Poor Tom

The Scottish Fiction Reprint Library

by Edwin Muir, Peter Butter (Introduction)

Poor Tom tells of a young man’s struggle to come to terms with the slow death of his brother in the city slums of a culturally impoverished Scotland.

252 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1932

About the author

Edwin Muir, Orcadian poet, novelist and translator noted, together with his wife Willa Anderson, for making Franz Kafka available in English.

Between 1921 and 1923, Muir lived in Prague, Dresden, Italy, Salzburg and Vienna; he returned to the UK in 1924. Between 1925 and 1956, Muir published seven volumes of poetry which were collected after his death and published in 1991 as The Complete Poems of Edwin Muir. From 1927 to 1932 he published three novels, and in 1935 he came to St Andrews, where he produced his controversial Scott and Scotland (1936).

Reviews

[Leah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brotherly love…

Tom and Mansie Manson are brothers, Tom the younger by a couple of years. They live in Glasgow with their widowed mother and their cousin, Jean. The family originally came from Orkney, but their father had moved them to a farm on the mainland, and on his death they had come to Glasgow, as so many people did from the rural areas of Scotland in the early 1900s. Both young men have good, steady jobs, so they live comfortably though they’re far from wealthy. One day Tom spots Mansie coming out of the park with Helen, and this begins a feud between the brothers. For Helen had until recently been Tom’s girl, but when he pushed too hard against her sexual repressions, she had become scared of him and ended their relationship. Now she has taken up with Mansie, and Tom hates them both for what he sees as a betrayal.

That all sounds a bit like a romantic melodrama, but the story soon takes a much sadder, deeper turn. Tom becomes unwell and is diagnosed with a brain tumour, at that time inoperable and incurable. The story is mainly about Mansie and how this affects him, and is a very moving portrayal of coping with the decline and imminent death of a loved sibling. The feud is no longer important in the scheme of things, although Tom’s illness will impact on Mansie’s feelings towards Helen, as he finds he can no longer ignore the guilt he has up till then been able to keep buried. We also see how other members of the family and their friends deal with Tom’s illness, and Muir handles this with a great deal of sensitivity and insight, never making it more of a tragedy than it is, especially at a time when death among young people was more common than it is now.

Mansie has an unspecified but clearly quite good office job with good prospects, so that even in Tom’s illness he is able to keep the family from falling into poverty. As he travels around the city, though, walking or by tram, he sees the true poverty and filth of the slums. But he also sees the rush and drive of this city at the heart of empire and industrial revolution, providing opportunities for those with a modicum of education and the ambition to rise. He shows the resulting inequality – areas of great wealth jostling elbows with areas of miserable deprivation. And all of this creating the conditions for the rise of the new extreme political ideologies sweeping through the cities of Europe, especially among the young. The whole depiction of Glasgow in the early twentieth century is the most balanced I have come across in the fiction of the time, neither portraying it as some shining city of intellectuals and artists (like in the abysmal Open the Door!) nor concentrating wholly on the poverty and violence of the slums (as in No Mean City).

On arriving in Glasgow, Mansie had become ‘born again’ into the Baptist faith, though largely for the social life it gave him among like-minded young men than through any particular religious fervour – again, this was a feature of life for those who arrived as incomers to the city at that time, especially from the Highlands and Islands. Through his church friends, he has gradually been drawn into the Socialist societies growing in the city at this time, though his understanding of the philosophy underlying the politics is shallow and sometimes muddled. Muir shows the link between the church and early socialism, and also shows expertly the difference between those who adopt Socialism as a symbol of their own superiority and those who actually want to get down and dirty and drag the poor out of their poverty. Mansie is of the former sort – he is dazzled by the marches and the flag-waving and the quasi-intellectual debates in smoke-filled rooms, but he is scared of the poor and tries to avoid them as much as possible. That makes him sound quite unlikeable, but when he is hit with the tragedy of Tom’s illness, he steps up to the mark, helping his brother and his family as much as he can, and in the process he learns more about himself and begins to see through his own shallowness, and that of some of his Socialist friends. He begins to see that the doers may be more useful to society than the self-congratulatory thinkers.

Tom, on the other hand, had never been attracted by either church or politics. He is more earthy, and already at this young age is showing signs of developing the alcoholism that blights the working-classes. Muir avoids turning him into a saint on learning of his illness – he remains selfish and self-pitying to the end, though now perhaps with better cause. But his imperfection makes the sacrifices of his family more pointed, his mother’s quiet heartbreak moving me to tears more than once.

There are points when Muir drifts off into hifalutin philosophising for lengthy passages which could easily have been left out. His characters and depiction of the city do the work for him – his desire to spell things out at a more intellectual level is redundant. Otherwise, the mix of a moving personal story with an excellent depiction of Glasgow in all her different costumes means this short novel should have a place among the true Scottish classics. Unfortunately it seems to have been more or less forgotten, so I’m pleased that Canongate have republished it as part of their four-book collection, Growing Up In The West – hopefully that will bring it a new, more appreciative readership. 4½ stars for me, so rounded up.

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[Jack Deighton · Rating 3 out of 5]

Edwin Muir is better known as a poet but he wrote three novels of which this is the third.
The plot centres round the conflict arising when Tom Manson finds out his brother Mansie has begun seeing Helen Wiliamson, a girl whom Tom had previously walked out with.
This causes tension within the family, the brothers stop speaking to each other and Tom starts drinking to excess.
For a book published in 1932 and set in 1911 there is a considerable emphasis on sexual matters. Of the imaginings of becoming intimate with a woman we are told, “Such secret pleasures are exciting, but they leave a sense of guilt towards the object that was employed to produce them. Tom was filled with shame that such thoughts should come into his mind when he was with Helen, and told himself he was a waster.”
There is stress too on the attractions of Socialism to those of Mansie’s persuasion and social standing, and of the similarity of its tenets to Christianity.
Tom has a bad fall under the influence of drink and thereafter suffers a series of headaches which increasingly incapacitate him. Both he and Mansie (but not the reader) are confused by the doctors they consult about Tom’s condition asking whether he has ever associated with loose women.
As the illness progresses reconciliation occurs and we are treated more to Mansie’s reflections on having an invalid in the house.
As a novel this is not entirely successful. As an insight into aspects of life in pre-Great War Glasgow (the Mansons had moved there from a farm some time before the novel begins) it is certainly better than Guy McCrone’s books about the extended Moorhouse family.