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Neil M. Gunn is celebrated as one of Scotland's foremost novelists
of the 20th century. Less well known is that he was also a
perceptive and meditative essayist and accomplished writer of short
stories. Most of his short stories were written in the 1920s and
1930s in parallel with his early novels, which they influence and
inform. This collection draws some of its short stories from two
previous collections but others are published for the first time.
Although most are set against a Highland background, they are not
in any way parochial; they touch on universal themes, which invite
the serious reader to ponder and enjoy. Topics explored are:
childhood and a sense of wonder; love in its deepest and most
subtle sense; death as part of the cycle of existence and the place
of land and sea in the development of those in search of greater
self-understanding. The stories are attractive in their own right
and have a freshness and immediacy that give a clarity and
accessibility to the rich subject matter. They are also a gateway
to a greater understanding of Gunn's essential thinking on life and
living.
"The Lost Glen" vividly portrays a clash of cultures and
personalities against a background of a landscape in visible decay.
The cultural collision and its effects are explored through Ewan, a
young local man recently returned from university in disgrace, and
a retired English colonel staying at the village hotel. Both men in
a sense are alienated from the community, the younger because of a
haunting sense of failure, and the older through an unwillingness
to understand the local culture. They have a mutual antipathy. The
Colonel's self-imposed cultural isolation leads to aggressive
bullying and an openly lascivious attitude towards local young
women. His unworthiness as a representative of Anglo-Saxon culture
is largely compensated for by his young niece, who behaves with
sensitivity and integrity. She is clearly attracted to Ewan whose
sense of failure is complex and does not only concern his enforced
withdrawal from university and his involvement in an incident at
sea that cost his father his life; it concerns the feeling he has
of himself as a spiritual exile - a man who had intended to
emigrate but who had remained as an outsider in the land that meant
so much to him. He is fascinated by the experience of a local
piper, whose finding of a lost glen that had a strange beauty and
primordial freshness had been translated into a pibroch. The
haunting tune acts as a stimulant to Ewan's Hamlet-like musings on
the possibility of a rejuvenation of the landscape or a final
disappearance of its life and meaning. The antipathy between the
two main protagonists leads to a physical struggle between them
that brings to an end a novel, layered with meanings, that is more
a symbolic drama than a novel of realism. One of the earliest
novels to appear in the Scottish Literary Renaissance of the 1920s
and 1930s, "The Lost Glen" turns its back on the form of writing
that had depicted Scotland as a rural paradise in favour of
describing Highland life as it really was at that time.
Although Neil M. Gunn is well-known as one of Scotland's foremost
writers of the 20th century, he is less well-known as a perceptive
and meditative essayist who wrote on a variety of subjects - from
landscape, nature and the sea to literature, politics and matters
of the spirit. Written in parallel with his novels, these essays
contain many of the ideas and speculations that inform them. In
this collection the focus is on landscape and the stimulus it
provides for a journey of an enquiring mind from the observation of
everyday life to a state of self-realisation. The essays mark the
route. For example, in The French Fishing Smack there is a sense of
freedom that only the sea can give; in The First Salmon a primal
sense of adventure captivates; The Heron's Legs cannot but engender
a sense of wonder and Light is a signal that the inner journey of
the spirit has all but ended. Products of the uneasy and uncertain
1930s, the Second World War and the Cold War, the essays lead not
only to a more imaginative and enlightened way of looking at life
in troubled times but also to a greater understanding of the mind
of this profoundly thoughtful writer. They can be understood as a
miniature biography of the writer himself in terms of being a
series of moments of revelation and delight experienced during
walks in the countryside, fishing expeditions and chance encounters
with people and books. Covering 40 years of the writer's life, the
essays show that the ideas derived from them evolve rather than
change; there is always a sense of movement. In the later essays it
is the smallest social entity of all, the human psyche, that
fascinates Gunn and becomes the essential ingredient in the search
for self-enlightenment. Encounters with Zen Buddhism and other
disciplines and philosophies were to reassure him that he had been
moving in the right direction throughout his life.
In 1937, the Scottish writer, Neil Gunn, gave up his job in the
civil service, sold his house in Inverness, and bought a boat. With
his wife and his brother John, he set off on a three-month voyage
around Inner Hebrides. The boat had outlived its first youth, and
its engine was somewhat cranky; she went tolerably under sail.
These are not high recommendations, but for Gunn, and at times his
fellow voyagers, the vessel was an argosy of freedom, of adventure
and misadventure-for they were fairly inexperienced sailors, and
the waters of the region are by no means placid. Gunn was a Scots
nationalist in a sense that goes far beyond the political, even
though he thought that an independent Scotland was the only proper
basis for a reasonable civilization. He was by nature poetic,
uplifted or cast down by changing skies, seascapes, and shores. His
descriptions of those things, including their moods, are remarkably
evocative. And he is also a passionate historian of his country,
exalting its possibilities, anathematizing its shortcomings. The
book is illustrated with Daisy Gunn's photographs taken on the
voyage, which are palpably amateur but wonderfully telling.
Introduction by Dairmid Gunn Neil M Gunn (1892 - 1973), one of
Scotland's most distinguished and highly regarded novelists of the
20th century, was a prolific writer. While he is best known for his
fictional work Gunn was also a perceptive and meditative essayist
who wrote extensively throughout his life on a wide range of
subjects from landscape, nature and fishing to politics,
nationalism and current affairs. Belief in Ourselves is a
collection of essays that focuses on politics in the widest sense,
embracing group activity in all its forms from nationalism to both
communal work in a social sense and co-operation in crofting and
fishing; the focus extends also to literature as a source of
inspiration for a nation and a provider of national identity. That
most of the essays were written between the two world wars - a
period of political uncertainty and economic crisis - brings a
sense of urgency to the writer in terms of the resolution of the
problems and the exploration of the ideas aired by him. Many of the
problems he identifies remain with us, albeit in different forms.
Indeed, the imaginative and enlightened way in which Gunn looks at
the events of his day have a strange relevance for today's world.
This forms a sister volume to the earlier Landscape to Light, which
concentrates on his native landscape and culture and the spiritual
aspects of his life and thought. As with Landscape to Light, much
of what Gunn writes informs his fictional work
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