A Scots Quair
A more sublime orchestration is heard in Robert’s contrasting sermons—the militant sermon about Samson and the Philistines which got him the Segget kirk, though the congregation hadn’t a clue what it meant; the crusading sermon with which he opens his campaign to clean up Segget and which puts the tradespeople against him; the namby-pamby quietist sermons he preaches after the defeat of the General Strike (we only hear about these, they are not quoted directly), and the fine rousing sermon at the very end of the book which looks away from Christianity altogether to the Communism of Grey Granite. Within this pattern of public oratory we also have the evangelical sermons of the hypocritical McDougall Brown (these are merely referred to, not quoted at length); and the dialectic between Robert’s sermon at the Memorial on Armistice Day and the socialist address of Jock Cronin, the spinners’ leader, after their procession has broken in on the official service. If Gibbon had included an Episcopal minister and his wife, as was once his intention,2 he might well have given us even more sermons than he did. And if he had followed the idea he once had of ending not with Robert’s death in the pulpit but with a grand trial scene in which he would have been expelled from the Kirk for his politics,3 public oratory would surely have bulked even larger in the total design.
Such oratory necessarily belongs, given the nature of society and public life in the Mearns and Scotland of the 1920s, to the world of men. But the book’s greatest achievement does not belong to the world of men at all, except peripherally; it lies in the continued development of Chris’s character, so brilliantly begun in Sunset Song. Robert’s career has the shape and emotional impact of a tragedy of character in which the hero redeems himself at the close and destroys himself in so doing. But we experience the tragedy mainly through its effect on Chris—the breakdown of her originally happy marriage, her agonised spectator’s response to his desertion of Christ the Tiger for Creeping Jesus after the defeat of the Strike, and the final act of heroic mercy that brings about his death. We are false to the book if we read it as primarily historical allegory; if it were, it would not turn non-Scots readers upside down the way it does. Like all the greatest characters in narrative and drama, Chris is both a unique individual and profoundly typical. George Malcolm Thomson, to whom the book is dedicated, wrote that ‘this Chris of yours is surely the greatest woman character in Scottish fiction … She is intensely Scottish and yet universal (Letter of 23 July 1933)4 In this respect Chris is like Natasha in War and Peace, for she exhibits the most positive, the most enduring aspects of the national character in a complex form. This, surely, is what Robert means when he says ‘Oh Chris Caledonia, I’ve married a nation!’, and Stephen Mowat when he says that the first time he met her ‘he felt he was stared at by Scotland herself.’ In her brief confrontations with Mowat she is representative, not of Scotland as an abstraction, but of the Scottish people, as Jeanie Deans is in her interview with the Queen in Scott’s Heart of Midlothian, and it is this aspect of her—her independence, lack of affectation, hatred of oppression, and love of freedom, which leads Robert to say that she will outlast him by a thousand years.
Gibbon’s remarkable presentation of female experience has been freshly examined recently, notably by Isobel Murray and Deirdre Burton.5 Burton in particular has observed that Gibbon’s techniques for rendering Chris’s separate selves—the first, second, third and fourth Chris —and the precise ways in which she is aware of these splits and is able to look down at herself ‘as though she looked at some other than herself’—are like those employed by many women writers: they are almost an identifying characteristic of women’s writing in this century.6 Female perceptiveness, or rather a remarkable fusion of male and female perceptiveness, also informs the cloud imagery that runs through the novel. The whole book as we now have it is structured around clouds. It moves from the high bright wispy clouds of Cirrus with their shapes like locks of hair, through the rounded heaps of Cumulus with darker horizontal bases, to the low, wide Stratus, and finally to the looming rain-clouds of Nimbus with their connotations of tragedy and despair. A thoroughgoing allegorical reading might however ponder the other meaning of nimbus—‘a cloud or luminous mist investing a god or goddess.’
One of the most beautiful moments in the book is a purely female exchange, an incident in sisterhood, when Chris has commented on the plight of the pregnant Cis Brown:
Oh, we’re such fools—women, don’t you think that we are now, Cis? To worry so much about men and their ploys, the things that they do and the things that they think!
Immediately after this, there occurs one of the strongest statements of the metaphysical significance of the title and its associated imagery. The clouds are linked in Chris’s mind with the deepest layers of woman’s biological being, ‘when it came on women what thing they carried, darkling, coming to life within them, new life to replenish the earth again, to come to being in the windy Howe where the cloud-ships sailed to the unseen south’. The Howe, the vast vale of the Mearns, is hollow, feminine. But the clouds transform themselves to pillars, symbols of maleness on a Freudian reading— ‘those clouds that marched, terrible, tenebrous, their pillars still south.’ Then follows the great Mosaic emblem which reverberates throughout the book and is associated with the best in Robert and the Kirk: ‘A pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night.’ On one level Chris thinks that the ideals, creeds, and theories which men have followed throughout history are insubstantial—‘mere’ clouds, and Robert’s not the least of these—compared to the underlying creativity of the universe, to which she is instinctively attuned. But on another the pillars of fire are not confined to one sex, they body forth the energy of the general unconscious, the libido, while the pillars of cloud are the superego and its rationalizations. Gibbon continues:
The wind was coming in great gusts now, driving the riven boughs of the broom, in times it rose to a scraich round about and the moor seemed to cower in its trumpet cry. Cloud Howe of the winds and the rains and the sun! All the earth that, Chris thought at that moment, it made little difference one way or the other where you slept or ate or had made your bed, in all the howes of the little earth, a vexing puzzle to the howes were men, passing and passing as the clouds themselves passed: but the REAL was below, unstirred and untouched, surely if that were not also a dream.
What is meant by ‘the REAL’ and what are we to understand by ‘below’? The answer, at this stage of Chris’s pilgrimage, is perhaps provided by comparison with an earlier passage where she speaks of ‘something that was bred in your bones in this land—oh, Something: maybe that Something was GOD’, and where it is clear that ‘land’ does not signify an abstract geographical entity, but rather the soil and the rocks and the trees and the heath as made out of the one solid reality, a base that is obstinately there. She continues, in that same earlier passage, with the thought that it is at the moment of death that Scots folk ‘face up to the REAL at last, neither heaven nor hell but the earth that was red’. (The soil of the Mearns is bright red in colour, which makes the fields when freshly ploughed glow with a peculiar richness and warmth). For Chris, the Earth itself abides below all the ephemeral forms that arise in the course of evolution and of history. Neil Gunn was struck by ‘mystical’ passages such as this, when he wrote to Gibbon on 17 July 1933:
I don’t think I have ever been put under the illusion
before of the Earth’s having a voice. Writers have tried to give it a voice, of course, often enough. But here the black thing speaks serpent and curlew, prehistoric gloaming (wan or fey, you get it when you want it), and in it for the most part an irony that never fails in an economy that is an echo-speech of the humors of your part of that world, but is often enough deep as horror.7
Gunn’s phrase about the Earth’s having a voice applies most of all to Chris, and she can be said—not to equal the Earth or the Land as a term in an allegorical equation—but to be aware of it as no other character is, to be thirled to it with every part of her:
S
he 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.
After Robert dies in the pulpit, with all the pages of his Bible soaked in the stream of blood from his lips, Chris speaks to the congregation in Christ’s words that come unbidden; ‘It is Finished!’ At that moment of tragedy she takes upon herself the priestly role reserved for men in her society. In the second last paragraph, as she leaves Segget for good, she once more mimes Robert, shaping her hands into the gesture with which he would bless the folk of Segget on Sabbath. The very last paragraph begins with an echo of her words in the kirk: ‘Then that had finished.’ She turns back to look at the hills, bare of clouds for once—the clouds of past doctrines and ideologies, ‘the pillars of mist that aye crowned their heights, all but a faint wisp vanishing south, and the bare, still rocks upturned to the sky.’
What she sees in that epiphany is the reality of the high places and their granite peaks, not necessarily truer but certainly different from the REAL that is ‘below’. It was perhaps those perceptions of Chris that Neil Gunn called ‘wan or fey’, and that led Hugh MacDiarmid, the day after it first went on sale, to end his review with the challenging and provocative conclusion: ‘Cloud Howe is the only really religious book Scotland has produced for a century and a half.’8
Thomas Crawford
NOTES TO INTRODUCTION
MSS in the National Library of Scotland are quoted by kind permission of the nls and of Gibbon’s daughter. Mrs Rhea Martin.
1. Quoted in Ian S. Munro, Leslie Mitchell: Lewis Grassic Gibbon (Edinburgh, 1966), p. 120.
2. Early list of ‘Dramatis Personae’ for The Morning Star, the first title that occurred to Gibbon for Cloud Howe, in nls ms Acc. 26040.
3. Ian Campbell, Lewis Grassic Gibbon (Edinburgh, 1985), Ρ. 95.
4. In nls ms Acc. 26064.
5. See ‘Action and Narrative Stance in A Scots Quair’, in Literature of the North, ed. David Hewitt and Michael Spiller (Aberdeen 1983), pp. 109–20; and Isobel Murray and Bob Tait, ‘Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s A Scots Quair’, in Ten Modern Scottish Novels (Aberdeen 1984), pp.10–31. Also Deirdre Burton, ‘A Feminist Reading of Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s A Scots Quair’, in The British Working-Class Novel in the Twentieth Century, ed. J. Hawthorne (1984), pp.35–46
6. ‘A Feminist Reading’, p.38.
7. In nls ms Acc. 2064. Gunn may have written ‘humans’ rather than ‘humors’.
8. In The Free Man, 29 July 1933.
Note on the Text
The present text follows that of the first edition as scrupulously as possible, except in such matters of typographical styling as the use of roman, not italic, capitals for words emphasised in direct speech. Misprints that were not picked up in later editions have been corrected. We have gone back to the original paragraphs of 1933, and the map of Segget has been prepared from the one in the first edition.
Map
PROEM
THE BOROUGH of Segget stands under the Mounth, on the southern side, in the Mearns Howe, Fordoun lies near and Drumlithie nearer, you can see the Laurencekirk lights of a night glimmer and glow as the mists come down. If you climb the foothills to the ruined Kaimes, that was builded when Segget was no more than a place where the folk of old time had raised up a camp with earthen walls and with freestone dykes, and had died and had left their camp to wither under the spread of the grass and the whins—if you climbed up the Kaimes of a winter morn and looked to the east and you held your breath, you would maybe hear the sough of the sea, sighing and listening up through the dawn, or see a shower of sparks as a train came skirling through the woods from Stonehaven, stopping seldom enough at Segget, the drivers would clear their throats and would spit, and the guards would grin: as though ’twere a joke.
But God alone knows what you’d want on the Kaimes, others had been there and had dug for treasure, nothing they’d found but some rusted swords, tint most like in the wars once waged in the days when the wife of the Sheriff of Mearns, Finella she was, laid trap for the King, King Kenneth the Third, as he came on a hunting jaunt through the land. For Kenneth had done her own son to death, and she swore that she’d even that score up yet; and he hunted slow through the forested Howe, it was winter, they tell, and in that far time the roads were winding puddles of glaur, the horses splashed to their long-tailed rumps. And the men of Finella heard of his coming, as that dreich clerk Wyntoun has told in his tale:
As through the Mernys on a day
The kyng was rydand hys hey way;
Off hys awyne curt al suddanly
Agayne hym ras a cumpany
In to the towne of Fethyrkerne
To fecht wyth hym thai ware sa yherne
And he agayne thame faucht sa fast,
Bot he thare slayne was at the last.
So Kenneth was dead and there followed wars, Finella’s carles builded the Kaimes, a long line of battlements under the hills, midway a tower that was older still, a broch from the days of the Pictish men; there they lay and long months withstood the folk that came to avenge the death of Kenneth; and the darkness comes down on their waiting and fighting and all the ill things that they suffered and did.
The Kaimes was left bare and with ruined walls, as Iohannes de Fordun tells in his time, a Fordoun childe him and had he had sense he’d have hidden the fact, not spread it abroad. Some kind of a cleric he was in those days, just after the Bruce drove out the English, maybe Fordoun then had less of a smell ere Iohannes tacked on the toun to his name. Well, the Kaimes lay there in Iohannes’ time, he tells that the Scots folk halted there going north one night to the battle of Bara; and one man with the Scots, a Lombard he was, looked out that morn as the army roused and the bugles blew out under the hills, and he saw the mists that went sailing by and below his feet the sun came quick down either slope of a brae to a place where a streamlet ran by a ruined camp. And it moved his heart, and he thought it an omen, in his own far land there were camps like that; and he swore that if he should survive the battle he’d come back to this place and claim grant of its land.
Hew Monte Alto was the Lombard’s name and he fought right well at the Bara fight, and when it was over and the Bruce made King, he asked of the Bruce the lands that lay under the Kaimes in the windy Howe. These lands had been held by the Mathers folk, but they had made peace with Edward the First and given him shelter and welcome the night he halted in Mearns as he toured the north. So the Bruce he took their lands from the Mathers and gave them to Hew, that was well content, though vexed that he came of no gentle blood. So he sent a carle to the Mathers lord to ask if he had a daughter of age for wedding and bedding; and he sent an old carle that he well could spare, in case the Mathers should flay him alive.
For the Mathers were proud as though God had made their flesh of another manure from men; but by then they had come to a right sore pass in the mouldering old castle by Fettercairn, where hung the helmet of good King Grig, who first had ’stablished the Mathers there, and made of the first of them Merniae Decurio, Captain-chief of the Mearns lands. So the old lord left Hew’s carle unskinned, and sent back the message he had more than one daughter, and the Lombard could come and choose which he liked. And Hew rode there and he made his choice, and was wedded and bedded to a Mathers quean.
But short was the time that he had for his pleasure, the English again had come north to war. The Scots men gathered under the Bruce at a narrow place where a black burn ran, the pass of the Bannock burn it was. And Hew was a well-skilled man in the wars, he rode his horse lathered into the camp, and King Robert called him to make the pits and set the spiked calthrops covered with earth, traps for the charge of the English horse. So he did, and the next day came, and the English, they charged right brave and were whelmed in the pits. But Hew was slain by an English arrow as he rode unhelmed to peer at his pits.
Before he rode south he had builded a castle within the walls of the old-time Kaimes, and brought far off from his Lo
mbard land a pickle of weavers, folk of his blood. They builded their houses down under the Kaimes in the green-walled circle of the ancient camp, they tore down the walls of that heathen place, and set their streets by the Segget burn, and drove their looms, and were well-content, though foreign and foolish and but ill-received by the dour, dark Pictish folk of the Mearns. Yet that passed in time, as the breeds grew mixed, and the toun called Segget was made a borough for sake of the Hew that fell at the Burn.
So the Monte Altos came to be Mowat, and interbred with the Mathers folk, and the next of whom any story is told is he who befriended the Mathers who joined with other three lairds against the Lord Melville. For he pressed them right sore, the Sheriff of Mearns, and the four complained and complained to the King; and the King was right vexed, and he pulled at his beard—Sorrow gin the Sheriff were sodden—sodden and supped in his brew! He said the words in a moment of rage, unthinking, and then they passed from his mind; but the lairds remembered, and took horse for the Howe.