A Scots Quair Read online

  A

  SCOTS

  QUAIR

  Sunset Song • Cloud Howe • Grey Granite

  Lewis Grassic Gibbon

  Edited and introduced by Tom Crawford

  Lewis Grassic Gibbon

  SUNSET SONG

  Edited with an introduction by Tom Crawford

  To

  Jean Baxter

  Contents

  Introduction

  Note on the Text

  Map of Kinraddie

  PRELUDE The Unfurrowed Field

  THE SONG

  I Ploughing

  II Drilling

  III Seed-Time

  IV Harvest

  EPILUDE The Unfurrowed Field

  Notes

  Introduction

  To its original readers in 1932 Sunset Song was a book in itself; they could not know it was the first part of a trilogy. Many reacted with disgust to its frank treatment of sex and childbearing, its scorn for the rich and powerful, its sometimes strident anti-clericalism. The Kirriemuir Free Press classed it with those modern works that ‘gloat foully’; the Paisley Express wrote that ‘the unredeemed close-packed filth, meanness, spite, brutality, lying squalor and stupidity wearies us’. Today it is one of Scotland’s favourite books, and a television serialisation has made it even more accessible to thousands of readers.

  When Gibbon, settled in the comfort of Welwyn Garden City, decided to write this novel, all his memories of the crofts on which he had been brought up, of village schools and Mackie Academy, Stonehaven, of farm tasks that had irked him, and of his parents’ back-breaking toil, rushed together in an irresistible flood of memorial reconstruction and creative transformation. Once he had hit on his style the book seemed to write itself: it has been said that it was completed in less than two months. This no doubt accounts for certain geographical inconsistencies, for some errors of historical detail,1 and for occasional lapses into sentimentality. But we can take such blemishes in our stride, as we do similar faults in Scott and Dickens, for the coherence of the whole is overwhelming. Thus the four main parts—‘Ploughing’, ‘Drilling’, ‘Seed-time’ and ‘Harvest’—are an obvious metaphor for the heroine’s development in terms of the natural divisions of the cultivator’s year. A communal climax brings all Kinraddie together at Chris’s wedding, which slides over into the great community festival of bringing in the New Year. The dedication of the memorial in the Epilude is also a ritual occasion where all are present, though this time wholly solemn and ceremonial. The book’s texture, too, is beautifully fitted to its milieu. Folk and national song play an unobtrusive part, as does the imagery of the Song of Solomon, and both strands come together magnificently at the wedding. Beast similes are equally prominent in the style, identifying characters like comparisons in some epic, and male sexuality is often seen in terms of an animal, more specifically of a cat. At moments of stress or heightened emotion the beast similes may expand till they seem to fill the universe: at the whin-burning the tongue of flame is like ‘a red roaring beast’, and Jean Guthrie’s childbed pains were ‘as if [she] were being torn and torn in the teeth of beasts’.

  In this novel Gibbon has created the most convincing female character in Scottish fiction, and so sympathetically, so inwardly, that many of the original readers wondered whether ‘Lewis Grassic Gibbon’ might be the nom-de-plume of a woman author.2 The book celebrates a nation through a region; its farm folk are of the Mearns, but they are also typical Scots: their words are felt as Scots words, not those of a regional dialect. And it belongs, like Ignazio Silone’s Fontamara, Anna Seghers’ The Price of a Head, and John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, to a sub-genre that David Craig has termed ‘the novel of peasant crisis’, in which a class of independent smallholders is threatened with annihilation by war, technology, usury, or landlords’ greed.3

  All these aspects come together in the struggles and responses of the heroine. She belongs to herself both before marriage and after, and there is an untamable, detached, still centre at the heart of her being. True, she tells us there are ‘three Chrisses’—Chris Guthrie, Chris Tavendale, and another that comes to the fore by the end of the novel; and Chris Guthrie is herself split in two, the Scots Chris of her family and forebears, and the more refined ‘English’ Chris created by her schooling. But we can never doubt the permanence of that still centre, and we feel it is obscurely connected with her intimations of the more than merely temporal. We are convinced that no man will ever possess her completely, though her heart is Ewan’s for ever. We share her fears when she is first pregnant and her hatred of her husband before her emotions can come to terms with her new condition: we sympathise with her tortured rejection of the Ewan whom army life has turned into a beast, and with her brief union with the defeated Rob before he goes off to the army. Gibbon counterposes the poetry of Chris’s independence (‘her blood ran so clear and with such a fine, sweet song in her veins she must hold her breath and heark to it’), to the prose of it (‘then he said Chrissie! Tired? and she said Losh, no, and my name’s Chris, Ewan!). He lets us share in her growing individuality as she responds to the men around her. First, there is John Guthrie’s domineering patriarchy: it is only at his graveside that she comes to know the agony of his self- torturing struggle when the ‘world’s fight and the fight of his own flesh grew over-bitter, and poisoned his love to hate’ Second, there is her love for Ewan, with his vulnerable, instinctual maleness (Chris is the stronger character, as well as the more intelligent). Third, there is Long Rob: she is the stronger there too, for she wills their coming together; and fourth, there is her second husband, the Reverend Robert Colquhoun.

  After war has destroyed her first marriage Chris begins to reconstruct her personality by ‘building the walls of a sanity cold and high, locked in from the lie of life’, determining to live in isolation behind them (the still centre is now frozen), till Chae Strachan tells her the true way of Ewan’s death. Chae’s narration, and the ‘supernatural’ intimation of the last paragraphs of ‘Harvest’, enable her to complete her reintegration before she meets Robert. Chris can now share with Robert her new understanding of her separate and succeeding selves (‘Oh, my dear, maybe the second Chris, maybe the third, but Ewan has the first forever’), and the way is open for Chris’s development in the more complex society of the second book in the trilogy, Cloud Howe. That is Robert’s second function in the novel: the first is to supply its emotional conclusion, the noble elegy for dead heroes and a vanished Way of life that he pronounces by the plaque on the Standing Stone, and which modulates so superbly into a national lament, with ‘The Flowers of the Forest’, and its Border words, piped by a Highlander, standing in the North East of Scotland. Yet the power of the book goes beyond question of solely national identity, for as the New York Times reviewer saw so clearly in 1933, Sunset Song ‘may be read with delight the world over.’

  The present text follows that of the first edition of 1932 as scrupulously as possible, except in such matters of typographical styling as the use of roman, not italic, capitals for words emphasised in direct speech. Misprints that were never picked up in later editions have been corrected, and in the interests of clarity I have added marks of punctuation in three places. We have gone back to the original longer paragraphs of 1932, and the map of Kinraddie has been prepared by George Mackie from the one in the first edition.

  If the book is entirely new to you, do not be put off by the glossary at the end. Whether you are Scots or English, American, Australian or Nigerian, speed-reading will sweep you into the action, and if—as Gibbon himself advised in the note prefaced to the American edition of 1933—you start with the Song itself, leaving the Prelude till later, you will soon find yourself effortlessly grasping the main
sense of unfamiliar words from the context, and responding with delight to the heroine’s inner voice and the rhythms of the community’s speech. But do not skip the Prelude altogether: as the New York Times reviewer was acute enough to observe on 2 April 1933, it is ‘a very skilfull piece of literary engineering.’

  It was Gibbon’s strategy in his introductory note (p.xiii) to pretend that he was writing in English, with only a few modifications. But in reality he achieved something rather different. He cloaked the Scots vocabulary in English spelling, writing ‘blether’ as ‘blither’, ‘blaw’ (to boast) as ‘blow’, ‘braw’ (fine, handsome) as ‘brave’, and so on, easing the reading for non-Scots. But for native speakers, the pronunciations and meanings automatically given to words like ‘ongoing’ and ‘childe’ strengthen their conviction that they are participating in a life that is both familiar and national, though gone, perhaps, for ever. Furthermore, different readers respond differently to matters of content as well as of style.4 Those who have read Gibbon’s essays and historical writings may be tempted to see the whole trilogy in terms of the diffusionist philosophy of history, an early twentieth-century version of primitivism with its notion that civilisation is a decline from some Golden Age.5 It is an interpretation which is easily combined with naive allegory, equating Chris Guthrie with the Land itself, and by extension with Scotland as a nation. There are even readings which push allegory to a ludicrous extreme, identifying Long Rob of the Mill with Robert Burns and Ewan’s desertion from the trenches with the Jacobite retreat from Derby in 1745.

  Some readers have been irritated by what they see as Gibbon’s overuse of ‘and’ and ‘you’. But the repeated ‘ands’ are a necessary feature of the style’s extraordinary fluidity and motion: while ‘you’ is perhaps his most effective device for displaying both his entire fictional world and the mind of his heroine. In the Prelude and Epilude the voice is mainly that of a crony narrator generalised from the community, though it sometimes modulates into another through which the author’s more sensitive perceptions can appear, as in the historical sketch of Kinraddie in the Prelude. The crony narrator, the ‘voice of the folk’ as he has been called, often employs ‘you’. Gibbon’s—and the reader’s—most vivid perceptions are mediated through Chris Guthrie’s consciousness, which exists within frames of third-person past-tense narrative and description. We respond with ease as Gibbon’s style shifts so smoothly between Chris’s mind, these frames, and the crony narrator.

  Gibbon often uses ‘you’ in a way quite rare in fiction, which he may even have invented: ‘self-referring you’, as Graham Trengove has called it.6 Self-referring you serves to dramatise a character’s thought; while generic you, equivalent to ‘everybody’, strengthens the impression of universality. By running the two together when dealing with Chris, Gibbon creates the overpowering conviction that even in the most particular and intimate moments of her life, Chris’s experiences are universal. Gibbon’s style is thus one of the great achievements of the trilogy, and should be seen in relation to Scottish forerunners like John Galt, as well as in the context of modernist innovators such as Joyce, Gertrude Stein and William Faulkner.

  Thomas Crawford

  NOTES TO INTRODUCTION

  1. See Ian Carter, ‘Dorset, Kincardine and Peasant Crisis: a comment on David Craig’, Journal of Peasant Studies 2 (4) 1975, pp. 483–8.

  2. I owe this piece of oral history to Dr W. R. Aitken, the distinguished bibliographer.

  3. David Craig, ‘Novels of Peasant Crisis’, Journal of Peasant Studies 2 (1) 1974, pp. 47–68.

  4. The point is discussed more fully in Ian Campbell, Lewis Grassic Gibbon (1985), pp. 53–4.

  5. The best account of Gibbon’s Diffusionism is in Douglas F. Young, Beyond the Sunset (1973), pp. 9–15.

  6. Graham Trengove, ‘Who is you? Grammar and Grassic Gibbon’, Scottish Literary Journal 2 (2) 1975, pp. 47–62.

  A NOTE

  If the great Dutch language disappeared from literary usage and a Dutchman wrote in German a story of the Lekside peasants, one may hazard he would ask and receive a certain latitude and forbearance in his usage of German. He might import into his pages some score or so untranslatable words and idioms—untranslatable except in their context and setting; he might mould in some fashion his German to the rhythms and cadence of the kindred speech that his peasants speak. Beyond that, in fairness to his hosts, he hardly could go: to seek effect by a spray of apostrophes would be both impertinence and mis-translation.

  The courtesy that the hypothetical Dutchman might receive from German a Scot may invoke from the great English tongue.

  L.G.G.

  Map

  PRELUDE

  The Unfurrowed Field

  KINRADDIE lands had been won by a Norman childe, Cospatric de Gondeshil, in the days of William the Lyon, when gryphons and such-like beasts still roamed the Scots countryside and folk would waken in their beds to hear the children screaming, with a great wolf-beast, come through the hide window, tearing at their throats. In the Den of Kinraddie one such beast had its lair and by day it lay about the woods and the stench of it was awful to smell all over the countryside, and at gloaming a shepherd would see it, with its great wings half-folded across the great belly of it and its head, like the head of a meikle cock, but with the ears of a lion, poked over a fir tree, watching. And it ate up sheep and men and women and was a fair terror, and the King had his heralds cry a reward to whatever knight would ride and end the mischieving of the beast. So the Norman childe, Cospatric, that was young and landless and fell brave and well-armoured, mounted his horse in Edinburgh Town and came North, out of the foreign south parts, up through the Forest of Fife and into the pastures of Forfar and past Aberlemno’s Meikle Stane that was raised when the Picts beat the Danes; and by it he stopped and looked at the figures, bright then and hardly faded even now, of the horses and the charging and the rout of those coarse foreign folk. And maybe he said a bit prayer by that Stone and then he rode into the Mearns, and the story tells no more of his riding but that at last come he did to Kinraddie, a tormented place, and they told him where the gryphon slept, down there in the Den of Kinraddie.

  But in the daytime it hid in the woods and only at night, by a path through the hornbeams, might he come at it, squatting in bones, in its lair. And Cospatric waited for the night to come and rode to the edge of Kinraddie Den and commended his soul to God and came off his horse and took his boar-spear in his hand, and went down into the Den and killed the gryphon. And he sent the news to William the Lyon, sitting drinking the wine and fondling his bonny lemans in Edinburgh Town, and William made him the Knight of Kinraddie, and gave to him all the wide parish as his demesne and grant to build him a castle there, and wear the sign of a gryphon’s head for a crest and keep down all beasts and coarse and wayward folk, him and the issue of his body for ever after.

  So Cospatric got him the Pict folk to build a strong castle there in the lithe of the hills, with the Grampians bleak and dark behind it, and he had the Den drained and he married a Pict lady and got on her bairns and he lived there till he died. And his son took the name Kinraddie, and looked out one day from the castle wall and saw the Earl Marischal come marching up from the south to join the Highlandmen in the battle that was fought at Mondynes, where now the meal-mill stands; and he took out his men and fought there, but on which side they do not say, but maybe it was the winning one, they were aye gey and canny folk, the Kinraddies. And the great-grandson of Cospatric, he joined the English against the cateran Wallace, and when Wallace next came marching up from the southlands Kinraddie and other noble folk of that time they got them into Dunnottar Castle that stands out in the sea beyond Kinneff, well-builded and strong, and the sea splashes about it in the high tides and there the din of the gulls is a yammer night and day. Much of meal and meat and gear they took with them, and they laid themselves up there right strongly, they and their carles, and wasted all the Mearns that the Cateran who dared rebel against the fine Engli
sh king might find no provision for his army of coarse and landless men. But Wallace came through the Howe right swiftly and he heard of Dunnottar and laid siege to it and it was a right strong place and he had but small patience with strong places. So, in the dead of one night, when the thunder of the sea drowned the noise of his feint, he climbed the Dunnottar rocks and was over the wall, he and the vagabond Scots, and they took Dunnottar and put to the slaughter the noble folk gathered there, and all the English, and spoiled them of their meat and gear, and marched away.

  Kinraddie Castle that year, they tell, had but a young bride new home and she had no issue of her body, and the months went by and she rode to the Abbey of Aberbrothock where the good Abbot, John, was her cousin, and told him of her trouble and how the line of Kinraddie was like to die. So he lay with her, that was September, and next year a boy was born to the young bride, and after that the Kinraddies paid no heed to wars and bickerings but sat them fast in their Castle lithe in the hills, with their gear and bonny leman queans and villeins libbed for service.

  And when the First Reformation came and others came after it and some folk cried Whiggam! and some cried Rome! and some cried The King! the Kinraddies sat them quiet and decent and peaceable in their castle, and heeded never a fig the arguings of folk, for wars were unchancy things. But then Dutch William came, fair plain a fixture that none would move, and the Kinraddies were all for the Covenant then, they had aye had God’s Covenant at heart, they said. So they builded a new kirk down where the chapel had stood, and builded a manse by it, there in the hiddle of the yews where the cateran Wallace had hid when the English put him to rout at last. And one Kinraddie, John Kinraddie, went south and became a great man in the London court, and was crony of the creatures Johnson and James Boswell; and once the two of them, John Kinraddie and James Boswell, came up to the Mearns on an idle ploy and sat drinking wine and making coarse talk far into the small hours night after night till the old laird wearied of them and then they would steal away and as James Boswell set in his diary, Did get to the loft where the maids were, and one IIϵγγί Δυνδαφ ωας ϕατ ιν Thϵ βνττockς αυδ I διδλι∊ wιτh hϵρ.