Beyond the Thirty-Nine Steps

by Ursula Buchan

  Other friends of the sociable Sandy Gillon, to whom he introduced JB, included Harold Baker, Alec Maitland and Hugh Wyndham. And John Edgar, who had arrived that year after finishing at the University of Glasgow, introduced him to an even more distinguished circle of earnest, clever, amusing and very sporting men in Balliol. These were either Scotsmen or English public schoolboys, and a number became lasting friends of JB’s, including Raymond Asquith, Cuthbert Medd, ‘the cleverest man I ever knew’, Reginald Farrer, Aubrey Herbert and his cousin, Auberon, as well as Johnnie Jameson, son of a Scottish judge, Lord Ardwall, a Gallowegian from the edge of the Solway. The ‘brain-grey wall’28 of Balliol sheltered some of the most talented undergraduates in Oxford, since the spirit of the meritocratic, thrusting Dr Benjamin Jowett, who had died in 1893, was still potent there. With the exception of the Herberts, they were not aristocratic, but came mostly from the comfortably-off, well-connected professional classes. None had had such a striving start in life as JB.

  There is, in the Buchan archive at Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, in Canada, a finely wrought book, entitled Epistolae praecursorum (Precious Letters). Bound in red leather, tooled with gold, it was the work of the famous bookbinder Katharine Adams. As well as letters from, for example, his father and his brother, Willie, there are sixteen letters to JB from Raymond Asquith, the first dating from early 1898. That was not long after Asquith had come up to Balliol from Winchester College, then, as now, one of the most academically demanding of the major English public schools. The keeping of these letters by one who cavalierly threw so many away suggests how much they meant to JB. Certainly Raymond was a remarkable correspondent, even if many of his sprightly jokes and aphorisms have lost their meaning over time. Some might find his subjugation of sense or honestly held belief to a ringing phrase, preferably a paradoxical one, a bit wearisome, but that was the taste of the time amongst young men.

  The stories about this good-looking Wykehamist, the centre of this Balliol group, are many and various: for example, that the Professor of Latin tipped his hat to him in the street and asked his father, H. H. Asquith, then a barrister and rising MP, whether he was related to the Mr Asquith. According to JB, the good fairies at his cradle ‘gave him great beauty of person; the gift of winning speech; a mind that mastered readily whatever it cared to master; poetry and the love of all beautiful things; a magic to draw friends to him; a heart as tender as it was brave…’29 Raymond Asquith swept all before him at Oxford, winning the Derby, Craven and Ireland scholarships, achieving a First in both Mods and Greats and, after all that, an All Souls fellowship. Yet he never seemed to do any work; it was apparently effortless. As JB put it, ‘An air of infinite leisure hung about him’.30

  Raymond Asquith was also a very fine speaker at the Union, with a mellifluous voice and a talent for biting satire. What the good fairies withheld from him – apart from a long life – was the gift of a right, respectable ambition. He did not care in the way his friend cared. JB loved him, but could see why he did not appeal to everyone. ‘He was immensely admired, but did not lay himself out to acquire popularity, and in the ordinary man he inspired awe rather than liking. His courtesy was without warmth, he was apt to be intolerant of mediocrity, and he had no desire for facile acquaintanceships.’31 JB was teased mercilessly by Asquith for his Calvinism, his love of wild weather and scenery and his crude, as the other saw it, passion for romance. But what Asquith saw was a brain as acute as his, a learning more ardently striven for, an attachment to the earth that in his Olympian way he did not feel, but could not but admire.

  This Balliol circle, of which JB was a cherished honorary member, disliked what they called ‘heygates’, Oxford men who were old beyond their years and already and obviously mapping out a career for worldly success. (JB kept his heygatism well closeted during his Oxford years.) His set put a premium on levity:

  Again, while affectionate and rather gentle with each other, we wore a swashbuckling manner to the outer world. It was our business to be regardless of consequences, to be always looking for preposterous adventures and planning crazy feats, and to be ready for a brush with constituted authority. ‘Booms’ were a great fashion … It was a ‘boom’ to canoe an incredible distance between a winter’s dawn and dusk; to set to walk to London at a moment’s notice;* to get horses, choose a meeting-place, mark down compass-courses and ride them out, though the way lay through back gardens and flooded rivers; to sleep out of doors in any weather; to scramble at midnight over Oxford roofs; and to devise all manner of fantastic practical jokes … The peculiar features of our circle were that this physical exuberance was found among men of remarkable intellectual power, and that it implied no corresponding abandon in their intellectual life. In the world of action we were ripe for any adventure; in the things of the mind we were critical, decorous, chary of enthusiasm – revenants from the Augustan age.32

  It was no wonder that four of these superheroes – Asquith, Buchan, Medd and Baker – should have accepted invitations from Arnold Ward* in March 1898 to join a literary society called The Horace Club. Members included the dons Dr Bussell of Brasenose and the Reverend A. G. Butler of Oriel, graduates such as Hilaire Belloc, and undergraduates such as A. E. Zimmern of New College and Aubrey Herbert of Balliol. There were honorary members from Cambridge, including Maurice Baring and Owen Seaman. An Arbiter was chosen for each occasion, and when it was JB’s turn, he invited all members to the President’s Garden in Magdalen to read poems and bring fruit ‘after Horatian precedent’. He also allowed the members to bring ladies as guests, although it is not known how many women took up the invitation to spend an evening of recited verse that was as likely to be in classical Greek or Latin as in English. This rarefied gathering of poets spurred JB to write some of his best early poems: ‘Ballad of Grey Weather’, ‘From the Pentlands Looking North and South’ and ‘The Soldier of Fortune’.

  Benjamin** Henry Blackwell, the bookseller in Broad Street close to Balliol College, was Keeper of the Records; after each meeting, he would paste the handwritten and signed poems into two handsome Kelmscott folios.33 In 1901 he published a limited edition of the best of the poems, including some of JB’s, which earned a mention in The Times.34 The Horace Club folded after three years, when that particularly brilliant group of undergraduates left Oxford.

  A photograph of JB exists from 1899, which shows, despite the bump on his forehead and the drooping eyelid, a good-looking young man in a three-piece suit, high collar and neat tie. He looks a little austere, on account of his thin, but not mean, lips and his long, wedge-shaped nose (‘questing and sagacious as a terrier’s’,35 in Catherine Carswell’s memorable phrase), yet his is undoubtedly a very intelligent face. The year before, he had achieved an entry in Who’s Who, in which his occupation was given as ‘undergraduate’, and which included his publications to date and his recreations: ‘golf, cycling, climbing, angling and most field sports’.36 Small wonder he was popular. Cuthbert Medd of Balliol addressed him as ‘you would-be outspoken pragmatical, puritanical Scotty you’.37 He was mercilessly teased for his Jacobite sympathies, but his friends were generally respectful of his keenness, drive and maturity, and they found him excellent company. He made something of a thing of his Scottishness, the respectability of which was helped by his friendship with such swells as Tommy Nelson, Johnnie Jameson and Sandy Gillon. He even chaired a Burns dinner: ‘It was magnificent, but what an orgy!’38

  Roger Merriman, an American who became a history professor at Harvard, remembered long afterwards how JB had once come adeptly to his rescue. Merriman had attended a boozy rowing dinner and fetched up at Brasenose ‘looking for more fun’. In the Old Quad, someone put a Roman candle down his ‘Oxford bags’. A mixture of drink and shock caused him to pass out. ‘When I came to, I heard loud voices shouting for John Buchan. “He’s the only sober man in B.N.C.!” In a minute a charming young Scot appeared in front of me…’ JB carried Merriman off to Balliol, getting past the porter somehow (fo
r it was past 11 o’clock), and put him to bed, even bothering to come the next day to enquire after him. ‘From that moment on I adored him,’39 wrote Merriman.

  In one of his periodic drawings-up of plans for the future, on his twenty-first birthday, JB mapped out the next four years under four columns – literary, academic, practical and likely income. Standing for the Union committee was one of his immediate aims. He had been a member for most of his time at Oxford, had seconded a motion as early as the summer of 1896 and, in December 1897, he proposed the motion condemning the Kailyard School. In this, he was almost talking to himself: explaining his desire to shake free of those aspects of Scottish provincial life that he knew could hold him back. His supporters in the debate were two Scottish friends, Robert Rait* and Johnnie Jameson. The Oxford Magazine reported, ‘His delivery is much improved, though still somewhat indistinct…’, and that the types of character of the Kailyard school that he mocked ‘were ridiculous, especially its young man of impossible genius from the countryside, and its theologically-minded peasants’.40 Jameson ‘closed the debate in a racy speech in which he spoke of porridge as an English drink’.41 The motion was carried – just. Not long after, JB was well vindicated in his attitude to the Kailyard School by the publication of George Douglas Brown’s famous The House with the Green Shutters, which used Kailyard clichés to subvert the genre, by showing the effect of external social change on the supposedly timeless Scottish countryside.* In March 1898 he was elected Librarian, being proposed by the President, E. C. Bentley, who is best known to history as the inventor of the clerihew.

  At the end of that summer term, JB attended the New College Ball, at the invitation of Sandy Gillon, in a party that included Johnnie Jameson and Tommy Nelson, as well as two Dumfriesshire cousins of Sandy’s, called Caroline and Olive Johnston-Douglas. After breakfast in his room, they went down to the riverside and danced reels barefoot on the grass. The Johnston-Douglas girls** remembered JB many years later as ‘very quiet and a bit shy’42 in comparison to his more boisterous confrères.

  Before he left Oxford that summer, he was again invited to the Encaenia; this time to recite part of The Pilgrim Fathers, the poem that had gained him – finally – the Newdigate Prize for poetry and, with it, 21 guineas and a place in a distinguished pantheon that included John Ruskin, Matthew Arnold, Julian Huxley and Oscar Wilde. ‘Commemoration went off very well and I managed to recite my Newdigate better than I expected ever to be able to spout my own nonsense.’43 The student paper Isis thought it ‘more readable than the average Newdigate and – what is of more importance – seems to show greater power of promise’.44

  This was also the moment when John Burnet of Barns (‘my big story’) was finally published in book form by The Bodley Head. Although finished two years earlier, it had only appeared in serial form in Chambers’s Journal between December 1897 and the following July. JB had originally intended to dedicate it to Lady Mary Murray, but in the end (perhaps under familial pressure?) he dedicated it to his sister Violet’s memory, with a Greek epigraphic inscription from Plato, which translates as:

  You used to shine, as the morning star among the rising dawns,

  And now – in death – you shine as the evening star among the shades.

  Although the novel had been a very great labour to him, he managed to create a believable tale of the ‘Killing Time’, towards the end of the seventeenth century, and a Borderer, John Burnet, from Barns near Peebles, who is a descendant of desperate reivers, yet has the education of a scholar. This book contains a terrific fight between John Burnet and his wicked cousin, Gilbert, a stirring description of a flash flood on the Tweed, and some rather too long and detailed, but entirely accurate, descriptions of wanderings in Tweeddale and Clydesdale, much influenced by Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped. By this time he had lost much of his tendency to overwrite. According to Professor David Daniell, it is in John Burnet of Barns that he shows that he has now become a fully conscious craftsman. ‘It is not simply that he has learned from classical literature “the virtue of a clean bare style, of simplicity, of a hard substance and an austere pattern”.45 The drastic reduction of epithets … shows a literary intelligence which has grasped the secret of getting more colour by using less.’46

  In its review, The Times specifically absolved the book from any taint of the Kailyard. ‘Mr Buchan’s work shows signs of thoughtful elaboration but, nevertheless, it is brightened and relieved by flashes of the sacred fire.’47 Robertson Nicoll of the British Weekly, on the other hand, had a score to settle with the young man:

  Mr Buchan is understood to be a miracle of precocity. There is little that he has not attempted, and more or less succeeded in, during the brief period of his existence, but he has not succeeded in this story … What his book wants is life … Mr Buchan may, and I trust will, do great things; but there is no sign that he will ever do much in fiction.48

  As JB told Charlie Dick: ‘John Burnet is out, and has been well reviewed by some papers, critically and sensibly by some others, and roundly abused by some of the baser sort (e.g. our dear friend Robertson Nicoll in the B.[ritish] W.[eekly]).’49 It must be said that it did not sell at all well until after The Thirty-Nine Steps was published.

  After the end of term, he went north to Ardwall, a small estate close to Gatehouse of Fleet in Galloway, to join a cheerful party of undergraduates that consisted of his host, Johnnie Jameson, together with Sandy Gillon and John Edgar. He found himself in quite a different Scottish atmosphere from that which he knew best, since he was staying in a comfortable country house, amongst only men of his own age. They galloped ponies along the sands by the Solway Firth, sailed, fished, chased hares with greyhounds, and made an expedition into the remote hills, to the Dungeon of Buchan, where they lunched off pâté de foie gras and drank Burgundy. Since few experiences were ever entirely lost to him, there is a description of the Solway Firth in ‘Streams of Water in the South’, one of the most accomplished and moving of his early short stories, published in Grey Weather in 1899. The Solway also plays a part in Castle Gay. During the same vacation, he sought refuge at Broughton for the peace and quiet (for there was a noisy infant brother at home in Glasgow), rather more often than his family would either have liked or expected.

  His fourth year at Oxford was spent out of college, at No. 141, The High [Street], opposite ‘Schools’ (where students still take their university examinations), sharing digs with Taffy Boulter and his old Hutchesons’ and Glasgow friend John Edgar. During the previous summer, he had acquired a black collie dog called Dhonuill Dubh (‘Donald the Black’), which accompanied him to Oxford. This was a mark of some eccentricity, and required an understanding landlady, not to mention friends, especially as the dog had a habit of disappearing and arriving back in the middle of the night. The rooms were reasonably spacious, and quite in the right place for friends to drop by. Hilaire Belloc, who could not stay away from Oxford, even though he had graduated two years before, was once heard to call up from the street: ‘Buchan, have you any beer up there? Very well, I’ll come up.’50

  JB was gearing up to take his final exams (‘Greats’) the following Trinity term. He had not much cared for Mods work, with its con-centration on close textual translation and analysis; he was happier with philosophy and ancient history. He was taught by highly capable Brasenose dons, in particular the chaplain, Dr F. W. Bussell, Pater’s old friend. His speciality was Byzantine history and under his tutelage JB became interested in pre-Christian cults, something that helped him later when writing the short story ‘The Wind in the Portico’ and the novel The Dancing Floor. Francis Wylie, his tutor that year, was a philosophy don and an inspired teacher, who found JB ‘a brilliant, and already mature mind’, perhaps partly because he had been taught so well in Greek philosophy by Professor Jones at Glasgow. He attended university lectures given by such luminaries as Edward Caird of Balliol (who had come from the University of Glasgow) on the moral philosophy of Aristotle, and F. H. Bradley of
Merton on Hegel. He was also reading contemporary philosophers, including William James, Henry James’ brother, one of the originators of Pragmatism.

  He finally achieved his ambition of becoming President of the Union in November 1898 for the Hilary Term (January to March) of 1899, with Johnnie Jameson elected Secretary and Raymond Asquith Librarian. Raymond and ‘Cubby’ Medd wrote to congratulate him in a characteristic letter dated 2 a.m. ‘We are both very drunk … but that does not prevent us from tendering to you our very heartiest congratulations on our own behalf and on that of all right-thinking men in this University (and the world) upon your election. I wonder if you are as drunk as we are?’51

  When JB became President of the Union, the university magazine, Isis, ran a profile of him under the heading, ‘Isis Idol’, and it is worth repeating since it shows how he struck his contemporaries. There was a caricature by Taffy Boulter, one of his most consistent and loyal friends, showing him dressed in a kilt, armed with a sgian-dubh (short-bladed knife) and basket claymore (sword), and brandishing a club, with a background of mountains and a foreground of empty whisky and wine bottles, a libel on one of the more temperate members of Brasenose. The eulogy ran:

  In 1895, our Idol descended upon Oxford and began to carry all before him that he cared to trouble himself with – one of the finest things about him is that he has a very good idea of what is worthwhile and what is not.

  It is no disrespect to Glasgow to say that he now became really great; it is simply that he developed. Here his powers ripened, his tastes matured, his knowledge of men and things increased…

  His powers of work are remarkable, and inspire awe in his friends; he confesses to a deep-seated loathing for what is called leisure. Yet there exists no keener lover of action in the open than he, and no sounder authority upon all branches of Scottish sport…