Genius of place

JO GRIMOND

An Orkney Tapestry George Mackay Brown (Gollancz 42s) 'In the northern islands December is a dark month. The lamps are burning when people go to their work. Light thickens again in the early afternoon. The weather, more often than not, is cold and stormy. There are also calm, clear nights when the hemisphere of the sky is hung with stars and in the north the Aurora Borealis rustles like curtains of heavy yellow silk.' Such is George Mackay Brown's Orkney.

'Mary Midder, had de haund Ower aboot for sleeping-baund, Had da lass and had da wife, Had da bairn a' its life. Mary Midder, had de haund Roond da infants o'oor laund.'

This was the prayer on Helya's Night when the old women committed the household and its children to the care of the Virgin.

George Mackay Brown is a portent. No one else writes like this or has this feeling for language. No one else stands out against the gravel background of modern literature with forms and colours like those he has taken from Orkney and made his own. He refreshes us in the desert of mass produc- tion. He could hardly be less fashionable. Sometimes you feel that he is going to slip into sentimentality, preciousness, or anti- quarian .folklore. But this fear confirms his genius. For it is an element in genius that it can go so near these pitfalls without toppling over—the best of Renoir's pictures verge on the pretty.

, . Again you may feel a twinge of suspicion that some of his somewhat stylised accounts

of simple life now lost, could only be

written by someone who has led a comfort- able, middle-class existence. Much as I admire him, I am aware that his compara-

tive well-being vitiates some of Belloc's rhetoric on the glories of hardship and battle. But this is certainly not true of Mr Brown who has suffered from illness and has never had much in the way of acclaim

or reward. His is an innate talent: as true

as that of Yeats. A talent which would have welled up wherever Mr Brown lived. But a talent which, while it has obviously fed on wide reading, on religion, on the influence of individuals like Edwin Muir, has been fashioned by Orkney and is used on Orknet, material.

It is worthwhile then sparing a moment to consider Orkney. Neither in appearance

nor tradition is Orkney Celtic. It can be a green country on blue sea—as you can imagine from the dust-cover of this book.

Its land is rolling, not jagged. Its soil is good. Mr Brown tells us that the people of Orkney (there are only 18,000 of them) are

intelligent and he quotes a long list of pro-

fessors to prove it. I used to think that they were the most normal of mankind—that if you wanted to show a visitor from Mars one specimen human being, creditable to the human race without being untypically

brilliant, you would show him an Orkney.

man. Now I think there is more to it than that. Orkney, for all the apparent gentle- ness of its sandstone, has a fine, hard skeleton beneath. There is a sculptor in 'North Ronaldshay, Ian Scott, who shows this very well. It is this which imposes form on the colour and romance which too often in Celtic art run to the heavy, the shape- less or the rhetorical.

Certainly there is a remarkable vein of talent in the islands. Eric Linklater, Edwin Muir and a number of artists: Ian McInnes.

Sylvia Wishart—who did the extremely evocative illustrations to this book—and in an older generation, Stanley Cursiter. We even keep the tradition of our folk songs about current events and, in spite of George Mackay Brown's lament that they are fail- ing. we still have men of distinction and individuality. I am glad he tells us about Robert Rendall, draper, poet and expert on sea-shells who, stone deaf and with no ear trumpet, used to sit in the gallery of the House of Commons to study the atmos- phere and watch the scene. Mr Mackay Brown's imagination uses images taken from landscape, heraldry.

artifacts. Though intensely sensitive to individuals and man's condition, strangely enough, though the book is largely about Earls and rulers, crofters and fishermen, the human being is not the first vehicle for his imagination. He is someone, I believe, who is more likely to describe a figure of eight as an hour-glass than a barmaid. And this. I think, is another Orkney characteristic. Eric Linklater, certainly, in Dr Juan and Angelo has created characters. But on the whole the figures in Orkney art are subord- inate to landscape or the genius of the place. In addition, Mr Brown's imagination owes something to mysticism as well as to the earth. In the foreword he claims 'This book takes its stand with the poets'. It is a bold but justified claim. There are not so many poets and some have only a little poetry in them. We should be thankful for Mr Brown and grateful to Orkney that has fed him.