Making Marks:
GMB on Writing
'There are mysterious marks on the stone circle of Brodgar in Orkney ... from 5,000 years ago.  We will never know what they mean. I am making marks with a pen and paper that will have no meaning 5,000 years from now.  A mystery abides.'
    from For the Islands I Sing

George Mackay Brown loved words.  He cherished them, mourned the passing of old good words, understood the magical quality of setting down just the right phrase.  He wrote for a living, as he reminded his readers constantly.

But he also wrote for pleasure, relishing the sounds words make, and he had an instinctive feel for the nuances.  He wondered if there would come a day when what he called the most tenacious Norn word of all, peedie would also disappear into the silence.  He felt that peedie had undertones of joy and affection quite absent in words like little or small.  

He worked at the kitchen table; often the table was awash with papers, books, maybe even the remnants from his breakfast – the honey pot and butter, crumbs.  He never embraced more modern technology than the ball point pen and a pad of paper.  He couldn't see the sense in waiting for inspiration as in his opinion there was no such thing.  Skills come from experience and practice, trial and error, learning from success and failure.  In fact he warns against inspiration in strong terms, saying not to believe anyone who tells you to wait for the spark of inspiration, or you'll end up with a blank page

He was workmanlike in his approach, settling down each day at the same time, writing steadily for three or so hours, and it seemed to matter to him that people appreciate the ordinariness of his labour, the hard graft involved.  He wrote several times of people, known and strangers, who asked what inspired him, what impelled him to write.  He answers that nothing inspires him, impels him to write, he is driven by the necessity to eat, drink and pay the rent. This may be true to some extent, but he wrote long before he supported himself by his craft. 

There is a plaintive note [or is it irritation?] about his assertion that nobody would dream of asking a joiner what inspired him to make that door, or asking a baker if he only baked when he felt inspired?  Like them, he considered himself a tradesman.

Does he protest too much?  There are a few lines in Rockpools which might suggest that, while hard work and practice undoubtedly form the bedrock of writing for a living, other forces are – just sometimes – at work.  Very occasionally he felt that his own will was set aside, that words, images and rhythms appeared which he knew were beyond his own capacities.

Some days his writing flowed, perhaps following on easily from yesterday's stint– or perhaps from notes on the backs of envelopes he always found in his pocket along with a stub of pencil.  

But there were days when he had nothing to say. He had to have patience, sometimes silence, before anything came.  Maybe an image, maybe a few words; something to build on.  Or it might require a rethink.  A short story that seemed to him to have nothing to commend it came alive when he tried to fill in a few sketchy parts.  For four or five days, a flood of words came; he had found a way to release his imagination.

Images seem to have been an important part of the process of writing for George.  He describes how the Brodgar poem cycle came into being, swarming images which stimulated his imagination, yet the solidity of the stones and the precision of their placements prevented extravagant use of it.  So we are not allowed to think that he got too carried away by his imagination!  

Even with this small excitement, he felt on re-reading the work within the space of a few weeks, that it was pretty awful.  He cut whole sections.  He had little hope that it could ever be worthwhile, either for himself or a publisher or possible readers.  And then the unexpected, for a tradesman.  He believed that somewhere in his subconscious the process of creation might continue until he took it up again.  In due course, the Brodgar Poems were brought out and reworked, later successfully published.  [Brodgar Poems, Perpetua Press, 1992]   This is the kind of discipline and discrimination he brought to his work, rigorously rejected and rehashing. Writing poems sometimes seems to have been a battle of wills for George.  He thought the poem, not the poet, was the master, shaping itself, not standing for being coerced into an unsuitable shape.

George describes poetry as the occasional thin vein of ore in the solid rock of verse, so making a distinction between verse and much rarer poetry.  He enjoyed lyricism and depth and insight, rhythm and evidence of thought and working in a poem.  Ever courteous, he read through reams of verse as a reviewer and found kind words to say here and there.  But he had little time for some modern poetry/verse where he observed that obscurity masqueraded as depth.

He sometimes suffered fallow times for poems; after one such spell, the Muse returned in 1976, bringing poems in astonishing profusion.  He refused to consider it worthwhile until time had passed to prove its worth. This illustrates his caution, his assertion that all work is work-in-progress. 

Strange things happen to break these unproductive cycles.  One Yuletide, George sat down late at night to sample his latest batch of home brew.  One sip confirmed the brew was good.  But he wasn't content to drink up and go to bed, his fingers got the urge to hold a pen, to make marks on a blank sheet.  He found a series of small poems falling over themselves to be written, all around the central Christmas theme.  This was A Christmas Patchwork [sometimes 'Stars:  A Christmas Patchwork'] published in 1983 in Voyages, and later in Selected Poems 1954-83 and 1954-92. 

After a similar dry season in 1990, George discovered a folder containing an unfinished story of about 10,000 words.  He had forgotten why he'd discarded it, but with the dearth of imagination, he took it up again to round out the tale with a few thousand words.  Again he found the pen filling the paper with images and events.  He knew he had a full-scale novel on his hands – Vinland.  Even though the story was clamouring to be let loose, and taking intriguing turns along the way, he only allowed himself understated delight, saying that he could think of worse ways of passing the time, worse ways of earning a living.

One story's creation has bitter-sweet connotations for George.  He wrote Tam, the first of the stories in the collection A Calendar of Love, in one sitting on a bench on the hill behind Stromness.  In his mind, it is forever associated with the death from a heart attack of his eldest brother Hughie, perhaps written on the same day or certainly close to it.  The pleasure of creation and the shock of the death intermingled.

He felt his best work nearly always came fully formed, requiring little correction, but he often had a hard struggle with a story or poem, Writing in long hand, the manuscript after such a session resembled a battlefield and he sometimes salvaged only a few sentences.  He felt that somehow this was how art ought to be created, in sweat and blood.  Eventually George accepted that when seemingly insoluble difficulties arose with a piece of work, it was prudent to stop at once, leave the manuscript for weeks or months before trying again. 

As well as poetry, short stories and novels, George wrote a weekly newspaper column, what he called his small scraps of journalism.  He confessed he had a weakness for lyricism and wondered if he might call the best of these weekly essays prose-poems.  However he describes them, they have been popular with readers of The Orcadian for over quarter of a century, and continue to be popular today, with recent reprints of two of the three collections of these little essays.  [Under Brinkie's Brae and Letters from Hamnavoe published by Steve Savage Publishers Ltd]  

An early occasional column in the 1950's and 1960's for The Orkney Herald, What the Pierhead is Saying coincided with a regular column for the same newspaper, Island Diary.  In 1961, The Orkney Herald succumbed to general changes in the newspaper industry, a shortage of staff and changing production techniques.  A decade later, Letters from Hamnavoe for The Orcadian newspaper was written to entertain Orcadians at home and abroad.  The first Letter was written, ironically, during the postal strike of 1971.  His pen-name was Islander, later changing to GMB for his essays in The Orcadian.

Plays too formed part of his output, and he wrote the words for The Martyrdom of St Magnus, music by Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, which received its first performance at the first St Magnus Festival, midsummer 1977.  But he wasn't himself a performer; perhaps his natural diffidence and modesty hindered him.  Sometimes he said he would make a recording for the BBC to earn some money, but that was less problematic for him than reading from a platform, something he wouldn't have done for a fortune.

A recording in Stromness Hotel for an Irish record company and a poetry reading at Scarabrae for Norwegian TV both had him feeling like he was going to his execution.  But a sup or two of whisky helped, so much so that he delivered the Scarabrae reading with serenity.   

One to one interviews were less of an ordeal; when he got over his nervousness at being surrounded by – and adorned with – various technological paraphernalia, he settled down to a meandering conversation with the interviewer, especially enjoyable when his interviewer was someone he esteemed such as Liz Lochhead. 

If he didn't enjoy being the star himself, George certainly enjoyed seeing his works performed.  In 1971, The BBC arrived to film three of his stories for the Play for Today series:  A Time to Keep, The Whaler's Return and Celia, all published in the collection A Time to Keep.  Stromness Academy's school journal made a project of reporting the filming, interviewing George in the process.  He said he was flattered that his work had been chosen, was pleased with the characterisation and script, and attended the filming.  With a hundred extras drawn from the islands, film crew and actors to be lodged and fed, the filming brought work to Orkney as well as excitement.  Filmed in colour, the play went out 13 May 1971, ironically before colour TV came to Orkney.

In 1972, George travelled to Perth to attend rehearsals of his play A Spell for Green Corn, and the same year went to a literary gathering in Edinburgh to celebrate his new book Greenvoe.  He found it exhilarating at the time, meeting people from across the spectrum of the publishing world from booksellers to journalists to publishers.  And of course the food and drink brought with it an air of euphoria and bonhomie.

Four TV plays for schools were filmed by the BBC and screened in Autumn 1978.  George was invited to see the shoot at Yesnaby.   The weather was worsening, the wind freshening so that the long hair of the Viking-actors streamed out.  He marvelled at the time it took to shoot a minute's finished scene.  For him it was a brief delicious interlude.

George enjoyed writing, but he also enjoyed being out and about, finding it much easier to write in the winter when the wind howled in the chimney or the rain beat against the window.

As well as his extraordinary literary output, George diligently answered letters from all corners of the globe.  Sometimes he felt he lived in a wilderness of paper and it took the help of friends to get him out from under.  Each Saturday he applied himself, at first with resentment that having written all week for a living, he should be required to letter-write on the sixth day.  He describes the process as at first mechanical and then in spite of himself, a few words began to come which pleased him.  If he began letter-writing in a black mood, he ended as if he had just spent an enjoyable few hours with friends.  He enjoyed, when he could, writing his letters in the sun, in a yard next to the sea, perhaps with a glass of wine, entertained by gulls and cats.   

For all his protestations and whatever the truth about the source of his 'inspiration', George left a profusion of memorable writings: over twenty collections of poetry, six novels, more than 15 collections of short stories, writings for children, plays, essays and other non-fiction.  His literary executors are still working on gathering together further strands of his work.