parents to have been protective of Anne, eager to guard her against a bad marriage.
In order to marry her, Daniel Muir had to overcome the strong objections of the father, but the root of these was not social; it was religious. David Gilrye was a Church of Scotland man, satisfied with the state and practice of Presbyterianism within the established body and probably defensive toward enthusiasts like Daniel Muir who thought establishment worshipers not so much satisfied as complacent with dry formalisms. If David Gilrye intuited that such a man, all but consumed in his zeal and arrogantly sure that others of differing shades of opinion were no Christians, would make a hard husband and father, he was right. Anne Gilrye’s life with Muir was hard indeed, and her comforts mainly those achieved through her connections with her children and in her private life, which she took care to shield from her husband. The marriage was to end many years later in separation.
Muir family tradition has it that Anne Gilrye was of a “poetical” nature in her maiden years, a euphemism generally indicating that thin indulgence sometimes granted young women to moon over ineffables and to write harmless verse in the period before life and its realities—husband, home, children—should begin. If she did once write poetry, none of it survives, but in her later letters to her son John there are suggestions of these conjectured youthful inclinations, and in the lines the work-worn farm woman wrote there is some evidence of that romanticism her son was able fully to express and that she could vicariously express through him.
But the woman was no silent cipher in the Muir household. When in 1834 the children began to come, Anne Muir did her best to protect them from the uncompromising rigidity of the father’s beliefs and behavior. Had she been any less successful, Daniel Muir’s tyranny and bigotry, unchecked and unleavened, must have produced corresponding deformities in the children. As it was, all were apparently sufficiently well adjusted—though all bore the marks of such a father—and for this the mother must be given considerable credit. In the pictureless, spartan house that Daniel Muir insisted upon, Anne Muir taught her children how to endure, and how to express and enjoy themselves when the father was elsewhere. They all had to wear the harness of Daniel Muir’s beliefs and character; she showed them how to wear it in some comfort.
PART
I
Apprenticed to the Land
The Lessons of a Long-Distance Runner
In the space of twelve years Anne Muir bore her husband seven children. Margaret came first and then Sarah in 1836; two years later John was born on April 21, and he would be followed by brothers David (1840) and Daniel Jr. (1843), and by twin sisters, Mary and Annie (1846). An eighth child, Joanna, would be born in America. Amazingly, considering the region’s infant-mortality rates, all the children lived and were healthy in their young years.
At the time of John Muir’s birth the family still lived in the house to which Daniel Muir had moved following the death of his first wife. In January 1842, however, Daniel Muir, described in the deed as a “corn dealer,” bought the house next door. To the seller, Dr. Charles Wightman, he paid cash, suggesting either that he had been doing well in business or that he had been left a substantial sum by his first wife, or both. Immediately after obtaining the house and property, Daniel Muir made over the deed to Anne Muir “for the love, favor and affection he has and bears [her]. …”
John Muir’s childhood home in Dunbar was separated from the house in which he had been born by a narrow alley. Tall and broad, the new house had three stories topped by a slate roof out of which protruded three dormer windows, the fronts of which looked out on the high street, the rears looking beyond chimneys and gables to the country westward. Daniel Muir conducted business on the street-level floor while the family rooms were on the second. The older boys, John and David, lived in one of the third-floor rooms. In back was a long narrow garden, every inch of it in use. Flowers were banked the length of its high gray walls, and three elm trees were homes for robins. At the rear were several outbuildings and a combination laundry and stable in which a neighborhood widow had life-rent rights. Behind the Muirs’ property ran a street used by deliverymen and bordered by the sheds and warehouses of the shops on the high street; at the far end was an abattoir, and from their garden playyard the Muir children could hear the mortal screams of the doomed pigs.
Among the thousands of scraps of paper John Muir left, the littered accumulation of years of random writings and scribbled notations, was this: “My first conscious memory is the singing of ballads, and I doubt not they will be ringing in my ears when I am dying.” It is a rich and suggestive fragment and may indicate, among other things, that in John Muir’s early childhood years his father had not yet become so soured as to put utterly away his fiddle and his memories of those songs of his high moorland youth.
Whoever the singer(s) John Muir heard, he could have had no more direct introduction to his native culture and history than these stark, deceptively simple tunes, so wild you can almost smell moor and mountain and sea in them or glimpse the lonely vistas that went into their making. The narratives the tunes carry are wilder yet, and in them the somber Scots genius can be overheard brooding on the long dark tale that is the national history and that formed the tough national character so often remarked on—and too often misunderstood in caricature. Bright as Burns can be or Scott or James Hogg, still that brightness gains from its contrast with the hue and tone of Scots history, as these authors knew so well: Scott’s introduction to his Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, for instance, is a skillful reduction of those gore-spattered chronicles that lie behind the minstrelsy he took such joy in collecting.
The themes of the ballads Muir heard and forever after carried in his head are variations on violence: murder, incest, fratricide, revenge, suicide. In “The Douglas Tragedy” the bride’s father, seven brothers, and groom are all slain in combat. In “The Bonny Hind” accidental incest leads to suicide. “Mary Hamilton” tells of infanticide, “Lady Maisry” of fratricide. In “Young Hunting” a woman kills the king’s son after she has gotten him drunk and seduced him; she herself is then burned at the stake: “An it took on her fair body/ She burnt like hoky-gren” (green wood). In “Gill Morice” a husband murders his wife’s presumed lover and presents her with the head for a football only to learn that this was no lover but the lady’s son.
There are also the border ballads celebrating the centuries of raiding and ambushing along the English-Scots border so close to Muir’s boyhood home. The heroes of these—Johnie Cock, Johnie Armstrong, Hobie Noble—are all men who live and die by the sword.
And of course the sea: surrounded on three sides by it, the Scots had sea in their history, their blood, their imagination. The Atlantic, the Irish Sea, the North Sea—none are smiling waters, and the North Sea merges itself at last into the dark waters of the Arctic Ocean. So in much of the balladry Muir would have heard the sea is a vengeful tyrant, taking, holding, disposing. In “James Harris,” for example, the shade of the dead lover returns from its watery grave to carry off the young girl to her destruction: only when they are well launched on the waves does she realize that the shade is really the Devil himself and those far shores to which they are hurrying the shores of Hell. The sea washes all through such wonderful ballads as “Kemp Owyne” and “The Lass of Roch Royal” and through what is arguably the greatest of all Scots ballads, “Sir Patrick Spens,” which ends on the swell of tragedy:
Have owre, have owre*
