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John Buchan 1875 - 1940 John Buchan 1875 - 1940 Contents: Biography.......................................................................................................................................................Pages 1 - 2 Contexts........................................................................................................................................................Pages 3 - 4 Further Reading / Contacts................................................................................................................Pages 5 - 8 Biography: John Buchan (1875-1940) bears the distinction of having led one of the fullest and most accomplished lives of any Scottish writer. From his childhood as son of a Free Church minister to his appointment as Governor-General of Canada, his career encompassed publishing, journalism, the legal profession, the Houses of Parliament, the intelligence service, the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, and more than 100 published books, including over 30 novels. He was born in Perth, but moved around Scotland according to the requirements of his father’s profession, from the industrial townscapes of Glasgow to the idyllic rural landscapes of Broughton Green. Buchan showed early promise of his considerable intellectual gifts and was awarded a scholarship to read Classics at Oxford where his writing career began. He had published six novels by the time he left. Leaving Oxford, he became a barrister and later took a position as a government administrator with the High Commissioner for South Africa. His experiences there would inform his later novel Prester John (1910). When he came back to London, he continued to write his novels and work as a journalist. In 1906 he took a position with publishers Oliver Nelson where he was responsible for their Sixpenny Classics range of titles and the Nelson Sevenpenny Range of copyright novels. He even contributed a few books of his own, including the 24 volume Nelson’s History of the War, the roroyaltiesyalties from which he donated to war charities.charities. He wouldwould later become director of the company. It was during this period that Buchan became closely involved with the Scottish literary scene. He was a regular contributor to Blackwood’s in Edinburgh – the magazine later serialised The Thirty-Nine Steps – and he became editor of the recently launched magazine, The Scottish Review. He used his infl uence to try to bring about a revival in Scottish writing, which had been in the doldrums since the death of Walter Scott Hugh MacDiarmid was also attempting a Scottish literary revival, but from a different angle, and the two writers, who were from completely different ends of the literary spectrum (one a writer of thrillers, the other a diamond-minded poet), worked together for some time. Buchan would eventually write the preface for MacDiarmid’s fi rst book of poems 1 Sangschaw. Copyright 2003 © Scottish Literary Tour Trust. All Rights Reserved. John Buchan 1875 - 1940 In 1912 Buchan became ill and during his recuperation in hospital wrote The Thirty- Nine Steps (1915) which became a huge international best-seller, and later a celebrated Hitchcock movie. It was the fi rst of his novels to feature the heroic Richard Hannay, a character who would appear in four more of Buchan’s novels, including Greenmantle (1916). When the First World War started Buchan was war correspondent for The Times. Between 1916-17 he served on the Headquarters Staff of the British Army in France as temporary Lieutenant Colonel. His career did not stop there. From 1917-18 Buchan was Director of Information for the Ministry of Information, and then for a short while after he was Director of Intelligence. In 1919 he was made a Director of Reuters, the international news agency. In 1927 Buchan stood for Parliament and was elected MP for the Scottish Universities. While in government he held a number of infl uential posts including his appointment, from 1933-34, as His Majesty’s High Commissioner to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland. In 1935 he was made the fi rst Baron Tweedsmuir and appointed Governor-General of Canada. He moved there, and died fi ve years later. Buchan was an astoundingly prolifi c writer. He wrote poetry, historical romances, criticism, journalism, and a textbook for accountants: The Law according to the Taxation of Foreign Income. He wrote bestselling adventure novels like the Richard Hannay series. Another series of adventure novels, which included The Powerhouse (1913), The Gap in the Curtain (1932) and the posthumous Sick Heart River (1941) featuredfeatured Sir Edward Leithan, a gentleman lawyer and a decent chap who fi nds himself in diffi cult situations. Yet another series of adventure novels had a retired Glasgow grocer as its daring protagonist. In spite of his broad, polymathic brilliance, his enduring fame and world-wide appeal, Buchan has been increasingly neglected in Scottish literature (fi nd out why), though there are signs that this trend is beginning to be reversed. Buchan also wrote biographies of such diverse historical fi gures as Oliver Cromwell (1934) and Sir Walter Scott (1932). Scott served as a kind of role model to Buchan, who saw himself as someone who could have twin careers as a bestselling author and establishment fi gure. He died in 1940. 2 Copyright 2003 © Scottish Literary Tour Trust. All Rights Reserved. John Buchan 1875 - 1940 Contexts ‘Who would be James Joyce if they could be John Buchan?” In 2001 best-selling crime writer Ian Rankin dedicated his book to Alan Massie, the Scottish journalist and historical novelist responsible for the quotation above. But what did Massie mean? The answer leads us to another question – when does writing become literature? John Buchan occupies a curious place in Scottish literature. His name is well known, his books continue to be read throughout the world, yet you won’t hear his name mentioned among the ‘great and the good’ of modern Scottish writing – the ‘literary canon’, as it is often referred to. People do not readily associate Buchan’s work with Hugh MacDiarmid or Neil Gunn – yet he played a signifi cant role in bringing Scottish literature out from under the shadow of Scott and Stevenson. You won’t hear mention of any of his works in a discussion of the great Scottish novels of the 20th century, among the likes of Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Neil Gunn, or Alasdair Gray – yet his suspense novels infl uenced generations of thriller writers. You might hear him as a footnote to a discussion of suspense and crime fi ction – which would include Ian Rankin, Ian Fleming, John Le Carré among others – but that seems to serve to marginalise him even further, and exclude discussion of Buchan as a ‘serious’ writer. The popular impression of Buchan is that he wrote crime stories, one of which got made into a famous Hitchcock fi lm. We can speculate the reasons for this. His life, lived mostly outside Scotland, does not fi t well with our perception of how a Scottish man of letters should behave. Buchan was quick to join the British Establishment: beginning with a scholarship to Oxford (“nursery for the youth of the land” as he describes it in an article in the Glasgow Herald) then to an appointment on the staff of Lord Milner, High Commissioner to South Africa, his work writing propaganda material for the Ministry of Information, his election as a Conservative MP; and fi nally his assignment as Lord Tweedsmuir, Governor-General of Canada. It is diffi cult to defi ne him as a specifi cally Scottish writer, but this probably has more to do with nationalistic chauvinism than anything else. Is it because he spent so much time in England? Robert Louis Stevenson spent much of his adult life away from his home country yet he occupies a central place in the Scottish literary tradition – perhaps it is because the themes of Stevenson’s work are quintessentially Scottish, fi rmly rooted in a Gothic sensibility. Stevenson is seen as an integral part of the Scottish literary tradition; Buchan isn’t. Perhaps Buchan spread his talent too wide, published too much. A “Jack of all trades; master of none”: the damning phrase for anyone seen to be over-achieving in more than one discipline. Was he a victim of his own success? Perhaps if he had concentrated on 3 the biographies we would remember him as a fi rst class biographer. If he’d only written Copyright 2003 © Scottish Literary Tour Trust. All Rights Reserved. John Buchan 1875 - 1940 historical books, he might have been remembered as one of Scotland’s great historians. If he’d kept his career horizons strictly within the publishing industry then we might remember him as the magazine editor who collaborated with Hugh MacDiarmid and helped get his career off the ground. Perhaps Buchan’s problem is he was too successful, did too much. Above everything he achieved in his remarkable life, Buchan is most famous for The Thirty-Nine Steps, a slim book written during a period of convalescence in hospital, which had enormous infl uence in the development of the thriller/ suspense genre. Reading it now we may squirm at some of the corny sounding dialogue or descriptions, and a lot of the historical background may be meaningless to us. The suspense novel is a form of writing which dates very quickly, as it often relies on contemporary events. More disquietingly, we feel very uncomfortable at the anti-Semitism which pervades the novel as well as a certain top-down world view – these may have been representative of certain attitudes prevalent and acceptable in Buchan’s day, but they strike a jarring note with modern readers. His representation of local characters’ speech in dialect contrasts with the easy ‘offi cial’ English of his hero and has the effect of patronising them, and rendering them ‘colourful’ local oddities rather than ‘real’ characters. Many writers since Buchan have made it their life’s work to rid literature of these linguistic anomalies which serve to marginalise local dialects and language.
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