Lewis Grassic Gibbon and Neil Gunn took a different approach to their early life
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As Scotland's favourite novel reaches its 90th anniversary, Dan Mackay reflects on two of the north's greatest writers
This year marks the 90th anniversary of the publication of Sunset Song. Voted Scotland’s favourite novel, the enduring Lewis Grassic Gibbon classic tells the story of heroine Chris Guthrie, who faces hardship, sacrifice and tragedy amongst the gritty farming folk of fictional Kinraddie, in rural Aberdeenshire.
Set against the backdrop of the Great War, it describes a period of upheaval as the old Scotland and the old ways of grafting a livelihood from the land "with your bare hands" were coming to end.
This novel, part of Gibbon’s Scots Quair trilogy, is his masterpiece in a literary tour de force that, to this day, remains unrivalled.
Born James Leslie Mitchell, but later writing under his pseudonym, Gibbon was a complicated individual who harboured a "very bitter detestation" of The Mearns and, not least, the "coarse speak of the people" with whom he grew up. He loathed their grey servitude to farming, although he would later draw distinctions between agriculture and his love of the land itself.
His schoolmaster at Arbuthnott was quick to recognise an emerging talent in the bookish boy who read avidly, had developed a fascination in archaeology, and endeavoured to speak ‘proper’ English. Gibbon’s mother would later claim he wrote "horrible books" which often appeared to expose the gossipy small-mindedness of the tight knit community he came to reject – but later to celebrate.
During a short, but amazingly prolific, literary career, Gibbon had 17 books published and penned 11 novels in just four years. Other book projects were in the making – a rate of writing which would have left most authors gasping! Sadly, his ultimate potential was never realised as he died tragically young in 1935. He was just 33 years old.
Born in November 1890, ten years before Gibbon’s birth, our other eminent Scottish man of letters, Neil Miller Gunn, was also born into a changing nation – both economically, industrially and culturally.
Both men had grown up in large families. Gibbon from farming stock whilst Gunn grew up, at least initially, into a Dunbeath fishing community. Both developed their academic interests and shared much in common. Not least a fascination in our pre-history and, later, their separate political passions.
Gunn’s house in Inverness would come to be described as the "spiritual home" of the emerging Scottish national movement (later the SNP) in the years before the Second World War. Gibbon, "the good sovietist", embraced communism.
Corresponding as Leslie Mitchell, he wrote to Gunn in 1934 proclaiming: “I am not really anti-Nationalist. But I loathe fascism, and all the dirty things that hide under the name. I doubt if you can ever have Nationalism without communism.” It is not known how, and if, Gunn responded.
There is much to compare and contrast between the two novelists.
The premature death of Gibbon, whose shining star had come to light "a fire in the Mearns, clearing the sullen soil for a richer yield" was regarded as "an incalculable loss for Scottish literature".
Gunn, on the other hand, had much the longer literary career, writing his last novel The Other Landscape in 1954 and his unconventional autobiography, The Atom of Delight, in 1956. Yet he had to endure a slow decline in the popularity of his novels, particularly his later work which were seen as too complex and difficult to understand.
With their contrasting life experiences and different visions Gunn would, for example, often return to the agreeable community of his boyhood and delight in celebrating its rich cultural heritage. His earlier work including Morning Tide, Highland River and The Silver Darlings exuded a freshness and vitality and earned him a deserved reputation as a writer of depth and distinction.
Gibbon, on the other hand, yearned for a past golden age, as he saw it, when people lived "free, happy and undiseased". Perhaps his travels during military service throughout Palestine, Egypt and Persia (as it was then) fuelled indignations which manifested itself in the belief of a then vogue Diffusionist philosophy of a world gone bad, downtrodden and corrupted by organisation, hierarchy and power which had spread, like a cancer, though all facets of humanity.
It was this troubling degeneration which drove Gibbon’s resentment of his neighbouring farming folk because he believed in an alternative and freer life for them away from the ‘beastly’ yoke and the plough.
His ultimate opus, a Scots Quair, continues the story of Chris Guthrie. It charts the end of an era and the "advent of new oppressions". It has been variously described as a requiem to that old society that lived by the soil.
And whilst Sunset Song and Scot’s Quair remain a staple on the secondary education curriculum, it seems Gunn’s work has gone out of fashion.
Yet the work of both men, though both part of a Scottish renaissance, is frankly night and day. With Gibbon at times bleak and despairing – perhaps a reflection on some of his own mental health struggles.
Gunn, under valued, had for much of his life incorporated a Zen Buddhism outlook. We see that best when Kenn successfully grapples and lands the salmon in Highland River – a moment when "nothing ever had quite the splendour and glory of that struggle by the Well Pool".
It was these "atoms of delight" that provided Gunn and his readers with enlightening illuminations. Indeed the ‘other landscape’ he would refer to was not another place but more another way of seeing life itself.
It has been said that if all of Gunn’s literary canon were to be published under one heading it could rightly be entitled: A Scottish Mystic’s Search for the Conditions of Human Fulfilment.
Critics, casting an eye over the Scottish literary scene, have argued that the quality of both these writers has never been excelled.
But it is Sunset Song’s closing lament, as they gathered to pay homage to those fallen in a Great War, that will forever endure. They had gone, banished in death. And we, alone, are left to ask what it is we inherit from those beyond the sunset…
