MODERN Scottish fiction follows a different trajectory from poetry and plays, though they overlap and some novelists were also significant poets and playwrights. The best writing of Compton Mackenzie (1883-1972) and Naomi Mitchison (1897-1999) arises from their literary priorities and personal and political dispositions. These are of far greater interest and variety than is conventionally assumed. They were both so prolific it’s almost impossible to get a clearly focused overview of their very different achievements and a firm grip on why they are still worth reading today, but let’s try.

Start with Mackenzie. He is best known for what might be called Scottish “comedies of manners” such as The Monarch of the Glen (1941) and Whisky Galore! (1947) but the film and television versions of these novels fail to represent the dry, extended humour, the unfailingly patient ironies, the strange mix of droll, laconic tone and farcical circumstance by which they are characterised.

The tartan comedy which is their caricature belies the fact that Mackenzie was deeply politicised, not only as a British government agent at the beginning of the century, but as one of the founding members, alongside Hugh MacDiarmid and RB Cunninghame Graham, of the National Party of Scotland in 1928. The NPS became a component of the SNP when it was formed in 1936, and is the party of government in Scotland in 2019. Progress.

Moreover, the Scottish comedies are a small part of Mackenzie’s achievement. His earliest major novels were Carnival (1912) and the autobiographical Sinister Street (1914) and its sequels Guy and Pauline (1915), The Early Life and Adventures of Sylvia Scarlett (1918) and Sylvia and Michael (1919). These long novels, set in polite London society and packed with social detail, elegant behaviour and characters loaded with human liabilities and vulnerabilities poured forth throughout the 1920s: The Altar Steps (1922), The Parson’s Progress (1923) and The Heavenly Ladder (1924), along with Coral (1925), a sequel to Carnival. They are kin to John Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga (1922) but richer, with a more varied cast of characters and social dilemmas.

There was a new departure with Water on the Brain (1933), which initiated the parodic genre of the absurd spy novel and prompted Mackenzie to open his writing up fully to comedy in The Red Tapeworm (1941), The Monarch of the Glen (1941) and Keep the Home Guard Turning (1943). Then in Whisky Galore! he produced one of the archetypal images of post-Second World War Scotland in the presentation of sly and crafty islanders cunningly outwitting the establishment authorities in maintaining access to the water of life in an age of oppressive bureaucracy.

There’s a lasting pleasure in this scenario, beyond the over-familiarity of the archetype. Mackenzie understood this as deeply as Shakespeare. In Michael Long’s words, in The Unnatural Scene:

A Study in Shakespearean Tragedy (1976), “When the Lords of Navarre vow [in Love’s Labours Lost], with ‘statutes’, ‘oaths’ and ‘strict observances’, to shut themselves off from life and wage their war against ‘the huge army of the world’s desires’, we sit back and wait for the ‘brave conquerors’ to be humbled and defeated.”

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Similarly, when Captain Waggett decides that the islanders of Little Todday have no right to the 50,000 cases of shipwrecked whisky, we know that the natural virtues belonging to those who understand how to make best use of the treasures of life will prevail over the assertions of social power, and relax into the arch deliberations of Mackenzie’s prose as it explores the conundrum of the conflict that yields comedy as surely as it otherwise might bring about tragedy.

The National:

Mackenzie continued the comedy with effortless endeavour and seemingly endless ink supplies in Hunting the Fairies (1949), The Rival Monster (1952) and Ben Nevis Goes East (1954). But a little earlier, throughout the Second World War, he had published in six volumes The Four Winds of Love (1937-45), in which the central character John Ogilvie takes us through the first forty years of the 20th century.

Then came Thin Ice (1956), his most impressive work, an edgy, tense, dramatic and singular novel about honesty, deceit and betrayal in the political world, centring on a good man whose homosexuality has to be concealed because of social prejudice and stigma. Edwin Morgan thought highly enough of this to include it in his list of Twentieth-Century Scottish Classics (published by Book Trust Scotland, 1987), describing it as “short, well-crafted, movingly restrained”, written “in a masterly way to convey a mixture of suspense, bafflement, and sympathy.” Surprising as it may seem, I’d say this is the one to start with.

Still, the comedy continued with Rockets Galore (1957), another sequel, The Lunatic Republic (1959), Mezzotint (1961), The Stolen Soprano (1965) and Paper Lives (1966), a sequel to The Red Tapeworm. Mackenzie published plays and poems as well as books of history and biography, including Gallipoli Memories (1929), First Athenian Memories (1931), Greek Memories (1932), a continuation of First Athenian Memories, Prince Charlie (1932), Catholicism and Scotland (1934), Aegean Memories (1940), I Took a Journey...A tour of the National Trust Properties (1951) and The Queen’s House. A History of Buckingham Palace (1953).

Musical and literary criticism gathered in My Record of Music (1955), Literature in My Time (1933) and Echoes (1954), is very much of its time but still acute: both historically and critically revealing. Mackenzie was well-known to a wide public through his broadcasting and the periodical Gramophone, which he founded in 1923 and is ongoing in 2018. His massive autobiography My Life and Times in 10 volumes, each covering eight years (1963–1971), is complemented by the shorter but comprehensive and lucid biography, Compton Mackenzie: A Life by Andro Linklater (1987).

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Naomi Mitchison began writing fiction with The Conquered (1923), Black Sparta (1928) and The Corn King and the Spring Queen (1931), in which ancient Greece and the classical world, and the world of pagan myth explored by JG Frazer in The Golden Bough (1890), promise historical verisimilitude but are also effectively allegories for political questions in contemporary Ireland and Scotland.

Mitchison’s unflagging, endlessly inquisitive mind seemed compelled to look deeply into history but also to bring in, by inescapable implication, current concerns and applications.

The National:

She was her own singular person, self-determined, quirky, uniquely quizzical, judgmental and sensitive, and she kept a healthy scepticism about the cultural ambitions being fermented by MacDiarmid in the 1920s and 1930s. Nevertheless, in a poem entitled The Scottish Renaissance in Glasgow: 1935 she emphatically acknowledged and praised the movement he was leading:

Somewhere up grim stairs, steep streets of fog-greased cobbles,
In harsh, empty closes with only a dog or a child sobbing,
Somewhere among unrhythmic, shattering noises of tram-ways
Or by cranes and dock-yards, steel clanging and slamming,
Somewhere without colour, without beauty, without sunlight,
Amongst cautious people, some unhappy and some hungry,
There is a thing being born as it was born once in Florence:
So that a man, fearful, may find his mind fixed on tomorrow.

Her autobiographical and non-fiction books are in sequence Vienna Diary (1934); Small Talk: Memoirs of an Edwardian Childhood (1973; reprinted with an introductory essay by Ali Smith, 2009), All Change Here: Girlhood and Marriage (1975), You May Well Ask: A Memoir 1920–1940 (1979), Mucking Around (1981) and Among You Taking Notes (1985). The alignment of her personal story and her commitment to social conditions is evident in The Wartime Diary of Naomi Mitchison (1986), Rising Public Voice: Women in Politics Worldwide (1995) and a posthumously-published collection Essays and Journalism (2009), while the earlier Lobsters on the Agenda (1952) describes in quasi-fictional form her work in post-war regeneration in the Highlands.

Her changing entries under “recreations” in Who’s Who, over the years, include: walking delicately, untying knots, learning new skills, being somewhere else, accelerating the wheels of God, a little danger, forwarding mutual enjoyment when possible, and crossing barriers.

Her most important later fiction continued to astonish in its variety, including The Delicate Fire (1933); Beyond this Limit (1935); We Have Been Warned (1935); The Fourth Pig (1936) and The Blood of the Martyrs (1939). The Bull Calves (1947) is a family drama ostensibly set in the aftermath of the 1745 Jacobite rising but imaginatively driven by her experiences of the Second World War. This was Edwin Morgan’s favourite of her works: “the most solidly enjoyable of her novels”:

“The calves of the title are the Haldanes, her own ancestors, and the book mingles real and imagined characters gathered in Perthshire for a couple of days in 1947”. Lovers of Outlander, start again here.

Mitchison was active in feminist, socialist and peace movements, and in the late 1950s became “mother” to the Bakgatla people of Botswana, at their request, and was treasured by them. When We Become Men (1965), set in Africa, might be read alongside Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka, as they were establishing the traditions of postcolonial writing in English at about the same time. Mitchison’s A Life for Africa: The Story of Bram Fisher (1973) tells the story of the anti-apartheid Afrikaner of the governing class imprisoned for his beliefs. Images of Africa (1980) draws on her experiences with the Bakgatla. It’s said that on one occasion, flying home from Africa, she landed in London and discovered that a strike had stopped all transport that could get her home to Carradale, on the Mull of Kintyre. Undaunted, in her 805s, she hitchhiked all the way.

The unexpected was her mode of transport. Memoirs of a Spacewoman (1962) is feminist science fiction, which she followed up with Solution Three (1975). Nobody could have predicted When We Become Men (1965) or Cleopatra’s People (1972) and among her last works, Early in Orcadia (1990) was a beautiful and surprising depiction of prehistoric people in that island archipelago, freshly imagined.

Her poems are collected in The Cleansing of the Knife (1979) and there’s an excellent biography by Jenni Calder, The Nine Lives of Naomi Mitchison (1997), which contains an anecdote illustrating Mitchison’s occasional propensity to express her idealism in blunt terms “JA Ford, Scottish Office assessor, remembers a meeting in Stornoway in which Naomi was getting carried away with ideas for expanding agriculture and forestry. He pointed out there was a limited amount of money in the till. ‘Fuck the till,’ was Naomi’s rejoinder.”