John Buchan and the Idea of Modernity

Kate Macdonald, Nathan Waddell, Kate Macdonald, Nathan Waddell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317319832
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Considered a quintessentially 'popular' author, John Buchan was a writer of fiction, journalism, philosophy and Scottish history. By examining his engagement with empire, psychoanalysis and propaganda, the contributors to this volume place Buchan at the centre of the debate between popular culture and the modernist elite.

1
The Roots that Clutch: John Buchan, Scottish Fiction and Scotland

Douglas Gifford

John Buchan’s thrillers, from The Thirty-Nine Steps in 1915 onwards, with his war histories, qualify him securely as a writer of modernity, depicting modern technologies in narratives predicated on speed, with an awareness of the modern reader’s political and cultural environment. Yet this writing was the work of a middle-aged man, who arrived at this moment of modern creativity with a twenty-year career behind him. Buchan’s writing was first published in 1893, and his first fiction was in the realist, Victorian tradition of the historical novel, beginning with Sir Quixote of the Moors in 1895. It is important to understand that Buchan first began to write in the tradition of Scottish historical fiction begun by Sir Walter Scott and continued in the work of Robert Louis Stevenson and others: ‘most of John Buchan is to be found in Stevenson’.¹ While Buchan was faithful to many of the principles set down by Scott, he also brought in, for instance, a new scepticism, in Sir Quixote (1895) and in A Lost Lady of Old Years (1899), that would be echoed in later fictions now recognised as expressing a completely modern refusal to offer contented closure in the novel: George Douglas Brown’s The House with the Green Shutters (1901) is a strong example.² At the earlier end of the nineteenth century, Scott used historical fiction as a modern and satiric critique of Scottish history and Scotland’s relationship with England and Empire. Buchan too critiques Scotland’s subaltern relationship³ with Empire, in Prester John (1910), and certain of his short stories, particularly ‘“Divus” Johnson’ (1913).⁴ Thus this chapter seeks to root Buchan’s development as a twentieth-century modern in his Scottish origins, and to foreground the importance to his fiction of this earlier trend in the historical mode.

By the time Buchan went to Oxford in October 1895, he had already studied for two years at, but not graduated from, the University of Glasgow. At the age of 19 he had already published his edition of the Essays and Apothegms of Francis Lord Bacon (1894); was about to see his first novel in print, Sir Quixote of the Moors (1895); and would soon publish the essay volume Scholar Gipsies (1896). Later biographers and critics have tended to pass over the productivity of this period, preferring to emphasize Buchan’s Oxford career and connections. The paperback editions of 1956 carried his son’s biographical note, which omitted any mention of Glasgow University, and claimed that Buchan at nineteen went as a scholar to Oxford. From this time on, despite Janet Adam Smith’s careful recovery of his Glasgow days, popular appreciation of Buchan has tended to minimize the importance of his Scottish cultural roots.

This chapter claims that important aspects of Buchan’s fiction have been underestimated. Firstly, I suggest that Buchan was more indebted to Scottish literature than has been recognized. There is a significant tradition of Scottish historical and social fiction, with its indigenous themes, patterns and symbolism, and its own deconstructive agenda, that runs from the novels of Sir Walter Scott and Waverley in 1814, James Hogg and John Galt in the earlier part of the nineteenth century right through to Buchan’s Witch Wood in 1927. Buchan’s Scottish historical fiction has its roots in this tradition, and draws inspiration from it, as we see in discussions by Smith, David Daniell, Francis Russell Hart, and Kate Macdonald.⁵

In Robert Louis Stevenson’s Scottish fiction (beginning in 1886 with Kidnapped, and ending in 1898 with St Ives) there is a significant extension of Scottish fiction of the earlier period, with its satiric yet ultimately regenerative criticism of Scottish history and culture. Later serious nineteenth-century novelists, led by Stevenson, reflected a mood of sceptical disgust in their work at what they saw as unquestioning acceptance by the mid-Victorians of pious interpretations of Scotland’s past and the values attached to them, culminating in 1901 with Brown’s bitter subversion of sentimental Scottish writing in The House with the Green Shutters. Stevenson was followed by Neil Munro (Scottish fiction published from 1896 to 1923). Buchan was Munro’s only real rival after Stevenson in the sustained subversion of Scottish historical romanticism. However, there are others, including Andrew Lang, Samuel Rutherford Crockett and Arthur Conan Doyle and, later, Violet Jacob and Naomi Mitchison. We know that Buchan knew and admired the work of these writers, and that he knew many of them personally.⁶

I discuss the significant qualities of the Scottish historical tradition in fiction here, what Buchan owes to it and why the debt has not been recorded. Thereafter, I look at the roots that held for all his life, despite his acquired English persona, and suggest that in the constant movement between his dual Scottish and English identities, Buchan’s creative position is an example of the predicament of the modern Scottish writer who had to respond to the often en irreconcilable claims of Scottish and British identity, audience and values, in a literary context of increasing aggression between the competing constituencies of Scottish modernism and Victorian literary tradition. In conclusion, I focus on the dominant concepts which Buchan inherited from his Scottish and Free Church background (such as destiny, providence and sacrifice) and how, like Stevenson before him, he used the ideas of chance and the random in his fiction as means of escape from their strictures.⁷ Throughout this, I ask whether escape was perhaps impossible, and whether the oscillation between developing a creative identity and the exterior pressures of writing for emerging modern readerships created a damaging restlessness throughout Buchan’s life and work, so that he never completely fulfilled his potential.

Scott and Scottish Fiction

In his poem ‘Scotland 1941’, the poet and critic Edwin Muir, despairing of the survival of indigenous Scottish literature and language, labels both Burns and Scott as ‘sham bards of a sham nation’.⁸ Likewise, writers from Carlyle to E. M. Forster, as well as modern critics like John Sutherland, have not been kind to Scott. There is however an opposing school of criticism which finds a much greater achievement in Scott.⁹ It is increasingly recognized that an effective subversion of Scottish historical and social Romanticism is the keynote of Scott’s fiction in, for example, Waverley (1814), Old Mortality (1816) and The Heart of Midlothian (1818). The great Scott novels are presented through ‘insipid’ non-heroes, trapped protagonists witnessing religious and Jacobite civil wars, and the novels illustrate the divided values and vicious decadence of an ancient and poor nation. Superficially romantic Highland chiefs are revealed as ruthless egotists; Covenanters and Royalists are equally warped in their bigotry; and the Scottish legal system is often en depicted as blind and greedy. These themes occur again in Buchan’s Sir Quixote and A Lost Lady, and elsewhere, but with more bite by being expressed in a more modern idiom, and with greater immediacy.

Scott’s contemporaries and rivals were also in Buchan’s mind. He knew the work of James Hogg, as so many of his own short stories reveal. Buchan’s story ‘A Journey of Little Profit’ (1896), with its all-night card game and negotiation over the value of a soul, could have been written by the Hogg of The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824). The influence of John Galt’s forensic ‘psychological histories’ of minister and provost and, particularly, Ringan Gilhaize (1824), a dark study of distorted faiths, can also be traced in Buchan’s earlier fiction of religion, particularly ‘The Outgoing of the Tide’ (1902).

This first period of great Scottish fiction has at its heart a central theme which Coleridge recognized, that of a fundamental opposition between ‘the two great principles of social humanity’, adherence to the past and the urge to progress and the future.¹⁰ These were coupled with the tragic inevitability of their clash in Scotland in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: Galt’s Annals of the Parish (1821) rehearses this struggle over time. The quarrel between Scott’s head and heart is well documented; had he been living during the Jacobite rebellions, his emotions would have made him a Jacobite while his reason would have taken the other side. This was a predicament for many in his time, and is not dissimilar to divisions of loyalty in Buchan’s fiction, and in himself, divisions which set the landscape and people of the Borders against other territories and folk.

Scott’s highly influential way of seeing Scotland as recurrently divided by violent civil wars of religion and politics, and in need of forgiveness for the excesses of its past, can be seen as paradoxical. It simultaneously preserved Scotland’s apparently colourful and Romantic past, but revealed that underneath lay far darker realities, insisting that the present must have a new rationality, humanity and charity to heal the wounds of bigotry and tribal loyalties. As Scott’s fiction seeks a regenerative mythology for Scotland, it uses symbolically opposed protagonists to embody the mutually destructive forces of Scotland throughout its history.¹¹ His characters Rob Roy and Bailie Nicol Jarvie in Rob Roy (1817) exemplify this; Highland against Lowland, outlaw against the prudent Glasgow merchant, yet cousins, emphasizing the tragedy of broken kinship and civil dissension. Scott seeks to find beyond these opposing symbolic figures a possibility of national renewal. If so many of Scott’s characters represent the broken sides of the nation, and its fatal divide between prudent progress and passionate adherence to the past, Jeanie Deans in Heart of Midlothian (1818) is presented by Scott as trapped between the laws of God and the laws of Man, and expresses hope and regeneration for Scotland, the nation’s instinctive healing heart.¹² But where Buchan does precisely the same, the focus of his John Burnet of Barns (1898) is personal and moral, but contrasts continental settings with Scotland’s politics and divided loyalties in a time of civil war.

By 1836 Scott, Galt and Hogg were dead. Then ensued a long period of anomie in Scottish literature, the period of Scots in Empire, culturally influential in Britain, but this was also a half-century when Scottish culture was at its lowest ebb. There were important writers like Thomas Carlyle, George Macdonald, Mrs Oliphant and James Thomson, but these writers all left Scotland, and more often en than not their work is set within a British rather than a Scottish context. Gaelic poetry thrived, yet became more marginalized, although ‘Fiona MacLeod’’s spurious post-Ossian works of the Celtic Twilight were immensely popular in the 1890s. There was also the rise of ‘Kailyard’ fiction, produced by John Wilson of Blackwood’s Magazine, Ian McLaren, and a cottage industry writing internationally popular tales of sterling Scottish peasantry, and the devotion of their country ministers and doctors. Until Stevenson in the 1880s, there was little meaningful fiction or poetry working seriously with the material of Scottish history and culture.¹³

However the symbolic witnesses to the fate of Scotland are often en doomed to failure (although they themselves are often en allowed personal good fortune). Their role of these characters is to bear witness to the endless ways Scotland destroys itself, and they function as self-lacerating cleansers of Scotland’s historical stables. When Scottish literature revived in the 1880s with Stevenson, this darker emphasis, rather than Scott’s attempts to create narratives of Scottish regeneration, would dominate the major fiction. This is exemplified in David Balfour’s rejection of political engagement in Scotland in Kidnapped (1886). Balfour’s disillusioned voice, weary mood and disenchantment with national politics is echoed in Buchan’s Sir Quixote of the Moors (1895), A Lost Lady of Old Years (1899), Midwinter (1923), Witch Wood (1927) and many of his short stories.

The voice of modernity that Stevenson placed in a late eighteenth-century mouth in Catriona (1893) speaks to us in accents of despair and with the awareness of having achieved simply nothing.¹⁴ The nihilism in the tone is an expression of frustration for nineteenth-century readers and later, who would be reading in a modern context: the traditional tropes will not work, and there is as yet no alternative for a hero who seeks heroism and triumph. Stevenson’s Kidnapped and Catriona re-established Scott’s model of young men representing Scotland caught up in mighty events despite themselves. They share Scott’s use of polarized protagonists as types. The tone of Stevenson’s works conveys modern preoccupations of ambivalence, pessimism and an undercurrent of a need for change, and these undercurrents profoundly influence Crockett’s The Men of the Moss-Hags (1895), Neil Munro’s The Shoes of Fortune (1901) and Doom Castle (1902), and Buchan’s John Burnet of Barns (1898), Prester John (1910) and Salute to Adventurers (1915). Buchan does not join Stevenson in the gloom, however. His later, more affirmative novels allow their protagonists personal success, even if the state of their native country is left as something separate and comparatively under-examined.

However, beyond this straightforward reworking of the more benign formulae of Scott and Stevenson, in many other novels Buchan alters the regenerative thrust of Scott’s central symbolisms and ambiguities. Stevenson’s The Master of Ballantrae (1888) and Weir of Hermiston (1896) show that both sides in Scotland’s historical, cultural and moral oppositions are suspect, as do Munro’s John Splendid (1898) and Gilian the Dreamer (1899). Buchan introduces a much bleaker note of disgust at the pointlessness of Scottish history’s violence, divided loyalties and tragic conclusions, which indicate a much deeper late-Victorian questioning of Scottish values and attitudes, in Sir Quixote of The Moors, A Lost Lady of Old Years, Midwinter and Witch Wood.

What are the principal features of these darker novels? Let me start with what is not a main feature. No modern Scottish novel until Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Grey Granite (1933) or Neil Gunn’s Butcher’s Broom (1934) dealt with the Scottish experience of modernity in urban industrialization or the Highland Clearances (although wider depictions of emigration and exile do figure in Stevenson, Munro and Buchan). For these writers, what they felt most compelled to explore were issues of Scottish national character, with an emphasis on its defects more often en than on its virtues.

The dominant topic for the modern Scottish novel...