George Mackay Brown, The Life,
by Maggie Fergusson.

. . . biographies are likely to be either acts of worship or acts of destruction and the best ones have elements of both . . .

Maggie Fergusson’s George Mackay Brown: The Life is an exception to Humphrey Carpenter’s dictum. Neither uncritical adulation, asserting the popular subject’s excellence as person or artist, nor a debunking exercise of the kind so often following hard upon an author’s death, her Life is an outstanding work of research which no-one interested in George Mackay Brown can afford to be without.

Why would anyone wish to write the biography of an apparently reclusive author, to whom little of note seems to have happened – according to his own accounts – and how could it sustain “womb to tomb” treatment of meagrely unpromising material?

The first question is easy to answer: Brown was a writer of great distinction, whose reputation was well established and continuing to grow, up to his death in April, 1996.

Insights into his habits of thought and composition and information about events and individuals influencing them, would be welcomed as far as they contributed towards understanding of the work.

Maggie Fergusson has answered the second query in this substantial volume. On the face of it, she did not have much to build on.

There were Brown’s essays on different phases of his life, most of them guarded, elegant and short, going over a few incidents and anecdotes so frequently as to approach the formulaic.

That posthumously issued, canny “autobiography”, For the Islands I Sing (1997), well worth having, was as notable, almost, one felt, for what it left out, as for what Brown chose to include.

More promising resources were the portrayals of his parents, again published after his death (1999).

Apart from selecting and assimilating skilfully within her story, what she thought relevant, from that rather skimpy collection, Maggie Fergusson has cast her net wide and deep.

Well versed in all the secondary publications, she has supplemented and excelled them through interviews and correspondence with a host of Brown’s acquaintances and admirers.

Even more informative and engrossing are extracts from Brown’s letters to her and his voluminous communication with three women whom he held in high regard.

There are almost 900 quotations attributed in this book, which, however, is anything but a scissors-and-paste compilation.

So “organically” do the passages employed arise from, illustrate or comment on what has gone before, that the effect is persuasively integrated.

More, the biographer’s familiarity with Brown’s work and relationships does not lead her to present a narrative which caters for particular readers’ expectations – even demands: “What often gets in the way of telling truths about someone’s life is not the biographer’s distortions or myopia, but the reader’s preconceptions about what should be there, the way it should be told, and the conclusions which should be drawn” (Norman White).

Maggie Fergusson avoids this “agenda”, able to state conflicting views, give the detail in support of them and, crucially, bear out Lyndall Gordon’s contention that “. . . it’s all really about a meeting between the biographer and the subject” by making up her own mind and making it known in a style which is both graceful and vigorous.

A most attractive feature of the book is the persuasive voice and presence of GMB. Setting aside fine pieces of his published works, we find him in speaking and letter-writing mode repeatedly, through quotation, paraphrase, echo and the anecdotes of others.

Maggie Fergusson has done her readers a great service by offering so many of Brown’s hitherto unpublished thoughts clothed in his distinctive images, tones and rhythms.

Not everyone may agree. Three years before his death, Brown wrote about the Selected Letters of Philip Larkin (1992): “. . .why did they have to go and publish his letters, so soon after his death in 1985? Letters are very intimate communications, meant for the recipient and no-one else. At least a half-century should pass before they see the light; whereas many people still alive are certain to be hurt by things in them.”

For my own part, I have no cavil with the biographer on this account. While one can understand Brown’s point of view, coloured significantly by letters he had written and was continuing to produce, no doubt, much of their content seems hardly likely to give rise to pain of recollection or association when released into the public domain.

Those letters which reveal writer and/or recipient to be the prey of physical or psychological ills seem to me to reveal a complexity of feeling and motivation which has gone largely unsuspected, strong as its influence was on particular periods of the writer’s life and on the works inspired by it.

Maggie Fergusson’s book combines virtues which many biographers have found impossible to exhibit. Her chronological treatment begins with a vivid description of the historical, geographical and dramatic context in which Brown has to be considered.

Like the provision of necessary background at various points in her story, this is most admirably done: “Following the shoreline, a flagstoned street winds a mile from one end of the town to the other. To the seaward side, squat, thick-walled fishermen’s houses are built into the rock, gable-ends to the road, standing out into the harbour like stone arks . . .”

The author demonstrates this mastery of the evocative detail and phrase throughout, maintaining a pace and wealth of particularities to carry forward the theme of a chapter, relating one phase of Brown’s life to others and never having recourse to the extremes of over-writing or eking out.

This structure allows her “to animate certain key moments or turning points”, as described by Ian Hamilton, when he became aware of how difficult it was to employ the method in the “cradle-to-grave life” of an author he had to abandon.

The key, defining junctures in Brown’s life are well-known, from infancy until the late 1950s–early ’60s: childhood, ending with enrolment in “The Prison on the Hill”, school; awareness of literature; his father’s death; contracting tuberculosis and hospitalisation; joining The Orkney Herald as its Stromness correspondent; residence at Newbattle Abbey College; recurrence of severe illness and matriculation at the University of Edinburgh.

All these are accorded space and emphasis appropriate to their place in Brown’s development, with Maggie Fergusson not shrinking from a playful swipe at the “prickly pomposity” of some articles in which he postured or refusing to note how Brown behaved in (temporary) enslavement by alcohol. “Very quickly, George was drinking as hard as his purse and guts would allow, sometimes sousing himself so thoroughly in alcohol that he suffered delirium tremens.” No dodging the issue, but honest reporting in a downright manner.

Realism of this type, evident in accounts of how Brown was affected by TB, becomes common when the later “turning points” are chronicled: the path to entering the Catholic Church did cause him much heart – and head – searching, but the drink and depression were to have immediate and long-lasting effects.

Maggie Fergusson’s narration of these troubles is frank and moving. So too is her examination of his claim that he had never loved or been loved by a woman: “‘I never fell in love with anybody, and no woman ever fell in love with me.’

“The truth is less straightforward.”

Illnesses come and go, or are repelled or tolerated; books are written; a number of memorable characters move through the pages (Ian MacInnes, Edwin and Willa Muir, Ernest Marwick, Jimmy I., Archie and Elizabeth Bevan, Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, Seamus Heaney, Attie Campbell and Billy Evans, Charles Senior, John Broom, Norman MacCaig, Gerald Meyer and many of Brown’s family) but the second half of this book is dominated by relationships with three women.

While the writer was quick to form adverse judgements about places and their inhabitants, only to find they had much to respect and cherish (Aberdeen, page 88, Dalkeith 104, Paisley 115 and Edinburgh 139), he was equally liable to become infatuated with the beauty and intellectual qualities he saw in these Muses.

The biographer traces the various stages in the relationships, describing Brown’s tenderness, even when initial raptures had passed. She examines comments and speculation about the man’s sexuality, with copious quotation from the women involved, correspondence and observers.

To many, the nature of Brown’s sexual identity and experience may not seem to have much to do with his progress as a literary artist.

Maggie Fergusson shows that in fact all three women had an instant effect on Brown’s writing: “This sense of being profoundly understood by another human being, perhaps for the first time in his life, had an invigorating effect on George’s poetry . . .” (page 155).

Anyone interested in the personalities concerned can look them up in the book’s very useful index.

Humphrey Carpenter, himself a great biographer, declared, “I always feel in each life that there is some hidden story or fact, some echo, which when you got hold of it, begins to unravel the whole thing. You still won’t get the complete truth about that person, but you’ll get the kind of truth that works within its own terms.”

I take these “terms” to include penetrating insight into Brown’s work, patient accumulation of material; convincing interpretation supported by specific references and understanding of the subject based on how the latter appeared to his biographer.

According to these criteria, Maggie Fergusson’s Life is a great success, Brown’s little-known love-story the element which “begins to unravel the whole thing.”

Brown looked back on a piece of writing he had longed to do. At last opportunity and inspiration coalesced: “Not every boy has his heart’s ambition realised sixteen years later. I wrote the report with relish. And believe me, I enjoyed doing it. Across the gulf of years, I had kept the faith.”

Maggie Fergusson has kept faith with her intention to write Brown’s story “before the silence subsumes it.”

In the course of this review a number of biographers have been mentioned. I am certain Maggie Fergusson is up there with them.

This is a distinguished example of the art of biography, beautifully produced in every respect.

It should gain many awards, but the greatest prize to be associated with it is the enjoyment readers will have in acquiring substantial quantities of Brown material mediated in a way which is at once sympathetic and professional.

Go and buy the book before Books and Prints runs out!

Brian Murray

Brian Murray is the co-author of Interrogation of Silence: The Writings of George Mackay Brown and has helped edit several compilations of Brown’s work, with Archie Bevan.