Beyond the Thirty-Nine Steps

by Ursula Buchan

  Our Idol is a very good business-man, and publishers world-famous for robbery have wagged their heads over him, owning they have met their match! … He has found out something good in everybody. All the same he can be angry when called upon in a right cause. This is established by recent experience.

  In politics he is a Tory-Democrat-Jacobite. Legitimacy is his ruling passion … He collects etchings. He dislikes dancing, and hates ladies. He has no high opinion of the literature of today, on the principle, doubtless, of ‘we makes it’. He does not like to hear about his own books; he refuses to be classified as a literary man. His works have a large circulation in the United States, where the newspapers have portraits of him as a tall, melancholy man with unkempt hair and beard…

  We know of no one who has had more success, or deserved it better. He is as popular with men as he is with Fortune. We hate eulogy; but we are helpless.52

  The remark about him being angry in a good cause refers to a contretemps in the college late in 1898. College ‘rowdies’ caused a rumpus one Sunday night in Hall, accusing the Principal, C. B. Heberden, a cerebral elderly bachelor, of being unsympathetic to their interests and trying to turn Brasenose into an intellectual college. JB spoke up for the Principal (whom he rather liked) in Hall and then, when a fight broke out outside, he berated the sportsmen, saying, amongst other things, that it was time they grew up. According to Janet Adam Smith, ‘the baiting stopped, and the chief rowdy was sent down, but Buchan paid for this outburst of righteous anger by a series of sleepless nights’.53 Although far from lacking in courage, he disliked conflict and it took its toll on him.

  By this time, he was ready to invite his mother and sister to visit him in Oxford, something that apparently required money, self-confidence and the good-humoured help of friends. The two women arrived in February and were put up by JB in a respectable hotel, The Mitre, in The High, close to his digs. He whisked them round the colleges at a very brisk pace, gave a dinner party for them, and took them to an Oxford University Drama Society production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. This left a lasting impression on Anna since, despite knowing the play off by heart, she had never been to the theatre before. This was the beginning of her lifelong passion for watching Shakespeare’s plays, which would take her to Stratford each spring, and was later to create a strong bond between her and JB’s equally stage-struck daughter, Alice.

  March 1899 saw the publication of Grey Weather by The Bodley Head. The fifteen stories are hymns of love and praise to the loneliest parts of Tweeddale and the people he knew who inhabited it, and are fragrant with the scent of heather and bog myrtle on hot summer days, when they are not chilling from the nightmarish terror experienced by a benighted traveller in the hills.

  These stories show how much he had absorbed of his environment in his youth. He was already exhibiting the marked ‘nympholepsy’, love for water, that he confessed to in his last, unfinished work, Pilgrim’s Rest;* he had learned to describe everything from a deep salmon pool to a raging torrent or a dripping mossy stone.

  Despite all his other activities, he did achieve a First Class degree in Greats (indeed the best of his year) that summer, which was a source of great satisfaction to him. But he scarcely broke step before starting on the study of law ‘and the dryer sods of history’ that vacation, variously in Tweeddale and Galloway, and when on holiday with his family in Arran in August. This was because his tutors had persuaded him to stay on for the Michaelmas term to try for an All Souls Fellowship, worth a handsome £200, and with enormous academic kudos attached to it. September was spent shooting grouse or partridge on the estates of various friends, indicative of the smarter, richer world to which Oxford had introduced him.

  His Jacobite historical novel, A Lost Lady of Old Years, was published that month by The Bodley Head, having first been lucratively serialised in fifteen parts in Today. In the dedication to his Scots friend, Duncan Grant Warrand, whose ancestor, the Lord President at the time of Culloden, plays a small cameo in the book, JB wrote that ‘it is the story of the bleak side of the Forty-five, of goodness without wisdom, of wisdom first cousin to vice, of those who, like a certain Lord [Lovat], had no virtue but an undeniable greatness’. It is an interesting, if historically inaccurate, tale of ‘Traitor Murray’ of Broughton and his beautiful wife, whom JB turns into a noble character, which she almost certainly was not. He also experiments for the first time with an unlikeable, angry but redeemable ‘hero’, Francis Birkenshaw, who is of a gentle family that has fallen on evil days and who, from time to time, lets his gentility down badly. The Times thought the book in tone, style and method very influenced by Stevenson’s Weir of Hermiston* but was not critical except about the amount of time given over to Birkenshaw’s early life. JB wrote to Charlie Dick that he felt the only real merit in the book, apart from the depiction of Lord Lovat, was the atmosphere of those moorland wars fought in the mists and rain.

  By now he was working on yet another novel, his first with a contemporary setting, entitled The Half-Hearted, published in September 1900 by Isbister. It was brought out a little later by Houghton Mifflin in the United States; this was his first connection with that publishing company, which would continue until his death. The book was dedicated to his friends, Raymond Asquith, Harold Baker and Cuthbert Medd. Its hero, Lewis Haystoun, a young Scottish laird, the ‘half-hearted’ of the title, was probably largely based on Raymond, whose post-Oxford letters to JB show him to have been without obvious ambition. However, the book developed from many conversations with his friends about what kind of life they should pursue and how they could develop the will and power to act, when so much had been given to them – brains, classical education, security, personal gifts – without them really trying.

  After much navel-gazing by the hero, whose unwillingness decisively to act loses him the girl to a stupider, less conflicted man, the action moves to the North-West Frontier of British India, a region providing much anxiety at the turn of the century, because of the expansionist (as the British saw it) tendencies of the Russians. No doubt Kim was at the back of his mind: in Memory Hold-the-Door he called Kipling an early influence ‘more because of his matter than his manner’.54 This is an uneven book, which lingers too long initially but reaches a stirring, if incredible climax. If the writing of it taught him anything it was that the dual sides of his nature – the romantic and the realist – could be harnessed in the cause of creativity, and in later novels he would do this more successfully. However, he told Lady Mary Murray that it was a ‘stupid book’, written at a time of ‘violent prejudice’ (whatever that meant) at Oxford. He told her husband, ‘I am glad you think I am better at love-making! I hate the stuff. I sit and blush with disgust when I am writing it.’55

  That October he went to live at 105, The High Street, with Sandy Gillon. A fifth year at university is rarely so good as the others, since most friends have gone down and, in the end, he did not achieve an All Souls Fellowship either. This was, undoubtedly, a great disappointment and one that JB contemplated with a certain, though short-lived, bitterness, since he was considered by many to be a very strong candidate and he thought himself superior to his friend, Dougal Malcolm, who beat him to the History Fellowship.* The letters of indignation and consolation poured in afterwards, including one from his tutor, Francis Wylie, who said that All Souls would be sorry one day that JB’s distinctions were not part of the college’s record. Dr A. G. Butler, the dean and chaplain of Oriel, wrote to console him: ‘Without however underrating the advantages of such a position, still I think it is often good for a man to be cut adrift from Oxford. There is little or no career here; and yet it is so pleasant, that people stay on here and lose their thews of action.’56 Butler also said in his letter that he was happy to introduce JB to John St Loe Strachey, editor of The Spectator, and by that he did the younger man a very great favour.

  JB told Gilbert Murray that he hated not to do the things he was expected to, and he was even more forthright to his mother: �
��… the general opinion in Oxford is that the election is preposterous. I am of course bitterly disappointed, but I will recover. Many thanks for the many kind letters you have written to me during the last weeks … I am chiefly sorry that I did not get it for your sake and Father’s … I must cut my coat according to my cloth and take humbler lodgings in town than I intended.’57 When she wrote bemoaning the fact he would have unpleasant quarters in London, he replied that they wouldn’t be nasty, only unfashionable, and that he would have between £200 and £250 for the next two and a half years, while he was training, and that would be enough to live comfortably in a quiet way.

  His father was moved to write one of his very rare letters to his son, who thanked him and said that the following year he would try for a Junior Fellowship at Oxford, but ‘I will not go in for All Souls again for worlds … Sandy Gillon has taken All Souls much more to heart than I have. He is inconsolable.’58 Not for the last time, Sandy would take JB’s reverses harder than he took them himself.

  JB was not one to brood and, in any event, he had cause to be cheerful that winter when his brother Willie sat the Oxford examinations and achieved a Junior Hulme Scholarship to Brasenose. It was a source of great satisfaction to JB that his clever, ambitious, politically sophisticated, athletic brother (he was a very good soccer player) should go to the same college and experience the same formative and intensely pleasurable four years that he had enjoyed.

  Sir Walter Scott told his son Charles that, although some people might scramble into distinction without a classical education, ‘it is always with the greatest difficulty, like climbing over a wall instead of giving your ticket at the door’.59 Oxford had given John Buchan that ticket, as well as the opportunity to discover what talents he had and what he might want to do with his life. He could have stayed on to teach philosophy as a Junior Fellow, but Butler’s words had gone deep. In later life he recalled that he ‘wanted to explore the wider stages of life’.60

  *In an essay on his High Victorian hero, George Meredith, published in The Spectator in May 1909, JB wrote ‘… he never fell into the blunder of those who think that a mass of undigested and unselected detail is fiction’.

  *In 1937, John Betjeman teased his friend Alice Fairfax-Lucy (JB’s daughter) in his poem ‘The Arrest of Oscar Wilde at the Cadogan Hotel’:

  So you’ve brought me the latest Yellow Book:

  And Buchan has got in it now:

  Approval of what is approved of

  Is as false as a well-kept vow.

  John Betjeman, Continual Dew, John Murray, London, 1937, p. 1.

  *Originally entitled In the Shadow but published as A Man from the North in 1898.

  *He had dived into a deep channel among rocks and cut himself badly.

  *Eating twelve dinners in the Middle Temple Hall, where he would meet other barristers, was one prerequisite of being called to the Bar.

  **The name for the annual Oxford ceremony when honorary degrees are given out.

  *‘No Man’s Land’ appeared in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1899, and was collected in The Watcher by the Threshold, published in 1902.

  **Composer of that most patronising and tuneful of missionary hymns, ‘From Greenland’s icy mountains’.

  *Later, his brother Willie was to occupy the same rooms.

  *Where part of Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps was filmed.

  *Both his son, Johnnie, and his great-grandson, Tommy Wide, achieved this feat, although possibly not at a moment’s notice.

  *Matthew Arnold’s great-nephew and son of the very popular novelist, Mrs Humphry Ward.

  **Not Basil as is often, erroneously, reported.

  *Later Professor of History at the University of Glasgow.

  *However, by the time that Anna Buchan began to write novels, which have elements of the Kailyard in them, after the Great War, JB no longer seemed to wish to do battle over it.

  **Caroline, later Lady Kinross, became a lifelong friend of JB’s. A third sister, Nina, married Sandy Gillon after the Great War.

  *Two chapters of which appear at the end of his reminiscences, Memory Hold-the-Door.

  *Others, such as Professor David Daniell, saw the influence of Stevenson’s Catriona.

  *They nevertheless remained friends for life.

  3

  The Bar, Journalism and South Africa, 1900–1903

  On a windowpane in the parlour of 34 Queen Mary Avenue, Glasgow, is etched a quotation from Kenilworth: ‘Fain would I climb, but that I fear to fall.’ Sir Walter Scott put this phrase into the mouth of Sir Walter Raleigh, a man who, as we have seen, had early captured JB’s attention. It is safe to assume that the engraver was JB, rather than any other occupant before or since, most likely at the time when he was thinking hard about what he should do after Oxford.1

  He arrived in London right at the start of the new century, and found lodgings in the Temple, sharing them with Richard Denman, a would-be City banker whom he had known at Oxford. ‘My first rooms were in [4]; Brick Court, the ugliest part of the Temple; they were small and new, reached by a staircase of lavatory bricks, and with no prospect but chimney-pots.’ He missed Oxford and he missed home. London, which he had enjoyed visiting from Oxford, now seemed to him dull, dingy and inhospitable. Fortunately, his homesickness lasted no more than a month, before he was caught up in the excitement of learning a profession in a cosmopolitan but still fairly small and contained city:

  London at the turn of the century had not yet lost her Georgian air. Her ruling society was aristocratic till Queen Victoria’s death and preserved the modes and rites of an aristocracy. Her great houses had not disappeared or become blocks of flats. In the summer she was a true city of pleasure, every window-box gay with flowers, her streets full of splendid equipages, the Park a showground for fine horses and handsome men and women. The ritual went far down, for frock-coats and top-hats were the common wear not only for the West End, but about the Law Courts and in the City.2

  As was common a hundred years ago, JB had fixed up for himself a few months’ training in a solicitor’s office – Rowcliffes, Rawle and Co – at 1 Bedford Row, as a precursor to being taken on as a barrister’s pupil in a set of Chambers. He had sought advice from a friend’s father, a London solicitor, who told him he would be wise to practise commercial law, presumably because it was, then as now, one of the best paid of legal specialisms. Rawle was an influential lawyer – later President of the Law Society – and the firm acted as a prominent London agent for provincial solicitors.3 But JB had to pay for this privilege. He wrote to his sister, Anna, that month: ‘I am liking my office work very much. I get all sort of queer jobs to do, such as rummaging among wills in the Bank of England, and interviewing defaulting Motor Car Companies.’4

  In the same letter he told her that he had been asked to join a ‘special yeomanry corps’ for gentlemen who could ride and shoot, to go out to fight in South Africa, three months after the start of the Second Boer War. This war, between the British Empire and two Boer Republics, the South African Republic (Transvaal) and Orange Free State, had begun the previous October. Smouldering political and economic resentments between Boers and ‘uitlanders’ – immigrants who were mostly of British origin – in the Transvaal, had flared up into a fierce and, as it turned out, lengthy conflagration. JB felt, on advice, that he could not ‘play tricks’ with his profession. But he told Charlie Dick in late January, ‘I have been leading a curious life lately, very busy and keen on my law, very gay, and at the same time tormented with proposals to go to the front, which unhappily fall in with my desires. These last I have now finally conquered, and I can now watch my friends go off without special bitterness.’ The truth was that he was in the first flush of fascination with his new profession. ‘I am acquiring an enormous craze for the law. Nothing has ever impressed me more with a sense of profound intellectual force than the decisions and pleadings of some of our great lawyers.’5

  Moreover, there had recently been a severe military reverse
in South Africa when, as a result of poor preliminary reconnaissance, the lives of many in the Highland Brigade, including its commanding officer, General Wauchope, had been sacrificed at the Battle of Magersfontein. Although JB could not bring himself to say it out loud, he was not inclined at this juncture to risk his neck for a cause about which he did not care very strongly.

  His office hours were a comparatively gentle 10 a.m. until 5 p.m., five days a week, which gave him the necessary leisure for fee-earning journalism, as well as the writing of books and the reading of manuscripts for John Lane. It was quite natural that he should turn for his freelance work to The Spectator, a popular weekly periodical, which was conservative, but generally Liberal Unionist, in politics. Founded in 1828,* the chief proprietor and editor for the previous twelve years had been the clever, Liberal-inclining commentator, John St Loe Strachey, a cousin of Lytton Strachey, and it was to him that the well-disposed Dr A. G. Butler wrote a letter of introduction.

  JB’s first article appeared on 20 January 1900 and was entitled ‘The Russian Imperial Ideal’, a subject about which he can have had only a limited knowledge before he knuckled down to research it, but which he was exploring in his novel, The Half-Hearted. Other articles that appeared that year included one on the decline of the memoir, a review of a book of poems by W. E. Henley, and an editorial on the politics of Roman Catholicism in Italy and France. His ambit was wide: he wrote on the law, philosophy, economics, history, literature, religion, and even angling and mountaineering. It was both an excellent training in getting up a subject quickly (much the same as the law in fact), and a necessary one, if he were to develop further an easy, attractive, popular literary style.

  Since The Spectator was run on a shoestring, yet had an influential, cultured and educated readership, he had often to work at great speed and to delve into areas with which he was unfamiliar. His articles on South Africa, before he arrived there in October 1901, for example, reveal his youthful leanings and prejudices, uninhibited by much real appreciation of the situation on the ground. But he proved himself to be a quick learner, and the imperatives of producing copy more or less every week loosened his writing style. He began to display both authority and a distinctive tone, especially where literary criticism was concerned.