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George
Mackay Brown was born in
Stromness, Orkney in 1921, the son of John Brown, Stromness postman and
tailor, and Mary Jane Mackay Brown. John
Brown was a popular figure in
Stromness, a fine tenor and mimic, mainstay of the Amateur Dramatics
group. The Browns had been in the Stromness area at least since 1700.
There were so many Brown lines that each had a name to distinguish their
family – George liked to say his father came from the Ducky Browns –
they kept ducks round a pond! Later in life, George
wrote a poem commemorating his father’s life and Stromness: My father passed
with his penny letters Mary
Jane Mackay was born Mhari
Sheena near Strathy in Sutherland from a line of Mackays displaced
by the clearances. She spoke only Gaelic until she started school, when
the English school master applied the tawse if he caught them speaking
it, even in the schoolyard. Overnight, Mhari Sheena had to become Mary
Jane. George wrote: Mhari They had not seen
sea before. Age 15 she left
Sutherland for Orkney, to work in a hotel there, owned by a Mackay
relative. Eventually she met John Brown at one of the Stromness dances. The story continues later
in the same poem: And she laughs with
the jokey postman But she did walk out with
him again, and when he was 34 and she was 19, Mary
Jane married John in Strathy and returned to Orkney on the ferry St Ola.
John was so popular the crew had decked the Ola with flags for the
occasion. Midsummer. The
wedding feast – John and Mary had 6
children; a daughter Ruby came first followed by 5 boys at approximately
2 year intervals. George was the last, named for his maternal
grandmother Georgina Mackay in Strathy. Harold died in infancy. George never knew this brother,
but wrote: Sing
an unknown brother,
Here’s a moment of his
childhood encapsulated: Winter:
An This poem seems to me to
have a magic about it, the magic of childhood and the magic of the
storyteller. And that’s what George was, a story teller, whether
writing poetry or prose. He started to smoke
– describing himself as ‘dedicated
and dependent on Woodbines at 5 for tuppence.’ And during a severe
epidemic in the town, he got measles. His eyes, ears and lungs were
badly affected. For a year he was almost deaf but then his hearing
returned to normal. His eyes and especially his lungs were permanently
affected, leaving a weakness exacerbated by smoking. By the age of 19, a year after his father died, pulmonary tuberculosis was diagnosed. At that time there was no cure, a terrifying prognosis for a young man. For 10 years he was in and out of hospitals and had a lot of bedrest. [1943 approx]
Letters of complaint began arriving at the Herald offices and even worse, George was confronted in the street – he would have hated that. ‘It
began to dawn on me that imaginative writing, not journalism, might be
my true calling.’ Soon after he began working at the Herald, a seemingly casual event set up a theme in George’s life. He was invited to a picnic on Hoy, the island which looms across the sound from Stromness. He wrote: ‘That Sunday, the beauty of Rackwick struck me like a blow’. Rackwick could be a
melancholy place with its ruined crofts and as George put it The Lullaby
for Lucy Another event of significance happened towards the end of the 1940’s. Stromness had been ‘dry’ – teetotal – for 25 years, but during the war the soldiers had their ‘wet’ canteens, and perhaps the time was ripe for social change. When George was 27, the first bar opened in Stromness selling beer at 1s 2d per pint. George describes his feeling of guilt at sidling into the bar, in spite of the legality of it. For him, it was the beginning of 30 years of heavy drinking. ‘how
under the drab surface complexities, there exists a ritualistically
simple world of joy and anger … in the north it is considered shameful
to show one’s feelings and emotions. The stoical mask must always be
worn, whatever befalls.’ A new element, a new
depth began to enter his writing. In the early 1950’s
George’s health improved enough to go to In 1954 he had his first collection of poems published, The Storm. The Storm What a blinding
storm there was! How it We can forgive him
the exclamation marks and the ‘O Suddenly’ because his imagery
starts here with the lance of nails and the gorse candles. But what to do after his finals in June 1960? He was getting poems and short stories published regularly in regional publications like the New Shetlander, and journals like Harpers Bazaar - the cheques from them took his breath away with their extravagance. He still had his Orkney Herald column, but even so, he couldn’t yet earn a living with his writing. He settled on teaching, and began teacher training. Hands on experience in the classroom left him horrified. He wrote that ‘children
who were angels and doves in the care of other teachers became demons in
his.’ At this point he
found the tubercle smouldering in his lungs an ally. It flared up and he
was hospitalised once more. He took time to consider his position, and
then wrote resigning as a trainee teacher: ‘it
would be better if I gave up all ambition to teach.’ The
1960’s was a particularly
productive decade, bringing him ever better reviews for several
collections of short stories and poems. But the decade held personal
sadness for him. George had continued to live with his mother as his siblings moved out.
Just before her death, she developed dementia, particularly hard for
George when she didn’t know him and grew suspicious of him.
The first dark petal fell, She died in 1967. He once
described her as a ‘fountain of endless cheerfulness’ and her
absence from his life was a great loss. She was missed in Stromness too.
At
her name's telling, At the end of his memoir
about his mother in Northern
Lights he shows the way his thoughts are going: ‘I
have a deep-rooted belief that what has once existed can never die:
not even the frailest things, spindrift or clover-scent or
glitter of star on a wet stone. All
is gathered into the web of creation, that is apparently established and
yet perhaps only a dream in the eternal mind.’ At the age of 46 he began
to live on his own and shift for himself for the first time. By this time he had
settled into a relationship with Hogarth Press. It was Norah Smallwood,
a director at Hogarth, who set him on a different course for the
1970’s. She suggested he try his hand at a novel. He didn’t think he could do it, didn’t think he was capable of such long distance running. He had some notes for a story, and tentatively began writing. To his surprise, ‘a
novel began to take shape and assert itself.’ Greenvoe was published, perhaps the most successful of his novels, continuously in print since 1972. George himself said he grew cold to the novel very quickly, with the exception of the character Mrs. McKee. He wrote: ‘Occasionally over a glass of whisky I take Greenvoe off the bookshelf and commune for half an hour with my friend Mrs. McKee. She is a consolation. We have things we can say to one another.’ Now wouldn’t it be
interesting to know if she resembled anyone in his real life?! Or just
filled a lack. George was not a
performer, he occasionally made recordings for the BBC to supplement his
income, and once went so far as to make a record, an LP. The recording
for the Irish record company was made at the Stromness Hotel, with Paddy
Maloney of the Chieftains. Not exactly high tech, every time a car
engine revved up outside they had to stop and start again. A sup or two
of whisky helped the proceedings along. At the beginning of
the 70’s, Rackwick had been the scene of the first meeting of George
and Peter Maxwell Davies, the composer. It was the start of a lasting
friendship and collaboration. Max was looking for somewhere to write for
6 months of the year, and eventually settled in a croft in Rackwick.
Together with a few other dedicated souls, Max and George had the idea
for a midsummer arts festival: music, drama and poetry, and in 1977 the
first St Magnus Festival took place. It’s now a leading festival in
the international arts calendar. The highlight of the
1977 festival was the first performance of an opera with music by Max
and libretto by George. The Martyrdom of Magnus was commissioned by the BBC for the
Queen’s Silver Jubilee. Magnus
plays a significant part in George’s life, he is a bright thread woven
throughout the tapestry of George’s work, poems, stories and plays,
and his martyrdom is a pivotal moment in Orkney’s history. The
1980’s were productive years,
in spite of more ill health as George moved into his 60’s. Instead of
publications every couple of years, the pace stepped up until he was
producing two a year, both stories and poems. George finally gave up smoking at the beginning of the decade; after a spell in hospital when he couldn’t smoke he threw away all his pipes. His relationship with alcohol changed too, after years of drinking to excess he wrote that the thirst had largely left him. For a long time he had had a divided allegiance to drink and to writing. ‘In
the end writing got the upper hand, but it continued to use the insights
drink had won for me…. I would have found life meaningless if I
didn’t sit at my writing desk for three hours every morning.’ In
the end, the urge and necessity to write was stronger than the
addiction. At the end of this
decade, he had a ‘skirmish with cancer’. He spent time in
Foresterhill in Homily We go into
distances, near or far, each man to his own bourne.
[There is only the
garden, There comes a call
in the night, in youth, a summons We go out into
wind and a few stars. In the morning we
are on a desolate road George weaves his ideas
of spirituality from his Celtic roots, his early visits with his parents
to the Presbyterian Kirk [when his mother would keep the children quiet
with a poke of sweeties], from the reflections of the Eternal he saw in
the world around him. And beginning to creep in, indications of his
interest in Catholicism. For a long time he kept his interest and
subsequent conversion private, only towards the end of his life did his
poems become more open, and even then he often still married the ancient
traditions with his new belief. Lux
Perpetua
* Lux perpetua In 1991, George was 70. He realised he was withdrawing into a narrower circle, that the light was lessening. He didn’t like to dwell on illness, but alluded to it. Interestingly, for
this poem he reverted to a form he used in The Storm collection in the
50’s …. One Star in the West To have got so
far, alone But his star wasn’t
quite setting yet. In 1994 he was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and
the same year his novel Beside the
Ocean of Time was judged the Scottish Book of the year by the
Saltire Society. And he was still
trying new ventures. His friend Gunnie Moberg the photographer took him
a batch of photographs. Could he write poems for some of them? I think I
might find something to say, he said. The result was the most beautiful
book Orkney: Pictures and Poems, published
just after his death. He died 13th
April 1996. His friends made shift and buried him just 3 days later
on 16th April, St Magnus Day. His obituary written by his
friend Archie Bevan ended with these words: ‘George
Mackay Brown was a visionary with his feet firmly on the ground, and a
strong sense of his place in the local community.
Every week, for well over a quarter of a century, he wrote a
column for the local paper. His
last contribution appeared two days before his death.
Characteristically, it was a welcome to Spring, and a salute to
April, his favourite month of the year.
Alas for his fellow Orcadians and for his many friends across the
globe, April 1996 was the cruellest month.’ His
gravestone in the kirkyard at Warbeth just outside Stromness, over looks
Hoy Sound. It is inscribed with the concluding lines of the last poem in
the last collection published in his lifetime: Carve
the runes
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