Sunset Song

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Leslie grew up in rural Aberdeenshire and was a profoundly unhappy child. He begins a semi-autobiographical novel, The 13 th Discipline , with the story of how, as a five-year-old child, a boy sets off from home with the express desire ‘to commit suicide’. A short biography of Lewis Grassic Gibbon (James Leslie Mitchell) and a brief summary of his published works. Over the past few years, my duties as First Minister have taken me to First World War centenary commemorations in Arras, Amiens and the Somme. I have heard and been humbled by the real-life stories of those who fought, died and survived. And yet so often I’ve found myself thinking about the fictional Ewan Tavendale; about how the war brutalised him, turning his happy marriage to Chris into a nightmare of abuse and contempt. And about how, far away in a field in France, he had suddenly come to his senses, overcome by the futility of it all: Sixteen books written by Lewis Grassic Gibbon (1901-1935), regarded as the most important Scottish prose writer of the early 20th century. All were published in the last seven years of his life, mostly under his real name, James Leslie Mitchell. They include two works of science fiction, non-fiction works on exploration, short stories set in Egypt, a novel about Spartacus, and the classic 'Scots Quair' trilogy which includes 'Sunset Song'. Mitchell's first book 'Hanno, or the future of exploration' (1928) is rare and has never been republished. The book is many things, a powerful fictional response to the First World War and its impact on a small rural community, a hymn to the natural beauties of the north east and its language and people as well as a lament for a way of life that is coming to an end. It is also a realistic account of rural life in Scotland with its privations and occasional brutalities. It is above all else though a book about Chris Guthrie and her path through life from a wide-eyed adolescent to a worldly-wise woman of 24. Along the way she suffers terribly, knows the pain of loss and the fulfilment of love but never loses sight of the beauty and power of the land around her. When it was published in 1932 it was an immediate commercial and critical success and it has never been out of print. It is now regarded as a classic and in 2016 was voted Scotland’s favourite novel in a BBC poll. The novel endures just as Chris Guthrie endures.

The first in a trilogy called A Scots Quair, Scottish author Lewis Gibbon’s novel Sunset Song (1932) follows a young Scot Chris Guthrie who is raised in a dysfunctional farming family in Kinraddie, a fictitious estate in Scotland’s northeast, Kincardineshire. Guthrie has a difficult life, punctuated by the larger geopolitical crisis of World War I. Gibbon develops his own mythology for this fictional Scottish place, embedding its events and characters in an allegory that points to Scotland’s crisis of identity during the war and postwar periods. For its deep characterization of the social and emotional texture of Scotland, the novel has become a household staple for Scots and has been entered into both the Scottish and Anglophone canons.He lived with no rights whatsoever, as all tenant farmers did, and woe betide the man who failed to doff his cap. This has had a massive negative effect not only on farmers but also their workers who depended on them. Though it will scandalise much of the neighbourhood, Chris is going to marry this minister, Robert Colquhoun, who evokes a rich past (for all its hardships and cruelties) and fears for the future. “So, lest we shame them, let us believe that the new oppressions and foolish greeds are no more than mists that pass. They died for a world that is past, these men, but they did not die for this that we seem to inherit.” The Mill of Benholm in Kincardine, which was chosen by the BBC team filming the serial of Sunset Song. There is no better description of the way all these young men from small villages went off to fight in a war, which the majority of them didn’t understand, and from which so many never returned. The thing to understand is that It was less wage slavery than a way of life. Despite the itinerant nature of this way of life, social relationships were maintained through the farm households and bothies, the weekly markets, and the quarterly fairs. Countries were much smaller: for example, I once worked out that my grandmother had lived her entire life within a sixteen-mile radius of where she was born. My grandfather was only ever displaced from his native country in Stirlingshire by the First World War and its aftermath, which disrupted rural populations in Scotland in ways that Robert Colquhoun eulogises in Sunset Song. Strong and abiding relationships were maintained in the smaller worlds of the farming communities of the time, as evidenced by Robert McLellan’s Linmill Stories.

Finally, Scottish exceptionalism isn’t the claim that Scotland and the Scots are ‘better’ than other nations. Rather, it’s the claim that Scotland and the Scots are different from other nations in every respect; that is, that they’re ‘unique’. Scotland and the Scots are not exceptional or unique in that the concept of a ‘national psyche’, which is culturally reinforced by a common language and/or heritage, is nowadays as inapplicable to them as it is to any other nation. Throughout Sunset Song, there is repeated reference to “two Chrisses” as a way of describing the conflict that she carries within her. It is best articulated in this beautiful passage which I still think of regularly: The cruel aspects of Gibbon’s story flow in part from his diffusionist philosophy which blames agriculture for society’s woes. He also detested religion and thought Calvinism responsible for the Scots’ unnatural attitude towards sexuality and the human body. But Leslie Mitchell, Gibbon’s real name, had his own personal reasons to feel alienated from his family and culture and to consider it brutal.And do we really need to be so terrified of talking about Scots from the past who have made a contribution, in case this makes someone feel ‘excluded’. An unforgettable evocation of a way of life that has slipped away … It is a love song for a landscape and language still familiar – and precious – to a generation born long after [Grassic-Gibbon] died … Chris is one of the great women of 20th-century fiction” Sunset Song is profound. It is heartbreaking but ultimately uplifting and life affirming. It tells a story of a Scotland that, in some senses, is no more, yet, in others, still lives in the hearts of each and every one of us. Why now are we getting an article that reflects badly on Scotland’s now distant past? Can we look forward to further pieces highlighting the treatment of witches, sectarianism or whatever shameful demonstration of the failures of the current people of Scotland. Grassic Gibbon died in 1935, at the age of just 33, from peritonitis, brought on by a perforated ulcer. But he has left behind an indelible legacy.

The assertion was that ‘there will soon be no ‘normal’ culture to reinforce a distinctive ‘Scots psyche’ [over and against ‘other’ cultures in our society that could be (and are) deemed ‘non-Scottish’ in relation to that norm]. It would indeed be wonderful if plurality rather than identity became the new cultural norm. It’s a work that is regularly voted Scotland’s favourite book in public polls, is acclaimed across the world, and remains the most evocative piece of prose ever penned about the Mearns with its message that people will come and go, laugh and cry, live and die, but only the land endures. Kinraddie, the book’s fictional setting, also represents a world in transition.The rural practices and way of life that the story’s characters have always known are increasingly challenged by advancing technology and the impact of war. A central theme of the book is the passing of the ‘old Scotland’, a theme powerfully articulated towards the end as the minister unveils a memorial to the parish’s war dead: In the second chapter, the twins are still babies. Learning she is pregnant again, Jean falls into despair. Unable to get help from her society, she goes insane, killing the twins and then herself. After the tragedy, Guthrie drops out of school, going to work on her family’s homestead. Her eldest brother, Will, absconds with a girl from Kinraddie, marries her, and moves permanently to Argentina. John is enraged by what he perceives as his son’s betrayal of their family, which causes him to suffer a stroke. For the rest of his life, he is paralyzed. While bedridden, he makes sexual advances to Guthrie, who refuses.Above all, it was the conflict that brews in Chris, between tradition and modernity, learning and the land, moving away or staying put, that resonated with me. Sunset Song: watch the exclusive trailer for the first world war tragedy starring Agyness Deyn – video Guardian Good point! It’s important to recognise that John Guthrie was ‘brutal’ not because such brutality is somehow inherent to the ‘Scots psyche’, but because he had been brutalised by the material conditions of his existence. This understanding of the character would be more consistent with Mitchell’s Marxism.

Chris, who has had some education, considers leaving for a job as a teacher in the towns, but realises she loves the land and cannot leave it. Instead, she marries a young farmer called Ewan Tavendale and carries on farming. For a time, they are happily married, and they have a son, whom they also call Ewan. However, when World War I breaks out, Ewan Sr. and many other young men join up. When he comes home on leave, he treats Chris badly, evidently brutalised by his experiences in the army. Ewan dies in the war; and Chris subsequently hears from Chae Strachan, who is home on leave, that Ewan was shot as a deserter but that he died thinking of her. She begins a relationship with the new minister, and she watches as he dedicates the War Memorial at the Standing Stones above her home. The Sun sets to the Flowers of the Forest, bringing an end to their way of life, forever. Thank you for your care. You have drawn for my attention many things I hadnie even considered when I first read – and was transported by –‘Sunset Song’– in the early 1960s. And thus enriched my appreciation of the contorted heritage we Scots have. Chris Guthrie is the most passionate and appealing heroine in Scottish literature; Grassic Gibbon’s magnificent novel is fresh, powerful and timeless” She has heard praise for Sunset Song wherever people are tilling the land and striving to make their way on the soil.

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Why on earth do we want to distinguish ourselves in kind from the people who live in England, New Zealand, or Ireland? What purpose does such estrangement serve? Only nefarious purposes I wat. My conclusion is that the love I feel for Sunset Song is not just an appreciation of its considerable literary quality; it is as much, maybe more so, a reflection of the profound impact it had on me at a formative time of my life. He developed – maybe invented is not too strong – a kind of word music of his own, without becoming as iconoclastic as Hugh MacDiarmid, who was writing poetry at the same time, in which he tried to re-invent a whole lowland Scots language that was consciously set up in opposition to English (which I once heard him describe as “a linguistic disease”, though admittedly he was drunk at the time). Grassic Gibbon’s prose, sometimes glorious, is stamped with individuality: he never seems to be imitating anyone else’s style, but going his own way.