Robert Simpson Silver is Professor Emeritus of Thermodynamics' University of Glasgow. He is also a play-wright, song Iyricist and poet among many other things. He maintains a steady stream of correspondence with his many friends In America and hears about us through them. A version of the following article appeared a few years ago in The Scottish American and it impressed me so much that I contacted Prof. Silver and asked permission to reprint it. He graciously grant my request and provided me with an expanded version of the original. Prof. Silver's play The Bruce, a drama written in broad Scots, was recently staged in his hometown of Montrose in celebration of his eighty years of distinguished service. Among his many contributions to science and technology was development of a new process for seawater desalination. He holds an MA as well as a PhD and DSc from Glasgow University. He was also honored by award of CBE in 1967 and was the first recipient of the UNESCO Science Prize in 1968. Among his non-technical publications is the music for Dream Sweetheart, 1931.

A friend in Maryland sent me some "tourist articles" about Scotland from The Washington Post, thinking they might give me a laugh or two. Well, not really. More often I was angered despite some good articles on Arran and on the Torridon landscape. Yet some of the ridiculous errors were laughable, such as the one about a rail tour of Scotland. According to its author, he took a Wednesday night flight from London to Aberdeen. "spent the night at the Skeabost Hotel in suburban Dyce," then took a taxi to the Aberdeen station, etc. Skeabost? There is no such hotel at Dyce airport, nor anywhere near Aberdeen, urban or suburban. The Skeabost is an excellent hotel ‹ but it is on the Isle of Skye! There is no record, even among tales of that mistiest of isles, that Skeabost ‹ more than 200 miles from Aberdeen ‹ ever crossed to the mainland. However, there is at Dyce airport a hotel named the Skean Dhu. Perhaps a touch of the whisky led the Post contributor to confuse the two‹I suppose it's one way of conveying atmosphere!

My Maryland friend is unable to travel, and has never seen Scotland. It saddened me to think that he ‹ and other Americans ‹ should be deceived by such tourist twaddle. And then a letter from another American friend ‹ this one from California ‹ prompted the idea of a possible remedy. This was from a woman whose paternal ancestors went to America from the island of Mull. She has visited Scotland, and has found some of the reality, including Scottish writing. She wrote to me about a Scottish writer, Neil Gunn. ³You should do a piece about him for American readers,² she urged. Few people here know his work. The University of California library, which otherwise has a fairly wide range of Scottish history and literature, has only one of Gunn's novels.

Gunn Should Be No Stranger To Americans
So perhaps I could ease Maryland's longing by doing what California asks, for certainly anyone who reads the work of Neil Gunn will get both delight and a sense of the real Scotland. And most of his novels have now been reprinted and are available in paperbacks. Certainly some Americans older than my two quoted friends must have heard of Gunn, for in the early 1950s stories by him were appearing in The New Yorker. And it was an American, Prof. Francis Hart of the University of Massachusetts, who published in 1963 a study, The Hunter and the Circle ‹ Neil Gunn's Fiction of Violence, and who later co-authored the definitive biography of Neil Gunn -- A Highland Life. But a brief, less scholarly article about Gunn and Scotland may be needed to bridge the age-gap.

If I start by telling you that many of Gunn's novels are set in contexts of glens, lochs, and rivers; that they feature illicit whisky stills, salmon poaching, riotous Highland dancing on heather-covered hillsides; and that every novel has its pair of lovers, you may think of a cross between Brigadoon and John Steinbeck. These are indeed the settings, the people and the activities. It is the genius of Gunn to give reality ‹ hard, sweet, bitter and piercing ‹ to what might otherwise be stock elements of mere romance.

Real Tales of the Old and New Highlands
In Morning Tide you can feel the blood gushing from your nose in a schoolboy fight -- and the joy of the one who bloodied it. In The Silver Bough you can taste the illicit whisky, dance and dream out the drunken night after it and cringe with the fear of discovery by the excise inspectors. (Gunn was himself an excise man for many years!)

In The Drinking Well you can cringe again on a dark night in the midst of relishing the skills of setting a poaching net across a river. When the estate factor turns up and you know it means the destruction of your hopes of a university career if you are caught ‹ and perhaps the loss of your father's tenancy of his croft.

You can go back to the times of Napoleon and the horrors of the Highland Clearances, when, with the young men of the glens dying all over Europe, the lairds cleared the old men, the women, the children and the maimed from the land, to make way for the more profitable sheep. Throughout the Highlands and the Islands that happened, the croft cottages burnt out by the factors, while the people were driven to the shore either to live there as best they could or be packed into waiting ships for forced exile. (Many Americans are descended from such exiles). Butcher's Broom is the novel that will tell you about that, and amidst it the love of Ellie and Colin and the wisdom of Dark Mairi of the Shore.

Sun Circle will take you to the dawning of Christianity in the same glens in much earlier times, and give you the awesome sense of the tearing apart of an ancient culture subjected simultaneously to the onslaught of Viking raiders and the psychological destruction by the teachings of the new preacher. Highland River will give you the glens in nearer times, and link the mysticism of the Celt with the hopes of nuclear physics. Young Art and Old Hector gives you a vision of the relationship between youth and age, of avid learning and guiding wisdom which is true for all times and cultures. And so on and so on. There's nothing of 'Brigadoon' about all that, but there is something of Steinbeck. Certainly, Gunn deserves to be better known in the U.S.A.

The Great Deep of 1994?
Ask someone whether he has heard of a book and an author, writing in English, satirising and exposing the totalitarian state. You'll probably get the answer' - 1984 " and "George Orwell.." Ask for a modern author who extols physical awareness, 'a blood knowledge', and the likelihood is you will be told D. H. Lawrence." Orwell's work is strong, but as everyone knows it was written in 1948, and the title year was randomly obtained by transposing the last two digits. Yet already in 1944 Neil Gunn's The Green Isle of the Great Deep had been published, and it is a far deeper study of the disintegration of human personality in a totalitarian state. It is at once both more subtle and more terrible because it is shot through with the pain of benevolent intent gone horribly wrong. More later.

Meantime to D. H. Lawrence. His attempts to convey the delights and the agonies of physical awareness seem to be inept and crude compared with Gunn's insight. Gunn never sets the physical and spiritual in opposition to each other, except when he wants to demonstrate the evils of that separation.. Through all his work there runs the theme of integrity in its original sense, not limited to 'moral 'brightness', but of wholeness. And in the wholeness of his persons, physical and spiritual are interlaced as in a traditional Celtic design. Gunn does not often give us a 'love scene' between his many created pairs of lovers, but when he does it is at once gentle and violent, always with a touch of laughter just around the corner.

Such laughter is absent from Lawrence. This indeed is one of the most moving aspects of Gunn's work. His concern, as revealed frequently in his novels and in the title of his autobiography, The Atom of Delight, is ultimately, with the experience of delight. He goes for that objective through whatever violence of action, of emotion, and even in the midst of appalling tragedy. There is no delight in the violence itself, no touch of sadism is ever present. The violence is described because it happened, as it happens, and the waste and tragedy is shown with implicit protest and condemnation. But he moves always forward, yet without any emollient glossing over, to catch some sign of resurgence of the human spirit, and therein lies the delight.

In Sun Circle Aniel and Breeta are among the very few survivors of the Pictish tribe slaughtered by Norse raiders. Their mutual attraction has simmered throughout the story, hindered because Aniel is the Master Druid's pupil and expected successor. But the whole community has been destroyed . There has been bloody fighting, with all its ghastliness portrayed, and there has been betrayal, and its psychic violence delineated with equal force. Yet amid the desolation of land and people the ending is:

"Breeta walked away. Aniel caught her up. She lost her head. He was all gleaming concentration and fierceness, and though she fought madly he got the better of her. When flat on her face, she had finished sobbing, he tickled the soles of her feet. Her legs leapt with mild astonishment and she rolled over and sat up. He did not however meet her glaring face, but with head down, smiling shyly, poked her suddenly in the naval. She doubled up and hit him on the head."
The atmosphere of tragedy and horror has not been dispelled, but the integrity of the human spirit is re-asserted, by the simple physical touch of tickling.

The Symbol of Wisdom<BR> Now to The Green Isle of the Great Deep. 1984 wasn't the only other chilling satire in English on the totalitarian state. That theme was bubbling under even the optimism of H. G. Wells in his stories of the future. It boiled over in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, and is common now in science fiction writers such as Ray Bradbury. Gunn's Green Isle differs from 1984 and all those others in two vitally important respects. The first is that his setting is pastoral. The totalitarian grip is not exercised through urban society and advanced technology. It is exerted on the mind by the psychologist Questioners, and through the body via the food permitted to the citizens. The second difference is that his central characters are not in the usual age group of other works, not the distraught lovers or struggling middle-aged of Brave New World and 1984. With a unique vision Gunn thrusts into his flawed Utopia the child and old man of whom he had written so idyllically in a previous novel Young Art and Old Hector. It was a risky gamble, but he brings it off magnificently.

Art and Hector go out on one of their characteristic -- from the earlier book - escapades to the salmon pool in the nearby river. The only warning murmur is that they leave from a group of the villagers talking about the mental atrocities known in Europe of the late thirties. They get on with their salmon quest, Art falls into the pool, Hector tries to save him, and from their drowning agonies they wake up in Paradise, the Green Isle. Its citizens are tamed, inert, happy, forbidden to eat the fruit of the land until it is processed. Old Hector is taken to the Questioners, but young Art escapes. The narrative continues in two interlaced patterns. Hector's story by itself has elements in common with all the "flawed Utopia² genre. Interactions with citizens, some dimly aware of a need which they can neither express nor recognise when Hector tries to tell them about it: repeated interviews and devastating attacks on his mind by the Questioners: intermittent help from some of the citizens, though bewildered always.

Interlaced with all that is Art's story. He can run -- did he not win the boys' race at Clachdrum in the earlier novel -- he can dodge the hounds of the Questioners. The citizens hear of him turning up in various places, and he is rumoured everywhere. He becomes legend, then myth, interacts with the citizens and runs off again. On a simple level the stories of Art's appearance and escapes and of Hector's trials and his resistance to them, are the stuff of many thrillers, and they are thrilling. But Art's continuing uncaptured presence and the sense of mysticism which has grown up about him, together with Hector's persistence in front of the Questioners threatens to make Paradise ungovernable. The Questioners force hard on Hector, who, on the point of breaking, asks to see God. God has been insulated away by the administrators and Questioners, and is effectively captive in his own Paradise. It is young Art who shatters God's insulation Hector is released, and the two wake up to find they have in fact been rescued from the Great Deep pool. They return to their village retaining the shared dream of their near drowning unconsciousness. -- and with the salmon, which to the Gael is an ancient symbol of wisdom!

Such a short account cannot convey the sense of hopeless, inert, degradation which pervades the citizens of the state before the impact of Art and Hector. Nor can it carry the conviction and total belief in the fantasy which Gunn manages brilliantly, even to the symbolic, apparently implausible ending. What emerges clearly, more clearly than from any other attack on the totalitarian state, is that the threat to degrade the integrity of the human person exists in any society irrespective of the status of its technology. There also emerges Gunn's own belief that the counter to that threat can only come from continual assertion of individuality, of vanity of personality, enriched by enduring traditions of equally vane small communities and their awareness of their own distinctive heritages. Gunn rejects the abstraction of "humanity as a whole" and realises that humanity only can exist in the individuality of differing personas. John Donne's saying ~No man is an island entire unto himself'" is valid, but what Gunn reveals with crystal clarity is that each man has the need, and right, to be a peninsula!

Struggle As a Way of Life
Although The Green Isle is undoubtedly an important work because of its subject, it is not the greatest of his novels. Most critics regard that place to be held by The Silver Darlings, published in 1941, though some would give the place to Butcher's Broom. While there are no characters in common, both are set in the same area of the country, but the folk of The Silver Darlings are among those crofters who had suffered the Clearances told about in Butcher's Broom. But instead of being exiled, they had been driven to the seashore where they learned to harvest a precarious living from the sea fishing for herring‹the "silver darlings" of the title. Even at that, they are not free from the invasions of the State, for the crew of one of the boats is press-ganged into the navy.

Tormad is one of them, and his pregnant wife Catrine does not know what has happened to him. The central character is his son, Finn. some 20 years later. The love stories of Finn and Una of Roddie, skipper of one of the boats which was not press- ganged, and Finn's mother Catrine‹who is attracted to Roddie but unable to accept him while she does not know if Tormad is dead or alive, of Finn's subsequent aversion to Roddie and uncertain attitude to his mother, and the loves of some other couples in the community, are all interlaced with a dignity and passionate perception which strikes far more truly than Lawrence's Sons and Lovers. Simultaneously driving through the interlaced pattern is the sheer adventure story of fishing, the struggle against the sea, of survival or death in all the hardships, including a cholera epidemic, and the relentless dictates of an uncaring and brutalising society.

The book is much too significant in its detailed action, character development, symbolism and feeling, to summarise. I shall give only one quotation. One of the press-ganged men does return after many years, having seen and endured much, which he indicates only with reluctance. Telling Finn of the death of his father he remarks, ³They can talk about religion and the sins of the flesh and the ten commandments and good and eviL but there is only one sin and one evil and its name is brutality.. It seems certain that this is Gunn's own opinion, for the only instance I have noticed of a near repetition of an identical phrase in two separate novels is an echo of these words, with 'cruelty' replacing 'brutality', in a conversation of Young Art and Old Hector.

The Strength of Tenderness
But I want to end with an instance of another facet of Gunn's writing, his equally deep awareness of tenderness as one of the abiding strengths in humanity. In Butcher's Broom, when the rest of the young men from the Riasgan village have been taken to the wars, Murdoch, a weaver, has been left because he has a crippled foot, the result of a foolhardy exploit as a boy. Rumours of the Clearances in other glens have already been heard, but so far the Riasgan has not been touched. Nevertheless Murdoch is ill at ease about it, and moody and difficult, suffering also a sense of shame at being left at home with the old men, the women and the children. His wife, Seonaid is near her time with their first child and they are on edge with each other. Each of them has a quick, sharp, tongue, and Seonaid particularly used to excel at the ceilidh game of "proverbs". In this the players try to cap one after the other with remarks in proverb style, giving either known proverbs or coining new ones instantly. Seonaid has goaded Murdoch by saying to Elie in this proverb vein, "Sweet as is the honey, who would lick it off the briar" When Elie leaves a quarrel ensues when Murdoch accuses Seonaid of carelessly over- exerting herself. It ends as follows: "Ah, Murdoch", she sighed, "you know the things to say. I was always frightened of your tongue, though I never let on. The thorn on your briar is frozen honey". "Now look here, Seonaid," argued Murdoch, calmly desperate, "let us be sensible and stop quarrelling for once. All you have got to do is to take things easy and not excite yourself. Why, in heaven's name, run any risk? You know how I got my foot. It's just sheer silliness to run a risk. i mean here you are, in grand trim, ail you have to do -- it's so simple --is just to be reasonable and not excite yourself and -- take things easy." He turned to her, but before her smile his further words dribbled out and his face darkened.'You mean, it's so easy to take things easy," she helped him. "You make me as mad as the devil", he said and turned away. "I think it's the bad light", she suggested, "that's hurting your eyes." He walked towards the loom. "Murdoch," she called him. He sulked. Murdoch!", she yelled. At the high sound he came in a rush, beside himself with fury. Murdoch". she murmured, "bend down". "I will not." And when he bent down he muttered, "Why do you always tear the heart out of me?. "To warm my own with it for a little", she answered.

It is this same Seonaid who, when the Clearances do come to the Riasgan, climbs to the thatch of her burning cottage, tears the wooden battens apart and throws them down at the factor's men, defiantly taunting them with her bitter sharp tongue until the blazing roof collapses under her. Even into this Gunn laces the symbol. The language of Seonaid is Gaelic, and the destroyers no more understand her taunts and curses than they comprehend the way of life they are destroying.

Telling Like as It Was
Thousands of American tourists do come to the Highlands and Islands of Scotland. The tourist-trap shops offer the tourist-trap souvenirs, the Bonnie Prince Charlie mawkishness, the tartan dolls, the comic mean-Scot, scenic mountain, and, loch postcards. Americans at home get their image of Scotland by diffusion from returned tourists and by films such as I Know Where I'm Going, Tight Little Island (Whisky Galore), and of course from such muddled articles as those exemplified in The Washington Post. They would get more of the reality of Scotland from almost any randomly chosen page of Neil Gunn. His writings give the reality of Scotland, past and contemporary, and with it, the interlaced variety of the universal human spirit, in triumph and in despair, in adventure and in adversity, in resisting violence and welcoming tenderness, and everywhere the sudden, startling, transient, solace of moments of delight to be forever remembered. My Maryland friend, and indeed ad Americans interested in Scotland, will find much of what they seek in that rich field.

Prof. Silver extends grateful acknowledgement to Lt. Cdr. Diarmid Gunn, nephew and literary executor of the late Neil M. Gunn, for permission to quote passages from the novels.