Short stories and poems can change lives; if they’re good, they hit you between the eyes, and you remember them for years, perhaps even decades.
In a far distant foreign country (Kirkintilloch High School, Scotland, c.1974), my class was introduced to a short story called “The Wireless Set.” Just before the Second World War, Howie, a sailor, returns on leave to his parents on Orkney. We thought it must be horrible living somewhere so far from Glasgow. He has brought them a present – a wireless set. Who wouldn’t have wanted one of those, particularly in the 1940s, when there was so much less home entertainment than in the 1970s (to say nothing of the 2020s…)? But the old couple are suspicious of the set; BBC forecasts are less reliable than local weather lore, and then there is the poisonous propaganda of Lord Haw Haw…
Howie is killed at sea and his parents react in the stoic, unemotional way of their place, people, and time – except in how they treat the hated wireless set. The themes of the story stayed in the memory and remain there still: the simple but harsh rhythms of rural island life, rejection of modern technology, celebration of tradition, and of those people who live their lives on the edge. It’s a story I still return to, and it’s a typical example of the prose work of George Mackay Brown, one of Scotland’s greatest writers – but possibly one of its least typical.
GMB (as he’s often referred to as shorthand) was born in Orkney, in the town of Stromness, usually rendered as ‘Hamnavoe’ in his poems and fiction. Only rarely did he stray from Orkney during his lifetime, and never terribly far; when he won a Society of Authors travelling scholarship, he went to Ireland.
Brown’s father, an Orkneyman, doubled as a tailor and postman in Stromness. His mother was from Sutherland on the Scottish mainland, and GMB speculated that his storytelling gift came from this Gaelic side of his heritage. Though he enjoyed writing, he struggled at school. His autobiographical work, “For the Islands I Sing,” is entertainingly forthright in its criticism of the way English language was taught in Scotland at the time. He concluded, ‘I hope that parsing and analysis have long been abandoned in Scottish schools.’ So do I.
GMB was always troubled by bad health. He eventually managed to attend Edinburgh University via Newbattle Abbey College. His funding committed him then to study education at Moray House College, and he found himself teaching in the industrial West Lothian town of Bathgate, ironically having to show pupils how to ‘parse’, chopping up evocative poems as if they were corpses on a slab.
Ill-health came to his rescue again and he began the slow move towards full-time writing. He had met many Scottish literary luminaries in Edinburgh and features in Alexander Moffat’s famous painting “Poets’ Pub” alongside the likes of Hugh MacDiarmid, his fellow Orcadian Edwin Muir, and Norman MacCaig. He settled in his native Stromness and began publishing poetry, short stories, novels, and ephemera for local newspapers. He became a kind of local bard, transplanted from a different century.
Most of his work is set in and around Orkney. The poems and stories capture the beauty and bitterness of the islands and the harsh lives of the crofter-fishermen and their families. The wheel of the seasons is a constant theme, as is the deeper cycle of time, as GMB draws on the Orkneyinga Saga to evoke Orkney’s Viking heritage; medieval monks, Georgian scholars, and Victorian merchants crowd the pages. GMB didn’t much like the modern world, even in the relatively lighter ways it touched Orkney in his lifetime, and he makes this clear in much of his writing.
Whatever medium he wrote in, whether it was a major poem or a column for the local newspaper, GMB wrote beautifully, but he was not one of those writers who raided the dictionary for big words, fine words, obscure words, wow words. In The Author, contemporary writer Anne Rooney wrote, ‘It’s not clever to use an unusual word. It’s clever to use ordinary words in a new way.’ That was GMB’s gift. He drew on a simple, everyday vocabulary but managed to string the words together so that they rang and chimed, glittered and gleamed. He was like a magician gathering pebbles from an Orkney beach and forming them into gorgeous jewellery. To change the metaphor a bit, Brown took plain words and formed a poem or short story from them, effecting a kind of literary transubstantiation. This is an appropriate image given how his ever-increasing Catholic faith influenced GMB’s prose.
GMB, rarely for a Scottish writer, was widely hymned south of the border; one of my favourite TV writers, the late and great Alan Plater, was a great advocate for GMB, and even adapted his novel “Greenvoe” for the stage. However, if the largely secularist London literary set loved Brown’s work, his Catholicism was a puzzle, perhaps an irritation. He often flyted in his writing with the Protestant tradition and how it had affected his native islands, though he mellowed on this theme over time, and, in any case, he had a number of friends who came from that tradition. Robert Rendell was an Orkney poet, much lesser known, whose work GMB championed, and Rendell was a member of a Brethren ‘Gospel Hall’ in Orkney. GMB did not often visit England, but Maggie Fergusson’s excellent biography includes an entertaining account of his whirlwind trip to Oxford, which he mostly spent searching for places associated with Gerard Manley Hopkins, one of his poetic heroes.
I have too many favourite GMB poems and stories to even begin to recommend places to start, so I’ll just mention one short story, one of his shortest. “Christmas Visitors” was collected in the 1989 short story collection “The Masked Fisherman.” A fisherman’s widow accepts her Christmas visitors and their gifts and reflects on her hard life and early loss of her husband. But all along she is waiting for her annual visit from her late husband’s watery ghost. Will he come this year?
**Why are you so long in coming this year, Samuel? In the early years, the first grey light was hardly in the window, when you were there, pulsing from the vividness and pain of the sea!**
It’s a heart-breaking story, beautifully written, a lifetime and a way of life evoked in just a few hundred words. If you don’t shed a tear by the end, you are barely human, and I have no wish to know you.
There’s never been a better time to discover or rediscover GMB’s poems and prose. Happily, almost everything he published is still in print, and a new edition of his classic nonfiction collection “An Orkney Tapestry” from 1969 was recently issued. And quite right too. In my personal pantheon of 20th-century Scottish writers, GMB is right at the top alongside Muriel Spark. No one else is up there with them.
New to GMB? Go and find him out.
