In the Commentary he describes a medieval winter in such vivid terms that we can almost smell the thawing offal in the streets. ‘Winter was a pall which lay black on a man’s spirit, and made him think, like Dunbar, of his latter end. Then, like a recovery from sickness, came the Spring and the world awoke. Men went out of their dark dwellings, bemused with sunlight, drunken with bird song and greenery, marvelling at the common flowers as if they were celestial visitants. Of such sudden awakenings poetry is born.’56
Despite so many years spent in England, Scotland was, and always would remain, at the back of JB’s head. The choice of ‘Lallans’ to express how he felt about the soldiers’ war in 1916 and 1917 drew him to those Scottish poets, such as Violet Jacob and Christopher M. Grieve, a Lowlander, who were attempting to use the Scots vernacular in poetry as a means of expressing their country’s particular identity.
On the face of it, the friendship that JB struck up with Grieve (who by the early 1920s was calling himself Hugh MacDiarmid) after the Great War was an unlikely one, since the latter was first a supporter of fascism, then communism, a Scottish Nationalist who was influenced by Modernism, and extremely inclined to fall out with people. However, JB had tried to help him get a job in journalism after he was demobbed, by writing to the owner of The Scotsman, and he was in sympathy with what was already called the Scottish Renaissance Group, headed by MacDiarmid, which was set on reviving and protecting the Scots language as a vehicle for a distinctive nationalist, though not nationalistic, literature. MacDiarmid included three poems of JB’s* in the 1920 first edition of his anthology of contemporary Scottish poets, entitled Northern Numbers, and three more the following year: ‘The Gipsy’s Song to the Lady Cassilis’, ‘The Wise Years’ and ‘Wood Magic’. It is interesting that these poems, essentially traditional, should appeal to MacDiarmid. Professor Alan Riach believes that the reason why he had such high praise for JB, initially at least, was perhaps because, ‘like Conrad, Buchan displays rather than endorses unlikeable or even despicable characteristics, and usually leaves them open for question. He knows what is at stake and what it costs to maintain what he values.’57
In 1923, MacDiarmid dedicated his first book, Annals of the Five Senses, to JB ‘for the encouragement and help he has given to a young and unknown writer’. JB continued to do so, anthologising one of MacDiarmid’s poems in The Northern Muse. In 1925, JB wrote the preface to MacDiarmid’s Sangschaw. MacDiarmid called him ‘The Dean of the Faculty of Contemporary Scottish Letters’.
However, in 1976, in the introduction to a new edition of Contemporary Scottish Studies, MacDiarmid displayed a curious lack of gratitude to JB in quoting, critically, from an article in the Morning Post about 1920s Fascist Italy, which JB had written forty-seven years earlier (see p. 279). The difference between JB and MacDiarmid was that the former was, in fact, a Baldwinite one nation Tory, whereas MacDiarmid was a Communist long after the true nature of Communism had become glaringly apparent, standing for Parliament under that banner eight years after Soviet tanks crushed the Hungarian Uprising in 1956.
Another contribution that JB made to the Scottish literary renaissance was his active support of the project to make a national library for Scotland out of the old Advocates’ Library in Edinburgh. In 1919, Hugh Macmillan, back at the Bar in Edinburgh, formed a committee with the intention of transferring the collections to the nation, if possible. He found JB deeply interested in the project and ready to help. He used his contacts in London and Scotland to involve many influential Scots, most particularly the Earl of Rosebery. He was at least partly instrumental in interesting Ramsay MacDonald, the Earl of Crawford and Balcarres, and Arthur (later the Earl of) Balfour as well.
The problem was money. The government promised a yearly grant of £2,000, which was welcome but not sufficient. An Endowment Trust was established, with Macmillan as Honorary Secretary, and an appeal for donations was devised, with JB adding an eloquent and characteristic last sentence: ‘It must not be said that a nation, which above others is tenacious of tradition and historic possession, permitted one of the chief of its heritages to decay, or that a race which has carried the light of learning throughout the globe suffered the lamp in its own citadel to grow dim.’58
Once the appeal was made public, Macmillan received an invitation to visit the McVitie and Price biscuit factory to meet Alexander Grant, the quiet, unassuming businessman who was head of the firm. Grant told Macmillan that he had invested £100,000 in the War Loan during the Great War and now wanted to put it to good use, to give people the advantages of learning that he himself had not enjoyed. He asked whether £100,000 would be enough and Macmillan, computing the interest earned on it in his head, thought that it would. On 28 June 1923 the government’s acceptance of the transfer of the Advocates’ Library was announced in the House of Commons.* When, in 1925, the National Library of Scotland Act was passed, JB was co-opted by the Trustees to be a member of the Board; he became a full Trustee in 1928 and served until he left for Canada in 1935.** In 1928, when it was obvious that the National Library required larger premises, Grant, now Sir Alexander Grant in public recognition of his generosity, gave another £100,000, which was matched pound for pound by the government.
As a result of these developments, JB and Sir Alexander became fast friends. JB dedicated Castle Gay to him in 1930 ‘in gratitude and affection’, while Grant did JB a number of very good turns thereafter (about which more later).
Perhaps because he was a publisher, and could do so without too great a financial penalty, JB sent many of his books as presents to his friends and to those acquaintances, such as King George V, whom he knew enjoyed them. Aware as he was that there is nothing better than ‘word of mouth’ in the sales of a book, the money would not have been wasted. The personal inscriptions were often highly valued by the recipients, and these days presentation copies fetch good prices at book auctions.
Although JB never allowed himself to become part of a literary circle, he did cultivate the friendship of individual writers, one of them being Thomas Hardy, whom he asked out to GHQ in July 1917 (the great man couldn’t face it), and with whom he exchanged books after the war. JB sent him volumes of his revised ‘History’ and Hardy wrote in reply: ‘What a number of events have passed under your eye since the fateful day in 1914. You must be still a walking kinema of them: though putting them down in a book does in a way get rid of them for a time.’59 In 1922 he sent JB a book of poems, Late Lyrics and Earlier with many other Verses. The latter replied with one of his gracious, literary aperçus:
I love the flute notes especially, and they seem to become sweeter with every volume; but in the present one you have got at the very heart of seventeenth-century melody.60
In 1923, JB published Midwinter, a historical novel concerning the attempts by a Scottish soldier to rouse the English and Welsh Jacobites to join the cause, at the moment when Prince Charlie and his Highlanders are marching south towards London in 1745. It was dedicated, in verse, to Vernon Watney, who lived at Cornbury Park in Wychwood, where part of the action takes place. One of the subsidiary characters, and the most attractive, is a youngish, penniless, boy’s private tutor, Samuel Johnson. His inclusion was homage to a man whom JB so much admired, and who had a close connection with his already beloved Elsfield Manor. He cleverly interposed well-known Johnsonian sayings into the dialogue.
In the book’s preface, which is another of JB’s historical conceits, papers about the Jacobite adventure – found at the back of a solicitor’s office cupboard – purport to be written by James Boswell, and refer to a visit that they made to visit Francis Wise at Elsfield, when Johnson is forcibly reminded of some terrible events of his earlier life, about which he had always remained silent to Boswell. JB wrote:
I had always felt keenly the romance of the Jacobite venture, but less in its familiar Scottish episodes than in the dreary ebb of the march to Derby, so I took that period for my attempt in Midwinter to catch the spell of the great midland
forests and the Old England which lay everywhere just beyond the highroads and the ploughlands.61
In the inaugural issue of The Listener in 1929 he mused about the historical novel:
I am told that the historical novel is a little out of favour to-day. It is suspected of dullness by those simple souls who like their fiction to be an elaborated form of what they can read in their evening paper; it is accused of shallowness by those subtler spirits who believe that the word ‘modern’ denotes not a period in time, but a stage in values. This is to be beaten on both sides of the head. For the complaint against the historical novel used to be that it found its romance too cheaply, that it was apt to be a sword-and-cloak affair, a raw chronicle of adventure. It is hard that the popular taste should shy at it because it is believed to be high-brow, and the high-brow condemn it on the ground that it is popular.62
He went on to write that the historical novelist had imaginatively to reconstruct modes of life and thought with which he was not familiar (and past modes of thought are harder to realise than modes of living). The historical novelist had to think himself into an alien world before he could expound its humanity. JB believed that an historical novel had to demand the same scrupulous gift of selection, and the same austerity of conscience, as a biography required. ‘It is easy to play tricks, and to startle with false colour and meretricious invention.’63
It seemed, however, that historical novels were for the Buchan connoisseur. Elsewhere he wrote that ‘These were serious books, and they must have puzzled many of the readers who were eager to follow the doings of Richard Hannay or Dickson McCunn. That is the trouble with an author who only writes to please himself; his product is not standardized, and the purchaser is often disappointed.’64
They have never been nearly as commercially successful as his adventure and spy novels, but they provide some of the most satisfying reads in the canon and, moreover, they have dated less. Interestingly, he told Alice late in life that, on re-reading them, he had been surprised by the historical learning which they exhibited. ‘It was not bogus, but thoroughly documentary!!’65
It is the lot of all successful published writers that they become, in one sense, public property. Certainly if a book absorbs the reader, he or she will often feel the urge to connect in some way with the writer, either to say how much they enjoyed or conversely disliked the book, or to put them right about some error in it. In JB’s case, letters that he received were generally laudatory, but sometimes readers couldn’t resist bringing up something that displeased them.
Because of the power, allure and range of his writing, he was probably more subject to this sort of thing than most. The letter-writers ranged from an outraged woman who wrote to scold him for allowing his hero to kick a greyhound in Midwinter when he stumbled over it at a moment of great danger and tension, to Arthur Balfour complaining – wrongly in fact – of a misprint in The Moon Endureth.66 The most tiresome example was from a barrister who wrote to the publishers about Mr Standfast: ‘In view of the likelihood of such an admirable book going into further editions I hope you won’t think me very pernickety if I point out that Assistant Provost Marshals on Home Service do not wear the red staff marks, they wear blue.’67
Continuing with his mission to provide his readers with a book a year, JB produced another thriller in 1924, The Three Hostages. The dedication to ‘a young gentleman of Eton College’ merits quoting almost in full:
HONOURED SIR, On your last birthday a well-meaning godfather presented you with a volume of mine, since you had been heard on occasion to express approval of my works. The book dealt with a somewhat arid branch of historical research, and it did not please you. You wrote to me, I remember, complaining that I had ‘let you down’, and summoning me, as I valued your respect, to ‘pull myself together’. In particular you demanded to hear more of the doings of Richard Hannay, a gentleman for whom you professed a liking … [Hannay] was so good as to tell me the tale of an unpleasant business in which he had recently been engaged, and to give me permission to re-tell it for your benefit. Sir Richard took a modest pride in the affair, because from first to last it had been a pure contest of wits, without recourse to those more obvious methods of strife with which he is familiar. So I herewith present it to you, in the hope that in the eyes of you and your friends it may atone for certain other writings of mine with which you have been afflicted by those in authority.68
Close to the beginning of The Three Hostages, Sir Richard Hannay, now married and settled down in the Cotswolds with Mary Lamington (whom he met in Mr Standfast) and their son, Peter John, entertains a friend, Dr Greenslade. This man berates his friend for wasting time on detective novels:
‘These shockers are too easy, Dick. You could invent better ones for yourself.’
‘Not I. I call that a dashed ingenious yarn. I can’t think how the fellow does it.’
‘Quite simple. The author writes the story inductively, and the reader follows it deductively.’69
Greenslade goes on to say that the writer takes three things that have no apparent connection with each other, weaves a story around them, and the reader is satisfied because he or she doesn’t realise that the author fixes on the solution first and then invents a problem to suit it. This was almost certainly the way that JB wrote his thrillers, but his success depended as much on the manner in which the story unfolds as the mystifying nature of the dénouement.
The Three Hostages has similarities to Greenmantle in that there is a riddle to solve, but this time the action takes place only in England and Scotland, often in ill-favoured London suburbs, and concerns the kidnapping of two young people and a boy by one of those evil geniuses with whom Buchan readers were by now thoroughly familiar. This time he is a deracinated Irishman, devilish clever and an inspired hypnotist. Hannay wins out in a frantic race against time, but in the end it is Mary who sees more clearly the way than her occasionally blockheaded husband.
JB liked and rated women, even if he was the opposite of ‘a lady’s man’. He sought out the company of intelligent, independent-minded women, such as Violet Markham (Mrs James Carruthers), Lady Mary Murray, Margaret Newbolt, Angela Thirkell, Enid Bagnold and Dorothy Gaskell, not to mention his sister Anna. And, although he saw the division of labour and function in marriage in those days as convenient and efficient, it is obvious from his strong support of women’s suffrage, and his encouragement of female university undergraduates, that he was committed to the progress of women, both politically and educationally. He was certain that a woman should be her own person, rather than just an adjunct to her spouse. As his fellow Scot Catherine Carswell recalled about a meeting with him in 1932:
Most completely happy (his own words) in his marriage, his liking and sympathy went out to women of all sorts and ages. His approach was without effusion, as without shyness or suspicion. A traditionalist in so many respects, he was yet a champion of the modern girl, delighting in her independences, even in her defiances, frowning neither upon her sometimes extravagant make-up nor upon her occasions for wearing trousers. As among the goddesses, his preference was for Artemis.70
It is true, however, that his portrayal of women in his novels is a little tongue-tied and occasionally rather ridiculous. He confessed to Anna that she was far better at portraying women in fiction than him – which she was. In this respect he was no Sir Walter Scott. There are lively, intelligent, courageous, attractive heroines in the novels – Mary Lamington, Janet Raden, Jacqueline Warmestre, Koré Arabin, Alison Westwater and Anna Haraldsen, in particular – and there is one terrific villainess, Hilda von Einem, but his male characters mostly get the best lines. And, by making Mary Lamington only eighteen years old in Mr Standfast, he not only ensures that she is a most unlikely seasoned spy, but also makes her relationship with the much older Richard Hannay look a little creepy. Interestingly, although Susie steadfastly denied the fact, most of JB’s fictional women have something of her about them. As Violet Markham put it, and she should have known,
‘… it is Susie, as I first knew her, who appears again and again in the high-spirited and attractive young women of the adventure stories’.71 However, since JB, along with a great many of his male contemporaries, put his womenfolk ‘on a pedestal’ (in the words of his son-in-law),72 it is not surprising if his female characters do not always entirely convince.
From his Elsfield vantage point, JB still looked north to Scotland but now also west across the Atlantic. His interest in North America was long-standing, the result of his admiration for an enormous country that, through its federal system, balanced its central and local authorities, and could thus be seen as a model for the evolving British Empire. In 1906, his friend F. S. Oliver had produced a well-received biography of Alexander Hamilton, the eighteenth-century Scottish-bred revolutionary credited with a key role in drawing the fissiparous American colonies into a federation. As the years went by, JB increasingly saw the shared interest in democracy, the shared culture and heritage, as well as cooperation during the Great War, as comprising a potential force for good on a global scale. At least since 1917, probably as a result of the Russian Revolution, JB had become convinced that the alliance of the United States and Great Britain would be the ‘greatest safeguard for the peaceful ordering of the world’,73 a theme to which he often returned.
Moreover, he had admired the writings of Walt Whitman and Henry Thoreau as a young man. In Salute to Adventurers he had extolled the richness and variety of North American ‘nature’. On a personal level, he got on very well with many Americans and Canadians, having met countless journalists, soldiers and politicians during the Great War.
Beyond the Thirty-Nine Steps Page 31
