardice and courage. For the distinguished art historian Michael Freed, encounters with corpses are also the crucial passages in the red batch of courage. The scene that preoccupied Houston of new recruits encountering a dead body in the road happens to be the first literary passage examined in Freed's important book, Realism, Writing, Disfiguration, on Thomas Akins and Stephen Crane. For Freed, the intensity of the scene arises from factors other than those that were added and braided by Houston. For Freed, the scene exhibits what he calls the conflicted nature of Crane's realism. Now here's the relevant passage from the red badge. Once the line encountered the body of a dead soldier, he lay upon his back staring at the sky. He was dressed in an awkward suit of yellowish brown. The youth could see that the soles of his shoes were worn to the thinness of writing paper. He vaguely desired to walk around and around the body and stare, the impulse of the living to try to read in dead eyes the answer to the question. In Freed's analysis, Crane, like the gawking recruits, could not take his eyes off the dead man's face, but for other reasons than those evoked by John Houston. Freed argues that Crane tried to write a realistic account of men in war, while simultaneously and unconsciously writing about the physical act of writing and the actual tools of writing. Hence the references in Crane's text to lines and writing paper and the impulse to read in dead eyes. According to Freed, the image of the upturned face recurs in many of Crane's texts and always carries this double weight of the front scene of writing. I mentioned at the start of this talk the curious linkage for Crane between urban poverty and war as occasions for cowardice or courage. Faced with poverty, the poor can be brave or cowardly, Crane suggests, just like the young recruits. As it happens, Crane was hardly alone during the 1890s in addressing the boundary between cowardly and courageous behavior. A constellation of literary texts probed the distinction as though a whole generation of writers, too young to have experienced war firsthand, considered the nature of courage to be a pressing problem. With the relative absence of major wars, there was a worried sense that the blessings of peace not be all that they were cracked up to be. As Crane writes of his youthful recruit in the first chapter of the Red Badge, there had been a portion of the world's history which he had regarded as the time of wars, but it he thought had been long gone over the horizon and had disappeared forever. Around 1900, there was a pervasive worry among the privileged classes in the United States that society afflicted with peace was becoming over-civilized, soft, cowardly. T.S. Eliot remarked that Boston was, quote, refined beyond the point of civilization. For whatever cultural or historical reasons he defined in the space of five or six years first the Red Badge of Courage in 1895, in which a young man deserts his regiment. Rudyard Kipling's American novel, Captain's Courageous, of 1897, in which a spoiled rich kid is rescued by a fishing vessel headed to the North Atlantic. Joseph Conrad's Lord Gem of 1900, in which the first mate of a ship full of poor immigrants, saves his own life while abandoning his vulnerable charges. What these works have in common is a preliminary diagnosis of manly cowardice, which must be healed, so to speak, by conspicuous acts of courage. In each case, the protagonist is dragged down into poverty, and in each case the protagonist found wanting when first tested by circumstance is granted a second chance at bravery. The writers of these works were united by ties of friendship and admiration. Crain was deeply indebted to Kipling's works. The two men met in New York in 1896, and it was from Kipling that Crain had derived his deep-seated conviction that art and suffering were allied. There are few things more edifying unto arts as the artist-hero of Kipling's The Light That Failed than the actual belly pinch of hunger. Conrad and Crain, Conrad gets pride of place in the exhibition here. Conrad and Crain forged a close friendship in England. It has been suggested that not only did Crain borrow in Lord Gem a major theme from the Red Badge of Courage, that of a coward given a second chance, but that he might even have modeled Gem on Stephen Crain himself. Now I'm coming around to my conclusion, so hold your breath. Stephen Crain's two great subjects, as I've said multiple times, were urban poverty and war. These were the conditions he tried obsessively to experience in his own life. As a freelance newspaper man, he lived so close to starvation that he hardly had to pass as an indigent writer. Having vividly imagined war on the Red Badge, he spent the rest of his life chasing actual wars as a war correspondent for Pulitzer and Hearst. So what's the linkage of poverty and war? Is there some tight connection? William James thought so. In the lectures that became his 1902 masterpiece, The Varieties of Religious Experience, James conceived of the world as, quote, essentially a theater for heroism. War was the traditional machinery for turning young men into heroes in James's view. He could almost be describing the plot of the Red Badge when he wrote, quote, the most significant individual, I'm sorry, the most insignificant individual when thrown into an army in the field is weaned from whatever excess of tenderness towards his precious person he may bring with him and may easily develop into a monster of insensibility. The challenge William James believed was to find in a modern and more civilized world, a world in which wars, James thought, had been banished to the past, to find in this peaceful world, quote, something heroic that will speak to men as universally as war does. In a phrase that became famous after the publication of his 1910 essay, an essay that opens with a nostalgic embrace of the Civil War, William James announced the need in civilized times for what he called, quote, a moral equivalent of war. For men of earlier times, and James is only talking about men, for men of earlier times, according to James, the greatest fear was war, the specter that haunts Henry Fleming of being found wanting on the battlefield. What then were modern men in a world of commercial trade most afraid of? For Americans of the Gilded Age, the greatest fear in James's startling view was poverty, quote, we have grown literally afraid to be poor, he wrote, scared as men were never scared in history at material ugliness and hardship. When we quake at the thought of having a child without a bank account and doomed to manual labor, it is time for thinking men to protest against so unmanly and irreligious a state of opinion, end of quote. Forget Theodore Roosevelt's martial fantasies of the strenuous life, his theatrical rough writers passing for heroic soldiers of the past, forget all that. As James said, poverty is the strenuous life. Without brass bands or uniforms or hysteric popular applause or lies or circumlocutions, poverty is the strenuous life. There's a moment in the Red Badge of Courage when the fear of battle and the fear of poverty converge dramatically. It comes from the same passage that so fascinated both John Houston, the filmmaker, and Michael Freed, the art historian, when the marching column of raw recruits encounters their first corpse in the room. And I'll read it again with another sentence included, he was dressed in an awkward and yellowish brown. The youth could see that the soles of his feet had been worn to the thinness of writing paper and from a great rent in one the dead foot projected piteously. And it was as if fate had betrayed the soldier. In death it exposed to his enemies that poverty which in life he had perhaps concealed from his friends. Strange sense. Every sense in the Red Badge of Courage is strange. And it was as if fate had betrayed the soldier. In death it exposed to his enemies that poverty which in life he had perhaps concealed from his friends. For a moment we are transported to an elegantly balanced sentence which recalls the phrasing of Samuel Johnson to a very different battlefield altogether. The youth is paralyzed by the fear that he will run from battle. And here is a dead soldier who was afraid instead that his carefully concealed poverty would be revealed. The two great sources of fear, war and poverty are thus momentarily elided in the Red Badge of Courage they were for William James. In a society obsessed with martial prowess or making money any falling short is regarded as shameful hence to be hidden from the sight of others. And both war and poverty for Crane and for James provide an opening for courage. Exposure for both writers is a small price to pay for a more noble a more courageous existence. James writes, we have lost the power even of imagining what the ancient idealization of poverty could have meant the liberation from material attachments the unbridled soul. If as James believed the prevalent fear of poverty become our, quote, worst moral disease then perhaps voluntary poverty could serve a money-grubbing age like Crane's like our own as, quote, the transformation of military courage. Thank you. So I'd be happy to field a few questions about war, football or poverty. Yeah, thank you. I had questions that kept evolving because it kept taking us into different places. So I'm going to come back to my initial question with the spin from the end which is, early in the book he mentions Homer and the Homeric. Says that's all over, that's right. Where does that fit in with, is that in a style record? Absolutely. It's sort of safer than safe from all of this. Exactly. So early in the novel in the first chapter as the youth is headed as they're waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting to see any real action the youth reflects that the days of Homeric battle and I don't remember Crane's exact wording but basically that all we care about is trade and commerce war has been banished. And of course he's completely ambivalent because he's both enraptured of the idea that he'll be found to have the right metal and terrified that he won. But yes, and I'm suggesting that both Crane and William James are writing writing from the perspective that maybe wars are coming to an end. That's the fear suggested in the red badge and the fear that William James has that we're all going to become softies. And there's a connection between Crane and William James. William James's well-known brother Henry was a good friend to him. Steven Crane. Is it clear that the kind of war of the ancient world isn't here anymore? You and I don't fight up close and personal and look each other in the eye. I kill you from 100 yards away because of the weaponry, the rifle in the Civil War and even better weapons in subsequent wars. Cannons that can kill from hundreds and hundreds of yards. Does that make war and heroism antithetical? Yeah, that's a great question. There's two wonderful images out in the exhibition from Winslow Homer before doing nostalgic scenes. New England was a great battlefield artist. And there's one of the sniper which suggests the incredible weaponry of the Civil War at the same time, the fact that soldiers had no armor. They were wearing woolen coats. So I think that recognition that war had become impossible for heroism waits until World War I. It's true it already happened in the Civil War, but Steven Crane still writes the battlefield scenes of the Red Baton Courage as though it's almost hand-to-hand contact. He wants Henry Fleming not to be holding a gun but just to be holding the standard and then grabbing the enemy's standard and sort of running through bullets and so on. So I think that nightmare of mechanized warfare which had already been experienced in the Russo-Japanese War which is going on in Crane's lifetime. I don't think that's his fear about war. He thinks it's disappearing, ironic under the circumstances since just after the novel was published we had about 100 years of continuous war and we're still having it. So I don't think it's entirely gone away. So William James Essay, the moral equivalent of war, was incredibly influential in American society and in the war and in the war and in the war and in the war. So it's very influential in American society and the idea of some kind of national service as some kind of voluntary poverty at least for a couple of years, like the couple of years, one might be expected to serve in the armed forces if one were drafted. That's had its life in the Peace Corps. It's called the Peace Corps and it's that idea of we can get the experience of the Marine Corps in times of peace in Teach for America and a lot of things that college students I think look at as something viable and worth doing before a career in finance or consulting college teacher. I think it's still very much with us. Pete Buttigieg, very interesting case of a military man making the case for peaceful national service. We still live with these. I mean, Adam was talking about the weird connections between the first Gilded Age and the second one, which is what we're living through now for our sins. See, Bob's got a new look. What's going on here? I'm curious if you mentioned Pete Buttigieg. What else are we thinking about? You just caused a nuclear explosion in my head in terms of his association with the military. He does have an association with the military. But if you think of all of the individuals that have run for president and lionized in terms of military, they were true military. I don't know if Buttigieg... No, he wasn't. But he talked about being trained with the AK... What do we use? That was his association that nothing else could talk about. Correct. Now, I think he drove a vehicle and did some destiny. No, I think that was a great example. I'm not criticize me. I think that was a great example. I think... I'm from Indiana, so as is my friend Betsy. We Hoosers, you know, we're not going to totally dump these guys. She's even from South Bend, for God's sake. Yeah. Well, then you were talking about war and football. South Bend is war and football. Yeah, I played basketball, though. From Indiana. It's curious. The movie was just done recently on PCM, the traditional classic movie.  Right. I always found it interesting that the hero, which he is a hero in the movie, was also the most decorated human being in World War II. Correct. Kind of ironic. Yeah. That he plays just the opposite. Yeah, that Houston is saying, it's ludicrous when somebody like you is brave. I think you did use the word ludicrous. No, yeah, Houston does. And I think the individual that introduced the movie, I don't think it was Mankiewicz. I can't remember. That's part of my problem today, is not being able to remember that she would use this individual, Lordy Murphy, this individual, Lordy, he was trying to become an actor, so. Yeah. I think you nailed it. Thanks. I want to hear from more students. What do you think? Did you all read this book? I think the book is so strange, you know. It's not, we try to turn it into the book that our teachers seem to have thought it was in high school.  So you've done some research on this, yeah. You kind of talked about different editions of the book, having different interpretations. But you didn't touch on the comic book. Like what? Yeah, see I'm not a scholar of the comic book. But you are. So touch on it. What did you? I just thought it was more geared towards, it seemed like they were trying to take the story and like a generation of like adults wanted the story for their kids and they translated the story for someone about their kids. See I think even without the comic book, the parents have translated the story into the story they want it to be, which is the coming of age story. It's what all American books are supposed to be. They're supposed to be coming of age stories. When they write Moby Dick or The Red Voucher of Courage. Yeah, I mean I, as I said at the beginning of the talk, I think some of the, just enough of the pot boiler is still in it, that the comic book writers and the high school, the college teachers and the parents can still make this book seem something that it's not. And the irony in it is, is shifty, is squishy. It's not a stable, oh I get it, Crane thinks this whole war thing is ridiculous, or ludicrous. It's, it's shifty. The book is, is squirrely, weasley, it's strange. It plays a lot of different keys. So that, I mean, when I talk about those three different views of the novel, those are major critical views of this book. You know, the book is a story of a young man finding courage in 48 hours. The story is about a kid who's fooling himself right up to the very end. Yep.  And head out. Yep. Become a man. And mom has a certain presence in the novel. A very big presence. She doesn't cry at all. That's right.  A man who's soft. Yeah. Yeah. She says, don't do anything, you'd be ashamed of. Right. And laundry can come home, which is a pretty good mom. Yeah. But. It comes home either way. And I can't get it. Yeah, it does. And I get it. Yeah. And I get where that would sit in with the, um, coming of age story.  You have to leave home. You have to leave mom. You have to become a man. But where does it sit in with the poverty story? Yeah. Good. May I have what a great question? Yeah. That's a great question. I mean, Crane, he did write a whole novel about a woman's descent into poverty. And it's a novel that uses just as familiar, like everybody knew this. Everybody knew she was going to die. Everybody knew she'd kill herself. The story was so, was so well known. Um, but he seems to have kind of endorsed the idea that poverty kills women and poverty elevates men.  And oddly, the working title of George's Mother, which he wrote right after the Red Badge occurred. And I, by right after, I mean, couple of months, couple of months ago, I mean, he's writing at just this red hot speed. The original title of George's Mother was A Woman Without Weapons. It's kind of interesting. So some sense that maybe, I mean, the absence of women in the novel was a disaster for the filmmakers. You should check out the original poster of the movie. There's one scene where a soldier tries to steal a pig from a house. And a young woman comes running out to say, that's our pig. And the studio head said, make that bigger. So you see a Victor Body Murphy with the only woman in the movie. Like, there's love interest. Like, it's going to be gone with the wind after. They want it gone with the wind, of course. Which was the big success. But they got the Red Badge occurred. Thank you very much. Great time.