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Ice House of the Mind is the third of this series of Stories and
Sketches. It contains the collections, His People, Faith and Hope,
published between 1906 and 1910, which present a typical mix of
Cunninghame Graham's stories set in widely separated locations and
drawing on his vast experience of life in different classes of
human society. The stories are suffused with Cunninghame Graham's
striking blend of the elegiac mood and unsentimental realism. "All
that we write is but a bringing forth again of something we have
seen or heard about. What makes it art is but the handling of it,
and the imagination that is brought to bear upon the theme out of
the writer's brain. It follows therefore that all writing, as I
said before, brings sorrow in its train.....To record, even to
record emotions, is to store up a fund of sadness, and that is why
all writing is a sort of icehouse of the mind.... (Faith, Preface).
Alan MacGillivray is a specialist in Scottish Literature, who has
lectured at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, and is a former
President of the Association for Scottish Literary Studies. John C.
McIntyre taught Spanish Language and Latin American Literature at
the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow. He holds a postgraduate
Diploma in Scottish Literature.
Fire from a Black Opal is the fourth of this series of Stories and
Sketches. It contains the collections, Charity, A Hatchment and
Brought Forward, published between 1912 and 1916, immediately prior
to and during the First World War. Cunninghame Graham was by now in
his sixties, yet many of the stories demonstrate his amazing powers
of recall for the experiences and feelings of his youth. Equally
the later stories reveal a close empathy with the terrible demands
that the war was making on people of different nations. "Honour and
virtue do not of necessity take with them charity; neither can base
estate nor any adverse circumstance of life stifle it in the hearts
of those, to whom it comes, just as the fire shines out from a
black opal, almost without their ken." Charity, Preface. Alan
MacGillivray is a specialist in Scottish Literature, who has
lectured at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, and is a former
President of the Association for Scottish Literary Studies. John C.
McIntyre taught Spanish Language and Latin American Literature at
the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow. He holds a postgraduate
Diploma in Scottish Literature. James N. Alison is a retired HM
Inspector of Schools with specialist interests in Scottish
literature, children's books and landscapes.
This fifth and final volume of Cunninghame Graham stories and
sketches brings together the three collections he published in the
last decade of his life. Redeemed, and Other Sketches appeared in
1927, followed in 1933 by Writ in Sand, and in 1936, the year of
his death, by Mirages. There is a sense of winding down in the
pieces presented. The characteristic Graham astringency and irony
are less intense, and there is more conventional sentiment.
However, some of the familiar targets for his distaste and anger
are still being picked off. Graham shows himself to be fully alive
to the increasingly menacing world of 1930s Europe. If he had
lived, there is little doubt about where his sympathies would have
lain. Graham died on the 20th March 1936. Exactly four months
later, the Spanish Civil War began. "I thanked the stationmaster
for his horse, unsaddled him, emptied a tin mug of water over his
sweating back, and threw him down a bundle of fresh Pindo leaves to
keep him occupied till he was ready for his maize. Then I strolled
into the station cafe, where Exaltacion Medina, Joao Ferreira, and,
I think, Enrique Clerici were playing billiards, whilst they waited
for me." (Writ in Sand, "The Stationmaster's Horse"), Preface Alan
MacGillivray is a specialist in Scottish Literature, who has
lectured at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, and is a former
President of the Association for Scottish Literary Studies. John C.
McIntyre taught Spanish Language and Latin American Literature at
the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow. He holds a postgraduate
Diploma in Scottish Literature. James N. Alison is a retired HM
Inspector of Schools with specialist interests in Scottish
literature, children's books and landscapes.
"Living with Ghosts", the second volume of this series, contains
the collections of stories that Cunningham Graham published between
1900 and 1905, in the period immediately after he was forced to
sell his estate of Gartmore and divide his time between London and
the smaller house of Ardoch on the Clyde. He was thus made more
free to devote himself to writing and achieve a greater output of
the stories and sketches that are at the heart of his literary
endeavour. The collections, Thirteen Stories (1900), Success
(1902), and Progress, and Other Sketches (1905), display his
new-found confidence about his own skills and ability to handle the
wide-ranging subject matter that became his trademark. "I, writing
as a man who has not only seen, but lived with ghosts, may perhaps
find pardon for this preface, for who would run in heavily and
dance a hornpipe on the turf below which sleep the dead?" (Thirteen
Stories, Preface) Alan MacGillivray is a specialist in Scottish
Literature, who has lectured at the University of Strathclyde,
Glasgow, and is a former President of the Association for Scottish
Literary Studies. John C. McIntyre taught Spanish Language and
Latin American Literature at the University of Strathclyde,
Glasgow. He holds a postgraduate Diploma in Scottish Literature.
he works by R.B. Cunninghame Graham in this volume were published
between 1895 and 1899. Notes on the District of Menteith (1895),
while not a collection of stories, is included because it was
Graham's first book, a brief survey of the district of Scotland
around Graham's house and ancestral estate of Gartmore. In a sense,
it is the physical, social and historical landscape seen from the
windows of his own home. Father Archangel of Scotland (1896) is a
collection of essays and sketches from the hands of both Robert and
his wife Gabriela, their only joint literary venture. The Ipane
(1899) is Graham's first true collection of his own short stories
and sketches, although he had already published a travel book,
Mogreb-Al-Acksa (1898), about his experiences in Morocco. ..".a
sort of record of a dream, dreamed upon pampas and on prairies,
sleeping upon a saddle under the southern stars, or galloping
across the plains in the hot sun, photographed in youth upon the
writer's brain..." The Ipane, "The Lazo" Alan MacGillivray is a
specialist in Scottish Literature, who has lectured at the
University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, and is a former President of
the Association for Scottish Literary Studies. John C. McIntyre
taught Spanish Language and Latin American Literature at the
University of Strathclyde, Glasgow. He holds a postgraduate Diploma
in Scottish Literature.
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