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George Mackay Brown

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As he wrote in his autobiography: “There are mysterious marks on the stone circle of Brodgar on Orkney and on the stones of Skara Brae village from 5,000 years ago. Calling Brown a “portent,” Jo Grimond suggested in the Spectator that “there are not so many poets and some have only a little poetry in them. We should be thankful for Mr. Brown and grateful to Orkney that has fed him.” Considering Fishermen with Ploughs: A Poem Cycle to be “Brown’s most impressive poetic effort,” Reino described the work as “a sequence of obscurely connected lyrics based on island ‘history’ as the author reconceives it.” Massingham called the work “a task indeed ... which is vividly and quietly accomplished with an interesting range of verse-forms and a marvelous prose chorus at the end.” Dunn agreed, stating in Poetry Nation that “much of Brown’s best writing is to be found in Fishermen with Ploughs.” Massingham concluded that “all his work to date has been a persistent devotion, not because he is running in runic circles but digging, rooting deeper.” 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. A Celebration for Magnus (son et Lumiere text by Brown, music by Davies; produced in Kirkwall, Orkney, 1988), Nairn, Balnain, 1987.

Brown rather literally brings them down to earth. He sees them as places. His verse is quietly informative, as if he realized the need to make these poems act as captions. In the Times Literary Supplement, Dunn remarked upon Brown’s traditional qualities in prose as well: “Brown has perfected a narrative style of great simplicity, its virtues drawn more from the ancient art of telling tales than from new-fangled methodologies of fiction.” Cleaving to “a collective tradition which rests on the work of old oral tale-tellers,” said O’Faolain, “his stories make no concession to contemporary taste.” And yet, according to Robb, to read a Brown story “is to experience life as an endless sequence of fresh starts. He communicates a sense of the limitless possibilities of human life. Interest, wonder, and even miracle lie around the next corner, be it ever so familiar and prosaic.” The Skarf is an inshore creelman – his boat is the Engels – taking lobsters with his uncle. ‘You with all that brains. You should have gone on to the school, then the university.’ (I heard some of my clients say, ‘These islands have turned out just too many Professors, what’s the good of them?’) The Skarf is shiftless, irresponsible, he avoids going to the lobsters whenever he can, he draws National Assistance – means-tested benefit – rather than work. He says ‘the sun of socialism’ warms him, ‘however feebly’. But he is a writer: ‘Anyone looking in through his webbed window could see The Skarf moving between boxes of books and a table covered with writing paraphernalia.’ He writes the history of the islands in an old cashbook that was found on the foreshore, preaches socialism and atheism to any youngsters who will hear him. 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.”

The tributes were effusive

New to The Fortnightly Review? Our online series, with more than 2,000 items in its archive, is more than ten years old! So, unless you’re reading this in the state pen, you may never catch up, but you can start here with ITEMS PUBLISHED DURING OUR 2023 HIATUS (July-August 2023): Master Ru by Peter Knobler | Four Poems on Affairs of State by Peter Robinson | 5×7 by John Matthias | Y ou Haven’t Understood and two more poems by Amy Glynn | Long Live the King and two more by Eliot Cardinaux, with drawings by Sean Ali Shostakovich, Eliot and Sunday Morning by E.J. Smith Jr. :: For much more, please consult our massive yet still partial archive. How much of Brown's life was a place of suffering and decision, as well as quiet and monotony, is revealed in Maggie Fergusson's excellent and surprising biography. Also revealed are details of his affairs with women, few admittedly, but genuine, and the extent of his travels, also few.

Scottish poet, novelist, short story writer, essayist, dramatist, scriptwriter, journalist, librettist, and author of children's books. His fame grew. He was, of course, one of Scotland's greatest lyric poets, but when he turned to fiction his stories and novels won wide acclaim, which in turn brought the torture of attention, especially the 1994 Booker prize. Brown endured the media circus with the aid of antidepressants. (Beside the Ocean of Time had been shortlisted, though the prize was won by another Scot, James Kelman.) By then it was necessary to pin the little notices on the door of his flat. Brown's hand has, I feel, been lighter, more subtle in his previous work. Although the language is as usual terse and austere, there are the odd times when he seems to be labouring his point. In his earlier short stories, one felt that the fire in the croft was life and must never go out. You did not need to be told. The story of the life of Magnus Erlendsson, Earl of Orkney was one to which Brown frequently turned, [49] and it was the theme of his next novel, Magnus, published in 1973. [50] The story of Magnus's life is told in the Orkneyinga saga. [51] The novel examined the themes of sanctity and self-sacrifice. [50] Brown takes the theme of sacrifice into the 20th century by inserting in journalistic language an account of the death of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. [52] While some critics see the work as "disjointed", [52] Peter Maxwell Davies, for example, marks it as Brown's greatest achievement. Davies used it as the basis of his opera The Martyrdom of St Magnus. [53] Mostly, it was a quietly difficult life of the imagination. "Sacrificed" is too strong a word. As is "cowardice". Brown could do nothing else. He has been well served by his biographer, as he was by his friends. He was held in such affection by the Orkney people that his funeral in St Magnus Cathedral was the first Catholic mass to have been held there since the Reformation. Furthermore, it fell on April 16, St Magnus's Day. As the minister said: "If you call that a coincidence, I wish you a very dull life."

‘We decided to enter a competition’

A settled home, which he rarely left, a settled religion, which he loved – and a dram or two – were to sustain him and his writing till his death in Stromness on 13 April 1996. He wrote regularly for the local newspaper – lively articles and essays – produced several short story volumes (some say his best work), and novels, and of course the poems on which his reputation rests. Brown's poetry and prose have been seen as characterised by "the absence of frills and decoration; the lean simplicity of description, colour, shape and action reduced to essentials, which heightens the reality of the thing observed," [90] while "his poems became informed by a unique voice that was his alone, controlled and dispassionate, which allowed every word to play its part in the narrative scheme of the unfolding poem." [91] By the late 1960s Brown's poetry was renowned internationally, so that the American poet Robert Lowell, for example, came to Orkney expressly to meet him. [42] George passed away on 13th April 1996 and his funeral took place on St Magnus Day three days later. St Magnus Cathedral, hosting a Catholic service for the first time since the reformation, was full. George dedicated his final collection of poems Following a Lark to me, but it was published shortly after his death and I never had the chance to thank him. In it is a beautiful poem: Mr. Brown was born and remained rooted in the Orkneys, and his art was filled with the rich lore and humanity of the people he knew so well. He also explored Scottish myths and mysticism as well as rituals of the Roman Catholic faith. At the same time, he expressed a social consciousness, as in his first novel, Greenvoe, which described the death of a 1,000-year-old village at the hands of a military-industrial establishment.

Two books of poems by GMB (as he is familiarly known) have been published this year: Following a Lark and Orkney: Pictures and Poems. Both books have turned out to be post-humous. (Both are available only in Britain.)But Brown's poem suggests that these feats of engineering (built by "Italian prisoners, Glasgow navvies") meant that every islander woke one morning to say, "I am an islander no more!" and consequently that an "enchantment is gone from his days." Under Brinkie's Brae (essays), photographs by Gordon Wright, Gordon Wright Publishing (Edinburgh, Scotland), 1979.

Thorfinn Ragnarson is known on his island of Norday as a "lazy idle useless boy". But his dreams tell us that he is a storyteller, the ancient bard; he has the "gift of language". His island world is abruptly destroyed when the government decides to build a military aerodrome on it. Crofters are served with notice to vacate land that has run through families for generations; crops are flattened by Nissen huts and concrete. Cleaned up, and eating his dinner, Freddie became talkative. I relaxed into his stories. During the war, his frail wooden house had been surrounded by the huge airstrip on Mainland. He went to sleep, woke up to the (beautiful) sound of Merlin engines as Spitfires landed, took off. He had fond memories of the pilots, ‘fine beuys’, with whom he had made some friends. He reached under his pillow, and brought out a creased, browning photo of a Spitfire and its pilot, who had autographed the souvenir, ‘For Freddie’. On his table, I noticed a card, some kind of invitation, with a horseshoe on its cover. To make conversation, I asked Freddie what he was being invited to. He smiled in a knowing way, ‘Ah beuy, that will be a secret. As secret as the Horseman’s Word.’

Vehicles and bicycles

Rhythms and repetition often appear in George’s work. Poems were composed around the cycle of the farming year, the circle at Brodgar, the 12 Stations of the Cross, and the understanding that life goes on after death. When George was diagnosed with tuberculosis, the illness was responsible for one death in every eight in Britain and he was certain he would die young. This inflected his work with dark humour: Rowena Murray and Brian Murray, Interrogation of Silence, John Murray, 2004, ISBN 0-7195-5929-4 p. 13.

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