Sunset Song

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two Chrisses there were that fought for her heart and tormented her. You hated the land and the coarse speak of the folk and learning was brave and fine one day; and the next you’d waken with the peewits crying across the hills, deep and deep, crying in the heart of you and the smell of the earth in your face, almost you’d cry for that, the beauty of it and the sweetness of the Scottish land and skies.

It’s not your intentions I am questioning, Mike. I am fairly comfortable that you are not longing for Boris to survive to be joint king with Charles. In the second chapter, the twins are still babies. Learning she is pregnant again, Jean falls into despair. Unable to get help from her society, she goes insane, killing the twins and then herself. After the tragedy, Guthrie drops out of school, going to work on her family’s homestead. Her eldest brother, Will, absconds with a girl from Kinraddie, marries her, and moves permanently to Argentina. John is enraged by what he perceives as his son’s betrayal of their family, which causes him to suffer a stroke. For the rest of his life, he is paralyzed. While bedridden, he makes sexual advances to Guthrie, who refuses. As she said: “There is a universality about Sunset Song which strikes a chord in so many different places. Cloud Howe is possibly even darker, though counter-balanced by a searing anger at the social injustice it documents. One of the great socialist novelists.My mother’s people were itinerant (‘migrant’) agricultural servants. My great-grandmother on my grandmother’s side and my grandfather both reminisced about the quarterly hiring fairs, where they would seek a seasonal position in return for a fee in lieu of bed and board or (when they had no dependents) for bed and board itself as part of the farmer’s household. In his last ‘place’, in the early 1960s, when he was in his 70s, my grandfather and grandmother were, in return for service, provided with a single room in a two-roomed cottage, the other room of which served as a tractor shed. In her later years, when she retired from itinerant fieldwork as an outdoor servant and ‘settled down’, my great-grandmother found a more-or-less permanent place as a cheesemaker in a farm dairy, which provided her with a living until she could no longer work, whereupon she became dependent on my grandmother. But the novel is also, and without a hint of sentimentality or ‘kailyardism’, a story of human resilience and spirit.The characters draw strength and perspective from the land, even as it takes its toll on them. The ancient Standing Stones, at which the book’s main character, Chris Guthrie, seeks refuge at times of grief or personal turmoil, help to place the story and its setting in a historical context. And they remind us that the joys and heartbreaks of our own lives are but the blink of an eye in the grand sweep of history. It is a story of both transience and continuity. Why now are we getting an article that reflects badly on Scotland’s now distant past? Can we look forward to further pieces highlighting the treatment of witches, sectarianism or whatever shameful demonstration of the failures of the current people of Scotland.

Because this man Mitchell wrote under the name of Lewis Grassic Gibbon and, in 1932, published his novel Sunset Song, which is now regarded as one of the crown jewels in literary fiction. I think one has also got to be careful about attributing this harshness to Scotland rather than to Victorian and Edwardian generations. My father was not British and although he wrote tenderly of his father after his father’s death in his diary as kind, dedicated and faithful (that’s my memory of my grandfather too) he commented to me once that in the generations before his father (i.e. my father’s grandfather, Stefan, born around 1860) that people of that time seemed to be hard and judgemental. But that ‘nowadays’ (1980s) people were kinder and more inclined to want to assist those who had fallen on hard times rather than judge them as weak, profligate, or failures. It just was common that fathers were feared rather than loved. Fathers were not expected to play a role in child care. But they were also generally respected. Respect was the basis of filial regard rather than love. A good father was one you could look up to and respect. Love did not come into it. It was rare to find examples of loving fathers who actually played with their children and were fun to be around and openly affectionate. It was mostly found amongst fathers who were comfortably off, and had leisure, like Charles Darwin who was broken hearted at the death of his young daughter, or E. C. Milne’s father who had the time to write Winnie the Pooh books to entertain his young son. But even then, Christopher Robin still remembered his father as emotionally remote. The Union is reinforced by the intertribal rivalries of the ‘Four Nations’ in, for example, the fields of sport and culture. In that respect, the UK is a bit like the subdivision of a school into ‘houses’, with each house having its own tribal identity as expressed in its totems and traditions and patriotism. I remember talking to somebody in Greece many years ago and he was raving about the book and I asked him why.There have been several adaptations, including a 1971 television series by BBC Scotland, a 2015 film version, and some stage versions.

He developed – maybe invented is not too strong – a kind of word music of his own, without becoming as iconoclastic as Hugh MacDiarmid, who was writing poetry at the same time, in which he tried to re-invent a whole lowland Scots language that was consciously set up in opposition to English (which I once heard him describe as “a linguistic disease”, though admittedly he was drunk at the time). Grassic Gibbon’s prose, sometimes glorious, is stamped with individuality: he never seems to be imitating anyone else’s style, but going his own way. It was the old Scotland that perished then, and we may believe that never again will the old speech and the old songs, the old curses and the old benedictions, rise but with alien effort to our lips. One side is the intellectual Chris that excels at school, is a voracious reader and wants to be a teacher, the other Chris is her more spiritual, emotional side that is at one with the land and the people of the MearnsAbove all, he portrays the cataclysmic impact of the war on a generation and their expectations. Chris loses her men, she has to cope with rumours of cowardice and desertion, and she sees the territory around her transformed. Life was hard for her – a cruel, incestuous father and a community that was often unforgiving in its iron-clad morality. But she was stirred by the power of the land, and therefore clung with her heart to a past that hadn’t been kind to her. Above all, it was the conflict that brews in Chris, between tradition and modernity, learning and the land, moving away or staying put, that resonated with me.

One of the comments above suggests the important point that what Gibbon was seeing is an east of Scotland more than a west of Scotland feature. While that would be hard to establish objectively, I think the east-west divide has roots deep in the nature of the land. The fact that the east is mostly fertile agricultural soil long made it a magnet for consolidated feudal power, based on coercion and the normalisaiton of violence. That’s not to say that there wasn’t also violence on the west coast. There was plenty, and brutally so like the Eigg massacre. But this was more within an indigenous framework where matters were easier to process locally through time – a case more of lateral violence (equitably, from the side) than vertical violence (from top down, and hard to engage with, thereby the pressure spilling out laterally). In the west, indigenous communities could be more themselves for longer because, until the Cheviot came in and the clearances began, the land was not worth grabbing and settling in for anything much other than subsistence. I suspect that in the west with Iona etc., Christian influence was also stronger, and the bardic tradition that it built on carried a kind of immunity in conflict that gave the culuture richer roots through which reconciliations might be effected. As the heroine Chris Guthrie, one of the strongest female characters in the world of literature, Vivien Heilbron was tough and she was tender; feisty and flirtatious; intelligent and intuitive. Grassic Gibbon – his real name was James Leslie Mitchell – was radical in the way he used language (as he was in politics) to convey feelings in descriptions that read as if they are the inner thoughts of people, rendered with a poetic pulse that he manages to sustain against the danger that the artificiality might get too much. The book’s personality is shaped by that language.That’s a terribly anglocentric thing to say. By virtue of the same argument, anyone who wanted to affirm or deny something written by a Scot who doesn’t write in English, but who writes in Gaelic or Urdu (say), would require literacy in Gaelic or Urdu. Why should English be privileged over any of contemporary Scotland’s other languages? It’s also now a politically dangerous concept. Part of the danger is that we interpret ‘other’ cultures from the point of view of the culture we regard as ‘normal’. Thus, we identify Gaelic or English as the common languages that reinforce ‘the Scots psyche’, even though many Scots nowadays have neither Gaelic nor English as their first language. Likewise, we identify the historical heritage that reinforces ‘the Scots psyche’ with that of Wallace, Knox, and Burns, even though many Scots nowadays don’t have any of that as their cultural inheritance. The danger is that Scots who don’t conform to the ‘normal’ psychological profile or archetype are excluded as ‘Scots’.