George Mackay Brown

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The line quoted at the beginning of this article is from a poem in the book called Churchill Barriers. These barriers were built during World War II, partly to protect Scapa Flow, where a Nazi submarine had torpedoed a British battleship with great loss of life, and partly to make road crossings (instead of boat crossings) between several of the southern islands.

By early 1977, he was entering a period of depression which lasted intermittently for almost a decade, but maintained his working routine throughout. [57] He also had severe bronchial problems, his condition becoming so serious that in early 1981 he was given the Last Sacraments. [58] I also admired the novel's highly physical yet deeply religious sense of sacrifice, both primitive and Christian. In ancient Orkney, Brown wrote, "the animals honoured the god … with their broken flesh and spilled blood … I speak of priests, a solemn sacred ritual, lustrations, sacrifice. The kneeling beast, the cloven skull, the scarlet axe, the torrent of blood gurgling into the earth at the time of the new sun, the hushed circle of elders." And "when the hands of the priest and the elders dabble in the blood, the whole tribe is washed clean of its blemishes." Centuries and civilizations later, a newer and ultimately similar sacrifice graced a 12th-century kirk: Anyone familiar with Brown's own disingenuous "autobiography" For the Islands I Sing might have expected Fergusson's book to be slim: Brown was born in Orkney in 1921 and died there in 1996. Aside from six years as a mature student, he seldom left the islands. No marriage, no children. He wasn't gay. His father was a postman. After he died, Brown lived with his mother. After she died, he lived alone. Nigel Wheale is the author of Raw Skies: New and Selected Poems (Shearsman 2005) and The Six Strides of Freyfaxi (Oystercatcher 2010). His academic texts include The Postmodern Arts (Routledge 1995) and Writing & Society: Literacy, Print and Politics in Britain 1590-1660 (Routledge 1999). An archive of his work for the Fortnightly may be found here. Robb offered his own elaboration on Brown’s sensibilities. “In Brown’s eyes the immense materialism of the current age and its craving for novelty are directly opposed to all his favorite values, which are, at base, religious,” the essayist wrote. “Brown’s values stress at least three equally important strands. He holds to the age-old religious rejection of material things as distracting, irrelevant novelties; his ideal of human life is of simplicity and, indeed, poverty. At both the personal and communal levels, furthermore, he sees human life in the present as requiring a rootedness in knowledge of the past and in the traditions deriving from the past.”

Beginnings

Between 1987 and 1989, George travelled to Nairn, including a visit to Pluscarden Abbey, journeyed around Shetland – another world of wonder – and eventually took the train down to Oxford, making it the longest time he had left Orkney since his earlier studies in Edinburgh. Brown was a poet who looked across modern Orkney with a sense of history, a preference for the past, and the persuasive idea that time will tell. The second book was unusual in its genesis. Brown's writing and Gunnie Moberg's photographs have been published side-by-side before. But on this occasion, the poems were written in direct response to the photographs. The Swedish-born photographer, who has lived on Orkney for 20 years (and in Scotland for almost 30) was not asked to illustrate a text; the procedure was the other way around.

In late 1960, Brown commenced teacher training at Moray House College of Education, but ill health prevented him remaining in Edinburgh. On his recovery in 1961, he found he was not suited to teaching and returned late in the year to his mother's house in Stromness, unemployed. [24] At this juncture he was received into the Roman Catholic Church, converting from Presbyterianism of his childhood [25] [26] being baptised on 23 December and taking communion the next day. This followed about 25 years of pondering his religious beliefs. The conversion was not marked by any change in his daily habits, including his drinking. [27] Maturity as poet [ edit ] Selected Poems, 1954-1983, J. Murray (London), 1991, reprinted as Selected Poems, 1954-1992, University of Iowa Press (Iowa City, IA), 1996.

Further Reading

Bardic and mystical, Brown found Orkney a "microcosm of all the world." Born in 1921 in the town of Stromness, he developed tuberculosis at the age of 20. Only a decade later could he resume his formal education, studying under the Orkney poet Edwin Muir at Newbattle Abbey near Edinburgh. Despite recurring illness, he did an English degree at Edinburgh University (1956–60) and graduate work on the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins (1962–64). In 1961, rejecting what he called a "life-denying" Scots Calvinism, he became a Roman Catholic—a rarity in Presbyterian Orkney—and deepened his sense of sacramentality and of liturgical festival.

Brown studied English literature at the University of Edinburgh. [19] After publication of poems in a literary magazine, with the help of Muir, [20] Brown had a second volume, Loaves and Fishes, published by the Hogarth Press in 1959. It was warmly received. [21] Between 1987 and 1989, Brown travelled to Nairn, including a visit to Pluscarden Abbey, to Shetland and to Oxford, making it the longest time he had left Orkney since his earlier studies in Edinburgh. The Oxford visit coincided with the centenary of the death of Gerard Manley Hopkins. [70] It might have been genetic – his family had a history of depression and George’s uncle, Jimmy Brown, may have committed suicide: his body was found in Stromness harbour in 1935. Under Brinkie's Brae (essays), photographs by Gordon Wright, Gordon Wright Publishing (Edinburgh, Scotland), 1979.And, although four decades had passed, George had never forgotten meeting and savouring the company of his peers. After leaving school, George worked in the Post Office until, aged just 20, he was diagnosed with tuberculosis. Recovery took him several years, but whilst he recuperated, George spent much of his time reading and writing. He discovered The Orkneyinga Saga during that time and in Saint Magnus, George found a fascinating figure. Magnus was a Viking Earl who had sacrificed himself to end a bitter civil war in Orkney.

Brown suffered from severe tuberculosis throughout the early part of his life. Long hospital stays and enforced idleness encouraged him to read and write, and in the periods when he was healthy he studied literature and poetry in educational settings. As an adult he rarely strayed far from Orkney, but his collaborations in play, opera, and musical form teamed him notably with British composer Peter Maxwell Davies. Among the Brown-Davies collaborations are operas based on Brown’s stories, including The Martyrdom of St. Magnus and The Two Fiddlers (1977) as well as a sampling of shorter choral works. These and a variety of other projects, from children’s literature to Orkney travel guides, rounded out Brown’s busy and productive writing career. He haunts the town hotel, ‘perched on the high stool in the corner of the bar’, where he holds forth, reading from his history. He gives a compacted, but compelling version of the long and complex story of the islands. Skarf – his name derives from Old Norse, meaning ‘to cut and join’, a term still found in timber boat-building. His language is ambitious – ‘In all the confusions of anabasis, domination, settlement that followed …’. ‘Anabasis’, a military advance into the interior of a territory, and the title of an epic poem written by the French diplomat, ‘Saint-John Perse’ (Alexis Leger), published in 1930 by T. S. Eliot, in translation made by Eliot working with the author. Had George Brown read Anabasis? There are lines and passages in the French poem that come very close to his preoccupations – ‘great turf-burnings seen afar and these operations channelling the living waters on the mountain’. 5 Reviewing the author's collection A Time to Keep and Other Stories in The New York Times Book Review in 1987, Sheila Gordon wrote that in his "marvelous stories," the author "holds us in the same way the earliest storyteller held the group around the fire in an ancient cave." A Calendar of Love (also see below), Hogarth, 1967, published as A Calendar of Love, and Other Stories, Harcourt, 1968.In the following review, Olson finds the stories of Brown's Winter Tales "as poetic as any of his verse."] The poet himself decided what he wanted to record. I realised afterwards that he was making a critical selection, and that some of his texts had apparently been already consigned to the outer darkness. This habit of rigorous self-criticism was to become more evident in later years, and was to cause his editors some heart-searching when they came to establishing the definitive texts of the Collected Poems.” Beside the Ocean of Time (1994) shortlisted for Booker Prize and judged Scottish Book of the Year by the Saltire Society Brown was a mature student at Newbattle Abbey College in the 1951–1952 session, [15] where the poet Edwin Muir, who had a great influence on his life as a writer, was warden. [16] His return for the following session was interrupted by recurrent tuberculosis. [17] While Brown's concerns are the times and history—the folk history above all—of the place that absorbed him, Moberg mainly provides a sense of the landscape, both near and far.