George Mackay Brown: The life, by Maggie Fergusson

Northern light on a poet at sea

This is a book about a man who leaps the perilous gap between wanting to be a writer and, at last, becoming one. It follows a minor journalist and literary dabbler, a tubercular alcoholic, self-obsessed and self-pitying, from abjection to triumph, exploring the wrong turnings he took, and the individuals who believed in him and lightened his miserable burdens: his mother especially, but also Edwin and Willa Muir, and several editors, critics and fellow authors. George Mackay Brown (1921-96) became a remarkable Orcadian poet and story-teller, some say the best poet from Orkney after Edwin Muir, but he lacked the physical fibre we might associate with growing up in the Orkneys, and the moral fibre of a great author.

Maggie Fergusson is a biographer particularly attentive to the poet's spiritual trajectory, gradual but inexorable, from a traditional island faith to Roman Catholicism. In her view this helped bring him to maturity and accomplishment, and added depth to his imagination.

Anyone who respects Mackay Brown as a writer will find this biography unsettling. He is a troubled and troubling man for the first 40-odd years of his life. He settles into a more or less stable and adult figure only in later middle life, and even then he retains qualities which make a well-disposed reader uncomfortable. His biographer knows the impression he makes. She does not compensate, quite, but her book, while being affectionate, beautifully conceived and written, continually lets him off the hook.

Fergusson is patient with an excessive, almost a maternal patience, so attentive to human shortcomings that we feel we have intruded upon an intimacy. Quietly, devotedly, she loves Mackay Brown even at his most repellent, even in the almost brutal use he makes of his mother. He is not a man who loves, though he is an object of love.

Fergusson only rarely loses patience with Brown. Why? Why should this man have elicited so much warmth from so intelligent and thorough a biographer? The most important reasons are his conversion and the author's fascination, conveyed in description and history, with the Orkneys themselves: their geography, flora and fauna, their remote, inexhaustible history. Hers is the attentive eye of the traveller as well as the acquisitive eye of the biographer.

The Orkneys are a place of wild weather and strange geology that history touches seldom, but with particular emphasis. It is at times of war that they come into their own. Their value to a foe, from Viking times to the present, is obvious to anyone with a map.

Wars, like storms, pass over the islands; there are reconfigurations, enhancement, erasure. The character of the Orkneys is parallel in this book to Mackay Brown's. It is not that Fergusson is trying to elude her subject. On the contrary, in evoking his world she is opening out his imagination to us. What she sees as a biographer, visiting his life and landscapes, is what he saw inhabiting those latitudes.

Fergusson writes with a precision which it is tempting to call poetic. She is not, however, a disciple of Mackay Brown's poetry. His verse is often elaborately adjectival; Fergusson's prose is spare, sparer even than the best prose of his stories. Her syntax, on the other hand, is elaborated and rich. She adds detail to detail to build up a large picture, the fuller landscape in time and season.

Several questions Fergusson leaves unanswered, because she feels the evidence is not helpful. What of his sexuality? His inadequacy in relations with women is clear, but there is no compensating intimacy with men. She might have pursued this theme: there are answers to her questions. Other issues she skirts are his politics, his alienation from his community, his willing dependence on others.

This wonderful book is the more wonderful for its gentle transparency, and the paradox with which it leaves us. The most durable legacy of George Mackay Brown may prove to be his impact on the composer Peter Maxwell Davis, whom he inspired, and whose presence has enriched the Orkneys. The writer's work is not weathering well; poems which were astonishing have lost their surprise and freshness. He seems a less durable feature on the literary landscape than in the 1970s. But after reading this book every reader will feel at home in the harsh, rewarding world of the Orkneys, with their strange history of great noise and great silence, of darkness and light, endurance and reward.

Michael Schmidt's 'Lives of the Poets' is published by Phoenix