A Scots Quair

by Lewis Grassic Gibbon

  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:

  Cold and controlled he had always been, some lirk in his nature and upbringing that Chris loved, who so hated folk in a fuss. But now that quality she’d likened to grey granite itself, that something she’d seen change in Duncairn from slaty grey to a glow of fire, was transmuting again before her eyes—into something darker and coarser, in essence the same, in tint antrin queer.

  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:

  Chris, I think, has lost a little of the character—but she’s lost it to Ewan, who’s coming very robustly alive; & the curious angular growth of his mind is very true to type. So far I can sympathise with his nascent politics very comfortably, & if the police had behaved in that manner his bottle-throwing would have been not merely noble, but natural.8

  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

  what maitters’t wha we kill

  To lessen the foulest murder that deprives

  Maist men o’ real lives?

  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:

  For it’s me and you are the working-class, not the poor Bulgars gone back to Gowans. And suddenly was serious an untwinkling minute: A hell of a thing to be history, Ewan … A hell of a thing to be History!—not a student, a historian, a tinkling reformer, but living history oneself, being it, making it, eyes for the eyeless, hands for the maimed!—

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

  [He] liked them well enough, knowing that if it suited the Party purpose Trease would betray him to the police tomorrow, use anything and everything that might happen to him as propaganda and publicity, without caring a fig for liking or aught else. So he’d deal with Mrs Trease, if it came to that…. And Ewan nodded to that, to Trease, to himself, commonsense, no other way to hack out the road ahead. Neither friends nor scruples nor honour nor hope for the folk who took the workers’ road …

  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 o
f 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:

  But what are you doing out here with me? I can get a prostitute anywhere … He stood looking at her coolly, not angered, called her a filthy name, consideringly, the name a keelie gives to a leering whore; and turned and walked down the hill from her sight.

  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:

  There will always be you and I, I think, Mother. It’s the old fight that maybe will never have a finish, whatever the names we give to it—the fight in the end between FREEDOM and GOD.

  It is Chris whose whole being is inseparable from the truth, justice and freedom which Muir claimed were such strong values for Gibbon, and Ewan whose communism is religious at bottom, as Ma Cleghorn notes quite early in the book:

  she wouldn’t trust Ewan, a fine loon, but that daft-like glower in his eyes—Och, this communism stuff’s not canny, I tell you, it’s just a eligion though the Reds say it’s not and make out that they don’t believe in God. They’re dafter about Him than the Salvationists are, and once it gets under a body’s skin he’ll claw at the itch till he’s tirred himself.

  It would seem likely, then, that Chris’s oblivion on the hilltop must have something to do with Freedom and God. In W.K. Malcolm’s interpretation, it signalizes a union between the two categories attained by Chris on the very last page, ‘for just before she finally becomes insensate to the feel of the rain and oblivious to the noise of the passing lapwings, she ultimately recognizes God in the constant working and reworking of her natural surroundings, identifying the power of Change which holds sway over life as the final truth.’13 This is quite some distance from earlier allegorical interpretations which identified Chris with the Land or the Scottish nation, and saw her ‘death’ as symbolizing both the final destruction of the peasantry and the end of Scotland, and indeed of all other nations, in favour of the proletarian internationalism of the industrial working class. One mystical experience is balanced against another—Ewan’s visionary identification with all the oppressed, and Chris’s recognition of God in the ever-changing natural world—and each epiphany is, in the last resort, religious.

  Thomas Crawford

  NOTES TO INTRODUCTION. mss in the National Library of Scotland are quoted by kind permission of the nls and of Gibbon’s daughter, Mrs Rhea Martin.

  1. Letter to Gibbon, 29 January 1935, nls ms. Acc. 26065 (8).

  2. Doubleday Circular of 30 January 1935, nls ms. Acc. 26065 (15).

  3. Listener, 5 December 1934.

  4. Ian S. Munro, Leslie Mitchell: Lewis Grassic Gibbon (Edinburgh, 1966), p.71.

  5. Ian Campbell, ‘Lewis Grassic Gibbon and the Mearns’, in A Sense of Place, ed. Graeme Cruickshank (Edinburgh, 1988), p.18.

  6. Munro, p.71.

  7. ‘Action and Narrative Stance in A Scots Quair’, in Literature of the North, ed. David Hewitt and Michael Spiller (Aberdeen, 1983), p.117.

  8. nls ms. Acc. 26109 (61).

  9. William Κ. Malcolm, A Blasphemer and Reformer (Aberdeen, 1984), pp. 157–70.

  10. Ian Milner, ‘An Estimation of A Scots Quair’, in Marxist Quarterly I (4),1954, p.214. Similar points were made by Jessie Koçsmanova, ‘Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Pioneer of Socialist Realism’, in Journal of Brno University (1955), and by John Mitchell in his Epilogue to the East German translation of Grey Granite (1974).

  11. Deirdre Burton, ‘A Feminist Reading of A Scots Quair’, in The British Working-Class Novel in the Twentieth Century, ed. J. Hawthorn (London, 1984), p.45.

  12. Edwin Muir, ‘Lewis Grassic Gibbon: An Appreciation’, in Scottish Standard I (March 1935), pp.23–4.

  13. Malcolm, p. 184.

  Note on the Text

  The present text follows that of the first edition as scrupulously as possible, except in such matters of typographical styling as the use of small capitals, not italic capitals, for words emphasized in direct speech. Misprints that were not picked up in later editions have been corrected, and the map of ‘The Land of A Scots Quair’ has been prepared from the one in the first edition.

  A typescript of Grey Granite survives, all but the last page, in nls ms Acc. 26042. It includes phrases and short passages which Gibbon altered for his final version. Thus at p.1, line 10, the typescript reads ‘and paused, breathing deeply, she could hear her heart, afore tackling the chave of the climb’, and at p.2, line 3, ‘And at sixty, with sweirty and creash combined, they’ll have carted you off to the creamery!’ Sometimes there is a weakening of the Scots, as at p.3, line 18, where the typescript has ‘hap of the fog’, the printed text ‘peace’. The nls also has a complete set of uncorrected galley proofs. These appear to embody all corrections made on first proof: a spot check revealed no differences from the published text.

  ONE

  Epidote

  ALL AROUND her the street walls were dripping in fog as Chris Colquohoun made her way up the Gallowgate, yellow fog that hung tiny veils on her eyelashes, curled wet, and had in her throat the acrid taste of an ancient smoke. Here the slipper-slide of the pavement took a turn that she knew, leading up to the heights of Windmill Place, and shortly, out of the yellow swath, she saw come shambling the lines of the Steps with their iron hand-rail like a famished snake. She put out her hand on that rail, warm, slimy, and paused afore tackling the chave of the climb, breathing deeply, she could hear her heart. The netbagful of groceries on her arm ached—she looked down through wet lashes at the shape of the thing—as though it was the bag that ached, not her arm….

  Standing still so breathing that little while she was suddenly aware of the silence below—as though all the shrouded town also stood still, deep-breathing a minute in the curl of the fog—stilling the shamble and grind of the trams, the purr of the buses in Royal Mile, the clang and swing of the trains in Grand Central, the swish and roll and oily call of the trawlers taking the Forthie’s flood—all pausin
g, folk wiping the fog from their eyes and squinting about them an un-eident minute—

  Daft, she said to herself, and began climbing the stairs. Midway their forty steps a lamp came in sight, at last, glistening, it flung a long dirty hand down to help her. Her face came into its touch, it blinked surprised, not expecting that face or head or the glistering bronze coils of hair that crowned them—hair drawn in spiralled pads over each ear, fog-veiled, but shining. Chris halted again here under the lamp, thirty-eight, so she couldn’t run up these steps, stiff’s an old horse on a Mounth hill-road.

  Old at thirty-eight? You’ll need a bath-chair at fifty. And at sixty—why, as they’d say in Segget, they’ll have carted you off to the creamery!