George MacKay Brown: The Wound and the Gift

Prologue

It is one of those still, seraphic June evenings that Orkney throws up surprisingly frequently. It has been a benediction of a day. My wife, Cristine, and I have had a meal out here on the decking of our wooden Norwegian house down by the coast. We look out, across a short stretch of water, to the blue hills of Hoy. A few hundred yards farther along the shore stands a ruined manor house, once the home of Orkney’s famed Arctic explorer John Rae, creator of a headline-making Victorian scandal.

Orkney is such a beautiful place, especially on calm days like this. It has a different, elemental kind of beauty when the storms rage and the 100-miles-per-hour gales hit full on.

The telephone rings from time to time throughout the evening. We talk on the decking to our three grown-up children, Fiona, Neil and Ally, and to our two little grandchildren, Oily and Dan. They all live in Scotland’s central belt.

The cows are lowing in the field next to our house, Bach’s Mass in B Minor is on the CD player, and I have in my hand a 12-year-old single malt from Orkney’s Highland Park distillery. It is only a couple of days after 21 June, when the sun reaches its northernmost point and we start to head slowly but inexorably towards the long, and sometimes bleak, darkness of a northern winter.

But that’s a long way off. Although it is nearly 10pm, and the orange disc of the sun is touching the horizon, the light is still strong enough for me to read, for the third time, an exquisitely written book. An Orkney Tapestry first attracted me to these islands nearly a quarter of a century ago. George Mackay Brown’s distinctive guide to Orkney is, literally, a fabulous book. It has history, of sorts, but also stories and poems and dramas. The back cover says that the author ‘explores the dark mysterious corners, as well as the quiet beautiful fertile places, in his search for the still point of Orkney’s history, the true face of the Orkney Fable’. GMB says that, while most writers about Orkney have been practical in their approach, he is doing something different. He writes:

This book takes its stand with the poets. I am interested in the facts only as they tend and gesture, like birds and grass and waves, ‘in the gale of life’. I have tried to make a kind of profile of Orkney, which is not a likeness of today only; it has been worked on for many centuries ... The facts of our history – what Edwin Muir called The Story – are there to read and study: the Neolithic folk, Picts, Norsemen, Scots, the slow struggle of the people towards independence and prosperity. But it often seems that history is only the forging, out of terrible and kindly fires, of a mask. The mask is undeniably there; it is impressive and reassuring, it flatters us to wear it.

Underneath, the true face dreams on, and The Table is repeated over and over again.

The true face dreams on: what does he mean by that? What is Orkney’s flattering mask all about? What is it that is being covered up?

George Mackay Brown’s tale begins with the physical approach to the Orkney Islands from the port of Scrabster on the rugged coast of northern Scotland.

There is the Pentland Firth to cross, first of all. This is looked on as a fearsome experience by some people who are visiting Orkney for the first time. In Scrabster, they sip brandy or swallow anti-seasickness tablets. The crossing can be rough enough – the Atlantic and the North Sea invading each other’s domain twice a day, raging back and fore through the narrow channels and sounds, an external wrestle; and the fickle wind can be foe or ally. But as often as not the Firth is calm; the St Ola dips through a gentle swell between Scrabster and Stromness. George Bernard Shaw visited Orkney once in the 1920s. He was impressed by that mighty outpouring of waters. There was power enough in the Pentland Firth, he wrote, to provide all Europe with electrical power. A pair of millstones at the bottom of the Firth grind the salt that makes the sea the way it is; the maelstrom called The Swelkie whirls above the place where the querns forever turn (or so the old people believed).

The cliffs of western Hoy rise up, pillars of flame. This coast has some of the tallest cliff-faces in the world, St John’s Head, The Kame, The Berry, Rora Head: magnificent presences. There among them, standing out to sea a little, is the rock-stack called The Old Man of Hoy ...An imposing presence; but from some aspects the Old Man looks comical, with his top hat and frock coat, like a Victorian gentleman, the last of the lairds turning his back on Orkney.

I look over to Hoy again. I’d never thought of the familiar Old Man as a Victorian laird. Good writing makes you look at the world differently. Good whisky sometimes does that too. (George Mackay Brown knew all about that.) Another sip.

The author is awed by the sense of history in the islands. The first Orkney peoples, he says, can only be seen darkly, a few figures on a moorland against the sky, between twilight and night. Hardly a thing is known about Orkney’s first inhabitants, says GMB, apart from the monuments they left behind them: the huge stones of Maeshowe and Brodgar, and the pastoral village of Skara Brae in the west. These sites are older than the pyramids of Egypt. The Orkney imagination, the writer says, is haunted by time.

History can tell us nothing; not a word or a name comes out of the silence – there are a few ambiguous scratches on a wall at Skara Brae. We wander clueless through immense tracts of time. Imagination stirs about a scattered string of bone beads found in Skara Brae. Did the girl have no time for adornment when a westerly gale choked the doors with sand; or did sea raiders tear them from her neck?

One of George Mackay Brown’s great themes – what he sees as the modern worship of progress and technology – soon emerges.

There is a new religion, Progress, in which we all devoutly believe, and it is concerned only with material things in the present and in a vague golden-handed future. It is a rootless utilitarian faith, without beauty or mystery; a kind of blind unquestioning belief that men and their material circumstances will go on improving until some kind of nirvana is reached and everyone will be rich, free, fulfilled, well-informed, masterful. Why should Orcadians not believe in Progress? – everything seems to insist on it. The stone cots of their grandfathers, where men and animals bedded down under the same roof, are strewn all about the parishes and islands, beside the smart modern houses of wood and concrete. The horses are banished, but then tractors and lorries are much less trouble, much more efficient. There is no real poverty any more; tramps and vagrants and tinkers are exiled with the horses. (Only the very backward farmers nowadays don’t have a car.) Progress is a goddess who, up to now, has looked after her children well. The sky is scored with television aerials. There is a family-planning centre. There are drifts of books and oil paintings and gramophone records everywhere. And still the shower of good things intensifies.

It is difficult to picture this goddess of plenty other than as some huge computer-figure, that will give our children what they desire easily and endlessly – food, sex, excitement – a synthetic goddess, vast and bland as Buddha, but without love or tenderness or compassion; activated only by a mania to create secondary objects that become increasingly shinier and shoddier and uglier

I feel that this religion is in great part a delusion, and will peter out in the marsh.

Hmm. I need to think some more about this. Technology has given us this CD player, this music, this whisky and this house, so well insulated against the gales and driving rain. Why is this progress, or even ‘Progress’, so bad? The lament goes on.

A community like Orkney dare not cut itself off from its roots and sources ... The goddess exacts tribute in subtle ways. For example: there is a kind of shame nowadays in using the old words. And Orkney, only a generation ago, abounded in characters, surrealist folk walked our roads and streets, Dickensian figures with earth and salt in them. Nowadays there is a distinct trimming and levelling-up; a man is ashamed to be different from his neighbour. The old stories have vanished with the horses and the tinkers; instead of the yarn at the pier-head or the pub, you are increasingly troubled with bores who insist on telling you what they think ... and you may be sure it isn’t their own thought-out opinion at all, but some discussion they have heard on TV the night before, or read in the Daily Express – and now, having chewed it over, they must regurgitate it for you.

Word and name are drained of their ancient power. Number, statistic, graph are everything.

We have come a long way in a few years.

Stories and language are this man’s passion. His writing is elegant – but is he not mentally and emotionally embedded in a mythical ‘golden age'? Or is he a prophet who is naming the losses of a community captivated by the sparkling gew-gaws tumbling from a technological cornucopia?

When he refers to ‘a community like Orkney’, George Mackay Brown knows what he is talking about. He spent almost all of his life in his native Stromness; he was shaped by Orkney, and was sometimes in conflict with it. Having lived in these islands for two decades, I can testify to the strength of this small community, in which the lines between private and public are blurred. The binoculars that sit on many windowsills are used not only for watching wildlife. In the main, though, they are instruments of curiosity rather than malice. At least, I think so.

Having been brought up in a strong, tight-knit mining community in west Fife, I know from experience that small places can feel claustrophobic; but, when you have children or are more than middle-aged, the strength of townships in which people keep an eye on their neighbours is more reassuring than threatening.

On a recent visit to my home town of Cowdenbeath to watch a football match, I went into a shop to buy some sustenance. The woman behind the counter looked at me, then said quietly: ‘You must be a Ferguson’. She studied me further. ‘You must be Ronald.’ I had not been in that shop for at least three decades. She ‘kent my farther’ – and I was glad. When I was a teenager, I opted cheerfully for the beckoning anonymity of the big city of Edinburgh; nearly half a century on, I was happy to chat to a knowledgeable and friendly woman about the mine disasters and heroic acts of rescue I had recorded when working as a cub reporter in the town.

Stories passed down the generations constitute the glue that binds communities. GMB is strongly aware of this: It is a word, blossoming as legend, poem, story, secret, that holds a community together and gives a meaning to its life. If words become functional ciphers merely, as they are in white papers and business letters, they lose their ‘ghosts’ – the rich aura that has grown about them from the start, and grows infinitesimally richer every time they are spoken. They lose more; they lose their ‘kernel’, the sheer sensuous relish of utterance. Poetry is a fine interpretation of ghost and kernel. We are in danger of contenting ourselves with husks ...I will attempt to get back to the roots and sources of the community, from which it draws its continuing life, from which it cuts itself off at its peril. With the help of the old stories, the old scrolls, the gathered legends, and the individual earth-rooted imagination, I will try to discover a line or two of the ancient life-giving heraldry.

George Mackay Brown is an exceptional wordsmith who understands himself as having a spiritual, almost monk-like vocation; but is this type of calling past its philosophically credible sell-by date for people living in the twenty-first century? Is he, as some critics have suggested, a provincial writer with a small-town mentality?

Questions such as these nag at me as I think about this complex, gifted writer who rarely left the archipelago of his birth, yet who has a growing international reputation.

If I want to find answers to at least some of these questions, a disciplined physical and spiritual journey must be undertaken. In order to provide a personal context for this quest – is it a calling, or just the Highland Park speaking? – I must digress in order to talk about a different journey.

It is 9 December 1990. We – my wife, two of our three children, one creaking Labrador, one hamster and I – have left our friends’ house in the Scottish Highlands, not much after 6am, in a virtual white-out. Farther up the road, a removal van, packed with our worldly goods from Glasgow, is ploughing through the snows. The drive plays havoc with the nerve-endings – but, after an eternity in a steamed-up Ford Escort, we catch our first sight of the harbour of Scrabster. O blessed Scrabster!

Soon we are crossing the Pentland Firth, notorious for the turbulence of its two colliding tides. Today, though, the sea is calm. About an hour later, we can see the faint outlines of Orkney. When we roll off the ferry at Stromness pier, we are rewarded with a breathtaking sight: the ground is white with sparkling frost, the sky a mixture of blues and pink. In the kitchen of a little house in Stromness, a lantern-jawed man has set aside the lined notebook in which he has been writing neatly with a ballpoint pen.

We turn to the right, towards Orkney’s capital, Kirkwall. When we reach the St Magnus Cathedral manse, ready for the unloading of our furniture, a welcoming fire is blazing in the hearth. We are home, even though we have never before lived in Orkney.

At the watchnight service in a packed St Magnus Cathedral, I hardly know anyone. Looking out from the pulpit, I see about a thousand people, many of them standing. Skulls and skeletons along the aisles of the ancient kirk speak of mortality. Having myself survived a serious scare about the state of my lungs, I can do without these spectral whispers.

I welcome people to the cathedral. It seems almost impertinent to do so, because I've only been in Orkney for five minutes, and this is their cathedral. The beautiful, yet simple, red-and-yellow sandstone Viking temple belongs not to any one Church but to the people of Orkney. When I think of the long line of bishops and priests and ministers since the cathedral’s founding in 1137,1 am aware that my time here, however short or long, will be a minuscule part of that historical record.

Believers, semi-detached believers and non-believers have spilled from homes and pubs and parties. Some will have shown up to check out the new St Magnus minister. At least, that’s their cover story. Others who hang on to the ledges of faith by their fingernails may be looking for a word of reassurance. There will be those who, under the cover of edgy jocularity secretly hope that something of the eternal will slip in under their defences. In the safety of the crowd, they will mouth half-remembered Christmas songs. As whisky fumes and yearning fill the air, memories will come flooding back – of more innocent times, of school Nativity plays and carol services, of punches traded with siblings as presents were unwrapped, of family life grievously fractured by divorce or bereavement. Tears will roll down cheeks. At midnight, as the lights of the cathedral are dimmed and the choir sings Still the Night, some may unexpectedly experience a striking of the hour of grace, a Word-become-flesh in the mysterious cradle of the heart.

Having been a community minister in the huge Glasgow housing scheme of Easterhouse, and leader of the ecumenical Iona Community, I am nervous about my first attempt at parish ministry. I wonder about the expectations of this big congregation, and whether I will be able to meet them; indeed, whether I should try to meet them. Will the hushed congregation want me to believe for them? Can I even believe for myself? Probably, yes, with a bit of help from the poets. Maybe even from the bard of Stromness himself. Perhaps with a temporary suspension of doubt, many of us will be captivated this night by the fabulous language of Bethlehem, about a peasant girl, a hidden Madonna, pregnant with hope, in a cattle shed because there is no room at the inn. As the man from Stromness has written in his notebook:

From a pub door here and there

A random ribald song

Leaks on the air.

The innkeeper over the fire

Counting his haul, hears not

The cry from the byre.

But rummaging in the till

Grumbles at the drunken shepherds

Dancing on the hill;

And wonders, pale and grudging,

If the strange pair below

Will pay their lodging.

My first encounter with George Mackay Brown came during a family holiday in Orkney in 1986. A friend of mine, Rev. Dr James Maitland, was in Orkney on holiday with his wife, Elizabeth. When I met them in a street in Stromness, Jim revealed that he was a good friend of the poet, whose work I admired. ‘Would you like to meet George?’ he asked me. Would I not?

My young family and I spent a pleasant evening with George in his home at Mayburn Court, Stromness. I was surprised to meet a man who was nearly six feet in height. He was thin and angular, with a jutting chin that seemed to have a life of its own. His pale blue eyes and gaunt face gave him a slightly fey look, the more so because his furrowed brow was topped by abundant whitening hair. There was something vaguely troubled about him, though he had a gentle charm. His voice was soft and lilting; I took his accent to be Orcadian, but I was to learn that he sounded exactly like his Sutherland mother, whose first language was Gaelic. I noticed that he said my name a lot, and that he would use my name at the ends of sentences. I hope you've had a nice day, Ron. Have you been in Orkney before, Ron? How do you like Glasgow, Ron?

I tried to engage him in discussion about literature, but what this giant of Scottish letters wanted to talk to me about was football. Oh yes, and also about the island of Iona, where we had lived as a family. He was curious about the history of Columba’s isle and the rebuilding of its Benedictine abbey. He signed books for us.

A few weeks later, a letter arrived at our home in Glasgow. The envelope was small, and the script on it was precise. It transpired that Jim Maitland had given GMB a copy of Grace and Dysentery, a small book I had written about a visit to India. In his letter, George said some nice things about it. I was impressed – and flattered – that such a highly regarded author had taken the trouble to encourage a rookie writer whom he barely knew. I also noted that he had remembered the unusual, Spanish, spelling of the name of my wife, Cristine. Kindness and attention to detail, I was to learn, were typical of the man. Ί enjoyed our meeting, too, very much/ he wrote, ‘and to speak to Cristine and the lovely children. I would love to go to Iona sometime – I feel it’s a kind of gap, never having been there. But at a comparatively quiet time, when there aren’t too many tourists.’ We stayed in touch.

Without those serendipitous meetings with Jim and Elizabeth Maitland and George Mackay Brown, I would not have become minister of St Magnus Cathedral. When the Orcadian newspaper announced news of my appointment in November 1990, the first letter I received welcoming me and my family to St Magnus Cathedral and to Orkney was from George Mackay Brown. ‘May it be a long and happy ministry for you/ he wrote. ‘I’m sure all the family will settle down well in Orkney. It is a good place to live in, weather and all/ And then he added: ‘Good for writing too.’ From then on, this Roman Catholic writer was a supportive and encouraging friend to this Protestant minister of Kirkwall’s cathedral, the prayer-saturated walls of which had resounded down the centuries to the sounds of Norwegian hammers, Catholic chants, Episcopal litanies and Presbyterian sermons.

Over the years, I read more of GMB’s work. I went to see him, off and on. When his health worsened, I visited him in the Balfour Hospital in Kirkwall. He came for dinner to the cathedral manse, and spoke calmly to a friend of mine about the prospect of his death.

I wish now that I had asked George more questions about his faith journey. Whether he would have given me any satisfying answers is debatable, though. Even when long-standing friends asked questions which touched on the personal, he employed a repertoire of defences. He would ignore the questions, or lead the discussion in a different direction. More disconcertingly, he would simply start humming as he sat in his rocking chair. Edinburgh’s first Makar (poet laureate), Stewart Conn, who produced some of GMB’s work for radio, told me: ‘Every time I asked him about the meaning of one of his poems, he started either humming the last movement of Beethoven’s Ninth, or reciting Hopkins’ Glory be to God for dappled things! He was incredibly courteous, yet there was this astronaut in a glass case – you couldn’t get in there! He’d just turn into a statue!’

In his extravagantly outrageous novel, Kalooki Nights, Howard Jacobson says of one of his characters, Manny:

He was not a person who responded well to pressure. Demand anything of Manny and he’d hold his breath for half an hour. Try to get his attention and he’d be off down the street, practising his breast-stroke. He knew what he was good at. He understood his own tolerance level. When someone wanted help, he swam away from them.

Substitute ‘asked him a personal question’ for ‘wanted help’, and you've got George.

Some of the things I wanted to know are found in four indispensable books – Maggie Fergusson’s beautifully understated biography, George Mackay Brown: The Life; Rowena Murray and Brian Murray’s superb introduction to GMB’s work, Interrogation of Silence; a collection called George Mackay Brown: Northern Lights, a poet’s sources, edited by Archie Bevan and Brian Murray; and, of course, GMB’s autobiography, For the Islands I Sing.

Questions remain. How much of an intellectual struggle did he have to find faith? Did he have times of agnosticism, of dark nights of the soul? Did he observe his religion rigorously at a personal level? Why did he reveal his severe and sometimes suicidal depressions to people who lived far away, yet conceal the depths of his despair from those closest to him in Stromness? Did he, like Orkney, wear a mask?

This book is a personal exploration. Its subject matter is George Mackay Brown’s spiritual journey. I am well aware that the concept of ‘spirituality’ is difficult to pin down. It would be possible – with a great deal of effort – to produce more and more nuanced definitions without ending up much wiser.

Let me offer a rough description that will allow us to get to work. ‘Spirituality’ encompasses wide-ranging attitudes and practices which focus on the search for meaning in human lives, particularly in terms of relationships, values and the arts. It is concerned with quality of life, especially in areas that have not been closed off by technology and science. Spirituality may, or may not, be open to ideas of transcendence and to the possibility of the divine. ‘Religion’, on the other hand, is typically associated with the doctrines and practices of institutionalised faith.

I would not go to the stake for this shorthand account; clearly, there is overlap between ‘spirituality’ and ‘religion’. Spirituality may include religion; that is to say, one may express one’s spirituality by means of specifically religious commitments and practices. There is a need for a richer, more limpid and more accessible language that will enable humans to talk with greater precision about experiences, feelings and connections which do not fit easily into the categories of scientific discourse or of organised religion.

When I first embarked on this project, my intention was to look mainly at George Mackay Brown’s movement from Presbyterianism to Roman Catholicism, and at how he expressed his convictions and feelings in his written work. The original working title was Transfigured by Ceremony. However, as the quest developed, I grew to realise more fully the extent of his (sometimes dark) struggles.

When I first got to know George, he struck me as being, for the most part, serene. I was later made aware of the less secure aspects of his faith and life through his own memoir, published after his death, and through Maggie Fergusson’s biography. As I looked into existing and new sources and talked to a variety of people, what I was unprepared for was the extent and relentlessness of the inner turmoil despite which – or out of which – his achievements were forged.

The spiritual territory traversed so distinctively by George Mackay Brown is of considerable significance. The examination of a writer’s spiritual journey cannot be undertaken by separating the life from the work; therefore, as well as citing some key written passages and letters, I will look at GMB’s personal struggles, relationships, change of religious allegiance, sense of vocation and life decisions.

Like many readers, I am curious about the lives of writers whose work I particularly admire; but I am emphatically not arguing that in order to understand a text, one has to know all about the life of the writer. A text is a text is a text. This is not a book of literary criticism – there are others more qualified than I am to undertake such a task – though I will offer personal commentaries on particular pieces of writing.

In this book, attention will be paid to George’s relationship with his fiancee, Stella Cartwright, in much more detail than has been possible up until now, incorporating extensive – and so far unpublished – excerpts from their correspondence. This raises troubling questions about intrusion into privacy; I will seek to address these in the book.

The new material includes conversations with an Orcadian woman who shared a flat with Stella Cartwright, and with a Glasgow-based professor who was a self-confessed George Mackay Brown ‘groupie’ at the age of 17. The latter’s area of professional expertise – the relationship between alcohol and depression – makes her contribution all the more significant.

The luminous beauty and craftsmanship of GMB’s writing will be set alongside the darker elements of his life; and, in conversations with Scottish writers and artists, the relationship between suffering and creativity will be explored. Hence the title, George Mackay Brown: The Wound and the Gift.

This book, then, is part biography, part memoir, part personal quest, part reflection, part conversation. It is about spirituality, institutional religion – particularly Roman Catholicism and Presbyterianism – sex (and no-sex), art, John Knox, poetry, relationships, alcohol, creativity, madness, storytelling and unlived life. It also includes a look at GMB’s writing as a spiritual resource for people from different faith traditions and none. I will seek to weave all of the strands together in what is intended as a unique, personal and occasionally idiosyncratic approach to George Mackay Brown’s life and work.

The extent of GMB’s prolific writings in the fields of journalism, short stories, poetry, drama and novels is so vast that only a small percentage of the total material can be discussed. Since part of my motivation in writing this book is to draw the attention of readers – particularly those who know little of his work – to the quality of GMB’s writing, his written material is highlighted on the page by being quoted in italics. Material from interviews and letters appears in quotation marks.

Following on Maggie Fergusson’s 2006 biography, new material in the form of letters and other sources is included in this study. I have interviewed a considerable number of people, all of whom have furnished new and sometimes startling insights into the life and work of George Mackay Brown. Almost everybody with whom I spoke said: ‘You must talk to so-and-so’. I would have loved to follow their advice in every case. There comes a time, though, when you have to say that enough is enough – even when you know that enough isn’t enough – and write the book. I farmed out the developing manuscript to a panel of readers, representing a variety of disciplines and interests; this, in turn, engendered even more dialogues, insights and anecdotes.

I cannot emphasise enough the importance of all these conversations to this project. They have been enlivening, challenging and influential. I regard this book as a form of conversation with GMB and with the reader; like George, I believe that writing is a communal experience. Much of what I have learned from teachers, friends, books, films, radio and television over the years remains embedded in my brain and psyche, long after the names of the contributors have disappeared from the conscious domain. Like all human beings, I am indebted, even though I am not always sure to whom. I am deeply distrustful of all rhetoric by and about ‘self-made’ people.

While this volume is grounded in detailed research and is intended as a contribution to GMB studies, I want it to have an appeal well beyond the academy. In the interests of accessibility and flow, I have only referenced key written sources; and these references are to be found at the back of the book. The conversations which run through the text are recorded interviews conducted by myself, and are not referenced.

My intention is to do more than lay out descriptive territory. I will raise some existential questions arising out of reflection on the faith, struggles, life and output of this remarkable, complex man.

The fact that the book is intended for a diverse readership, and that it crosses genres, presents particular challenges for the writer. This is highlighted by the question of what to call the subject of the book. If this were simply an academic book, the answer would be straightforward: call him ‘Brown’. In several contexts, though, ‘Brown’ looks cold on the page. The general resolution I have adopted has been to call the subject ‘George’ in a personal context, and ‘GMB’ – a commonly used way of referring to George Mackay Brown – when discussing his work as a writer. Despite being a Kierkegaard-loving Protestant with Calvin’s pale ghost lurking in my mental attic, I have declined to worry myself sick about consistency of usage.

Because of the personal nature of the exploration, I have used the pronoun Ύ more often than a well-brought-up Presbyterian normally would. The usual convention of saying ‘in the view of the author’ does not work for a book whose subject is an author.

Before this conversational journey gets under way, I need to disclose two predispositions, so that the reader can deduct points for bias. First, as I have made clear already, I was a friend and admirer of George Mackay Brown, both as an artist and as a person; admiration, though, need not entail the dulling of one’s critical faculties. Second, I was reared in the Presbyterian traditions of the Church of Scotland – and, though I am not uncritical of these traditions, my approach to GMB is informed by them, possibly even in ways of which I am not conscious.

The book is in four parts. Part 1, ‘The Horizontal Bard’, seeks to establish George Mackay Brown in his time and place and to locate the beginnings and early development of his spiritual quest. After that, more attention is paid to issues and themes. Part 2, ‘Transfigured by Ceremony’, looks at GMB’s spirituality largely through his writings. Part 3, ‘The Wound and the Gift’, turns the spotlight on his personal conflicts and on the relationship between art and suffering. Fart 4, ‘Finished Fragrance’, focuses on George Mackay Brown’s ageing, death and remarkable funeral. An outline GMB timeline, to which the reader can refer with ease, is provided.

In his little house in Stromness, like a monk in a cell, George Mackay Brown was refining and refining again words to express the mysteries of life and faith. What drove him as a writer was a mission to purify the sources, to unblock the wells that poison the tribe. He also wanted to demystify the arts, and to repair what he saw as a fatal cleavage between the arts and the trades. For the past two centuries or so, a kind of snobbery has invested all the arts. The patrons of art and the connoisseurs are more responsible for this unhealthy attitude than the writers and composers and painters themselves ... Why should a painting on the wall be considered superior to the work of joiner or mason? What makes a poem better than a loaf of bread or a jug of ale? Nothing at all.

The task of the artist, he said, is to keep in repair the sacred web of creation – that cosmic harmony of God and beast and man and star and planet – in the name of humanity, against those who in the name of humanity are mindlessly and systematically destroying it. This ambitious vocation, a form of co-creation with God, was exercised by an island writer who described himself as ‘a word-voyager who rarely voyages far from his rocking chair’. It is time now to walk around that rocking chair.

On the decking, the June air is still balmy, but it is getting darker now. I must put down my glass and pick up my pen.

PART 1

The

Horizontal Bard

CHAPTER 1

Sweet

Georgie Broon

Wearing pyjamas and dressing gown, Georgie Broon – as he is known in Stromness – lies on top of his bed, looking at the ceiling, wondering what will become of him.

He is a serious man. Before his life changed for the worse, his adolescent self used to mooch around the tombstones of Warbeth cemetery on the edge of Stromness, reading the inscriptions. He wishes he were free to do that now.

Warbeth is one of his favourite haunts. Down near the sea, with its clashing tides and the cliffs of Hoy as dramatic backdrop, it has an elemental feel. He runs yet again in his mind the tape loop of his now-dead father saying to him: ‘There are more folk lying dead in this kirkyard than there are living nowadays in the whole of Orkney’.

He pictures his father. He misses him.

In his reverie, the image of one particular tombstone that has held his imagination in thrall since he frst stumbled upon it comes again unbidden. It is the memorial of a girl, Ellen Dunne, who died in 1858 at the age of 17. He can see the words, which both draw him and appal him, on the ceiling. He knows them off by heart. He vocalises them silently.

Stop for a moment, youthful passer-by,

On this memento cast a serious eye.

Though now the rose of health may fush your cheek,

And youthful vigour, health and strength bespeak,

Yet think how soon, like me, you may become,

In youth’s fair prime, the tenant of the tomb.

At a time when other young men were playing football or seeking to persuade comely Orcadian lassies that they might be more comfortable with their clothes off, George had been worrying about human transience and death. He would write a beautiful poem, ‘Kirkyard’, on this subject:

A silent conquering army,

The island dead,

Column on column, each with a stone banner

Raised over his head.

A green wave full of fish

Drifted far

In wavering westering ebb-drawn shoals beyond

Sinker or star.

A labyrinth of celled

And waxen pain.

Yet I come to the honeycomb often, to sip the finished

Fragrance of men.

Now he is in a sanatorium in Kirkwall, for the second time, suffering from tuberculosis. His exquisitely painful reverie is interrupted by a familiar, irritating sound: the other patient in this small ward has switched on his radio. George can hardly bear it. He sighs. He wants silence.

He also wants to hit this man. Why can people not tolerate quietness? Why do they have to fill up every bloody minute with loud noise? He must speak to the superintendent to complain.

Some of the patients get on his nerves. not long ago, a young man had put snow down his back. George had punched him with a ferocity that surprised both the other man and himself.

His violent thoughts trouble him. They seem to come out of nowhere.

He picks up a book, and tries to read, but he cannot concentrate. Mercifully, his room-mate switches the radio off and goes out for a walk. He is hardly out of the door when George rolls off his bed, lifts the offending radio and beats it violently against the wall.

Tuberculosis had first been diagnosed in 1941, when George Brown presented himself at Kirkwall’s hospital for a medical examination after receiving his call-up papers for military service. The army doctor sent him straight to Eastbank Sanatorium.

There had been hints and shadows. As well as being uncomfortably close to the lit-up sights and sounds of random death – flying shrapnel at a hamlet near Stromness had caused the first civilian death of the Second World War – George had also inhabited a personal war zone. In the aftermath of a debilitating bout of measles, his battle was fought in chest and heart and mind. The weakness in his lungs had been compounded by his cigarette-smoking. He often found himself gasping for breath.

Now, lying on his bed, George had time to reflect on his life so far.

The youngest of five surviving children, he was born on 17 October 1921 in Stromness, with the sea lapping against a pier outside the door of the family house. The town, with its twisting, narrow main street and its tiered closes – made even more romantic by names like Khyber Pass and Franklin Place – grew up, as the writer known as George Mackay Brown was to say, ‘like a salt-sea ballad in stone’.

Stromness’s prosperity had grown during the expansion of trade in the eighteenth century. The town’s rise to prominence as the principal recruiting ground for the Hudson’s Bay Company in Canada in the nineteenth century increased its importance. The residents of Stromness had become used to the sight of visiting mariners and – during the First World War – soldiers in uniform making their noisy and unsteady way through the town. By the 1920s, however, Stromness was less prosperous and certainly less boisterous, especially after all its thirty-eight taverns were closed by a public vote. Describing the Stromness of his birth as ‘old and gray and full of sleep’, George would later observe: ‘It was a very depressed local community that I was born into’.

Young Georgie grew up in a world of stories. He heard tales about the notorious Stromness-born pirate John Gow, and about the doings of Orcadian midshipman George Stewart, who sailed on the Bounty and joined the mutineers. He also learned about the adventures of John Rae, who was blacklisted by the London naval establishment when he came back from Canada with strange stories about the fate of the expedition to find the northwest Passage, led by Sir John Franklin. Well-founded reports by the highly regarded Orcadian explorer, suggesting that the starving Franklin crew had engaged in cannibalism, caused outrage in London. Lady Franklin and novelist Charles Dickens made sure that Rae would receive none of the awards that his pioneering work merited.

Tales about press-gangs, shipwreck and smuggling were part of a communal folklore which was a wonderful resource for a would-be poet and novelist.

As a boy, Georgie had what he remembered as a secure childhood in Stromness. As a child between the ages of fve and eight, he would say, Stromness seemed to be like Bethlehem, where a child might not be surprised to meet angels, shepherds or kings on a winter night. He would later mythologise Stromness, using its norse name of Hamnavoe – ‘haven inside the bay’ – to situate it as a fabulous place in a fabled time.

Contemporaries said that he had inherited the sweetness of his naturally cheerful Gaelic-speaking mother, Mhairi Sheena Mackay. Brought up in the strict Calvinist ethos of the Free Presbyterian Church, Mary Jane – as she was known in Stromness – had moved to Orkney from Strathy in Sutherland at the age of 16 to take up work in the Stromness Hotel.

George was a confident and aggressive footballer; but there were shadows over his childhood. At the age of four or five, he woke up one night and discovered that his mother wasn’t there. He later described his fear: Probably she was out visiting a neighbour, or at a concert or kirk soiree. I was overwhelmed by a feeling of desolation and bereavement: she was gone, she would never never come back again … I made the night hideous with my keening. On another occasion, he was sitting on the doorstep at home when a tinker woman came to the door