Walter Scott, Julius Caesar, Flambard and Prince Anatole JB at Elsfield, 1932
David Daniell
A lecture given to the John Buchan Society Conference, Oxford, 10 July 1999.
As everyone will immediately have seen, my title is something of a cheat. Certainly the four books it refers to were all published in 1932, but at least three of them, the biographies of Sir Walter Scott and of Julius Caesar, and the novel The Gap in the Curtain, were written before that year, in the case of the Walter Scott, over some years. According to Andrew Lownie, Julius Caesar was written in the autumn of 1931, and The Gap in the Curtain between March 1930 and February 1931. I am not quite sure when The Magic Walking Stick was expanded from a short story in a collection in 1927 into book form, but it was first published as a book on 24th October 1932, and may have been done by the spring of 1932. We should have also included in the title that throughout 1932 he was writing A Prince of the Captivity, his ninety-ninth book and twenty-third novel. In March 1932, as we know from a letter to his wife, he has started getting out of the London Library books about Oliver Cromwell, and his big biography of Cromwell was published, amazingly, on 3rd September 1934.
I do not, however, apologise for so cheating. Those four books all brought John Buchan to a certain kind of prominence in 1932, and in all the remarkable fullness of JB's life his biographer has to stop and hang his hat somewhere, and there will be seen to be good reasons for choosing 1932. The biography I am writing (which steadily inches forward) is much less about what he had for breakfast, where he went, whom he met, what he said in Parliament, though these have to be in there, as an attempt to be about what was in his mind. This almost entirely survives in what he wrote. Observing what was in his library can help, and some, but only some, letters; other people's accounts of conversations can also help, though caution is obviously needed there. Our prime evidence about what he was thinking is what he wrote. What he was thinking is, I humbly suggest, of greater importance to us than almost everything else. Whom he met on Tuesday, with rare exceptions, does not much matter now. All we have is the books, 97 of them, with 39 pamphlets and unbelievably enormous amounts of other, more occasional writing, like 141 contributions to other people's books, and journalism and reviewing, for example, coming to well over 1,000 pieces.
Let me remind you briefly about his life at Elsfield. He writes movingly about it in the second part of Chapter 8 of Memory-Hold-the-Door. He and Susan bought it after the Great War to be a country retreat to soothe shattered nerves. By 1932, with his wife and growing family, it was very much as he wanted it to be. His study, his treasured garden, nearby Oxford, the surrounding Cotswolds known and loved from frequent thirty-mile walks, the quiet days of trout-fishing, these all made for him a highly creative setting. Many people from all over the world came to Elsfield to see him. From the study windows of Elsfield Manor, the view was global.
Janet Adam Smith, who knew the house and JB and his family in it, wrote so well that I can't do better than quote at some length, especially as what she wrote is apposite to what I want to go on to say.
The regular programme for his Elsfield day would be: up at 7.30 or 8, short family prayers before breakfast at 8.30, the four hours' work in the library ... In the afternoons he walked, by himself or with the children, or did some pruning or hedge-clipping in the garden ... After tea there was another couple of hours' writing: he did not work after dinner, or on Sunday ... Though Buchan wrote at regular hours, he did not demand complete solitude. Visitors would expect to be barred from the library, but would find themselves installed there, talking to Susan with children coming in and out, while their host worked away quietly at his desk with enviable concentration ... He was firm about not being interrupted, but he did not need to be alone. Writing his novels and biographies was pleasure rather than work; and though, on family holidays, he would refuse to read newspapers or write articles, he usually put in two or three hours of this pleasant labour every day. (Adam Smith 1965, 335-6)
(All that is omitted there is that he began many mornings on horseback.) John Buchan himself wrote:
The procession of the seasons was now part of my life, as it could not be for a town-dweller, and to watch it gave me a keener sense of the rhythm of things. I enjoyed every type of scene and weather -- autumn gales which blew down Thames from the Bristol Channel, the first snow clouds from the Chilterns, the long-lighted midsummer days when sunrise trod on the heels of sunset, the woods bathed in the clear radiance of April and alive with bird-song. Riding on winter mornings I would see the lights go out one by one in the villages of the plain, or, returning in the twilight, watch them kindle, and reflect that I lived apart from, and within hail of, the sounding, glittering world. (Buchan 1940, 202)
He rejoiced in discovering the ancient Cotswold landscape on his doorstep, and not long after he settled at Elsfield he had poured that into Midwinter, and again in 1930 into The Blanket of the Dark.
In 1932 he had been an assiduous Member of Parliament for five years, and Deputy Chairman of Reuters for nine, and much, much else, as we shall see, including still keeping an eye on Thomas Nelson & Son, the publishing firm he had effectively remade. Public life, apart from his parliamentary work and Reuters and Nelson's, would have filled the life of anybody else. Yet in his sixteen years at Elsfield he wrote well over fifty of his books. Half a dozen of them were big works of scholarship like The History of the Royal Scots Fusiliers, the second biography of Montrose and the lives of Lord Minto, Lord Rosebery, Walter Scott and Oliver Cromwell. At Elsfield he wrote fourteen enduring novels. As we heard, at Elsfield he worked for four hours in the morning, and for two hours after tea, nothing else, and not at all on Sundays. There is something extraordinary here.
The Elsfield house he shared with Susan was full of people coming and going, not least his daughter Alice (then 24), and sons Johnnie (then 21 and at Brasenose an hour's walk away, which meant welcoming all his many friends as well as his falcons); William (then 16) and Alastair (then 14) both at Eton and frequently at home, with friends. In that year, 1932, JB and Johnnie sailed to the Faeroe Islands, a time packed with interest and event, and fishing, for them both. (This striking fortnight in the Faeroes is easily lost in the account of the year. More should be made of it, as it went deep in JB's psyche, and emerged later as the setting for the last of the Hannay stories, now with Dick Hannay's own son, The Island of Sheep, published in 1936. I have not found anything more than the few lines in Janet Adam Smith's biography, p337.)
Undergraduates of all kinds (including Janet Adam Smith) walked from Oxford for tea on Sunday. JB was active with the Oxford Preservation Society, and put in especially hard work with the Oxford Exploration Club, raising much of the money for the 1932 Sarawak expedition: he interested the Rajah in the project. He kept alive his dream of a flight over Everest, which happened in 1933: the four-page introduction he wrote to the resulting book, pointing out that it was not a stunt but a scientific venture, shows how involved he was; but those pages do not explain how fully he had kept in touch with Himalayan travellers, and how his diplomatic work with the governments of India and Nepal up to February 1933 smoothed the way. Here is a characteristic to which I shall return: the record of what he did, in so many things, does not at first reveal the amount of sheer hard labour which he has put in to it. Listen to Janet Adam Smith again:
Buchan's wish to help people was by no means confined to adventurous young men. When any of his wide range of acquaintances struck difficulties in writing, whether books of history, travel or memoirs, Buchan would be asked for help and advice, which he seems never to have refused: his library is full of books inscribed by authors with thanks for 'unfailing kindness' or 'generous and never-failing assistance'. 'He had the most happy gift of not giving perfunctory advice, like so many people, but of bending the whole weight of his mind and experience to help a friend'. Buchan said these words of James Bryce [Lord Bryce, a predecessor as Governor-General of Canada], but they are as true of himself ... He helped any number of people to find their first jobs. He put himself about for people: when his old Glasgow friend John Edgar had a nervous breakdown and was miserable in the hospital to which he was first sent, Buchan arranged for him to come to the Warneford near Oxford. There he visited him every Friday, bringing him books and taking him for drives, though it meant cutting down the precious writing-hours of the Elsfield week-end. (Adam Smith 1965, 341)
He was one of only five Trustees (including Stanley Baldwin, then Prime Minister) of the most admirable Pilgrim Trust, which in 1930 he had helped to found. Still very much with us, the Pilgrim Trust gave and gives large grants to help to conserve 'the heritage of Britain', which then meant making opportunities for deprived people to learn, as much as looking after buildings: the first Pilgrim Trust grant was for the restoration of Durham Cathedral. Buchan wrote the preamble to the Trust Deed, which largely settled the policy, and he was permanently active.
From a speech he made in a House of Commons debate in May 1932, when a motion of his was welcomed, he worked towards the setting up of the British Film Institute the following year; he was Chairman of the Advisory Council. Here again we are only looking at the tip of the iceberg, for he already had close links with all kinds of film-makers, and it had been his hand sixteen years before that had transformed the film coverage of the war in France, so that what was shown in cinemas did bear some relation to events on the front. (I have seen almost all the 'newsreels' up to mid-1916, before JB had an influence, and they are dire. One of the most exciting shows at length a railway platform and some supplies being loaded slowly and with many delays onto a train.) A funny passage in Mr Standfast when Hannay stumbles into a film being made in Yorkshire does not really do post-1916 war films justice.
He also continued to take an interest in Scottish matters, on which he spoke widely throughout the country as well as in Parliament. In June 1932, in a debate on Scottish Records and speaking as President of the Scottish History Society ... [he said] 'If it could be proved that a separate Scottish Parliament were desirable ... Scotsmen should support it'. (Lownie 1995, 220)
We live today in stirring times.
Formed the year before, Ramsay Macdonald's National Government was frequently in difficulties, and as Janet Adam Smith notes, 'to Buchan it was clearly a patriotic duty to keep up the PM's spirits' (Adam Smith 1965, 329). As he had done with Stanley Baldwin, he regularly walked with Macdonald round St James's Park before joining him for breakfast at No10, and was in demand for private advice. Buchan did what he could to stop the PM being silly, for example when Lady Londonderry entertained preposterously. And so on. And so on. In May 1932 there was talk of separating Burma from India, and Buchan was sent for and asked to be the first Governor-General. 'In the end Burma was not separated and the suggestion came to nothing' (Lownie 1995, 219).
Now, what I want to try to do now is to watch JB, in the setting of all of this, moving from his Sir Walter Scott into the other three books, to ask if we can catch a glimpse of what made the writer about Scott go on the write about Julius Caesar, and from there into the curious Gap in the Curtain, and from there into writing a children's book about a Magic Walking Stick. To follow the stream of his mind from week to week we should be taking in his weekly journalism; he wrote the 'Notebook' in the Spectator every week throughout January, February and March, 1932. From January to April he wrote a fortnightly article for The Graphic. Throughout the year he wrote the 'Atticus' column in The Sunday Times. All of these were on a host of subjects and required a good deal of reading, and if we took them in, as well as the letters I should go on all day. As it is, I shall stay firmly with the four books.
The process in his creative mind I want to see if we can watch has a somewhat gigantic parallel in the developing mind of Shakespeare: it has always surprised me that no-one has made anything of this, which seems to me obvious. As you will well remember, Shakespeare began writing the tragedy of Hamlet in the summer of 1599, while he was finishing his Julius Caesar for the opening of the new Globe Theatre, that summer, or early autumn. Hamlet was first performed, at the Globe, in the summer of 1600, by Shakespeare's company, by then the finest in Europe. As you will also recall, one of the mysteries in this play is exactly how the old King Hamlet was murdered. His ghost is explicit but keen Hamlet-watchers know not to trust a word the Ghost speaks. He says he was murdered by having poison poured into his ear, and died instantly. I won't stop to go on to elaborate the problems there. Just let us hold on to the dramatic fact of murder of a great man by having, in a moment, poison poured into the ear. Look ahead now a few years to the next in the sequence of great tragedies, Othello, and watch the process of Shakespeare's imagination. One of the characteristics of his dramatic mind is that so often what was at first a metaphor gradually hardens, as we may put it, into dramatic action. So here what was a puzzling incidental in Hamlet turns into action; the villain Iago spends the entire play pouring the poison of his evil slanders into Othello's ear, until Othello kills first his wife of a few days, Desdemona, and then himself. For almost five acts Iago pours poison into the ear.
Moving back to John Buchan: can we see anything of the same thing? Is anything hiding, as it were, in the Walter Scott biography that emerges in the other books ? There are quite a few rather splendid small pointers from book to book: thus in his Julius Caesar book, early in his chapter on the youth of Caesar, summing up the position of the young man of twenty, JB remarks, 'His politics were still a boy's politics, based on personalities and romance' (Buchan 1932b, 39), and we leap forward to sixteen-year-old Prince Anatole and the fine longer story which makes up the last nine chapters of The Magic Walking Stick, where 'a boy's politics' make such a terrific story.
By the way, though JB's mind, like anybody's, is a continual stream, I do think that the Walter Scott biography is special, and that it is unique, including being a unique fountain, something I'll come back to at the end. So what took him from that to a brief life of Julius Caesar for a series called 'Men of Destiny'? One answer is that he had discovered how to do it in the Walter Scott book, how to control rich material, how not to get bogged down, how to keep the story moving when there was so much to explain. To a Scotsman on the centenary of Walter Scott's death, there was no greater story, outside the Bible, than that of the laird of Abbotsford, what he did and what followed his death. To the whole world, since that March day in 44BC, there had been no greater story outside the Bible than that of Julius Caesar and the manner of his death and what followed. Moreover, each man had achieved huge work in spite of great odds, including physical disability. Scott wrote enormously, almost beyond belief. Caesar conquered all Gaul, and far to the north and east. Scott gave the world historical fiction. In JB's fine phrase, he 'released the past for fiction' (Buchan 1932c, 131); and, as well, he established all the trimmings of Romanticism, the Gothic ruins and suffering heroines and so on. He gave Scotland a view of itself and its history which, we may be in danger of forgetting, then for the first time had dignity and self-respect. (If the result of such self-identifying today tends to be tins of shortbread with coloured lids showing Scotsmen in kilts, or cuddly Nessies in tam o'shanters, those are part of it.) Above all, Scott, perhaps only surpassed before by Shakespeare, gave us in his pages ordinary humanity, gave ordinary flesh and blood, albeit in romantic plots, a voice. And beyond that, Walter Scott was a great man, greatly loved.
Julius Caesar reorganised Rome
He drew the habitable earth into an empire which lasted for five centuries, and he laid the foundations of a fabric of law and government which is still standing after two thousand years. He made the world possible for the Christian faith ... he gave humanity order and peace, and thereby prepared the ground for many precious seeds. The greatest of poets [Virgil] believed him to have been 'the noblest man that ever lived in the tide of times'. (Buchan 1932b, 9-10)
So JB. We begin to see a current. We can see more. The Walter Scott biography was, among much else, a work of love for John Buchan, the great fulfilment of all his long empathy as a neighbour and Borderer, begun as a schoolboy and especially strong as an undergraduate in Glasgow and Oxford. Tweeddale to JB was 'a local habitation' for his classical studies. Though JB would go on in five years' time to write at length, and wonderfully, about Julius Caesar's successor, his great-nephew Augustus, this for the moment is the fulfilment of his classical grasp, of all his delighted studies in Roman history and writing. Just as JB's grasp of Edinburgh and Tweeddale life in the decades around 1800, and his ability to convey them easily and grippingly, is remarkable, equally remarkable, more so, because in one-tenth the space, is his ability to make the intricacies of Roman politics and events over five decades seem so clear to the reader that they feel more like remembering than learning. JB's Julius Caesar is the offspring of Walter Scott and, surprisingly, Tweeddale.
Can we see the stream flowing from Julius Caesar to The Gap in the Curtain? Indeed one can. The given origins of that novel are these. In the closing pages of J W Dunne's strange book An Experiment with Time, in a series of case-notes about dreamers, Dunne writes:
The subject agrees that this dream was associated with her reading Mr John Buchan's book, The Gap in the Curtain. Mr Buchan wrote to me that this book had been inspired by An Experiment with Time. It is, essentially, the story of four men who practised the 'Dunne' experiment until they were able to foresee, conjointly, a page of the Times newspaper a year ahead. The interest lies mainly in the uses they made of this piece of foreknowledge. (Dunne 1929 [1934], 268)
Well, up to a point. Dunne's book is weird indeed, with every page awash with italics, like a mad political tract. Dunne himself comes across as the sort of late-middle-aged obsessive one prays not to find in the same seaside boarding-house on a wet holiday. The banality of his 'The interest lies mainly in the uses ...' is like the schoolboy essay which says 'The poet uses words to convey his meaning'. Mr Dunne seems not to know anything about novels.
For this book, Buchan read other scientist-philosophers, like Bergson. He read physics for pleasure in any case, books by those wonderfully clear writers Sir Arthur Eddington and Sir James Jeans, so this was no strangeness for him. You will recall the story of The Gap in the Curtain: the mortally ill mathematical genius Professor Moe, who claims to enable people to see the future a day or two ahead, is a guest at a long country-house-party given by Lady Flambard one Whitsuntide. Another guest is Sir Edward Leithen, the narrator of the early short story 'Space' (also about a mad mathematician), of The Power-House, John Macnab, The Dancing Floor, and a story in The Runagates Club, and to be the centre of JB's last, great, novel, Sick Heart River. The gaunt and obsessive Moe makes seven people train for a daring experiment, of trying to look a year ahead. Five men successfully see an item about themselves in The Times on that day next year. The searing moment kills Moe (one is not sorry). Leithen pieces together the stories of the five's intervening twelve months, with ingenuity and point. They are all good yarns, and the last one has something important in it. Buchan has learned from Scott, beginning with Waverley itself, how to make a hero who is taken into great events, and records rather than moves them. (Buchan will develop the technique of the off-centre hero strikingly in the next novel, A Prince of the Captivity.)
So how did John Buchan get from Julius Caesar to the curious Professor Moe ? Easy -- Caesar was told to beware the Ides of March. Sorted! We can hasten on. But perhaps there is more, especially as JB does not mention Plutarch's (and Shakespeare's) Soothsayer.
As we get further in, we notice at once JB's skill in scene-setting, something he does first supremely in the Walter Scott book. The scene-setting of The Gap in the Curtain, 'Whitsuntide at Flambard', subtly puts into place two important elements, that the experiment has to be made while holiday-making in new scenes, and that the participants are professional people desperate with exhaustion. One of the curious qualities of the Julius Caesar book is the sense of the newness of Rome, not only of its buildings (rightly) but of the men and women who make its society and its politics. Both qualities are rich in The Gap in the Curtain, to the point that two stories, of the Rt Hon. David Mayot and of Sir Robert Goodeve, are snapshots of the British political scene in 1932, and two others, of Mr Reginald Baker and of Captain Charles Ottery, are pictures of an middle-to-upper level social life at the time, both of them offshoots of the picture of Rome, especially in 45 and 44 BC, but now attuned to the expected types of popular fiction in the 1930s, as a deliberate ploy. (That this was deliberate, part of the craft, is so often ignored, and JB is written of as if he didn't know any better.)
Secondly, JB was always good at sorting out what was important, getting to the heart of it: not only his barrister's mind is at work here. The sense of grasping at something big and elusive, the mystery in a great man, is very strong indeed in the Scott book, and, though briefer, in the Julius Caesar book. In The Gap in the Curtain Buchan has Leithen get quickly to one reality of Professor Moe's mystery, saying explicitly at first that Moe's grandiose theories of Time had nothing to do with it, one simply needed a good memory, (Buchan 1932a, 59) which is comforting. But then Leithen is proved spectacularly wrong, and at that micro-second of insight the irrational takes over. Here the novel is in special Buchan territory of understanding something of the tremendous energies which are in the irrational: think of hypnosis in The Three Hostages, old pagan religion in The Dancing Floor, the terrible magic in Witch Wood, the visions in The Blanket of the Dark. The latter title is from Shakespeare's Macbeth, significantly, because Buchan links this irrational force with evil, an evil hidden in the most socially acceptable people, like Dominick Medina, Moxon Ivery and Cranmer in The Free Fishers. The great Professor Moe is mad and, though it is not stated at Flambard, evil, like the witchcraft in The Blanket of the Dark, which was supposed to lead to treasure, but led instead to a horrifying cadaver. John Buchan is always alarmed at hidden power over the minds of men, finding it always diabolic, as A Prince of the Captivity will show his alarm at the rise of Fascism: it was on sale in the shops six months after Hitler seized power. The four men's insights are almost comically destructive, except that the last one, to Charles Ottery, is transcended when he forgets himself, and experiences the even greater irrationality of true love. The force of the insights has been to throw each of the men into total self-regard, which Buchan shows is a by-product of evil. (Even Leithen succumbs to it.) This New Testament understanding of self-loss in love is the territory of a religious writer still very fashionable, C S Lewis, whose supernatural novels were begun only six years after Buchan's Walter Scott. Lewis admired Buchan, it may yet turn out that he was influenced by The Gap in the Curtain.
It will seem mad of me to put Walter Scott into a science-fiction world. But in all the down-to-earth solidity of Scott the man, Buchan does see a mystery, the curious irrationality of genius. Buchan's two biographies of Montrose had been about a Scotsman in a calling Buchan himself longed to have, as military adventurer and supreme strategist. His biography of Scott was about a man whose callings were JB's own, a life rooted in Tweeddale; classicist; lawyer; poet and above all novelist. This puts Buchan a unique position, like a great portrait-painter whose skill alone catches just that light and just those forms. Scott the Sheriff and Laird with his building and planting and horses and dogs was also a writer of genius. Buchan's book gives us that, in its mystery. Buchan doesn't claim genius for himself, rightly, but he does know the territory, the living fictions which mysteriously came fully-made into the mind (both Scott and Buchan did not write until the story was told in their heads).
A few words only is all I have time for on The Magic Walking-Stick, where, like a monkey version of The Gap in the Curtain, the irrational plunges the boy hero into silly stories and one serious one, all of it both irritating in its social snobbery and huge fun. Perhaps a line in his Walter Scott set it all off: describing an expedition from Abbotsford, Buchan wrote 'One unfailing companion was a massive stick, called Major Weir after the warlock, because of its necromantic powers of disappearance' (Buchan 1932c, 217).
As I head towards an ending, I want to turn now to that life of Walter Scott, which I think is John Buchan's greatest book. I want this to be a long and solid conclusion to my lecture. In John Buchan's very full and happy life at Elsfield in 1932 (perhaps we have been in danger of ignoring the fact that it was happy) there were, of course, some disappointments. That he was passed over for a Cabinet post in that year seems to have been one of them, of which some writers on JB have made a good deal. The evidence for his disappointment is one short letter to Stanley Baldwin, and a remark by the Evening Standard (the Evening Standard, forsooth!). Look more closely, and you find that he was in fact offered, and turned down, the Cabinet post of Secretary of State for Scotland in 1931. What has been invented as the myth of Buchan the successful careerist has now in some quarters been replaced by the myth of Buchan the failure. I quote the conclusion of a recent biography:
He failed to gain the All Souls Fellowship on which he set his heart, was unsuccessful first time in his Bar exams, did not secure the posting to Egypt with Cromer he might have expected, seems to have made little impact at the Bar and was out-manoeuvered as a wartime civil servant, failing to receive any regard for his work ... His books brought him financial but not critical success. Desperate to be acknowledged as a politician and biographer he is now principally remembered for books he dismissed as 'tusheries' and largely wrote to put his children through school. (Lownie 1995, 296-7)
It is the final summary of a life of John Buchan. I want to turn it round through 180 degrees, and conclude my account of the triumphs of what has been called that 'flat' and 'disappointing' year of 1932 with the glory, I use the word carefully, of the Walter Scott biography, which at the time did receive high critical praise. It is simply not true that his novels did not: Kipling loved The Blanket of the Dark, and so did Rose Macaulay: C S Lewis, no less, hugely admired Witch Wood, and there was a great host of others, all the time. More to the point, the Walter Scott biography is still admired, nearly seventy years later: Scott's latest biographer, the prolific and prickly A N Wilson, goes out of his way to single out Buchan's Walter Scott for praise (Wilson 1989, vii).
Enough of this. Let us, as I draw to a close, get to the book itself. JB's opening sentence of his Sir Walter Scott has an imaginary, and alert, Edinburgh citizen 'in the autumn of the year 1771 ... returning after many years absence' noting certain changes. That whole first chapter of twelve-and-a-bit pages of 'Ancestry' shows Edinburgh, all Scotland and particularly the Borders at a parting of the ways. 'That she [Scotland] chose rightly was due to two children ...' one of whom 'on the 15th of August of that year had been born to a respectable middle-aged lawyer, a certain Mr Walter Scott', a sentence dropped into the middle of the chapter.
The history leaps off the page, partly through the men and women so cannily caught in a few words. 'The householder would stop his reading of the Bible at family prayers with the remark: "If it hadna been the Lord's will, that verse had been better left out" ' (Buchan 1932c, 20). The Scotts emerge as figures in the richest of tapestries, and Walter 'had a more varied ancestry than falls to the lot of most men' (op cit, 22). It is worth quoting JB's continuation of that observation, the conclusion to this first chapter.
He was linked collaterally through the Buccleuchs with the greater noblesse. He had behind him the most historic of the Border stocks in Scott and Murray and Rutherford and Swinton. He had Celtic blood from MacDougal and Campbell. Of the many painted shields in the ceiling of the hall at Abbotsford which enshrine his pedigree, only three lack a verified heraldic cognizance. Among his forbears were saints and sinners, scholars and sportsmen and men-at-arms, barons and sheep-farmers, divines and doctors of medicine, Whigs and Jacobites, Cavaliers and Quakers. Above all he had that kindest bequest of the good fairies at his cradle, a tradition, bone of his bone, of ancient pastoral, of a free life lived among clear waters and green hills as in the innocency of the world. (op cit, 22-3)
It is fine writing, for a fine writer. JB's craftsmanship takes us at once into a special world; we are in at the beginning of a book, and a life, that will be rich and strange. There is detail enough (the shields in the ceiling) but what is irresistible is the atmosphere of enjoyment. Part of the secret of it is JB's sympathy. A good biographer must love his subject, however many warts the close observations of great affection reveal. These ancient men and women who went to the making of Walter Scott are in JB's bones as well; if not in his pedigree of birth, then from his study and understanding over his fifty-seven years, and his enthusiasm for their Scottishness. More, JB also is in love with that 'ancient pastoral ... a free life lived among clear waters and green hills'. From Tweeddale, Abbotsford is only just over the hill: though Scott had died a century before (JB is writing a centenary biography) the countryside had changed less than the towns, and in the farmsteads there was still gossip about the great writer. But above all, JB could rightly claim that his own father, as he had said of Scott, 'had been born to a respectable middle-aged lawyer', in this case, 'a certain John Buchan'.
The family parallel continues. JB's second chapter, 'Boyhood and Youth', describes Walter Scott's Calvinist father and shrewd upright mother, the latter's head being 'stored with ballads and proverbs and tales ... it was she who first introduced him to the enchanted world of poetry. His boyish ailments established a special intimacy between them ...'. (op cit, 27). JB's maternal grandmother, and his own mother, are suggested, as well as a Calvinism more extreme than his father's. Walter Scott's dead siblings, dying in infancy or in early middle life, suggest Violet, or Walter, just as his only surviving sister, Anne, lived a full imaginative life rather like JB's sister Anna, though Anne Scott did not see thirty. The young Walter as an infant and small boy revelled in the life of a Tweeddale farm, to which he returned in the holidays. The 'green pastoral simplicity of Tweedside' had captured his heart, and a 'whole lost world had been reborn in his brain', the society from which the ballads had sprung (op cit, 33). It would be wrong to force the parallels but we must note that the sympathy is unusual, and that JB is already revealed, thirty pages in, as the ideal biographer of WS.
As with JB, schooling and college in dingy city surroundings (Glasgow for JB, Edinburgh for Scott) did not inhibit the enchantment of reading the Latin classical writers for himself, and Shakespeare. 'He fell in love with, but soon tired of, Ossian ...'; clearly the young Walter has admirable taste. 'He read Tasso and Ariosto in translation; Spenser he knew by heart ...' (op cit, 35). That last remark pulls us up short. Surely the lad did not commit to memory all six long Books of The Faerie Queene, and everything else? True, JB adds '...since his memory retained whatever impressed his mind, [he] could repeat an immense number of stanzas'. Even so, JB is romancing, and 'Spenser' means 'some of'. Boredom with college life, and weaker health as he outgrew his strength threw him into more reading.
At fifteen Walter Scott became his father's law apprentice, and learned two important capacities: to scribe clearly and at length, and 'an insight into the eternal disparities of father and son ... to make allowances for the rigid, buttoned-up old gentleman whom he had come to comprehend as well as love' (op cit, 38).
At seventeen Walter set out to become a lawyer, and at twenty 'assumed the gown of an advocate'. He enjoyed a full social life in the capital, and 'indulged in herculean walking trips' (op cit, 40-1). 'Scott', says JB, 'passed into manhood with a remarkable assortment of knowledge ... a sound lawyer ... in history widely and curiously read .. enough French, German, Spanish and Italian to read the works in these languages which appealed to him ... of Latin he had full measure ...' (op cit, 41-2) only the lack of Greek (which JB finds telling, as it might have 'trimmed the prolixity which was to be his setting sin' [op cit, 42]) prevents this from being a recognisable portrait of JB himself. Well-educated young men who loved the landscapes of the Borders were, no doubt, not uncommon in the 1790s as in the 1890s: the point was what was to happen next. 'It was the education most consonant with his genius, most exquisitely fitted for the achievements of his life' (op cit, 43).
The glory of this book is partly that it makes you want to read Scott. Now this is something remarkable. I have been a teacher of literature all my life, and all my life it has been popular among undergraduates and the general public to say 'Ugh! Scott'. It is true that my own set of his novels (ignoring the poems, the editions of Dryden and Swift and so on) spreads on the shelf to three feet two inches. It is true that there are a lot of words.
But that 'Ugh!' has not been true of writers. I remember twenty years ago my colleague at University College London, the novelist A S Byatt, dropping the remark that she had that morning discovered that Iris Murdoch, like her, was just re-reading for love and delight Scott's Anne of Geierstein. (And let me remind you that after his death in 1750 people in Europe were saying 'Ugh! Johann Sebastian Bach!'. Many of Bach's compositions were not even in print, until Mendelssohn rediscovered him nearly a century later). You don't need to have read a word of Scott to take in JB's book, though after it (or during it), you will, you will.
What John Buchan also gives us is Walter Scott the solid great man in all his friendships and loves and work: he was then, and still is for some, Scotland's greatest son. One cannot separate the work and the man, but the other glory of the book is that solid sense of Walter Scott's physical presence as a great man: a flawed man, of course, as what son of Adam is not, but undoubtedly a great one, and a man often in pain, and suffering in mid-life what JB calls 'the broken years'. What JB does is set the camera on him, as it were, from all sorts of angles, in which we suddenly see another aspect of him, as it might be Scott presiding as Sheriff at the trial of a poacher, who escaped on some formality, and liking him so much he took him into his employ as a shepherd, from which work Tom Purdie became for ever after 'the "laird's man". factotum, guardian and affectionate tyrant, a familiar Scots relationship', says JB (one thinks of Queen Victoria and John Brown). Or consider JB's rearrangement of Lockhart to give us this cameo. We have to remember the intensity with which Scott tried to preserve the secret of the authorship of his first novel, Waverley:
He met all the literary and political celebrities whom he had known before, and made a new friend in Sir Humphry Davy. But the two men chiefly associated with this [London] visit were the Prince Regent and Byron. The Prince had long admired Scott's poetry and had commended his behaviour over the Laureateship, so his friend Adam, afterwards Chief Commissioner of the new jury court in Scotland, was ordered to invite him to a little dinner at Carlton House. Croker was of the party, and Lord Melville, the Duke of York, Lord Huntly, Lord Fife, and that formidable nobleman. Lord Hertford, who was to figure variously in literature as Lord Steyne and Lord Monmouth. It was a merry occasion; the Prince and Scott, both noted raconteurs, capped each other's tales; and at midnight the host, looking towards his guest, asked for a bumper to the author of Waverley. Scott, an adept at this game, promised to convey the compliment to the real Simon Pure, and the Prince countered with the health of the author of Marmion [as well-known as Scott's]. The Prince called him by his Christian name from their first introduction, gave another little dinner for him, at which he sang his favourite songs, and sent him a gold snuff-box set in brilliants with a medallion of the royal head on the lid. Scott was naturally pleased; he had an old-fashioned reverence for royalty, and it was much for one of his prepossessions to be treated as an intimate by the heir-apparent. As his later correspondence shows, he had no illusions about George the Fourth, and condemned as strongly as any radical the grossness and folly of much of his career; but it was given him to see that odd being at its best, to come under the spell of manners which could be most gracious and winning, and to get a glimpse of the genuine talents of one who was far more than the half-witted debauchee of the caricaturists. Scott had a singular gift of eliciting what was worthiest in a man, and the Prince Regent's relations with him are among the few creditable things in a dubious record.
It was the same with Byron ... . (op cit, 144-5)
John Buchan's Walter Scott is a book that lifts and energises and irradiates. It is far, far more than a re-telling of Lockhart's great life of 1838, though when he does quote Lockhart directly, he does it memorably, for example with the picture of the Scott who spent six hours in court five days a week and whose hand was seen late at night in a window writing, hour after hour, without pause, what became the second volume of Waverley (op cit, 121-2).
JB loves Walter Scott, and the biography is written out of love. JB's enthusiasm for others is unmistakable, for Scott himself, and for the company of men and women around him, and the greater crowd of men and women he created. The love is not blind: JB is unblinking, and detailed, in analysing the weaknesses of character which led Scott into the financial morass which destroyed him prematurely. He is clear-eyed about faults in the poems and novels, some trivial, as his note that in The Antiquary 'the sun is made to set in the east and there are two Tuesdays in one week' (op cit, 149), some major, which as a poet led Scott so instantly to be overtaken by Byron, or as a novelist in his permanent unwelcome prolixity and invariable slowness in getting the action going. JB is frank about how many readers give up, and why. But the love shines all the stronger, and the narrative, for it is, after all, a story, gains in fullness as it sweeps along.
I conclude with two sentences, one from me and one from John Buchan. Mine is to repeat what I have just said: John Buchan's Walter Scott is a book that lifts and energises and irradiates. Life at Elsfield gave him the happiness to write this consummate book: his Sir Walter Scott is the work of a supremely happy man.
John Buchan's remark, slightly adjusted, is from the penultimate page of his book, and I want it to stand as being about John Buchan himself as well as Walter Scott:
Scott had no enemies, except a prejudiced few who had never met him. Such a one makes a light and a warmth around him. (op cit, 371)
References
Janet Adam Smith, 1965 John Buchan, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
John Buchan, 1932a The Gap in the Curtain, Hodder & Stoughton, London.
John Buchan, 1932b Julius Caesar, Hodder & Stoughton, London.
John Buchan, 1932c Sir Walter Scott, Hodder & Stoughton, London.
John Buchan, 1940 Memory Hold-The Door, Hodder & Stoughton, London.
J W Dunne, 1929 (1934) An Experiment with Time, Faber, London.
Andrew Lownie, 1995 John Buchan: The Presbyterian Cavalier, Constable, London.
A N Wilson, 1989 The Laird of Abbotsford, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
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