Growing Up In The West. John Muir
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but its philosophy concerns emotions and half-formulated perceptions as much as coherent ideas. Muir’s great achievement in the novel is to find a series of compellingly vivid images to convey the often wordless visions of his characters. One can say of Poor Tom what Muir himself says of Kafka’s The Castle: ‘everything happens on a mysterious spiritual plane which was obviously the supreme reality to the author; and yet in a curious way everything is given solidly and concretely’.6
Be that as it may, Muir’s method in Poor Tom has its pitfalls. The fact that, for most of the novel, the two principal characters are not on speaking terms rather limits the opportunity for meaningful dialogue. Partly as a result of this, the novel suffers from a condescendingly intrusive narrator. Critics have complained that Muir is too eager to articulate for Mansie and Tom, that there is too much telling and not enough showing in the novel. This is true, but one could equally argue that the forensic, third-person approach pays significant dividends here; for one thing, it conveys something of the detached, impersonal state of these characters, their curious alienation from their own emotions and actions. The distanced, third-person narrative – viewing the characters from the outside, treating them as laboratory specimens – is not just legitimate but apposite, for this is how the brothers view themselves.
If Tom and Mansie are the protagonists of the novel, the most rounded minor character is the city itself. There is an amplitude, a generosity in Muir’s depiction of Glasgow that distinguishes Poor Tom from the more one-sided and pejorative treatments of the city in Scottish Journey (1935) and An Autobiography (1954). The Mansons may seek to blame their troubles on ‘the corrupting influence of Glasgow’, but it is clear that Tom was a restless drunk and Mansie a shallow prig long before the removal from Orkney. Glasgow’s slum districts – the loathsome Eglinton Street in particular – inspire some classic Muir invective, but even here Muir largely avoids the kind of hysterical rhetoric that marks similar passages in the Autobiography (‘the damned kicking a football in a tenth-rate hell’). He also responds with real enthusiasm to the bustle and vitality of the city, its whist drives and Socialist dances, the fervid debates over Nietzsche and Shaw. Douglas Gifford sees Muir’s treatment of the city as deeply ambivalent, arguing that, in Poor Tom, ‘Glasgow is simultaneously positive and negative’.7 This is true, though it is not clear why Gifford should regard such ambivalence as a ‘weakness’ when, on the contrary, it represents a properly complex and fluid response to a many-sided city. A more damaging inconsistency, perhaps, lies in the characterisation of Mansie who, as P. H. Butter observes, spends much of the book as an amiable dullard, only to rise at sudden junctures into vertiginous flights of philosophical speculation.8
Despite such glitches, however, Poor Tom remains a forceful, cunning book. Perhaps, in addition to its philosophical intensity and its lively treatment of place, what impresses most about the novel is its careful craftsmanship, its meticulous construction. I’m thinking, for instance, of how religious imagery is threaded so subtly through its pages; of how its key incidents are so deftly foreshadowed (when Mansie describes Tom as ‘always stumbling against things that hurt him’ he innocently anticipates the accident with the tram); of how Muir sets up an intricate series of parallels – between, for instance, Mansie’s ‘defenceless clothes’ during a liaison in the woods, and Tom’s ‘crumpled blue trousers’ as the doctor conducts an examination. There is, on top of this, an often brilliant use of symbol: the ‘naked’ iron bedstead that reproaches Mansie when Tom has abandoned their shared bedroom, or the pristine bowler hat that speaks of Mansie’s fastidiousness. This is a novel of poetic reach and intensity, a novel that repays multiple readings and that reinforces our sense of Muir as one of the century’s truly significant Scottish writers.
Fernie Brae: A Scottish Childhood (1947) is the only published novel by James Findlay Hendry, a writer who, partly due to his lengthy residence abroad, is culpably little known in his native land. Born in Glasgow in 1912, and raised mainly in Springburn, Hendry studied modern languages at Glasgow University in the thirties, though he left without taking a degree. After the war, during which he served in the Intelligence Corps, Hendry left Scotland (like the hero of Fernie Brae) and travelled widely in Europe, Africa and North America, working as a professional translator and interpreter, before becoming Professor of Modern Languages at Laurentian University in Ontario. He died in 1986, on the verge of returning to Glasgow for good.9
An eclectic writer, Hendry’s output includes a volume of stories, a biography of Rilke, a handbook for translators and (as editor) The Penguin Book of Scottish Short Stories (1969). Like Muir, however, he was principally a poet. He was the key figure in the wartime New Apocalypse movement, which countered the political poetry of the Auden school with a verse of extravagant and often mystical opacity. A number of Scottish poets – Norman MacCaig, G. S. Fraser and W. S. Graham – also participated, but Hendry was the prime mover, composing the New Apocalypse manifesto and co-editing the movement’s three anthologies: The New Apocalypse (1939); The White Horseman (1940); and The Crown and the Sickle (1943).
While the New Apocalypse was a short-lived affair, some of its ideas and practices – a delight in the visual and the visionary, a preference for the image over the concept, a belief in the regenerative potential of myth, and a deep distrust of the machine age – continued to inform Hendry’s work and are powerfully apparent in Fernie Brae.10 Towards the start of the novel, there is an episode in which the young protagonist gently places a number of caterpillars into the drawer of his mother’s sewing-machine, only to discover the ‘stench of green death’ on the following morning. As well as being a plausible naturalistic incident, this is a classic New Apocalypse symbol: organic potential destroyed by the machine.
In Fernie Brae, Glasgow itself is a machine, a sordid contraption of iron and stone, crushing the life of its trammelled inhabitants. The city is a parody of nature; its chimneys wag like ‘wasted grain’, its trains cross the landscape ‘like black slugs’. The hero, David Macrae, inhabits a tenement district penned in by a cemetery, a grassless park and two vast locomotive works. The irony here – that the locomotive workers rot in their places while the engines they fashion circle the globe – is dryly drawn: ‘Engines from [the Cowlairs works] went to India, China and South America. The majority of the men who built them did not even go down town.’ The city is a penitentiary, its spiked iron railings the symbol of its purpose. From the schoolroom, with its clangorous bell, to the factory, with its pitiless siren, the city is an instrument of subjection, a device for enforcing obedience to ‘the mechanical cackle called civilisation’.
Like Edwin Muir, Hendry views the Industrial Revolution and its concomitant urbanisation as a massive cultural trauma, a catastrophe that menaces Scotland’s very survival as a nation. At the novel’s outset we learn of the process by which ‘the Scots, in the gathering wheels of industry, lost historical vision and perspective’. Cairns Craig is wrong, I think, to perceive in this a Scotland cut off from the process of history.11 Rather, what Hendry depicts is a Scotland dangerously ignorant of the baleful history whose patterns and antagonisms it mechanically repeats. David’s ‘feeling for historical faces’ (he has an aunt who looks like James VI) is repeatedly borne out in a novel whose pages resound with the din of dead battles. The Glasgow district of Battlefield takes its name from the defeat of Mary Queen of Scots by the forces of John Knox. For David Macrae, nearly four hundred years later, the district is ‘still a battlefield’, still governed by a punitive ethic of iron discipline and masculine aggression. The embers of Clan warfare and the spark of Covenanting zealotry still cast an angry glow on a Scotland riven by factional hate. As surely as Stephen Dedalus, David Macrae is struggling to wake from the nightmare of history.
And yet, all is not bitter in Fernie Brae.