Lewis Grassic Gibbon: Revolutionary Writer by William K. Malcolm, and: Lewis Grassic Gibbon: The Reader by ed. William K. Malcolm (review)

Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Sunset Song of 1932 regularly appears as one of the top choices in surveys of Scotland’s favourite books, but not all readers who nominate the novel realise that it is one of a trilogy titled A Scots Quair or that its author had a companion identity as a writer of English-language diffusionist and dystopian fiction under his family name of J. Leslie Mitchell. William Malcolm’s current companion volumes – a sequential critical study of the Mitchell and Gibbon work and an accompanying collection of textual excerpts – may help to remedy this situation.

Malcolm’s Revolutionary Writer builds on his Blasphemer and Reformer of 1984 and is supplemented by his continued research over subsequent decades. The book assumes no significant previous knowledge of Mitchell/Gibbon, and its companion Reader supplies textual excerpts which provide examples relating to the discussions in the critical account. In both books there is an initial Biographical Outline which lists chronologically the principal events of the writer’s personal life alongside the publishing dates of his writing as J. Leslie Mitchell and Lewis Grassic Gibbon. Each ends with a Bibliography of Primary Works by Mitchell and Gibbon, including books, short stories and non-fiction articles, together with a list of secondary source critical studies, slightly more extensive in the critical study book. All of this provides helpful material for both novice reader and literary scholar, although the greater maturity of the writing in the Scottish books gives their excerpts an identity which can more readily resist separation from the wider context. It is, however, no easy task to provide a comprehensive and detailed review of the corpus of both Mitchell and Gibbon in the space of the 158 pages of A Revolutionary Writer.

Malcolm divides his discussion of the Mitchell work into categories of ‘Realist’ and ‘Romantic’, with books such as Stained Radiance, The Thirteenth Disciple and Spartacus belonging to the former and the diffusionist Three Go Back and dystopian Gay Hunter to the latter Romantic category – although a reader might find the Romantic penetrating the realist/political in the earlier novels also. What is interesting in these Mitchell books is their relationship to the life-writing more often found in fiction by women in this interwar period, but also in fiction by Edwin Muir such as The Three Brothers and Poor Tom. Although to some extent disguised by exotic settings and scenarios, in Mitchell’s early fiction we can recognise its author struggling to understand the course his personal life has taken from boyhood to adulthood, and to analyse and organise his angry responses to the social and political conditions of the contemporary world. Provocative also are the occasional glimpses of the writer Mitchell would become in his mature Grassic Gibbon books, such as Thea’s contrasting feelings in Stained Radiance towards her everyday London adult existence and her ‘holiday’ return to the Scottish countryside of her childhood: an anticipation of Chris Guthrie’s struggle between her emotional love of her land and her intellectual wish for education.

The more satisfying sections of A Revolutionary Writer are however those that deal with A Scots Quair, the maturity of which shows how Mitchell has escaped from the need to continually interrogate his own life and his responses to social and political conditions and has achieved that important ‘distancing’ which allows personal experience to be transformed into artistic form – what Eliot described as the necessary separation between ‘the man who suffers and the mind which creates’. It is also important that throughout his discussion Malcolm insists on the unity of the three books of the Quair, and he directs attention to a notebook in the National Library of Scotland’s Gibbon archive which gives detailed planning notes for Cloud Howe and Grey Granite, a ‘template...