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Light from the Orkneys: Edwin Muir and George Mackay Brown Transcript Light from the Orkneys: Edwin Muir and George Mackay Brown Transcript Date: Thursday, 5 February 2009 - 12:00AM LIGHT FROM THE ORKNEYS: EDWIN MUIR AND GEORGE MACKAY BROWN The Rt Revd Lord Harries of Pentregarth Off the North Coast of Scotland lie the Orkneys with their remarkable ruins, including the village of Scara Brae, some 5000 years old. In the capital, Kirkwall, is the magnificent 12th century red and white sandstone cathedral of St Magnus. And in a small corner of the Cathedral are the names of about a dozen distinguished Orkneymen. Two of those men are amongst the finest poets of the 20th century, George Mackay Brown and Edwin Muir. Both struggled against depression. Both knew at first hand the harshness of life. Both came to Christian faith as adults and reflected that faith in their writing. My theme is their struggle with the dark side of human existence, the suffering, the hardness, and the light emerges from their writings for all who are conscious of that darkness. Edwin Muir lived from 1887 to 1959, George Mackay Brown from 1921 to 1996. So Edwin Muir was the older and, as I will mention, a great influence on George Mackay Brown. But as the writing of Edwin Muir is the more theologically developed of the two, I will begin with George Mackay Brown. Apart from a short spellas a mature student at Edinburgh University and one at Newbattle Abbey College, during the time when Edwin Muir was Warden, George Mackay Brown spent the whole of his life on the Orkneys. It was these islands, their scenery, history, legends and people that provided the inspiration for his poetry, short stories and novels. On his mother's side he came from Gaelic speaking highlanders. His mother, Mhairi Mackay, had come over from their croft in Sutherland when she was 16 to work in a hotel. His father, John Brown, came from a family that had lived in the Orkneys for centuries. They had six children, George being the youngest. The family lived in Stromness, which George liked to call 'Hamnavoe', the old Norse name, meaning 'haven inside the bay'. The family was poor, and as well as being a postman, John Brown had two other jobs. Being a postman meant that he had a new uniform every year, and this had the great advantage that the old one could be cut and remade for the children. Even so they had to apply for grants from the poor fund for shoes for their children in the winter. They went barefoot in the summer. But basically they were happy and George had a stability and routine of life which he loved. Mhairi Mackay was a warm, generous, unfailingly buoyant soul, gently singing gaelic songs about the house, to whom George was absolutely devoted throughout the whole of his life. His father, fifteen years older than his mother, short and fat, had a sharp wit, was a good mimic and was clearly something of a frustrated actor. This combination of Mahris songs about the house and his father's wit and sense of drama, helped to create an environment in which George's imagination and poetry were nurtured. It was also helped by his elder sister Ruby, ten years older, who loved telling melodramatic stories with unhappy endings. As George said in response to this, 'I was beginning to learn that there was a thing in the world called evil; but I learned a thing even more important, that all the bad things in life, that happen to everybody sooner or later, could be faced, controlled, and even made beautiful by poetry.'[1] This stable childhood was rudely broken when an unkind landlady took against Marhi and kicked the family out. They went first to an ugly house with a drain under it, a factor that further undermined the health of George's father, John, and then to a council house. John became totally crippled with arthritis, and had to retire, with no pension. Brooding and depressed in his room, he became convinced that his teeth were the cause of the trouble and persuaded the dentist to take the whole lot out, which he did without anaesthetic, John and his dentist drinking half a bottle of whiskey during the operation to help matters. In his mid teens George started to get into a bad way both physically and psychologically. He chain smoked Woodbines from the age of fifteen, and he was so frightened of being separated from his mother he used to follow her out shopping and hide in doorways to keep an eye on her. Then came the war. George applied for the forces, but they diagnosed TB and he was sent to a sanatorium in Kirkwall. TB in those days inspired great terror-interestingly, it was believed that smoking was good for it, and that suited George very well, but he remained ill for a long time. The TB returned in later years, when he was at Newbattle Abbey College, when again he had to go into hospital. George's recurrent illnesses made it impossible for him to lead a normal working life but this is what gave him the space to write. Interviewed in 1996 he said 'Sometimes I think... recurrent illness is a kind of refuge. When things are beginning to be too much, you suddenly become ill. Not desperately ill, but ill enough to avoid your responsibilities'[2] Or as he also wrote 'there must be a secret wisdom inside us all that directs our lives, often against our wills and desires' and he saw that wisdom at work in his illnesses. Of course some like his sister, simply thought he was a lazy idler and was often sharp with him, which she bitterly regretted later in life, not realizing at the time how ill her brother had in fact been. George's mother cooked three meals a day for him and generally mollycoddled him. He got £1.10s a week paid by the government to TB sufferers, of which he gave £1 to his mother for his keep. With the ten shillings he bought cigarettes and a small library of 78 records, including T.S. Eliot reading his own poetry. He played this so often and so loudly that those working in the house would loudly chant great chunks of The Waste Land and Murder in the Cathedral by heart. The years immediately after World War II were difficult ones for George, living the life of a semi-invalid, his only outlet occasional pieces for the Orkney Herald, in which he championed what we would call reactionary views, regarding every change of modern life as a change for the worse. However, at about this time George became more disciplined, putting a mask over his depression, and spending hours working on his poetic technique. It is important to remember that he saw poetry as a craft, and himself a craftsman like a plumber or carpenter. His poetry did not just come, but he worked at it, in even more disciplined ways as he grew older. He also moved significantly closer to becoming a Roman Catholic. Brought up by his father to attend a Presbyterian Church every Sunday, it never had much appeal for him and in his teens he started attending an Anglican one. Then during the war some Italian prisoners of war, in their own time, started to turn an old Nissen hut into a remarkable chapel which can still be visited. As George wrote in 1945: 'Where the English captive would build a theatre or a canteen to remind him of home, the Italian, without embarrassment, with careful devout hands, erects a chapel... The Italians, who fought weakly and without hope on the battlefield, because they lacked faith in the ridiculous strutting little Duce, have wrought strongly here.' [3] That chapel and reading Newman's Apologia shifted him decisively towards Catholicism. Another rather different change in his life at that time was the discovery of alcohol. The islanders had continually voted against having pubs until 1947, but then, in 1948 the Stromness Hotel opened its bar for the first time in 27 years. George drank two glasses of beer and was hooked. They were, he wrote, 'a revelation; they flushed my veins with happiness; they washed away all cares and shyness and worries. I remember thinking to myself 'If I could have two pints of beer ever afternoon, life would be a great happiness'.'[4] Unfortunately it did not stay at two and he needed more and more to get that feeling again, until he had become an alcoholic. He frequently had to be carried home at night, where his mother would be waiting up for him, with his dinner ready cooked hours before, never complaining. As a local remarked, if George had died then he would simply have been remembered as the local soak. It was at this time, however, that he had the good fortune to meet people who encouraged him, in particular Edwin Muir who immediately recognized George's poetic gifts and got him to Newlands Abbey College where he was Warden, and persuaded him to publish his first book of poems. As Muir said abut the poems, he was impressed 'by something which I can only call grace. Grace is what breathes warmth into beauty and tenderness into comedy; it is in a sense the crowning gift, for without it beauty would be cold and comedy would be heartless.'[5] And as George wrote 'It was Edwin Muir who turned my face in the right direction: firmly but discretely- and gave me a pocketful of hope and promise for the journey.'[6] Muir singled out particularly a poem based on a true story of a Stromness lad Thorfinn, a known poultry thief, who had rowed out beyond the harbour one evening, supposedly to collect his lobster creels and drowned.
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