The Shadow Read online

  The Shadow

  Neil M. Gunn

  Published by

  Whittles Publishing Ltd.,

  Dunbeath Mains Cottages,

  Dunbeath,

  Caithness, KW6 6EY,

  Scotland, UK

  www.whittlespublishing.com

  Foreword © 2006 Dairmid Gunn

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced,

  stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted,

  in any form or by any means, electronic,

  mechanical, recording or otherwise

  without prior permission of the publishers.

  ISBN 978-184995-073-2

  Printed by Bell & Bain Ltd., Glasgow

  Foreword

  Neil M Gunn, one of Scotland’s most distinguished 20th century novelists, wrote over a period of thirty years, starting in the late 1920s with The Grey Coast and ending in 1956 with The Atom of Delight, a work that can be described as a spiritual autobiography. His period of creative writing spanned the Recession, the political crises of the 1930s and the Second World War and its aftermath. The word ‘spiritual’ is of immense importance when describing Gunn’s work as his novels invariably depict two worlds—the world of here and now and that in which the meaning of life and the essence of living are explored.

  Most of Gunn’s novels are set and enacted in the Highlands of Scotland and the backdrop for The Shadow, published in 1948, is even more specific in terms of location there. The setting is undoubtedly based on that part of the Highlands where Gunn spent his most creative and productive years (1938–1949) in the hill country near the county town of Dingwall in Ross and Cromarty. Resemblances do not end with place; one of the most important characters in the novel, Aunt Phemie, is unmistakably a portrait of Gunn’s wife, Daisy.

  The Shadow has another significance; it is one of two novels, the other being an earlier book, The Serpent, in which some of Gunn’s innermost feelings are indirectly revealed. During the years immediately prior to the publication of the book he was concerned and depressed by much of the literature of the time, which, in his view, concentrated too often on negative attitudes and violence, and a destructive analysis of the human spirit; it created an atmosphere of confusion and doubt. A challenge was there for Gunn to accept, and he met it in this enchanting novel through its female characters.

  The Shadow is not what could be described as a ‘war’ book although it deals in depth with the causes and effects of war. The years preceding the war had seen the emergence of two totalitarian regimes, Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany; the latter perished with the Second World War, but the latter remained a protagonist in what was to be called ‘the Cold War’, and the idea of Marxism as a system still had its attraction in some circles for those who thought that it offered an opportunity to build a better world. The idea presented in a plausibly rational way by its adherents is a vital ingredient to the thought processes explored in this novel.

  The Shadow reflects Gunn’s fascination with antitheses, be they darkness and light, reason and emotion or destruction and creation. One of the two principal characters, Nan, a young Highland woman who had experienced the Blitz in London and been a member of an intellectual Marxist clique there, returns to her native country and her favourite aunt, Aunt Phemie, a widow and farmer, to recover from a nervous breakdown. The causes of her mental illness are progressively revealed in her erratic return to health. The names given to the three parts of the novel are related to Nan’s condition. The first part,‘Convalescence’, takes the form of a monologue through letters written by Nan, but not necessarily sent, to her lover, Ranald, in London, a member of the clique she had deserted. The letters are both a paean to the wonders of nature and its healing effects and a searching analysis of herself including allusions to the hallucinations she is experiencing. The prose is complex, a mix of the sophisticated with literary allusions and the simple, expressed in a seemingly innocent way. The writing is clearly a form of release, a way of explaining her views and values without fear of contradiction, the inevitable contradiction that had blighted her thoughts and inner feelings in conversations in the clique. The letters are clearly affected by the unpleasant recollections of living in an amoral circle of people divorced from the traditional norms of social behaviour and obsessed by attaining through a rational approach the aim of building a new world order regardless of the suffering and cruelty that that process would necessitate; they are stimulated by the need to have a loved recipient always in mind to give shape to her thoughts for her own benefit, and for his. Her opening lines are joyous and full of thoughts of Ranald. ‘I have discovered the world! Today, this very day in the hours that are past—just past, for I still hear them blowing in the wind, the softest loveliest wind with clouds coming up over the sky, and even as I write this, in the tail of my eye,just outside the small gable window, a long new branch of the climber—a white rose—not tied up, blows up and down. Oh, I wish I could tell you about it.’ But there were dark clouds on the horizon, and Nan’s movement towards recovery was interrupted by the news of the brutal murder of a local crofter; a shadow was cast over the landscape that had seemed to be a rural paradise. Nan was affected not only by the deed itself but also because the suspected murderer was a man suffering from a mental disorder caused by his military experiences in the First World War. Her condition was not helped by chance encounters with a local artist, Adam, whose ideas about nature differed so much from her own. There was a ruthless streak in him that revelled in the cruelties of animal life and placed man outside nature as a dominant force. Only Aunt Phemie as a beloved aunt, an educated woman of experience and a trusted confidante could provide the haven of peace she sought, but even her efforts could not prevent a serious relapse on the part of Nan.

  The second part of the book, ‘The Relapse’, sees the appearance of Ranald, who has been asked by Aunt Phemie to visit Nan. The story is now in the third person and the focus moves from Nan to Ranald and Aunt Phemie. The dialogue between them takes up from where Nan ends her epistolary monologue and presents itself as a fencing match between the optimistic, sensitive and emotional outlook of the woman and the bleak materialism and harsh logic of the man. Ranald cannot but admire his interlocutor, who is not only a well-educated woman but also one who runs a farming business effectively and pleasantly. His blueprint for a more effectively organised world stands up weakly against her proven success in getting the best out of her farm and those who work on it. His ideas are rational, ruthless, and shown by history to lead to tyranny and unhappiness; hers are full of the warmth of a human and natural approach to life and have shown themselves to be successful in the small world of her farm. Although Aunt Phemie occasionally glimpses touches of humanity within the confident, self-assured and almost arrogant attitudes of Ranald, she finds him cold and remote and more of a personification of certain political ideas than someone fully responsive to the views and needs of his ill and distressed girl friend. A suppressed dislike is there. Ranald’s departure after the beginning of Nan’s recovery fills her with a sense of relief and the faint hope that Nan will perhaps abandon her intended return to London.

  The final part of the book, ‘The Recovery’, brings the two women closely together again, and their relaxed and easy relationship is resumed. Aunt Phemie has still some investigative work to do regarding a serious fight between Ranald and the artist, Adam, which has been kept a secret by both men. In the process she gets to know Adam better and tries to understand his strange views on nature, in particular that of man’s place relative to it. The idea of man’s domination of an environment from which he is separated is at the heart of this thinking and dampens his ability to appreciate the subtleties of nature. When they are both looking with admiration at a be
autiful view of a ravine and waterfall, she remarks, ‘You can be part of this and still be yourself, only more full of intimacy, of love of it. You don’t want to dominate it. That’s the very mood that does not arise.’ He is responsive to this, and there is a feeling that this is his first step back to spiritual health. Even earlier he pays her a compliment in the words, ‘You have a gift of discreet silence.’

  Aunt Phemie certainly has that gift and many other attributes natural to the female psyche. Her kindness, her courage and common sense—all loosely bound within the orbit of emotion—make her the anchor person in the novel. Her virtues are the antitheses of those of Ranald and Adam, who are victims of their own logic and theories. There is no doubt that Gunn had his wife, Daisy, in mind when Nan describes Aunt Phemie in her letter to Ranald, ‘She is comfortably slim and though well over forty the gold in her hair hasn’t faded. I suppose gold doesn’t. She is a tirelessly energetic worker and yet can stand quite still.’ It is little wonder that Gunn’s inscription on his wife’s copy of The Shadow should be, ‘For one who chases the shadows away.’

  This book, beautiful in its own right, leaves the reader with the question of whether the shadows have been truly swept away. It was written at a time when Marxism, or at least a debased form of that system, was seen as the great threat to the concept of democracy and the freedom and welfare of humanity. Today, it is terrorism, but not terrorism alone; in addition, in this era of ‘post-modernism’ there are distinct symptoms of a malaise at the heart of Western civilisation that takes many forms. The acquisitive nature of a society based on consumerism and individualism, the absence of a spiritual dimension in domestic affairs and the emphasis on rights without a concomitant emphasis on duty are but three of these. Allied to all this, there is a justifiable fear that the process of globalisation will denude the world of the immense contribution made by small communities to the happiness and spiritual health of mankind. The Shadow in this world of shadows maintains the strange relevance it had over fifty years ago and perhaps offers the reader a glimpse of hope.

  DAIRMID GUNN

  Part One

  CONVALESCENCE

  1

  I have discovered the world! To-day, this very day, in the hours that are past—just past, for still I hear them blowing on the wind, the softest loveliest wind, with clouds coming up over the sky, and even as I write this, in the tail of my eye,just outside the small gable window, a long new branch of a climber—a white rose—not tied up, blows up and down. Oh, I wish I could tell you about it! I wish I could tell you, as I did tell you every step of the way. No, not every step. Oh dear, it’s going, even as I write. It’s going away. But it was lovely telling you. Am I incoherent? I can’t help it and I don’t care. Listen to me, Ranald. Oh, listen, listen! And forget all about my mental breakdown. Please. Though seeing the sly destructive ones called me neurotic, why shouldn’t I be allowed some small licence in conjuring up hallucinations and all inconsequence? Anyway I’m taking it. Just as I should love to take the smile from your face as you read this, tear it off and throw it on the wind, and cry to it hurrah! as it sailed away with the storm of thistledown.

  And what a storm! That’s what started it. I was going up by the hollow between the two great fields. It’s really a tiny ravine, with occasional elm trees growing out of it, gnarled and old. But I won’t start on the trees just now. There’s a thousand things I won’t start on. And I hadn’t much on myself. Anyway it felt as thin as the thistledown and was as white, including the legs and the canvas shoes, and the wind hardly noticed them in its way. Well, as I was saying about the thistledown. But first there was this field on my left. It’s a great breast of a field and the up-slope is fairly steep. Till now, I have found it very tiring. It’s been a secret measure of my strength. I think the field knew this, for often I sat down on it. It’s been a sort of game between us. The field never encouraged me once. But then it’s an extraordinarily patient field. And it’s big, not flat, but with the slow curve of the earth itself. Sometimes there are three brown horses in it, two of them young but no longer gawky, and one of the two with a grey face (whorls of grey, like thin lichen on a stone). The first time I came on them—at least they came on me—I was terribly frightened. I felt suddenly caught and they were enormous, and with their manes and their heads up, they stopped and stood there against the sky. Wild horses, I thought. Does that give you, far in, an uncanny feeling? For it’s queer, isn’t it, that if you say wild anything else—like wild lions—it’s not the same? Wild lions would lie flat to the earth, their ears flat, their tails slowly twitching, and then spring. But in wild horses there is something withholding. Terrible and wild, not looking but watching. They are imminent, or is it immanent? I was always a little confused with these two words. Like that something which is always behind a real legend, or in it, or in a fairy story, the true fairy story—the kind that comes back. Can you remember that? Can you get a quick glimpse of a child face, a still face, listening with the eyes, but with a growing reserve, because it knows the something in the story as ominous, a wild gleam of peril? I can’t see my own face like that—but I can see yours. A very good-looking child (were you?) with—already!—its hidden reserves, the certainty that it will take its own way—or have a way with it (if that’s different)!

  The involuntary chortle, please, made me forget what I was going to say about the horses. You always were a little surprised at the way in which I could forget the facts. You have always thought me a little bit scatter-brained. I know that. You really believe, deep inside, that I belong to the Party because you were in it before me. You’re quite right, of course. Isn’t it delightful? But you’re not quite right, all the same. You see, you have the facts, the terrible economic facts, and you can produce them—you do—with inexorable and devastating power. (I tried these rolling adjectives on the field, but they rolled off it. It is so patient.) But I just feel it’s splendid being in the Party, fighting for better things. And I know that’s right. Deep in me, Ranald, I know. And I know it’s glorious to be young, and fighting for what one believes, without thought of reward. The facts are absolutely necessary, all the statistics. When I have just read them and realised what they mean, they make me so angry that afterwards if I may not remember them exactly, I remember their gleam.

  Then the young horse with the grey face came towards me, with movement of its head against an invisible bit, in pride and power, and its brown eyes shone, and its nostrils curled, and all the flesh melted on my bones and my skeleton shook at the knees. I think perhaps my skeleton rattled, for the beast stopped. As a small boy, my brother Archie had a hen’s foot. He pulled a sinew in the leg and all the toes jerked. I squawked the first time it was done on me, and they roared with laughter. Well, this time the sinew was in me and something or someone pulled it, and every limb jerked, my arms flew up, and a surpassing discord proceeded from my lips. At once the wild horse threw its head aloft, reared against the sky, pivoted on its hind legs, and in a thunderous manner pounded back to its companions and once more formed into line above me, looking down from the sky.

  Have you ever staggered against a roaring river? Neither have I, until then. But I reached the five-barred gate. It never occurred to me to try to open it. I just climbed over it and fell down on the other side. I won’t say that I wept, and I won’t say that I was nearly sick, but I will say it took a little time for the flesh to fall asleep on the bones, and for those awful heart-thumps, like thuds in an empty pump, to grow less and less and fall away into sleep, too. I had no idea the heart was so terrible and fierce an engine.

  But you’ll be tired of these horses (they’re pets really, and Greyface eats now out of my hand) and I have forgotten what it was I was going to say about them. Probably it was a thought I had. But the awful thing about thoughts is that I am inclined to forget them, almost as if they were facts. Not that I mind. You can have no idea, for example, how interesting you are when you stop thinking. Oddly enough, when I think about it, you are inte
resting, too, on a soap-box, speaking facts, with the night and the dark crowd around. But perhaps also the facts then are not the most interesting thing about you. This is all so difficult that I can’t work it out. And please don’t ask me to—or criticise. I know all you’re going to say. But I also know something else.

  Didn’t I tell you it was a patient field? You think I should tell a thing and be done with it. But the field doesn’t think that. And it wouldn’t think it if they put a dozen tractors on it at once this minute. Do you hate that sort of dumb patience? All right. I shan’t speak of it any more. For of course we’re in a hurry. We must go ahead at once, and man the barriers, and die fighting if need be. (Oh, Ran, how lovely life is!)

  Well, there was the field, full of thick grass and myriads of thistles, and not a horse to be seen, only the wind. You could see the wind coming, like waves of the sea. Doesn’t some poet make the folk dance like a wave of the sea? Yeats, wasn’t it? Oh, yes, I remember—“The Fiddler of Dooney”. And dance like a wave of the sea. But that, of course, must have been before Yeats took to Thought and became a real poet. It’s me for the Fiddler of Dooney! (Oh, Ran! Ran! to dance like a wave of the sea!) I’ll study poetry maybe when the dance is over. It will be a compensation. Isn’t that the word the psychoanalysts use?

  The wind came blowing across it from the west, from the mountains far away in conic sections blue against the utmost boundaries of the sky. And it came over pine forests that sometimes look black, swooping with a swish over lochs in the hollows of the low hills, and with a scurry across screes, and a rushing up glens, and here it was where the thistles grew in the old patient field. The thistles, too, were old and grey-headed. And they had been waiting for this wind—but oh, with so different a kind of patience.