Lewis Grassic Gibbon and Sunset Song

By Ian Campbell, Department of English Literature, University of Edinburgh

LEWIS GRASSIC GIBBON (James Leslie Mitchell, 1901-35) was born in Auchterless in Aberdeenshire, but spent his childhood largely in the area of Arbuthnott in the Mearns, where his father rented a croft (Bloomfield) and where he and his brothers attended the local school. A shy and fastidious boy, Mitchell loathed farm work and preferred reading and amateur history and archaeology: encouraged by his schoolmaster he developed an early talent for writing, but after a disastrous year of secondary education in Stonehaven (he expelled himself) left home for journalism in Aberdeen, then Glasgow, then a number of years in the armed forces which sustained him during the Depression. While he found services life unpleasant he was able to travel (to the Middle East) and to write, which he did with relish, short stories, fiction, articles -- until finally he was accepted, published, and was able to leave the forces, marry his childhood sweetheart from Arbuthnott, and settle in London then in Welwyn as a professional writer. A period of intense productivity gave rise to 16 books and a mass of articles, but the price was ill health which culminated in Mitchell's sudden death in 1935 of peritonitis. His widow, Rhea Sylvia, buried him in Arbuthnott and brought up his son and daughter in Welwyn Garden City, where belatedly attention is being paid to the writer who produced in those leafy southern streets the wonderfully nostalgic A Scots Quair (1932-34) for which he is most remembered today. His grave, with Rhea's, is in Arbuthnott where also is a thriving Grassic Gibbon Centre (Arbuthnott Parish Hall, Arbuthnott, Laurencekirk AB30 1YB telephone 01561-361668) and his books -- for decades all but impossible to buy -- are steadily coming back into print from Polygon and from Canongate in Edinburgh.

The Mearns

From Montrose to Aberdeen lies a fertile plain, cut off from the sea in the south by low hills, but tapering to a point near Stonehaven where it meets the sea. Here the Highland Line marks the beginning of more rugged territory, but there are hills enough round Arbuthnott, many of them marked with remains of Roman and pre-Roman times which fascinated Mitchell. Sunset Song is set on such a hill, near the real-life Bloomfield, the Pictish Standing Stones on its summit one of the links to that far-off past which fascinated the author, before modern civilisation (which produced the Great War as well as the Depression) marked the country, before officialdom stripped the hillsides of their forests for the war effort, before the march of 'progress' emptied the small farms and the bothies, and horses gave way to tractors and mechanised farming. Growing up in Arbuthnott Mitchell felt the shifting tide of history during the War, and the sunset of a way of life which he captures brilliantly in the decline of Kinraddie -- Arbuthnott -- in Sunset Song, a song which celebrates what was beautiful and neighbourly and Scottish -- but a sad admission that the sunset had finished that old Scotland and the country now had to move forward. The sequels Cloud Howe (1933) and Grey Granite (1934) complete the story of Scotland's transformation in Mitchell's lifetime, through small town to city life, the eclipse not only of a centuries-old farming tradition but of the influence of the Kirk (Cloud Howe) and the countryside itself, elbowed aside by the urban squalor of Duncairn in Grey Granite, an unlovely jumble festering in the Depression. Mitchell did not flinch from the Depression and the troubles it brought to Scotland even though the picture makes the second half of A Scots Quair less attractive than Sunset Song, and much less read for that matter. But the author believed passionately that Scotland was for living in here and now, not for preserving in the past: as a committed socialist and Marxist, and a committed enemy of that civilisation he saw rotting around him, he writes in Grey Granite (and several of his other novels) about the need for revolution to sweep away the grim past and bring back something living, and free, and anarchistic to Scotland -- without snobbery, without class distinction, without Scottish/English rivalries, without dogma or Church. He died before his vision could be resolved one way or another; he did not live to see the rise of Hitler, or what followed.

Speech

At the time Mitchell wrote there was fierce debate about whether Scottish literature should be in standard English, or in the Scottish languages -- Scots and Gaelic -- still spoken in declining numbers both in Scotland and, to a surprising degree, overseas among emigrant communities. Some Scottish writers, like MacDiarmid, fiercely pushed the cause of writing in Scots to stimulate an interest in the language and stem the advance of standard English from radio and film. Mitchell, realising that the difficulty of reading a page of Scots would put many off, hit on a subtler strategy of writing his Scottish novels in a unique style which looks like English, but in fact uses Scottish words but spells them as if they were the nearest English-sounding one. The word "quean" for girl will be spelt "queen": the word "braw" for fine will be spelt "brave", and so forth. The word order will be unfamiliar, and a clear attempt to re-order speech the way Scots might speak it, and the vocabulary will be disguised by the spelling. There is no need for glosses (Mitchell resented it keenly when publishers asked for one) for the unfamiliarity very soon disappears, and readers fall into the rhythm and intonation of Scots and feel more keenly the sense of being there. Significantly, the style of the Scots Quair becomes less Scottish, and more English, as the trilogy enters the 1930s and city life: Mitchell knew from experience the country was where Scottish traditions and speech lasted longest. Mitchell's English fiction is very characteristic too: a lot of little stylistic quirks mark him out as an experimental writer, and he is fond of putting into the mouths of his characters pidgin English in the case of his Middle East figures, or Cockney in London. Most readers find the Scottish fiction the easiest, but the science fiction in particular is grippingly well told, and he has a talent for the occasional action scene which sustains the reader through the frequent brutality -- alas, all too true to life -- of his magnificent historical novel Spartacus.

Truth to life

During his lifetime Mitchell published a great deal -- he even assumed his pen-name (his mother was Lilias Grassic Gibbon before marriage) to help disguise the quantity he was writing. Like other Scottish authors, he drew heavily from experience, and like other Scottish authors he was not always popular as a result. Arbuthnott is very clearly the source of Kinraddie, and there are even end papers to the early editions of the three parts of the trilogy which show the layout of the real-life Mearns -- with details cunningly altered here and there to protect the author should anyone go so far as to sue him for libel. In fact no one did, but a lot of people (including his own family) resented the accuracy with which he incorporated real-life people and incident from memory -- often very unflatteringly, sometimes cruelly. His mother complained he had made them 'the Speak of the Mearns' -- which he had. But not in the way they wanted. People found themselves caricatured, and old scandals dredged up, and they resented it keenly. Some found the love scenes, the childbirth scenes, the politics of the novel distasteful and many tried to have it banned from public view. Incredibly, the Aberdeen City Libraries had it in a reserved case until quite lately, available only on special request.

In the Speak of the Mearns, a posthumous collection, an unfinished novel is published for the first time in which he draws heavily on recollections of the next parish -- Kinneff -- plainly showing he had plenty of material still to hand for further fiction, had he lived to complete it. The Speak of the Mearns also has his magnificent short stories (some of which, like parts of the Quair, have been televised) and splendid essays on his childhood, and on his writing, and on his views of history and Scottish culture past and present. The essay on Aberdeen, where he lived, is an acerbic gem. Glasgow, which he remembered in the stinking days of the Depression, is a darker essay, but a powerful indictment of a society which lets its poorer members starve.

Literary value

Few would dispute the stature now of the Gibbon novels, and with republication the Mitchell stories are also steadily gaining in critical recognition. What did he achieve in that hectic brief writing career?

The Scottish fiction. 

In the Quair, in his other autobiographical pieces (notably Stained Radiance) and in the splendid short stories set in Arbuthnott and its area, he fixed a period in time when the old country was disappearing, the new slowly emerging and yet to find its character. Vanishing people, customs, speech were incorporated in thoroughly well-told stories: the Scottish style which was not obviously or threateningly Scottish drew in those who had no first-hand knowledge (he was published and popular in the USA in his lifetime, and has been translated since into several languages) and Sunset Song, in particular, is now recognised as a classic of 1930s fiction by critics of British literature, not merely Scottish fiction. Closest to his own childhood in recollection, and coloured by the disappearance of a town he had loved even while he longed to get away to a wider world, Sunset Song has as its central character his best creation, Chris, a farmer's daughter who becomes a farmer's wife, and survives her husband Ewan's death in the Great War to see his Scotland, her Scotland, their farm all but obliterated. Chris and her son Ewan move through Cloud Howe and Grey Granite to form the backbone of the trilogy, and Ewan at the end follows his creator South, to London, to political involvement, while Chris returns to the Aberdeenshire where Mitchell was born in real life. Nostalgia in these Scottish books is beautifully captured, but not wallowed in. A sunset of a past age is there to usher in a new dawn, and Mitchell the politically active writer wanted Scotland to wake up to the 1930s, not take refuge in the 1900s. Now, with the whole Scots Quair available and in print, people can see the message as a whole, and even though the author's Marxist and revolutionary politics may have few supporters, the passion with which he lambasts the sick and tired Scottish institutions of his time still wins him many admirers.

The non-Scottish fiction

Mitchell's interest in history and archaeology led him to write with great speed, and professionalism, studies of explorers Nine against the Unknown, Hanno (a life of Mungo Park), the historical Spartacus, science fiction alternative societies (Three Go Back set in the past, Gay Hunter in the far future), fiction of Cairo and the Middle East (The Calends of Cairo, the Lost Trumpet) and the superlative short stories in The Speak of the Mearns. His autobiographical novels, Stained Radiance, The Thirteenth Disciple chart not only his Scottish roots but his early experiences in London (where he and his wife knew poverty, frustration and much ill health) and in the army. His articles, many of them all but forgotten, are like his books: neat, tidy, well organised, produced at speed. A wonderful oddity is Scottish Scene, a collection of articles, poems, short stories and press cuttings produced in tandem with Hugh MacDiarmid and published in 1934, largely through Mitchell's efforts. Neither man saw the other's contribution, and the book is a glorious muddle.

The legacy

The Grassic Gibbon centre's opening, and the celebrations planned for 2001 to mark the centenary, are some indication that the years of neglect are past. The fact that Penguin have A Scots Quair in print and in wide circulation, that Canongate have published the three parts of the trilogy separately and together (and have more republication in the pipeline), and that Polygon plan to have all the work except the Quair in print shortly, the fact he is taught very widely at every level of secondary and higher education, the fact he is known through television and radio adaptation -- all point to an enduring fame and legacy. Most of all, he needs to be read. More people need to come to this marvellous evocation of a Scottish past that has nothing sentimental or sticky, but that brings back to life for a while something which is definitely of the past -- that challenges today's audiences to respect that past, though the Scotland waiting outside may be in the 21^st century. If Chris, in Sunset Song, found it hard to love her own country -- she admitted she 'loved and hated in a breath' when she thought about it -- people today find it hard to think of what they mean by Scotland. They can hear the words spoken in the theatre, on TV, even though the legacy of spoken Scots of the kind Mitchell knew in the Mearns in the early years of the century may have thinned down a great deal. They can see the dramatic adaptation, and be drawn to the originals as many were by the televised version.Lewis Grassic Gibbon weaves his own spell on his readers. At last, his work is there to be read. Once read, it does not allow itself to be forgotten.

Thanks to Ian Campbell for his permission to include this material, originally written for the Education Pack for the Prime Productions production of Sunset Song.