The Two Cousins: Episode 7

Episode 7: Hector goes to War

Iain Smith

In Episode 5, we left Hector MacIver teaching in Edinburgh and pursuing various literary interests.

One of MacIver’s school students, Robert Taubman, paints a vivid picture of MacIver as a very young teacher at the Royal High School in Edinburgh in 1934.

From Taubman’s description of the MacIver writings we get an impression why some of these caused Hector’s reputation in his native island to become a mixed one:-

“He wrote stories (for little magazines that are now untraceable) that were as close to the life of the Western Isles as he could go. It was the life of a pre-industrial imaginative people……… He had a certain notoriety at home as an enemy of the Kirk; but he was susceptible to the splendours and the spleen of the Gaelic pulpit and the language of damnation, and when a word like ‘fornication’ appeared in his stories it didn’t look so much stark as theological.”

Quite; but the view in Hector’s native village in the 1930s may have been just a touch less generous.

Certainly Hector was vocal in his opposition to the churches of his native island. In one piece he wrote:-

 “As interpreted by the Presbyterian ministers of the Hebrides, life is identified with ascetism and repression. The crucifixion of the body is the monotonous theme of all their discourses. Drinking, dancing, music and recreation are officially condemned. But these gentlemen in their fanatical and destructive campaign forget that such taboos cannot be imposed on country people, whose nature is to set more store on human values than on ascetic ones. And the more their human wants are denied, the more they tend to excess.”

World War II came; and MacIver joined the Navy. He writes modestly but eloquently about what was a hazardous occupation – an officer on board a destroyer on convoy duties in the North Atlantic.

“…in the midst of all this rigorous routine there were moments of pleasure and excitement-quite apart from the occasions when we were attacked- for attack and counter-attack became also part of the routine. A destroyer, by the very traits of her character, never fails to provide excitement; her movements are unpredictable, her vitality inexhaustible. In the very smoothest of seas, a shiver of life from her engine rooms runs through her whole fabric; she resembles the pulsating body of a greyhound preparing for the chase; and if she decides to turn in her tracks, as she often does, she exercises her narrow circle with the neatness of compass and pencil upon paper.

Anyway, for a whole summer, while we escorted convoys up and down the coast with our ship keeping guard, marshalling the long column of merchant ships and rounding up vagrants, I watched her with interest. I already felt that if, some day, I went back to my profession, I should often be tempted to digress from the strict theme of literature to talk for a moment about destroyers.”

 

His friend Neil Gunn writes to him “I wrote a book on the herring industry of a century ago, ‘the Silver Darlings’, and it’s to be filmed in the north later this year’.  As does Chris Grieve (Hugh MacDiarmid):-

“Sorry my reply is belated. The trouble is that working as an engineer on munitions, I have excessively long hours and practically no time to myself at all….. However hard physical work (hitherto unknown to me) has suited me well enough in every other respect, physically, psychologically and pecuniarily (sic) - and I venture to hope that you have a like tale to tell…”

 

One of Hector’s naval commanders was Angus, the Marquis of Graham, later the Duke of Montrose and famous (or infamous) in the 1960s in Ian Smith’s Rhodesian government. Graham had learned Gaelic at Balliol (where else indeed would a Scottish aristocrat choose to learn Gaelic?); and went to Shawbost on leave with MacIver. There he not only conversed with the locals in Gaelic: he also addressed an assembly of Nicolson Institute pupils in Gaelic.

As in other places in his autobiographical writing, MacIver’s belief in the supernatural comes through. He writes about an American officer with whom he had become friendly:-

“One day, when I was at sea, I turned to see him coming along the deck towards me. I was astounded for I knew his presence was an impossibility. He was smiling as if eager to share a good joke with me, but as he came closer, he suddenly vanished. Later, I found that his ship had been sunk, just at that time, with the loss of all hands.”

Despite being torpedoed twice (and on one of these occasions having a fellow-officer repel with an oar his efforts to climb aboard a half-filled lifeboat -  in a sea where exposure to low temperatures gave one a life expectancy measured in minutes), MacIver survived the war. He goes on holiday to Lewis after being demobbed and heckles Iain Macleod (later Chancellor of the Exchequer) who was the – unsuccessful – Conservative candidate for the Western Isles in the 1945 General Election.

 

At this point, having resumed his job as an English teacher, MacIver’s (often sketchy) autobiographical essay comes to an end; but his story was subsequently picked up by his wife.

Mary MacIver provides a fascinating explanation why so many people were attracted to Hector:-

 “I’ve always felt I missed a great deal, losing my Irish background and Hector embodied it for me. I think this was true for other people also, no matter how distinguished they were. People like Hugh McDiarmid, Louis MacNeice and Dylan Thomas saw in Hector not just a fascinating personality in his own right, and a wonderful raconteur, but also the representative of a world they would like to have grown up in  or, in Chris’s [Hugh McDiarmid’s] case, to have had much more personal contact with.”

In the cases of the first two, this is a plausible view; with Dylan Thomas, whose attitude to things Welsh was notoriously ambivalent, it seems more dubious.

Dylan Thomas [whose birth centenary is 2014] wrote to Hector with typical Thomas prose: “I do so hate it here in this toadish valley among slow rabbits and sly cows. Oxford is near, but full of young men. Our pub is cold and wild with dominoes.” Why Thomas disliked rabbits that were slow or cows that were sly or (for that matter) men that were young is not explained.

A later letter from the Thomas village of Laugharne does however explain one dislike “I am writing this with a vile Biro junior which cuts through paper and table-top, spits greased, mock-ink at shirt, eye and wall, and whose writing fades, sometimes conveniently, almost at once.”  The invention of László Bíró was indeed then fairly undependable.

This, as so often with Dylan Thomas, is the writing of a man at ease with words- although sadly not with himself.

 

(to be continued)

 

Iain Smith was formerly Dean of Education in the University of Strathclyde. He welcomes feedback at i.r.m.smith@strath.ac.uk.

The Two Cousins: Episode 6

The Two Cousins

Episode 6: Robert revisits Stornoway

Iain Smith

 

 

 

We last left Robert MacIver (in Episode 4) in Aberdeen. There the draft of his first book had won a Carnegie award. He married – to an Aberdonian, Ethel Peterkin.

But he moved on:-

 

He was appointed in 1915 to a post in political science in Toronto. So MacIver left the University of Aberdeen – resulting in the end, for some decades, of any teaching of sociology in the University of Aberdeen.

 

Temporarily leaving his pregnant wife and his first child behind, Robert sailed for the New World, a journey he regarded as a permanent migration. “I had no expectation of ever remigrating to my native land.”

 

The Canadian years saw MacIver:-

i.                 establish himself as well-regarded author;

ii.               begin to establish himself as someone who could be called upon by governments;

iii.             live through a period of thorough disillusionment with the post-War world.

 

His first book was The Community: A Sociological Study (1917), well received by most, apart from a review by Robert E Park –then one of the world’s foremost sociologists. The praise from the many counted less for MacIver than the criticism from Park. However, beneath MacIver’s benign manner, there seems to have been a trait of steel which manifested itself at several points in his life: he attributes Park’s views as much to a Park defect as to a MacIver inadequacy.

There followed Elements of Social Science (1921), a book “of modest, thin, back-street longevity” in the words of the author. It may indeed have been modest but it contains one of his best known quotations; and one which explains why MacIver did not always endear himself to American sociologists of the subsequent decades - who were often dedicated, first, to the pursuit of the empirical rather than the philosophical; and, second, to the strict measurement of social data.

 

“We are apt to think we know what time is because we can measure it, but no sooner do we reflect upon it than that illusion goes. So it appears that the range of the measureable is not the range of the knowable. There are things we can measure, like time, but yet our minds do not grasp their meaning. There are things we cannot measure, like happiness or pain, and yet their meaning is perfectly clear to us.”

 

In 1927, he migrated from Canada to the United States to become head of department at a college of the University of Columbia. “On a September morning we all arrived in New York, to make, as it turned out, the United States our homeland ever thereafter.” His journey from Stornoway to New York had been a long one chronologically (1898 to 1927); and academically and psychologically. He remained in the University of Columbia for some 23 years, for most of that time being professor of political philosophy and sociology.

Some 10 years later after going to the USA, Robert revisited his native island. This is chronicled in a contemporary essay which he later appended to his 1968 autobiography. So what did the great sociologist (and one who specialised in the idea of “community”) make of Lewis in the late 1930s? He writes well and yet with deceptive simplicity, his prose verging on poetry. As a description of Stornoway in the early 20^th century and as a recollection of teenage life there in the 1890s, it is hard to surpass:

 

“How unchanged the little town seems, especially to those who come from the changeful world without. The same kippering sheds, the same barrels and herring troughs, the same quays, the tides still ebbing and flowing between the same walls, the little boys still fishing off the same stone steps…. the same sombre religion, just as the same tides come up the bay. The traveller feels, perhaps with surprise, how deep are the roots of that life and custom from which he has gone apart. He has changed, but it abides.

“Here the spur of ambition first urged me to strive towards dawning goals. Here I was nursed in the strong uncomfortable language of heaven and hell, offering the oppressive alternatives of lurid damnation and meaningless bliss, and shook myself free at length, with vast relief, from their ancient spell. Here I learned, from the silent starry nights, the immutable eternity of law that rings about our little lives. Here I heard the secret voice of nature, borne through the winds and the waves, telling of life and death. Here lived my comrades and first friends, my rivals and boyish foes. Here was my home, where a father toiled for me and a mother watched over me with indomitable love. And here the light shining in the eyes of a girl first stirred profounder deeps, as an angel might descend to trouble the pool, and left me alone and wondering, subdued by a breathless, fearful joy.

 

“Such a land has bred its own people. Where the earth yields so little to their toil, men must follow the sea as well. A grave and patient race, they are content with little. They wring meagre crops of oats and potatoes from their crofts, and eke them out with the precious harvests of the sea. Precarious in another sense as well, for the sea is never to be trusted, and every village nurses the tragedy of the men………………and the boats that do not return.

 

“this people is much-enduring and sombre-minded. They have few comforts and few recreations, and even the later incline to melancholy. Their native songs are for the most part minor and plaintive, telling of far dreams and ancient yearning, of parted love and eternal farewell.”

 

His characterisation of Lewis religion (comparable to that of his cousin, who wrote similar things at a similar time) is a bleak one. As is his judgment of its effects on local culture:-

“It holds the quintessence of this religious spirit, which has none of the boisterous joy in salvation evinced, for example, by the east coast fishermen or the blithe sense of liberation from sin that, for example, the Salvation Army proclaims…..

“It regards art and beauty as lures of the devil or at best as profane pursuits unworthy of the seriousness of life. “

One can understand why Professor MacIver, despite his renown, did not endear himself to the community from which he had arisen.

 

It was his last visit to Lewis, although not to Scotland: Professor Robert MacIver did not ever again return to his native island. 

(to be continued)

Iain Smith was formerly Dean of Education in the University of Strathclyde. He welcomes feedback at i.r.m.smith@strath.ac.uk.