Reminiscences of a Poet

DAVID SIMPSON reports on Morag McGill’s lecture on the work of George MacKay Brown, which is scheduled for a repeat airing at the St Magnus Festival in June. Alistair Peebles explains the context in a short introduction.
 

ALISTAIR PEEBLES writes: In late 2005, Morag McGill gave a lecture at Keats House in London on some aspects of the work of George Mackay Brown. As David Simpson reports below, Morag had been asked to contribute to a series entitled ‘The Sea and the Story’.

When news of the event spread, Morag was invited to deliver a version of the lecture during the coming St Magnus Festival, reworked a little to reflect on the promenade performance that will mark the tenth anniversary of the poet’s death and the continuing relevance of his work to the town of his birth.

Maggie Fergusson’s biography, George Mackay Brown: The Life, will be published on April 10. This will be the first authorised biography of the writer, for which Maggie Fergusson has had access to GMB’s friends, family and letters. She also interviewed the writer several times, and is the only biographer to whom George, a reluctant subject, gave his blessing.

Also planned for publication to coincide with the tenth anniversary of George’s death on 13 April is a CD of recordings of a selection of his poems and short stories.

This has been compiled by Orkney Aye, the Young Enterprise Company at Stromness Academy, and it will include previously unpublished recordings of the poet reading his own work. For more details, see the end of David Simpson’s report on Maggie McGill’s lecture, which now follows:

LAST OCTOBER, in the house that once was home to the poet John Keats, a group of Londoners assembled for a talk on the work of George Mackay Brown. Few of them may have realised what a strong and beguiling taste of Orkney they would get, or how much they would come to know about George, whom they had probably only vaguely heard of before that evening.

Morag McGill was, however, the ideal person to speak in that context: a writer herself, and an Orcadian, with close personal and family connections to GMB.

It could be said, Morag suggested, that for the rest of his life, his work was an attempt to create the perfect saga.

Morag’s talk was part of a series entitled ‘The Sea and the Story’, run by the Corporation of the City of London, which owns the house as well as nearby Hampstead Heath. Walking round the house with a glass of wine before the talk, one felt a slight tingle entering rooms still furnished much as Keats had known them.

We looked across to the heath from the same window though which he had seen it, when his bed was brought downstairs to a front room for that very purpose at a time when his tuberculosis – in those days known by the now somewhat romantic name of consumption – demanded bed rest.

It was inevitable, too, to be thankful that medical science gave our own TB-afflicted poet a good four decades more than poor Keats, decades in which George Mackay Brown produced such a wealth of unique and beautiful work.

From the start, Morag made both poet and Orkney come alive. She hooked her audience at once with her earliest memories of George, a close friend of her father, Ian MacInnes, since their boyhood days, during which, according to Morag, they would bunk off school together.

She set the scene enchantingly, taking us back from where we sat in Keats’s house, waiting for a story from her, to the times when, as a very small girl, she sat on George’s knee, wrapped in the gentle kindness he had with children, waiting for a story from him.

It was already clear that we were in the hands of an exceptional storyteller and teacher, just as she had been in the days she was recalling. For her, the story would come at the end of a long ritual of pipe lighting, with spent matches accumulating on the arm of the chair.
 
At last a great cloud of smoke would billow out, and George would adjust the pile of spent matches and tell the young Morag that they were various members of a family called Matches (one of Orkney’s distinctive family names, as it happens). There would be Mr and Mrs Matches, Granny Matches, uncle Matches, and so on, and George would proceed to spin a yarn about them.

Such simplicity in story-telling came naturally to George, to whom the more complex and the new-fangled things in life were usually unwelcome; as Morag put it, George had trouble with progress, and his storytelling reflected that.

The Orkney of old was a place of coming and going, especially as so many men worked at sea, and when they came home, they told their stories. George wrote best not of heroes but of simple folk, the sort who would have listened to the sailors’ stories, or been part of them.

His themes were the glorification of ordinary people, observing how in many ways their lives were richer and more real than those caught up in the hurly burly of city life, with all its rush and complexities. However, she was quick to point out that there was nothing precious in George’s work.

For a writer, though, if you are faced with history – and by now the audience were beginning to realise how Orkney is hotching with the stuff – it hits you in the face, and you simply have to address it. In passing, she also noted the difficulties for a writer nowadays of reinterpreting Orkney after George.

We learned how Ian MacInnes and George used to frequent the house of Peter Esson the tailor, where Mr Brown senior worked.

To those familiar with Stromness and George’s work, the sessions she described were reminiscent of the ‘Pierhead Parliament’, still to be observed sometimes in unofficial session to this day, though perhaps with more drouthy debaters than in the past; or of those winter evening sessions at the blacksmith’s, where old men tell stories in the heat of the forge, as depicted in several of George’s stories.

The peedie Ian and George would make themselves scarce under the tailor’s table, hoping to be forgotten and thus, with luck, pick up some of the juicy scraps of stories chewed over by the men.

At times we almost felt we were there, familiar with the old Stromness that George wrote about, beginning to understand how the town worked, what its people were like as they went about their work by day, and how they were in their community, close as could be yet at the same time fiercely independent individuals.

We even got to know some of their nicknames – George was one of the Duckie Broons, for example, since an ancestor Brown had lived near a duck-pond. Ian and George were mischievous boys, apparently, and got up to “all sorts of wickedness.”

As the child Morag grew, she would see George at social events where songs would be sung and verse recited. These were convivial gatherings, so much so that Ian found himself singing hymns, even though he was an atheist.

Morag wondered whether these hymns, classic, simple forms of verse, provided an early training ground for the future poet. Such simplicity is a function of ballads: their economy, the way they quickly allow their writers to get through to their audience.

At the MacInnes home, they used to listen to the peerless voice of Richard Burton in the classic BBC recording of Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood, a play that comes to the mind of many who read Greenvoe, or vice versa. George loved to recite Milk Wood, and did so with great relish; and it may have given him courage to start writing about his own community, Morag thought.

She reminded us of some of the recurring themes in George’s work: the dignity of toil, the cold disapproval of the Calvinist church. We could almost catch the acid whispering of old ladies as they sucked their pan drops in the kirk on Sunday, as the minister poured out the brimstone.

We were also reminded of George’s noticeably precise speech, in which Morag detected the influence of his mother. Her native tongue was Gaelic and she would think carefully before she spoke, as she hated making mistakes in English. To Morag’s ear, sometimes George did not even sound particularly Orcadian, but more like his mother.

Mention of the Second World War prompted the realisation that this was actually a boom time for Orkney, and the time when George began work in journalism.

It was not a great success: after all, facts can get in the way of a good story. But at least he discovered that he could do composition. And he read voraciously, constantly taking books out of the library (though not always remembering to take them back again, apparently).

Of the books most important in George’s reading at this time, the Orkneyinga Saga was preeminent. It could be said, Morag suggested, that for the rest of his life, his work was an attempt to create the perfect saga.

Sagas were not just stories and language, but an invitation into another world, about life, and death, suffering and heroism. They abounded in contrasting images, and in symbols, powerful components of the language of literature.

We thought about the women in George’s work. Feminists point out that all they do is bake, and sit around waiting for their men to come home; but against this, his women are actually the strong ones, who know things will work out. It is the men in his stories who do the silly things.

In summary, Morag said George’s work was about making the ordinary mythic. He was the poet as outsider, but also as recorder, as the skald was recorder in the time of the sagas.

When Morag finished her talk in deference to the official timetable, there was immediately a demand for more, and she continued with further readings. She now read and discussed some of George’s poems, to the evident delight of an enchanted audience.

She ended with Jock and Mary the tinkers, and the miracle of St Magnus restoring the sight of blind, obstinate old Mary, as she and her man trudged across the north of Orkney’s Mainland.

Such was the appreciation of those who gathered in Keats’s house that night, both in their resounding applause and the fulsome compliments overheard in snatches of conversation as they drifted reluctantly away, that it would be no surprise if some of them, for whom Morag had brought George and Orkney so vividly to life, were at this moment considering a visit, to come and see for themselves.

Maggie Fergusson, George Mackay Brown: The Life (John Murray, ISBN 0 7195 5659 7, price £25.00), is published on 10 April. Further information on the Orkney Aye project can be obtained from orkneyaye@hotmail.co.uk  

© David Simpson, 2006

Link

• St Magnus Festival website