George MacKay Brown

by Maggie Fergusson

George Mackay Brown was one of Scotland's greatest twentieth-century writers, but in person a bundle of paradoxes. He had a wide international reputation, but hardly left his native Orkney. A prolific poet, admired by such fellow poets as Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes and Charles Causley, and hailed by the composer Peter Maxwell Davies as 'the most positive and benign influence ever on my own efforts at creation', he was also an accomplished novelist (shortlisted for the 1994 Booker Prize for Beside the Ocean of Time) and a master of the short story. When he died in 1996, he left behind an autobiography as deft as it is ultimately uninformative. 'The lives of artists are as boring and also as uniquely fascinating as any or every other life, ' he claimed. Never a recluse, he appeared open to his friends, but probably revealed more of himself in his voluminous correspondence with strangers. He never married - indeed he once wrote, 'I have never been in love in my life.' But some of his most poignant letters and poems were written to Stella Cartwright, 'the Muse of Rose Street', the gifted but tragic figure to whom he was once engaged and with whom he kept in touch until the end of her short life.Maggie Fergusson interviewed George Mackay Brown several times and is the only biographer to whom he, a reluctant subject, gave his blessing. Through his letters and through conversations with his wide acquaintance, she discovers that this particular artist's life was not only fascinating but vivid, courageous and surprising.

Genres: Biography, Nonfiction, Poetry, Literature

400 pages, Kindle Edition

First published April 1, 2006

Reviews

[Ade Bailey · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a fine biography, well written and researched. For me, the brilliance of Brown’s poems, stories and novels has never been in doubt, and I’m not generally interested in a writer’s private life unless it allows a greater engagement with their work. Fergusson’s book stands alone as a ‘good read’ for several reasons which I’ll outline here.
Brown was shortlisted for the Booker Prize the year that James Kelman won it, in 1994. There are similarities, I suppose, in the lives of the two men: a working class origin and lifelong focus upon the lives of ‘ordinary’ people, a deep love of words and stories, a vicious suspicion of “Culture’ (Brown called it Kultur), deep impatience with establishment and provincial bourgeois power structures, and a fierce commitment not only to write about ‘their’ people but also, with a profound generosity, to reach and teach and never lose touch with people. The differences between them too are great. I’d simply suggest that each require generous reading, and that any honest expression of community will involve in part at least a recognition and celebration of the communal bonds that allow for individual vitality.
If I take exception with Fergusson’s book, it is that she unknowingly sympathises with some of the ‘political’ values implicit in Brown’s various outlooks. I merely state this; to demonstrate it would be tedious and require an examination of her phraseology at times. She seems to smile when she describes Brown’s adulation of the Pope’s visit to Britain, one key marker of his conservative vision of individuals in hierarchical status as being the natural arbiters of power (and to an extent this is reflected in his writing which, rooted in a fairly sentimental history, is made of good kings and bad kings, the evil and the virtuous). Yet, Brown was undoubtedly imbued with a core of Keir Hardie type protestant socialism. His implied construction of an ‘organic community’ under threat from ‘progress’ is no more unfamiliar than other sentimental conservative tosh about the good old days. Yet, here is a key: while denouncing the advent of television on the islands so that the ‘folk’ started talking about Vietnam and other things that did not concern them (being away from the natural order of things) he went on to list ‘watching television’ in his Who’s Who entry. (In his odd autobiography, For the Islands I Sing, he wrote that he had to discipline himself away from television).
It’s clear that Brown did indeed form close and lasting friendships with folk whatever their standing. As a regular, sometime drunkard, in the Stromness Hotel, he achieved the great advantage denied to so many on life’s journey of being at home among the targets of condemnation by the righteous and respectable. Yet he was stricken with such a streak of puritanism that towards the end of his life he edited some of his poems to exclude sexual references. It’s not that the Scottish male is peculiarly attributed with a violent oscillation between moral profligacy and moral rectutude, but perhaps that there is something in the cultural history and geography which makes it more manifest in expressive or confessional form. Brown’s depression, for which he was treated with medication, his shyness, and ultimately agrophobia may have been partly a result of his horror at his own thoughts and feelings, a self-loathing and wretchedness measured against his ideals. Nothing so unusual there: in fact. wishing here that I was an ill-read follower of third-rate hand-me-downs of books about Freud, one could say that this biography outlines some of the basic elements of everyman. I can’t speak for women.
There’s his desire for seclusion, a powerful wish sometimes to be monkish. There is his longing for community, for people. Balanced between a fear of condemnation by the gossips, the forces of rectitude, the respectable, and the fear of being vaporised by inclusion into the world is his individuality, his anguish. His deep depressions, his extreme shyness, his dread of social gatherings, fear of new places, dark vision of a world being destroyed by the poisonous clouds of Progress and mechanical register (see Greenvoe), his self-perceived inadequacy measured against others, his extremely confused sexuality (there is a suggestion in the book from one source that he was partly homosexual), his chronic drinking patterns – against these his genuine egalitarianism, sociability, courtesy, concern for others, decency, and that strength noted so often by so many of a deeply private man with a certain vision and strength. George was contradictory in his nature, so one of us.
Now, you have to read between the lines a little but there is a marvellous play waiting to be written at the heart of the book. Stella Cartwright, the Muse of Rose Street, precocious 16 years old entering the Poets’ Pub(s) in Edinburgh. Hers is a tragic tale of a descent into alcoholism, a life wrapped up with a longterm unconsummated but highly sexualised love affair with Brown: yet her actual love affairs with the other poets, reported and yet to be discovered (when archive material may be released) were some sort of rocky dark reality against which, to paraphrase her, she and George seemed to fly ethereal above the world. Not that she was religious or spiritual in assertion, but Brown believed in something like a destiny that carries us. It’s implied that Brown and MacCaig were very wary of each other, though highly respecting each others’ work. One wonders whether among all the poets Stella catalysed, shall we say, a certain chemistry that coloured their relationships with each other.
Of poetry in general, his own in particular, Brown often thought it a fairly worthless pursuit. The scene of poet gatherings he very healthily despised. At a deeper level, he wondered whether his writing was simply playing with shadows or touching on reality itself. He concluded the latter and probably died at peace, a happy Catholic neoplatonist. The question is raised to what extent this barely travelled (even on his beloved Orkneys) man could express the human dimensions of a race, a history, a world; to what extent would some writer who was down in the slums or setting themselves on council estates do it more ‘truthfully’. Personally, I don’t care. Today, Stromness is visted by thousands of tourists each year on the Brown trail, and I dare say all of them will have their own agenda, just as will visitors to any shrine. But less picturesquely located writers have their followers too, and they. like the pilgrims to Stromness, are often less than fully engaged with the writers’ work.
In structuring the book, Fergusson has done a valuable job of giving just enough of the wider social context, particularly involving education, to invite thought and further thinking (which may even include reading). Also valuable are the many insights she gives to some of Brown’s writer friends, most notably Edwin Muir.
It’s strange. I’m reading Samuel Beckett at the moment. whom Brown included among “all the sick writers and the anti-artists; their works are the symptoms of a deep and (it may be) incurable malaise.” Strangely, among Beckett’s darkness and sickness I find constantly just the vaguest hint of light that perhaps, psychologically or it may be spiritually, rescues Brown’s vision from despair and ruin. Both of them are doing what only great writers can do. When they make it through the ice, I have two James Kelman books coming this way from the amazon.

[Nicola Pierce · Rating 5 out of 5]

I cannot recommend this book highly enough. Poetry, for the most part, baffles me and I had never heard of George Mackay Brown but - my - oh - my - how I bawled my eyes out on finishing it.

Tremendously moving biography by one wonderful writer about another wonderful writer.

All I feel like doing now is opening the book to page one and starting it all over again.

[Cornelius Browne · Rating 5 out of 5]

This Orcadian poet and storyteller was a steadfast artist who worked always against the current, wholly uninterested in material success as he sought to transmute both the Orkney of legend and the Orkney of ordinary life into a singular art. For her first book, Maggie Fergusson shows tremendous ambition in choosing to write the life of Mackay Brown: apart from a relatively brief period as a mature student in Edinburgh, he hardly left his native Orkney, and even within these islands he did not travel extensively. Dogged by ill health and depression, many years were consumed by more or less complete confinement. Mackay Brown, away from his pages, was hardly an adventurer. But an understanding of his often difficult life is key to fully appreciating his tremendous work. And here Fergusson deserves the gratitude of readers for decades to come, because from what many may consider unpromising material she has fashioned a minor miracle, an odd thing, a kind of spiritual page-turner.

[Jane · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting biography of a somewhat obscure Scottish poet, who spent his life in the Orkney Islands. He wrote articles for the local community as well as novels and poetry. In addition to staying put, he never married, and determined from the outset not to be a public figure should his writing meet with such success. Brown was also a Catholic convert.

Brown was born in 1921 and died in 1996. He was a 20th C writer, but his story often seems more of the 19th C. I suppose that is because of his island life and his determined resistance to contemporary ways, but he was fully involved with his community and both aware of and responsive to events of the day—in his writing and in his life.

I discovered his poetry as part of my current interest in Scotland, in islands and archeology, in out-of-the-way places and lives. Much about Brown’s life reminded me the novel The Book of Ebenezer Le Page, except Le Page and his author G.B. Edwards were Guernsey men where Brown was an Orkney man. Reading these books, I have been struck by their « sense of place », how firmly and deeply these characters take their identity from the small place where they were born and lived. I have wondered if it has to do with islands, or with rural traditions that have been somewhat undisturbed. I have also contrasted that with what seems like my complete lack of a sense of identity associated with the place—street, town, state, nation—where I grew up. I guess I do identify with the jocular idea of the Left Coast, but I also wonder bleakly if Americans are largely excluded from such deep-rootedness, what with our recent arrivals, our penchant for relocation and reinvention, the anonymity of urban living. I don’t know, nor even if one or the other modes of life is preferable.

In any case, it has made for an interesting reading path which is not yet done. I recommend looking up George MacKay Brown’s poetry.

[Anne-Marie · Rating 5 out of 5]

An exceptional biography of the life of Orkney poet George Mackay Brown. As a convert to Catholicism I was hoping he would have lived an exemplary life but he was human not a walking saint. Apart from a weakness for alcohol and one relationship with a divorced woman later in life he did a really good job of living his faith. His writing was incredible and his faith was very much part of what made him so good. He was a remarkable, well-loved man and his biographer is pretty incredible too.

[Carnegie Olson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I dabble in GMB and so far, only his poetry. I was inspired to read him and about him by way of a trip to Scotland which included a day trip to Orkney, indeed a special place. The ferry from the mainland begins the dreaminess that imbues the place, chugging along upon the ocean in the wind and unusual, silvery light. That one does not, somehow, long for trees there probably has something to do with all the things GMB writes or rather evokes about the little realm, namely, its quiet ancientness so bound to the sea and its neolithic and mythic significance, a curiously humble experience in person. It was green there in the summer but it is the memory of the rugged, dark stone strewn about in enormous craggy heaps, as if the gods turned over the Earth's crust with a giant spatula, that penetrates my bones. GMB, apparently mostly in spite of himself, led the typically unconventional life of a devoted writer and this biography almost manages to get you inside the man's own experience, a little victory.

[Christine Cather · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is good to find out about the man from someone allied to him who shares the desire of new readers of GMB to pull apart the surface layer and look down into the deep well he dwellt in.

It's a great gift indeed to be eventually able to read the man after my early years of feeling excluded from his texts.

[Paul F. · Rating 5 out of 5]

A brilliant biography

How does a writer sum up the life of another writer? By choosing just the jewels and setting them in spare, illuminating prose. I will read this book a few more times before I die.

[5greenway · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautifully written, fascinating subject, an exemplary biography, really

[Ginebra Lavao Lizcano · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good life recollection with beautiful fragments of Broon's writings in between.

[Scott Neil · Rating 5 out of 5]

A remarkable biography of a remarkable writer. George Mackay Brown is somewhat an enigmatic figure due to his avoidance of publicity and his life that was lived almost exclusively in the remote Orkney islands off the northeast coast of Scotland. Biographer Maggie Fergusson has done a sterling job collecting anecdotes and insights into Mackay Brown's life through his work, the people he knew and the letters he wrote and received from friends and colleagues.
Using short passages from Mackay Brown's own writings, his prose and his poetry, Fergusson illuminates his life - and it is a life that meanders through episodes of joy, tragedy, and love, and above all celebrates the work of a writer who treasures his surroundings, the islands of his birth, and through them creates some of the most outstanding literature of the 20th century.
I would say this is "the best biography of a poet I have ever read", but that commendation has already been given by A.N.Wilson and appears on the cover of the paperback edition. Suffice to say I completely concur with the sentiment and, having read Fergusson's well-researched and masterfully constructed biography, wish I might have met the great George Mackay Brown myself.
A book to be enjoyed and savoured.

[Angela Young · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the most wonderful wonderful biography. I didn't know much about George Mackay Brown until I read it, but it sent me scurrying to read his poetry and isn't that the mark of the best biographies, that they send you to the subject's work practically before you've finished the biography? I read Fergusson's beautifully-written account of Mackay Brown's life as if I were reading a poignant heartfelt novel. Her depiction of his reclusive and sometimes troubled nature is sympathetic but clear-eyed (not sentimental in the least) and the poem I still think about long after finishing the biography is Hamnavoe Market for its yearning and brilliantly-evoked pieces of magic from such an - apparently - ordinary event.

[Seonag · Rating 4 out of 5]

A well written book about a man whose life and writing is deeply fascinating - I got this book when on holiday in Stromness and I'm still being pulled by the place, the island, the poetry, the man, the spirit of the place.

[Peter · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a beautifully written biography that illuminates the many dark regions in the life of this complex writer who was, ultimately, simply a thoroughly decent human being.

[Richard Thomas · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very good evocation of our national poet (along with Edwin Muir) and novelist. With Ron Ferguson's book it gets to what made him tick and analyses his inspirations and muses.

[Sophie Breese · Rating 5 out of 5]

An absolute stunning biography of a much under-rated poet. Fergusson brings the man alive but with it his poetry and the landscape of his writing.