1 - Life and Background

Summary

Born in the year 1891 into a warm and traditional Highland community which during his lifetime was visibly in decline, Neil Miller Gunn lived in the Highlands and drew nourishment from his roots in the Highlands, yet was never merely a ‘regional’ novelist, never wrote the same book twice, and dealt always with the whole universe of man and the other landscape of the mind.

In 1926, on the evidence of his first novel The Grey Coast, C.M. Grieve (Hugh MacDiarmid) who was the initial driving force of the Scottish literary renaissance, forecast that Gunn would ‘take rank as the foremost of living Scottish novelists’; when Morning Tide was published in 1931, John Buchan described it as ‘one of the most remarkable pieces of literature which in recent years have come out of Scotland’; Kurt Wittig wrote in his seminal study The Scottish Tradition in Literature (1958) that ‘modern Scottish literature reached its peak in the novels of Neil M. Gunn’; and the American Francis Russell Hart devotes more space to Gunn in The Scottish Novel than to any other writer. Since Gunn's death in 1973 all his novels have been reissued, a biography, selected letters, collections of his essays and short stories, three book-length critical studies and numerous articles have been published, and no history of Scottish literature could be written without close attention being paid to his work.

Nevertheless, both the Chambers Biographical Dictionary and the Cambridge Biographical Encyclopaedia still conclude their account of Gunn with the sentence: ‘Gunn was at his best when describing the ordinary life and background of a Highland crofting community and when he interprets in simple prose the complex character of the Celt.’ This is an oddly patronizing summary of a novelist of European stature who combines intellectual perception and emotional intensity to a remarkable degree, and whose themes deal with the most significant issues of his day.

So what sort of a writer was he? The books can be seen at the same time as an exploration of the history and values of a particular people in a fast-changing predatory world, and as his personal journey from shame and anger at the acid taste of this history, through reassessment of the values themselves, and on into realization that they are fundamental in human nature.