George Mackay Brown

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Christopher Whyte, The 1970s in Modern Scottish Poetry (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004) It is remarkable to think that visitors to Stromness in Orkney thirty years ago might have encountered one of Scotland’s best poets speaking to the fishermen at the pier head or bidding them a friendly hello as he wandered through the streets. The experience has changed little despite the technological upheavals of the past ninety years. Life on the islands remains sharply tuned to a number of cycles: those of the seasons, those of men and women from birth to death, and the inevitable series of invaders who surge and recede like the ocean tide. The cyclic nature of the Orcadian experience has provided ample material for Brown and serves as one structural frame upon which he builds his narratives. It also provides him with his most powerful means of asserting the continuity of Orcadian experience: argument by association. In the juxtaposing of two or more events, their shared features are made fully manifest despite the centuries separating them. Times Literary Supplement, February 16, 1967; April 27, 1967; September 28, 1973; September 27, 1974; August 13, 1976; February 22, 1980; November 21, 1980; April 10, 1981; April 1, 1983; January 20, 1984; June 15, 1984; October 30, 1987; June 30, 1989; May 11-17, 1990. Brown suffered from severe tuberculosis throughout the early part of his life. Long hospital stays and enforced idleness encouraged him to read and write, and in the periods when he was healthy he studied literature and poetry in educational settings. As an adult he rarely strayed far from Orkney, but his collaborations in play, opera, and musical form teamed him notably with British composer Peter Maxwell Davies. Among the Brown-Davies collaborations are operas based on Brown’s stories, including The Martyrdom of St. Magnus and The Two Fiddlers (1977) as well as a sampling of shorter choral works. These and a variety of other projects, from children’s literature to Orkney travel guides, rounded out Brown’s busy and productive writing career.

There were no frills, but a lilting hint of the otherworldly qualities of a man who had faced many privations in his life, including tuberculosis, cancer and a variety of bronchial conditions, and wasn’t about to start complaining now he was in his 70s. SOURCE: A review of Beside the Ocean of Time, in Publishers Weekly, Vol. 241, No. 35, August 29, 1994, p. 63. Mr. Brown was born and remained rooted in the Orkneys, and his art was filled with the rich lore and humanity of the people he knew so well. He also explored Scottish myths and mysticism as well as rituals of the Roman Catholic faith. At the same time, he expressed a social consciousness, as in his first novel, Greenvoe, which described the death of a 1,000-year-old village at the hands of a military-industrial establishment. After a period of unemployment and rejection of a volume of his poetry by the Hogarth Press, [28] Brown did a postgraduate study on Gerard Manley Hopkins, although such work was not to his taste. [29] This provided some occupation and income until 1964, when a volume of poetry, The Year of the Whale, was accepted. [30]

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Brown was a poet who looked across modern Orkney with a sense of history, a preference for the past, and the persuasive idea that time will tell. Brown was also a prose writer, and produced a number of short story collections, novels, and essay collections. His first novel, Greenvoe (1972), describes the gradual decimation of a mythical Orkney fishing village after the construction of a secret military establishment on the island. By detailing the events of the five days preceding its final demise, Brown suggests that the banal existence of its inhabitants inadvertently contributed to the destruction of the village. Despite its bleak theme, Greenvoe concludes with an ambiguous but uplifting promise of resurrection. In Magnus (1973), Brown combines the starkness of Norse saga with the ornamentalism of the Roman Catholic mass. The story of the martyrdom and sanctification of twelfth-century Earl Magnus of Orkney, who was killed by his cousin and rival for supreme control of the Orkneys, Magnus extends Brown's fascination with the Christian theme of redemption. Brown's third novel, Time in a Red Coat (1984), is a fable that chronicles the experiences of a young Eastern princess as she journeys through distant countries and flees the devastation of her homeland by marauders. An innocent figure, the princess begins her travels in a white coat that gradually turns red due to the human folly and injustice she encounters. In Vinland (1992) "Brown has returned to the world of his beloved Orkneyinga Saga, that astonishing, bloody and darkly humorous chronicle of early Orkney which also provided material for his novel Magnus," Jonathan Coe remarked. Vinland chronicles the spiritual development of it hero, Ranald Sigmundson, from youthful seafaring adventures to old age. The fictional locale of Vinland "comes to symbolise a hope of release from the grip of the Orcadians' primitive, fatalistic Christianity, as well as providing a model of man in harmony rather than conflict with the physical world—a natural equivalent of the 'Seamless Coat' after which St Magnus was searching in the earlier novel," Coe noted. Beside the Ocean of Time (1994), which was shortlisted for the 1994 Booker Prize, again presents an island hero, a young dreamer named Thorfinn whose adventure fantasies illuminate the Orkney lifestyle. SOURCE: A review of Beside the Ocean of Time, in World Literature Today, Vol. 69, No. 4, Autumn, 1995, pp. 790-91. The Skarf is an inshore creelman – his boat is the Engels – taking lobsters with his uncle. ‘You with all that brains. You should have gone on to the school, then the university.’ (I heard some of my clients say, ‘These islands have turned out just too many Professors, what’s the good of them?’) The Skarf is shiftless, irresponsible, he avoids going to the lobsters whenever he can, he draws National Assistance – means-tested benefit – rather than work. He says ‘the sun of socialism’ warms him, ‘however feebly’. But he is a writer: ‘Anyone looking in through his webbed window could see The Skarf moving between boxes of books and a table covered with writing paraphernalia.’ He writes the history of the islands in an old cashbook that was found on the foreshore, preaches socialism and atheism to any youngsters who will hear him.

He haunts the town hotel, ‘perched on the high stool in the corner of the bar’, where he holds forth, reading from his history. He gives a compacted, but compelling version of the long and complex story of the islands. Skarf – his name derives from Old Norse, meaning ‘to cut and join’, a term still found in timber boat-building. His language is ambitious – ‘In all the confusions of anabasis, domination, settlement that followed …’. ‘Anabasis’, a military advance into the interior of a territory, and the title of an epic poem written by the French diplomat, ‘Saint-John Perse’ (Alexis Leger), published in 1930 by T. S. Eliot, in translation made by Eliot working with the author. Had George Brown read Anabasis? There are lines and passages in the French poem that come very close to his preoccupations – ‘great turf-burnings seen afar and these operations channelling the living waters on the mountain’. 5 In a brief commentary on his own writing, Brown once told Contemporary Authors, “Since it seems to me that our civilization will possibly destroy itself before too long, I am interested in the labour and lives of the most primitive people of our civilization, the food-getters (crofters and fishermen) since it is those people living close to the sources of life who are most likely to survive and continue the human story; and since even their lives would be meaningless otherwise, I see religion as an illuminating and stabilising force in the life of a community. Out of these things I make my poems, stories, and plays.” The old priest peered closely into the parchment that he held in front of him, and he read the Latin [of the Gospel] in a faded voice. Candle-light splashed the worn parchment…. [Then began] a slow cold formal dance with occasional Latin words—an exchange of gifts between God and man, a mutual courtesy of bread and wine. Man offers … the first fruits of his labour to the creator of everything in the universe, stars and cornstalks and grains of dust…. The bread will be broken, and suffused with divine essences, and the mouths that taste it shall shine for a moment with the knowledge of God. For the generations, and even the hills and seas, come and go, and only the Word stands, which was there … before the fires of creation, and will still be there inviolate among the ashes of the world's end. The poet himself decided what he wanted to record. I realised afterwards that he was making a critical selection, and that some of his texts had apparently been already consigned to the outer darkness. This habit of rigorous self-criticism was to become more evident in later years, and was to cause his editors some heart-searching when they came to establishing the definitive texts of the Collected Poems.” Reviewing the author's collection A Time to Keep and Other Stories in The New York Times Book Review in 1987, Sheila Gordon wrote that in his "marvelous stories," the author "holds us in the same way the earliest storyteller held the group around the fire in an ancient cave."Though Brown thought himself a mere craftsman, his death this year in Kirkwall, Orkney's capital, brought tributes proper to an artist. In London, The Tablet called him "a giant of literature and much loved"; The Guardian found him "a major influence" and a leader of "the Scottish literary renaissance"; The Times named his last novel "a magisterial summing-up of the purpose and meaning of man's life." Nigel Wheale is the author of Raw Skies: New and Selected Poems (Shearsman 2005) and The Six Strides of Freyfaxi (Oystercatcher 2010). His academic texts include The Postmodern Arts (Routledge 1995) and Writing & Society: Literacy, Print and Politics in Britain 1590-1660 (Routledge 1999). An archive of his work for the Fortnightly may be found here.

We are excited to be presenting a new publication of poetry and prose from Orkney writers this year. Edited by writer Alison Miller, it is called Gousters, Glims and Veerie-orums, and includes a broad variety of writing in Orcadian from the Orkney Voices Writing Group: Vera Butler, Lorraine Bruce, Sheila Garson, Ingrid Grieve, Issy Grieve, Barbara Johnston, Greer Norquoy – as well as previous members, Moyra Brown, Caroline Hume and Barbara West. Rhythms and repetition often appear in George’s work. Poems were composed around the cycle of the farming year, the circle at Brodgar, the 12 Stations of the Cross, and the understanding that life goes on after death. When George was diagnosed with tuberculosis, the illness was responsible for one death in every eight in Britain and he was certain he would die young. This inflected his work with dark humour: By early 1977, he was entering a period of depression which lasted intermittently for almost a decade, but maintained his working routine throughout. [57] He also had severe bronchial problems, his condition becoming so serious that in early 1981 he was given the Last Sacraments. [58]

The Martyrdom of St. Magnus (opera libretto; music by Peter Maxwell Davies; adaptation of novel Magnus by Brown; produced in Kirkwall, Vienna, and London, 1977 ; produced in Santa Fe, 1979), Boosey and Hawkes (London), 1977. We will never know what they mean. I am making marks on a piece of paper that will have no meaning 5,000 years from now. A mystery abides. Brown was a mature student at Newbattle Abbey College in the 1951–1952 session, [15] where the poet Edwin Muir, who had a great influence on his life as a writer, was warden. [16] His return for the following session was interrupted by recurrent tuberculosis. [17]

New York Times Book Review, April 28, 1968; July 19, 1970; September 9, 1984, pp. 9, 32; March 22, 1987, p. 9; March 31, 1996, p. 18. It might have been genetic – his family had a history of depression and George’s uncle, Jimmy Brown, may have committed suicide: his body was found in Stromness harbour in 1935. In the following review, Andreae considers Brown's posthumously published Following a Lark and Orkney: Pictures and Poems.] From his family, George inherited his mother’s Calvinist work ethic and his father’s talent for storytelling. In the tailor’s shop where his father worked, George listened to the men’s tales about the past and present folk of the town. Other influences came from George’s brother Norrie, my grandfather, who shared George’s love of poetry, and George’s sister Ruby, who taught him Scottish Ballads when he was very young. After leaving school, George worked in the Post Office until, aged just 20, he was diagnosed with tuberculosis. Recovery took him several years, but whilst he recuperated, George spent much of his time reading and writing. He discovered The Orkneyinga Sagaduring that time and in Saint Magnus, George found a fascinating figure.A guidebook today comments that the barriers have "probably saved these isles from postwar depopulation." Cleaned up, and eating his dinner, Freddie became talkative. I relaxed into his stories. During the war, his frail wooden house had been surrounded by the huge airstrip on Mainland. He went to sleep, woke up to the (beautiful) sound of Merlin engines as Spitfires landed, took off. He had fond memories of the pilots, ‘fine beuys’, with whom he had made some friends. He reached under his pillow, and brought out a creased, browning photo of a Spitfire and its pilot, who had autographed the souvenir, ‘For Freddie’. On his table, I noticed a card, some kind of invitation, with a horseshoe on its cover. To make conversation, I asked Freddie what he was being invited to. He smiled in a knowing way, ‘Ah beuy, that will be a secret. As secret as the Horseman’s Word.’ The Two Fiddlers (opera libretto; music by Davies; adaptation of story by Brown; produced in London, 1978), Boosey and Hawkes, 1978.