The Watcher by the Threshold. Buchan John
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As President of the Scottish History Society he successfully won increased government funding to index and preserve various Scottish Record collections. He served on the Board of the new National Library of Scotland, the committee to preserve the site of the Battle of Bannockburn, as a Governor of Gordonstoun School and was, in an apparent oxymoron, President of the Scottish branch of the English Association. Throughout his life, even when abroad, he regularly addressed Caledonian Clubs, Burns and Stevenson dinners and in 1923 was President of the Sir Walter Scott Club. His appointment as Governor-General of Canada in 1935 owed much to his successful tenure as Lord High Commissioner of the Church of Scotland in 1933 and 1934. When he chose a peerage he initially considered an entirely Scottish title – Buchan of Tweed, Buchan of Tweeddale, Buchan of Fruid or Lord Manorwater – eventually deciding on a combination of his Oxford and Border links with Lord Tweedsmuir of Elsfield.
Much of his writing centres around Scotland. His non-fiction included well-reviewed biographies of Montrose and Sir Walter Scott, histories of the Fifteenth Scottish Division and the Royal Scots Fusiliers, The Kirk in Scotland (1930) and The Massacre of Glencoe (1933). He contributed countless chapters or introductions to books on Scottish subjects: The Scottish Tongue (1924), A History of Peeblesshire (1925), The Face of Scotland (1933), Scots Heraldry (1934), to name a few. Eleven of his novels are either entirely or partly set in Scotland, including his best-known novel, The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915). Even when the action is ostensibly based elsewhere the landscape is unmistakably Scottish in appearance, whether it is the South African terrain of Prester John (1910) or the Canadian wilds of Sick Heart River (1941). Buchan’s Scottish fictional landscape is very much bound by his own upbringing and experiences. His early historical novels – Sir Quixote of the Moors (1895), John Burnet of Barns (1898) and A Lady of Lost Years (1899) – and the more contemporary The Half-Hearted (1900) are set in the Borders; Prester John (1910) and The Free Fishers (1934) draw on his early upbringing on the Fife coast; Huntingtower (1922), Castle Gay (1930) and The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915) are set in a Galloway remembered from student walking holidays, while John Macnab (1925) and parts of The Three Hostages (1924) and Mr Standfast (1918) come from holidays with friends in the Highlands. It is not just places that are Scottish but also the characters. Who can forget the Glasgow grocer Dickson McCunn, the Gorbals Die-Hards, Andrew Amos, Mrs Brisbane-Brown, Lewis Haystoun and Lord Lamanchas as well as the better known Sandy Arbuthnot and Archie Roylance?
Buchan’s interest in poetry is rarely mentioned, yet it is one of the most obvious manifestations of his ‘Scottishness’. Many of them in his wartime collection, Poems Scots and English (1917), are written in the Doric and he was sufficiently highly regarded as a Scottish poet that when Hugh MacDiarmid published Northern Numbers in 1920 and 1921 in an attempt, in his words, to bring together ‘certain living Scottish poets’, Buchan was included along with Neil Munro, Lewis Spence and MacDiarmid himself. In 1924 Buchan edited The Northern Muse: an Anthology of Scots Vernacular Poetry, the first anthology to include some of the poetry produced by the Scottish Literary Renaissance. He was an early champion of Neil Munro, Violet Jacob and of Hugh MacDiarmid, contributing the preface to MacDiarmid’s Sangshaw. MacDiarmid subsequently was to describe Buchan as ‘Dean of the Faculty of Contemporary Scottish Letters’ and write of The Northern Muse that it stood ‘in relation to Scots poetry as Palgrave’s Golden Treasury to English’. Indeed one of Buchan’s strengths as a writer in general, MacDiarmid also noted, was that the ‘books abound in loving and delightful studies of Scottish landscape and shrewd analyses and subtle aperçus of Scottish character’.
Apart from their own intrinsic literary merits, Buchan’s short stories are interesting for a number of reasons. First, they show how he responded to the environment around him. The early stories, which are included in this book, draw from holidays spent with relations around Peebles and the life of the Upper Tweed Valley. Later his protagonists will be young Oxford scholars finding mystery, first in the Scottish countryside and then abroad, particularly in Africa where Buchan spent two years on Lord Milner’s staff. The First World War, during which Buchan served as a war correspondent on the Western Front and then ran a government propaganda organisation, would inspire five stories, while further tales would be drawn from his postwar sojourn in the Cotswolds. It is interesting, in tracing themes in Buchan’s work, to see just how many of his own current interests or those of his family are ascribed to characters or are central to the books. They include mountaineering, fishing, birds and walking, all of which figure in the stories, as well as the novels. As the critic Patrick Cosgrave has put it: ‘He did not metamorphose his personality when he came to write adventure stories; he merely relaxed, and indulged some of the whims of his temperament and imagination.’ Two of his stories, for example, have a mountaineering background. ‘Space’ combines Buchan’s fascination with the metaphysical teachings of Bergson and Poincaré with the practical difficulties of climbing the Chamonix Aiguilles to produce a haunting story about the nature of reality, while ‘The Knees of the Gods’, reproduced here, touches on the hallucinatory effects of climbing.
Secondly, many of the stories are explorations of themes subsequently developed in the novels, themes which remain constant even if the locations change. ‘The Watcher by the Threshold’ and ‘The Outgoing of the Tide’ are early prototypes of the novel, Witch Wood (1927), ‘Fountainblue’ has similarities with The Half-Hearted (1900) and looks forward to Sick Heart River (1941), and ‘The Frying-pan and the Fire’, which revolves around a sporting bet, has parallels with John Macnab (1925). It is often assumed that Buchan’s preoccupation with the fragility of civilisation comes after the First World War or dates from The Power House (1916) with Lumley’s famous remark, ‘You think that a wall as solid as the earth separates civilisation from barbarism. I tell you the division is a thread, a sheet of glass. A touch here, a push there, and you bring back the reign of Satan.’ In fact Maitland, the central figure in ‘Fountainblue’, a story written in 1900, expresses his concern about the ‘very narrow line between the warm room and the savage out-of-doors’, adding, ‘you call it miles of rampart, I call the division a line, a thread, a sheet of glass. But then, you see, you only know one side, and I only know the other.’
The theme of the precarious balance between the civilised and the primitive becomes more explicit in the course of Buchan’s writing career. Where in the early short stories the contrast has been between England and Scotland, later it is to be found, for example, between Britain and Africa. Many of the characters exhibit dual personalities, desperate to attune themselves to their more primitive sides, especially the more conventionally successful they become. As one character puts it of Maitland in ‘Fountainblue’, who turns his back on success to die forgotten in Africa, ‘… he saw our indoor civilisation and his own destiny in so sharp a contrast that he could not choose but make the severance.’ Many of Buchan’s stories are about the undersides of our personalities. Ladlaw in ‘The Watcher by the Threshold’, ‘a good landlord and respectable country gentleman, now appeared as a kind of horrible genius, a brilliant and malignant satyr’, once he becomes possessed by the devil. It is this dual personality, later to figure so prominently in Buchan’s villains, to which one of the characters in another of Buchan’s short stories, ‘The Kings of Orion’, refers when he says, ‘There’s our ordinary self, generally rather humdrum; and then there’s a bit of something else, good, bad but never indifferent – and it is that something else which may make a man a saint or a great villain.’ Characters are often possessed by powerful atavistic urges as a reaction to the civilised lives they enjoy – so, for example, Maitland in ‘Fountainblue’ realises that ‘the sad elemental world of wood and mountain was far more truly his own than this cosy and elegant civilisation’.
There is often a sacred place, temenos, in Buchan’s writing, most obviously in the novels Witch Wood (1927) and The Dancing Floor (1926), but it is also to be found in the stories, either in Scotland as in ‘The Green Glen’, or in Africa as in ‘The Grove of Ashtaroth’. Place is integral to plot and theme in Buchan, often personifying the border between the primitive and the civilised. As a review of ‘The Watcher by the Threshold’ put it: ‘The mountains are no mere piles of rock, they are the abodes of mystery, of