Beyond the Thirty-Nine Steps

by Ursula Buchan

  In September 1924, partly as a result of an invitation to give a lecture, partly because he had Reuters business to transact, and partly because they had friends clamouring to see them, the Buchans took off for their first visit to Canada and the United States. They left on 30 August on RMS Empress of France and docked at Quebec in early September. After a fishing holiday with friends, Robert and Elsie Reford at Grand Métis, they went to stay with William Lyon Mackenzie King, the Canadian Prime Minister, at Laurier House in Ottawa.* The Buchans had first met Mackenzie King through Violet Markham in May 1919, when they were still living in Portland Place.

  King, who kept a daily, voluminous, often self-serving and misleading, but as often illuminating, diary, recorded his initial thoughts: ‘I was much impressed with Mr Buchan’s personality. He is a young man [he was forty-four, less than a year younger than Mackenzie King] of scholarly appearance, and a delightful quiet English manner.’74 The two men kept in touch from time to time, corresponding on Canadian politics in particular. Mackenzie King, who had a disconcerting tendency to idolise people whom he had only just met, only to undergo a process of disillusionment as they steadily refused to live up to his over-inflated expectations, wrote in his diary, after he had shown the Buchans around Laurier House, ‘He is a charming man, a man I love with my whole heart.’75 When they arrived in Ottawa, JB gave Mackenzie King a copy of his soon-to-be-published biography of Lord Minto, and had to endure a gush of sentimental flattery as a result. (Some people found this kind of thing intolerable: the wife of the British High Commissioner, Lady Floud, for example, declared that it was like being licked all over by the family cat and made her want to have a bath.)76

  The next day was a Sunday and they were taken for a walk near Mackenzie King’s country estate at Kingsmere in the Gatineau Hills. They set off up a hill but, before they got all the way, their host blindfolded them – surely an excruciatingly embarrassing experience for the reticent Susie – and led them to the top, where he removed the blindfolds so that they could enjoy the panoramic view of the Ottawa River valley. JB rose to the occasion gallantly by commenting that it was ‘a real Pisgah’s heights’, a reference to Pisgah on the top of Mount Nebo, from where God showed Moses the Promised Land. He probably wondered whether he had gone too far but Mackenzie King, for whom there was no such thing as too much flattery, was thrilled by the association. He wrote about JB in his diary: ‘I know no man I would rather have as a friend, a beautiful, noble soul, kindly and generous in thought and word and act, informed as few men in this world have ever been, modest, humble, true, a man after God’s own heart.’77 This weekend spent in each other’s company was to have far-reaching consequences for them both.

  From Ottawa, the Buchans travelled by train to Boston, to meet Ferris Greenslet, the literary advisor and director of Houghton Mifflin, JB’s American publishers. Greenslet and JB had struck up a deep friendship, at least partly because of their shared fascination both with fishing and the American Civil War, and Ferris had promised to conduct the Buchans around some of the battlefields of Virginia.

  The two men, who were the same age, had first met when, in early 1915, Greenslet had crossed the Atlantic to visit Charles Masterman at Wellington House and find publications that might tell Americans something about the European situation. Greenslet returned to England in January 1917 and spent time with JB, just about to become Director of Information, when they discovered a mutual love of fishing and ‘we spoke the same language – largely Latin, after dinner. My rather Shandean sense of humor was matched by Buchan’s mildly Rabelaisian turn.’78

  The Buchans and Greenslet travelled together from Boston to Washington D.C., where JB’s reputation, as a result of his war work, was very high, amongst both soldiers and journalists. As he told his brother Walter: ‘I went to the War Office where the Secretary for War [John W. Weeks] welcomed me, and called in all the Generals and we had a good pow-wow. Then I had half an hour with the President [Calvin Coolidge] – very good of him in the middle of his election.’79 Greenslet, who sat in the outer office while this was going on, wrote: ‘He came out after an hour, twice his allotted time, flushed and smiling. Asked what they had been talking about, he replied, “Latin poetry”.’80

  They then took off in a large, open-topped car, accompanied by the historian Professor Sam Morrison, for a ten-day tour of the Virginia battlefields, driving through Maryland to Antietam and Harper’s Ferry, and then up the Shenandoah Valley. Equipped with Confederate battle maps, they followed the trail of Stonewall Jackson and his men. At Port Republic, they came upon the house marked on the map ‘Lewis House’, and found an elderly Miss Lewis sitting on the porch where she had sat on a June day in 1862, and watched General Taylor’s Louisiana Brigade ‘burst from the woods back of the house to capture a Massachusetts battery on its front’.81 According to Greenslet, JB could tell his American companions the names of the Blue Ridge and Massanutten mountains without looking at the map.

  It was a thrilling ten days for JB, especially as he had long had in mind writing a biography of General Robert E. Lee, the Confederate leader for whose generalship he had the greatest admiration. But when, at Richmond, he met the journalist and historian Douglas Southall Freeman, who guided them over the country of the so-called ‘Seven Days Battles’, from the Chikahominy River to Malvern Hill, he backed off, because Freeman had already begun his magisterial four-volume study of General Lee.

  One idea that may have germinated from conversations with Greenslet on this trip was that of an historical novel concerning the hounding of ‘witches’ in seventeenth-century Scotland. Ferris Greenslet was a direct descendant of a woman hanged as a witch in Salem in 1692* and, not surprisingly, he felt very strongly about the matter. It is possible that the ‘witch pricking’ incident in Witch Wood developed from informed discussions between the two men about what Greenslet called ‘Puritanism gone mad’.

  The party went north to New York, where JB completed some business for Reuters, met old friends from the Associated Press, and was conducted around the Pierpont Morgan Library, ‘an amazing treasure-house’. They then travelled up to the White Mountains of New Hampshire, to stay at Greenslet’s country home. The next day the two men walked up Mount Chocorua, all 3,500 feet of it. Greenslet had climbed it before with G. M. Trevelyan, who, like JB, was a member of the Alpine Club, but this was altogether more taxing. ‘Talking continuously, even on the steepest stretches, he accomplished the ascent in fifty minutes. Foaming at the mouth, but trying to look pleasant, I just managed to keep within sound of the one-sided conversation.’82

  They then travelled to Milton Academy in Massachusetts, so that JB could deliver the War Memorial Foundation’s* annual lecture.** His brief was to address ‘the responsibilities and opportunities attaching to leadership in a democracy’83 and he was invited on the strength of the final paragraphs of volume IV of The History of the Great War (quoted in

  Chapter 6); these had impressed the headmaster, since they so exactly expressed the spirit in which the War Memorial had been founded. JB had been pleased to oblige, because he thought it an imaginative way to commemorate the dead.***

  He began by saying that the Great War had made them all for a time one household and went on that his object was to illustrate the continuity of history; he talked of what the British military learned from the American Civil War, since ‘all the main strategic and tactical developments of the Great War were foreshadowed’.84 He described the reasons why the North had won the Civil War, showing a knowledge of it that must have astonished the staff of the school. He discussed the greatness of Abraham Lincoln: ‘Lincoln fought to prevent Democracy making a fool of itself, and if that noble but most brittle type of polity is to be preserved to the world, we have not done with the fight.’85 This was his most important point: that democracies had sometimes to battle to preserve that ‘brittle type of polity’. Greenslet recalled in his memoirs: ‘I was astounded and charmed when the quiet, swift voice to which I was accustomed
deepened its pitch and increased its volume, taking on old cadences of the Kirk of Scotland, and an eloquence I had not heard since the brief church-going period of my own youth.’86

  The Buchans then travelled back to Canada to stay with Viscount Byng of Vimy, Governor-General of Canada, at Government House in Ottawa. JB had first met Julian Byng in South Africa in 1902, when he was sitting on his haversack on a deserted station platform, wondering where he might next eat and sleep. ‘Bungo’ Byng had arrived at the head of a mounted column of men and given him supper, so beginning a lifelong, affectionate friendship. JB found him a most attractive personality, funny, intelligent, kindly and honourable, who, like Sir Walter Scott, talked to anyone he met as if they were a blood relation. A few weeks after he was sworn in as Governor-General in 1921, Byng wrote to JB: ‘We have settled down – myself as governor general, i.e., a governor who doesn’t govern and a general who cannot generalize and my better half as governess general.’87

  He was much loved by the Canadian army veterans for, with the support of Lieutenant-Colonel Edmund Ironside, amongst others, he had led them to a profoundly important victory at Vimy Ridge in April 1917. Byng had a very excitable and unusual half-Greek wife called Evelyn, an enthusiastic gardener, who made a rock garden in the grounds of Rideau Hall (Government House) that survives to this day. She could not stand the Prime Minister, Mackenzie King, at any price, even before the so-called ‘King-Byng thing’.

  ‘The King-Byng Affair’ was the constitutional crisis that blew up in 1926, when Mackenzie King wanted the Canadian Parliament dissolved for partisan political advantage, as Byng thought, and he would not agree to it. Constitutionalists argue to this day as to who was in the right, but no one argues about the political consequences: at the Imperial Conference in 1926 in London, Mackenzie King pressed for, and got, agreement that the Governor-General’s role should be altered, and this agreement was enshrined in the Statute of Westminster in 1931. No longer was the Governor-General to be in any way the representative or agent of the British government in the Dominions; he would not be chosen by the British government but by the King, on the advice of the relevant Dominion government, and his effective power was all but extinguished. As JB put it in 1935, ‘[The Statute of Westminster] removed, with a few small exceptions, every shackle from a Dominion’s sovereign power.’88

  While staying with the Byngs, JB gave a number of public speeches and one in particular, which he delivered to the Empire Club of Canada in Toronto on 23 October, caused a great deal of interest. He spoke on ‘Some new elements in British politics’, referring to the earthquake that had shaken the political establishment, both in Britain and in the Empire, in 1923, when the Labour Party became the largest party in the House of Commons, shored up by the Liberals, with Ramsay MacDonald as Prime Minister. To have a Socialist government, albeit a minority one, in power in Britain, only six years after the convulsions in Russia that led to the Russian Revolution, was for many people, not just conservatives, alarming. Nine months later, and less than a fortnight before JB rose to speak in Canada, Ramsay MacDonald’s government had fallen on a vote of censure, so JB felt it was time to tell Canada what was going on. What he said showed how percipient he could be about politics, and also that he paid much more than lip-service to the idea of democracy.

  He pointed out the advantages of a new party, in bringing in new blood. For ‘… no country can afford to limit its election of rulers to one small social circle’. He also stated that British socialism was different from the Continental variety, its proposers being much more pragmatic: ‘They cannot give up in a moment the fake creed they have preached on a thousand platforms, but they are practical men and Englishmen and they can recognize compelling facts. If they cannot formally discard their theories, they can neglect them. [Laughter].’89

  Earlier that month, the Byngs had entertained the Prince of Wales (later King Edward VIII) on his way back to England from visiting his ranch in Alberta. Despite being warned by the Governor-General not to go to a private house, he had done so in the company of a married woman late at night after a dance. A furious Byng, anxious that such a story might get out and adversely affect Canadian opinion of the future monarch, told the Prince very firmly that he should not come back to Canada while Byng was Governor-General. He knew he had to tell the King what had happened, but was reluctant to put the news in a letter; instead, he gave JB the unenviable task of calling on the King with this tale on his return in November.*

  JB had been energised and diverted by his trip. His Atlanticism had been confirmed and, perhaps most crucially, he was now looking firmly to the future.

  He once wrote that there was daftness in the blood of all Scots; certainly he was not free of such a thing. The older he grew and the more domestic and business responsibilities he acquired, the more hectic and irresponsible were the activities of his heroes in the fiction he wrote at the same time. It seems it was absolutely necessary for him to escape into a world of ‘romance’, as a counterweight to all the worthy enterprises in which he was engaged. There is a subversive strand in most of his novels, but nowhere more so than in John Macnab.

  Initially serialised in Chambers’ Journal between December 1924 and July 1925, and then published that July by Hodder and Stoughton, it was dedicated to Gerard Craig Sellar’s sister, Rosalind Maitland. It is highly likely that some of the novel was written while he was on holiday at Letterewe with the Maitlands, as well as with General Stronach at Kinlochbervie. JB had heard about the exploits of a rather colourful soldier, Captain James Brander Dunbar, who, in the last years of the nineteenth century, had sent a gentleman’s challenge to Lord Abinger at Inverlochy, telling him he intended to poach a deer from his estate. He succeeded, winning a wager of £20 in the process. When John Macnab appeared, Captain Dunbar wrote to its author, sending him pictures of both the ‘head’ of the stag he had poached and the cheque.

  John Macnab should really be subtitled ‘Eminent Men Behaving Badly’ since it tells the story of how three friends – a senior banker (John Palliser-Yeates), a former Attorney-General (Sir Edward Leithen) and a Cabinet minister (the Earl of Lamancha) – discover that they are all suffering from a period of paralysing ennui and, remembering the exploits of ‘Jim Tarras’, they decide to write to three landowners in the Scottish Highlands, proposing to poach two stag and a salmon from them over a certain period, and signing the letters ‘John Macnab’. This venture will require skill, guile, hard exercise and even danger, since the reputations of such prominent people will be placed in dire jeopardy if they are apprehended. They are aided and abetted by Hannay’s old friend, Sir Archie Roylance, who, rather unbelievably, is a Unionist parliamentary candidate, and has to deliver his first speech at a political meeting. This is a set-piece in the book, much as it had been in The Thirty-Nine Steps.

  Although the three men prove themselves to be brave and skilful poachers – and it is pleasing to see the ultra-respectable Leithen, in particular, take on disguise and lie like a trooper – the real heroes of this book are the clever, outdoorsy girl, Janet Raden (referred to by the smitten Sir Archie as ‘clean-run’, as if she were a salmon!), the brash journalist, Crossby, and the clever ‘tinkler’ boy, Fish Benjie. The latter was based on an itinerant juvenile fish-seller who JB encountered when staying with Stronach in Sutherland.

  John Macnab exhibits the love JB had come to feel for the Highlands, but it is a challenge to read for anyone who does not understand ‘the lie of the land’ as JB did, and must have mystified many a city-dweller who had never been near Scotland. There is an elegiac strain in it, ostensibly for the old life of a sparsely populated, impoverished area of the British Isles, but with a wider application. This elegy is spoken by Janet Raden, the daughter of a laird, and it may point to the way that JB’s thinking was tending in the years after the war:

  The old life of the Highlands is going, and people like us must go with it … Nobody in the world to-day has a right to anything which he can’t justify. That�
�s not politics, it’s the way nature works. Whatever you’ve got – rank or power or fame or money – you’ve got to justify it, and keep on justifying it, or go under. No law on earth can buttress up a thing which nature means to decay … People should realise that whatever they’ve got they hold under a perpetual challenge, and they are bound to meet that challenge … Papa and the rest of our class want to treat politics like another kind of property in which they have a vested interest. But it won’t do – not in the world we live in today.90

  Perpetual challenge is the key, both for people and nations. JB was describing not just the predicament of old-fashioned lairds in the Highlands, but the aristocrats of post-war Britain as well, who were thoroughly in retreat – paralysed by grief for the loss of their sons and circumvented by a new class of politicians who were keener to meet the multifarious challenges of the 1920s.

  *

  In early 1926, Violet Markham relayed to JB a message from the Canadian Prime Minister, Mackenzie King, in which he said that he would like him to be the next Governor-General of Canada and suggested that he get his friends to approach Stanley Baldwin, the British prime minister, about the matter. Although this was a decision that would still be made by the British government, Mackenzie King was determined to have a substantial say in it. JB, not surprisingly, told Violet Markham that he would not do anything to put himself forward and, in the end, the job was given to Viscount Willingdon, who had experience of being Governor of Bombay and then Madras, and would subsequently be Viceroy of India. Susie, in particular, felt that they had been marched up a hill, only to be marched down again, and this may have been the origin of her dislike of Mackenzie King, although it was not really his fault.

  While sailing for home from Canada in early November 1924, JB had started to write The Dancing Floor, one of his most inventive and close-textured stories, influenced by Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough. This is a more complex tale than John Macnab, for example, drawing, as it did, on JB’s enduring interest in the survival of pre-Christian cults, which dated from his Oxford days under Dr Bussell’s tutelage, and his memory of the house that he and Susie saw when cruising with Gerard Craig Sellar in the Aegean in 1910. The central character with the terrifying vernal nightmares, Vernon Milburne, survives into the novel from the earlier short story, ‘Basilissa’, but he is joined in the novel by Sir Edward Leithen and a girl who they both come to love, Koré Arabin, whose house is on a Greek island, where the climax of the action takes place. The plot revolves round the islanders, during a period of great hardship, abandoning Christianity for ancient pagan rituals, and turning against Koré as against a witch, because of her late father’s depravities. She is saved by the courage of Milburne, the rationality of Leithen and the power of Christianity, the climax coming at the time of the Greek Orthodox Easter. The novel is carefully plotted; the only problem readers will have had was that the map in the first edition was orientated 180 degrees in the wrong direction. The book frightened Enid Bagnold, the author of National Velvet and wife of Sir Roderick Jones, so much, that she had to fetch her Sealyham terrier in from the stable to keep her company while she read it.