Luca Fumagalli

Probably the best definition of George Mackay Brown’s literary output is that of Nobel Prize winner Seamus Heaney, who praised the writer’s ability to «transform everything by passing it through the eye of the needle of the Orkney». In fact, in almost all of Brown’s works – poems, stories, novels, plays and essays – the protagonist is the community of the Scottish archipelago: it is a small world that, however peripheral and isolated, is translated by his writings into a fascinating testimony of God’s providential plan.

Brown (1921-1996) spent most of his life in his native Orkney, in voluntary exile. Even after the Sixties, when he began to be famous, he continued to grant few interviews to the journalists who knocked on his door almost every day. He considered himself, by vocation, a kind of hermit monk who had also the role of a traditional Scandinavian bard. His reserve was partly the result of tuberculosis, which had manifested itself since his youth and which forced him to undergo periodic hospitalizations. He also battled alcoholism and depression for a long time.

When Brown was a boy, his imagination was ignited by reading the Orkneyinga Saga, a collection of stories and poems composed between the 12th and 13th centuries by one or more authors of Icelandic origin. The influence of the Saga, which deals with the history of the conquest of the Orkney by the Norwegians and the subsequent era of the Jarls, is evident throughout Brown’s bibliography. Traces of it can be found in the themes, characters and style, which, apart from occasional lyrical outbursts, is essential and free of unnecessary frills.

Also fundamental to his human and artistic growth were the books of the man who launched him onto the literary scene, namely his fellow compatriot Edwin Muir. Brown was especially struck by the autobiographical volume The Story and the Fable; reading it he understood that the artist must not stop at the surface of things, but must describe the essence of reality, the mystery that is within it.

On the religious side, he began quite early to distance himself from the Presbyterian culture in which he had grown up and to draw closer to the Church of Rome, thanks to reading Newman’s Apologia pro Vita Sua and the novels of Fionn MacColla, but also Muir’s John Knox: Portrait of a Calvinist. According to Muir, the sixteenth-century reformer was an iconoclast, a man who had dragged Scotland down the abyss, depriving it of the benefits of the Renaissance. Calvinism was a ridiculous ideology, in some ways similar to Marxism and guilty of corrupting the noble spirit of the nation. The sense of loss caused by Knox surfaces in some of Brown’s most successful short stories, such as “Witch” and “Master Halcrow, Priest”, as well as in the opening poem of The Storm, his first poetry collection.

By contrast, Catholicism was a perfect union of beauty and truth, the embodiment of a strong, living faith, supported by ancient rites. That’s why in the final pages of his autobiography, For the Islands I Sing, Brown stated that the humble Mass in a country village was for him the most beautiful thing imaginable. As a consequence, after the Second Vatican Council he found himself bitterly admitting that the elimination of Latin had deprived the Eucharistic celebration of much of its majesty and mystery.

Nevertheless, it was only after long meditation that he decided be baptized, when he was already forty years old.

The conversion, in addition to providing Brown with a whole range of themes and images to use in his work – the Marian cult, the Via Crucis, the liturgy etc. – had above all the merit of making him reconsider the Orkney from a sacramental perspective. The islands then become a corner of land that bears the traces of God. When Brown describes the work of fishermen and farmers, the rituals of everyday life and the slow passing of the seasons he demonstrates a metaphysical inspiration that, using the indeterminacy of the symbol, transforms Orkney into an idiom of ecumenical relationship. As scholar Alison Gray writes, «Orkney and the glory of God are one and the same; there is “No separation”».

If the celebration of nature and the references to Norse sagas have led superficial critics to accuse Brown of paganism, it is because the writer attempts to break down the boundaries of space and time with the invitation to an eternal communion between creature, creation and Creator. All this set in the cultural context of the medieval Orkneys, not yet disfigured by the poison of the Protestant Reformation. According to Brown, literature therefore has a social impact and the aim of the author, even when he adopts the point of view of the marginalized character, is that of becoming, in Tolkien’s words, a co-creator:  one who keeps in repair «the sacred web of creation – the cosmic harmony of God and beast and man and star and planet – in the name of humanity, against those who in the name of humanity are mindlessly and systematically destroying it».

So nothing could be further from his ideas than the environmentalism that is so fashionable today, just as in his writings there is no trace of localist or nationalist claims (moreover he did not want to get involved in either theological or political debates).

Brown’s community model, a unity in diversity identified with the symbolic image of the tapestry, is none other than the Church itself, a place where the freedom of the individual is exalted in the relationship with others, in the responsibility he has towards them, in a bond that transcends the mere legal level and concerns not only the living but also the dead, not only the present but also the past and the future; as a lover of islands, he often repeated that no man is an island.

The renunciation of one’s self for the good of others has the best example in Saint Magnus, patron saint of the Orkney. The story of the 12th century nobleman who embraced death in order to bring peace to the islands is taken up by Brown in various works, including Magnus, his favourite novel.

On the other hand, the most serious threat to the natural and divine order is constituted by “progress”. With this word Brown identifies all the centrifugal forces of modernity – for example, the enslaving technology, the contempt for history, the egocentrism and the greed for money – that lead to sin, that is to the selfish exaltation of the individual and to the destruction of society (as brilliantly narrated, for example, in the poetic cycle Fishermen with Ploughs or in the novel Greenvoe).

Brown’s works continue to be read and appreciated even outside Scotland precisely because his portrait of the Orcadian microcosm is a true Lectio Divina for anyone. In other words, his islands are a last bastion of humanity that opposes rampant nihilism, a hope for universal redemption that has nothing to do with old and new utopias, much less with contemporary globalization.

Follow Radio Spada: