Why the 'magical' fiction of Highland author Neil Gunn is ripe for reappraisal
As new Scottish publisher North House Press prepares to re-issue the complete works of Neil Gunn, academic and author Kirsty Gunn (no relation) explains why it’s time to look again at his remarkable fiction
A hundred years ago, London Publishers Jonathan Cape received, in their elegant Georgian offices in Bloomsbury, a most unusual manuscript. It was the first novel by Caithness born writer Neil Gunn, and it was set there, in his homeland in the far north of Scotland, its pages filled with the harsh realities of life in one of the most remote counties in the British Isles. The Grey Coast couldn’t have been more strange to the gentlemen editors working in Gower Street. There they were, just around the corner from the British Museum and a stone’s throw from where the BBC, in clipped Southern accents, broadcast its own particularly English-inflected version of British culture. What could they have possibly made of a story stiff with a form of syntax and vocabulary that is challenging enough for a Lowland Scottish reader, let alone those who’ve never been north of Edinburgh, and for whom Edinburgh is far enough? Here was something other, something else.
And yet straight away the editors at Jonathan Cape knew they wanted to publish this work, and without changing a line – all of its words, sensibility and particular geographic history in place. From the first sentence – “Before she had called her uncle to tea, she had drawn the cheap slip of window-curtain to one side so that the last of the daylight may be made use of…” – the novel had its first readers in thrall. Cape had just brought out Ernest Hemingway’s first collection of short stories and here was something just as exciting.
The Grey Coast came out to widespread critical acclaim and Gunn’s reputation was assured. He went on to publish 20 more novels as well as short stories, essays and journalism. He assumed a literary life that put him fully at the centre of British Modernism – along with TS Eliot, who was to publish his later books at Faber and Faber – while in America the likes of William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound quickly became friends and correspondents. Gunn had an international writers’ fellowship established in his name – taken up by Nobel Prize laureates such as Mario Vargas Llosa, Nadine Gordimer and Heinrich Boll – and his books continued to be read and admired around the world. “Gunn’s affinity with the Highlands of Scotland is evident in everything he wrote” says the journalist and former deputy editor of this newspaper, Alan Taylor. This, along with a depth of thinking that was universal and timeless, was brought together in his novels – “an understanding of inner and outer nature fused in one story…” Taylor concludes, in a “rich and rewarding reading experience.”
How times have changed. Though one still encounters those who have heard of Neil Gunn or have even read one or two of his novels – usually “back in school” or “a long time ago” – the overall impression is of a writer who has simply “fallen out of favour” as one teacher or academic after another puts it. “Oh yes, Neil Gunn. I have heard of him”, murmured a colleague who was compiling his list of novels for a Scottish Literature course. “What kind of thing did he write, again? Remind me?”
Well, the kind of thing he wrote is re-emerging on the Scottish literary scene and is set to make quite an impact. North House Press, the brain child of Scottish publisher David Graham – formerly of Canongate, as well as Granta, Phaidon, and a key player in the independent publishing sector – is bringing Gunn back into print this year, to mark the centenary of his first novel, and, as he puts it, he’s doing it “properly”.
“It seems crazy that a writer of Gunn’s stature and history is not a central figure of our Scottish canon,” Graham says. “His work crosses boundaries of class and privilege; he understands what it is to struggle; his characters are astonishing in their reality. Critics have described him as Tolstoyan – he has that depth and breadth of human vision, for sure. And, like the great Russian writer, he understands that it is women who power the narrative – just as in life – lending a generative imaginative quality to the novels that make them mysterious and surprising, as well as completely natural.”
For these reasons and more one might wonder why it should be the case that Gunn’s work is so far from our reading experience now. Is it because of a perceived necessity to focus upon the urban in so much contemporary Scottish fiction? The requirement to reveal, in stories of dense inner-city lives, the economic and social challenges that attend our age? Who knows. But it seems to this reader that even a change in literary taste does not account for just quite how far Gunn’s novels have fallen off our radar.
At this point I should perhaps declare an interest in his rehabilitation, as a co-founder North House Press but also as a teacher. Since I’ve been involved in tertiary education I’ve used Gunn’s fiction as a kind of creative workbook, as inspiration to thinking about form and process and content; this is someone who has so much to show young readers and writers about how novels can be made. He’s open to a really plastic, multi-purpose kind of fiction, one that veers from drama to essay to psychological study to a kind of romance, in the French sense of the word, as well as thriller, page turner… it’s magical.
North House Press has a mission to pass some of that magic on to readers throughout Scotland. Part of Graham’s publishing impulse comes from wanting to demonstrate that Scottish fiction can take us in all kinds of directions. Gunn’s work shows how the land itself can become a character in books, influencing the circumstances of the people in his novels and making them who they are. “The portrait that emerges is infinitely nuanced, real and textured,” says Graham. “Whilst the cultural history of the Highlands figures large in our sense of Scottish identity, the reduction of it to “shortbread tin” versions of Bonnie Prince Charlie, Highland coos and the rest – and all the time ignoring great talent like Neil Gunn… well, it makes no sense. We need to remind ourselves that there’s rather a lot more to the Highlands than those old, spent and somewhat patronising cliches. Celebrating the real Highlands, and how they truly figure in the Scottish imagination – that is what North House Press is all about.”
Kirsty Gunn (no relation to Neil) is Research Professor of Writing Practice and Study at The University of Dundee and the author of novels including The Big Music, set in the Highlands, as well as short story collections, the latest of which is Pretty Ugly (Rough Trade, £13.99). North House Press is a new independent publishing venture based in Sutherland, which aims to celebrate Scottish Highland culture, landscape and people. It launches this month with the republication of three long out of print titles by Neil Gunn: The Grey Coast, Blood Hunt, and The Serpent, which will be available in bookshops and online from 21 May, see www.northhousepress.co.uk
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