George Mackay Brown

Recovering from his first attack of tuberculosis in 1941, the young George Mackay Brown wandered out of the sanatorium on to the streets of Kirkwall, and presently stood for the first time in the nave of St Magnus Cathedral.  According to his Autobiography, the experience was intense.  “I can’t remember the details except for the one thought – I would like to be buried in this place.” 

Fifty years later, on St Magnus Day, Orkney’s poet was carried out of the great Viking church on his last journey home to Stromness and its quiet kirkyard by the shore.  The time and the place could not have been more appropriate.  Ever since that youthful moment of revelation, the Cathedral of St Magnus and the Saint himself had loomed large in the poet’s life and work.  George Mackay Brown saw the martyrdom of Magnus as the supreme event in the long history of the islands, and it fired his creative imagination to a degree matched only by the Nativity and the Passion, and of course, his beloved ‘Hamnavoe.’

But the Orkney landscape is haunted by its history.  The poet’s funeral cortege passed within yards of Maeshowe, one of the greatest of all megalithic tombs, built so as to allow the setting sun at midwinter to reach through the long entrance passage and cast its dying rays deep into the heart of the tomb.  Half a mile to the west lies the great ring of Brodgar, and two miles beyond that, on the Atlantic coast, the incomparable Neolithic village of Skarabrae.  Little wonder that this poet chose to stay at home and find his inspiration and subject matter in Orkney and its people, across the full sweep of their long history. 

Despite his apparent insularity, George Mackay Brown was always something more than just a very good regional writer.  What set him apart was the transcendent vision by which he transformed the familiar Orkney scene into something timeless and universal.  His work is imbued with a deep sense of compassion, a gentle humour and a quiet assurance that all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well.  He was a religious poet who achieved some of his finest work in a non-Religious context. 

His technical mastery was supreme, both in prose and verse.  He was beyond question one of the great wordsmiths of our time.

These qualities attracted a world-wide readership.  George Mackay Brown was never a best seller, despite winning numerous awards and being short-listed for the Booker prize in 1994.  Nevertheless, his books were published in a dozen or more countries, and every year brought a stream of visitors to his door from Europe and America, Israel and Japan.

Visitors were received with quiet courtesy, though morning callers were usually confronted by a faded old notice pinned to the door, announcing that the writer was not at home.  He was of course very much at home, closeted in his kitchen for the daily three hour stint with his biro.

His preference for the humble ballpoint may have reflected his habitual distrust of modern gadgetry.  It also accorded with the view expressed in his lyric ‘The Poet’ (one of this year’s Poems on the Underground) that the poet’s “true task” is “interrogation of silence”.  However, George’s own attitude was usually a trifle less romantic.  He maintained (with an almost straight face) that hand-written manuscripts could earn extra money, and that even his humble shopping lists were faithfully filed away for posterity!

Beneath the shy exterior was a very funny man:  a born raconteur with a rich store of anecdotes and a marvellous gift of mimicry.

In the summer of 1970, the Orkney poet and the Manchester composer met for the first time, in the remote valley of Rackwick.  For Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, that chance encounter turned out o be one of the key moments in his life:

”It was an epiphany which determined my future – I was bowled over by the place and the people and soon settled in Rackwick, renovating the smallest and most remote of the roofless cottages – the one recommended by George.

”Since then I have written all my music here.  Not only did I feel the place blessed by George’s Rackwick poems, but I myself felt blessed by his approval of my move.  He and his work effected a magic which informed and transformed my own creation.  I have set many of his poems, and we collaborated on several projects, perhaps the most ambitious of which was the opera The Martyrdom of St Magnus, with which the first St Magnus Festival opened in 1977.

”George was a staunchly supporting friend, the most modest and unassuming of men, and an exemplary creator, whose work has defined and refined for me, over a quarter of a century, my perceptions of Orkney, as expressed in my music;  he must be the most positive and benign influence ever on my own efforts at creation.”

The composer finished his Sixth Symphony in Rackwick on the day of the poet’s death.  He dedicated the work to the memory of his old friend.

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.

© Archie Bevan, December 1996
Reproduced with the kind permission 
of Archie Bevan  

Archie Bevan, Stromness, 2001