George Mackay Brown

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One of the experiences running through Beside the Ocean of Time is that of displacement—from the displacements of the islands' "original" people by emigrants from Alba, Cornwall, and Sicily nearly two thousand years ago, the conscription of young men by the press gangs of King George III, and the displacements initiated by the British government during World War II, when it requisitioned the entire island of Norday for an air force base (an event treated more fully in Brown's 1972 novel Greenvoe). Resistance is often passive and, with time, often successful. The emigrants from Alba, for example, build an impregnable castle and stow themselves away in it when invaders arrive. The islanders hide their young men in smugglers' caves until the press gangs leave. Even the commandeering of the island by the British is temporary. The islanders begin returning soon after the base is abandoned.

Though Brown thought himself a mere craftsman, his death this year in Kirkwall, Orkney's capital, brought tributes proper to an artist. In London, The Tablet called him "a giant of literature and much loved"; The Guardian found him "a major influence" and a leader of "the Scottish literary renaissance"; The Times named his last novel "a magisterial summing-up of the purpose and meaning of man's life." The poet, who was famously reclusive and disinclined to leave his beloved Orkney, was nonetheless kind in offering his condolences and began chatting about my dad’s brother, Bill, in terms which came as close to excitement as he could muster.

Beginnings

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. 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." This was not an easy choice to make. In Stromness, George was acutely aware of being seen as a layabout who lived with his mother and drank a little too much. His poem The Old Women voiced these concerns, and though his first poetry collections were well received, they were not very profitable:

Bardic and mystical, Brown found Orkney a "microcosm of all the world." Born in 1921 in the town of Stromness, he developed tuberculosis at the age of 20. Only a decade later could he resume his formal education, studying under the Orkney poet Edwin Muir at Newbattle Abbey near Edinburgh. Despite recurring illness, he did an English degree at Edinburgh University (1956–60) and graduate work on the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins (1962–64). In 1961, rejecting what he called a "life-denying" Scots Calvinism, he became a Roman Catholic—a rarity in Presbyterian Orkney—and deepened his sense of sacramentality and of liturgical festival. An eminent chronicler of Orkney life and geography, Brown has published numerous collections of essays, including An Orkney Tapestry (1969), which Seamus Heaney described as "a spectrum of lore, legend, and literature, a highly coloured reaction as Orkney breaks open in the prisms of a poet's mind and memory." In Portrait of Orkney (1981), Brown intertwines contemporary descriptions and facts with history, legend, and anecdote. Brown's works for the stage include A Spell for Green Corn (1970), which is concerned with symbolism, ritual, and the supernatural, and The Loom of Light (1972), an adaptation of Magnus. He has also written radio and television plays and published several children's books, including The Two Fiddlers: Tales from Orkney (1974) and Pictures in a Cave (1977), and a biographical work, Edwin Muir: A Brief Memoir (1975). Positive assessment of Selected Poems, 1954–1983, drawing comparisons between Brown and other poets. Editor with Neil Miller Gunn and Aonghas MacNeacail), A Writers Celidh for Neil Gunn, Balnain Books (Nairn, Scotland), 1991.

The tributes were effusive

A Spell for Green Corn (radio play; broadcast, 1967; produced in Edinburgh, 1970; adaptation produced at Perth Theatre, 1972), Hogarth, 1970. 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. Anyone familiar with Brown's own disingenuous "autobiography" For the Islands I Sing might have expected Fergusson's book to be slim: Brown was born in Orkney in 1921 and died there in 1996. Aside from six years as a mature student, he seldom left the islands. No marriage, no children. He wasn't gay. His father was a postman. After he died, Brown lived with his mother. After she died, he lived alone. Between 1987 and 1989, Brown travelled to Nairn, including a visit to Pluscarden Abbey, to Shetland and to Oxford, making it the longest time he had left Orkney since his earlier studies in Edinburgh. The Oxford visit coincided with the centenary of the death of Gerard Manley Hopkins. [70] A guidebook today comments that the barriers have "probably saved these isles from postwar depopulation."

The line quoted at the beginning of this article is from a poem in the book called Churchill Barriers. These barriers were built during World War II, partly to protect Scapa Flow, where a Nazi submarine had torpedoed a British battleship with great loss of life, and partly to make road crossings (instead of boat crossings) between several of the southern islands. In the following review, Henry describes Brown's chronicling of island life in Beside the Ocean of Time.] Times Literary Supplement, February 16, 1967; April 27, 1967; September 28, 1973; September 27, 1974; August 13, 1976; February 22, 1980; November 21, 1980; April 10, 1981; April 1, 1983; January 20, 1984; June 15, 1984; October 30, 1987; June 30, 1989; May 11-17, 1990. In the following excerpt, Coe discusses Brown's exploration of "the riddle of fate and freedom" in Vinland.] He haunts the town hotel, ‘perched on the high stool in the corner of the bar’, where he holds forth, reading from his history. He gives a compacted, but compelling version of the long and complex story of the islands. Skarf – his name derives from Old Norse, meaning ‘to cut and join’, a term still found in timber boat-building. His language is ambitious – ‘In all the confusions of anabasis, domination, settlement that followed …’. ‘Anabasis’, a military advance into the interior of a territory, and the title of an epic poem written by the French diplomat, ‘Saint-John Perse’ (Alexis Leger), published in 1930 by T. S. Eliot, in translation made by Eliot working with the author. Had George Brown read Anabasis? There are lines and passages in the French poem that come very close to his preoccupations – ‘great turf-burnings seen afar and these operations channelling the living waters on the mountain’. 5In the following review, the critic describes Brown as gifted in "sharpening one's interest in genuinely rustic activities."] Brown was a poet who looked across modern Orkney with a sense of history, a preference for the past, and the persuasive idea that time will tell. SOURCE: A review of Selected Poems, 1954–1992, in Publishers Weekly, Vol. 243, No. 40, September 30, 1996, p. 84. Nigel Wheale is the author of Raw Skies: New and Selected Poems (Shearsman 2005) and The Six Strides of Freyfaxi (Oystercatcher 2010). His academic texts include The Postmodern Arts (Routledge 1995) and Writing & Society: Literacy, Print and Politics in Britain 1590-1660 (Routledge 1999). An archive of his work for the Fortnightly may be found here.

Although his persona (what Brown called a "mask") and work lend themselves to that sort of romance, using them thus risks ignoring what one admirer, Seamus Heaney, diagnosed as "a solitude ... a place of suffering and decision". Rowena Murray and Brian Murray, Interrogation of Silence, John Murray, 2004, ISBN 0-7195-5929-4 p. 13. Reviewing the author's collection A Time to Keep and Other Stories in The New York Times Book Review in 1987, Sheila Gordon wrote that in his "marvelous stories," the author "holds us in the same way the earliest storyteller held the group around the fire in an ancient cave." At first sight, Vinland seems taken up with moods, gestures and epiphanies; it does not signal excitedly when important ideas appear in its narrative. Thus, at one level, we follow the fortunes of Ranald the hero, as he moves determinedly but uncertainly from a sea-roving youth, through agrarian middle age and on to visionary and rheumatic senility. We register, too, the narrative fate of other young men, "splits" of the protagonist, who were either less fortunate or more rebellious—as when Ranald the dutiful son fathers Einhof the runaway heir. Gradually, a pattern of ideas—of themes and variations—emerges. Ranald roves the seas between Greenland, Vinland, Iceland and Orkney, but the dilemmas of Viking life follow him like porpoises. For all the novel's gloomy sense of fate's tight fist, the North Atlantic hero has endlessly to exercise his (all too) free will in making hard choices: heroic enterprise or agrarian domesticity, lobster-fishing or learning Latin, ship or farmhouse, crew or family. He might also decide between the conflicting wishes of father and mother and loyalty to foreign king or to homeland—a fraught choice in a homeland in which "there are always two earls, sometimes three". Are the prizes worth the prices? Is civilization really just like old age; that is, tolerable only when you consider the alternative? It is no wonder that many a grizzled Orcadian soul took refuge in the strong libations supplied by Ord, the surly malt-maker of Papa Stronsay.

‘We decided to enter a competition’

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.) Yet it was typical of him that he should find inspiration in the midst of his travails and produce Foresterhill in 1992, about his recollections of the Granite City and the gratitude he felt for the medical staff who had treated him. In late 1960, Brown commenced teacher training at Moray House College of Education, but ill health prevented him remaining in Edinburgh. On his recovery in 1961, he found he was not suited to teaching and returned late in the year to his mother's house in Stromness, unemployed. [24] At this juncture he was received into the Roman Catholic Church, converting from Presbyterianism of his childhood [25] [26] being baptised on 23 December and taking communion the next day. This followed about 25 years of pondering his religious beliefs. The conversion was not marked by any change in his daily habits, including his drinking. [27] Maturity as poet [ edit ] In a brief commentary on his own writing, Brown once told Contemporary Authors, “Since it seems to me that our civilization will possibly destroy itself before too long, I am interested in the labour and lives of the most primitive people of our civilization, the food-getters (crofters and fishermen) since it is those people living close to the sources of life who are most likely to survive and continue the human story; and since even their lives would be meaningless otherwise, I see religion as an illuminating and stabilising force in the life of a community. Out of these things I make my poems, stories, and plays.” Dictionary of Literary Biography, Gale, Volume 14: British Novelists since 1960, 1983, Volume 27: Poets of Great Britain and Ireland, 1945-1960, 1984; Volume 139: British Short-Fiction Writers, 1945-1980, 1994, pp. 29-39.