The man who loved one island

The poet and storyteller George Mackay Brown was the son of the postman at Stromness, Orkney. His father John had also been an apprentice tailor before becoming the postman. George, in one of his poems, speaks of how ‘not wisdom or wealth can redeem/The green coat, childhood’. In his knowledge of every cranny of the Orkneys, but in particular in his feel for the town of Stromness, George retained some of the postman’s instinctual topographical grasp for the one dear perpetual place in which his genius was rooted. In the exactitude of his meta- phors, the flair of his tragic impulse, there is something of Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus, the pessimistic tailor ever struggling to say an Eternal Yes to life.

Brown departed the Orkneys to study at Newbattle Abbey under the direction of Edwin Muir, and subsequently, as a mature student, he read English at Edinburgh University, but except for these sorties he hardly ever left his native islands, and a growing agoraphobia determined that even in Orkney, apart from the journey to mass in Kirkwall, life was bounded by the pub, usually the bar of the Stromness Hotel, and a council flat, Mayburn Court, Stromness.

Brown was therefore very much out of the mainstream. His poetry and stories had a cult status almost from the moment that Edwin Muir persuaded the form- idable Norah Smallwood at Chatto & Windus to publish them. (Characterist- ically, Andrew Motion and Carmen Callil, when they took over the controls of that publishing house, ‘let McKay go’, with the admirable Hugo Brunner as editor and patron, to John Murray.) Early admirers included Seamus Heaney, John Betjeman and Ted Hughes who, at the age of 25, read Brown’s extraordinary poem ‘Thorfinn’. ‘It really went into me. I can see all sorts of little hints and suggestions in this piece that I’ve taken myself’ — the words were spoken when Hughes was Poet Laureate and Brown was still on the margins.