George Mackay Brown

George Mackay Brown. Courtesy Other Voices International Project.

George Mackay Brown (17 October 1921 – 13 April 1996), was a Scottish poet, prose author and dramatist, whose work has a distinctly Orcadian character. He is ranked with the great Scottish poets of the 20th century.

Life

Family, youth, education

Stromness, Orkney Islands. Photo by Gus Macdonald. Licensed under Creative Commons, courtesy Geograph.org.

Brown was the youngest of 6 children, born to John Brown, a tailor and postman, and Mhairi (Mackay); she had been brought up in Braal Castle, Strathy, Sutherland, as a native Gaelic speaker. He was born on 17 October 1921.

Except for periods as a mature student on mainland Scotland, Mackay Brown lived all his life in the town of Stromness in the Orkney islands. Due to illness his father was restricted in his work and received no pension and there was a family history of depression. It is likely that Mackay's uncle, Jimmy Brown, committed suicide. The body was found in Stromness harbour in 1935.

Brown's youth was marked by poverty and it was from this time that he was affected by tuberculosis. This illness kept him from entering the army at the start of World War II and it afflicted him to such an extent that he could not live a normal working life; however, it was because of this that he had the time and space in which to write.

In 1947, Stromness voted to allow pubs to open again, the town having been 'dry' since the 1920s. When the earliest bar opened in 1948 Mackay Brown first tasted alcohol, which he found to be "a revelation; they flushed my veins with happiness; they washed away all cares and shyness and worries. I remember thinking to myself 'If I could have two pints of beer every afternoon, life would be a great happiness'". Subsequently alcohol played a considerable part in his life, although he says, "I never became an alcoholic, mainly because my guts quickly staled".

He was a mature student at Newbattle Abbey College, where poet Edwin Muir, who would have a great influence on his life as a writer, was warden in the 1951-1952 session. His return for the following session was interrupted by the return of tuberculosis.

Career

After he had had poems published in several periodicals, his debut volume of poems, The Storm, was published by Orkney Press in 1954. Muir wrote in the foreword: "Grace is what I find in these poems". Only 300 copies were printed, and the imprint sold out within a fortnight. It was acclaimed in the local press.

He studied English literature at the University of Edinburgh. After publication of poems in a literary magazine, with the help of Muir, Brown had a 2nd volume Loaves and Fishes published by the Hogarth Press in 1959. It was warmly received.

During this period he met, and drank in Rose Street, Edinburgh with, many of the Scottish poets of his time: Sydney Goodsir Smith, Norman MacCaig, Hugh MacDiarmid and others. Here he also met Stella Cartwright, described as "The Muse in Rose Street". Brown was briefly engaged to her, and began a correspondence that would continue till her death in 1985.

In the autumn of 1960 Brown commenced teacher training at Moray House College of Education, but soon was unable to remain in Edinburgh because of ill-health. On his recovery in 1961 he found that he was not suited to this type of work and returned late in the year to his mother's house in Stromness, unemployed. It was at this time that he was received into the Roman Catholic Church, being baptised on 23 December and taking communion on the following day. This followed about 25 years of pondering his religious beliefs. But this conversion was not marked by any change in his daily habits, including his drinking. After a period of unemployment, and the rejection of a volume of poetry by the Hogarth Press, Brown did post-graduate study on Gerard Manley Hopkins, although academic study was not to his taste. This provided some occupation and income until 1964, when a volume of poetry, The Year of the Whale, was accepted.

Brown now found himself able to support himself financially for the 1st time, as he received new commissions. He received a bursary from the Scottish Arts Council in December 1965 and he was working on the volume of short stories, A Calendar of Love, which was issued, to critical acclaim, in February 1967. He was still troubled by his excessive drinking and that of Stella Cartwright. Late in that year his mother, who had supported him, while disapproving of his drinking, died, leaving as estate of £4.

Meanwhile he had been working on An Orkney Tapestry, which includes essays about Orkney and some more imaginative pieces. 1968 also saw his only visit to Ireland, on a bursary from the Society of Authors. He met Seamus Heaney there although his nervous condition reduced his ability to enjoy his time there.

In 1969 A Time to Keep, a collection of short stories, was published, and received a very positive welcome. The poet Charles Causley said, "I don't know anyone writing in this particular genre today who comes within a thousand miles of him". This was also the year in which he finished working on a six-part cycle of poems about Rackwick, published in 1971 as 'Fishermen with Ploughs'. Meanwhile An Orkney Tapestry was proving to be a commercial success.

Brown met musician Peter Maxwell Davies in Rackwick during the summer of 1970. Subsequently Davies - who came to live in Rackwick - based a number of his works on the poetry and prose of George Mackay Brown.

Brown was now working on his debut novel, Greenvoe, the story of an imaginary Orkney community menaced by an undefined project called 'Operation Black Star'. The characters, with one exception, are not portrayed in any psychological depths.. The exception is Mrs Mckee, mother of the (alcoholic) minister; he had intended her to be a minor character but he said of her, "I grew to love her more and more as the novel unfolded". In the 'Dictionary of Literary Biography' is says that Greenvoe "ranks ... among the great prose poems of this century". When the novel was published in May 1972 it appeared somewhat prophetic because of the oil exploration beginning in the Orkney area.But the resultant degree of celebrity was a trial to him.

The story of the life of Magnus Erlendsson, Earl of Orkney was 1 to which Brown frequently turned, and it was the theme of his next novel, Magnus, published in 1973.The story is magnus's life is told in Orkneyinga saga., It examined the themes of sanctity and self-sacrifice. Brown takes the theme of sacrifice into the 20th century by inserting in journalistic language an account of the death of Dietrich Bonhoeffer.". While some critics see the work as disjointed" Peter Maxwell Davies, for example, regards it as Brown's greatest achievement. Davies used it as the basis of his opera The Martyrdom of St Magnus.

The period after the completion of Magnus was marked by one of Brown's more acute periods of mental distress. Nevertheless he maintained a stream of wrting: poetry, children's stories and a weekly column in the local newspaper. His columns in The Orcadian continued from 1971 to the end of his life; a collection of these columns was published as Letter from Hamnavoe in 1975.

In the summer of 1976 Brown met Nora Kennedy, a Viennese jeweller and silversmith, who was moving to South Ronaldsay. They had a brief affair, and remained friends for the rest of his life. He said in early 1977 that this had been his most productive winter as a writer. But by the spring of 1977 he was entering a period of depression which would last intermittently for almost a decade. But he maintained his working routine throughout.He also suffered from severe bronchial problems, with his condition so serious that in the spring of 1981 he was given the Last Sacraments.

These years saw his work on Time in a Red Coat, a novel which Brown called "more a sombre fable", a meditation on the passage of time. It has been described as "a novel in which the poet" - Brown as poet - "assumes an undoubted authority" .

2 of the more important women in Brown's life died at about this time: Nora Smallwood who worked for his publishers, Chatto & Windus, and who had helped and encouraged them over the years, in 1984; and Stella Cartwright in 1965. It was in the period after her death that Brown began For the Islands I Sing, the autobiography which was not published until after his death. It devotes more space to Stella than to any other individual, although he did not attend her funeral.

Brown subsequently formed an intense, platonic, attachment to Kenna Crawford, to whom he dedicated both The Golden Bird: Two Orkney Stories and some poems in The wreck of the Archangel, a volume of poetry. She bore a remarkable resemblance to Stella Cartwright.

He died on 13 April 1996, and was buried on 16 April, the feast day of Saint Magnus, with his funeral service held at the Church of Scotland St Magnus Cathedral. The service was presided over by Rev. Mario Conti, Father Michael Spencer and his later biographer Ron Ferguson. Peter Maxwell Davies played Farewell to Stromness. George Mackay Brown's gravestone bears an inscription from the last two lines of his 1996 poem "A work for poets" : "Carve the runes / Then be content with silence".

Writing

A Work for Poets

To have carved on the days of our vanity
A sun
A ship
A star
A cornstalk

Also a few marks
From an ancient forgotten time
A child may read

That not far from the stone
A well might open for wayfarers

Here is a work for poets-
Carve the runes
Then be content with silence

“

”

From "A Work for Poets" (1996)

Mackay Brown gained most of his inspiration from his native islands, in poems, stories and novels which ranged through time. He drew on the Icelandic Orkneyinga Saga, especially in his novel Magnus. In 1961, he entered the Roman Catholic Church; he drew much inspiration from the traditional Latin liturgy, monasticism and the history of the medieval Church in Orkney. He was nominated for the Booker Prize in 1994 for his Beside the Ocean of Time and won the 1987 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for The Golden Bird: Two Orkney Stories. His autobiography, For the Islands I Sing, was published shortly after his death. A biography George Mackay Brown: The Life by Maggie Fergusson was published in 2006.

Recognition

The Golden Bird won the 1987 James Tait Black Memorial Prize.

Brown was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in the 1974 New Year Honours List.

Composer Peter Maxwell Davies collaborated with Mackay Brown for many of his Orkney-inspired works.

In 2005, a memorial plaque to George Mackay Brown was unveiled in the Writers' Museum, in the Royal Mile, Edinburgh. It is engraved with a quotation from his best-known poem "Hamnavoe":

In the fire of images

Gladly I put my hand

Publications

Poetry

• The Storm, and other poems. Orkney Herald Press, 1954.
• Loaves and Fishes. London: Hogarth, 1959.
• The Year of the Whale. London: Hogarth, 1965.
• The Five Voyages of Arnor. Falkland Fife, Scotland: K.D. Duval, 1966.
• Twelve Poems. Belfast, Northern Ireland: Belfast Festival Publications, 1968.
• Fishermen with Ploughs: A Poem Cycle. London: Hogarth, 1971.
• Lifeboat, and other poems. Crediton, Devon, England: Gilbertson, 1971.
• Poems New and Selected. London: Hogarth, 1971; New York: Harcourt, 1973.
  • enlarged edition published as Selected Poems. London: Hogarth, 1977.
• Penguin Modern Poets 21 (with Iain Crichton Smith and Norman MacCaig). London: Penguin, 1972.
• Winterfold. London: Chatto & Windus, 1976.
• Voyages. London: Hogarth, 1983.
• Christmas Poems (illustrated by John Lawrence). Oxford, England: Perpetua Press, 1984.
• Stone (photographs by Gunnie Moberg). Duval & Hamilton, 1987.
• Four Poets for St. Magnus (with Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, and Christopher Fry). Brockness Press, 1987.
• Tryst on Egilsay. Wetherby, Yorkshire, England: Celtic Cross Press, 1988.
• Selected Poems, 1954-1983. London: J. Murray, 1991
  • revised as Selected Poems, 1954-1992 Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 1996.
• The Lost Village: Poems. Wetherby, Yorkshire, England: Celtic Cross Press, 1992.
• Foresterhill. Schoandorf, Germany: Babel Press, 1992.
• Brodgar Poems. Oxford: Perpetua Press, 1992.
• The Sea and the Tower. Calgary, AB: Bayeux Arts, 1994.
• The Wreck of the Archangel. Calgary, AB: Bayeux Arts, 1995.
• Following a Lark: Poems. London: J. Murray, 1996.
• Water (1996)
• Travellers: poems (2001)
• Collected Poems (2005)

Short fiction

• A Calendar of Love. London: Hogarth, 1967
  • published in U.S. as A Calendar of Love, and other stories. New York: Harcourt, 1968.
• A Time to Keep, and other stories. London: Hogarth, 1969; New York: Harcourt, 1987.
• Hawkfall and other stories. London: Hogarth, 1974.
• The Sun's Net. London: Hogarth, 1976.
• Witch, and other stories. London: Longman, 1977.
• Andrina, and other stories. London: Chatto & Windus, 1982.
• Christmas Stories (illustrations by John Lawrence). Oxford: Perpetua Press, 1985.
• The Hooded Fisherman: A story (illustrations by Charles Shearer). Duval & Hamilton, 1985.
• Selected Stories. Vanguard Press, 1986.
• The Golden Bird: Two Orkney Stories. Vanguard Press, 1987.
• The Masked Fisherman and Other Stories. London: J. Murray, 1989.

Novels

• Greenvoe. New York: Harcourt, 1972.
• Magnus. London: Hogarth, 1973.
• Time in a Red Coat. London: Chatto & Windus, 1984; New York: Vanguard Press, 1985.
• Vinland. London: J. Murray, 1992.
• Beside the Ocean of Time. London: J. Murray, 1994.

Non-fiction

• Let's See the Orkney Islands. Inverness, Scotland: Thomson, 1948.
• Stromness Official Guide. London: Burrow, 1956.
• An Orkney Tapestry (essays). London: Gollancz, 1969.
• Letters from Hamnavoe (essays). EdinburgH: Gordon Wright Publishing, 1975.
• Edwin Muir: A Brief Memoir. West Linton, Peebleshire, England: Castlelaw Press, 1975.
• From Stone to Thorn. Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1975.
• Under Brinkie's Brae (essays, photographs by Gordon Wright). Edinburgh: Gordon Wright Publishing, 1979.
• Portrait of Orkney (photographs by Werner Forman). London: Hogarth, 1981
  • revised edition (photographs by Gunnie Moberg, drawings by Erlend Brown). London: J. Murray, 1989.
• The Scottish Bestiary (illustrations by John Bellany, Steven Campbell, Peter Howson, Jack Knox, Bruce McLean, June Redfern, and Adrian Wiszniewski). Paragon Press, 1986.
• For the Islands I Sing: An Autobiography. London: J. Murray, 1997.

Juvenile

• The Two Fiddlers: Tales from Orkney (illustrations by Ian MacInnes). London: Hogarth, 1974.
• Pictures in the Cave (illustrations by Ian MacInnes). London: Chatto & Windus, 1977.
• Six Lives of Fankle the Cat. London: Chatto & Windus, 1980.
• Keepers of the House (illustrations by Gillian Martin). London: Old Stile Press, 1986.

Edited

• Selected Prose of Edwin Muir. London: J. Murray, 1987.
• A Writers Celidh for Neil Gunn (edited with Neil Miller Gunn and Aonghas MacNeacail). Nairn, Scotland. Balnain Books, 1991.

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy the Poetry Foundation.

Plays

• Witch, produced in Edinburgh, Scotland, 1969, published in A Calendar of Love, 1967.
• A Time to Keep (television play based on three stories by Brown), telecast, 1969.
• A Spell for Green Corn (radio play; broadcast, 1967; produced in Edinburgh, 1970; adaptation produced at Perth Theatre, 1972). Hogarth, 1970.
• Orkney (television play), telecast, 1971.
• The Loom of Light (produced in Kirkwall, 1972; photographs by Gunnie Moberg, illustrations by Simon Fraser). Balnain Books, 1986.
• The Storm Watchers, produced in Edinburgh, 1976.
• The Martyrdom of St. Magnus (opera libretto; music by Peter Maxwell Davies; adaptation of novel Magnus by Brown; produced in Kirkwall, Vienna, and London, 1977; produced in Santa Fe, 1979). London: Boosey and Hawkes, 1977.
• Miss Barraclough (television play), telecast, 1977.
• Four Orkney Plays for Schools (television play), telecast, 1978.
• The Two Fiddlers (opera libretto; music by Davies; adaptation of story by Brown; produced in London, 1978). London: Boosey and Hawkes, 1978.
• The Well, produced at St. Magnus Festival, 1981.
• The Voyage of Saint Brandon (radio play; also see below), broadcast, 1984.
• Andrina (teleplay), telecast, 1984.
• Three Plays (contains The Loom of Light, The Well, and The Voyage of Saint Brandon), Chatto & Windus, 1984.
• The Road to Colonus, broadcast by PTE-Dublin, 1989.
• A Celebration for Magnus (son et Lumiere text by Brown, music by Davies; produced in Kirkwall, Orkney, 1988), Nairn, Balnain, 1987.
• Edwin Muir and the Labyrinth, produced in Edinburgh, 1987.

Except where noted, information on plays courtesy the Poetry Foundation.

See also

The Old Women by George Mackay Brown

• List of British poets
• List of English-language playwrights

References

• Bold, Alan (1978), George Mackay Brown, The 'Modern Writers' Series, Barnes & Noble, ISBN 0-06-490569-1 
• Ferguson, Maggie (2006), George Mackay Brown: The Life, John Murray, ISBN 0-7195-5659-7 
• Murray, Rowena; Murray, Brian (2004), Interrogation of Silence: The Writings of George Mackay Brown, John Murray, ISBN 0-7195-5929-4 
• Ferguson, Ron (2011), George Mackay Brown: The Wound and the Gift, Saint Andrew Press, ISBN 978-0-7152-0935-6 
• Rt Revd Professor the Lord Harries, 'Light from the Orkneys: Edwin Muir and George Mackay Brown' (Public Lecture given at Gresham College, 5 February 2009)

External links

Poems

• George Mackay Brown (1921-1996) at the Scottish Poetry Library (profile & 5 poems)
• George Mackay Brown 1921-1996 at the Poetry Foundation

Audio / video

• George Mackay Brown (1921-1996) at The Poetry Archive

Books

• George Mackay Brown at Amazon.com

About

• George Mackay Brown at Writing Scotland
• "Not just Orkney's greatest poet, but Britain's" at The Guardian
• A Marvellous Journey - George Mackay Brown Official website.
• Douglas Dunn, "Finished Fragrance: The poems of George Mackay Brown".Poetry Nation #2 (1974)
• Portraits at Scottish National Galleries