Beyond the Thirty-Nine Steps

by Ursula Buchan

  Now that I read it in print I don’t feel at all satisfied with it. Some of it I like, but in a good deal of it I think I have been quite unsuccessful. Of course you will understand that it is all written in character, and that this accounts for the frequently exaggerated sentiment and style. I only hope that you will not repent now of having given me permission to dedicate it to you. The binding of the book, I think the most awful conceivable – a livid nightmare.59

  The lack of confidence, both in the dedication and the letter, is painfully obvious, as if he were already regretting it all.

  He received a long reply a few days later from Murray, in which the latter had obviously mixed kindly praise with judicious criticism. JB wrote back to thank him: ‘One of the worst faults of the book, I think, is the tendency to mere sentence-making. I think this is due partly to the excessive admiration which I have felt for some years for Stevenson, partly in the way the book was written.’60 It had been written in small pieces at snatched moments towards the end of his time at Glasgow, and that showed. No doubt he felt he was a more mature writer now. But at least he was a published novelist, at the age of twenty.

  The novel is set in the ‘Killing Time’, when ‘Covenanters’ – those Scottish Presbyterians who had signed the National Covenant of 1638 – were persecuted by Graham of Claverhouse, known popularly as ‘Bonny Dundee’, in the 1680s. Sir Quixote of the Moors tells of a French soldier of fortune who finds himself in the position of having to protect a ‘fair maiden’ while her father and lover are hiding from Claverhouse on the Galloway moors. The book was, JB wrote, ‘an effort to show what would be the course of a certain type of character in certain difficult circumstances, and in the second an attempt … to trace the influence of scene and weather on the action and nature of man’.61 These were Stevensonian preoccupations that would surface again and again in his early fiction. Young as he was, he had already learned the importance of writing an arresting first sentence:

  Before me stretched a black heath, over which the mist blew in gusts, and through whose midst the road crept like an adder.62

  What was obvious, even this early, and despite some offputting archaisms, was not only his acute interest in, and observation of, the natural world, in all its kindness and malice, but that he knew from experience what it was like to be cold, wet, stormstayed and frightened, and could translate that with immediacy to the page.

  Moreover, it is obvious that this twenty-year-old already knew what sexual longing was. The soldier rides away from the girl, because he cannot trust himself to behave honourably if he stays, and thinks his honour more important than her protection. We do not know, but can easily imagine, what he thought when the American publisher, Henry Holt and Company, insisted on an additional paragraph to give the story a happy ending, thereby entirely undermining the point of the book.

  This unhappy compromise appeared in the United States in October 1895, just as JB, his character forged and his literary career already under way, set his face southwards, like many an ambitious Scot before and since. Although he would never live permanently in Scotland again, his upbringing there had taught him how to be happy, and despite tragedies, misfortunes, failures, ill-health, successes and fame, that capacity for happiness never left him.

  *Some 450 ministers and their congregations left the Church of Scotland over an issue of principle concerning patronage and founded the Free Church of Scotland, usually known as ‘the Free Kirk’.

  **She came from Whim, near Lamancha in Peebleshire.

  *More than fifty years later, JB met a man in the west of Canada who remembered seeing him being carried down Thornton Road in Pathhead after the accident.

  *JB’s The Free Fishers is dedicated to Hutchison’s brother John.

  *It can be sung to the tune of ‘Blessed are the pure in heart’.

  *His mother was Catherine Stewart, or Stuart, of Thornhill, Perthshire.

  **Stellknowe, near Penicuik.

  *The lawsuit was the result of a trusteeship he had taken on for a Peebles widow’s estate, which had included shares in the bank.

  *The two men kept up their friendship by correspondence in later life, JB sending James Caddell a copy of his Poems Scots and English in 1917.

  *The reason why the ‘session’ only lasted half the year was because many students had to work for the rest of the time to earn the tuition fees.

  *This was twelve years before the Talla Reservoir was completed.

  *When Horne, who was the son of a kirk minister, became a member of the Cabinet in 1919, his mother is supposed to have remarked: ‘We always prayed that Robert would become a minister but maybe the Lord mistook our intention.’

  2

  Oxford, 1895–1899

  JB arrived at Brasenose College on the afternoon of 11 October 1895 to find that his rooms were on No. 1 staircase, in the corner of the sixteenth-century Old Quad. Brasenose College was part of a cluster of colleges close to ‘The High’, the main east/west thoroughfare through a city that was still small, compact and mainly medieval in character. At the end of the nineteenth century, the ordinary ‘commoners’ of Brasenose were often sons of country gentry from the north of England, while the ‘scholars’ tended to come from provincial grammar schools. The college, referred to by its members as BNC, was renowned for its sporting prowess, especially on the river and the rugby football field. (William Webb Ellis, the supposed inventor of Rugby Football, was an alumnus.) In retrospect, JB reckoned Brasenose taught him much about the English character.

  Oxford in the mid-1890s still had an air of the monastery about it, since college dons had only finally been allowed to marry less than twenty years before. There was no great turmoil in the outer world to disturb the ancestral peace of the place, and young men (for they were nearly all men) had time to make elaborate friendships and read themselves into a proper, if arguably already rather old-fashioned education, based on the Classics.

  JB quickly settled down to work all morning at his Classics (Homer’s Iliad, Theocritus and Demosthenes), spent part of the afternoon in the Bodleian Library doing research for the ‘Stanhope’, the university history prize, then more Classics before and after supper, and finally what he called ‘general work’, meaning journalism. Within two weeks of arrival, he had written a piece for The Glasgow Herald on his first impressions of Oxford and, in early November, another, on ‘Nonconformity in Literature’. This was a doughty, if overwritten, attack on the so-called ‘Kailyard’ (‘cabbage-patch’) school of Scottish novelists, which included S. R. Crockett, a Free Church minister, whom he knew, Gabriel Setoun and Ian Maclaren. Of Crockett he wrote:

  Mr Crockett hates the sickly and the grimy with a perfect hatred. He is all for the wind and the sunshine, hills and heather, lilac and adventure, kisses and fresh-churned butter … he is all for the great common things of the world – faith and love, heroism and patience. But it seems to us that in this also there is a danger; mere talking about fine things does not make fine literature, and Mr Crockett at his worst is only a boisterous talker. No man, however high his spirits and rich the life within him, can hope to be a great writer save by the restraint, the pains, the hard and bitter drudgery of his art.1

  That last sentence gives a good idea of what the twenty-year-old thought of the art (and craft) of writing, but these harsh words prompted a howl of protest from Robertson Nicoll, the editor of The British Weekly: A Journal of Social and Christian Progress, a conservative and religious magazine very popular in Scottish kirk-minded homes. JB was rebelling against the parochial and Pollyannaish nature of Scottish fiction-writing at the turn of the century, which threatened to stifle him quite as much as Glasgow manse life, and from which he was equally determined to escape.

  This wide-ranging article also dealt with other fashions in 1890s literature, notably ‘decadence’ and ‘naturalism’, and he showed his distaste for the exalting of vice into virtue by the ‘decadents’, and the incidental and insignificant in ‘naturalism’.* He was n
ot against novelty per se, but rather against the elevation of newness to something more than it deserved, at the expense of traditional literature. ‘The besetting sin of the day is pride,’2 announced the youngster. ‘The decadents’ distinguishing feature is a sort of disdain for the things which common men think great and good, and an affected seeking after esoteric beauties and virtues.’ These writers were providing vices with a touch of paint and a coating of sugar, he thought. ‘They claim to represent a new age, a new era, a new hedonism, a new Heaven knows what.’

  The nub of his essentially conservative philosophy, which he never abandoned, was: ‘The moral law has been accepted by saint and sinner for many hundred years, and has been the basis of all sound work, artistic or social, which has ever been done. And yet here we have so many presumptuous folk declaring that it is out of date, and setting in its place a substitute manufactured from their own evil desires.’3

  In the early afternoons he went on the river, played golf, or took long walks, the Cumnor Hills and Bablock Hythe being popular destinations for him, in homage to Matthew Arnold. He found the countryside around Oxford enchanting with its lush greenery, hidden lanes, fine houses and churches, slow-flowing rivers and, best of all, its long and stirringly chequered history: ‘From Roman centurion to Norman baron, from churchman to cavalier, much of the drama of England was staged here.’4

  He had not been at Brasenose for more than a couple of days when his rooms were invaded by six drunken college men, who turned his furniture upside down and then demanded whisky, which JB could not provide. Nevertheless, they left him with profuse protestations of friendship. It is not surprising that, as he told Gilbert Murray, his first impression was that his contemporaries were a curious mixture of overgrown schoolboys and would-be men of the world, whom he thought he might tire of quite soon.

  In his first term he helped to found a select Ibsen Society, to meet weekly to read the great man’s plays. ‘But after a few meetings the study of the works of that master so scandalised the members that they passed a vote of censure on me and turned the Society into a [dining] club called “Crocodiles”, with a tie of green, grey and white (that, in the opinion of the members, being the colour of the crocodile).’5 He rather ruefully consented to be its President.

  Despite his scholarship of £80 a year, he could not initially afford to eat in hall more than four days a week. But the remedy was in his own hands, because, even in his first term, he had aroused the interest of London publishers and editors. Very soon after he arrived, T. Fisher Unwin came down to talk about the imminent publication of Sir Quixote of the Moors (for which he paid £25)6 as well as possible publication of a collection of short stories under the title The Face of Proserpina. In the end, Fisher Unwin havered so much that JB sent them instead to John Lane, who published them as Grey Weather in 1899.

  Moreover, a couple of weeks after he arrived, he was summoned to breakfast in the Clarendon Hotel by John Lane,7 who invited him to become a publisher’s ‘reader’ (reading manuscripts and recommending whether they should be published or not), at a rate of three a week, earning £6 thereby. He had no hesitation in accepting, despite the substantial increase in his workload, since this would both enhance his reputation and help make ends meet. As importantly, it would also keep him abreast of what other fiction writers were doing. It was a time when novelists were experimenting with (comparatively) explicit sexual material, which frankly unsettled the prudish young man. These were some of his comments to Lane about Edgar Jepson’s The Passion for Romance: ‘It is very full of “sex”, full of sickening descriptions of passion, and sugary paroxysms. In a word, it is thoroughly vulgar … I do not think that it would do any good to your firm’s reputation.’8

  When he came home for his first vacation, his family laughed at his ‘Varsity’ accent, which he had swiftly acquired. In this vacation he walked long miles in the hills with his brother, Willie, and worked on his novel, John Burnet of Barns, as well as a bleak, compelling story about a reformed sinner, entitled ‘A Captain of Salvation’, which was published in The Yellow Book during the next term.*

  He finished John Burnet of Barns in early March. It was 100,000 words in length and had been a substantial labour. The process had certainly taught him the courage to carry out a big project, but he thought, rightly, that, in places, it was cumbersome and ill put together.

  About the same time, he wrote an article for the University of Glasgow Magazine on ‘Books and Places’ to please Charlie Dick, who had become its editor. JB wrote to his friend ‘… I enjoyed your Notes on a Western Isle immensely. You are getting into an admirable and restrained English style.’9 He had enthusiastically congratulated Dick the year before when his edition of Walton’s The Compleat Angler appeared in The Scott Library. And so began an enduring tradition of warmly praising (unprompted) other labourers in the same vineyard, which must often have surprised writers unused to such magnanimity in their contemporaries.

  In the Trinity (summer) Term, he failed to win the Stanhope prize, although this did not depress him unduly, for he reckoned that the subject chosen for the following year – ‘Sir Walter Raleigh’ – would suit him better. He told Dick that ‘I have been alternating between hard work (I get about 10 hours done in the day) and lying on my back among trees of the riverside, or drinking cider in the Union Gardens. I have done a good deal of tennis, yachting, rowing, canoeing and punting lately.’10 He was also reading three manuscripts a week and reporting on them to Lane.

  All the while, he was fizzing intellectually. He continued to Dick: ‘I am busy preparing a violent article for the Yellow Book on Modern Criticism in which I am having a drive at all my bêtes-noires from the Kailyard School to Socialism.’ Sadly, since that would have been quite a trick to pull off, this was never published, because the quarterly ceased after the April 1897 number. His last story to appear in it was ‘At the Article of Death’ – a rather moving tale of a dying Border shepherd.

  His health was not terribly good, as a result, he said, of too much work and excitement – in other words, burning the candle at both ends. However, although a heatwave in late May gave him asthma, the full beauty of the city of Oxford and the surrounding countryside was open to him that term. He told his mother that ‘Oxford is a lovely sight, with its greenery and flowers, pretty frocks and pretty faces; speaking generally, the beauty and fashion of England are congregated here just now. When I turned up yesterday on the barge in boating clothes, I was horrified to find it filled with ladies, and opera glasses and parasols.’11 It must have looked like a scene from the farce Charley’s Aunt, which was running in London at the time. Zuleika Dobson, the cynical satire of Oxford undergraduate life, which Max Beerbohm had begun in 1898, describes just such an occasion.

  As well as the money for Sir Quixote, JB was also paid for a short story for Macmillan and two more articles for The Glasgow Herald, and there were regular and welcome increments in his second and third terms from John Lane. However, his earnings really began to take off just before he started his second year, when he received £100 for the serial rights for John Burnet of Barns. At the end of 1896 he had more than £190 in the bank. At the end of the following year, 1897, the balance was less than £130, despite reviewing for The Academy, reading for Lane, and receiving royalties from Scholar Gipsies. He had begun to spend more, and was gradually turning into the typical late Victorian undergraduate, although he was careful not to waste his money. He could afford vacation holidays, and to buy as many books as he liked. He would often lend money to his mother, who was punctilious about paying him back, as well as to his friends, who may not have been so careful, and he also gave to charity. He felt able to afford to join the Union Society and even a London gentleman’s club, the Devonshire in St James’. Crucially, in the spring of 1897, he had enough money to pay £40 6s 8d to become a member of the Middle Temple. He had come to the conclusion that he was capable of earning sufficient from his pen to read for the Bar. The Bar, of course, was a sensib
le option for a man with an Oxford classical education who knew he must make his way in the world, as well as a writer who doubted whether, initially or indeed ever, he could make a living by his pen.

  That summer he bought his sister Anna (‘dear Pudge’) a bicycle for £12 10s, which he had promised her if he received advantageous serial rights for John Burnet of Barns. He was determined to help her have as much freedom as was possible for a middle-class teenage girl in turn-of-the-century Glasgow.

  JB, like many of his contemporaries, was very shy of girls, for they featured rarely in Oxford college society in the 1890s. Whenever he met one at a tea party, he seemed fated to be dressed unsuitably, having just come from the river or the library, which made his shyness worse. There were few women’s halls (Somerville became a college only in 1894) and the female students were, in any event, heavily chaperoned. Most Oxford men lived an almost continuously masculine life, unless they happened to meet someone’s sister on a visit of his ‘people’. There are a number of references in his letters to charming or pretty girls and he definitely admired Miss Lilian Collen, who played the female lead in a student production of Romeo and Juliet in February 1898. Although he was not, constitutionally, very susceptible, and does not seem to have seen young women as part of his landscape at Oxford, he was not entirely immune to their charms.

  In early June 1896 he wrote to Anna, who was his discreet and faithful confidante, crossly turning down his parents’ invitation that he become a deacon of the John Knox church – how far away that must have seemed to the urbane Oxford ‘undergrad’! A week later he told her that he had been on the river nearly every afternoon. ‘It is very pretty, for the water-lilies are all out and the lanes are simply masses of wild roses.’ He went on to write: ‘What in the world does Mother mean by telling me to take care of my health and my morals! She is a most uncomplimentary person.’12