The Leithen Stories Read online

  Introduction

  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 bee
n 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 of Sutherland’s evicter-in-chief, a name which still inspires strong emotions. On the other hand, the highlanders do get the last word, the sporting 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.)

  THE POWER-HOUSE

  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 leisure to read. My friends in that uneasy region have asked for more. So I have printed this story, written in the smooth days before the war, in the hope that it may enable an honest man here and there to forget for an hour the too urgent realities. I have put your name on it, because among the many tastes which we share, one is a liking for precipitous yarns.

  J.B.

  Preface by the Editor

  WE WERE AT Glenaicill – six of us – for the duck-shooting, when Leithen told us this story. Since five in the morning we had been out on the skerries, and had been blown home by a wind which threatened to root the house and its wind-blown woods from their precarious lodgment on the hill. A vast nondescript meal, luncheon and dinner in one, had occupied us till the last daylight departed, and we settled ourselves in the smoking-room for a sleepy evening of talk and tobacco.

  Conversation, I remember, turned on some of Jim’s trophies which grinned at us from the firelit walls, and we began to spin hunting yarns. Then Hoppy Bynge, who was killed next year on the Bramaputra, told us some queer things about his doings in New Guinea, where he tried to climb Carstensz, and lived for six months in mud. Jim said he couldn’t abide mud – anything was better than a country where your boots rotted. (He was to get enough of it last winter in the Ypres Salient.) You know how one tale begets another, and soon the whole place hummed with odd recollections, for five of us had been a good deal about the world.

  All except Leithen, the man who was afterwards Solicitor-General, and, they say, will get to the Woolsack in time. I don’t suppose he had ever been farther from home than Monte Carlo, but he liked hearing about the ends of the earth.