Lewis Grassic Gibbon

A Scots Quair


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      A

      SCOTS

      QUAIR

      Sunset Song • Cloud Howe • Grey Granite

      Lewis Grassic Gibbon

      Edited and introduced by Tom Crawford

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      Lewis Grassic Gibbon

       SUNSET SONG

      Edited with an introduction by Tom Crawford

      To Jean Baxter

       Contents

       Introduction

       Note on the Text

       Map of Kinraddie

      PRELUDE The Unfurrowed Field

      THE SONG

      I Ploughing

      II Drilling

      III Seed-Time

      IV Harvest

      EPILUDE The Unfurrowed Field

       Notes

       Introduction

      To its original readers in 1932 Sunset Song was a book in itself; they could not know it was the first part of a trilogy. Many reacted with disgust to its frank treatment of sex and childbearing, its scorn for the rich and powerful, its sometimes strident anti-clericalism. The Kirriemuir Free Press classed it with those modern works that ‘gloat foully’; the Paisley Express wrote that ‘the unredeemed close-packed filth, meanness, spite, brutality, lying squalor and stupidity wearies us’. Today it is one of Scotland’s favourite books, and a television serialisation has made it even more accessible to thousands of readers.

      All these aspects come together in the struggles and responses of the heroine. She belongs to herself both before marriage and after, and there is an untamable, detached, still centre at the heart of her being. True, she tells us there are ‘three Chrisses’—Chris Guthrie, Chris Tavendale, and another that comes to the fore by the end of the novel; and Chris Guthrie is herself split in two, the Scots Chris of her family and forebears, and the more refined ‘English’ Chris created by her schooling. But we can never doubt the permanence of that still centre, and we feel it is obscurely connected with her intimations of the more than merely temporal. We are convinced that no man will ever possess her completely, though her heart is Ewan’s for ever. We share her fears when she is first pregnant and her hatred of her husband before her emotions can come to terms with her new condition: we sympathise with her tortured rejection of the Ewan whom army life has turned into a beast, and with her brief union with the defeated Rob before he goes off to the army. Gibbon counterposes the poetry of Chris’s independence (‘her blood ran so clear and with such a fine, sweet song in her veins she must hold her breath and heark to it’), to the prose of it (‘then he said Chrissie! Tired? and she said Losh, no, and my name’s Chris, Ewan!). He lets us share in her growing individuality as she responds to the men around her. First, there is John Guthrie’s domineering patriarchy: it is only at his graveside that she comes to know the agony of his self- torturing struggle when the ‘world’s fight and the fight of his own flesh grew over-bitter, and poisoned his love to hate’ Second, there is her love for Ewan, with his vulnerable, instinctual maleness (Chris is the stronger character, as well as the more intelligent). Third, there is Long Rob: she is the stronger there too, for she wills their coming together; and fourth, there is her second husband, the Reverend Robert Colquhoun.

      After war has destroyed her first marriage Chris begins to reconstruct her personality by ‘building the walls of a sanity cold and high, locked in from the lie of life’, determining to live in isolation behind them (the still centre is now frozen), till Chae Strachan tells her the true way of Ewan’s death. Chae’s narration, and the ‘supernatural’ intimation of the last paragraphs of ‘Harvest’, enable her to complete her reintegration before she meets Robert. Chris can now share with Robert her new understanding of her separate and succeeding selves (‘Oh, my dear, maybe the second Chris, maybe the third, but Ewan has the first forever’), and the way is open for Chris’s development in the more complex society of the second book in the trilogy, Cloud Howe. That is Robert’s second function in the novel: the first is to supply its emotional conclusion, the noble elegy for dead heroes and a vanished Way of life that he pronounces by the plaque on the Standing Stone, and which modulates so superbly into a national lament, with ‘The Flowers of the Forest’, and its Border words, piped by a Highlander, standing in the North East of Scotland. Yet the power of the book goes beyond question of solely national identity, for as the New York Times reviewer saw so clearly in 1933, Sunset Song ‘may be read with delight the world over.’

      The present text follows that of the first edition of 1932 as scrupulously as possible, except in such matters of typographical styling as the use of roman, not italic, capitals for words emphasised in direct speech. Misprints that were