Beyond the Thirty-Nine Steps

by Ursula Buchan

  After the end of term, he went to stay for a couple of days with John Lane in his set of rooms in Albany, Piccadilly, close to the offices of the Bodley Head. Lane took a fatherly interest in the young man and introduced him to a number of literary and would-be literary figures, such as Arnold Bennett, whose first novel JB had read for him and warmly recommended for publication, despite doubting whether it would be a striking success.* He was right about that. Bennett reckoned that, after the cost of typing was taken away, he made one sovereign out of A Man from the North; with it, he bought a new hat.

  Arnold Bennett has left us with a pen-portrait of the twenty-year-old JB:

  A very young, fair man, charmingly shy, ‘Varsity’ in every tone and gesture. He talks quietly in a feminine, exiguous voice, with the accent of Kensington tempered perhaps by a shadow of a shade of Scotch … A most modest, retiring man, yet obviously sane and shrewd. Well-disposed, too, and anxious to be just, a man to compel respect, one who ‘counts’.13

  JB stayed three days in London and told his Brasenose friend Benjamin Boulter, known as ‘Taffy’, that he had ‘met all sorts of people, from awful New Women, who drank whisky and soda and smoked cigars, to John Murray, the publisher, who is a sort of incarnation of respectability. I never was in so many theatres and restaurants in my life.’14

  He was rather loath to go north at the end of the summer term to spend the first part of the vacation with his family, since his parents’ idea of a holiday was to manse-swap with other ministers – first Innerleithen, east of Peebles, and then Gallatown, close to Pathhead. However, as it turned out, he enjoyed Innerleithen more than he thought he would, since Charlie Dick came to stay; after studying in the mornings, they would walk, play golf or fish every afternoon. At Gallatown in August, JB entertained John Edgar, another friend from Hutchesons’ and the University of Glasgow, and they played a lot of golf, but he still managed to work on Modern Criticism, begin writing ‘Sir Walter Ralegh’ (sic) and his Newdigate Prize poem on Gibraltar, plan a new novel in twenty chapters to be called ‘A Lost Lady of Old Years’ (a quotation from Robert Browning’s Waring), and read George Meredith’s Evan Harrington for the second time. All this exhibited an unusual and, as it turned out, enduring capacity for breaking off from one subject to another, while retaining the same high level of concentration for each.

  He wrote to Charlie Dick from Gallatown two days after his twenty-first birthday:

  … my hair is completely white with Sir Walter Ralegh [sic], who seems to have ordered his life for the sole reason of perplexing biographers.

  Even as I write, I observe from my turret chamber the Countess of Rosslyn and the beautiful Lady Dudley are driving past from Dysart House in a high dog-cart. I begin to wish I were she, and then, reflecting that her husband has lost all his money on the Turf, I am glad I am not. Still a high dog-cart makes up for many inequalities in life. In fact, now that I have been 21 years in this Valley of Humiliation, I begin to reflect that life what with over-work, being confined to bed, wind, rain, aristocrats and submerged reefs* is played out. But I am consoled by the thought of high dog-carts.15

  After Gallatown, he went to Galloway to walk in the hills, most likely with his brother Willie, telling Charlie Dick that he had had one of the most enjoyable and adventurous holidays ever and got much fresh material. ‘I slept one night in a shepherd’s cottage, 9 miles from the nearest house and 25 miles from the nearest station. I took him two loaves and some tea, and he told me that he had not seen loaf-bread since the Spring and did not get his letters till a fortnight late.’16

  Before he went up to Oxford for his second year, Lane told him that he was happy to publish a collection of his short stories, and they agreed upon the title Grey Weather: Moorland Tales of My Own People. These had already appeared in a variety of publications – Chambers’s Journal, The Yellow Book, Macmillan’s Magazine and Black and White – which showed how quickly he had learned the tricks of the freelancer. At the same time, in late September, Scholar Gipsies, a mix of essays and stories, with six exceptional drypoint etchings by D. Y. Cameron, was published. Within five months, Lane was forced to print a second edition.

  From an early age, JB, in thrall to Matthew Arnold, had seen himself as a cerebral man of action, a man for the open road with a stick in his hand and a copy of Thucydides in his pocket. He had managed to persuade John Lane (unlike T. Fisher Unwin, who ‘hummed and hawed’) to publish this book of early writings in the autumn of 1896. That was no mean feat, since published essays are usually the product of a mature mind and ripe experience, not of a callow lad who had only just achieved his majority. Certainly, his readers must have imagined him to be much older. Scholar Gipsies was dedicated to the memory of his grandfather, John Masterton of Broughton Green, and comprised sixteen essays, containing, in his words, ‘a few pictures of character and nature, pieces of sentiment torn from their setting, a fragment of criticism, some moralisings of little worth…’17 The best chapters are those that draw on his experience of talking to shepherds in remote places, of fishing on the Tweed, or of thinking back to how he thought as a child, just as the shades of the prison house had effectively closed upon the grown boy.

  ‘Men of the Uplands’, for example, anatomises the particular characteristics of Tweed folk (of which he counted himself as one) and their interests – religion, politics, sport – and describes vividly a night-time poaching expedition, with local ne’er-do-wells, which has the ring of personal experience about it. He had been caught poaching salmon, aged sixteen, and probably only escaped being hauled in front of the procurator fiscal – his uncle – because of his youth and his family’s standing in Peebles:

  [Salmon-poaching in the close season] is hazardous in the extreme, for the waters are often swollen high, and men in the pursuit of sport have no care of their lives … ‘Firing the water’ as it is called, consists in flaring torches, made of pine-knots or old barrel-staves dipped in tar, over the surface of the river, and so attracting the fish. The leister with its barbed prongs is a deadly weapon in a skilful hand, but in the use of it a novice is apt to overbalance himself and flounder helplessly in the wintry stream. The glare of light on the faces of the men, the leaping fish, the swirl of the dark water, the black woods around, the turmoil of the spot in contrast with the deathly quietness of the hills, the sack with its glittering spoil, the fierce, muffled talk, are in the highest degree romantic.18

  He had not yet rid himself of the tendency to some de haut en bas pontificating at times, as well as a self-consciously literary tone, but the fine writing is tempered by some good, yet comprehensible, Scots dialogue, for his ear was by now finely tuned, and some of the ‘characters’ described, particularly an old kirk minister, do leap from the page.

  In his second year, JB was given rooms on Staircase 6 in Old Quad, which he found delightful and easy to work in. He was buoyed up by good reviews and sales of Scholar Gipsies, as well as the offer from Fisher Unwin to send him manuscripts to read, which ‘will add to the hardships of my lot’19 but for which he was paid handsomely.

  He was beginning to become active in the Union Society, having, at the end of his first year, seconded a motion ‘That motley’s the only wear’. This was a strange proposal for such a dapper young man to endorse but proof that he was developing a lawyer’s zest for arguing any point, however duff.

  He spent the Christmas holidays mostly at Broughton, working all morning and then taking long walks in the afternoons. A ‘magnificent walk’ of fifteen miles took him to the foot of Caerdon, through the hill pass and down the Holmes Water. ‘A snow storm was drifting up against the setting sun, and I have rarely seen anything finer than the lurid crimson and yellow flaming behind the bald white domes of the hills.’20 As well as working on his Latin poetry he had nearly finished another chapter of his Jacobite novel, A Lost Lady of Old Years. The lost lady was the wife of ‘Traitor’ Murray of Broughton, the man who turned King’s evidence to save himself and betray Bonnie Prince Char
lie. ‘Here, not five hundred yards from the place [the House of Broughton] which once was her home, I seem to write better,’ he told Charlie Dick.

  In preparation for reading for the Bar, he started to ‘eat dinners’* in Middle Temple Hall in March 1897. That Lent term, he sat ‘Mods’ and, after it, celebrated with friends in his rooms sufficiently well that they were each fined £1 to pay for broken windows. Generally, in comparison with most other Brasenose men, he was notably temperate, but he could sometimes be reckless, in a way that would have caused frowns and heart-burnings in Queen Mary Avenue, had the occupants known of it.

  However, when the exam results were posted in May, he was disappointed to discover that he had narrowly missed a First. He had ploughed Roman Poetry; although expected to get an alpha plus he could only manage a beta minus. He told Gilbert Murray that it had been foolish of him to spend so much time writing his essay on Sir Walter Raleigh. However, at least he had won the Stanhope History Prize and, as a result, had to read out part of it at the Encaenia,** held after the end of the summer term. ‘Sir Walter Ralegh’ (sic) was published by Blackwell’s in July, when The Oxford Magazine enthused: ‘The essay of Mr J. Buchan on Sir Walter Raleigh seems to have thoroughly deserved the success which it obtained … the author is well up with his subject, and writes in a pleasing and sometimes very epigrammatic style. His estimate of the character of Raleigh is just, and his criticisms on his literary productions are incisive.’21

  That summer was spent partly at Broughton, mixing hard work (he translated 360 pages of Plato’s Republic from the Greek in a fortnight) and violent exercise, including practising diving and swimming in the Tweed. In July, with Taffy Boulter, he went on a walking tour in Galloway, north-east of Newton Stewart, basing themselves at a cottage in St John’s Town of Dalry. He told Charlie Dick that the trip was ‘the most soul-satisfying and adventurous I ever had’.

  They walked in blinding heat the ten miles up the Ken and the Pulharrow Burn to the Forest of Buchan, climbed the Clints of Millfire (2,500 ft. high) and then plodded through bog to the Back Hill of Buss. Here they found a shepherd making hay, who gave them tea, lent them each a blanket, and escorted them across the Siller Flow of Buchan. They then had a hard climb to the top of the Wolf’s Slock, where they could look down on Loch Enoch:

  I shall never forget that sight as long as I live. The loch was one sheet of burnished silver with its wonderful milk-white sand, and islands glowing like jewels all athwart it … All the other great lochs of the Dungeon were spread out at our feet – Neldricken, Arron, Valley, Macaterick, Trool etc. We went down to a promontory, had a long swim then I fished, but had very indifferent sport. About 8.30 we lit a large fire of heather and bog-oak and made supper. Then we rolled ourselves in our plaids, lit our pipes, and lay down before the fire and slept … At 2.30 I got up and fished for a little. Then we went for a swim. Did you ever bathe before sunrise? It is a queer effect to be swimming in the blackest water, and see shafts of golden light cleaving ravines in front of you.22

  The images that JB retained of Galloway, in particular its extreme remoteness, the pattern of its hills and lochs, even the position of railway stations ‘in the bog’, did not leave him, and he conjured them later, both as the background to the terrifying story he wrote while at Oxford about a remnant of Picts,* and, most famously, for Richard Hannay’s flight across the moors in The Thirty-Nine Steps.

  In his third year at Oxford, JB was happy to be given the set of rooms in which Reginald (later Bishop) Heber** had entertained Sir Walter Scott; they were pleasant and light, and looked over the Exeter College gardens.* The Michaelmas term was the usual mixture of hard Classics studies and reading novel manuscripts; at one moment he had twelve of these ‘in my coal-hole mixed up with my coal and faggots. When I want one I light a candle, say my prayers, get the coal hammer and begin to burrow.’23 The following term, he achieved a Senior Hulme scholarship, the examiners acknowledging that the paper would have gained him a First in Greats. The scholarship was worth £130 a year and added substantially to his financial security. Indeed, even by the standards of the privileged young men of the time, he was now a rich undergraduate.

  His attractiveness to publishers, together with his ambition to succeed in as many fields as possible, ensured that he was often almost overwhelmed with extracurricular work. At one time he was revising John Burnet of Barns for publication (‘It is dreary work for I have entirely lost the sentiment I wrote it in,’24 he told Gilbert Murray), reviewing books for The Academy, getting up a speech on foreign policy for the Union, and learning about Celtic and Norse poetry to deliver a paper to the Ingoldsby, the Brasenose literary society. He learned some Icelandic for the purpose and read a good deal of Icelandic poetry, he told Charlie Dick, ‘and I am altogether rather intoxicated just now with things like the Mabinogion in Celtic poetry and the Helgi songs in Norse. I am trying to make my paper as thorough and original a piece of work as possible.’25

  He was also writing A History of Brasenose College, a task given to him by the Principal, Dr Heberden, and a signal honour for an undergraduate. The title was to appear in a series of Oxford College histories, written by Fellows and published by F. E. Robinson. It was not an easy book to write, but the college was pleased with the result. It showed JB’s growing capacity for writing for a particular audience in a way that did not come naturally to him; he was frankly not very interested in the college’s sporting achievements, yet he gave them their proper place. As one reviewer, obviously not a Brasenose man, commented in The Spectator: ‘Mr Buchan is a clever young Scotsman who, with the intellectual precocity of his race, has produced several volumes while still an undergraduate. He can scarcely be accounted a typical product of his College, but he has done his business of chronicling very thoroughly. The subject forbade his making an interesting book, for Brasenose, except on the river and (in the days of Mr. Ottaway) at Lords, has never been conspicuous … For the outside public Brasenose will chiefly be of interest as the curiously inappropriate setting for Mr. Pater’s delicate qualities of mind.’26

  He continued to spend time in London at the beginning and end of every term, meeting publishers and editors and enjoying himself with friends, away from his family. Now that he was a member of the Devonshire Club, he no longer needed to depend on his elderly uncle and aunt in Clapham for lodging, with all the constraints that that imposed.

  During the Easter vacation in 1898 he went north with John Edgar to walk in the Highlands, and encountered difficulties that could have stopped this narrative in its tracks. The pair left the train at the Bridge of Orchy in Perthshire and walked through the Black Mount deer forest until they reached the King’s House in Glencoe.* ‘The next morning the Spirit of Evil tempted me and I fell,’ he told Dick. The two young men decided to climb up Buchaille Etive Mhor (Gaelic for the Great Shepherd of Etive), despite the fact that contemporary guidebooks called it ‘inaccessible’ and members of the Scottish Mountaineering Club had only succeeded in climbing it the summer before, using ropes and ice-axes. It was a piece of the utmost foolhardiness, for they had no proper equipment and, moreover, were encumbered with waterproofs. It was not long before they became separated, since JB was a more audacious mountaineer, and in his excitement forgot all about Edgar. The going was very hard, for he had to pull himself up, hand over hand, on rocks encrusted with ice, and then cross crevasses of snow:

  Once I thought I was done for. I was crossing a snow-filled gorge when I began to slide. I got on my face and kicked, but I couldn’t stop, so before ever I knew I had shot down a chasm away below a great snowdrift of about 20 feet in depth. I thought I should slip to the foot of the drift and be suffocated, but luckily my foot caught a rock and I stopped. The place was pitch dark; only the hole I had fallen through shone like a little patch of light away above me. I was lying flat in the bed of a stream and the icy water was trickling up my arms and down my neck. I should think I must have taken an hour to crawl out, inch by inch, and when I reache
d the open and lay down on a rock, I felt as weak as water and my teeth were chattering with fright.27

  He managed to get to the summit and, on the way down, he met Edgar, who had had his own difficulties, having lost the nail of a finger when he made an involuntary glissade down a snow-field and fell amongst rocks. Even if one takes account of a youthful over-dramatisation of the incident for the benefit of his rather less adventurous friend (he never went climbing with Charlie Dick), the young men were extremely lucky to survive without much injury.

  JB took full advantage of the many opportunities for enjoying what a university town can offer in the third year of a four-year course, despite his punishing and very carefully organised work schedule. Although he never played games for either college or university, he took plenty of exercise and was sufficiently well thought of to be elected a member of Vincent’s Club, more usually the preserve of those who played sport for the university.

  He also made some enduring close friendships outside Brasenose, in particular with Tommy Nelson, from University College, whom he probably met through Stair Gillon (known as ‘Sandy’) of New College, since they both came from Edinburgh. Sandy Gillon was a Scot educated at an English public school, who had a big booming voice, a thatch of fair hair, a loyal nature and a very kind heart. He had the capacity to oxygenate the air around him by good humour and sheer high spirits. Tommy Nelson, scion of the Edinburgh publishing house Thomas Nelson and Sons, was a most popular undergraduate and supremely gifted sportsman; he played Rugby Union for Oxford, and gained an international cap, playing outside centre for Scotland in 1898. Almost certainly JB saw him play rugby for Oxford against Cambridge in the Varsity Matches of 1897 and 1898. (There is a gripping account of an international rugby match at the beginning of JB’s 1930 novel Castle Gay.) Tommy was President of Vincent’s when JB was elected, admired for his sanity, warmth of personality and his balance. He also had a pronounced social conscience, which JB – sensitive to these things – divined early on.