A Scots Quair. Lewis Grassic Gibbon

       Contents

       Introduction

       Note on the Text

       Map of Kinraddie

      PRELUDE The Unfurrowed Field

      THE SONG

      I Ploughing

      II Drilling

      III Seed-Time

      IV Harvest

      EPILUDE The Unfurrowed Field

       Notes

       Introduction

      To its original readers in 1932 Sunset Song was a book in itself; they could not know it was the first part of a trilogy. Many reacted with disgust to its frank treatment of sex and childbearing, its scorn for the rich and powerful, its sometimes strident anti-clericalism. The Kirriemuir Free Press classed it with those modern works that ‘gloat foully’; the Paisley Express wrote that ‘the unredeemed close-packed filth, meanness, spite, brutality, lying squalor and stupidity wearies us’. Today it is one of Scotland’s favourite books, and a television serialisation has made it even more accessible to thousands of readers.

When Gibbon, settled in the comfort of Welwyn Garden City, decided to write this novel, all his memories of the crofts on which he had been brought up, of village schools and Mackie Academy, Stonehaven, of farm tasks that had irked him, and of his parents’ back-breaking toil, rushed together in an irresistible flood of memorial reconstruction and creative transformation. Once he had hit on his style the book seemed to write itself: it has been said that it was completed in less than two months. This no doubt accounts for certain geographical inconsistencies, for some errors of historical detail,1 and for occasional lapses into sentimentality. But we can take such blemishes in our stride, as we do similar faults in Scott and Dickens, for the coherence of the whole is overwhelming. Thus the four main parts—‘Ploughing’, ‘Drilling’, ‘Seed-time’ and ‘Harvest’—are an obvious metaphor for the heroine’s development in terms of the natural divisions of the cultivator’s year. A communal climax brings all Kinraddie together at Chris’s wedding, which slides over into the great community festival of bringing in the New Year. The dedication of the memorial in the Epilude is also a ritual occasion where all are present, though this time wholly solemn and ceremonial. The book’s texture, too, is beautifully fitted to its milieu. Folk and national song play an unobtrusive part, as does the imagery of the Song of Solomon, and both strands come together magnificently at the wedding. Beast similes are equally prominent in the style, identifying characters like comparisons in some epic, and male sexuality is often seen in terms of an animal, more specifically of a cat. At moments of stress or heightened emotion the beast similes may expand till they seem to fill the universe: at the whin-burning the tongue of flame is like ‘a red roaring beast’, and Jean Guthrie’s childbed pains were ‘as if [she] were being torn and torn in the teeth of beasts’.

In this novel Gibbon has created the most convincing female character in Scottish fiction, and so sympathetically, so inwardly, that many of the original readers wondered whether ‘Lewis Grassic Gibbon’ might be the nom-de-plume of a woman author.2 The book celebrates a nation through a region; its farm folk are of the Mearns, but they are also typical Scots: their words are felt as Scots words, not those of a regional dialect. And it belongs, like Ignazio Silone’s Fontamara, Anna Seghers’ The Price of a Head, and John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, to a sub-genre that David Craig has termed ‘the novel of peasant crisis’, in which a class of independent smallholders is threatened with annihilation by war, technology, usury, or landlords’ greed.3

      All these aspects come together in the struggles and responses of the heroine. She belongs to herself both before marriage and after, and there is an untamable, detached, still centre at the heart of her being. True, she tells us there are ‘three Chrisses’—Chris Guthrie, Chris Tavendale, and another that comes to the fore by the end of the novel; and Chris Guthrie is herself split in two, the Scots Chris of her family and forebears, and the more refined ‘English’ Chris created by her schooling. But we can never doubt the permanence of that still centre, and we feel it is obscurely connected with her intimations of the more than merely temporal. We are convinced that no man will ever possess her completely, though her heart is Ewan’s for ever. We share her fears when she is first pregnant and her hatred of her husband before her emotions can come to terms with her new condition: we sympathise with her tortured rejection of the Ewan whom army life has turned into a beast, and with her brief union with the defeated Rob before he goes off to the army. Gibbon counterposes the poetry of Chris’s independence (‘her blood ran so clear and with such a fine, sweet song in her veins she must hold her breath and heark to it’), to the prose of it (‘then he said Chrissie! Tired? and she said Losh, no, and my name’s Chris, Ewan!). He lets us share in her growing individuality as she responds to the men around her. First, there is John Guthrie’s domineering patriarchy: it is only at his graveside that she comes to know the agony of his self- torturing struggle when the ‘world’s fight and the fight of his own flesh grew over-bitter, and poisoned his love to hate’ Second, there is her love for Ewan, with his vulnerable, instinctual maleness (Chris is the stronger character, as well as the more intelligent). Third, there is Long Rob: she is the stronger there too, for she wills their coming together; and fourth, there is her second husband, the Reverend Robert Colquhoun.

      After war has destroyed her first marriage Chris begins to reconstruct her personality by ‘building the walls of a sanity cold and high, locked in from the lie of life’, determining to live in isolation behind them (the still centre is now frozen), till Chae Strachan tells her the true way of Ewan’s death. Chae’s narration, and the ‘supernatural’ intimation of the last paragraphs of ‘Harvest’, enable her to complete her reintegration before she meets Robert. Chris can now share with Robert her new understanding of her separate and succeeding selves (‘Oh, my dear, maybe the second Chris, maybe the third, but Ewan has the first forever’), and the way is open for Chris’s development in the more complex society of the second book in the trilogy, Cloud Howe. That is Robert’s second function in the novel: the first is to supply its emotional conclusion, the noble elegy for dead heroes and a vanished Way of life that he pronounces by the plaque on the Standing Stone, and which modulates so superbly into

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