Allan Massie reflects on the life and work of the Orkney poet George Mackay Brown, who saw holiness in the natural world
George Mackay Brown was born in Orkney in 1921 and died there in 1996. Apart from time spent studying at Newbattle Abbey and Edinburgh University, he scarcely left the islands. When the Scottish Arts Council gave him a travel grant, he went only as far as Ireland where he stayed with Seamus Heaney, an early admirer of his poetry.
He endured tuberculosis as a young man, suffered from chronic bronchitis, intermittently from depression, and had spells of near-alcoholism. He was a poet from his youth, and, at least in mid-life, a great one, his work distinguished by that rare combination of simplicity and depth. In his best work you felt he was in tune with eternal verities. He wrote exquisite short stories and a couple of good novels, one of which, Magnus, was made into an opera by Peter Maxwell Davies.
He was born in Stromness, his father a tailor and postman, his mother, who came from Sutherland, a native Gaelic speaker. George himself had no Gaelic and I don’t think he felt the lack of it, for he was entranced by the Viking or Norse history of Orkney. A gentle man, he relished the bloodthirsty Sagas. All the same, he once told me: “There’s not a lot of Norse blood left in Orkney now.” In any case, Viking warriors played a much smaller part in his imagination and work than farmers and fishermen and troubled men and women.
At the age of 30, he was rescued from the idleness and depression that were the result of his ill health by the chance to study at Newbattle Abbey, Midlothian, a college established to give a second chance of a liberal education to those failed by their schooling. George was fortunate to go there; even more fortunate that the warden of the College was Edwin Muir. Himself an Orkney man born on the little island of Wyre, Muir, a Catholic convert, was a poet of rare gifts and, in collaboration with his wife, Wilma, had been the first to translate Kafka into English. Muir looked back on his Orkney childhood as an Eden from which he had been expelled. He recognised George’s rare quality and nurtured it, while George said that Wilma, whom many found difficult, was like a second mother to him.
George had already published poems in newspapers and magazines, and even a small booklet using a local publisher, but Muir took it upon himself to send his recent work to his own publishers, the Hogarth Press. The poems were accepted and George’s reputation was made almost immediately. This was the first decisive turning point in his life.
The second, in 1961, was his conversion and reception into the Catholic Church. There were few Catholics in Orkney and the fine medieval St Magnus Cathedral had been a Presbyterian kirk since the Reformation. But for George, becoming a Catholic bound him to Orkney’s more distant past.
St Magnus, the Earl of Orkney – a Viking chief converted to Christianity and then submitting to martyrdom – became a powerful presence in his imagination.
I don’t think George was much interested in theological questions. Part at least of the appeal of the Catholic Church was its antiquity, part the manner in which it was in tune with what for George were the essential realities of the cycle of the seasons and man’s relationship to the natural world: the harvest of the sea and the land. The sacraments were a reflection of holiness.
Much of his work, both poetry and prose, was austere and deceptively simple, so much so that you might think anyone could do it, until you found you couldn’t. George looked on the modern age with dismay. “We cannot live,” he wrote, “without the treasury our ancestors have left us. Without the story –in which everyone living, unborn and dead, participates – men are no more than bits of paper blown on the cold wind.”
He deplored, even resented, almost everything about the 20th century. Spare though his best writing was in its evocation of the harsh realities of Orkney life – the demanding peril of the sea, the tilling of the land – there was something in his acceptance of Catholicism as making sense of life which recalled Chesterton, very different in temperament though the two were. You could not read his work – you could not spend time with him – without being aware that you were in the presence of goodness. His character and the trials, tribulations and reward of his life are beautifully caught in The Life, Maggie Fergusson’s biography.
Living alone in a council house in Stromness, he would spend every morning writing at his kitchen table. Pen or pencil and paper were all he needed. If his work was uneven, poems and stories of limpid beauty and rare insight often side by side with work which might be thought banal, this is true of almost all prolific writers: think of Wordsworth and Tennyson. We should judge writers by their best work; George’s lingers and acquires deeper meaning in one’s memory.
Engagingly, to my mind, despite his rejection of so much of the 20th century, he acquired a television set in later life, and liked to watch afternoon quiz shows and soaps.
His funeral Mass, with music by Peter Maxwell Davies in St Magnus Cathedral, was, I believe, the first celebrated there since the Reformation.
Allan Massie is the Catholic Herald’s chief book reviewer
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