Into the Mountain: A Life of Nan Shepherd by Charlotte Peacock

Author:Charlotte Peacock [Peacock, Charlotte]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Galileo Publishers
Published: 2017-12-01T00:00:00+00:00

Neil Gunn in the 1920s.

This is magical, illuminating, but how shall I say? The least trifle sudden! I am thinking more of the normal reader. (Of whom, of course, I never think when I am underway myself!…) Possibly I am merely moved by the very commonplace desire to see work that I like successful – at least in the sense of attracting many readers. 629

He was right, of course, as some of the reviews reveal. Much of what was in The Weatherhouse sailed straight over readers’ heads.

Nan wrote back to Neil by return on 14th March:

Yes, I know The Weatherhouse demands closer reading than many of its readers will give it. And I know also that that is partly due to bad craftsmanship, and partly to good! There are a lot of subtleties of character presentation that wouldn’t strike the average reader, at any rate at a first reading; and equally there are a lot of blurred effects, where I haven’t really got the meaning through.630

Neil guessed she might have no interest in how the book fared commercially and he was right. Creatively, Nan was done with it. She had already, mentally, moved on from her second novel. But what is obvious from this exchange of letters between the two writers is a mutual understanding and insight into each others’ work.

* * *

Born two years earlier than Nan in 1891, in Dunbeath on the east coast of Caithness, Neil Miller Gunn was the seventh of nine children born to James Gunn, a herring boat captain and his wife Isabella, a domestic servant. Isabella Gunn was ambitious for her seven sons and determined that they should not go to sea like their father and in 1907 Neil followed his older brother, James, into the Civil Service in London. By 1910 he had been posted back to northern Scotland as a Customs and Excise Officer. Married in 1921 to Jessie Frew (known as Daisy) in the summer of 1923, Neil was appointed Excise officer at the Glen Mhor Distillery and the Gunns moved to Inverness.

Remembered chiefly for his writing, Neil Gunn was a socialist who was passionate about Scottish Nationalism and a strong supporter of the National Party of Scotland.631 A regular contributor to the Chapbook, Neil met Christopher Grieve, the man behind it, in around 1924. Initially, the two men found they had a great deal in common, aside from a taste for whisky and a love of literary conversation, and became staunch comrades. Although they later became alienated, their opinions on literature, politics and philosophy of life diverging, Grieve said of those early days ‘in the twenties, when the ideas of a Scottish Literary Renaissance were first being canvassed, there was no one in Scotland with whom I was in closer touch’.632 Grieve was an ardent supporter of Neil’s writing, declaring him ‘the only Scottish prose-writer of promise, that is to say, in relation to that which is distinctively Scottish.’633 Neil returned the compliment, describing Grieve (in his guise as ‘Hugh MacDiarmid’) as ‘Scotland’s Greatest Poet of Today’.

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