Orkney Through Writers’ Eyes

MORAG McGILL sounds off on the official neglect of indigenous writing in Orkney, and celebrates a step in the right direction.

I WAS LYING in bed this morning listening to an item about car tourists. It seems VisitScotland have included our isles on a route map to be distributed to major European cities. ‘The longer they stay, the more they spend,’ said the official – and up I got, in a bad temper.

Yes, tourism is Orkney’s life blood now; but the cash nexus ain’t the only equation. We have a vital literary heritage that goes almost unnoticed, unremarked, taken for granted.

I’m not talking about George Mackay Brown here – if anything, as far as George is concerned, we suffer from a kind of hectic Great Poet Syndrome, rather like what happened to Tennyson, the first big media star, whose hat, cloak and stick are enshrined in the Usher Art Gallery in Lincoln, along with a lock of his hair.

Gardens! Statues ! Plaques on empty houses! Yes – fine – but I prefer a more cerebral celebration of – not just George, but of the line of writers artists and wayward thinkers who gave us a cultural heritage that most small communities would die for.

And I’d prefer for the tourism Big Boys with the Big Bucks to invest in a literary centre which will give ‘car tourists’ a real understanding of who writes about us, why they do, and what they say. Because nobody’s doing it!

That long internal matutinal rant got me through two cups of tea – and then on to the class we’re having in Kirkwall Library (run by OIC Community Education) – a bunch of enthusiastic, committed, knowledgeable folk who want to learn more about writing here, and the social context it happened in, and want to engage and criticise and question.

Interestingly, Storer Clouston, Eric Linklater and Edwin Muir were born within years of each other – and yet, the Orkneys that they write about are very different.

‘The Spy in Black’ (Clouston) is an endearingly flawed tale, with a sweet love story and a hubristic yet naïve German hero. It’s sub–John Buchan, but interestingly sub. And you have to admire a man who produced so much, and also wrote well about local archaeology and history. However, he is, and always will be, the laird o’ the manor, king of the witty quip, pourer of the sherry.

Eric Linklater was a laird too – but an arriviste. The Hemingway-esque persona – huntin’, shootin’, fishin’ and drinkin’ – concealed a man of marshmallow sensitivity. Alas, it’s only in his novel about Shetland, ‘The Dark of Summer’, that he probes a little more deeply into his own psychology, but that book – unjustly passed over when published post-war, because nobody wanted to think of dark things any more – is a sensitive and troubled piece, about guilt, and heroism and sacrifice.

If you want to understand Linklater – read his letters. They are warm, engaged, funny, tender.

Then we come to Muir – man of steel! Forget what they tell you about shyness and neurasthenia – this was a survivor, a philosopher who learned not to trust Nietzsche, but to trust peerie Willa Anderson instead. Without Willa, there would be no Muir.

And – like many Orcadians before and since – he was a European, not just because he was translating, but because he was experiencing at first hand the march of Fascism. Linklater prickled when his German translator was dumped for being Jewish, and left the publisher: Muir had a breakdown after Prague. Politics was what they all breathed, in their different ways.

Next week we get to GMB, to Ernest Marwick and Robert Rendall, the quiet souls, the honourers of the dialect and a vanishing way of life… and the week after – the new writers.

There are many, some ‘local’, some ‘fae sooth’ (no point pretending these distinctions are not made). A class member said last week, ‘Isn’t it strange that those who have written most poignantly about Orkney are those who were exiled?’

Perhaps now we have folk writing poignantly about Orkney who want desperately to belong – who are living on that old street wanting to belong. A renaissance? Yes, I think so – you read the old to learn how to write the new Orkney.

But back to my main point – we don’t honour these folk the way we should. The class, I think, is showing us all what renaissance is about – being engaged in a discussion about culture. And I haven’t even got started on Margaret Tait – film maker extraordinaire – who writes poetry that sings.

Car tourists – slow doon and tak notice. Tourist board – same applies.

© Morag McGill, 2007