Cloud Howe. Lewis Grassic Gibbon

McDougall Brown (these are merely referred to, not quoted at length); and the dialectic between Robert’s sermon at the Memorial on Armistice Day and the socialist address of Jock Cronin, the spinners’ leader, after their procession has broken in on the official service. If Gibbon had included an Episcopal minister and his wife, as was once his intention,2 he might well have given us even more sermons than he did. And if he had followed the idea he once had of ending not with Robert’s death in the pulpit but with a grand trial scene in which he would have been expelled from the Kirk for his politics,3 public oratory would surely have bulked even larger in the total design.

Such oratory necessarily belongs, given the nature of society and public life in the Mearns and Scotland of the 1920s, to the world of men. But the book’s greatest achievement does not belong to the world of men at all, except peripherally; it lies in the continued development of Chris’s character, so brilliantly begun in Sunset Song. Robert’s career has the shape and emotional impact of a tragedy of character in which the hero redeems himself at the close and destroys himself in so doing. But we experience the tragedy mainly through its effect on Chris—the breakdown of her originally happy marriage, her agonised spectator’s response to his desertion of Christ the Tiger for Creeping Jesus after the defeat of the Strike, and the final act of heroic mercy that brings about his death. We are false to the book if we read it as primarily historical allegory; if it were, it would not turn non-Scots readers upside down the way it does. Like all the greatest characters in narrative and drama, Chris is both a unique individual and profoundly typical. George Malcolm Thomson, to whom the book is dedicated, wrote that ‘this Chris of yours is surely the greatest woman character in Scottish fiction … She is intensely Scottish and yet universal (Letter of 23 July 1933)4 In this respect Chris is like Natasha in War and Peace, for she exhibits the most positive, the most enduring aspects of the national character in a complex form. This, surely, is what Robert means when he says ‘Oh Chris Caledonia, I’ve married a nation!’, and Stephen Mowat when he says that the first time he met her ‘he felt he was stared at by Scotland herself.’ In her brief confrontations with Mowat she is representative, not of Scotland as an abstraction, but of the Scottish people, as Jeanie Deans is in her interview with the Queen in Scott’s Heart of Midlothian, and it is this aspect of her—her independence, lack of affectation, hatred of oppression, and love of freedom, which leads Robert to say that she will outlast him by a thousand years.

Gibbon’s remarkable presentation of female experience has been freshly examined recently, notably by Isobel Murray and Deirdre Burton.5 Burton in particular has observed that Gibbon’s techniques for rendering Chris’s separate selves—the first, second, third and fourth Chris —and the precise ways in which she is aware of these splits and is able to look down at herself ‘as though she looked at some other than herself’—are like those employed by many women writers: they are almost an identifying characteristic of women’s writing in this century.6 Female perceptiveness, or rather a remarkable fusion of male and female perceptiveness, also informs the cloud imagery that runs through the novel. The whole book as we now have it is structured around clouds. It moves from the high bright wispy clouds of Cirrus with their shapes like locks of hair, through the rounded heaps of Cumulus with darker horizontal bases, to the low, wide Stratus, and finally to the looming rain-clouds of Nimbus with their connotations of tragedy and despair. A thoroughgoing allegorical reading might however ponder the other meaning of nimbus—‘a cloud or luminous mist investing a god or goddess.’

      One of the most beautiful moments in the book is a purely female exchange, an incident in sisterhood, when Chris has commented on the plight of the pregnant Cis Brown:

      Oh, we’re such fools—women, don’t you think that we are now, Cis? To worry so much about men and their ploys, the things that they do and the things that they think!

      Immediately after this, there occurs one of the strongest statements of the metaphysical significance of the title and its associated imagery. The clouds are linked in Chris’s mind with the deepest layers of woman’s biological being, ‘when it came on women what thing they carried, darkling, coming to life within them, new life to replenish the earth again, to come to being in the windy Howe where the cloud-ships sailed to the unseen south’. The Howe, the vast vale of the Mearns, is hollow, feminine. But the clouds transform themselves to pillars, symbols of maleness on a Freudian reading— ‘those clouds that marched, terrible, tenebrous, their pillars still south.’ Then follows the great Mosaic emblem which reverberates throughout the book and is associated with the best in Robert and the Kirk: ‘A pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night.’ On one level Chris thinks that the ideals, creeds, and theories which men have followed throughout history are insubstantial—‘mere’ clouds, and Robert’s not the least of these—compared to the underlying creativity of the universe, to which she is instinctively attuned. But on another the pillars of fire are not confined to one sex, they body forth the energy of the general unconscious, the libido, while the pillars of cloud are the superego and its rationalizations. Gibbon continues:

      The wind was coming in great gusts now, driving the riven boughs of the broom, in times it rose to a scraich round about and the moor seemed to cower in its trumpet cry. Cloud Howe of the winds and the rains and the sun! All the earth that, Chris thought at that moment, it made little difference one way or the other where you slept or ate or had made your bed, in all the howes of the little earth, a vexing puzzle to the howes were men, passing and passing as the clouds themselves passed: but the REAL was below, unstirred and untouched, surely if that were not also a dream.

      What is meant by ‘the REAL’ and what are we to understand by ‘below’? The answer, at this stage of Chris’s pilgrimage, is perhaps provided by comparison with an earlier passage where she speaks of ‘something that was bred in your bones in this land—oh, Something: maybe that Something was GOD’, and where it is clear that ‘land’ does not signify an abstract geographical entity, but rather the soil and the rocks and the trees and the heath as made out of the one solid reality, a base that is obstinately there. She continues, in that same earlier passage, with the thought that it is at the moment of death that Scots folk ‘face up to the REAL at last, neither heaven nor hell but the earth that was red’. (The soil of the Mearns is bright red in colour, which makes the fields when freshly ploughed glow with a peculiar richness and warmth). For Chris, the Earth itself abides below all the ephemeral forms that arise in the course of evolution and of history. Neil Gunn was struck by ‘mystical’ passages such as this, when he wrote to Gibbon on 17 July 1933:

I don’t think I have ever been put under the illusion before of the Earth’s having a voice. Writers have tried to give it a voice, of course, often enough. But here the black thing speaks serpent and curlew, prehistoric gloaming (wan or fey, you get it when you want it), and in it for the most part an irony that never fails in an economy that is an echo-speech of the humors of your part of that world, but is often enough deep as horror.7

      Gunn’s phrase about the Earth’s having a voice applies most of all to Chris, and she can be said—not to equal the Earth or the Land as a term in an allegorical equation—but to be aware of it as no other character is, to be thirled to it with every part of her:

      She had found in the moors and the sun and the sea her surety unshaken, lost maybe herself, but she followed no cloud, be it named or unnamed.

      After Robert dies in the pulpit, with all the pages of his Bible soaked in the stream of blood from his lips, Chris speaks to the congregation in Christ’s words that come unbidden; ‘It is Finished!’ At that moment of tragedy she takes upon herself the priestly role reserved for men in her society. In the second last paragraph, as she leaves Segget for good, she once more mimes Robert, shaping her hands into the gesture with which he would bless the folk of Segget on Sabbath.