MAGGIE Fergusson's biography is a charming, compassionate, well written and long overdue tribute to one of the greatest Scottish poets of the 20th Century. I have to admonish myself for taking three years to getting around to reading it, because Fergusson has done a spectacular job in bringing this complex man to life for me. Her remarkable accomplishment is particularly surprising in light of the fact that she apparently obtained most of her material from the poet's papers and letters held in the library archives of Edinburgh University rather than through extensive interviews with him.
George Mackay Brown was born out of his time, believing that progress was detrimental to a healthy and cohesive society. He often felt out of step with other people and the environment in which he found himself. Some might argue that this trait was attributable to his background of growing up in relative poverty, but it is more likely to simply have been something intrinsic to his nature. Above all he valued solitude and silence, both in the actual and spiritual senses. He didn't like school much, throwing his school bag onto the kitchen floor after his first day and declaring that he was never going back. He did, of course, but felt that the straight-laced and unimaginative teaching methods of his day meant he learnt more outwith the school gates than inside the classroom.
Like any youngster he enjoyed the company of his school friends and loved playing football. When he was twelve, however, a measles epidemic at his school was to seriously affect his health for the rest of his life. Initially the illness left him semi-deaf, a condition which lasted for six months. It also left him with permanent damage to his eyesight. He quickly got out of breath and was no longer able to keep up with the energetic games of his mates. At nineteen he was diagnosed as suffering from tuberculosis, preventing him from joining the army and recurrent bouts of the disease would force him to spend significant amounts of time in sanitoriums. Perhaps it is not entirely surprising that he welcomed these periods of isolation and often used them creatively, either planning or even writing poetry and short stories.
From an early age George Mackay Brown had a passion for stories and people-watching (which, no doubt, inspired many of his ideas). While still at primary school he launched a magazine called Celts. He wrote most of the content himself, distributing copies of the magazine to his peers and inviting their comments as well as suggestions for future editions.
On Sundays the Brown family would attend one of the four Presbyterian churches in Stromness, the town in which George was born, grew up and which he rarely left. The young lad found the sermons dry and uninspiring and later on leant increasingly towards catholicism. In 1961 he converted to the faith. His beliefs are frequently mirrored in his writings, both directly and indirectly.
Since I hadn't done the maths before it was quite a revelation to me to realise that George Mackay Brown was forty years old before he became properly established as a poet. Prior to that his writings had been largely journalistic (for the local press, The Shetland Times and The New Shetlander), serving merely to earn him a little income rather than being his true passion. For a period, during his twenties, he felt artistically stifled in Orkney, complaining that the community 'lacked culture', that its people saw artists and poets as 'an inferior breed'. That feeling eased when he started meeting regularly with a group of writers and intellectuals at the home of Ernest Marwick, another writer, who became a good friend and was one of several mentors who helped the shy and reticent poet get his work published and seen by a wider audience.
At the age of thirty he took up a scholarship at Newbattle Abbey College, an adult learning institution in Dalkeith, near Edinburgh and described his time there as "the happiest years of my life". Under the gentle guidance of Edwin Muir, a fellow Orcadian, poet and warden of the college, and his wife, Willa, he found a new kind of confidence he had not known before. Of particular pleasure to him were the evenings spent in the Abbey's crypt together with the other students on his course. Here they would sit until well into the small hours reading their work to one another as well as the poems of some of the great established poets who inspired them.
Returning to Orkney he found the insular community life stifling and depressing and applied to read English Literature at Edinburgh University. Initially he was homesick for Orkney, the very place he had sought to escape from, but after a few weeks he found inspiration and companionship amongst the set of poets (such as Sydney Goodsir Smith, Hugh MacDiarmid, Norman MacCaig, Tom Scott) who regularly frequented the bars in and around Rose Street. It was here also that he first met the Rose Street muse, Stella Cartwright, thus known because her blond beauty and sweet personality inspired several of the poets to write about her. Even George Mackay Brown succumbed to her charms in spite of being sixteen years her senior. They were later briefly engaged, but even when they decided they had no real future together they kept in touch until Stella's death from alcoholism at the age of forty seven. In the weekly letters they exchanged they expressed their love and fondness for each other.
Although women were attracted to him and he enjoyed their company George once said that he had never been in love and it is true that his only consummated relationship was during his mid-fifties with Nora Kennedy, an Austrian jeweller and silversmith who moved to Orkney in 1976.
The last decade of his life was the writer and poet's most productive period. He died on April 13th, 1996. His funeral took place three days later on St. Magnus Day. A fitting testimonial perhaps to a man whose quiet heroism had made a deep impression on George Mackay Brown and features in much of his work.
REF. George Mackay Brown: The Life, by Maggie Fergusson
Publisher: John Murray (10 April 2006), 363 pages, hb
29/06/09
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