Читать книгу Land Of The Leal - James Barke - Страница 6

James Barke (1905–58) is well known for his fictionalized biography of Burns, Immortal Memory, which appeared in five volumes between 1946 and 1954. Few people have read The Land of the Leal (1939), yet this is probably his best book and the one which makes his most important and lasting contribution to Scottish literature. It has been described by F.R. Hart in The Scottish Novel as being comparable in scope and design to Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s A Scots Quair.

The Land of the Leal, as Barke wrote in an earlier novel, Major Operation (1936), is the Scottish peasant’s Heaven, where there is neither heartbreak nor sorrow, cauld nor care; where he is free from all human oppression and injustice. And in telling the story of David and Jean Ramsay’s lifelong quest for such peace of mind, the novel presents a vivid picture of life in late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century Scotland. For as the Ramsays move from place to place they come into contact with many different layers of Scottish society, and each successive encounter, each change in their circumstances, serves to redefine and sharpen their awareness of who they are. Each move, in a progression from backbreaking work on the land to working in the great Glasgow shipyards, brings them right up to date as participants in one of the greatest social changes of our time – the move towards an increasingly technological society:

the basis of the agricultural life was breaking up. The introduction of machinery and labour-saving devices was shattering the old life that was governed by the rhythm of man and beast. Economic necessity drove men to look away from the fields and the byres towards the industrial centres that produced the machines. The railway linked them with those centres. In the cities there was work and the vitality of a new life.

It is against this background of dramatic social upheaval that the young David Ramsay decides to seek something better for his wife and child than the unremitting harshness and brutality of life on a Galloway farm. A job turns up in the Borders, and the Ramsays set out on their long journey, a journey through Scotland which is also a journey towards a deeper understanding of themselves, their children and their marriage. It is a long, hard journey and at its end even the voyagers themselves are uncertain of its success. Yet such doubts are signs of one of the most important aspects of the journey: the Ramsays have truly lived their lives. They have lived through personal tragedy and loss with a deep courage sustained by their faith in life itself: a feeling that, whatever happens, life is a marvellous thing. Their attitude to life is always positive and creative so that everything that happens to them helps them to grow as human beings.

Yet they are two very different characters. David is quiet and shy, ‘introspective and analytical to an almost morbid degree’. At the same time he is also courageous and determined. He may lack Jean’s great vigour, but he is still a fighter. While he makes no attempt to ‘lord it’ over anyone else, he is always quick to stand up for himself and for his people, whether it be his family or his fellow workers. At Caddomlea, for instance, he is not afraid to contradict Sir Charles’s patronizing remarks about ‘the labourer in his humble cottage’. Later, completely caught up in circumstances much bigger than himself, he stands up for his daughter’s good name against the self-righteousness of the aristocracy even though it could jeopardize his chances of a new job and a new life for his family elsewhere. For all his reserve, David Ramsay is a remarkable man, although many of those with whom he comes into contact only realize this when it is too late.

Jean Gibson is a lively, sharp-tongued, quick-witted character whose literary antecedents include the Wyf of Auchtermuchty and Kynd Kittock as well as Chris Guthrie. And like some of the women of ballad and folk-tale she is also possessed of the awesome ability to lay on an effective curse. She is no fool, and does not suffer fools gladly. Scrupulously honest herself, she is quick to attack dishonesty in others, as a Glasgow butcher finds out to his cost when he tries to sell her a less than perfect chicken:

‘“That’s a lovely young pullet, madame,” says he. It was a pullet the same time as you were a cockerel…’

In all things she is practical and down-to-earth, and ‘lives for the present and the immediate future’. Where David is perhaps over-imaginative, Jean is almost incapable of introspection and has an unwavering faith in her own judgement; a strength which Barke points out might well be seen as her greatest weakness.

In many ways the marriage of these two very different characters seems an obvious recipe for disaster, and much of the book’s interest must lie in how their relationship develops as, over the years and in ever-changing circumstances, they come to see each other more clearly.

This is one of Barke’s strengths: the way he conveys to the reader the sense of time moving on, of characters slowly growing older and slowly changing. The reader is very much aware of the passing of youth from David and Jean Ramsay as the brightness of their courtship, the music and dancing of their wedding, begin to fade into the struggle to find a decent job and to bring up a family. It fades finally into the sadness of loss, and Jean is left with only memories to lighten her last days. Although The Land of the Leal is about many other things, it is perhaps the story of David and Jean Ramsay which gives it coherence, simply because it follows so surely the natural curve of life.

The characters themselves, though, are too close to the action to be able to make out the meaning of their own story. At the end of the Ramsays ‘long journey David is troubled that he can find no shape or pattern to his life. Yet surely this is as it should be, for a life that is fully and completely alive is always changing and developing; it can never be fixed into a static, ‘safe’ pattern. David Ramsay himself should know that better than anyone:

For David life was mystery. Sometimes the mystery was joyous and drenched in golden sunlight as when the wind caressed a field of barley or life laughed in the eyes of his child: sometimes it was sad and wrapped in impenetrable darkness.

It is this mystery – the marvellous way that life cannot be pinned down to any one ‘meaning’ or shape – which David values most.

For David the world was vast, multitudinous, an inexhaustible wonder and speculative delight.

An openness to experience, the refusal glibly to accept established philosophies of life, is part of the ‘radical’ nature that sets David apart. It sets him apart from his own father, and from Tom Gibson, Jean’s father, who is a most striking example of the uncompromising Old Testament faith of Galloway which David had known and so distrusted in his youth. Unlike Jean, David is unable to accept what Barke calls the ‘spiritual determinism of the Scottish peasant’. In his wariness of spiritual certainties he is very much a modern character. Indeed part of the feeling of futility which assails him towards the end of his life comes from his inability to recognize this, an inability to grasp the way in which his own identity embodies the tensions and uncertainties of his time.

Like many thousands of his day and generation he had been uprooted from the countryside, plunged from a life of semi-agricultural labour, semi-peasantry, into one of industrial wage-slavery. Only he had been plunged later in life than most of his fellow-countrymen. Too late for him to adapt himself to the life, even though necessity compelled readjustment.

Although David does achieve a rather uneasy peace with city life he remains always a countryman at heart, a displaced person. Neither he nor Jean can really become reconciled to life in Glasgow and what it represents: the modern world. For their children, and especially for their sons, it is different.

Like David and Jean, their sons Tom and Andy seem to be complete opposites. Tom is quiet, sensitive and studious, destined for the ministry. Andy is a shipyard worker and a more robust, active character. Ironically the studies which Tom is encouraged by his parents to pursue gradually set him more and more apart from the rest of the family, and especially from his brother. This growing sense of alienation is brought to a head when Andy attacks Tom for not helping the family more by getting a job, when David, like so many other paid-off shipyard workers, has worn himself out in a desperate search for work.

It is not until David’s death that the two brothers achieve a measure of reconciliation, and it is in their lives that David’s own life begins to reveal the pattern or meaning that he was unable to discern. It is in the lives of the sons that his own vision is carried forward: the need to rid the world of ‘mutual distrust and open hatred’; the struggle for harmony and unity which David saw as the true end of life.

Each of the sons in his own way shares that vision. Andy sees his decision to fight for the Socialist cause in Spain as giving significance to his life and to the lives of his parents who had been ‘the victims of greed and brutality, the passionless indifference of British Capitalism’.

For Andy the answer lies in a Socialism which his father, for all his radical tendencies, could never accept because, in spite of its harshness, work on the land can still afford ‘a deep elemental satisfaction’ denied to the modern industrial worker. Always David had been torn between his hatred of the tyranny of the farmers and an almost overwhelming love of the land. And like Chris Guthrie in A Scots Quair he realizes that it is the land itself, uncompromising but always true to itself, that sustains him. Andy, who is unaware of this feeling, is troubled by no such ambivalence and cannot understand his father’s distrust of Socialism. In the same way David had carried his father’s sceptical cast of mind a step further with regard to religion, so at many points in the novel the reader is made aware of echoes and correspondences in the relationships between different characters over a long stretch of time.

Tom’s answer lies not in Socialism, but in Christianity. Yet under Andy’s influence his Christianity begins to take a radical note of concern for the workings of this world that rather alarms his middle-class congregation. After his brother’s death in Spain, Tom preaches a strong sermon which, for all its ‘naive idealism’ in attempting to link Socialism and Christianity, is a genuine attempt to reawaken in his listeners the essential spirit of Christianity: the spirit of compassion.

In Tom’s compassion, in Andy’s tenacity and determination, the spirit of David Ramsay lives on. The sons who seem so completely different unite in themselves their father’s best qualities, qualities such as the vision and independence which so many others had recognized in him, and that he himself had inherited from his father and from the ordinary folk of Galloway, the Land of the Leal.

Yet there can be no going back, no retreat to some imagined pastoral paradise. The sharp unsentimentality of Barke’s picture of life on the land makes that quite clear. By the end of the novel the old ways have gone; the world is irrevocably changed. At the heart of The Land of the Leal, as in many other modern Scottish novels, lies the tension between life on the land and life in the city: the tension between a traditional and a modern way of life. At the end of the novel this tension remains unresolved: a strong elegiac concern for the passing of the old ways seemingly at odds with the fervent hopes of Socialism for a better future.

Whether one reads it as an account of changing social conditions in nineteenth-and early twentieth-century Scotland or as a spiritual Odyssey, The Land of the Leal is a powerful novel which deserves to be better known. With its many striking characters, its telling changes of scene, and its vigorous and varied use of Scots dialogue it is, as Professor Hart has said, ‘as moving and believable … as any novel produced by modern Scotland’.

John Burns