The Leithen Stories. Buchan John
I
… you are a man of good commonplace intelligence. Pray forgive the lukewarmness of the phrase; it is really a high compliment, for I am an austere critic. But you also possess a quite irrelevant gift of imagination. Not enough to affect your balance, but enough to do what your mere lawyer’s talent could never have done. You have achieved a feat which is given to few – you have partially understood me.
The prototype Buchan villain, Andrew Lumley in The Power House (1913) got closer to nailing Sir Edward Leithen than anyone else. Leithen, the first and last of Buchan’s heroes, and the one closest in character to his author, was also his most enigmatic. It’s possible to construct his biography – Buchan’s characters, popping up from novel to novel, usually have well-realised backgrounds – but Buchan on Leithen is uncharacteristically sketchy. He tells us he was born in 1879 and a Scots Calvinist, but nothing about his presumably Peeblesshire family, save for a somewhat dim nephew, Charles. He is a Tory MP and a barrister in The Power-House, yet in The Dancing Floor he seems to have acquired his knighthood as Solicitor-General pre-war. He was only elected in 1910, and couldn’t have been in the wartime government, as he was serving at the front; and, unusually, he doesn’t go on the bench. He comes awkwardly close to his creator, and seems to operate as an intellectual filing-cabinet for preoccupations and speculations which Buchan wanted to keep at one remove from himself. To compare him with another lone barrister in London, Anthony Trollope’s moving portrait of the widowed Sir Thomas Underwood in the otherwise rather silly Ralph the Heir (1871), is to see how flat a character he initially is.
II
The Leithen stories, nevertheless, contain the heart of the Buchan matter, political and philosophical, bringing out tantalising glimpses of work which a more troubled man – ‘serious unto death’, as Carlyle put it – might have turned into a golden lyric. Perhaps this was also apparent to Buchan himself: that what came naturally and fluently to him was something deadly serious to his younger Scots contemporaries. Buchan/Leithen never gave up his day job – or indeed jobs – for the ‘determined stupor’ of the full-time writer, as did Edwin Muir, Hugh MacDiarmid, Eric Linklater or Lewis Grassic Gibbon – and at a further remove, W.B. Yeats and Ezra Pound. The Power-House announces the terrific anarchy to be loosed upon the world, John Macnab the recuperative power of the pastoral. The Dancing Floor is in its way a fire sermon with the kindling material of tradition, sex and violence. In Sick Heart River in particular it’s possible to hear echoes of a flyting between MacDiarmid’s pitiless mysticism of the material in ‘On a Raised Beach’ and Buchan’s own theism, going on behind his post-imperial project of creating a common Canadian culture.
With the practically-minded Buchan there was always a resistance to ‘inoppugnable realities’: that sense of being ensnared by circumstances and irreversible political change. But in the 1920s as an MP he may have felt that he had made a false move: he was a political ‘lieutenant’ who would never be a leader, partly because of his health, partly because he wouldn’t commit himself 100 per cent to the party game. He was doomed to see mediocre Tory contemporaries scale heights interdicted to him. One book which doesn’t appear here, the implausible Gap in the Curtain (1932) has Leithen narrating an uncharacteristically stodgy political tale. ‘The Rt. Hon. David Mayot’ could have concerned a real, and gripping episode in which Buchan was involved – the formation of Ramsay MacDonald’s National Government the previous August – but it reeks of Asquith’s day, not Baldwin’s.
III
Leithen/Buchan’s career is therefore something of a ‘bag-end of life’, of speculative enterprises worked out better elsewhere. But what remains is considerable. If, as Roderick Watson and Douglas Gifford have argued, a salient feature of the Scottish renaissance was a preoccupation with the socialising functions of myths and archetypes, then few writers were richer in this respect than Buchan, throughout his career concerned with ‘the causal and the casual’ in politics. This was something he gained from older contemporaries such as Andrew Lang, John Veitch and J.G. Frazer. The political was something from which they recoiled; yet perhaps the most famous line in all Buchan, Lumley’s warning to Leithen: ‘You think that a wall as solid as the earth separates civilisation from barbarism. I tell you the division is a thread, a sheet of glass …’ could almost have been plucked directly from the second volume of The Golden Bough (1892):
It is not our business here to consider what bearing the permanent existence of such a solid layer of savagery beneath the surface of society, and unaffected by the superficial changes of religion and culture, has on the future of humanity. The dispassionate observer, whose studies have led him to plumb its depths, can hardly regard it as otherwise than as a standing menace to civilisation. We seem to move on a thin crust which may at any time be rent by the subterranean forces slumbering below.
This in turn related to a metaphor running back via Disraeli, Carlyle and Goethe to the geological debates of the Enlightenment. The Power-House shows the super-intellect Lumley – with more than a few resemblances to Buchan’s hero Arthur Balfour – brought down by the ‘commonplace’ Leithen, and an enthusiastic but bungling Labour MP. This was one way of saying that to Buchan the security of 1913 Britain was genuine, and not canvas painted to look like stone and stretched over a chasm. This didn’t last: by August 1914 the reign of Saturn had been resumed.
IV
The war made Buchan’s ‘shockers’ famous. It also delivered blow after shattering blow through the loss of family and friends: all the more severe because his deskbound jobs deprived him of the exhilaration of survival which his French contemporary Henri Barbusse celebrated in Under Fire (1916). But war propaganda was complex enough to be recuperative; it also involved Buchan in probing German nationality via German psychoanalysis. Catherine Carswell wrote that he had mastered all the standard texts ‘with attention and respect’, which certainly meant Freud and Jung.
Freudian traces in Buchan are pretty limited, although the distinguished Scots psychoanalyst Jock Sutherland argued that his relationship to his mother might repay study. Jung, an exact contemporary and, like Buchan, a son of the Calvinist manse, was likely to be a more agreeable ideologue; but both would lead back to the huge myth-kitty of Victorian anthropology, The Golden Bough in particular, because of their interest in custom and habit, totem and taboo.
John Macnab (1925) seems remote from such concerns, the most lighthearted of Buchan’s novels, with its origins in Captain Brander Dunbar’s challenge to Lord Abinger at Inverlochy in 1897, and its stunning descriptions of the treacherous beauty of the West Highlands. But it becomes equally freighted with significance. Editing The Northern Muse (1924), his fine anthology of Scots vernacular poetry, Buchan doubtless remembered that his great predecessor in this business, Allan Ramsay senior, had used the politics of pastoral in his Gentle Shepherd exactly two centuries earlier. This was still acted by village companies into Buchan’s childhood, reminding the folk of a protest against misgovernment which was both Jacobite and radical.
This comes out in the election meeting, with its contrast between Lord Lamancha’s meaningless party oration, and Archie Roylance’s love-kindled idealism. It owes something to Disraeli – Buchan snitching one of his best jokes – but also in the background is Arthur Hugh Clough’s The Bothie of Tober Na Vuolich (1848) in which a group of Oxford men on a highland reading party are faced with old inequalities, love, and the prospect of a new beginning. If it doesn’t work quite as well as that masterly réprise of Peacock and Scott, Castle Gay (1930), put this down to Buchan’s problems with the highlands and a landscape which, however beautiful, was empty of people. Border pastoral had a somewhat different meaning for those who had been driven forth by the shepherds, the Cheviot and the stag, and Gerard Craig Sellar, Buchan’s host at Ardtornish, was the grandson of Patrick Sellar, the Duke