The Leithen Stories. Buchan John
gents’ destinies being firmly in the scaly, crafty, hands of Fish Benjie.
Craig-Sellar also had a hand in The Dancing Floor (1926) which followed quickly after John Macnab. Inspired by a huge, silent house on one of the Petali Islands, north-east of Athens, visited while on Craig-Sellar’s yacht in 1910, it was a reworking, at novel length, of a much earlier short story ‘Basilissa’ (1914), published not long after The Power House, and also in Blackwood’s. Vernon Milburne is a young English country gentleman happened on by Leithen after an accident (does Leithen never encounter, by accident, somewhere terribly boring?). He is haunted by an annual dream about a fire in a room, each year advancing towards him. Leithen provides the link to a strange house on a Greek island and an ordeal he must endure, and the mysterious figure of Koré Arabin. Travelling in the Aegean, he discovers the house, residence of Koré’s father Shelley Arabin, an English littérateur far gone in nameless decadence. Furious against their landlord, the locals perceive Milburne as being the priest-king ‘who slew the slayer and shall himself be slain’, who must marry the daughter of the hated house, and then be sacrificed with her. All this has more than a whiff of Arthur Machen, even of Dennis Wheatley, about it. It’s with a start that one remembers that the Plakos business was right in the time and place of a quite different sort of villain: Eric Ambler’s Dimitrios Makropolos.
In the earlier novels Leithen is energetic and self-confident. It is quite otherwise in Sick Heart River (1941), written while Buchan, now Lord Tweedsmuir, was Governor-General of Canada and published after his death. It puzzled his staff, who found it sombre and introverted. The dying Leithen is involved in no thriller plot, but the task of finding a French-Canadian financier, Francis Gaillard, who has disappeared in the Canadian North, something complicated by the fact that Lew Frizel, brother of Leithen’s guide, seems to have gone crazily off in search of an edenic valley, the Sick Heart River. The quest for the two deranged men also becomes a quest for a nation. The Sick Heart, although tranquil and green, is dead. When Leithen gets Lew out he has to minister to ‘the madness of the north’ which has afflicted all the voyageurs. They might also be suffering from the malaise of Canada – its division by region and racial group – something which became obvious to Buchan on his tours as Governor-General. Leithen finds himself acting as a sort of medicine man. His moment of choice comes in the camp of the Hare Indians, who have, following an epidemic, become totally demoralised. Is Leithen to go back to England – now at war – or to stay and organise, with Gaillard, the hunting of winter food?
Compared to his companions Leithen suddenly saw himself founded solidly, like an oak. He was drawing life from deep sources. Death, if it came, was no blind trick of fate, but a thing accepted and therefore mastered.
Leithen ends up as more than a sacrificial Frazerian priestking. He provides, by hunting, a function which antedates the Demeter goddess, and concurs with a leading myth of the Scots renaissance, particularly salient in Neil Gunn and Lewis Grassic Gibbon: the ‘golden age’ of the hunting horde.
V
Throughout the four books Buchan seems to be preoccupied with what the literati of the eighteenth century would have called ‘notions’ derived from philosophy and anthropology, or had these confirmed by his wartime experience. The first was the fragility of civilisation. A somewhat thetorical apprehension in his pre-war books, this had now become reality. Man’s capability of generating evil was far greater because of the eclipse of the constraints Buchan associated with western Christendom, and Lumley’s reference to China introduces the ‘Asiatic’ combination of the wielding of power and its abnegation that Buchan elaborated in his master-villain Dominick Medina in The Three Hostages (1924). This ‘rebarbarisation’ would loom over The Dancing Floor – Plakos wasn’t far from Smyrna, and its appalling massacre in 1922 – and even the japes of John Macnab. Young Claybody’s private army – a Highland Freikorps? – draws on the unemployed set adrift by the post-war slump. Buchan’s German friends like Moritz Bonn would make him aware of where this could lead.
Linked to this was something he derived from Freud via Frazer: the role of repressive doctrine. To Buchan this stemmed from over-mechanistic religion which recoiled from the cycle of nature, and bred evil and sexual perversion. If Shelley Arabin was based on Lord Byron, whose private letters had horrified Buchan – if not Henry James – investigating them in 1905, then the impact of Calvinist repression of the sort dramatically evident in Witch Wood (1928) couldn’t be discounted. The young Buchan who had gone to Brasenose hoping to study under Walter Pater, would also have known all about Gilles de Rais, quondam ally of Joan of Arc, pederast and child-murderer, central to J.–K. Huysmans’ Là-Bas (1891).
Finally, myth and ritual gave to a humanity assailed by ‘mass culture’ and ‘mass politics’ a prospect of ecological harmony. Buchan was reared in an intellectual tradition in which the scientific had always been related to the anthropological and the theological: by the Scottish Enlightenment, by Carlyle, by Robertson Smith and Frazer, and a growing Scots’ fascination with psychoanalysis. Getting to the heart of the matter seemed necessary in the post-war turmoil, when the structures of liberal capitalism were collapsing. In The Dancing Floor Vernon Milburne recognises the rituals of Plakos as ultimately benign, going back not just beyond Christianity but predating the ‘noisy, middle-class family party’ of the Greek gods: ‘You may call her Demeter, or Aphrodite, or Hera, but she is the same, the Virgin and the Mother, the “mistress of wild things”, the “priestess of the new birth in spring”.’
In Sick Heart River this ‘natural theology’ is assimilated not so much into the Canadian Indians’ respect for their natural environment – the Hares are their environment’s victims – but into the quandary of the ‘true’ Canadians, the half-breed Frizels. The pollution and environmental destruction that Gaillard’s factory has inflicted on the Clairefontaine, are the cognate penalty of mechanistic ‘civilisation’. Making the connection, and consequently the new Canada, is the ideal for which Leithen ultimately sacrifices himself.
Buchan/Leithen was a product of that peculiar involvement of the Scots with empire, whereby patronage, career-development and economic exploitation were also linked up with the drive to understand so typical of a Scots-influenced intelligentsia. Buchan’s first publication in 1894 had been Essays and Apothegms of Francis Lord Bacon: ‘all knowledge was his province’. His mission to know, but also to evangelise, made him what H.G. Wells called in, The New Machiavelli (1911) – with Buchan’s friend G.M. Trevelyan in mind – a secular monk. Wells didn’t mean this in any kindly sense, believing that science and sexual hedonism were delightfully compatible. Leithen’s motor was quite obviously sublimation in the Freudian sense, but he was no less of a scientist for ending up a priest-king.
Christopher Harvie
(This introduction benefitted from discussions with my wife Virginia, the Rev. James Greig and Owen Dudley Edwards. Responsibility for any mistakes is mine alone. C.H.)
Contents
Preface by the Editor
1. Beginning of the Wild-Goose Chase
2. I First Hear of Mr Andrew Lumley
3. Tells of a Midsummer Night
4. I Follow the Trail of the Super-Butler
5. I Take a Partner
6. The Restaurant in Antioch Street
7. I Find Sanctuary
8. The Power-House
9. Return of the Wild Geese
TO MAJOR-GENERAL
SIR FRANCIS LLOYD, K.C.P.
My Dear General,
A recent tale of mine has, I am told, found favour in the dugouts and billets of the British front, as being sufficiently short and sufficiently exciting for men who have little