Growing Up In The West. John Muir

Growing Up In The West - John Muir


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but its philosophy concerns emotions and half-formulated perceptions as much as coherent ideas. Muir’s great achievement in the novel is to find a series of compellingly vivid images to convey the often wordless visions of his characters. One can say of Poor Tom what Muir himself says of Kafka’s The Castle: ‘everything happens on a mysterious spiritual plane which was obviously the supreme reality to the author; and yet in a curious way everything is given solidly and concretely’.6

      Be that as it may, Muir’s method in Poor Tom has its pitfalls. The fact that, for most of the novel, the two principal characters are not on speaking terms rather limits the opportunity for meaningful dialogue. Partly as a result of this, the novel suffers from a condescendingly intrusive narrator. Critics have complained that Muir is too eager to articulate for Mansie and Tom, that there is too much telling and not enough showing in the novel. This is true, but one could equally argue that the forensic, third-person approach pays significant dividends here; for one thing, it conveys something of the detached, impersonal state of these characters, their curious alienation from their own emotions and actions. The distanced, third-person narrative – viewing the characters from the outside, treating them as laboratory specimens – is not just legitimate but apposite, for this is how the brothers view themselves.

      Despite such glitches, however, Poor Tom remains a forceful, cunning book. Perhaps, in addition to its philosophical intensity and its lively treatment of place, what impresses most about the novel is its careful craftsmanship, its meticulous construction. I’m thinking, for instance, of how religious imagery is threaded so subtly through its pages; of how its key incidents are so deftly foreshadowed (when Mansie describes Tom as ‘always stumbling against things that hurt him’ he innocently anticipates the accident with the tram); of how Muir sets up an intricate series of parallels – between, for instance, Mansie’s ‘defenceless clothes’ during a liaison in the woods, and Tom’s ‘crumpled blue trousers’ as the doctor conducts an examination. There is, on top of this, an often brilliant use of symbol: the ‘naked’ iron bedstead that reproaches Mansie when Tom has abandoned their shared bedroom, or the pristine bowler hat that speaks of Mansie’s fastidiousness. This is a novel of poetic reach and intensity, a novel that repays multiple readings and that reinforces our sense of Muir as one of the century’s truly significant Scottish writers.

      An eclectic writer, Hendry’s output includes a volume of stories, a biography of Rilke, a handbook for translators and (as editor) The Penguin Book of Scottish Short Stories (1969). Like Muir, however, he was principally a poet. He was the key figure in the wartime New Apocalypse movement, which countered the political poetry of the Auden school with a verse of extravagant and often mystical opacity. A number of Scottish poets – Norman MacCaig, G. S. Fraser and W. S. Graham – also participated, but Hendry was the prime mover, composing the New Apocalypse manifesto and co-editing the movement’s three anthologies: The New Apocalypse (1939); The White Horseman (1940); and The Crown and the Sickle (1943).

      In Fernie Brae, Glasgow itself is a machine, a sordid contraption of iron and stone, crushing the life of its trammelled inhabitants. The city is a parody of nature; its chimneys wag like ‘wasted grain’, its trains cross the landscape ‘like black slugs’. The hero, David Macrae, inhabits a tenement district penned in by a cemetery, a grassless park and two vast locomotive works. The irony here – that the locomotive workers rot in their places while the engines they fashion circle the globe – is dryly drawn: ‘Engines from [the Cowlairs works] went to India, China and South America. The majority of the men who built them did not even go down town.’ The city is a penitentiary, its spiked iron railings the symbol of its purpose. From the schoolroom, with its clangorous bell, to the factory, with its pitiless siren, the city is an instrument of subjection, a device for enforcing obedience to ‘the mechanical cackle called civilisation’.

      And yet, all is not bitter in Fernie Brae.


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