Neil Gunn Takes a Look at The Highlands

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.

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)

Neil Gunn Truast [www.neilgunn.org.uk]

A Great Gael: A Review of Calum Maclean’s The Highlands

Some sixteen years passed by before Calum Maclean’s book The Highlands, first printed in 1959, was republished by Club Leabhar in 1975. The following is a review by John MacLellan that appeared in The Scots Magazine. MacLellan in his favourable review remembers reading the book on its first appearance and is of the opinion (shared by many) that some memorable passages left a lasting impression:

It speaks volumes for a writer’s integrity, for the sincerity of his belief in what he is saying, when the very words and images he uses to express himself, remain indelibly engraved upon the reader’s mind. For me, the late Calum I. Maclean triumphantly passes this test. For, although it’s seventeen years since I first read The Highlands, his loving portrait of his native Gaeldom, there are scenes in it, and comments and judgements, which I have never forgotten, simply because they are so positive and so patently consistent with the man’s own identity and with his convictions. When the book first came out in 1959, the cultural heritage of the Gaelic was in even a more parlous state than it is now, for many of its last custodians were nearing the end of their days. I suppose that most of those grand story tellers, who passed their treasures on by word of mouth to Calum Maclean are now gone beyond recall, but, thanks to them and thanks to him, much that must have been lost for ever has been rescued, literally from the grave, and preserved for posterity.

Now the book has been reprinted by the Club Leabhar, the Highland Book Club, with financial support from the Royal Celtic Society, Edinburgh, as an elegant memorial to a gifted and gallant Highlander and an acknowledgement of the legacy he left to future generations of his race.

What of those impressions of Calum Maclean’s work which have stuck in my own mind since I first read them only a few months before his tragic and premature death? One example of his fearlessness in stating the truth, as he saw it, occurs in his description of the gentry at the Argyllshire Gathering: “A special covered enclosure is reserved for ‘members,’ namely county families and their friends, and the general public is not admitted. The stand is usually full of sophisticated, painted, and ungainly women with their husbands masquerading in their kilts and plaids and their young sons, home on vacation from school in England, replete with impeccable non-Scottish accents and kilts and shepherds’ crooks twice their own size.” And later Maclean chanced to be in the cocktail bar of a large Oban hotel when a party of county folk arrived on their way to one of the Highland Balls, “for the exclusive enjoyment of the ‘quality’.” “I had,” he wrote, “the rare the rare opportunity of scrutinising them at close range, and what struck me most was how utterly English they were both in mannerisms and speech. The sober truth is that there is no longer any Scottish or Highland aristocracy and there has not been for a very long time.”

I have never forgotten this passage because it goes to the very heard of Gaeldom’s tragedy. The process of alienation between clansmen and chief, after Culloden, inseparable from the Anglicization on the Highland gentry, led inevitably to the virtual persecution of much of the race, and the vitiation of its ancient language and culture. Calum Maclean carried the sorrow of this betrayal in his heart, and made the cause of rescuing what he still could of that martyred heritage, his mission during the last nine years of his short life.

The charm of the man shines through these pages as he pursues his odyssey through the historic territories of the clans—Lochaber, Morar, Arisaig, Moidart, Ardgour, Ardnamurchan, Morvern, Badenoch and the rest—names dear to Highland hearts, which no reforming bureaucrat can ever hope to extinguish. The book is the story of his travels in these places and stories they passed on to him. As he put it himself: “I have to find living people whose memories were not dead.” At the time Calum—who had been employed by the Irish Folklore Commission—was on loan to the School of Scottish Studies, and a colleague has estimated that during the period covered by the book, he used nearly 100 miles of tape, collecting his material, even then warning that this was “far from being enough.”

It is immensely sad that Calum Maclean was not spared to carry on his task, but Gaeldom owes him an everlasting debt for what he did accomplish in a life which must be an inspiration to all who believe, as he did, that Highland culture is a unique and priceless possession which civilization cannot afford to lose. The new edition is enriched by an affectionate memoir by Sean O’ Suilleabhain of the Irish Folklore Commission and by poems in Gaelic and English by John Macleod and by Calum’s two brothers, the late John Maclean and Dr Sorley Maclean.

Sorley Maclean, writing to the late Frank Thomson, who had assisted with the new edition, on the 19th of December 1975, thanked him for all his help and also for the two copies that he had sent to him:

Dear Frank,

The two books arrived yesterday, and they certainly look well. I am very pleased indeed with them, and so I daresay all our family will be. You have done a great job. What a pity you did not get the job when you first asked me. Still, it is good to get it done now, and I do hope it will be as much of a success financially as it is aesthetically.

I wonder if you have sent a copy to Sean O’ Suilleabhain; if not, tell me and I will do it myself. Meanwhile my great gratitude to you and all the very best.

Le deagh dhùrachd agus mìle taing, agus bliadhna mhath ùr.

Somhairle MacGill-Eain

References:

Club Leabhar Ltd., Acc. 12149/9, National Library of Scotland

Calum Maclean, The Highlands (Inbhirnis: Club Leabhar, 1975)

John MacLellan, ‘A Great Gael’ [Review of The Highlands], The Scots Magazine, vol. 104, no. 6 (March, 1976), pp. 645–46

Image:

Front cover of the second edition of The Highlands (1975)

The Highlands: Written by a Highlander from the Inside



Front cover of the first edition of The Highlands
by Calum I. Maclean

Due to his untimely death at the age of only forty-four in South Uist, Calum Maclean had but only a few years to write the only book (and for which he is perhaps most famous for) that he would live to see in print and which remains to this very day a classic example of this type of genre.

The first edition of The Highlands appeared in 1959 and was published by Batsford. After the first print run, the publisher, despite the book’s popularity, refused to commission any more copies. The reason behind such a decision was probably due to the fact that the book was seen by them to have been too ‘politic’ and perhaps even too ‘controversial’.

After a hiatus of sixteen years, The Highlands was reprinted by Inverness-based Club Leabhar in 1975 with additional material including a ‘Memoir’ by Seán Ó Súilleabháin, Maclean’s close friend and colleague, together with three poems by John Maclean, Sorley MacLean and John MacLeod. Much of the editorial work for the second edition was carried out by Frank Thompson. The Irish University Press was interested in bringing out the second edition prior to 1975 but, for whatever reason, such a plan never came to fruition.

A third edition of The Highlands appeared in 1990 and was published by Edinburgh-based Mainstream. Cailean Maclean, Maclean’s nephew, supplied the stunning photographic images which makes this edition the most attractive one thus far. A later trade paperback (and fourth edition) was also published by Mainstream but which contained hardly any illustrative material.

The genesis of The Highlands would seem to have been fairly long in the making for Maclean notes in a diary entry for 26 May 1954: “I had some writing to do after lunch. I must try to get some specimen pages of that book for Batsford.” Presumably Maclean has been approached by the publisher to write a book about the Highlands and it would appear that they requested him for some samples of his writing. It is also discernible that Maclean’s style of diary writing was affected by this book commission for his later entries became more discursive and read more as if they were being prepared as a travelogue. Passages from his diaries from around this time onwards were later redrafted and appear sporadically throughout The Highlands.

On its first publication, The Highlands received favourable reviews. One which would have pleased Maclean would have been a review written by John Lorne Campbell, a close friend and colleague:

Mr Maclean has the advantage not only of being a native Gaelic-speaker but of having acquired…an international background and approach to his subject, an approach that is sadly lacking in most of the “experts” who have written about the Highlands and their problems during the past generation. This enables him to describe the oral traditions and the folklore of the Highlands in their true setting, as par to the Indo-European tradition. The great importance and interest of Gaelic Scotland from this point of view lie in the fact that it has preserved a vast corpus of ancient tales, traditions, and folk music that has largely perished in other European countries west of the Balkans, apart from Ireland. Mr. Maclean is able to convey to his readers vividly the wealth of oral literature and folksong that is still to be found in the Highlands in the crofter’s cottage and the tinker’s tent, a heritage which, to the everlasting disgrace of the so-called civilized parts of Scotland, was entirely ignored by official Scottish academic circles before the School of Scottish Studies was founded in 1951, and thereby allowed to drift to the brink of oblivion.

 

A fifth (and hopefully!) definitive edition of The Highlands is currently in preparation which will also include a representative sample of Maclean’s other popular and academic writings. This should have at least one benefit in that since the appearance of the second edition The Highlands will not have been out of print, a reflection of its enduring appeal and, of course, Maclean’s unique and valuable insight into his own native Gaelic culture which had been denigrated for many generations.

Reference: Campbell, John Lorne, ‘Gaelic Lore [Review of Calum I. Maclean’s The Highlands]’, The Times Literary Supplement, no. 2982 (24 Apr., 1959), 243

 

Image:

Front cover of the first edition of The Highlands