Sunset Song

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A short biography of Lewis Grassic Gibbon (James Leslie Mitchell) and a brief summary of his published works. One of the comments above suggests the important point that what Gibbon was seeing is an east of Scotland more than a west of Scotland feature. While that would be hard to establish objectively, I think the east-west divide has roots deep in the nature of the land. The fact that the east is mostly fertile agricultural soil long made it a magnet for consolidated feudal power, based on coercion and the normalisaiton of violence. That’s not to say that there wasn’t also violence on the west coast. There was plenty, and brutally so like the Eigg massacre. But this was more within an indigenous framework where matters were easier to process locally through time – a case more of lateral violence (equitably, from the side) than vertical violence (from top down, and hard to engage with, thereby the pressure spilling out laterally). In the west, indigenous communities could be more themselves for longer because, until the Cheviot came in and the clearances began, the land was not worth grabbing and settling in for anything much other than subsistence. I suspect that in the west with Iona etc., Christian influence was also stronger, and the bardic tradition that it built on carried a kind of immunity in conflict that gave the culuture richer roots through which reconciliations might be effected. It is said that Grassic Gibbon (just 33 years of age when he died, even younger than that other Scottish genius Robert Burns at the time of his death) wrote this masterpiece in six weeks. In doing so, he gifted us one of the finest literary accomplishments Scotland has ever known. Sunset Song is profound. It is heartbreaking but ultimately uplifting and life affirming. It tells a story of a Scotland that, in some senses, is no more, yet, in others, still lives in the hearts of each and every one of us.

Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s classic novel of love, war and rural life laid out the tensions between the old and the new Scotland. He replied: ‘It tells the story of peasants the world over’ and I understood exactly what he meant.

Though it will scandalise much of the neighbourhood, Chris is going to marry this minister, Robert Colquhoun, who evokes a rich past (for all its hardships and cruelties) and fears for the future. “So, lest we shame them, let us believe that the new oppressions and foolish greeds are no more than mists that pass. They died for a world that is past, these men, but they did not die for this that we seem to inherit.”

Mitchel was a socialist, a communist even. The garden city movement has complex origins but a good part of them are in the idealism of the cooperative and Arts and Crafts movements and the developing traditions of the trade Union movement. Welwyn Garden City had an active communist party branch and a relatively skilled and well organised work force drawn from working class communities right across the UK as well as strong non conformist and artistic communities. Grassic Gibbon died in 1935, at the age of just 33, from peritonitis, brought on by a perforated ulcer. But he has left behind an indelible legacy. My mother’s people were itinerant (‘migrant’) agricultural servants. My great-grandmother on my grandmother’s side and my grandfather both reminisced about the quarterly hiring fairs, where they would seek a seasonal position in return for a fee in lieu of bed and board or (when they had no dependents) for bed and board itself as part of the farmer’s household. In his last ‘place’, in the early 1960s, when he was in his 70s, my grandfather and grandmother were, in return for service, provided with a single room in a two-roomed cottage, the other room of which served as a tractor shed. In her later years, when she retired from itinerant fieldwork as an outdoor servant and ‘settled down’, my great-grandmother found a more-or-less permanent place as a cheesemaker in a farm dairy, which provided her with a living until she could no longer work, whereupon she became dependent on my grandmother. I think one has also got to be careful about attributing this harshness to Scotland rather than to Victorian and Edwardian generations. My father was not British and although he wrote tenderly of his father after his father’s death in his diary as kind, dedicated and faithful (that’s my memory of my grandfather too) he commented to me once that in the generations before his father (i.e. my father’s grandfather, Stefan, born around 1860) that people of that time seemed to be hard and judgemental. But that ‘nowadays’ (1980s) people were kinder and more inclined to want to assist those who had fallen on hard times rather than judge them as weak, profligate, or failures. I assume you would be equally dismissive of any attempt to discuss “Frenchness” or “Italianness” or “Russianness” on the basis that any such discussion must inevitably lead to “exclusion”.’I agree with some of what you say, but I think, in your determination to warn of the dangers of nationalism, you throw the baby out with the bathwater. Your assertion that there will soon be no ‘normal’ culture to which we can refer is dubious – the only question is, what will that culture be like. Why can’t the new ‘normal’ culture be characterised by its diversity?’ Thank you for your care. You have drawn for my attention many things I hadnie even considered when I first read – and was transported by –‘Sunset Song’– in the early 1960s. And thus enriched my appreciation of the contorted heritage we Scots have. One can make a case for other Scottish books, by Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Walter Scott, Muriel Spark, the collected poems of Robert Burns or more recent authors.

Lewis Grassic Gibbon, whose real name was James Leslie Mitchell, was born in Aberdeenshire in 1901. After working as a journalist on the Scottish Farmer and becoming involved in left-wing politics, he joined the army in 1919, and served in the Royal Army Service Corps and RAF before settling down in Hertfordshire and beginning his writing career. Grassic Gibbon’s experience in the military informed his fiction, and, although he did not fight in the First World War, Sunset Song taught me more about that conflict – its human impact and consequences – than I would have learned in a dozen textbooks. At some passages, I cried, moved more deeply by a book than I had ever been before.The book is many things, a powerful fictional response to the First World War and its impact on a small rural community, a hymn to the natural beauties of the north east and its language and people as well as a lament for a way of life that is coming to an end. It is also a realistic account of rural life in Scotland with its privations and occasional brutalities. It is above all else though a book about Chris Guthrie and her path through life from a wide-eyed adolescent to a worldly-wise woman of 24. Along the way she suffers terribly, knows the pain of loss and the fulfilment of love but never loses sight of the beauty and power of the land around her. When it was published in 1932 it was an immediate commercial and critical success and it has never been out of print. It is now regarded as a classic and in 2016 was voted Scotland’s favourite novel in a BBC poll. The novel endures just as Chris Guthrie endures.