The Watcher by the Threshold. Buchan John
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pastoral country with bright streams and valleys’ over the hills at Glenaicill.
Reviewing Buchan’s novel, Sick Heart River (1941), Graham Greene drew attention to Buchan being ‘the first to realise the enormous dramatic value of adventure in familiar surroundings happening to unadventurous men’. He was referring to the thrillers, but his comment could equally apply to the short stories, even these early ones set around Peebles, where the menace comes from the familiar and trusted – streams that flood their banks, hosts who are not what they initially appear, sons who make unusual demonstrations of filial love. Greene also noticed the ‘completeness of the world’ Buchan created in his books. Buchan’s fictional world is already taking shape in these stories, long before many of the people or places appear in the novels. The Clanroyden family are introduced in ‘A Reputation’, ‘The Watcher by the Threshold’ and ‘Fountainblue’, the Sempills in ‘The Outgoing of the Tide’ and Lady Amysfort in ‘The Green Glen’. The Radens, who figure so prominently in John Macnab, are in ‘The Far Islands’ while the Manorwaters appear in ‘The Far Islands’ as well as the novels, The Half-Hearted and The Dancing Floor. Even characters who do not appear in the novels tend to reappear in different stories, so Lady Afflint is in both ‘A Reputation’ and ‘The Far Islands’, Gideon Scott is the eponymous hero of one story and appears as Gidden Scott in ‘The Herd of Standlan’, while Jock Rorison features in both ‘Streams of Water in the South’ and ‘Comedy in the Full Moon’. The town of Gledsmuir makes an appearance in six stories and there are numerous references to Clachlans, Callowa, Aller, the Gled, the Forest of Rhynns and St Chad’s College at Oxford. Castle Gay, the title of a 1933 novel, is mentioned in ‘The Rime of True Thomas’, a story written in 1897, and then in ‘The Green Glen’, Glenaicill is in ‘The Watcher by the Threshold’ and Machray is referred to in ‘Fullcircle’.
Another link with the novels is the use of similar techniques or the reliance on coincidence to drive the plot. In The Three Hostages Dr Greenslade described the recipe for writing a thriller as ‘fixing on one or two facts which have no obvious connection’ and then inventing a connection. ‘The reader is pleased with the ingenuity of the solution, for he doesn’t realise that the author fixed upon the solution first, and then invented a problem to suit it.’ ‘The Frying-pan and the Fire’ begins with an after-dinner game where ‘you invented a preposterous situation and the point was to explain naturally how it came about. Drink, lunacy and practical joking were barred as explanations.’ So in the story the Duke of Burminster has to explain just how he came to appear on the station at Langshiels in a dishevelled state to be met by an official reception committee and band.
Buchan had a strong mystical sense and a large number of the short stories have a supernatural element. It may be the power exerted by place, especially a house or an island as in ‘Skule Skerry’. Or it may be a spell that only affects certain people and can pass through several generations. Throughout his life Buchan was intrigued by the idea that certain qualities or susceptibilities could be passed from one person to another. His novel, The Path of the King (1921), is about how kingship can be passed through different quite ordinary people. In ‘The Grove of Ashtar-oth’ the central character worships an ancient goddess because of his Jewish blood, while in ‘The Green Wilde-beeste’ Andrew du Preez, with his ‘touch of the tar brush’, is caught in an ancient spell. In ‘The Far Islands’, included in this volume, Colin Raden inherits the vision of ‘The Far Island’ first bestowed on a distant ancestor.
Many of the stories involve some encounter with the forces of the unknown and the way in which the ‘other’ world impinges on the ‘ordinary’ world. Buchan’s susceptibility was heightened at Oxford by attending lectures on pre-Christian cults, by living in rooms at Brasenose, where reputedly a former President of the Brasenose Hellfire Club had been literally snatched by the Devil, and by the influence of Andrew Lang, a neighbour in the Borders, whose Custom and Myth dealt with the survival of ancient customs in a modern society. Buchan was also much influenced by his wide reading of Celtic myths, fairy tales, Border ballads, the Bible and Shakespeare, as well as the work of more contemporary writers such as Stevenson, Conan Doyle, Ibsen, Maupassant and Poe, whose Tales of Mystery and Imagination he edited for Thomas Nelson in 1911. By education and temperament Buchan was a classicist and his grounding in the classics is evident in his stories, marked as they are by a clear and economical prose style and use of classical imagery. He was also a son of the Manse, brought up to accept an omnipotent and benevolent God and a Devil that was half-humorous and half-earthy, and his Scottish Calvinism was to be an important influence on his writing, including the short stories. At the same time part of the creative tension in his work, as in his life, would come from the fact he was also conversant with the teachings of Erasmus, Galileo and Hume.
Buchan’s Scottish stories can be enjoyed at different levels – simply as tales about his own people, as delicate expositions of human character which demonstrate that his gift for strong descriptive writing was apparent from his early twenties, or as explorations of themes to be developed more fully later in his novels. For many of the recurrent Buchan themes are present – the power of place, the use of the sacred place temenos, the importance of landscape to plot, the strong descriptive writing, the emptiness of success, the call of the wild, the contrast between the city and the countryside and between England and Scotland, the narrow thread between the primitive and civilised.
Buchan’s stories cannot be separated from his novels and are integral to our understanding of his fiction, yet they have received very little critical attention and many are not even recorded in the standard bibliographies. The publication of this selection of stories should help to rectify two gaps in Buchan studies – examination of him as a Scottish writer and as a short story writer – as well as introducing devotees of his novels to another facet of his writing. They give an insight into the versatility of his literary styles and the peculiar cast of his imagination and suggest how he could have developed into an archetypical Scottish writer, more interested in social observation than a gripping yarn. Many stories were clearly written to a deadline, others are highly repetitive or imitative, but some have that mark of greatness, the ability to stay in the mind long after the piece has been read. They are a reminder that John Buchan was a far more accomplished and complex writer than his contemporary reputation has allowed.
Andrew Lownie
Buchan’s first published story, this appeared in the Glasgow University Magazine in December 1894 and was included in his first collection. Scholar Gipsies (1896). A gamekeeper caught in a poacher’s trap reflects back on his life and the role in it played by drink and religion.
I
The gamekeeper of Cademuir strode in leisurely fashion over the green side of the hill. The bright chilly morning was past, and the heat had all but begun; but he had lain long a-bed, deeming that life was too short at the best, and there was little need to hurry it over. He was a man of a bold carriage, with the indescribable air of one whose life is connected with sport and rough moors. A steady grey eye and a clean chin were his best features; otherwise, he was of the ordinary make of a man, looking like one born for neither good nor evil in any high degree. The sunlight danced around him, and flickered among the brackens; and though it was an everyday sight with him, he was pleased, and felt cheerful, just like any wild animal on a bright day. If he had had his dog with him, he would have sworn at it to show his pleasure; as it was, he contented himself with whistling ‘The Linton Ploughman’, and setting his heels deep into the soft green moss.
The day was early and his way was long, for he purposed to go up Manor Water to the shepherd’s house about a matter of some foxes. It might be ten miles, it might be more; and the keeper was in no great haste, for there was abundant time to get his dinner and a smoke with the herd, and then come back in the cool of the evening; for it was summer-time, when men of his class have their holiday.