The Watcher by the Threshold. Buchan John

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       Contents

       Introduction

      On Cademuir Hill

      Afternoon

      An Individualist

      A Journey of Little Profit

      Politics and the May-Fly

      The Herd of Standlan

      Streams of Water in the South

      At the Article of Death

      At the Rising of the Waters

      Prester John

      The Moor Song

      A Reputation

      Comedy in the Full Moon

      The Earlier Affection

      The Black Fishers

      Summer Weather

      The Oasis in the Snow

      Gideon Scott

      No-Man’s Land

      The Far Islands

      The Watcher by the Threshold

      Fountainblue

      The Outgoing of the Tide

      The Knees of the Gods

      The Green Glen

      The Riding of Ninemileburn

      Watches of the Night

      The Frying-pan and the Fire

      Skule Skerry

       Glossary

       Selected John Buchan Reading List

       Introduction

      In popular imagination John Buchan is generally remembered as the author of a series of thrillers that centre around English country houses and London Clubs, an old-fashioned, misogynistic, snobbish and anti-Semitic writer primarily concerned with the British Empire and Establishment. The reality, as is gradually being recognised, is quite different. His thrillers are more sophisticated, profound, ambivalent, better-written and with a greater width of literary reference than their reputation might suggest, and in any case constitute only a fraction of his writing output, which included historical novels, film scripts, comic romances, military history, a legal text book, children’s books, biographies, poetry, essays, hundreds of articles and – a particular love – short stories.

      Writing to his school and university friend Charles Dick in January 1900, he claimed that ‘to a person of my habits the short story is the real form’. By December 1912 The Bookman, in a profile of the thirty-seven-year-old writer, was arguing he was ‘probably the best modern exponent of the short story’ and noting he made ‘the short story what a cameo might be when it is cut by the hand of a master’. Buchan wrote about sixty short stories and the majority of them were published in four collections – Grey Weather (1899), The Watcher by the Threshold (1902), The Moon Endureth (1912) and The Runagates Club (1928). The exceptions were some stories in Scholar Gipsies (1896), in various interwar Nelson Annuals, in the Scottish Mountaineering Club Journal and some unpublished stories, recently discovered in his private papers. His first published short story, ‘On Cademuir Hill’, appeared in the Glasgow University Magazine in December 1894 when he was still a teenager and soon, having secured the services of a literary agent, he was publishing stories on a regular basis not just in British papers such as Macmillan’s Magazine, Chambers and Blackwoods but also in American journals such as The Living Age. This meant that relatively quickly he found he could support himself from his writing and he soon learnt the importance of a transatlantic appeal.

      Another myth, that needs to be scotched, is that Buchan, though born in Perth, should not really be classified as a Scottish writer. What is increasingly becoming clear is that Buchan’s interests, both in his life and his writing, remained predominantly Scottish and he deserves to be remembered in the same way as Sir Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson – who were themselves great literary influences on him – as a writer who found fame throughout the world but who drew much of his own inspiration from the country of his birth and especially from its literature, religion and topography. Nowhere is this clearer than in his short stories, half of which are set in Scotland, and which, as can be seen in the following selection, reveal him to be as interested in moorland as Clubland heroes. The stories here largely revolve around the lives of Border shepherds, poachers, gamekeepers and drovers and rely heavily on the use of local dialects. Indeed one of Buchan’s great literary gifts in his novels, as well as short stories, was to capture the different forms of Scottish idiom. His Scots stories are unsentimental and largely about temptation, death and retribution and the role played in people’s lives by religion, drink or the weather. They are a far cry from either the Kailyard or the adventures of Richard Hannay or Sir Edward Leithen.

      It is certainly true that after Hutchesons’ Grammar School and Glasgow University, Buchan, like many ambitious Scots before him, headed south and never again lived in Scotland, but the case can easily be made that he retained his love of Scotland and that the country deeply influenced his writing. He regularly visited his parents and siblings, who continued to live in Peebles, and his annual holiday was always spent in Scotland, partly with his family in the Borders and partly staying in the Highlands with friends such as Gerard Craig Sellar on his Ardtornish estate opposite Mull. For twenty years Buchan worked for the Scottish publisher Thomas Nelson and spent some of his time before his marriage in 1907 at their Edinburgh offices. At Nelson he set up a weekly newspaper, The Scottish Review, which was an attempt to create a Scottish version of the Spectator, a return to the tradition of Francis Jeffrey’s Edinburgh Review. In it he did much to promote both a new wave of Scottish writers, such as Neil Munro, and reassess more established writers; for example he published some hitherto unknown verse written by R.L. Stevenson at Edinburgh University.

      When he decided to pursue a political career he chose to stand not for a local English constituency but for Scottish ones, first as the candidate for Peebles just before the First World War and then as the Conservative Member of Parliament for the Scottish Universities from 1927 to 1935. Among his ambitions as an MP was to be Secretary of State for Scotland and he took a keen interest in Scottish debates, often to the point where he took a strong independent line from the Conservative Party. It is sometimes suggested, on the strength of some selective quotation from his speeches, that Buchan favoured СКАЧАТЬ