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Chapter I George Mackay Brown: a Reappraisal Chapter I George Mackay Brown: A Reappraisal 1. Introduction: Brown’s Reception in Britain Over the past decade the critical evaluation of the work of Orcadian poet, novelist and short-story writer George Mackay Brown has undergone a number of transformations. Brown’s literary career began in 1952 when, on Edwin Muir’s recommendation, he sent his poem ‘The Exile’ to the New Statesman. After the publication of his first collection of poetry, The Storm and Other Poems (1954), and particularly after the first nation-wide publication of his volume of poetry, Loaves and Fishes (1959), Brown began to make his mark as a poet. The publication of The Year of the Whale (1965) consolidated his reputation and the appearance of his first book of short stories, A Calendar of Love (1967), won him a new position as an eminent prose stylist. Alan Bold remarked that Brown’s prose ‘was an even sharper instrument than his verse’ and he proclaimed him as ‘Scotland’s finest living writer of imaginative prose’.1 In 1969 the publication of A Time to Keep brought Brown a Scottish Arts Council literature prize and, for the title story, a Katherine Mansfield Menton short-story prize. After the publication of An Orkney Tapestry in 1969 – the poet’s account and celebration of Orkney history, legend and folklore – Brown was considered to be one of Scotland’s most gifted poets. The Spectator celebrated him as one of the foremost Scottish writers: George Mackay Brown is a portent. No one else writes like this or has this feeling for language. No one else stands out against the gravel background of modern 1 See Alan Bold, George Mackay Brown (Edinburgh 1978), p. 50. 13 literature with forms and colours like those he has taken […]. His is an innate talent: as true as that of Yeats.2 The Times Educational Supplement acknowledged Brown’s writing as ‘work as widely known and respected throughout the English speaking world as the writings of Edwin Muir and Eric Linklater’.3 In the early 1970s the publication of Brown’s first novel Greenvoe (1970), which shows his concern for the small and remote Orcadian community faced with the threats and blighting effects of scientific and technological progress (embodied in the government project ‘Black Star’), struck a strong chord among British, and particularly Scottish, readers who had been sensitised to political and economic change since the first wave of SNP success in the 1960s and North-Sea-Oil-related developments in the early 1970s. Brown’s foreshadowing of the possible devastating impact of the oil industry on humanity and the Northern Isles in particular coincided with the heated debate that was sparked off by the coming of North Sea Oil and related discussions about the future of the country as well as the increased attention given to Orkney and Shetland in these years. In 1975 The Times commented that the novel had prophetic qualities; it was suggested that, although what Brown foresaw was an island village torn apart by the mysterious operation ‘Black Star’ rather than by oil tankers, the effect was much the same.4 Brown’s works were hailed by some of the foremost contemporary poets such as Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes and by one of his most influential mentors and early supporters, Edwin Muir. Despite his reluctance to follow literary fashion or join the poetry-reading scenes and circuits in Edinburgh, Glasgow and London, Brown yet enjoyed over the years a status as one of the most popular and prominent modern writers in Britain, and on the Scottish scene in particular. Public acclaim came to him in the form of many literary awards and prizes: his last novel, Beside the Ocean of Time, was nominated for the Booker Prize in 1994 and won the Saltire Award. At the same time, however, Brown was criticised for being too insular and narrow in his outlook. After the publication of Greenvoe many Scottish reviewers and critics grew 2 Quoted in George Mackay Brown (GMB), An Orkney Tapestry (London 1973, 1969), p. i: reviews. 3 See Times Educational Supplement (TES), 16/5/1975. 4 Ibid. 14 increasingly impatient with his subsequent work whose main theme and preoccupation had been recognised as being Orcadian life, history, folklore and legends. Despite contemporary interest in the social and cultural values of ‘regional’ literatures and the acknowledgement of ‘place’ as an aesthetic category, Brown’s use of Orkney as a setting and a locale came to be regarded as a potential limitation of his artistic talents. Critics also felt that, after the publication of Greenvoe, he had turned his back on the more urgent implications of change.5 Earlier, in the late 1960s, Brown had been criticised for being too ‘local’, writing about Orkney all the time. Stuart Conn’s warning that Brown ought to be careful not to ‘become too local and allow himself to be thought of as the “The Orkney poet”’ is symptomatic.6 Frequently, Brown’s personal and artistic relationship with his native islands, and the reputation he had for being ‘the Orkney bard’ or ‘the voice of Orkney’, led to the belief that his writing was characterised by a certain narrowness of field. Douglas Gifford, for instance, tentatively suggested that Brown’s case ‘is the sad one of a truly great writer who has chosen to live in a room with only one view from its single window’.7 On other occasions Brown’s work was labelled as being slightly old-fashioned, ‘far-away’ and ‘otherworldly’.8 Moreover, Roderick Watson maintains in The Literature of Scotland that Brown’s ‘mythic and fatalistic habit of mind [cannot] always do justice to the tensions and complexities inherent in the contemporary world’.9 Further criticism was directed at Brown’s perceived immersion in Catholicism. It was argued that his religious outlook and didacticism led to a restricting of his literary ability. Gifford claimed that Brown was compelled by his Catholicism to ‘a predictable denouement and […] an artless obviousness and repetitiveness of situation and image’.10 Such assessments would seem to subscribe to the view that a writer has to revolutionise the literary scene in some ideological, stylistic or 5 Ibid. 6 See Stuart Conn, ‘Poets of the Sixties – II: George Mackay Brown’, in Lines Review 22 (Winter 1966), p.17. 7 See Douglas Gifford, ‘Scottish Fiction since 1945’, in Norman Wilson (ed.), Scottish Writing and Writers (Edinburgh 1977), p. 15. 8 See Tom Lappin, ‘The Booker Breakdown’, in The Scotsman, 7/9/1994. 9 See Roderick Watson, The Literature of Scotland (Edinburgh 1984), p. 435. 10 See D. Gifford, ‘Scottish Fiction since 1945’, p.15. 15 linguistic way in order to be deemed ‘modern’ enough for the tastes of a critical post-modern society that never tires of deconstructing itself. Brown never claimed that his work attended to the sceptical and dissective twenty-first-century Zeitgeist in the same fashion as the mainstream of contemporary Scottish or British writing did. This further complicated the process of placing his work or fitting it into the established literary camps. When his novel Beside the Ocean of Time (1994) was short-listed for the Booker Prize in 1994, ‘gentle poet’ Brown, whose nomination had come as a surprise to many, seemed to be slightly out of place amongst the likes of ‘gritty’ writers James Kelman and Alan Hollinghurst. At least so it seemed to the reading public in England, as Douglas Gifford tellingly puts it when he observes that Brown appeared to many in the south as an ‘unknown foreigner’.11 Possibly Brown’s deliberate reluctance to follow literary fashion may have contributed to the sometimes rather muted response to his work. Moreover, Brown’s secluded Orkney-based life and his modest, ‘unarty’ behaviour, which did not involve much travelling, giving of interviews or appearing before cameras and on stage, no doubt provided sufficient reason for critical neglect. It also made reviewers and even his publishers feel that his attitude was unhelpful at times.12 The extent to which Brown’s relative marginalisation may also be naturally linked to Orkney’s geographic position, encouraging ambiguous reactions to the peripheral Other, requires further investigation. However, irrespective of the reasons, the ambivalent background to Brown’s reception, the relative lack of scholarly attention to his work and the disparity in critical opinion as to his artistic achievement certainly merit closer examination. At any rate, the fact that his literary standing is still inconclusive raises fundamental questions as to his place in a Scottish and wider British and European literary context. 11 See D. Gifford, ‘George Mackay Brown – An Appreciation’, in The Scotsman, 15/4/1996. 12 See Peter Gilman, ‘A Cold Northern Light’, in The Sunday Times, 3/9/1989. 16.
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