The Key of the Chest

Neil Gunn was born in Caithness in 1891, son of the skipper of a fishing boat. He had worked for more than twenty-five years in the Excise service when he threw up his job to live by writing.

For too long he was short-sightedly categorised by critics as simply a regional novelist writing about the lives of crofters and fishermen, yet from the beginning each book had a theme and the themes were universal. In 1944 he published
The Green Isle of the Great Deep
, a profound fable which dealt not only with the spiritual corruption resulting from the use and abuse of power, but with the disintegrating effect of accepting the primacy of intellectual analysis over emotion. Gunn had come to see freedom as fundamental both as an individual drive for discovery and expression, and as an operative principle in society. But individuals and communities interact, and if the community is too oppressive or individual behaviour too unbridled, both suffer.

In
The Key of the Chest
, which followed immediately in 1945, he engaged with the essential nature of community, and the divisions in human society caused by damaging it. Because Gunn is a Highland writer, the community explored is a Highland one.

As so often with Gunn, the basis for the novel is a short story written long before. In this case the story is ‘The Dead Seaman', published in
The Scots Magazine
during 1931, but he has used the plot for a new purpose, deepened its effect and widened its scope, just as he has used the narrative drive of the mystery story to explore the need for human beings to sustain one another.

The action of the novel is paramount, and never slackens; yet it is under scrutiny from many viewpoints. The tale
is set back in time from the date of writing. No period is specified, but the doctor operates a somewhat primitive motor-cycle, and there are no automobiles to be seen in the district. The fact that characters are introduced whose function is to comment on the action emphasises the philosophical intention. The transitions from one viewpoint to another are managed with unobtrusive elegance, and the impression given is less one of detachment than one of balance and control.

The situation is this: Charlie MacIan has thrown up his course of training for the ministry because of loss of faith, and returns home a failure. His failure is especially shameful because he has been helped to university by the community, and in particular by his brother Dougald, shepherd to the community sheep club.

When on a night of storm a ship is wrecked on the coast, Charlie rescues a seaman, who dies. Medical examination shows that he died from strangulation. Was his death accidental? The seaman was clinging to a chest, but the chest is almost empty, so why did he save it? Did it once contain money? How is it that Dougald is suddenly able to buy sheep of his own?

On one level the focus is on the mystery – but there are other levels. There is the basic level of nature, with the moods of the weather and the behaviour of birds and animals continually observed; there is the community regarded as an organism; there is the level of relationships – Charlie with the minister's daughter, Flora, the relationship of the brothers with one another, and of the two brothers with the society they have offended. There are outsiders observing and analysing the community and its behaviour. There is action and commentary on the action. Finally, there is the metaphysical dimension of meaning.

At the end the doctor reflects:

The idea of morality as a protection for a total community of men, birds and beasts is an interesting one, which may derive from notions of co-operation within species for survival, as developed by Kropotkin in
Mutual Aid
, a book for which Gunn had both respect and affection. There is always in his work the sense that the interdependence of natural life has a metaphysical as well as a physical reality.

It is said during the story, ‘A living community always meets.' This community meets in two centres: Kenneth Grant's shop, where business is conducted, and Smeorach's house, for social gatherings. Kenneth Grant is the organising brain of the community, the driving force behind not only the co-operative sheep club, but most of the progressive moves in the place.

Smeorach's is the only house where the thrawn Dougald calls when he comes to the township. Smeorach is an elder of the tribe. He is not authoritative, but a smoother, an easer of social life, who has a feeling for the traditions of the community, for courtesy and hospitality.

Several times, though, he is seen suffering from a kind of ennui and despair which the Highland community as a whole has endured since the Clearances, when whole areas were cleared of people to make room for sheep.

Throughout there is a sense of the community as an organism with eyes –‘Eyes, many eyes, looking round corners'. Someone is watching when the outsider, Michael Sandeman, takes his prying photographs of birds and
people. His camera is watching them, and they are watching him.

The boy Hamish is innocent of knowledge, yet he seems to be everywhere, seeing everything. He is watching when Michael goes over the cliff and it is Hamish who calls for help.

When Charlie MacIan secretly meets Flora, the doctor sees them.

When Dougald MacIan is driving home his suspect sheep, Hamish sees him.

When Dougald clashes with the minister, there are eyes everywhere.

The doctor sees Flora's final parting from her father.

Typically: ‘His mother heard him coming a long way off. As indeed did the neighbours, who would be wondering what had kept the doctor all day.'

The seeing is intrusive, but it saves Michael from death on the cliff, and saves his boat from disaster when he sets out in a storm to seek Charlie and Flora.

So it breaks both ways: curious eyes are always watching, to help or to harm. Everyone knows everything – or nearly everyone, and nearly everything. What they don't know, they want to find out. Community is at once a protection and a prison.

When an event occurs, people gather naturally: ‘A man here and there found he wanted an ounce of tobacco at Kenneth's and some of the women thought they might as well buy their messages early, for it was a fine morning.'

The men of the community attend the seaman's funeral:

But there are those in the community who are not fully of it, set apart by their position and function: the minister, the doctor, and the policeman.

The policeman has his duties in connection with the
seaman's death, but he knows that if he is too officious he will not be able to live easily with his neighbours. He meets with resistance when he enquires where Dougald got the money to buy his sheep. He is worried by the affair not only for his own sake, but for the community's.

And there is the strange position of the minister. The community meets in the kirk on the Sabbath, but does it feel entirely at home there, as it does in Kenneth's shop or in Smeorach's house?

The minister is shown at his best and his worst within a few pages. First, he is praying with a dying woman and her family, giving spiritual sustenance and comfort. But as he leaves the croft he sees Dougald driving those dubious sheep, and lo! it is the Sabbath.

And later, in the pulpit:

Gwynn is the other outside observer, a friend of Michael Sandeman's, and a philosopher. He says of the minister in relation to the community:

The minister, then, is at once an anchor for the community, and a threat to it. He should be a link between the community
and the spiritual reality of God, but his God is a judging and divisive God, so that religion, instead of uniting people in community, splits them into righteous and unrighteous, elect and damned, into theological categories not natural to the old way of life.

The minister's relationship with his own daughter is in question. He has repudiated Charlie because the young man disrupted Flora's respectable university life. But there is a strong element of the sexual in the minister's possessiveness. (The method of revealing this, oddly enough, is through a dream of the doctor's, yet the dream affects the reader as an authentic perception.)

When the minister loses his daughter, he collapses and is lost. He finds his way to Smeorach, the elder of the tribe – the old tribe, not the new, the tribe whose values were established before the coming of the God of wrath and judgement.

The doctor is the other link. In a sense he is a link with the outer world of education and science. But he is one of the community, too. He is, as a result, the book's central figure:‘The doctor was well liked and considered very able. Women talked of him confidently among themselves. For a bachelor, some of the older women thought he had a great understanding.'

But he is set apart by his position, his advisory and authoritative function – and by his relationship with the outsiders Michael Sandeman and Gwynn.

There is continual reference to the doctor's habit of distancing himself from people and events; from the Procurator Fiscal, for instance, who comes to investigate the seaman's death: ‘…be ‘put though [the doctor] recognised the necessity for officials and their procedures, he usually adopted in their presence a cool and precise form of talk or answer.'

The doctor distances himself, too, from the intrusive Sandeman. When he sees Michael's photograph of the dead seaman, this is his reaction: ‘Deep in him there was a movement of that sense of shock, which causes at a still deeper level, a cold stirring of the elements of hostility.'

He reacts against the sophisticated abstractions of the
philosophical Gwynn. He is always afraid of ‘giving himself away', of letting Gwynn and Michael inside his mind.

Although demonstrating his own skill at rational analysis, the doctor distrusts it, reflecting at one point that it can become an effort to explain away what is important, in the interests of the mind's comfort. He senses that if analysis goes too far, separation of individual mind from community is complete, and both are in danger.

Michael Sandeman, the first of the outsiders, is accurately placed in relation to the community. He occupies the Lodge which belongs to the land-owning family, but he is not a respectable tenant – he is the black sheep, a remittance man in Highland exile.

He is something of a clan warrior without a clan. He is also a natural artist. His photographs are odd and alarming; they produce shock and surprise. His insight is real, but contains a destructive, disintegrating element.

When Michael is forced to recognise the existence of community, as the result of twice being rescued from death by the men of the district, he reacts with a kind of half-humorous generosity, giving the boy Hamish his fishing rod, but making the mistake of offering his rescuers money. Erchie, his ghillie, reports:

Michael is forced to acknowledge the existence of a code which has power for the whole social body, and he resents the fact.

Gwynn, the other outsider, has a concern and a thesis. He is looking at the community for elements of the primitive, because, he says,‘… in that early tribal or primitive society… life was completely integrated'.

In the modern world:

Indeed we can't, and that is one of the main themes in Gunn's writing from this time on. Gwynn refers to:

This is an explanation for evil which would be shared by Kropotkin, Mencius, and Chwang Tzu, but not by the theology of original sin. You cannot convincingly advocate freedom without a belief in ‘the old primordial goodness of the human heart'. To liberate human beings you must trust them. Authoritarians prefer original sin.