THERE ARE PARTS of the British Isles so far from London they cannot be called ‘provincial’. They differ from that hypothetical standard of what is held to be ‘national’ — a standard promoted by the occasional necessities of common cause — that they are British only by circumstances of history and geography and not identity.

     In a country such as Scotland, of frustrated independence, and of the severe and obvious historical transformations embodied both sentimentally and realistically in the dates 1603 and 1707, nostalgia for a self-governing and unified past is understandable, if not always useful. While it would be foolish to claim that George Mackay Brown was an Orkney nationalist, it is still true that the Orkney Islands stand culturally and historically in a comparable relationship to Scotland as Scotland does to England.

     Although part of Scotland since their annexation to the Scottish crown in 1612, the Orkney Islands had been an Earldom owing allegiance to the Danish Kings, with a long history of Norse and Viking settlement. They became a Scottish possession in 1468 de facto if not de jure, the consequence of a marriage settlement in which both sides seem to have defaulted. Five hundred or so years is a long association; but the record of Orcadian individuality is almost unbroken. In 1604, objection to Highlanders of the mainland was made clear: ‘beggaris, sornaris, and vacaboundis’, they claimed, had ‘broken fra thair companeis and clanis out of the Hilandis and utheris barbarous partis’. And in one of Brown’s uncollected poems, spoken by a mordant doctor who chronicles the ways by which the Orkneys have been populated, Lowlanders are referred to as ‘The off-scourings of Scotland, the lowest sleaziest pimps from Lothian and the Mearns ...’

     Orcadian differences have survived. While it is probably true that proud utterance of their characteristics is on their part as much xenophobia or spiritual jingoism as these gestures are elsewhere, George Mackay Brown relies on the exclusiveness of Orkney culture and history in his poems. His poems attempt to make the special case of the Orkneys — and perhaps all remote communities —seem reasonable. He concentrates on a place; and the regret of his poems is that a community, seen to be at one time content with its appropriate ways of earning a living and the kind of society that its cultural inheritance had formed, is on the verge of total alteration, its once necessary unanimity corrupted by individual materialism and collective helplessness.

     Poets have come from Orkney before. Edwin Muir, who is to an extent Brown’s master, was born on the island of Deerness in 1887. His father was a farmer. They moved to the island of Wyre, and then to a farm near the town of Kirkwall, their travels encouraged by the dealings of a bad landlord, one General Burroughs whom Brown mentions in his essay, ‘The Broken Heraldry’.

     In his remarkable Autobiography, Muir wrote of the islands he had known in his childhood:

That world was a perfectly solid world, for the days did not undermine it but merely rounded it, or rather repeated it, as if there were only one day endlessly rising and setting. Our first childhood is the only time in our lives when we exist within immortality, and perhaps all our ideas of immortality are influenced by it.

     Religious and transcendental impulses are marked in Brown’s poems as well as Muir’s. Brown, however, is closer to the real landscape and its farmers and fishermen, while one of his central concerns is the medieval core of what seems a peculiarly Orcadian or Norse tradition of Christianity. The idea of place, however, is important to Muir’s poems, as can be seen in his book Journeys and Places (1937) at its most particular, and indeed throughout his writing. What Muir celebrated in his love of the Orkneys was what he took to be a fact of natural, or at least socially preferable order:

The farmers did not know ambition and the petty torments of ambition; they did not realize what competition was, though they lived at the end of Queen Victoria’s reign; they helped one another with their work when help was required, following the old usage; they had a culture made up of legend, folksong and the poetry and prose of the Bible; they had customs which sanctioned their instinctive feelings for the earth; their life was an order, and a good order.

     It illuminates both Muir and Brown and the basic structure of feeling in their work, to quote here from an anonymous 17th century poem used as an illustration in Raymond Williams’s The Country and the City:

How beautiful the World at first was made
Ere Mankind by Ambition was betray’d.
The happy Swain in these enamell’d Fields
Possesses all the Good that Plenty yields;
Pure without mixture, as it first did come,
From the great Treasury of Nature’s Womb . . .
No Fears, no Storms of War his Thoughts molest,
Ambition is a stranger to his Breast;
His Sheep, his Crook, and Pipe, are all his Store,
He needs not, neither does he covet more.

     In the Scottish context, such feelings must be examined with care. They are not all that far from the degenerate bathos of epic fireside sentimentality which swept through Scottish poetry and popular attitudes alike in the 19th century, and which still persists:

My hame is but a lowly bield,
     A wee bit but and ben,
A kame intil a croodit byke
     That grandeur disna ken;
Yet Pride within her lofty wa’s,
     Amid her menial train,
Micht envy me the treasures
     Of my ain hearthstane.

     The feeling involved in these extracts is one of entrenchment in a moral simplicity, associated with rural life, and a complaint against changing patterns of society that radiate outwards from the Town. This, too, is expressed in Muir’s poems (‘The Town Betrayed’), with characteristic mystification. However, it is also a common feature of pastoral poetry; and it is in the traditions of pastoral that I think Brown’s work ought to be discussed, as well as for its intrinsic merits.

     Despite his fidelity to one place and its history, Brown’s practice fits uneasily into Spender’s analysis in The Struggle of the Modern, speaking of writers who come from ‘life — real life’.

. . . he becomes a professional: no longer one of the people he came from, but an inventor who has taken out a patent on his own background origins, a bit aggressive, as though not only were he determined to be the only writer coming from Nottingham or Leeds, but the only person with a pen who had ever come from those black, dire, gruff, bluff, inexpressive regions.

Certain contemporary writers are as Spender says (especially dramatists). Such proprietorial behaviour is refreshingly absent from Brown’s attitudes. There is no need for it. He may not be the only writer to have come from the Orkneys; but he is the only writer there now, the kind of writer who has not for long left ‘the people he came from’.

     Brown’s first book appeared in 1954, when he was 33. Orcadians was published locally, and must have had little notice of readership except in the Orkneys themselves. Loaves and Fishes (1959) was his first commercially published book, and the religious stress is evident enough from the title. ‘Holy’ was his favourite word: ‘the holy earl’, ‘terrible holy joy’, ‘their lips/Welded holy and carnal in one flame’, ‘holy furrow’. Strenuously over-poetic efforts did produce the occasional success. A line like ‘the sea grinds his salt behind a riot of masks’, while it comes from the stable of over-dramatised visual imagery, that industrious measuring out of incantatory mysteriousness which suffered from the demise of Dylan Thomas’s reputation, does however show the quality of Brown’s pictorial sense at its most imaginative. It also shows that from the beginning Brown was prepared to associate his writing with outlier Celtic styles, the big bardic puff.

     There is a good deal of heavily mannered, verbalised and landscaped faith in Loaves and Fishes, an example of which is ‘Elegy’ —

The Magnustide long swords of rain
     Quicken the dust. The ploughman turns
          Furrow by holy furrow
               The liturgy of April.
          What rock of sorrow
     Checks the seed’s throb and flow
Now the lark’s skein is thrown
     About the burning sacrificial hill?
          Cold exiles from that ravished tree
               (Fables and animals guard it now) . . .

and so on. Brown translates the elegiac Christian concern to the Orkneys, much like the Anglo-Saxon method in The Dream of the Rood. He is, in fact, lamenting the disappearance of the unified religion-culture-landscape of Orcadian catholicism.

     There is certainly passion and skill behind the poet’s conviction that ‘Elegy’ is a proper kind of poem to write in the latter half of the 20th century. Brown became a catholic in 1961; as a post-graduate student at Edinburgh University he wrote a thesis on Gerard Manley Hopkins, the laureate of modern catholicism. Brown’s conversion is not only a matter of private conviction; it ratifies the past eras he so often celebrates, and — from his poems — one could almost say that it was a matter of necessity, produced by his retrospective empathy for the heroes of his ideal Orkneys. His religious passion is as much a test of his imaginative sincerity as his technique, or the truth of what his eye sees. His involvement in the Norse past is imaginative, not inert or archeological. In ‘The Abbot’, for example, he can rise to the effortlessly beautiful narrative of these lines,

At Rinansay, Einar was a butterfly
Over a tangled harp.
The girls miss him in that low island.
Now when candles are lit
For matins, in the warp of winter,
He drifts, our grey moth
Among the woven monotonies of God.

One does not re-create a medieval religious past as good as that from a basis of information and nothing more.

     These lines come from The Year of the Whale (1965). By then Brown had succeeded in sorting out the obsessively rhetorical from an idiom closer to linguistic reality. One could call the interest of his best poems ‘documentary lyric’. In Loaves and Fishes, the lyrical and its rhetorical friends get the upper hand, as in ‘Hamnavoe’ and ‘The Old Women’. In ‘Halcro’, however, the realism inherent in portraiture obdurately resists attempts to meddle with it, though not always successfully — ’With daffodil-shining dove-winged words’, for example. Later on, we get

     Even the rum you bring
And the tobacco coiled and mellow
     He loves to chew, he’ll stuff
In the oblivion of his pillow.

     Give him the salty texts
Chanted in smithy, pub, and oan —
     How the corn’s ripening; how
The pier was grey with Grimsbymen

     Last stormy weekend; how
Sigurd got a pint of stout
     So riotously sour
They had to call the police out; . . .

At times, Brown could in these earlier poems produce expressions worthy (or unworthy) of Thomas or George Barker. A lark, for example, stammers an ‘Abracadabra of joy’.

     Even if a reader had suspected from Loaves and Fishes that what germs of lyrical realism there were in the book would become the most interesting aspect of subsequent poems, the first poem of his next book — The Year of the Whale — must have come as something of a surprise. ‘The Funeral of Ally Flett’ dispenses with naive patter. Imagination perceives what the eye might have seen rather than what the ear can revel in as a substitute for sense. His new idiom is a lucid counterpart of subject, but is at the same time under a formal control that does not neglect musicality. It uses the simplest method of telling a story; episodes and characters follow each other in a sequence of regular verses of eight lines of uneven length. The lyrical finish of the poem is beautifully accommodated to a concrete, visualised narrative. Brown also allows himself words too colloquial for his earlier poems — ’tearaway’, ‘copper’ — although to an urban ear, these would already have been replaced.

     Brown, as a poet of remote island communities and unindustrial, non-urban landscapes, is at odds with the tradition of modern poetry. He is, in some ways, like Vernon Watkins, who adhered to a post-Modernist climate but maintained interests remote from it, and even antagonistic to the ways of life most contemporary poems arise from. Muir was like this, too, although his commitment to Modernism was critical and thoughtful; it is perhaps the Christianity of these poets that makes them seem apart from the way modern poetry has developed, and at once a criticism of the nature of that development. Local traditions also die hard.

     Brown has described one of the attractive features of Muir’s poems as ‘pellucid archaic imagery’. A line like ‘The sea, the hill, the town’, occurs in Muir’s poems in such a way that it is made to exert a full weight of emblematic associations. One of Brown’s achievements is to allow these affinities to be modified by observation of real things and people. What to an outsider might appear archaic in his poems is held by Brown to be both quintessential and timeless, to be the past alive in the present. His observations of reality are to be seen as corrupt, contemporary life in a time-scale of mundane history, and also in a timelessness of landscape. When excessive alliteration and heavy rhythm (usually to do with the sea) seem to intrude on the contemporary veracity of his observations, it is like an unconscious recall of the past making itself felt, as in the first verse of ‘Old Fisherman with Guitar’.

A formal exercise for withered fingers.
     The head is bent,
          The eyes half closed, the tune
Lingers
     And beats, a gentle wing the west had thrown
     Against his breakwater wall with salt savage lament.

Both the metaphor and the enacting sounds of that last line take a reader to a highly unfashionable limit of how strong a poet can come on. One could justify the line by saying it is entirely proper an Orkney poet should be influenced by Norse alliterative poetry. And yet, in the same poem, the narrative continues more directly, without the obtrusions that frequently make his poems appear stylistically confused:

So fierce and sweet the song on the plucked string,
     Know now for truth
          Those hands have cut from the net
The strong
Crab-eaten corpse of Jock washed from a boat
One cold winter, and gathered the mouth of Thora to his mouth.

Love, death, the dangerous life of the fisherman, music, age — their associations are admirably precise. The movement of the poem may appear to rely too much on the obvious link between the hands that make music and the hands that deal with the realities of love and death. But the antitheses are presented with economy, the ordinariness of the situation heightened without sentimentality, and an equilibrium between artfulness of language and the familiarity of the predicament perfectly achieved.

     Brown’s best poems are like that. They are full of names and characters, their typical vulnerabilities, and the virtues of the way of life their personalities prove. He celebrates an ideal of community. At the centre is an imaginary town of Hamnavoe, the microcosm of the Orkneys, and a disguising cipher for the town of Stromness where Brown lives. Scottish imagination is obsessed with the dissection of community. Galt’s Annals of the Parish is a distinguished fore-runner, and there are other examples — Dr Finlay’s Casebook is a not an altogether insignificant phenomenon. One can so easily express through such a concentration all those notable Scottish characteristics — Presbyterian repression, gossip, the clash of generations, drink, sex, the processes of social change, the persistence of old and national traits, the couthy wit of ‘worthies’. Scottish poetry is often particularly regional, of a special place — Burns in Ayrshire, Fergusson in Edinburgh. In Brown’s ‘Hamnavoe Market’, therefore, we get writing as gently incisive as this —

Johnston stood beside the barrel.
All day he stood there.
He woke in a ditch, his mouth full of ashes.

A gypsy saw in the hand of Halcro
Great strolling herds, harvests, a proud woman.
He wintered in the poorhouse.

They drove home from the Market under the stars
Except for Johnston
Who lay in a ditch, his mouth full of dying fires.

Moralistic finality, accompanied by a wink, a shrug of sadness — it is typical of Scottish poetry as a whole. However, there is also a residue of medieval feeling about the poem, an almost symbolic or allegorical quality to the place where men’s strengths and weaknesses are exposed. Brown’s imagination processes reality rather like Muir’s in this respect. There is a sense of universal value, an oldness, a solidity under threat.

     Increasingly, Brown has incorporated his vision of the past into a criticism of the present and a dread of the future. The poet who in The Year of the Whale saw himself as a ‘blind lyrical tramp’ whose ‘true task’ was the ‘interrogation of silence’ has now in Fishermen With Ploughs (1971) devised a conceptual distaste of modern urban society — the kind of life which men like Edwin Muir’s father, and many before and since, found it attractive or necessary to adopt in cities like Glasgow.

     Looking at the history of the Orkneys, one can readily see that it has been fraught with interferences from outside — the Scottish connection, a Cromwellian occupation, Reformation, press gangs, and unscrupulous landlords within the community itself. A contemporary manifestation of this is tourism, and in The Year of the Whale one of Brown’s best poems dramatises the effect on local sensibilities of ‘English fishing visitors’. Semphill’s guilt is moving, his love of the natural life, and his knowledge that what to him is necessary to fishing visitors is only sport, is superbly spoken —

‘Forgive me, every speckled trout,’
     Says Semphill then,
          ‘And every swan and eider on these waters.
Certain strange men
          Taking advantage of my poverty
Have wheedled all my subtle loch-craft out
          So that their butchery
     Seems fine technique in the ears of wives and daughters.
And I betray the loch for a white coin.’

     Unfortunately, Brown has now put forward a quaintly antithetical notion that there is a certain kind of real life for the good men of the Orkneys, and another kind of life in the cities of the mainland which is so vicious that it brings total punishment in the form of ‘Black Pentecostal Fire’. In this he is a latter-day Rousseau, to whom the prospect of the brutalisation of pastoral contentment by ‘civilisation’ is made more real by the fact of civilisation’s capacity of self-destruction. This line of feeling exists in Edwin Muir’s work, too. Apart from his famous poem ‘The Horses’, he wrote in ‘The Town Betrayed’ —

Our leaf-light lives are spared or taken
     By men obsessed and neat.

We stand beside our windows, see
     In order dark disorder come,
And prentice killers duped by death
     Bring and not know our doom.

     One is entitled to have second thoughts about an imagination whose figments forecast Apocalypse; above all, a mind, like Brown’s, that is so defiantly involved in a way of life, that he is prepared to use an imaginative Doom and kill off millions for the sake of a fresh start. Satisfying as an extreme gesture the final blow may be; he imagines it, and in a poetry with such overtly social implications a quick downward thrust of the hand of an atomic God hardly suggests that there is a solution for the problems of remote communities in life. Pessimism too easily takes the form of a hideous mushroom. It is the imagination’s answer to the necessity for political engagement — i.e., don’t do it; and to some extent it shows a hysterical misunderstanding by Brown of his own passion.

     The ‘legend’ begins in the 9th century. A tribe of fisher-people leave Norway after the death of their God, Baldar; they bring a cask of corn-seed, seeking a new God, one representative of agriculture. ‘Fate, blind and all-wise, has woven their myth about them. Now the same Fate sits at the helm’, he says, as the fisher-people arrive. It is Fate that fixes the change of the first settlers to agriculture from fishing, the first step taken by Progress; after that, the future unfolds as an increasingly sophisticating and vulgarising decline, rounded off by Brown’s atomic punishment, a rap on the knuckles with the tawse of God.

     Much of Brown’s best writing is to be found in Fishermen With Ploughs, which makes his overall meaning doubly unfortunate. Certainly, taken as chronological narrative steps towards future catastrophe, the individual poems don’t persuade that holocaust is either inevitable or even likely. Lines like these from ‘The Scarecrow in the Schoolmaster’s Oats’ are lucid, bright and interesting —

Rain. A sleeve dripping.
Broken mirrors all about me.

A thrush laid eggs in my pocket.
My April coat was one long rapture.

And from ‘Beachcomber’—

Monday I found a boot—
Rust and salt leather.
I gave it back to the sea, to dance in.

Sunday, for fear of the elders,
I sit on my bum.
What’s heaven? A sea chest with a thousand gold coins.

     Brown seldom writes about himself. His objectivity is welcome, subordinated to passionate intention as it is. Instead of adopting a representative stance, he shows himself as a poet of community, of shared destiny, whose craft and insights are at the service of his neighbours. He writes from diffused experience, his passion deriving from concerns larger than himself. Even if one looks in his contemporary poems for personal testimony, evidence that what happens to the poet might prove the truth of his generalisations, one is likely to find the absence of subjective attitudes compensated by fidelity to a handful of themes consistently worked. His ‘seriousness’ is not in question.

     There is one important subjective poem, ‘Kirkyard’, in Poems: New and Selected (1971):

A silent conquering army,
The island dead,
Column on column, each with a stone banner
Raised over his head.

A green wave full of fish
Drifted far
In wavering westering ebb-drawn shoals beyond
Sinker or star.

A labyrinth of celled
And waxen pain.
Yet I come to the honeycomb often, to sip the finished
Fragrance of men.

     Ignoring the cheapness of ‘wavering westering ebb-drawn’, one can go on to say that Brown’s poems revel in this ‘finished fragrance’. The situation of the poet in the kirkyard, conscious of the dead and the past which is his ‘honeycomb’, and conscious of landscapes, the sea, the present and the future — it is peculiarly representative, ratifying and explanatory, not only of the sadness of dispossession, transformation, and disinheritance frequently asserted in his poems, but of the same feeling in lines of Wordsworth’s which Brown’s own lines recall —

. . . a district on all sides
The fragrant breathing of humanity,
Man free, man working for himself, with choice
Of time, and place, and object.

Brown is left with what Clare called the ‘social loneliness’ of Nature and society deformed by new and irresistible ways. It is an essentially pastoral complaint; and it is neither an overestimation of Brown’s importance nor a mis-reading of pastoral traditions, to say that he has to an extent successfully re-used methods and feelings of Wordsworth’s, as seen in ‘Michael’.—

. . . the ploughshare has been through the ground
On which it stood, final changes have been wrought
In all the neighbourhood.

     But Brown’s exhaustive vision, relating as is does to certain patterns of feeling known from the pastoral tradition, has flaws. The first is his rapid dismissal of The City; there is nothing in his writing prepared to admit the possibility of an Ideal Cosmopolis; and he seems unprepared to acknowledge the many writers and thinkers who have imagined such an ideal.

     Nostalgia for the better community is, in my view, a valid poetic activity; retrospection is at least one way of visualising an antidote to what in contemporary society has nothing to do with virtue and goodness. Brown may have gone over the score in Fishermen With Ploughs, but his complaint is real enough, and magnified by the present activities of those concerned with North Sea Oil. Brown’s pastoral mode maintains an awareness of reality; he prefers the socially descriptive and real, and ignores the sophisticated, decorative and sexually delighting — also legitimate elements of ‘pastoral’ — which are, perhaps, not all that apt in a northern Arcadia. Brown’s is a poetry of work and people in an inherited environment, of struggle and compensating pleasures; it is not a poetry of a Golden Age, the unworked abundance. He involves our sympathy for ordinary people, for the idea of a whole community, and not for those for whom they provide — the taxman, the landlord, or the tourist.

     When one considers the contrast between the limpidity of much pastoral writing and its motives, and Brown’s vision of Orcadia/Arcadia, some sense of his power of literary controlling and merging can be felt. In his best work, he solves all the problems of the poet who wants to be both bucolic, real, hard and northern. For despite the distance between what is ‘pastoral’ in poetry, and the kind of poetry signified by ‘Norse’ — and it is extreme — there are few signs of chronic disharmony in Brown’s work. Theocritus, it seems, has donned the helmet with wings and horns, and dashed off a few Orcadian Eclogues.

     But there are negative aspects to his vision which although admirable to the extent that they are present, are not developed to anything like the lengths Brown’s commitment to his ideals might indicate they should be. There is a general rejection of Modernity, for example. It can be noticed in Loaves and Fishes, where in ‘The Shining Ones’ he speaks of ‘the great beasts of time’ ranging beyond the night, ‘a funnel of darkness, roaring with stars’. In the same poem, eternity is described as ‘a flower pressed dry/By poets, preachers, all the literate humbugs’. This anxious feeling in Brown’s poems for the unknowable scale of time, and the existence of mysterious dimensions, while one basis for the bardic styles he sometimes uses, is also behind his social criticism. His deep hatred of the materialist phase of History arises from mystical conceptions of time, not political ones, and this in spite of a bitter awareness of the root causes of what has altered the Orcadian ways of life. It has more to do with exploitation, capitalist manners, and political neglect, than looking up funnels of darkness at the tantalising galaxies.

     But Brown must have it both ways; even a mystical-religious poet cannot evade reality when it washes up the rubbish of the Age on to his beaches. He seems to be saying that the Cosmos as viewed from the Orkneys below is his true subject; the rest is temporal dross, side-issues, a tiresome necessity to face what is only too observable. There is a latent moral strategy in this, a creeping ambivalence. By espousing what is vast and unknowable, Brown is able to think of present time with at least a muted amount of contempt. Recently, I came across a reported statement of Beckett’s, purported to highlight the ignobility of Sartre’s dictum ‘Man is a useless passion’. ‘The microcosm’, says Beckett, ‘cannot forgive the relative immortality of the macrocosm’. Brown’s resentment is of that kind. And it is possible to sympathise with a poet in such a dilemma; if only, that is, he would not use his ultimate belief to crucify a world which, whether we like it or not, or whether Brown likes it or not, is the only one we are ever likely to have. For all his fixity and local commitment, Brown is, in poetical terms, unsettled; he is looking at the stars, dreaming of the stars, but round his feet are rusting tin cans, old tyres, beached poisoned fish, while just over the horizon Americans in safety helmets and boiler-suits are sinking their oil wells.

     Although he dramatises the activities of lairds and landlords, visitations of the taxman, depopulation by the magnet of urban prosperity, there is a wholesale withdrawal in his writing from political decision, or even outright social criticism. Regret, fear, premonitions of a general worsening — moving, and poetic; but the passion that is obviously behind his writing, and the humanity that dictates censorship of self and private emergency in a gesture of communal humility, might also be seen to demand a stridency outwith that represented by the dire trick of Apocalypse. No radical interpretations are offered, only a wiping out. He accepts Time and its consequences, what other men do. He never attempts to answer the question ‘What can be done about what is happening to where I live?’ In fact, he never asks the question. We are left with an impression of far-off turbulence. He accepts corruption and exploitation with the inert grin of the man happy with what survives, but wanting more because he knows all that there used to be, preferring to outline an ideal by retrospection, creating an image of the past to act as a spell against the present and future.

     Having been convinced by the best of what Brown has written, my feeling is that a bit more is called for, a harshness and indignation that Brown might be unsuited by temperament, or poetic beliefs, to provide.