A Scots Quair

MACGILLIVRAY, Alan, ‘Obituary for Christine Guthrie (1896–1999)’

11 September 2021 by Duncan Jones

ScotLit 21, Winter 1999 |

Readers who have loved the writings of James Leslie Mitchell (“Lewis Grassic Gibbon”) will be saddened to learn that recently the death occurred in a Grampian eventide home of the woman whose early life he had immortalised in a fictionalised biography, the trilogy of novels, A Scots Quair. Chris Guthrie has for more than sixty years been regarded as Gibbon’s greatest literary creation. It is a tribute to his artistry that few people ever penetrated behind the fictional surface to make a connection with the very real woman who was his true subject. Now that Chris’s long life has ended in her hundred and third year, it is appropriate that the real relationship between the “novels” and Chris’s life should be brought into the open.

The main outline of Chris Guthrie’s life up to the age of nearly forty is well known from the pages of Sunset Song, Cloud Howe and Grey Granite. While Gibbon’s creative imagination and his obsession with the theories of Diffusionism and Communism led him to take some liberties in creating characters out of real people for the purposes of his story, the main events are true. Chris did undergo a traumatic sequence of personal losses with the destruction and dispersal of her family and friends over the years between 1912 and 1918, mainly because of the First World War; and although she went on to make a longer and happier second marriage, the pattern of her life up to middle age was a troubled one. It is not surprising that, as Gibbon vividly describes, she raised protective mental and emotional barriers to shield herself from the external world.

Only a few people now alive know how Leslie Mitchell and Chris Guthrie first met and how their literary partnership developed. When Leslie Mitchell was a boy in Arbuthnott, he used to cycle all over the district looking at prehistoric remains and historical ruins. Chris remembered meeting him first one day as she went up to the Standing Stones above Blawearie, a serious youngster who lectured her rather solemnly about the people of ancient times and then went down with her to the farm kitchen for a glass of fresh milk and a newly-baked scone. That was in the early summer of 1914 when she was pregnant with young Ewan, just a month or so before the outbreak of the Great War. Their paths crossed once or twice again before Leslie went off to Mackie Academy for his brief sojourn there; by the time he went there, Chris’s husband Ewan had gone off to join the army and Chris was running the farm almost by herself. Whether Ewan and Leslie Mitchell ever met is not known. What is pretty clear is that Mitchell used a high degree of licence in his description of Ewan Tavendale’s degeneration as a result of his military training. Chris herself was very reticent about the relations between herself and Ewan prior to his embarkation for France with the 10th Battalion of the North Highlanders, but nothing she ever said suggested that she and Ewan were totally estranged as a result of his treatment of her. Mitchell, of course, had a philosophical point to make about the degenerative effects of human civilisation and is known to have often subordinated literal truth to the needs of his thesis.

It appears that Chris Guthrie and Leslie Mitchell met again on one or two occasions about 1930 and 1931 when she was living in Segget. By this time Mitchell was married, had come out of the RAF and was living in lodgings in London trying to make himself a success as a writer. He was already beginning to take on or initiate more projects than he could comfortably handle, and it was probably about this time that he developed the idea of writing a long chronicle of life in the North-East, coming out of his own childhood love-hate relationship with the land and his home district. The idea of building it around a woman protagonist came partly from his own wife Rebecca, or Ray, Middleton and, it is now clear, partly from the figure of the young farm housewife whom he had first met years before and then renewed acquaintance with when she was a minister’s wife in Segget. Chris used to recall that they had a number of conversations in the Manse, during which she reminisced about her years of growing up in Echt and Kinraddie and spoke about the different world she seemed to inhabit as a lady of the manse. Mitchell expressed interest in her as the subject for a biography disguised as fiction that would explore social change in that part of Scotland in the first three decades of the century, and, with her permission, began making copious notes from their talk.

Once again, however, events took a tragic turn. Chris’s husband, Robert Colquohoun, died in rather dramatic circumstances while preaching a sermon of a political nature, and Chris had to leave Segget with her teenage son Ewan. They were now in very reduced circumstances and had to move to the city of Duncairn, where Ewan, like his mother before him, had to give up for the moment his thoughts of higher education and begin working as a industrial apprentice. Chris bought a small share in a boarding house and it was here that Mitchell met her again to continue discussing the treatment of her life in fictional terms, which he had already begun as the novel Sunset Song. They only met once to agree the pattern of the project, a trilogy of works covering Chris’s life in the three locations of Kinraddie, Segget and Duncairn, and further communication was by letters between Duncairn and Welwyn Garden City, where Mitchell had recently settled with his family. Unfortunately, no trace of this correspondence survives. Mitchell clearly destroyed Chris’s letters once he had assimilated their contents, and Chris’s attitude to personal belongings was for most of her long life one of total indifference.

The Duncairn volume of the trilogy, Grey Granite,turned out to be the one covering the shortest time. Ewan’s progressive involvement in left-wing politics and Chris’s unwise and short-lived third marriage caused the separation between mother and son and Chris’s move back to the farm of her birth, Cairndhu in Echt, in the summer of 1934. Mitchell brought the biographical trilogy to an end with Chris’s return as a kind of symbolic withdrawal from the world and all emotional involvement. He actually wrote the final words sitting on the Barmekin Hill above Chris’s home, creating a symbolic death or union of Chris with the natural world around her while she sat on the top of the hill meditating as night fell. Chris’s memory of the occasion is more prosaic: “I found I was getting very wet, so I just got up and went home to bed.” One could speculate that Mitchell might have written more about Chris’s life, but by the next year, 1935, he was dead. So, as far as the world knew, the story of Chris was at an end; and certainly it makes a satisfying artistic unity.

However, real life is rarely so accommodating. People’s lives go on, often in a prolonged and inartistic anticlimax. As some in the North-East know, Chris lived for another sixty-five years until her recent peaceful passing away in the eventide home where she spent the last fifteen years of her life. From 1935 until the mid-1960’s she made a slender living from her Cairndhu croft, which was latterly supplemented by her old-age pension. When that eventually became uneconomic, she let out the croft land for grazing and continued to live in the croft-house until her ninetieth year, at which point a place was found for her in a home and the house at Cairndhu was sold as a holiday home to a family living in the South of England. Until she was well through her nineties, she was physically independent, but failing sight and progressive weakness at last confined her to a chair.

Although she remained detached from close friendships and involvements, she was not totally isolated. In the post-war years, she renewed contact with her younger brothers Dod and Alec and their families in different parts of Scotland, and a number of her nephews and nieces with their young families spent occasional holidays with her at Cairndhu. The big adventure of her later life occurred when she made a journey to Argentina to visit her great-nephew, Juan Guillermo Guthrie Vasquez, the grandson of her elder brother Will, at his estancia on the pampas. Tragically, Juan later became one of the victims of the Argentine junta and is classified among the “desaparecidos”, the missing opponents of the regime, during these years. Chris’s third husband, Ake Ogilvie, never contacted her again after he sailed as a ship’s carpenter to Canada in 1934, but Chris learned after the war that he had been lost with his ship torpedoed at sea on a North Atlantic convoy in 1942. The great tragedy of Chris’s life after the period of the biographies was, of course, the death in 1937 of her only son, Ewan Tavendale, fighting in Spain with the International Brigade against the Fascist armies of General Franco.

As Chris Guthrie (she resumed her maiden name after the Second World War) moved into old age, she acquired a little local notoriety from her occasional appearances on Grampian Television talking about life as it had been in the farming communities of her youth, and her broadcasts on similar themes on Radio Duncairn. Some people pressed her to write a book about her life and times, but she always refused, saying that it had already been done. Although she never went back to education in her mature years, she was a great reader when the work on her croft permitted. One of the subjects that interested her was history, particularly of ancient and prehistoric times. She used to say that she could have a rare argument with Leslie Mitchell if he had been spared, since she had come to disagree profoundly with the ideas that he used to uphold and spread in his books.

After a long time in which she was deeply pessimistic about the possibility of anything of any value surviving, probably because of the many losses and disappointments she had had to endure, she came towards the end of her life, without being in any way drawn to religion, to believe that there was some cause for hope, against all the odds. She believed that love and charity might make some slight difference to the possible level of human happiness, and it was in that spirit that she lived out her last years. Finally, however, it was her memories that were her closest companions, coming home to her down the long tunnels of the years. It was reported by the nurse who was with her at the end that her last words were, first “Mother”, and then a few seconds later, just before her final breath, “Rob.”

The above article is a fictional tribute to the literary creations of James Leslie Mitchell

McCULLOCH, Margery Palmer, ‘Ideology in Action: Modernism and Marxism in A Scots Quair’

11 September 2021 by Duncan Jones

James Leslie Mitchell Centenary Conference, 9 June 2001 |

A revised and updated version of this paper, along with eleven other essays on Gibbon’s works, is available in A Flame in the Mearns, published June 2003 by ASLS.

Abbreviations are defined at the end of the document.

Despite its dialectical title, my paper is as much concerned with narrative form as it is with ideology. What interests me about A Scots Quair is the way in which this text of the later Modernist period dramatises and interrogates the politics and social history of its time through characterisation, setting and voice; and especially through the responses of its fictional characters to the events which overtake them and which some of them at least try actively to shape.

It seems to me important to keep in mind also the relative youth of Leslie Mitchell/Lewis Grassic Gibbon during the composition of the trilogy – 31 years old at the publication of Sunset Song in 1932, 33 when Grey Granite appeared. This author was a young man who was himself in the process of formation intellectually: absorbing and making responses to influences, rejecting what did not work for him , moving on to new investigations. It may be that critics have been too ready to pigeon-hole his philosphical position as Diffusionist or Marxist – to name the two most popular ascriptions – as if the trilogy were the product of historical hindsight and reflection as, say, George Eliot’s Middlemarch was the product of the distance in time between the events portrayed in her novel and the date of that portrayal. Mitchell’s interest in ancient history deriving from boyhood and his more recent involvement with Marxist theories of history are certainly present in the Quair, but I would suggest they are there in an explorative and interrogative way, rather than as settled philosophies. And in Cloud Howe and Grey Granite in particular, he is living through the events and ideological responses to them which are being portrayed. It is inevitable, therefore, that, like the formal ending of the trilogy itself, ideological certainties should be deferred, unresolved.

What is pertinent also in relation to Mitchell’s relationship with the Scottish Renaissance movement is the age difference between him and other principal writers such as MacDiarmid, Muir and Gunn. Like their contemporaries Eliot, Lawrence and Joyce, MacDiarmid, Muir and Gunn were born in the late 1880s or early 1890s and the influence of late Romanticism and the several cultural and philosophical crises of the Victorian age can be found in their work alongside the innovations and philosophical uncertainties of Modernism. Gibbon, on the other hand, was born in 1901, and while ten or twelve years may not seem sufficient to call a generational difference, these ten years came at a critical point in regard to the experiences which shaped him as adolescent and young adult. MacDiarmid, for example, served with the Royal Army Medical Corps in Salonika during the war, and for him, as for others of his generation, the war was an event which broke the continuity of past and present. As Edwin Muir described it in his Autobiography: ‘The generation to which I belong has survived an age, and the part of our life which is still immobilized there is like a sentence broken off before it could be completed; the future in which it would have written its last word was snatched away and a raw new present abruptly substituted’ (A 194). Leslie Mitchell, on the other hand, could be seen as closer to the Auden generation. He was a boy aged 13 at the outbreak of hostilities and tried on three occasions to enlist, although under age. Hypocrisy, jingoism, profiteering and injustice are the indictments against the war found in his later fiction and essays, not the philosophical awareness of a cataclysmic break with the past given expression in much art of the Modernist period. Similarly, the Russian Revolution of 1917 was of formative significance for Mitchell. In 1917, as a young reporter, he was attending the foundation meeting of an Aberdeen Soviet; and in 1919 he was becoming involved with Communist groups in Glasgow. In contrast, while Marxism was to become a major theme for MacDiarmid in his poems to Lenin in the fashionably political thirties, in the years immediately preceding and following the end of World War One, it was the regeneration of Scotland and a revolution in Scottish literary culture that preoccupied him, not Marxist politics. Such differences are important in any consideration of Gibbon’s place in the interwar Scottish literary revival movement, to which he was a late entrant.

In relation to Modernism, it is frustrating that there would appear to be so little written specifically about literary matters in the essays and letters of Mitchell/Grassic Gibbon – and I think I should call him Grassic Gibbon from now onwards. The principal literary essay is, of course, ‘Literary Lights’ from Scottish Scene (LGGA 123-37), in which he demonstrates how few of the writers of the so-called Scottish Literary Renaissance can in his view actually be considered Scottish writers, as opposed to English writers from the county of Scotshire. His criterion for judgement here is language, whether Scots or Gaelic, and it is interesting that, like MacDiarmid and Muir in their unnecessary quarrel over Muir’s Scott and Scotland, Gibbon in this essay ignores the fact that Scottish English, even in the 1930s, is the medium of communication for a large number of Scots for everyday discourse as well as creative writing – Scottish English was then as it is now one of the three principal languages of Scotland, and had been so for a considerable time. The more significant section of the ‘Literary Lights’ essay, however, is where Gibbon discusses his own attempts to develop a specifically Scottish medium for his narrative in the books of the Scots Quair trilogy. Scots-language experimentation in Scottish Renaissance circles had been principally in the area of poetry with Neil Gunn, at that point the most promising novelist associated with the revival movement, writing in English (and being ironically characterised in the ‘Literary Lights’ essay as ‘a brilliant novelist from Scotshire’). Now, however, an experiment of a different order was under way:

The technique of Lewis Grassic Gibbon in his trilogy A Scots Quair– of which only parts I and II, Sunset Song and Cloud Howe, have yet been published – is to mould the English language into the rhythms and cadences of Scots spoken speech, and to inject into the English vocabulary such minimum number of words from Braid Scots as that remodelling requires. His scene so far has been a comparatively uncrowded and simple one – the countryside village of modern Scotland. Whether his technique is adequate to compass and express the life of an industrialized Scots town in all its complexity is yet to be demonstrated. (LGGA 135)

So far as the Modernist dimension of the Quair is concerned, it’s significant that in his speculation as to whether this new medium can be used successfully when transferred from the rural to the city scene, Gibbon goes on to make comparison with James Joyce. For the free indirect style of the Sunset Song narrative, the blurring of the distinction between narrator and characters, has much in common with Joyce’s experiments with narrative voice, as it has also with Virginia Woolf’s approach in Mrs Dalloway. It’s interesting too that the negative noises Gibbon makes about Joyce’s later work must apply in this instance to Ulysses, for Finnegan’s Wake, usually cited as Joyce’s descent into incomprehensibility, was not published until 1939, four years after Gibbon’s death. And in Ulysses, Joyce, like Gibbon, transfers his earlier narrative experimentation to the city context of Dublin.

There are two other references to Joyce in ‘Literary Lights’: one at the beginning of the essay linked also to Proust, where the writer speculates that among the many unread published books, there may well have been overlooked ‘a Scots Joyce, a Scots Proust’; and later where he again mentions a possible future Scots James Joyce who will ‘electrify’ the Scottish scene, this time in company with a future Scots Virginia Woolf who will ‘astound’ it (LGGA 124, 127). In addition, in the essay ‘The Land’, Gibbon talks of the pleasure he himself finds in the ‘manipulation of wordson a blank page’ (LGGA 84 my italics), not, one notices, the manipulation of ideas. These few comments, when brought together with the innovative narrative methodology in all three books of the Quair, provide reasonable evidence, in my view, for Gibbon’s interest in literary form and for his awareness of and interest in the experimental fiction of the modernist period. And what is so interesting about A Scots Quair itself is the way in which Gibbon marries a Modernistic fictional form with a Marxist exploration of contemporary and historical forces, an exploration more often conducted in fiction through socialist-realist methodology.

The opening of the ‘Ploughing’ section of Sunset Song offers a fine example of his approach, which includes also a bringing together of the oral and the literary. Beginning, apparently, with the voice of a traditional third person narrator, the narrative quickly modulates into the generic ‘you’ and then into the voice of Chris herself: ‘Folk said there hadn’t been such a drought since eighty-three and Long Rob of the Mill said you couldn’t blame this one on Gladstone, anyway, and everybody laughed except father, God knows why’ (SS 25). One senses immediately that this will be a story of lives told from the inside, where the reader will also be encouraged to ‘belong’ as opposed to observing from a distance. The passage is compelling not only for its innovative communication of the rhythms of the north-east speaking voice, but also for its linguistic vibrancy and colour – we have a Scottish Fauve landscape personified here:

Below and around where Chris Guthrie lay the June moors whispered and rustled and shook their cloaks, yellow with broom and powdered faintly with purple, that was the heather but not the full passion of its colour yet. And in the east against the cobalt blue of the sky lay the shimmer of the North Sea. that was by Bervie …

Each word chosen communicates in its different way a countryside throbbing with life: the wind ‘shook and played in the moors and went dandering up the sleeping Grampians, the rushes pecked and quivered about the loch when its hand was upon them’; the everyday and the erotic mingle in the imagery of the parks which lie like a mythical earth-goddess ‘fair parched, sucked dry, the red clay soil of Blawearie gaping open for the rain that seemed never-coming’. And then, at the end of this introductory descriptive passage there is the alien technological image of the motor-car ‘shooming through [the roads] like kettles under steam’ – a motor-car which intrudes into the life of the community and almost knocks down Chae Strachan’s son, a narrative detail which, with hindsight, points imagistically towards the technology which is even then beginning to undermine traditional ways of farming and points also to the ending of the book where technology in the form of the armaments of war brings the final disintegration of the community. With this small, almost unnoticed imagistic detail, followed by the economic characterisation of Chae Strachan and Long Rob in their responses to the motorist and Chae’s court fine, Gibbon unobtrusively introduces the ideological context of the novel alongside its modernistic descriptive prose and focalisation. This is very clever writing which has to be read in its entirety to be fully appreciated. (SS 25-6)

The section which follows, and which switches anachronistically to the story of Chris’s parents, is even more important for an understanding at this early stage of the narrative of the way in which the ideological discourse is communicated through voice and characterisation. The narrative begins with the voice of Chris remembering her mother and then modulates into the voice of the mother herself, into her own memories as she had perhaps retold them to the younger Chris:

[B]ut fine she’d liked it, she’d never forget the singing of the winds in those fields when she was young or the daft crying of the lambs she herded or the feel of the earth below her toes. Oh, Chris, my lass, there are better things than your books or studies or loving or bedding, there’s the countryside your own, you its, in the days when you’re neither bairn nor woman. (SS 27)

This is followed by the meeting between her and Chris’s father, John Guthrie, at a ploughing match in which it is clear that the ‘brave young childe with a red head and the swackest legs you ever saw’ would carry off the prize. And he carries off more than the ploughing prize:

‘For as he rode from the park on one horse he patted the back of the other and cried to Jean Murdoch with a glint from his dour, sharp eye Jump up if you like. And she cried back I like fine! and caught the horse by its mane and swung herself there till Guthrie’s hand caught her and set her steady on the back of the beast.’ (SS 28)

What is captured here is the immediate attraction between two young people, their impetuosity and their willingness to risk putting their lives together. From an ideological perspective, the ensuing narrative shows, economically but forcibly, how this early joy in each other becomes warped and destroyed by external forces they are unable to control – the struggle to farm unrewarding land, repeated pregnancies, physically difficult for the mother, the continuing extra mouths to feed. In addition, it demonstrates the way in which our lives can be determined not only by factors outwith our control, but also by our own unwillingness to open our minds to change, by our refusal to question dominant ideologies. In his poem ‘London’ William Blake speaks of ‘mind-forg’d manacles’ – ‘In every voice, in every ban,/The mind-forg’d manacles I hear’ (WBSP 36) – and Gibbon’s narrative shows that we can put these manacles on our own minds, as well as have them imposed from outside. John Guthrie, for example, refuses to question his Old Testament religion. His cruelty to his wife – ‘We’ll have what God in His mercy may send to us, woman. See you to that’ – is patterned in his cruelty to his son when the boy calls to the new horse ‘Come over, Jehovah’, a name whose wonderful sound seems to the child to match the wonder the animal holds for him, but a use which Guthrie can interpret only as blasphemous (SS 28, 30). John Guthrie is to a large extent portrayed negatively and might easily be dismissed as a cruel, authoritarian husband and father. Yet that brief capturing of the early love between the two young people remains in the mind as a touchstone of what might have been and it conditions us to think about why he has become the man he has. This portrayal of the Guthrie marriage is paralleled in a passage from Gibbon’s essay ‘The Land’ in which he talks of the cyclical struggle of marriage and breeding and endless work, and he adds:

[I]t was a perfect Spenglerian cycle. Yet it was waste effort, it was as foolish as the plod of an ass in a treadmill, innumerable generations of asses. If the clumsy fumblements of contraception have done no more than break the wheel and play of that ancient cycle they have done much. (LGGA 93)

Marx’s view of the historical process was two-fold: on the one hand, it was deterministic, sweeping human beings along with it; on the other he believed that human beings should be active in helping to shape that historical process. Gibbon, too, in his essay ‘Religion’ stresses that ‘men are not merely the victims, the hapless leaves storm-blown, of historic forces, but may guide if they cannot generate that storm’ (LGGA 166); and it is this conflict between those who attempt to guide or shape events and those who refuse to question, who obstinately or apathetically hold to old ways of thinking and behaviour which is played out in the three books of A Scots Quair. In Sunset Song, for example, Chris is notable for the way she makes choices with regard to her own life. In the end she chooses to stay on the land, to put aside the ‘English Chris’; she asks Ewan to share her life and the farm with her; she learns how to control her fertility, so that she will not follow on her mother’s road; and she never loses her sense of self-possession, even in the darkest days of the ironically named ‘harvest’ section of the book. As has often been noted, Sunset Song is both the song of a young woman growing to adulthood and simultaneously the end of an old song for a rural way of life that is dying; but Gibbon’s Marxist insight in this book is that although the historical process was working against that way of life, it did not need to work to its end in the way it did. People could have responded to events in a way that would have shaped them less harshly.

The harshest event in the narrative is, of course, the intrusion of the Great War into the life of community. In this depiction we find the hypocrisy and self-seeking, the readiness to adhere unthinkingly to religious and political propaganda that are characteristic of many contemporaneous accounts of the home front in that war, and which are found also in Gibbon’s comments about the war in his essays. Chris and Long Rob are branded as pro-German because they dare question gossip and newspaper stories; Chae Strachan emotionally thrusts aside his Socialism and rushes off to fight – behaviour which patterns Gibbon’s Scottish Scene comment about H.G. Wells: ‘That unique internationalist, Mr HG Wells, erupted like an urgent geyser – “every sword drawn against Germany is a sword drawn for peace!”’ (LGGA 145). Ewan, who is not a thinker like his wife, also submits to the hysteria, enlists and is eventually shot as a deserter in France. All the horror of the war is brought alive by its enactment through these characters we have come to know, and by our realisation that, although the war itself was beyond their control, in the areas of life where they did have choice and the opportunity to use their minds to question and evaluate, the inhabitants of Kinraddie mostly did not use that choice, or, as in the case of the home-front profiteers, they used choice to their own advantage, and to the ultimate hastening of the end of the farming way of life, as in the cutting down for short-term profit of the trees which sheltered the farming lands.

Sunset Song is heartbreaking in the tragedy of its ending, but that ending also leaves open the possibility of something positive coming out of the disaster with the forthcoming marriage of Chris to the new Christian Socialist minister Robert Colquhoun, who has been gassed in the war and has come home with a mission to make Christ’s gospel relevant to the everyday lives of people here on earth, a mission interrogated in the second book.

Cloud Howe is probably the least talked about book in Gibbon’s trilogy. Edwin Muir called it ‘an unusually bad novel’ in the Listener of 9 August 1933. I think this is unfair. Certainly, from a formal perspective, it is not so immediately stiking as either the first or final book, and with Chris no longer at the centre of events, her perspective cannot be so immediate or meaningful as it was in Sunset Song. Other ways have to be found to bring this more fragmented community to us while attempting to hold on to the innovative narrative voice developed previously. Nevertheless, while the formal, modernistic attributes of this second book may be less coherent, what is of much interest is its presentation of religion and politics.

Gibbon’s presentation of religion in Sunset Song and his Scottish Scene essay is a negative one. In Sunset Song, religion and its Kinraddie minister come to us like ‘flat’ characters and very often also in the guise of stereotypical music-hall Scotch comics. There is no rounded characterisation, no positive side seen. Kinraddie’s minister is always presented as pompous, ludicrous, lecherous, gluttinous and self-serving while the religion he preaches is the harsh creed that has warped unthinking adherents such as John Guthrie. In Cloud Howe, on the other hand, it is as if Gibbon is giving religion a second chance to prove itself as an ideology which can help shape a new society. Religion is brought to the foreground of the narrative, at least in its earlier sections, and the portrayal of Robert’s attempt to make it meaningful to the lives of the inhabitants of Segget is sympathetic, his own characterisation rounded. Yet while Robert may seem to have taken over from Chris as the dominant perspective in many parts of the novel, Chris’s point of view is still important, even if communciated obliquely. At the end of the ‘Cirrus’ chapter, for example, Chris in on the hill at the Kaimes ruins, thinking of Robert and his dream of a new age:

Was his dream just a dream? Was there a new time coming to the earth, when nowhere a bairn would cry in the night, or a woman go bowed as her mother had done, or a man turn into a tormented beast, as her father, or into a bullet-torn corpse, as had Ewan? A time when those folk down there in Segget might be what Robert said all might be, companions with God on a terrible adventure?

Then, breaking into her thoughts:

Suddenly, far down and beyond the toun there came a screech as the morning grew, a screech like a hungered beast in pain. The hooters were blowing in the Segget Mills. (CH 34)

This harsh interruption to Chris’s uncertain questioning – reminding the reader, perhaps, of Dickens’s ‘melancholy, mad elephants’ in the Coketown factories of Hard Times – appears to suggest through its imagery of ‘screeching’ and ‘hungered beast in pain’ that Robert’s dream may well be illusory, as indeed it proves to be. For the Segget people are divided among themselves, between the gentry and the incomers, the spinners. Robert is trusted by neither group and attacked by the more conservative because he identifies with the workers and tries to improve their conditions. But these coarsely depicted, uneducated workers don’t trust him either, because, ironically, this is not the traditional role they expect of a churchman. Their contempt, as portrayed in the narrative, may well derive from Gibbon’s own contempt for institutionalised religion and his view that ‘religion is no more fundamental to the human character than cancer is fundamental to the human brain’ (LGGA 152). One could say, therefore, that the failure of Robert’s dream is as much pre-determined by his author’s views on religion as it is by the fictional conflicts of Segget, for even at its most sympathetic with regard to Robert, the narrative, through Gibbon’s characterisation of Chris’s response, is negatively directed:

Then he started talking of the Miners, of Labour, of the coming struggle in the month of May, he hoped and believed that that was the beginning of the era of Man made free at last, Man who was God, Man splendid again. Christ meant . . . when He preached the Kingdom of Heaven – He meant it on Earth. Christ was no godlet, but a leader and hero -’ (CH 143)

And as Robert talks out his dream:

‘He forgot Chris, striding up and down the slope, excitement kindled in his harsh, kind eyes. And Chris watched him, standing, her stick behind her, her arms looped about it, saying nothing to him but hearing and seeing him, him and the hills and the song that both made. And suddenly she felt quite feared . . . ’

The ‘Stratus’ chapter is the political heart of Cloud Howe where the presentation of the failure of the General Strike reminds one of the similar scenario in the symbolic ‘Ballad of the Crucified Rose’ or ‘Ballad of the General Strike’ in MacDiarmid’s long poem of 1926, A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle. In Gibbon’s novel, the failure marks the end of Robert’s dream, the betrayal of the workers, partly through their own in-fighting but also betrayal by their own leaders and politicians. As in MacDiarmid’s ballad:

The vices that defeat the dream
Are in the plant itsel’,
till they’re purged its virtues maun
In pain and misery dwell. (CP 121)

Politics and political factions are the stereotypical ‘flat charaters’ in Cloud Howe, as religion was in Sunset Song, and their aggressive, unthinking, prejudice-ridden characterisation brings one again to realise the necessity of interrogating existing ideologies and attitudes, of being prepared to cast the manacles from our own minds as well as fighting against external forces. There are no ideological positives in this novel – all conventional political parties are scorned, religion is seen ultimately as providing no answers, nationalism is rejected. We are left with the continuing personal self-possession of Chris: ‘She had found in the moors and the sun and the sea her surety unshaken, lost maybe herself, but she followed no cloud, be it named or unnamed’ (CH 173 ). We are also left with the impersonal rationality of her son Ewan and his is the philosophy which takes us into Grey Granite and into the interrogation of yet another possible way forward, this time the hard, impersonal ideology of Marxism, which patterns the flint and granite images associated with the characterisation of Ewan who takes up work in a city metal foundry. In contrast to the epilogue and prologue which separated the first two books in the trilogy, the second and third books flow into each other without obstruction, a structural device which emphasises the connectedness of their ideological discourse.

While the retrospective narrative pattern and the structuring through symbolic section titles are less significant in this book, Gibbon seems to me to be remarkably successful in his creation of an urban setting and in his translation of the modernistic free-flowing narrative voice from the rural to the urban scene. As in the earlier books, it is Chris’s perspective which opens the Grey Granite scene as she pauses for breath, not this time on the hillside at the Kinraddie Standing Stones, or the Kaimes ruins in the countryside above Segget, but at a turn in the steep steps which lead up to Windmill Place in the city of Duncairn. Immediately we feel we are in a new environment with the quicker pulse of the city, its damp, dirty fog and swish of traffic, its more expansive, yet fragmented setting where there is no possibility of a cohesive community, not even of the limited community there was in Segget. In Duncairn there is the impersonality of city streets, the perception of a variety of occupations and classes with separate interests, of townspeople who are unlikely ever to meet up with one another, of areas of the city outwith their experience. Despite the continuing modernistic elements in Gibbon’s narrative form, this is not the modernist city of alienated but fascinated intellectuals and artists found at the beginning of the century, not the ‘unreal city’ of Eliot’s The Waste Land. This is a proletarian city, a city of slums, of class warfare, of economic injustice and protest: the kind of city which provided a setting for the Socialist and Marxist debates and action of the interwar period. Ewan and Chris are considered ‘toffs’ (GG 21,23) in this new world, despite the fact that Chris has to work long hours in her boarding-house to make any kind of living and Ewan himself has chosen to enter a factory. This classification would appear to derive from their conscious sense of self, from an independence of mind alien to the urban worker at the bottom of the heap and which marks them out as different. Chris doesn’t understand the word ‘keelie’(GG 26) which Ewan uses of his fellow workers, although she understands his derisive intonation – something she thinks should not be used towards working people, of whom she considers herself one. In the exchanges between Ewan and the apprentices at Gowans and Gloag we are shown the narrow perspectives of the workers, their petty enmities and rivalries, their unwillingness to unite in the attempt to better their situation. The employers seem firmly in control here and we get an insight into how generations of industrial working, poor living conditions and lack of education can sap initiative, so that there remains little belief in the possibility of escape from what seems a predestined place in life.

Grey Granite is of interest not only for its continuing ideological exploration, but also in relation to that question raised by Gibbon in his ‘Literary Lights’ essay: would he be able to transfer from a rural to urban context the narrative methodology he had developed for Sunset Song – that modernistic free indirect narrative voice with its mixture of Scots and English vocabulary and rhythms of the north-east speaking voice. As we have seen, Duncairn’s population is fragmented and there is no possibility of an overarching community voice such as was found in Kinraddie and to a lesser extent in Segget. Chris, who in theory still tells the story, has been removed from the centre of the action of Grey Granite, but even had she been more involved in the central happenings, the social fragmentation of the setting and characters would not have allowed her to act as principal focaliser.

Despite these obstacles, Gibbon is remarkably successful in adapting his methodology to the new context. After its Chris-centred opening, focalisation in this last book moves from character to character and from one particular group to another. Thus we have perspectives from the foundry workers, often with an anonymous yet insider industrial worker’s voice; sometimes there is a kind of ‘group’ voice, reminding one of the Kinraddie community voice, yet representative only of a section of the townspeople here; sometimes the maid Meg is the focaliser, sometimes Ewan’s girlfriend and co-socialist worker Ellen; perspectives come also from Chris and Ewan and from a whole range of one-dimensional characters such as the boarding-house inmates, the provost and labour leader, the chief of police, the minister and his housekeeper. Undeveloped as they are, these characters still appear to speak to us for and by themselves, as opposed to being spoken about by a conventional omniscient narrative voice. This is an unusual and important step forward in portraying a fragmented urban environment, anticipating in many ways the later urban narratives of James Kelman. The language used also anticipates Kelman’s practice. It is still the remodelling of English into the rhythms and cadences of spoken Scots speech as Gibbon described it in ‘Literary Lights’, but these are now urban rhythms and the lexis includes words such as ‘keelie’ which Chris did not understand.

Gibbon’s methodology can be seen to good effect in passages such as the Paldy Parish narrative in the early stages of the novel and the later Socialist march to the town hall (LGGA 19, 53). In the evocation of a hot June night in the Paldy Parish slum, focalisation moves from the man to his wife to his daughter, each of them focussing on their hopes and realising the privations of their present situation with the smells and the heat and the lack of privacy. The parents’ despairing memories and the determination of their daughter to escape their fate are brought alive by the synaesthetic imagery and the speech rhythms of the language. The terrible irony of the human situation is brought out later in the plot when the girl Meg becomes pregnant by her boyfriend, and so the cycle of entrapment starts up all over again. The presentation of the Socialist march is equally powerful. The main focaliser here is an anonymous man on the march, but his perspective is also a group perspective for the class of workers to which he belongs. In addition, included within his voice is the perspective of his wife – and of all the wives – as he remembers what shethinks of protest activity; he remembers also his comrades, the ones who emigrated and the ones who were killed in the war, he remembers the war; and all the time we are overhearing his thoughts and memories, the narrative is simultaneously bringing to us the crowds lining the streets, the noise of the drum and the singing and the traffic. And then, the slowing of the march, the disbelief when it begins to be diverted away from the Town Hall, the angry breaking of the line and the charge of the police horses. This is a wonderful passage of narrative which demands to be read aloud, savoured. I know of nothing like its effect in Scottish writing, except, perhaps, the effect achieved by Walter Scott’s narrative of the townspeople and the Porteous riots in The Heart of Midlothian.

Like Cloud Howe, Grey Granite is most often compared unfavourably with Sunset Song, perhaps because of its overt ideological plot and focus on the characterisation of Ewan with the inevitable marginalisation of Chris; and perhaps because of a perceived need by readers and critics to find out exactly what message Gibbon meant to convey in the book and how we should interpret its ending with regard to his ideological beliefs. My own view is that it is more profitable to focus on his narrative methodology and what he achieves by it, and that interpretative questions will then look after themselves. For this trilogy is an ideological investigation in process, not one resolved, and in all three books it is the work’s imaginative narrative method which encourages us to explore both the many beauties of the text and the philosophical and ideological questions it raises.

The Socialist march to the Town Hall transfers the struggle to find a new order of society from Cloud Howe’s religious search to the political context, but the interrogation of political systems in this final book is hardly more optimistic than the blind antagonisms which destroyed Robert in its predecessor. A recurring theme in all three books of the trilogy is that we imprison ourselves by our unwillingness to examine dominant ideologies and conventional responses. In Duncairn, the workers reject parties and policies which are attempting to bring about change – as we see also in the Paldy Parish view of the danger of the ‘Communionists’ (GG 20). There is hatred of the upper classes and the better off, yet, paradoxically, the workers give their votes to the very people to whose advantage it is to maintain the status quo. Ewan is at the heart of the struggle with his adherence to Communism, but his characterisation is such that it does not encourage us to believe that the resolution of social ills will lie with his impersonal ideology and its rejection of human needs and commitments. While he is characterised successfully as the flint-like personality needed for the ruthless pursuit of political necessities, the question as to whether the system to which he is committed is really what a world in economic and social crisis needs is left open by his author.

And what of Chris? Are we to believe, as Angus Calder has suggested, that ‘her peasant values drag her into regression, stasis and death’(UF112); or is her return to Cairndhu and the croft where she was born to be interpreted as a rejection of Ewan’s Marxist solution and a validation of some kind of watered-down Golden Age Diffusionist theory? I think Chris’s situation at the end of Grey Granite should be freed from both such inflexible interpretations and considered in relation to Gibbon’s characterisation of women throughout the trilogy. For, on the whole, the women in the trilogy hold true to a sense of human values. The outstanding example of this is Chris. She appears to go along with the flow of history, yet she acts to shape her life where she can, choosing what is life-giving as opposed to what is imprisoning. Ellen, too, opts for the human as opposed to the impersonal ideology of Ewan and Gibbon himself said: ‘I’m a jingo patriot of planet earth: Humanity right or wrong!’ (LGGA 95) If one has to find ‘meaning’ in the trilogy, then, for me it is this focus on humanity which is the principal message of the text, not the endorsement of any particular ideology, a humanity communicated so variously and vitally by Gibbon’s innovative and modernistic narrative method, something quite new in Scottish fiction.

Abbreviations used in the paper

A – Edwin Muir, An Autobiography (London: Hogarth Press, 1956)

CH – Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Cloud Howe in A Scots Quair, ed. and introd. by Tom Crawford (Edinburgh: Canongate, 1995)

CP – Complete Poems of Hugh MacDiarmid, ed. Michael Grieve and W.R. Aitken (London: Martin, Brian & O’Keeffe, 1978)

GG – Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Grey Granite in A Scots Quair (1995)

LGGA – Lewis Grassic Gibbon, A Lewis Grassic Gibbon Anthology, ed. Valentina Bold (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2001)

SS – Sunset Song in A Scots Quair (1995)

UF – Angus Calder, ‘A Mania for Self-Reliance: Grassic Gibbon’s Scots Quair’ in The Uses of Fiction ed. Douglas Jefferson and Graham Martin (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1982)

WBSP – William Blake: Selected Poems, ed. P.H. Butter (London: Dent, 1982)

MURRAY, Isobel, ‘Gibbon’s Chris: A Celebration With Some Reservations’

11 September 2021 by Duncan Jones

James Leslie Mitchell (Lewis Grassic Gibbon) Centenary Conference, 9 June 2001 |

A revised and updated version of this paper, along with eleven other essays on Gibbon’s works, is available in A Flame in the Mearns, published June 2003 by ASLS. References are given at the end of the document.

I am a great admirer of A Scots Quair. It is a wonderful trilogy. But I have frequently stabbed my toe on its imperfections, wishing I could call its author back from the shades for half an hour, to score out lines or phrases that gar me grue. “‘Oh Chris Caledonia, I’ve married a nation!’ … He said suddenly and queerly, ‘The Last Supper, Chris’” … the last sentence of Grey Granite …I think it is perhaps the most imperfect great work of literature I know. Maybe this is not surprising, given the pressured haste with which Gibbon composed it. And today I find myself getting at the creation most generally agreed to be its triumph, Chris Guthrie. I want to say her creation is very imperfect too. I start with a remark from Tom Crawford’s Introduction to Sunset Song in his fine edition of A Scots Quair:

In this novel Gibbon has created the most convincing female character in Scottish fiction, and so sympathetically, so inwardly, that many of the original readers wondered whether ‘Lewis Grassic Gibbon’ might be the nom-de-plume of a woman author.¹

It’s true that women at first thought it might have been written by a woman, but I don’t think it’s possible to think that now, now that the dust has had time to settle. At best, I’d argue, Chris may be the most convincing female character in Scottish fiction created by a male author. To outline my case, I place the trilogy – or, because of shortage of time today, Sunset Song – beside two other novels of the time, Nan Shepherd’s The Quarry Wood (1928) and Willa Muir’s Imagined Corners (1931).

Gibbon is unparalleled in creating the passionate lyricism of Chris’s Song. And he is not above learning from his contemporaries, which is praiseworthy. I have pointed out elsewhere how many suggestions he took from Willa Muir, including the portrayal of Chris as composed at different times of warring selves.² It was Muir who pioneered this technique in Imagined Corners, with both Elizabeth Shand and Elise Mutze. Elizabeth Shand, trying to be a perfect wife, has a waking nightmare experience, ‘feeling that she was lost and no longer knew who she was’.³ When she remembers the name ‘Elizabeth Ramsay’, her maiden name, the nightmare vanishes. She faces the diminution of her personal identity, but rallies: ‘Elizabeth Ramsay she was, but also Elizabeth Shand, and she herself, that essential self which awoke from sleep, had felt lost because she had forgotten that fact’ (IC 65).

Elise Mutze also recognises co-existing selves, as she tries to find a ‘central self’, looking back in some self-mockery at ‘Elizabeth the first’ and ‘Elizabeth the second’: ‘When she was a little girl Elizabeth the second had been, if anything, a few moments the quicker of the two, and Elizabeth the first was restricted to making sarcastic comments’ (IC 147). These references are carefully selected, and few.

As we all know, Gibbon memorably adapted the technique, in Sunset Song, with the English Chris and the Scottish Chris: ‘two Chrisses there were that fought for her heart and tormented her. You hated the land and the coarse speak of the folk and learning was brave and fine one day; and the next you’d waken with the peewits crying across the hills, deep and deep, crying in the heart of you and the smell of the earth in your face, almost you’d cry for that, the beauty of it and the sweetness of the Scottish land and skies’. (SS 32). This is a brilliant utterance of the self-reflexive you, but we might argue that Gibbon uses the technique of divided selves too often, and fragments his heroine too many times. We remember Chris’s emotional response to her realisation of her pregnancy –‘And Chris Guthrie crept out from the place below the beech trees where Chris Tavendale lay and went wandering off into the waiting quiet of the afternoon, Chris Tavendale heard her go, and she came back to Blawearie never again’. (SS 176). Each usage is effective, but they don’t stack up: it is not necessarily a failing of literal-minded undergraduates that they become puzzled by the Epilude when Chris says to Robert, ‘Oh my dear, maybe the second Chris, maybe the third, but Ewan has the first forever!’ (SS 253). And it is perhaps a self too far when she dreams in Cloud Howe of going her own way, ‘Chris-alone, Chris-herself, with Chris Guthrie, Chris Tavendale, Chris Colquohoun dead!’ (CH 166).

I suggest also that the intimacy and conviction of Chris’s thought-and-feeling, combined with the marvellously contrived structure of Sunset Song, blinds us to the drama – or even the melodrama – to which Gibbon subjects the readers of Sunset Song. These qualities obscure the speed and drama with which events pile up for Chris.

The Quarry Wood is a deal less eventful. Rory Watson says it shows ‘what might have happened to Chris Guthrie, had she decided to go to university after all’,⁴ and says Martha ‘makes the same difficult journey towards intellectual and emotional maturity at a time when such space was seldom freely given to women’. The action here is much more mundane. Martha’s mother Emmeline has a lot in common with Jean Guthrie on the face of it. We are told in a dry, dispassionate way of her circumstances on page 2:

With base effrontery she married the man she loved, and after twelve pinched and muddled years, with her trim beauty slack, two dead bairns and a living one mostly nerves and temper, she stood in her disordered kitchen and fretted that she could not offer her aunt a decent cup of tea.

Emmeline does not commit suicide, nor murder: she hashes her way along, picking up extra bairns to nurture at every turn. Martha goes to university, nurses mother and aunt repeatedly, becomes a teacher, falls hopelessly in love with her best friend’s husband, and in a moment of un-Shepherdlike passion exchanges one kiss with him. It’s a fine novel.

It is possible to make the action of Imagined Corners sound sensational, if you say it starts with a newly married couple arriving in Calderwick, and ends with the bride running off with another woman. But it is not sensational. The most that happens is that people rebel against the repressive society of Calderwick, and leave, and the main action is internal, a matter of self-discovery for the two main female characters.

Contrast Sunset Song, where Chris is fifteen during the horror of the difficult birth of the twins. There follow in quick succession the move to the Mearns; the ‘daftie’ going on a sexual rampage which involves Chris; Mother killing herself when she discovers she is pregnant yet again; Mother killing the year-old twins as well; the loss of brothers Dod and Alec, the departure of Will, leaving Chris alone with her father; father’s strokes, his attempted incest; his death; Chris’s decision to stay on the land; her marriage to Ewan, pregnancy and childbirth, and after all that she is still a teenager! We might call this ‘heightened realism’, perhaps?

The same kind of ‘heightened realism’ can be seen in the cast of characters. The Quarry Wood has a wide range of both sexes, and Martha as main female character is surrounded by strong portraits of women of different ages – the ever-memorable Great Aunt Josephine, Martha’s feckless mother Emmeline, her friend Dussie, the intimidating intellectual Lucy Warrender and more. Similarly, in Imagined Corners we meet a wide range of characters of both sexes, the women most notable including, as well as the two Elizabeths, Sarah Murray, Mabel Shand, Aunt Janet and the Watson sisters. But in Sunset Song female characters other than Chris are stripped away or kept in very minor positions. In the whole trilogy, Chris has only one equal female friend, Marget Strachan. We recall that vivid short scene when Marget shows Chris how her future lad will kiss her – ‘quick and shameful, fine for all that, tingling and strange and shameful by turns’ (SS 46). But she is almost immediately removed from the scene, never to return, not even as a guest at Chris’s wedding, and she fades from the reader’s memory.

Jean Guthrie of course is taken away from Chris as well, by her own act. And I’ve always found her suicide affecting and horribly understandable: the birth of the twins was described so graphically that her fear at another prospective delivery makes sense. (But I’ve never understood killing the twins – only one even named, and given a gender, though they have been part of the family for a whole year. Jean has apparently no compunction about killing them, although she has cared for them for a year; and Chris makes little of their deaths: both she and her father wonder later why Jean left them, but seem to have forgotten the babies, surely distinct personalities to the whole family by this time). The rest of the family is stripped away, leaving Chris and her father alone. Now Chris is the only sexual focal point on the landscape, in an otherwise all-male environment, with sexual tensions in all directions, from Chae, Long Rob, Ewan, and of course Father.

The local people who were affronted on the publication of Sunset Songperhaps had a point: it is drenched in sex, to a unique degree. I am unfashionable here: it is not my favourite volume of the trilogy, because the drenching with sex tends to overwhelm the other aspects of Gibbon’s vision, and it is after all rather superficial. I find the treatment of the troubled love between Chris and Robert Colquohoun, as we see it in Cloud Howe, and in retrospect in Grey Granite, has greater depth than the treatment of sexuality in Sunset Song. We remember the day when Andy the daftie goes on the sexual spree, and follows Mistress Ellison, Maggie Jean and Chris herself, who is able to take refuge in Pooty’s. But we are struck by John Guthrie’s reaction: ‘Father raged when he heard the story from Chris, queer raging it was, he took her out to the barn and heard the story and his eyes slipped up and down her dress as she spoke, she felt sickened and queer. He shamed you then? he whispered.’ (SS 52-3). This is like his fury when he finds Chris treading the blankets bare-legged, when it was ‘as though she saw a caged beast peep from her father’s eyes’ (SS 60). Or the fearful night during the harvest madness when she hears him lurking outside her bedroom door. We are well prepared for his attempted incest when it comes. There is the rest of the harvest madness sequence, which attacks father first: ‘every harvest there came something queer and terrible on father’ (SS 67). Then the casual working tink offers to relieve Chris of her virginity, and she does consider it, however briefly. Ewan Tavendale is seen with Sarah Sinclair; Cuddiestoun surprises the manse maid and the minister; people talk about Will and his Molly, and the minister reveals the depth of his hypocrisy in this regard.

Now I must tell you a wee story that dates back to the first time I offered a Scottish special subject to Honours students, and I encountered the Donald Paterson syndrome. Donald was a bright and lively student: I learned later that he and his mate Callum used to rehearse some of their best lines together before the seminar, to get maximum impact – and it worked! But it was unrehearsed, and in a spirit of pure pity that he said to me at the Sunset Song seminar –‘Isobel, you’re never going to understand the Gibbon thing until you realise that every male reader is in love with Chris.’ I saw what he meant, and was grateful for the tip. But since then I have seen it ever more clearly, and no longer feel simple gratitude. I now see that for all her unique intimacy with the reader, the self-reflexive you, Chris is regularly seized on by her (male) creator and displayed to the male gaze.

I’ve often asked female students since Donald Paterson’s year whether they have a recurrent need to retreat upstairs to a cold, wintry bedroom, there to undress and inspect themselves slowly in front of the mirror. I’ve never yet met one who owns up to this tendency, although women’s bedrooms are surely warmer now than in Chris’s young day. This adds a new meaning to the Mirror Phase. Chris does it five times in Sunset Song, six times in Cloud Howe and eight times in Grey Granite. Maybe using a word such as voyeurism is unkind and unnecessary, but there is an element of titillation here that seems unusual.

In Quarry Wood Martha Ironside is not a mirror sort of girl, and I think she is only recorded as looking in a glass twice. This extract shows us a great deal about her with Shepherd’s customary economy:

But what did they all see in her eyes, she queried, staring in the dull and spotty mirror. She could not even tell their colour exactly: they had something in them of Nature’s greens that have gone brown, of grass-fields before the freshening of spring. What did they all see in them? She looked in the mirror longer than she had ever looked before, searching for her own beauty. It was not to be found there. (QW 79)

The mirror is dull and spotty – and the colour of her eyes is suggested very specifically; and what other people see in her eyes is nothing she will ever find by looking in a mirror. Soon after she looks again, transformed by wearing the very special frock handed down through the family. This time she does almost glimpse an elusive, real Martha:

Wearing it, Martha had an uncanny sense of being someone other than herself; as though she had stepped carelessly to a mirror to dress her hair and had seen features not her own looking out from the glass. The mere wearing of the frock could not have changed her: but like the mirror it served to make her aware of alteration; and she seemed to herself farther from her folk and her home. Wearing the lustre frock, she had no Ironside instincts. She did not belong to the Leggatts. Across the mirror of lustre there flitted an unfamiliar Martha with alien desires. (QW 93)

In Imagined Corners Elizabeth Shand is not a mirror person either. She is gawky and awkward, a girl with a passionate soul and no interest in make-up, but here she is resolving to be a good wife to the appalling Hector, and take care of him as he requires:

She now presented the comforting appearance that Hector expected of her. She must have known this instinctively, for she first bathed and powdered her face, and then put on her prettiest frock. In Calderwick at that time it was considered slightly improper to powder one’s face by day, but Elizabeth excused her daring by reflecting that darkness had already set in, although it was not yet five o’clock. She inspected herself in the glass and added a string of coloured beads, signs of dawning femininity which might have pleased her sister-in-law. (IC 126)

Like Shepherd, Muir preserves a dry detachment, even amusement toward her characters, who are more complex, and more insecure than Gibbon’s Chris. Elise Mutze, the continental sophisticate who used to be Lizzie Shand, is no doubt much more used to utilising the mirror than Elizabeth Shand. But her author does not take us there routinely. On this occasion a Calderwick tea-party has irritated Elise beyond bearing, and she has escaped, only to glimpse something very interesting in her bedroom mirror:

In that moment of consciousness she caught sight of herself in the long mirror. One cannot look at oneself and remain angry; contrariwise, if one insists on remaining angry one cannot go on looking at oneself. Elise stared; the mirror was like a fog enclosing a ghostly image; gradually the image grew clearer, took shape, and Elise, breaking into a smile, said: ‘Hello, Lizzie Shand! Where have you been all these years?’ The impetuous, resentful small girl who had hovered in the church and stepped with Elise over the paving stones of Calderwick had come back. (IC 233)

In all these examples the authors are using the simple act of looking in the mirror to convey complex nuances of character and theme.

It feels mean, now that I’ve reached them, to point out my examples of Gibbon’s Chris, or a selection of them. Oh well. The first is a moving picture of a beautiful, sensual woman looking frankly out at the reader, who is encouraged to dwell on her attractions, and follow the path, even the touch, of the moonlight.

Closed the window, shutting out the smells of the night, and slowly took off her clothes, looking at herself in the long glass. … She was growing up limber and sweet, not bonny, perhaps, her cheek-bones were over high and her nose over short for that, but her eyes clear and deep and brown, brown deep and clear as the Denburn flow, and her hair was red and was brown by turns, spun fine as a spider’s web, wild, wonderful hair. … And below face and neck now her clothes were off was the glimmer of shoulders and breast and there her skin was like satin, it tickled her touching herself. Below the tilt of her left breast was a dimple, she saw it and bent to look at it and the moonlight ran down her back, so queer the moonlight she felt the running of that beam along her back. And she straightened as the moonlight grew and looked at the rest of herself, and thought herself sweet and cool and fit for that lover who would some day come and kiss her and hold her, so. (SS 70-1)

The same kind of description is found again, the emphasis this time less on wonderful hair and more on satin skin and long lines, with a touch of pity for those less well equipped. I have to quote again to underline the similarities, the effects:

And she saw the light white on the satin of her smooth skin then, and the long, smooth lines that lay from waist to thigh, thigh to knee, and was glad her legs were long from the knee to the ankle, that made legs seem stumbling and stumpy, shortness there. And … she bent to see if that dimple still hid there under her left breast, it did, it was deep as ever. Then she straightened and took down her hair and brushed it, standing so, silly to stand without her nightgown, but that was the mood she was in. (SS 147)

Next is a snatch of the pregnant Chris, again admiring her reflection, and pitying by contrast women whom pregnancy does not become.

She was glad, peeking at herself in the long mirror when she was alone, seeing gradually that smooth rounding of belly and hips below her frock – lucky, she had never that ugliness that some poor folk have to bear, awful for them. (SS 183)

I think I have to call it voyeurism. Certainly the author seems as entranced with his own creation as Emma Tennant suggests Hardy is with his, in Tess.

There may even be a deliberate, self-conscious acknowledgement of Gibbon’s subtle voyeurism. Remember when his horrible namesake, the Rev Gibbon, came to try for the pulpit at Kinraddie? He preached a very ‘rare’ sermon on the Song of Solomon:

Christ’s description of the beauty and comeliness of the Auld Kirk of Scotland, and …a picture of womanly beauty that moulded itself in the lithe and grace of the Kirk … and in a minute or so all Kinraddie kirk was listening to him as though he were promising to pay their taxes at the end of Martinmas.

For it was fair tickling to hear about things like that read out from a pulpit, a woman’s breasts and thighs and all the rest of the things, in that voice like the mooing of a holy bull; and to know it was decent Scripture with a higher meaning as well. (SS 55)

Chris may not be the most convincing female character in Scottish fiction, but Gibbon seems aware that he has taken pains to make her the most attractive!

But remind us how completely he triumphed at the end of the day, let me quote again what Jessie Kesson wrote to Douglas Young some years ago:

To read it, I ‘snecked’ myself inside our dry lavatory next to the pig’s sty. And although I had ‘written’ bits and pieces ever since I could spell!!! – it was then I had my first conviction that I’d be a writer, in my reaction to Sunset Song – in the dry lavatory. ‘That’s MY book’, I protested to myself. ‘He’s written MY book!’ I so identified with Chris Guthrie.⁵

Notes

¹ Tom Crawford, ed, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, A Scots Quair Introduction to Sunset Song, p viii, Canongate Classics 59, 1995. Further page references to Sunset Song and Cloud Howe will be given in the text as (SS 000) and (CH 000).
² Isobel Murray, ’Selves, Names and Roles: Willa Muir’s Imagined Cornersoffers some inspiration for A Scots Quair’, Scottish Literary Journal, May 1994, Vol 21 No 1, pages 56-64.
³ Willa Muir, Imagined Corners in Imagined Selves, Canongate Classics 69, 1996. Further page references will be given in the text as (IC 000).
⁴ Nan Shepherd, The Quarry Wood in The Grampian Quartet, Canongate Classics 70, 1996, Introduction by Roderick Watson, page viii. Further page references will be given in the text as (QW 000).
⁵ Quoted in Isobel Murray, Jessie Kesson: Writing Her Life, Canongate 2000, page 81.

A Scots Quair

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