A Scots Quair (71 page)

To
Hugh MacDiarmid

When
Grey Granite
was published at the end of 1934 it was advertised as the last volume of a trilogy. Yet many who had missed the first two novels were swept off their feet when they read it. This seems to have been the experience of Tom Wintringham, the influential editor of
Left
Review
, who termed it ‘the best novel written this side the Channel since Hardy stopped writing'.
1
And it was certainly that of the
Sheffield Daily Telegraph
reviewer, who was glad he had not come across the earlier volumes because, after the overpowering experience of
Grey Granite
, the ‘pleasure of their first perusal' was still to come (31 January 1935). Page Cooper of Doubleday (Gibbon's American publisher), who did of course know the other books, could not keep it out of her mind and found it ‘a bigger, more disturbing, and beautiful book than
Cloud Howe
. One hesitates to label anything with the word genius, but there isn't any other for the quality of his mind.'
2
Of those who went in for comparisons, the
New York Times
reviewer was almost as enthusiastic, calling it ‘Gibbon's most swiftly moving book and most adventurous in ideas' (3 February 1935). More significantly, perhaps, Gibbon's greatest Scottish contemporaries, Hugh MacDiarmid and Edwin Muir, both liked it: MacDiarmid enthusiastically, Muir less so (though he preferred it to its predecessors).
3

The majority of those who had read all three parts seem to have agreed with the
Glasgow Herald
in the judgment that is still, I think, standard among ‘common readers': ‘
Sunset Song
stands by itself, a good novel;
Cloud Howe
and
Grey Granite
are two rather ramshackle outhouses which have been added to it.' This, however, is to forget that Gibbon had planned a
trilogy from the first,
4
and to ignore the fact that each of the outhouses has its own effective structure, however different from nineteenth-century and Edwardian norms. Like all creative writers Gibbon had not worked out the total shape right at the start; once begun, the novels flowed with their own momentum and took on new features as he wrote. That his original title for
Cloud Howe
was
The Morning Star
indicates that he cannot at first have thought of organizing it around contrasting cloud-formations passing over the vale of the Mearns, but perhaps around heavenly bodies ironically conceived. And when he came to grips with
Grey Granite
he scrapped his original plan of a Prelude that would make the beginning of
Grey Granite
formally parallel to those of the earlier novels, with their milieux firmly set in place and time (this is given in the Appendix). The result is that Duncairn has depth, history, and background only for those in the know; for them, Gibbon's city is more like Aberdeen than Dundee, Glasgow or Edinburgh, and the glancing identifications and allusions provide, quietly and unobtrusively, many of the in-jokes of which Gibbon was so fond.
5
For the wider readership, Duncairn is an imaginary city, the crumbling backdrop to the personal and political paradigms set within it. The novel has thus a much freer form than
Sunset Song
, framed by Prelude and Epilude; its frame consists of two passages about Chris, where interior monologue deftly incorporates third-person narration. With the first, we begin
in medias res
with Chris—‘old at thirty-eight?'—puffing and panting as she lugs her groceries up the urban height of the Windmill Steps, and end with her in the countryside, above the croft she has ‘retired to', enigmatically losing consciousness on top of the Barmekin.

When Gibbon began
Sunset Song
he told his wife the whole trilogy was to be written round ‘a woman',
6
and the framing just mentioned seems to show that this is as true of
Grey
Granite
as it is of the earlier novels. But Chris, though as moving and convincing as ever, is in a sense peripheral to the main action, the growth and development of her son Εwan, which parallels and contrasts with her own rural adolescence
in
Sunset Song
. The book's four sections are called after different constituents of granite: Epidote (a greenish silicate of calcium, aluminium, and iron), Sphene (whose crystals are wedge-shaped and which contains the element titanium—strong, light, corrosion-resistant), Apatite (consisting of calcium phosphate and fluoride), and Zircon (‘a tetragonal mineral, of which jacinth and jargoon are varieties'—jacinth is reddish orange, and jargoon brilliant and colourless). They mirror the stages in Ewan's transformation into the kind of person required by the stark, sure creed that will cut like a knife:

Gibbon's theme reflects one of the commonest spiritual sequences of the thirties—the process whereby a bourgeois intellectual came to join the Communist Party and decided to give over his life to it. Many have felt with Isobel Murray that ‘the greatest weakness of the book is the character and role of Ewan';
7
others have seen in him its main strength. That was certainly Eric Linklater's view before he had even finished it. He has left a unique record of his immediate responses in a letter written towards the end of 1934:

The function of the granite symbolism is to highlight Ewan's willed transformation into the ‘more than human': Ewan comes to be like granite just as Stalin means steel and
Molotov means hammerman. He inherits from Chris a still centre, a refusal to be anything other than himself, an aloofness that others find unsympathetic and haughty. He respects what Gibbon sees as the cool detachment of science and is utterly blind to the arts; his sense of humour is, to put it mildly, limited, and at one point Chris says, ‘human beings were never of much interest to him.' Yet it would be wrong to say he is emotionless; it is merely that he can keep his ordinary feelings under control—his admiring affection for Chris, his detestation of what breeds nauseous slums and stunts the wretched of the earth, his contempt for the inchoate, the indecisive, and the second-rate. His most intense emotions are those of the communist mystic, which come on him towards the end of the novel, an essentially religious identification with the enslaved and the exploited throughout recorded history. They are only made possible by what Ewan learns in the factory, the working-class movement, and the police cell, but they are rooted in a character trait he displayed even in boyhood, in his friendship for Charlie Cronin the spinner's son and his strange bond with old Moultrie, survival from an age of pre-industrial knacks and skills, who on his deathbed shared with Ewan the precious essence of the old ways (
Cloud Howe
, Canongate Classics edition, p.192). They also link him to Chris and show that despite his crystalline hardness, his sensibility is akin to hers—to the Chris who in her girlhood saw visions of prehistoric hunters and farmers and identified with the tortured Covenanters in the Whigs' Vault at Dunnottar.

William K. Malcolm, in what is perhaps the best critical presentation of Ewan to date,
9
draws attention to his literary precursors in the Soviet Pantheon, and links him to the Russian and international debate over the nature of the Communist Hero and how to present him. He sees Gorki's
Mother
(1906) and Gladkov's
Cement
(1925) as the most important analogues, and Ewan's brusque rejection of Ellen as being in their tradition, where ‘the protagonist demonstrates his heroic fortitude … by resisting the threat made to his greater political destiny by romantic involvement'
(p.161). But it is not strictly correct to speak of a ‘socialist realist' influence here: the dogma was not theoretically formulated until 1934, and therefore could have had no influence on either
Mother
or
Cement
. Orthodox communists have always criticized Gibbon's presentation of Ewan. They have felt that the ideal communist leader should be warm, sympathetic, many-sided, and richly human—all the things that socialist realism said he should be, and which Ewan is not. His coldly analytic mind drives him to extreme and ‘super-revolutionary' conclusions, to ‘an intellectualized and at times inhuman conception of the workers' struggle for Socialism', and his remarks on tactics do not in the least resemble the real communist tactics of the time; they are pure fantasy on Gibbon's part.
10
But the whole course of history since 1934 seems to show that they were not fantasy. The book is dedicated to Hugh MacDiarmid, and as early as 1926, in the
First Hymn to Lenin
, MacDiarmid had proclaimed that the horrors of the Cheka were not merely necessary but even insignificant when compared with the role of Death in the whole Cosmos, and had asked

Solzhenitsyn has shown how the Leninist Cheka was a precursor of the Yezhov terror, and it is only a step from MacDiarmid's lines to ‘What maitters't what lies we tell, or how we deceive the poor lumpen proles?', since we, whatever our actual social origins,
are
the working class, and
our
will is the ‘real will' of the proletariat, whether they know it or not. Jim Trease makes the point, at first grimly joking:

Or again, when Ewan is with Trease and his wife:

In 1934 fascism seemed in the ascendant in Europe, and possible even in Britain. Beyond the novel's open end there lies for Ewan, as Gibbon saw it, a brief spell as a full-time communist organizer and a long period when he would ‘hunger, work illegally, and be anonymous', through ‘a generation of secret agitation and occasional terrorism'. As things actually turned out in Britain and the world, Ewan might well have fought in Spain with the International Brigade, then spent several years as a industrial organizer in Scotland and the English midlands before ending up as one of the leaders of the British Communist Party. But in both the Ewan-Trease vision of a fascist Britain and the ‘real' future, Ewan would have had to live through the Moscow trials and the Stalin purges: he would have had to justify what he knew to be false in the interest of what his theory told him was the lesser evil. Many communists tricked themselves into believing that the accused were always guilty, that there were only a very few labour camps, that socialist planning in the East was economically successful. Ewan, as Gibbon presents him, would have faced up to the truth in private and deliberately suppressed it for the public. And if the communists had come to power in Britain, a mature Ewan, given his attitude to ends and means at the end of
Grey Granite
, might have been capable of sending comrades and rivals to their deaths after a show trial—or else of stoically signing his own confession if the Party decided that he was the one to be sacrificed.

It is Ewan's final scene with Ellen that shows the New Man most appallingly in action. Though Ellen is depicted critically
—she is about to ‘sell out' to ordinary values—yet she was after all the person who helped him through his psychological crisis after police torture, and she is consistently straight and above board in her dealings with others. Ewan rejects her in the most brutal way possible:

As Deirdre Burton has put it, ‘It is that recourse to the irrelevant insults of sexuality that finally marks Ewan out as the person of limited vision, limited growth—both personal and political.'
11
Yet, horrified, we empathize with him in his rejection. Writing with hindsight in the years after communism's collapse from within, one is impressed by Gibbon's refusal to endorse Ewan's ethics in this scene, and by the deft impressionism with which he portrays his flawed hero.

Because ideas play such a large part in
A Scots Quair
there has been a tendency for critics to impose an abstract ‘meaning' on the trilogy as a whole. What is certain is that, as Edwin Muir put it, Gibbon ‘was firmly convinced that man once lived a life of innocence and happiness' in the Golden Age of the Gay Hunters; ‘but all his impetuous energy was concentrated on drawing the vital conclusion from this, which was that by breaking the bonds imprisoning him man can live again.' He certainly believed that revolutionary communism was the sword to cut those bonds; but he had also, to continue with Muir's appreciation, ‘a passionate devotion to such things as truth, justice and freedom, and a belief in their ultimate victory that nothing could shake'.
12
In the beginning he seems to have seen the
Quair
as propaganda for socialist action (‘I am a revolutionary writer … all my books are explicit or implicit propaganda', Letter in
Left Review
, February 1935); but the fact surely is that in the white heat of composition it turned into a method of
thinking
about contemporary morals and politics in aesthetic terms—thinking
by means of the images which we call characters. Gibbon's aesthetic thought points to conclusions somewhat different from the sort he was accustomed to formulate in articles or arguments with friends. As Ewan says: