By the age of
forty-six Neil Gunn quit his job as a
Civil Servant in the Customs and Excise Service, sold his house Larachan in
Inverness, and purchased a converted lifeboat the Thistle to embark upon a sailing tour of the Hebrides in 1937 along
with his wife. The result inspired his classic book Off in a Boat (1938) – the ‘simple record of a holiday in a boat’ –
heralded a successful writing career.
A
fisherman’s son from a large family of nine to James Gunn and his second wife Isabella Miller,
Neil Miller Gunn (1891–1973) was born in the fishing and crofting village of
Dunbeath in the county of Caithness. Early in his boyhood he went to Galloway,
and then to the Edwardian streets of London and Edinburgh. At only fifteen
years of age he became a clerk in the Civil Service, and at nineteen was
promoted to an officer in the Customs and Excise. From 1923 until 1937 – when he
resigned to devote his time to becoming a full-time writer – he supervised a
Highland distillery, and became an authority on whisky.
Neil
Gunn was a prolific and distinguished twentieth-century novelist and dramatist,
a leading writer of the Scottish Renaissance. His novels such as The Silver Darlings (1941) and The Atom of Delight are set in the
Highlands but are philosophical in tone and allegorical in nature, reflecting
wider contemporary issues. Gunn entered the Civil Service in 1911 and spent
time in London and Edinburgh before returning to the North as a customs and
excise officer based in Inverness.
Gunn
was obviously no stranger to the Highlands and stayed in various locations just
to the north of Inverness for the remainder of his life. He was born and bred a
Caithness Highlander and therefore would be better placed than many to review
Calum Maclean’s The Highlands. The
review was transmitted on the Scottish Home Service on the 24th of June, 1959,
and is here reproduced from the BBC transcript:
I hadn’t got through the introduction to this
book before I knew exactly where I was, and so settled down to enjoy myself.
But let me quote the remark that did it, thrown off by the author in a way that
would have brought a laugh at any ceilidh. It refers to one of the three great
poets of Scottish Gaeldom. Here it is: “Duncan Ban MacIntyre, a Presbyterian
and tenant on the Campbell Breadalbane estates, fought in the Hanoverian ranks
at the battle of Falkirk. He ran away as fast as he could, chuckling inwardly
over the discomfiture of the Hanoverians or, as he called them, ‘the
English-speaking folk’.”
The touch of exaggeration, the humour, is a
characteristic way of saying that for the true Gael, whatever side he may have
found himself fighting on, there was always finally one side, and in his heart
he knew it. Chiefs were brutal for their own ends, religious zealots thundered
away, Westminster could divide and destroy, but the folk themselves cared
finally for their own way of life, their own tongue, for that warmth of human
relations which their poets and their story-tellers and their composers made
memorable.
This then, is what the author, Calum Maclean,
never forgets as he wanders about the Highlands. As a Celtic scholar and member
of Edinburgh University’s School of Scottish Studies, he rarely misses what he
is looking for. In the process he displays the gorgeous spectacle of the
Highlands: Lochaber, Morar and Moidart, northward through the glens to Wester
Ross and Sutherland. Over a score of full-page photographs do their wonderful
best to bear him out. But scenery is not what he is really after, nor is he
much concerned to discuss Highland economics today, and once or twice I caught
myself disputing the accuracy of some historical point; but all that is, in a
real sense, by the way, for that the author is searching for, with his
recording gear, is the hidden Highlands, for the men and women who can
still tell the ancient stories for nights on end or sing hundreds of Gaelic
songs, and the truly astonishing thing is the quantity of the essential spirit
of the old Gaelic culture that still survives. This, I feel, is what gives the
book its permanent value, over against so many books published in our day about
the Highlands. For, after all, unless the Highlands had a distinctive way of
life, that would enrich the human spirit today, why bother with a Crofters’
Commission or other bodies concerned to keep the old Highland stock on their
own land and sea?
If I appear to commend the spirit of this
book highly, let me add that, as a Caithness man, I failed to find the word
Caithness in the index, though the book’s title is THE HIGHLANDS. But then they
always were a tolerant and active folk up in Caithness – today, in fact, the
only radio-active folk in Scotland, – and it may be that the School of Scottish
Studies had it in mind to devote a whole volume to this remarkable county.
The review is short and sweet as well as
being extremely positive. Perhaps because of illness that first struck in 1956,
and consequently disrupted the writing process of The Highlands, left Maclean in an invidious position where he had
to rein in his ambition to cover the whole of the Highlands. Caithness which
Maclean must have visited is all but absent and other areas such as Kintyre,
Braemar are barely mentioned. Nevertheless, Gunn obviously sympathised with a
kindred spirit and a writer who explored the Highlands from an insiders’s
perspective. In short, Gunn recoginsed all that was good about Maclean’s book –
the humour, the emphasis upon Highland folk and, more importantly, their stories
and songs that were ignored by conventional books, just as popular it would
seem then as now, about the Highlands. If Calum Maclean heard the broadcast
then, rest assured, he would have been pleased indeed.
Illustrations:
Neil Gunn.
Neil Gunn.
Calum
Maclean. Photograph by Dr Werner Kissling taken in Kirk Yetholm in 1956.
Dustjacket
of the first edition of The Highlands,
showing Glencoe.
References:
Calum
Maclean, The Highlands (London: B. T.
Batsford, 1959)
NLS,
‘Neil M. Gunn reviews “The Highlands” by Calm I. Maclean, published by B. T.
Batsford Ltd., Dep.209/Box 10/1(d)
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