Grey Granite. Lewis Grassic Gibbon

others find unsympathetic and haughty. He respects what Gibbon sees as the cool detachment of science and is utterly blind to the arts; his sense of humour is, to put it mildly, limited, and at one point Chris says, ‘human beings were never of much interest to him.’ Yet it would be wrong to say he is emotionless; it is merely that he can keep his ordinary feelings under control—his admiring affection for Chris, his detestation of what breeds nauseous slums and stunts the wretched of the earth, his contempt for the inchoate, the indecisive, and the second-rate. His most intense emotions are those of the communist mystic, which come on him towards the end of the novel, an essentially religious identification with the enslaved and the exploited throughout recorded history. They are only made possible by what Ewan learns in the factory, the working-class movement, and the police cell, but they are rooted in a character trait he displayed even in boyhood, in his friendship for Charlie Cronin the spinner’s son and his strange bond with old Moultrie, survival from an age of pre-industrial knacks and skills, who on his deathbed shared with Ewan the precious essence of the old ways (Cloud Howe, Canongate Classics edition, p.192). They also link him to Chris and show that despite his crystalline hardness, his sensibility is akin to hers—to the Chris who in her girlhood saw visions of prehistoric hunters and farmers and identified with the tortured Covenanters in the Whigs’ Vault at Dunnottar.

William K. Malcolm, in what is perhaps the best critical presentation of Ewan to date,9 draws attention to his literary precursors in the Soviet Pantheon, and links him to the Russian and international debate over the nature of the Communist Hero and how to present him. He sees Gorki’s Mother (1906) and Gladkov’s Cement (1925) as the most important analogues, and Ewan’s brusque rejection of Ellen as being in their tradition, where ‘the protagonist demonstrates his heroic fortitude … by resisting the threat made to his greater political destiny by romantic involvement’ (p.161). But it is not strictly correct to speak of a ‘socialist realist’ influence here: the dogma was not theoretically formulated until 1934, and therefore could have had no influence on either Mother or Cement. Orthodox communists have always criticized Gibbon’s presentation of Ewan. They have felt that the ideal communist leader should be warm, sympathetic, many-sided, and richly human—all the things that socialist realism said he should be, and which Ewan is not. His coldly analytic mind drives him to extreme and ‘super-revolutionary’ conclusions, to ‘an intellectualized and at times inhuman conception of the workers’ struggle for Socialism’, and his remarks on tactics do not in the least resemble the real communist tactics of the time; they are pure fantasy on Gibbon’s part.10 But the whole course of history since 1934 seems to show that they were not fantasy. The book is dedicated to Hugh MacDiarmid, and as early as 1926, in the First Hymn to Lenin, MacDiarmid had proclaimed that the horrors of the Cheka were not merely necessary but even insignificant when compared with the role of Death in the whole Cosmos, and had asked

      what maitters’t wha we kill

      To lessen the foulest murder that deprives

      Maist men o’ real lives?

      Solzhenitsyn has shown how the Leninist Cheka was a precursor of the Yezhov terror, and it is only a step from MacDiarmid’s lines to ‘What maitters’t what lies we tell, or how we deceive the poor lumpen proles?’, since we, whatever our actual social origins, are the working class, and our will is the ‘real will’ of the proletariat, whether they know it or not. Jim Trease makes the point, at first grimly joking:

      For it’s me and you are the working-class, not the poor Bulgars gone back to Gowans. And suddenly was serious an untwinkling minute: A hell of a thing to be history, Ewan … A hell of a thing to be History!—not a student, a historian, a tinkling reformer, but LIVING HISTORY ONESELF, being it, making it, eyes for the eyeless, hands for the maimed!—

      Or again, when Ewan is with Trease and his wife:

      [He] liked them well enough, knowing that if it suited the Party purpose Trease would betray him to the police tomorrow, use anything and everything that might happen to him as propaganda and publicity, without caring a fig for liking or aught else. So he’d deal with Mrs Trease, if it came to that…. And Ewan nodded to that, to Trease, to himself, commonsense, no other way to hack out the road ahead. Neither friends nor scruples nor honour nor hope for the folk who took the workers’ road …

      In 1934 fascism seemed in the ascendant in Europe, and possible even in Britain. Beyond the novel’s open end there lies for Ewan, as Gibbon saw it, a brief spell as a full-time communist organizer and a long period when he would ‘hunger, work illegally, and be anonymous’, through ‘a generation of secret agitation and occasional terrorism’. As things actually turned out in Britain and the world, Ewan might well have fought in Spain with the International Brigade, then spent several years as a industrial organizer in Scotland and the English midlands before ending up as one of the leaders of the British Communist Party. But in both the Ewan-Trease vision of a fascist Britain and the ‘real’ future, Ewan would have had to live through the Moscow trials and the Stalin purges: he would have had to justify what he knew to be false in the interest of what his theory told him was the lesser evil. Many communists tricked themselves into believing that the accused were always guilty, that there were only a very few labour camps, that socialist planning in the East was economically successful. Ewan, as Gibbon presents him, would have faced up to the truth in private and deliberately suppressed it for the public. And if the communists had come to power in Britain, a mature Ewan, given his attitude to ends and means at the end of Grey Granite, might have been capable of sending comrades and rivals to their deaths after a show trial—or else of stoically signing his own confession if the Party decided that he was the one to be sacrificed.

      It is Ewan’s final scene with Ellen that shows the New Man most appallingly in action. Though Ellen is depicted critically—she is about to ‘sell out’ to ordinary values—yet she was after all the person who helped him through his psychological crisis after police torture, and she is consistently straight and above board in her dealings with others. Ewan rejects her in the most brutal way possible:

      But what are you doing out here with me? I can get a prostitute anywhere … He stood looking at her coolly, not angered, called her a filthy name, consideringly, the name a keelie gives to a leering whore; and turned and walked down the hill from her sight.

As Deirdre Burton has put it, ‘It is that recourse to the irrelevant insults of sexuality that finally marks Ewan out as the person of limited vision, limited growth—both personal and political.’11 Yet, horrified, we empathize with him in his rejection. Writing with hindsight in the years after communism’s collapse from within, one is impressed by Gibbon’s refusal to endorse Ewan’s ethics in this scene, and by the deft impressionism with which he portrays his flawed hero.

Because ideas play such a large part in A Scots Quair there has been a tendency for critics to impose an abstract ‘meaning’ on the trilogy as a whole. What is certain is that, as Edwin Muir put it, Gibbon ‘was firmly convinced that man once lived a life of innocence and happiness’ in the Golden Age of the Gay Hunters; ‘but all his impetuous energy was concentrated on drawing the vital conclusion from this, which was that by breaking the bonds imprisoning him man can live again.’ He certainly believed that revolutionary communism was the sword to cut those bonds; but he had also, to continue with Muir’s appreciation, ‘a passionate devotion to such things as truth, justice and freedom, and a belief in their ultimate victory that nothing could shake’.12 In the beginning he seems to have seen the Quair as propaganda for socialist action (‘I am a revolutionary writer … all my books are explicit or implicit propaganda’, Letter in Left Review, February 1935); but the fact surely is that in the white heat of composition it turned into a method of thinking about contemporary morals and politics in aesthetic terms—thinking by means of the images which we call characters. Gibbon’s aesthetic thought points to conclusions somewhat different