A Scots Quair (38 page)

To
George Malcolm Thomson

American reviewers were as impressed by
Cloud Howe
on its first appearance as they had been by
Sunset Song
. The
New
York Times, Herald Tribune
, and
North American Review
praised it to the skies, but the best account I know of a first reading comes from Herschell Bricknell, in a letter of 14 February 1934 to Gibbon's American publishers:

Gibbon's peers among contemporary Scottish novelists —Compton Mackenzie, Naomi Mitchison, Neil Gunn, and George Blake—hailed it as a masterpiece, although one writer of the older generation, the poet Lewis Spence, who had been delighted by
Sunset Song
, saw its successor as merely ‘a deliberate misconception, a capricious guffaw' (
Scottish
Field
, October 1934). As might have been predicted, many Scottish newspapers were as scathingly contemptuous as they had been over
Sunset Song
. ‘Those who like a simple clean story will not find it here', wrote the Aberdeen
Press
and Journal
's critic on 3 August 1933. ‘If life in a Mearns town is compounded of indecencies, sneers, ill-will, spying, gossiping, downright cruelty, then this Mearns town is consistent.'

These hostile judgments are worth recalling because they were a response to an essential feature of the book. Seen from one angle,
Cloud Howe
is a brilliant picture of a small country town set in a consummately rendered fictional region. There
is nothing on the map of Kincardineshire that corresponds to Segget in the place where Segget is supposed to be, though certain features, such as the jute mill and the owner's management of it may be based on Inverbervie. The ruined Kaimes are compounded from various sources, not least Fenella's castle near Fettercairn; Frellin, Culdyce Moor, and Quarles seem to be inventions, though marvellously plausible ones. But Gibbon, in the interests of solidity, also features many genuine place names from the real region of which the fictional one is an emanation. Segget, like so much in the book, is fictional in order to be
typical
—more typical than a photographic documentary of any real community could be; and it is typical of a community gone wrong. It has gone wrong because it is infected with ‘those little prides and those little fortunes' which Robert told of in his sermon by the war memorial at the end of
Sunset Song
, the ‘new oppressions and foolish greeds of the world that we seem to inherit'. That is why the narrative voices of the community—the Segget voices—are often cruder and more strident than the Kinraddie voices, and why Chris's voice never fuses with the Segget ones but is always separate, just like her essential inner self, ‘Chris alone'.

Yet it is not only what has happened since the war that has made Segget the obscene pit that it is; it is the whole history of class society, all the millenia of man's inhumanity to man, as we see from Chris's thoughts during a confrontation with Mowat, the degenerate mill-owner:

What Lewis Spence and the
Press and Journal
reviewer did not appreciate was that there are still kindly souls in this community, a point made cogently by Chris in a dialogue with Robert which extends the discussion from region to nation, from the Mearns to the whole of Scotland:

 Throughout the novel, the voices of Segget are not uniformly mean and petty. True, there is the vile voice that reports the long agony of Meiklebogs' injured horse; but there is also an essentially decent voice that is proud of Cis Brown and refuses to believe she has taken up with Dod Cronin. This same voice is later full of honest radical indignation at the sufferings of the unemployed:

One of the triumphs of
Cloud Howe
is its magnificent ‘orality'. There are indeed many voices other than the community voices—not merely the voice of Chris's interior thoughts with its subtle use of ‘self-referring you', or Else Queen's intensely Scots inner voice and Ewan's cool English one, which we occasionally hear as vehicles of the narrative; not merely Robert's ministerial conversation (we hear him
only in dialogue, he is never given interior monologue); but the more public voices of oral folk tale, sermons, and open-air speeches. There is at times a quite extraordinary orchestration of folk-narrative technique within the Segget voice, where one must assume an anonymous
individual
in the traditional role of tale-teller with an audience around him. It is such a person (though malicious and mean of spirit, one feels), who tells how Else Queen's bairn was born among the sheaves in the corn-loft; and into
his
tale is set another, a folk anecdote about Burns and the Virgin Mary, assigned to a named individual and perfectly suited to his character: ‘That was a real foul story to tell, it showed you the tink that Ake Ogilvie was, interrupting the real fine newsy tale of the happenings down at the Meiklebogs.' Of course Gibbon's irony intends us to approve of Ogilvie's racy irreverence and condemn the tone of the newsy tale-teller.

A more sublime orchestration is heard in Robert's contrasting sermons—the militant sermon about Samson and the Philistines which got him the Segget kirk, though the congregation hadn't a clue what it meant; the crusading sermon with which he opens his campaign to clean up Segget and which puts the tradespeople against him; the namby-pamby quietist sermons he preaches after the defeat of the General Strike (we only hear about these, they are not quoted directly), and the fine rousing sermon at the very end of the book which looks away from Christianity altogether to the Communism of
Grey Granite
. Within this pattern of public oratory we also have the evangelical sermons of the hypocritical McDougall Brown (these are merely referred to, not quoted at length); and the dialectic between Robert's sermon at the Memorial on Armistice Day and the socialist address of Jock Cronin, the spinners' leader, after their procession has broken in on the official service. If Gibbon had included an Episcopal minister and his wife, as was once his intention,
2
he might well have given us even more sermons than he did. And if he had followed the idea he once had of ending not with Robert's death in the pulpit but with a grand trial scene in which he would have been expelled from the Kirk for his politics,
3
public oratory would surely have bulked even larger in the total design.

Such oratory necessarily belongs, given the nature of society and public life in the Mearns and Scotland of the 1920s, to the world of men. But the book's greatest achievement does not belong to the world of men at all, except peripherally; it lies in the continued development of Chris's character, so brilliantly begun in
Sunset Song
. Robert's career has the shape and emotional impact of a tragedy of character in which the hero redeems himself at the close and destroys himself in so doing. But we experience the tragedy mainly through its effect on Chris—the breakdown of her originally happy marriage, her agonised spectator's response to his desertion of Christ the Tiger for Creeping Jesus after the defeat of the Strike, and the final act of heroic mercy that brings about his death. We are false to the book if we read it as
primarily
historical allegory; if it were, it would not turn non-Scots readers upside down the way it does. Like all the greatest characters in narrative and drama, Chris is both a unique individual and profoundly typical. George Malcolm Thomson, to whom the book is dedicated, wrote that ‘this Chris of yours is surely the greatest woman character in Scottish fiction … She is intensely Scottish and yet universal (Letter of 23 July 1933)
4
In this respect Chris is like Natasha in
War and Peace
, for she exhibits the most positive, the most enduring aspects of the national character in a complex form. This, surely, is what Robert means when he says ‘Oh Chris Caledonia, I've married a nation!', and Stephen Mowat when he says that the first time he met her ‘he felt he was stared at by Scotland herself.' In her brief confrontations with Mowat she is representative, not of Scotland as an abstraction, but of the Scottish
people
, as Jeanie Deans is in her interview with the Queen in Scott's
Heart of Midlothian
, and it is this aspect of her—her independence, lack of affectation, hatred of oppression, and love of freedom, which leads Robert to say that she will outlast him by a thousand years.

Gibbon's remarkable presentation of female experience has been freshly examined recently, notably by Isobel Murray and Deirdre Burton.
5
Burton in particular has observed that Gibbon's techniques for rendering Chris's separate selves—the first, second, third and fourth
Chris —and the precise ways in which she is aware of these splits and is able to look down at herself ‘as though she looked at some other than herself'—are like those employed by many women writers: they are almost an identifying characteristic of women's writing in this century.
6
Female perceptiveness, or rather a remarkable fusion of male and female perceptiveness, also informs the cloud imagery that runs through the novel. The whole book as we now have it is structured around clouds. It moves from the high bright wispy clouds of Cirrus with their shapes like locks of hair, through the rounded heaps of Cumulus with darker horizontal bases, to the low, wide Stratus, and finally to the looming rain-clouds of Nimbus with their connotations of tragedy and despair. A thoroughgoing allegorical reading might however ponder the other meaning of nimbus—‘a cloud or luminous mist investing a god or goddess.'

One of the most beautiful moments in the book is a purely female exchange, an incident in sisterhood, when Chris has commented on the plight of the pregnant Cis Brown:

Immediately after this, there occurs one of the strongest statements of the metaphysical significance of the title and its associated imagery. The clouds are linked in Chris's mind with the deepest layers of woman's biological being, ‘when it came on women what thing they carried, darkling, coming to life within them, new life to replenish the earth again, to come to being in the windy Howe where the cloud-ships sailed to the unseen south'. The Howe, the vast vale of the Mearns, is hollow, feminine. But the clouds transform themselves to pillars, symbols of maleness on a Freudian reading— ‘those clouds that marched, terrible, tenebrous, their pillars still south.' Then follows the great Mosaic emblem which reverberates throughout the book and is associated with the best in Robert and the Kirk: ‘A pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by
night.' On one level Chris thinks that the ideals, creeds, and theories which men have followed throughout history are insubstantial—‘mere' clouds, and Robert's not the least of these—compared to the underlying creativity of the universe, to which she is instinctively attuned. But on another the pillars of fire are not confined to one sex, they body forth the energy of the
general
unconscious, the libido, while the pillars of cloud are the superego and its rationalizations. Gibbon continues:

What is meant by ‘the
REAL
' and what are we to understand by ‘below'? The answer, at this stage of Chris's pilgrimage, is perhaps provided by comparison with an earlier passage where she speaks of ‘something that was bred in your bones in this land—oh, Something: maybe that Something was
GOD
', and where it is clear that ‘land' does not signify an abstract geographical entity, but rather the soil and the rocks and the trees and the heath as made out of the one solid reality, a base that is obstinately
there
. She continues, in that same earlier passage, with the thought that it is at the moment of death that Scots folk ‘face up to the
REAL
at last, neither heaven nor hell but the earth that was red'. (The soil of the Mearns is bright red in colour, which makes the fields when freshly ploughed glow with a peculiar richness and warmth). For Chris, the Earth itself abides
below
all the ephemeral forms that arise in the course of evolution and of history. Neil Gunn was struck by ‘mystical' passages such as this, when he wrote to Gibbon on 17 July 1933: