Book Review

Orkney’s convivial hermit poet

George Mackay Brown: a life

In this loving but clear-eyed biography of the Orcadian poet and storyteller, Maggie Fergusson dispels two myths about him. He was not, as he was generally thought to be, the self-appointed Hermit of Stromness, only unwillingly stirring from his native island. In fact, and his letters show this, whenever he did move from his little island he was markedly reluctant to return. The reasons for this are many, the most important being poverty, a desperate uncertainty as to how he could make a living there. What kept him in Orkney – apart from an almost neurotic shyness and social uncertainty – were prolonged bouts of enfeebling ill-health; because of tuberculosis he was sometimes confined to hospital for a year at a time. Only quite late in life did he decide to make Orkney his subject, because it was the only subject he had. With admirable doggedness, despite illness and the siren attractions of whisky – “the smiler with the knife” – he stuck to it for the rest of his days.

The second myth, or mystification, he was responsible for himself. In his autobiography For the Islands I Sing, after (correctly) asserting that writers’ lives are not more interesting than the lives of plumbers, he writes: “One of the great experiences of most lives never happened to me. I never fell in love with anybody, and no woman ever fell in love with me.” Maggie Fergusson discovered this to be deliberately misleading, and by a sad chance. Mackay Brown had agreed for her to write his biography, not to be published in his lifetime. They had met and, after his initial silences, they had liked each other. It was agreed that they would spend May 1996 in Stromness discussing his past. In April of that year George, aged 75, suddenly died, and Fergusson had to make do with the archive in Edinburgh. There the librarian presented her with a sealed package, “containing hundreds of letters from George Mackay Brown to Stella Cartwright, the woman known in Edinburgh in the Sixties as ‘the Rose Street Muse’.” Rose Street, in Edinburgh, lined with pubs, was where the poets of Scotland forgathered and Stella, young, trusting and a dedicated drinker, was indeed a Muse; half the poets in Scotland were in love with her, sometimes it seems that they all were; and she loved George Mackay Brown.

What biographer’s heart would not have leaped at such a trove, however guiltily? “I felt sure”, says Fergusson, “that had he lived, George would never have spoken to me about Stella.” Yet she found hints that George had wanted his feelings some day to come to light. In his sixties, when too much trust and too much drink had made a tragic mess of Stella’s life, he wrote to her, “Some day we must print all Stella’s Birthday Poems in a little book and launch it upon the world. Everyone will say, ‘They Liked Each Other More Than A Little’ ... They sure did.”

Stella was indeed a generous star, and there were others: Edwin Muir and his wife, Willa, for instance, endlessly supportive and encouraging; so was Norah Smallwood, his first publisher. There was a galaxy overlooking the Recluse of Orkney: it is a delight to read how many emerge so well from their relationships with him, and how many cared about what they considered good writing. In fact, despite his terrible health, his psychic tremors, what he called his “morbus Orcadensis, a darkening of the mind, a progressive flawing and thickening of the clear lens of the spirit”, one thing that stands out, at least in the literary sense, is his good luck. Francis Scarfe was perhaps the first stroke of this. George Mackay Brown’s father was the Stromness postman, his mother had been a maid in the local hotel. Before TB struck George, in 1941 when he was 20, he had been (astonishingly, when one thinks of the hairpin figure he later became), a star footballer. In the sanatorium he began to read widely, and when he came out Orkney was awash with soldiers. Francis Scarfe, poet, anthologist, university lecturer, now a soldier, was billeted on the Brown parents. Scarfe discussed poetry with him, they wrote poems together – Scarfe noting Brown’s ability to mix the everyday with the timeless – and, on a wind-up gramophone, Scarfe introduced him to classical music, which left him, George later reported, “overwhelmed”. It is hard to exaggerate how important such a chance contact can be to an unsophisticated young man, who already felt himself an outcast. George thought TB had made him unattractive and unloveable. It may even have affected him sexually, and may have been the reason for the break-up of his engagement to the glowing Stella. This is a matter Fergusson faces up to fairly and squarely.

The next major stroke of luck was Edwin Muir, a fellow-Orcadian, whose poetry George loved and who had become Warden of Newbattle Abbey, near Dalkeith, an “academy of second chance” for older students. The Orkney Director of Adult Education suggested that George apply for a place there, which, surprisingly, he did, aged 30, and was accepted. Later Brown was to describe his time there as the happiest in his life. (He still parcelled up his dirty washing to his mother in Stromness.) He felt the spirit of the Cistercian monks who had been there before the Reformation; he half longed to be such a monk himself and, disliking Presbyterianism, had long felt drawn to the Catholic Church. Perversely, it was Lytton Strachey’s sneering attack on Catholicism in Eminent Victorians that had most convinced him: he felt that an institution which inspired such scorn, and had mysteriously survived for so long, must have something going for it.

Then came another bout of TB, followed by Edinburgh University, and in a short while it was back to Orkney, his mother, the dole, and drink. There he was received into the Church, and after one too many a hangover his gentle unrebuking mother cried, “A fine Catholic you are!” – her first reproach. Somehow, in between the dark times and illnesses, the writing continued. His Orkney stories were acclaimed, the bursaries and royalties came in, and, to his horror, he became a celebrity. He felt himself a charlatan, as Thomas Mann said all writers sometimes do. Still he trusted his faith in joy, given glimpses of it sufficient for him. Strangely, this is what I would call an inspiriting story, not a depressing one, despite the lows, the loneliness and the drinking; and it is very well told.

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