Читать книгу The Leithen Stories - Buchan John - Страница 4

The Leithen stories, nevertheless, contain the heart of the Buchan matter, political and philosophical, bringing out tantalising glimpses of work which a more troubled man – ‘serious unto death’, as Carlyle put it – might have turned into a golden lyric. Perhaps this was also apparent to Buchan himself: that what came naturally and fluently to him was something deadly serious to his younger Scots contemporaries. Buchan/Leithen never gave up his day job – or indeed jobs – for the ‘determined stupor’ of the full-time writer, as did Edwin Muir, Hugh MacDiarmid, Eric Linklater or Lewis Grassic Gibbon – and at a further remove, W.B. Yeats and Ezra Pound. The Power-House announces the terrific anarchy to be loosed upon the world, John Macnab the recuperative power of the pastoral. The Dancing Floor is in its way a fire sermon with the kindling material of tradition, sex and violence. In Sick Heart River in particular it’s possible to hear echoes of a flyting between MacDiarmid’s pitiless mysticism of the material in ‘On a Raised Beach’ and Buchan’s own theism, going on behind his post-imperial project of creating a common Canadian culture.

With the practically-minded Buchan there was always a resistance to ‘inoppugnable realities’: that sense of being ensnared by circumstances and irreversible political change. But in the 1920s as an MP he may have felt that he had made a false move: he was a political ‘lieutenant’ who would never be a leader, partly because of his health, partly because he wouldn’t commit himself 100 per cent to the party game. He was doomed to see mediocre Tory contemporaries scale heights interdicted to him. One book which doesn’t appear here, the implausible Gap in the Curtain (1932) has Leithen narrating an uncharacteristically stodgy political tale. ‘The Rt. Hon. David Mayot’ could have concerned a real, and gripping episode in which Buchan was involved – the formation of Ramsay MacDonald’s National Government the previous August – but it reeks of Asquith’s day, not Baldwin’s.