gmb website

By George, a work to be proud of
Ron Ferguson

Interrogation of Silence
Rowena Murray and Brian Murray
published by John Murray, £25

George Mackay Brown's ultimate ambition was, in his own words, "some day to leave one or two really good poems behind". This was not false modesty: the statement simply reflects the Orcadian poet's quest for perfection. His compulsive revisions reveal that, for Brown, even the published poem was a work-in-progress.

"A poet's drafts represent his rough pilgrimage towards the final grace of the poem," he wrote. "They chart a voyage of discovery during which words mutiny, lines are keel-hauled and stanzas are occasionally made to walk the plank."
Brown's view of the poet's vocation can be seen in a stanza from one of his finest poems, The Poet:

Under the last dead lamp
When all the dancers and
masks had gone inside
His cold stare
Returned to its true task,
interrogation of silence.

George Mackay Brown makes silence a key image for his craft. The authors of this fine book observe: "Silence was both the source – the 'pool of silence' – and the goal. For him the work of the poet was constant refining, endless revision, persistent striving for the perfect poem. Consequently, silence is a persistent motif throughout his writings. It is both a central idea and a symbol of his motivation."

Interrogation of Silence provides an excellent overview of Brown's work, covering all the genres in which he wrote: poetry, prose, drama, journalism, autobiography, children's story and essay. Employing a narrative structure, the authors skilfully and economically lead the reader through the whole body of Brown's work. The chronological framework shows Brown's development of the craft of writing.

This is the first literary biography of George Mackay Brown to cover all of his writing, including works published posthumously. Rowena Murray, reader in the Centre for Academic Practice at the University of Strathclyde, and her father, Stromness schoolteacher Brian Murray, a close friend of Brown's and co-editor with Archie Bevan of GMB's unpublished works, have produced an admirable, unfussy, user-friendly introduction to Brown's work. It will encourage those who do not know GMB or have little acquaintance with his writing to engage with his complete corpus.

This reviewer's strong sense of George was that he had something of the monk about him, living for years off state benefits, sitting in his little council house in Stromness writing poems, stories, essays and newspaper columns every morning in a ruled notebook. He was a man with a discipline of life and a pure vocation, forged in silence. There was a whiff of incense about this shy poet.

Recurrent visitations of tubercular illness – requiring spells in the local sanatorium – and of depression, were like silent retreats from the world, in which GMB regrouped before sallying out again to meet once more the challenge of what he called "purifying the dialect of the tribe". The main business of any poet, he said, was "to keep the roots and sources clear".

His writing life properly began with journalism, providing news and columns for the Orkney Herald. Over his lifetime, he wrote hundreds of thousands of words for the local press, right up until the week before he died.

There are surprises in this delightful book, even for those who knew Brown pretty well. This reviewer was unaware of the extent to which, as a young writer, GMB felt alienated in Orkney. His often controversial and acerbic columns made him enemies, and he railed against Orkney as a cultural desert from which he had to escape, first to Newbattle Abbey, under the direction of Edwin Muir, and then to Edinburgh University .

These were among the happiest days of his life, especially drinking in Milne's Bar with the greats of the Scottish literary renaissance. When he returned to Orkney, literature was his salvation. "Without literature, I would have become a scarecrow in the community." He sometimes felt himself to be in a minority of one.

And there are no poets in Orkney;
Stirred by breeze and blood and
ocean
I set the trumpet to my lips.
I only.

The material quoted by the authors sits uneasily alongside the commonly-held view of Brown as always being comfortably – too comfortably – at home in the community of Orkney. What is fascinating is to watch the gradual development of a provincial journalist into a word-intoxicated literary craftsman who, from his island fastness, would enchant the world.

As Brown lies in the dust of the Hamnavoe he loved so passionately – even as he sometimes hated it – his words speak eloquently, with typically beautiful economy, from his tombstone:

Here is a work for poets –
Carve the runes
Then be content with silence

from The Herald, 2 August 2004

Brown's Orkney Odyssey
Ian Bell

Interrogation Of Silence – The Writings Of George Mackay Brown
by Rowena Murray and Brian Murray (John Murray, £25)

Once upon a time, if you worked on The Herald or The Scotsman, a Christmas story or poem by George Mackay Brown was part of the annual ritual. The pieces were not, in my recollection, the best things he ever did, but they always seemed to express that singular writer’s determination to make something universal out of what was, literally, an insular life.

Brown and Orkney were, perhaps remain, inseparable. The young writer began by damning his native islands as cultural deserts. By the time of his death in 1996 he had made them the mythic extensions of his own personality. In a narrow physical space, with repetitive themes and sometimes arid formalism, amid recurrent health problems, Brown’s writing became an intense, almost monkish, meditation.

Was it any good? The necessary question is necessarily impudent. For my own taste the fiction shows repeated, almost wilful, failures of characterisation. Brown’s people are themes and types, much like the figures in the Norse sagas which inspired him, not authentic individuals. Like so many poets who turn to prose, the novelist was over-fond of symbolism. In Brown’s fiction every voice is his own and the tale, invariably, is subordinate to the idea.

The poems, originating in precisely the same way, are a different matter. You can trace each of Brown’s inspirations, as the Murrays, father and daughter, do with diligence, but he remains sui generis. If he can be characterised at all it is as an unwitting part of a very old, very loose fraternity in which the price of membership is not style or nationality – should we even call him a Scottish writer? – but a conception of poetry’s meaning and purpose.

In many ways the professional Orcadian is reminiscent of Robert Frost, an avidly ambitious sophisticate who re-invented himself as a humble man of the New England soil. But Brown also somehow associates himself, in my mind at least, with poets with whom he has no obvious affinity, poets like Paul Celan, the German-Romanian whose translator, Michael Hamburger, once wrote of poetry “always close to the unutterable because it has passed through it and come out the other side”.

Another of Celan’s editors said, meanwhile, that his verse “moved ever closer to silence”. The Murrays make the same case for Brown, who alleged that, in the absence of perfection, “the second-best poem is silence”. The point of the rhetorical gift was its own negation. Striving for absolute harmony – and Brown was an inveterate reviser of his own work – the poet found his ultimate meaning in the absence of voice.

It is a difficult concept to convey and I am not sure that the Murrays succeed. This is partly because of their book’s construction as a “literary biography” – neither pure textual criticism nor resolved narrative – and partly because they have embarked on that dismal project, the “resource for students and scholars”. The real “resource” is, of course, Brown’s body of work, not a crib sheet that neither brings the writer to life – he flits through these pages like an ominous shadow – nor gives the writings the explications they fully deserve. Equally, joint authorship tends to make for stilted prose.

Still, given the paucity of published work on Brown, there is no point in carping. If a book such as this nudges anyone back to the poems, well and good. Where it does succeed, in any case, is in providing a reminder of the most intangible thing in literature, a quality Brown had in abundance. Tone, the genetic marker of a literary personality, is the difference between technical accomplishment and art. The voice in Brown’s poems is ancient, soaked in legends and folk memory. Whether as King Barleycorn or “Harald, the Agnostic Ale-Drinking Shepherd” the poet is overlaying reality with myth. He is inventing a world.

It is, for the most part, quite a performance. Brown made Orkney his own by dedicating himself, in journalism and literature, to preserving its past and culture. He also turned “George Mackay Brown”, the sickly postal worker’s son, into a persona. While he was transforming his native Stromness into “Hamnavoe”, or viewing landscapes with a falcon’s eye (“To drift like a still question over/The fecund quarterings of the field”), Orkney itself was being transformed by oil. While he was declaring that “Orkney is a microcosm” the island community had the mundane problems of isolation and modernity combined to contend with.

He succeeded, nevertheless. As he put it: “Looking at the great wheel of human life in a small segment is an ancient literary device. Chaucer chose a random company of pilgrims. James Joyce wandered about Europe but wrote entirely about the city he had exiled himself from, Dublin ”. Edwin Muir, his patron and fellow Orcadian, got the point. Yet even that fact presents a paradox: the happiest times, by Brown’s own account, were far from Orkney, at Newbattle Abbey College , in the 1950s, when Muir was warden. Did a place make a poet, or a poet the place?

At times Brown gloried in his isolation and his devotion to the local and the traditional. You wonder, nevertheless, about the sort of writer he might have become with a larger canvas. He believed that every theme could be found almost within walking distance.

But would there have been an obsession with Saint Magnus if he had moved from Orkney? And would the silence, eternal and pervasive, have pierced to the roots of his being if a city had claimed him?

from The Sunday Herald, 1 August 2004