Читать книгу The Leithen Stories - Buchan John - Страница 6

The war made Buchan’s ‘shockers’ famous. It also delivered blow after shattering blow through the loss of family and friends: all the more severe because his deskbound jobs deprived him of the exhilaration of survival which his French contemporary Henri Barbusse celebrated in Under Fire (1916). But war propaganda was complex enough to be recuperative; it also involved Buchan in probing German nationality via German psychoanalysis. Catherine Carswell wrote that he had mastered all the standard texts ‘with attention and respect’, which certainly meant Freud and Jung.

Freudian traces in Buchan are pretty limited, although the distinguished Scots psychoanalyst Jock Sutherland argued that his relationship to his mother might repay study. Jung, an exact contemporary and, like Buchan, a son of the Calvinist manse, was likely to be a more agreeable ideologue; but both would lead back to the huge myth-kitty of Victorian anthropology, The Golden Bough in particular, because of their interest in custom and habit, totem and taboo.

John Macnab (1925) seems remote from such concerns, the most lighthearted of Buchan’s novels, with its origins in Captain Brander Dunbar’s challenge to Lord Abinger at Inverlochy in 1897, and its stunning descriptions of the treacherous beauty of the West Highlands. But it becomes equally freighted with significance. Editing The Northern Muse (1924), his fine anthology of Scots vernacular poetry, Buchan doubtless remembered that his great predecessor in this business, Allan Ramsay senior, had used the politics of pastoral in his Gentle Shepherd exactly two centuries earlier. This was still acted by village companies into Buchan’s childhood, reminding the folk of a protest against misgovernment which was both Jacobite and radical.

This comes out in the election meeting, with its contrast between Lord Lamancha’s meaningless party oration, and Archie Roylance’s love-kindled idealism. It owes something to Disraeli – Buchan snitching one of his best jokes – but also in the background is Arthur Hugh Clough’s The Bothie of Tober Na Vuolich (1848) in which a group of Oxford men on a highland reading party are faced with old inequalities, love, and the prospect of a new beginning. If it doesn’t work quite as well as that masterly réprise of Peacock and Scott, Castle Gay (1930), put this down to Buchan’s problems with the highlands and a landscape which, however beautiful, was empty of people. Border pastoral had a somewhat different meaning for those who had been driven forth by the shepherds, the Cheviot and the stag, and Gerard Craig Sellar, Buchan’s host at Ardtornish, was the grandson of Patrick Sellar, the Duke of Sutherland’s evicter-in-chief, a name which still inspires strong emotions. On the other hand, the highlanders do get the last word, the sporting gents’ destinies being firmly in the scaly, crafty, hands of Fish Benjie.

Craig-Sellar also had a hand in The Dancing Floor (1926) which followed quickly after John Macnab. Inspired by a huge, silent house on one of the Petali Islands, north-east of Athens, visited while on Craig-Sellar’s yacht in 1910, it was a reworking, at novel length, of a much earlier short story ‘Basilissa’ (1914), published not long after The Power House, and also in Blackwood’s. Vernon Milburne is a young English country gentleman happened on by Leithen after an accident (does Leithen never encounter, by accident, somewhere terribly boring?). He is haunted by an annual dream about a fire in a room, each year advancing towards him. Leithen provides the link to a strange house on a Greek island and an ordeal he must endure, and the mysterious figure of Koré Arabin. Travelling in the Aegean, he discovers the house, residence of Koré’s father Shelley Arabin, an English littérateur far gone in nameless decadence. Furious against their landlord, the locals perceive Milburne as being the priest-king ‘who slew the slayer and shall himself be slain’, who must marry the daughter of the hated house, and then be sacrificed with her. All this has more than a whiff of Arthur Machen, even of Dennis Wheatley, about it. It’s with a start that one remembers that the Plakos business was right in the time and place of a quite different sort of villain: Eric Ambler’s Dimitrios Makropolos.

In the earlier novels Leithen is energetic and self-confident. It is quite otherwise in Sick Heart River (1941), written while Buchan, now Lord Tweedsmuir, was Governor-General of Canada and published after his death. It puzzled his staff, who found it sombre and introverted. The dying Leithen is involved in no thriller plot, but the task of finding a French-Canadian financier, Francis Gaillard, who has disappeared in the Canadian North, something complicated by the fact that Lew Frizel, brother of Leithen’s guide, seems to have gone crazily off in search of an edenic valley, the Sick Heart River. The quest for the two deranged men also becomes a quest for a nation. The Sick Heart, although tranquil and green, is dead. When Leithen gets Lew out he has to minister to ‘the madness of the north’ which has afflicted all the voyageurs. They might also be suffering from the malaise of Canada – its division by region and racial group – something which became obvious to Buchan on his tours as Governor-General. Leithen finds himself acting as a sort of medicine man. His moment of choice comes in the camp of the Hare Indians, who have, following an epidemic, become totally demoralised. Is Leithen to go back to England – now at war – or to stay and organise, with Gaillard, the hunting of winter food?

Compared to his companions Leithen suddenly saw himself founded solidly, like an oak. He was drawing life from deep sources. Death, if it came, was no blind trick of fate, but a thing accepted and therefore mastered.

Leithen ends up as more than a sacrificial Frazerian priestking. He provides, by hunting, a function which antedates the Demeter goddess, and concurs with a leading myth of the Scots renaissance, particularly salient in Neil Gunn and Lewis Grassic Gibbon: the ‘golden age’ of the hunting horde.