William the Lyon. King of Scotland, 1165-1214.
Aberlemno’s Meikle Stane. A six-foot high carved standing stone in Aberlemno churchyard, six miles ne. of Forfar. One side depicts a battle in which both horse and foot are engaged. Malcolm 11 (1005–34) commanded the victorious ‘Picts’.
p.2 Mondynes. About one mile sw of Drumlithie, for which see below. Duncan 11, son of Malcolm Canmore, was defeated and slain there in 1094 by his uncles, Donald Bain and Edmund.
Dunnottar Castle. A magnificent ruined coastal fortress about one mile se of Stonehaven. See below, pp. 126-8.
p.3 Aberbrothock. Arbroath,17 miles ne of Dundee.
First Reformation. That associated with John Knox and George Wishart, c. 1560.
others: the high points of Calvinist history in the seventeenth century, viz. the National Covenant (1638), the Presbyterian ascendancy in the 1640s, and the resistance of the Covenanters against episcopalian conformity in Charles II’s reign.
Whiggam!: Gibbon makes this the battle-cry of the Covenanters. For a full explanation, see snd under ‘whigga- more’ (a colloquial term in the seventeeth century for a Presbyterian zealot).
Dutch William. William III (of Orange), who was invited to be King of England and Scotland in 1688 in order to ensure the Protestant ascendancy.
p.3 James Βoswell. The Greek letters spell out ‘Peggi Dundas was fat in the buttocks and I did lie with her’. Boswell, who is today almost as well known for his uninhibited journals as for his Life of Samuel Johnson, recorded on 28 August 1776, in Greek letters, as here, that he ‘madly ventured to lye with’ a prostitute called ‘Peggi Dundas’ on the north brae of the Castle Hill, Edinburgh. Boswell’s journal for 1776 was first printed privately in 1931, in an edition limited to 570 sets, a year before the publication of Sunset Song. Perhaps Gibbon read it in the British Museum.
p.4 The Auld Kirk. The Established Church of Scotland.
Jacobin. A supporter of the more extreme French revolutionaries.
p.5 black blood. She had a hereditary mental instability.
p.7 the Turra Coo. The National Insurance Act of 1911 had introduced unemployment insurance for certain trades, financed in part by weekly contributions from the employer. A certain Paterson of Lendrum, near Turriff (‘Turra’), Aberdeenshire, refused on principle to buy insurance stamps for his men; when one of his cows was impounded, it was bought back by well-wishers and led home adorned with garlands and ribbons.
p.9 Drumlithie. Village seven miles sw of Stonehaven. Arbuthnott. Kincardineshire rural parish in whose churchyard Leslie Mitchell’s ashes are interred, and on which the fictitious ‘Kinraddie’ is largely based.
Laurencekirk. A market town which lies along the main road between Aberdeen and Perth and more or less equidistant between Stonehaven and Brechin.
Peesie’s Knapp. ‘Lapwing’s Hillock’.
p. 13 Druid stones. Most standing stones probably antedate the Celtic Druids.
Stonehaven. At the period of the action, a seaport and the county town of Kincardineshire—‘the capital of the Mearns’, 16 miles sw of Aberdeen.
Auchenblae. Market village five miles n of Laurencekirk.
p.17 Calgacus. Caledonian chieftain, commander of the tribes defeated at Mons Graupius by Agricola in 84 ad.
p.18. Ingersoll. For comic effect, Gibbon has run together Robert Green Ingersoll (1833-99), colonel in the American Civil War and noted propagandist for agnosticism, and Robert Hawley Ingersoll (1859-1928) who in 1892 introduced the one-dollar watch, ‘the watch that made the dollar famous’.
p.19 He’d whistle. The first two pieces are folk songs, but English; for The Lass that made the bed, see the notes to p. 163 below.
p.21 Glenbervie. The Kincardineshire parish which contains Drumlithie village.
p.22 Weeee … Beastie. The first line of Burns’s To a Mouse.
p.24 kailyard … green shutters. Not a ‘despicable literary in- joke’, as one critic has called it, but a conscious craftsman’s pointer to his intentions. In Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush (1894) ‘Ian Maclaren’ (the Rev. John Watson) produced the archetypal sentimental novel of the ‘kailyard’ (cabbage patch) school of Scottish fiction. George Douglas Brown’s The House with the Green Shutters (1901) rendered the sombre meannesses of Scottish small-town life in the spirit of Zola’s naturalism. To the Rev. Gibbon, Kinraddie echoed both imaginative worlds.
p.26 The Howe. ‘The Howe [vale] of the Mearns’, the name given to that part of the great valley of Strathmore contained in Kincardineshire.
Prince of Wales. In 1911, George v’s son, the future Edward VIII.
p.27 The Barmekin. A conical hill (800 ft) near the Aberdeenshire village of Echt.
Kildrummie. A hamlet and parish on Donside, W central Aberdeenshire, with a notable ruined castle.
Pittodrie. Perhaps the estate in Chapel of Garioch parish, Aberdeenshire.
p.31 Rienzi, the last of the Roman Tribunes (1835), by Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton.
The Humours of Scottish Life (1904), a collection of anecdotes by the Rev. John Gillespie, minister of Mouswald, Dumfriesshire. Many of them are rather ponderous jokes about ministers, elders, and church beadles.
p.33 Wallace. Sir William Wallace (?1270-1305), guerilla fighter and Scottish Independence leader, was executed in 1305 and different parts of his body were gibbeted at Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Berwick, Stirling and Perth.
Bannockburn. Robert Bruce’s decisive victory against Edward 11 of England, 1314.
Flodden. James iv’s disastrous defeat in 1513 by the forces of Henry VIII of England, commanded by the Earl of Surrey.
The Flowers of the Forest. See below, pp.163 and 257. Mrs. Hemans. Felicia Dorothea Hemans (1793-1835), a writer of sentimental and patriotic verses popular through-
p.33 out the nineteenth century. Her best known piece is Casa- bianca (‘The boy stood on the burning deck’).
p.36 The Slug road. Runs from near Banchory on Deeside to Stonehaven, climbs to a height of 757 feet, and is often snow-bound in winter.
p.39 Pytheas. Greek navigator and geographer of the fourth century bc who circumnavigated the British Isles and described ‘Thule’, six days’ sail to the north of Britain.
p.42 Kinneff. A hamlet eight miles s of Stonehaven.
p.43 Duncairn. A made-up name, in Grey Granite used of a city with many of Aberdeen’s characteristics. Here the school has some of the features of Mackie Academy, Stonehaven.
p.50 Bonny wee thing. The singer probably learnt this Burns song orally, not from print. He has changed Burns’s ‘canie’ into ‘canty’, and ‘wear’ into ‘clasp’.
p. 54 Song of Solomon. Theologians made this Hebrew love song into an allegory of the Church described in terms of a woman’s physical beauty.
p.55 Gourdon. A coastal village in Bervie parish. At the turn of the century grain was shipped from the harbour, there was ‘an extensive fishing and fish-curing industry’, and it had a boat-building yard (OGS).
p.59 Mucker. From the portion of a draft typescript of Sunset Song in the National Library of Scotland it seems clear that Gibbon intended ‘Bugger’ for every occurrence of the word. This is confirmed by the gloss he supplied for the American edition: Mucker. A euphemism for “bugger”;i.e.,a Bulgarian heretic; i.e., suspected of nauseous practices.’
Religio Medici. A whimsical and erudite masterpiece of baroque prose by Sir Thomas Browne (?1605-82), physician, of Norwich, which would inevitably bore a person as young as Chris.
p.61 Aberdeen University. The first degree there was m.a. not b.a.
p.82 Nebuchadnezzar. This king of Babylon ‘was driven from men, and did eat grass as oxen, and his body was wet with the dew of heaven, till his hairs were grown like eagles’ feathers, and his nails like birds’ claws’ (Daniel iv.33).
p.96 The Liberal ‘People’s Budget’ of 1909 taxed the wealthy to pay for a non-contributory pensions scheme and other social measures. It was passed by the Commons, rejected by the Lords, and finally pass
ed in 1910 when the government threatened to create enough new peers to give it a majority in the Upper House. A consequence was the Parliament Act of 1911, which removed the Lords’ right of veto except on
p.96 bills to extend the life of Parliament. For ‘Insurance’, see note on p.7 above.
p.102 Up in the Morning. Like ‘Bonny wee Thing’, this song helps to bring Burns subtly into the texture of the novel. Chae Strachan sings it at Chris’s wedding (below p. 164).
p. 108 Old Testament times. Lot’s daughters lay with their father and bore his sons, but the initiative came from them, not Lot (Genesis xix.30-38). Thus Guthrie twists scripture to justify his lust.
p. 119 Brechin. In e Forfarshire, and by courtesy a ‘city’ because of its cathedral. The ‘Pictish Tower’, attached to the sw angle of the cathedral, is round, and almost 90 feet high; it may date from the late tenth century (ogs). παντα ϱει ‘Everything flows on’ (Heraclitus of Ephesus, c.500 bc, Greek philosopher).
p. 126 Rev: XI Ch: 12 Verse. ‘And to the angel of the Church in Pergamos write; These things saith he which hath the sharp sword with two edges’.
p. 163 The Lass that Made the Bed. Another Burns song, whose imagery is linked to the Song of Solomon, so popular with the Rev. Gibbon. Ellison’s first English song carries on from the Song of Solomon’s imagery of cheeks, lilies, etc.
p. 164 Villikins and his Dinah. A comic treatment of the old folk theme of unfortunate lovers who commit suicide, much sung in Victorian theatres and music halls.
The Bonnie House o’ Airlie. A traditional ballad about how ‘gley’d Argyll’ (Montrose’s opponent in the seventeenth century) burnt and plundered the Lady Ogilvy’s house when her husband was from home.
Auld Robin Gray. Originally an art song, by Lady Anne Barnard (1750-1825).
p. 165 The Flowers of the Forest. A ‘national’, not a ‘folk’ song. The words are by Jean Elliot (1727-1805), sister of David Hume’s great friend, Sir Gilbert Elliot of Minto. ‘The Forest’ is Ettrick Forest.
p.173 Thomas the Rhymour. Thomas of Ercildoune (Earlston, in Berwickshire) hero of the ballad ‘Thomas the Rhymer’, a seer and poet of the fourteenth century, to whom many prophetic rhymes and sayings were attributed. Gibbon catches their tone exactly.
Edzell Castle. Formerly a seat of the Lindsays, in Glenesk. The walls of the original flower garden are decorated with bas-reliefs of the virtues, sciences, planets, etc.
Ρ.195 a jade called Jael. See Judges iv. 17–22.
p.208 Conscription Act. The Military Service Act of January 1916.
p.231 Ladies of Spain, There was a Young Farmer: folk songs, but not especially Scottish; indeed the first, which is almost Rob’s ‘signature tune’, is a shanty about sailors returning to ‘old England’.
A’ the Blue Bonnets are Over the Border. A ‘national’, not a ‘folk’ song. The words are by Sir Walter Scott, from chapter 25 of The Monastery.
Tipperary, Long, Long Trail: popular songs of 1912 and 1917 respectively.
p.239 Verey lights. Coloured flares projected from a pistol for signalling or to light up part of a battlefield. The inventor’s name is spelt ‘Very’.
p.245 Uhlans. Originally Polish, later German, cavalrymen armed with lances and wearing distinctive uniforms.
p.251 They have made a desert … peace. These words go back to the Roman historian Tacitus (?55-117 ad), who puts them in the mouth of Calgacus, so potent a symbol in this novel.
p.255 Revelation: 11 Ch: 28 Verse. See the inscription to the Covenanters in Dunnottar Castle, from Revelation xi, above, note to p. 126. Revelation ii.28 actually reads ‘And I will give him the morning star’, and is preceded by verses (26, 27) whose spirit is not elegiac but militant, looking forward to the positives of Grey Granite: ‘And he that overcometh, and keepeth my works unto the end, to him will I give power over the nations: / And he shall rule them with a rod of iron; as the vessels of a potter shall they be broken to shivers: even as I received of my Father’.
Lewis Grassic Gibbon
CLOUD HOWE
Edited with an introduction by Tom Crawford
To
George Malcolm Thomson
Contents
Introduction
Note on the Text
Map of Segget
PROEM
I Cirrus
II Cumulus
III Stratus
IV Nimbus
Notes
Introduction
American reviewers were as impressed by Cloud Howe on its first appearance as they had been by Sunset Song. The New York Times, Herald Tribune, and North American Review praised it to the skies, but the best account I know of a first reading comes from Herschell Bricknell, in a letter of 14 February 1934 to Gibbon’s American publishers:
I read until I went to sleep Saturday night and waked half a dozen times thinking of what Gibbon was saying. Early Sunday morning—very early—I finished it, and all day yesterday I was under the spell of it. It is a perfectly extraordinary book—I don’t know what people will do with the dialect, but I hope everybody able to be turned upside down by a piece of writing will read it.1
Gibbon’s peers among contemporary Scottish novelists —Compton Mackenzie, Naomi Mitchison, Neil Gunn, and George Blake—hailed it as a masterpiece, although one writer of the older generation, the poet Lewis Spence, who had been delighted by Sunset Song, saw its successor as merely ‘a deliberate misconception, a capricious guffaw’ (Scottish Field, October 1934). As might have been predicted, many Scottish newspapers were as scathingly contemptuous as they had been over Sunset Song. ‘Those who like a simple clean story will not find it here’, wrote the Aberdeen Press and Journal’s critic on 3 August 1933. ‘If life in a Mearns town is compounded of indecencies, sneers, ill-will, spying, gossiping, downright cruelty, then this Mearns town is consistent.’
These hostile judgments are worth recalling because they were a response to an essential feature of the book. Seen from one angle, Cloud Howe is a brilliant picture of a small country town set in a consummately rendered fictional region. There is nothing on the map of Kincardineshire that corresponds to Segget in the place where Segget is supposed to be, though certain features, such as the jute mill and the owner’s management of it may be based on Inverbervie. The ruined Kaimes are compounded from various sources, not least Fenella’s castle near Fettercairn; Frellin, Culdyce Moor, and Quarles seem to be inventions, though marvellously plausible ones. But Gibbon, in the interests of solidity, also features many genuine place names from the real region of which the fictional one is an emanation. Segget, like so much in the book, is fictional in order to be typical—more typical than a photographic documentary of any real community could be; and it is typical of a community gone wrong. It has gone wrong because it is infected with ‘those little prides and those little fortunes’ which Robert told of in his sermon by the war memorial at the end of Sunset Song, the ‘new oppressions and foolish greeds of the world that we seem to inherit’. That is why the narrative voices of the community—the Segget voices—are often cruder and more strident than the Kinraddie voices, and why Chris’s voice never fuses with the Segget ones but is always separate, just like her essential inner self, ‘Chris alone’.
Yet it is not only what has happened since the war that has made Segget the obscene pit that it is; it is the whole history of class society, all the millenia of man’s inhumanity to man, as we see from Chris’s thoughts during a confrontation with Mowat, the degenerate mill-owner:
… suddenly she’d seen so much she didn’t say, all the pageant of history since time began up here in the windy Mearns Howe: the ancient rites of blood and atonement where the Standing Stones stood up as dead kings; the clownings and cruelties of leaders and chiefs; and the folk—her folk—who kept such alive—dying frozen at night in their eirdes, earth-houses, chaving from the blink of day for a meal, serfs and land workers whom the Mowats rode down, whom the armies harried and the kings spat on, the folk who
rose in the Covenant times and were tortured and broken by the gentry’s men, the rule and the way of life that had left them the pitiful gossiping clowns
that they were, an obscene humour engraffed on their fears, the kindly souls of them twisted awry and veiled from men with a dirty jest …
What Lewis Spence and the Press and Journal reviewer did not appreciate was that there are still kindly souls in this community, a point made cogently by Chris in a dialogue with Robert which extends the discussion from region to nation, from the Mearns to the whole of Scotland:
[Robert said], ‘My God, were there ever folk like the Scots! Not only them —you and I are as bad. Murderous gossip passed on as sheer gospel, though liars and listeners both know it is a lie. Lairds, ladies, or plain Jock Muck at the Mains—they’d gossip the heart from Christ if He came, and impute a dodge for popularizing timber when He was crucified again on His cross!’
Chris said ‘That’s true, and yet it is not. They would feed Christ hungry and attend to His hurts with no thought of reward their attendance might bring. Kind, they’re so kind…. And the lies they would tell about how He came by those hurts of His …’
Throughout the novel, the voices of Segget are not uniformly mean and petty. True, there is the vile voice that reports the long agony of Meiklebogs’ injured horse; but there is also an essentially decent voice that is proud of Cis Brown and refuses to believe she has taken up with Dod Cronin. This same voice is later full of honest radical indignation at the sufferings of the unemployed:
And there were worse cases than these, far worse, God damn’t! you had never much liked the spinners, but the things that were happening near turned you sick, it was kicking in the faces of the poor for no more than delight in hearing the scrunch of their bones.
One of the triumphs of Cloud Howe is its magnificent ‘orality’. There are indeed many voices other than the community voices—not merely the voice of Chris’s interior thoughts with its subtle use of ‘self-referring you’, or Else Queen’s intensely Scots inner voice and Ewan’s cool English one, which we occasionally hear as vehicles of the narrative; not merely Robert’s ministerial conversation (we hear him only in dialogue, he is never given interior monologue); but the more public voices of oral folk tale, sermons, and open-air speeches. There is at times a quite extraordinary orchestration of folk-narrative technique within the Segget voice, where one must assume an anonymous individual in the traditional role of tale-teller with an audience around him. It is such a person (though malicious and mean of spirit, one feels), who tells how Else Queen’s bairn was born among the sheaves in the corn-loft; and into his tale is set another, a folk anecdote about Burns and the Virgin Mary, assigned to a named individual and perfectly suited to his character: ‘That was a real foul story to tell, it showed you the tink that Ake Ogilvie was, interrupting the real fine newsy tale of the happenings down at the Meiklebogs.’ Of course Gibbon’s irony intends us to approve of Ogilvie’s racy irreverence and condemn the tone of the newsy tale-teller.