Luca Fumagalli

Born in Orkney, George Mackay Brown was one of the most important Scottish poets of the last century, although today he is mainly remembered for his extensive prose output, including short stories, novels, essays, articles, and plays.

The conversion to Catholicism was fundamental in his life and in his artistic career. Besides providing him with themes and images for his writing, Catholicism also prompted him to reconsider his vision of the homeland from a sacramental point of view, with the consequence that in his verse the work of anglers and farmers, the rituals of daily life, and the changing seasons become part of a cosmic relationship.

The celebration of nature and references to Norse sagas are also part of Mackay Brown’s attempt to break down the boundaries of space and time in an intergenerational communion between people and God, who is simply the origin of life itself. The poet’s aim is therefore to become a sub-creator or an artisan constantly committed to maintaining the sacred web of creation in the name of humanity.

From these preliminary considerations emerges a community model that reflects the Church itself, a unity in diversity identified with the symbolic image of the tapestry. Mackay Brown describes a bond that is not merely juridical and that concerns not only the living but also the dead, not only the present but also the past and the future; and as a lover of islands, he often repeated, “no man is an island”.

On the other hand, the most serious threat to the natural and divine order is what he called “progress,” that is the manifestation of an increasingly brutalized and self-referential modernity; in other words, it is a rather demonic exaltation aimed at eradicating everything, sweeping away any affection, exactly the opposite of the example set in medieval times by Saint Magnus, patron saint of the Orkney, who sacrificed his own life to ensure peace and prosperity for his people.

Reading the poems of the Jesuit Gerard Manley Hopkins was very important for Mackay Brown in order to elaborate such fascinating and complex poetics (without losing his originality). This is how he described his first approach with Hopkins’ work in his autobiography, For the Islands I Sing: «In those days – the early 1960s – there seemed to be plenty of money to spare for post-graduate study. I got to know about this, and applied, and was accepted to do a year’s post-graduate work on Gerard Manley Hopkins. It would be honest to say that I chose Gerard Manley Hopkins because … Hopkins’ collected poems are probably the fewest in English literature. … But I had always loved Hopkins’ poetry. … The image that comes closest to Hopkins is that of a blacksmith, fettling ‘for the great gray dry-horse his bright and battering sandal…’ No English poet ever fell upon the language with such skill, sweetness and boisterous daring”.

Mackay Brown wrote within a central pool of ideas (a Catholic epistemology) that became increasingly clear to him. This clarity can be seen in his Hopkins studies. He saw his origins in the Logos and all his writings came through God and were imbued with his grace. Like Hopkins, his work stands as an intricate illumination in the darkness, and even though the darkness at times takes the appearance of overcoming the light, it is not able to do so. In fact, they both knew that the darkness was a necessary part of their life and work that elicited from them an interlaced and illuminated sensational vision.

Alison Gray, scholar and friend of Mackay Brown, described the relationship between these two prominent poets in his extended analysis Passion Partners: The Piety of George Mackay Brown and Gerard Manley Hopkins, published by Angelico Press in 2024. The book explores the godliness of Mackay Brown and Hopkins as just such “partners” in the Passion of Christ. Catholics they may both be, but they both were keenly aware that it is by their artistic sense that they would be judged as writers in the end. From the “Pied Beauty” of the “Greenfields Kirk” to the “Theological Blades,” the illuminated threnody of the Hopkins–Mackay Brown partnership becomes a journey deep into the Fornaldarsǫgur of the North Atlantic.

The result is a well-written and truly insightful book that sheds new light in particular on Mackay Brown, one of the most under-appreciated authors of British Catholicism, and is therefore well worth reading.

Alison Gray, Passion Partners: The Piety of George Mackay Brown and Gerard Manley Hopkins, Angelico Press, Brooklyn (NY), 2024, 326 pp, € 24,44.

Buy the book: https://angelicopress.com/products/passion-partners-alison-gray?srsltid=AfmBOoq7ZmTrb8QQV3PItwZk3-xjuHpkZX6adDzkbwDSdyVUXxWR6XBC

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