The Leithen Stories

The prototype Buchan villain, Andrew Lumley in
The Power
House
(1913) got closer to nailing Sir Edward Leithen than anyone else. Leithen, the first and last of Buchan's heroes, and the one closest in character to his author, was also his most enigmatic. It's possible to construct his biography – Buchan's characters, popping up from novel to novel, usually have well-realised backgrounds – but Buchan on Leithen is uncharacteristically sketchy. He tells us he was born in 1879 and a Scots Calvinist, but nothing about his presumably Peeblesshire family, save for a somewhat dim nephew, Charles. He is a Tory MP and a barrister in
The Power-House
, yet in
The Dancing Floor
he seems to have acquired his knighthood as Solicitor-General pre-war. He was only elected in 1910, and couldn't have been in the wartime government, as he was serving at the front; and, unusually, he doesn't go on the bench. He comes awkwardly close to his creator, and seems to operate as an intellectual filing-cabinet for preoccupations and speculations which Buchan wanted to keep at one remove from himself. To compare him with another lone barrister in London, Anthony Trollope's moving portrait of the widowed Sir Thomas Underwood in the otherwise rather silly
Ralph the Heir
(1871), is to see how flat a character he initially is.

The Leithen stories, nevertheless, contain the heart of the Buchan matter, political and philosophical, bringing out tantalising glimpses of work which a more troubled man – ‘serious unto death', as Carlyle put it – might have turned into a golden lyric. Perhaps this was also apparent to Buchan himself: that what came naturally and fluently to him was something deadly serious to his younger Scots contemporaries. Buchan/Leithen never gave up his day job – or indeed jobs – for the ‘determined stupor' of the full-time writer, as did Edwin Muir, Hugh MacDiarmid, Eric Linklater or Lewis Grassic Gibbon – and at a further remove, W.B. Yeats and Ezra Pound.
The Power-
House
announces the terrific anarchy to be loosed upon the world, John Macnab the recuperative power of the pastoral. The
Dancing Floor
is in its way a fire sermon with the kindling material of tradition, sex and violence. In
Sick Heart River
in particular it's possible to hear echoes of a flyting between MacDiarmid's pitiless mysticism of the material in ‘On a Raised Beach' and Buchan's own theism, going on behind his post-imperial project of creating a common Canadian culture.

With the practically-minded Buchan there was always a resistance to ‘inoppugnable realities': that sense of being ensnared by circumstances and irreversible political change. But in the 1920s as an MP he may have felt that he had made a false move: he was a political ‘lieutenant' who would never be a leader, partly because of his health, partly because he wouldn't commit himself 100 per cent to the party game. He was doomed to see mediocre Tory contemporaries scale heights interdicted to him. One book which doesn't appear here, the implausible
Gap in the Curtain
(1932) has Leithen narrating an uncharacteristically stodgy political tale. ‘The Rt. Hon. David Mayot' could have concerned a real, and gripping episode in which Buchan was involved – the formation of Ramsay MacDonald's National Government the previous August – but it reeks of Asquith's day, not Baldwin's.

Leithen/Buchan's career is therefore something of a ‘bag-end of life', of speculative enterprises worked out better elsewhere. But what remains is considerable. If, as Roderick Watson and Douglas Gifford have argued, a salient feature of the Scottish renaissance was a preoccupation with the socialising functions
of myths and archetypes, then few writers were richer in this respect than Buchan, throughout his career concerned with ‘the causal and the casual' in politics. This was something he gained from older contemporaries such as Andrew Lang, John Veitch and J.G. Frazer. The political was something from which they recoiled; yet perhaps the most famous line in all Buchan, Lumley's warning to Leithen: ‘You think that a wall as solid as the earth separates civilisation from barbarism. I tell you the division is a thread, a sheet of glass …' could almost have been plucked directly from the second volume of
The
Golden Bough
(1892):

This in turn related to a metaphor running back via Disraeli, Carlyle and Goethe to the geological debates of the Enlightenment.
The Power-House
shows the super-intellect Lumley – with more than a few resemblances to Buchan's hero Arthur Balfour – brought down by the ‘commonplace' Leithen, and an enthusiastic but bungling Labour MP. This
was
one way of saying that to Buchan the security of 1913 Britain was genuine, and not canvas painted to look like stone and stretched over a chasm. This didn't last: by August 1914 the reign of Saturn had been resumed.

The war made Buchan's ‘shockers' famous. It also delivered blow after shattering blow through the loss of family and friends: all the more severe because his deskbound jobs deprived him of the exhilaration of survival which his French contemporary Henri Barbusse celebrated in
Under Fire
(1916). But war propaganda was complex enough to be recuperative; it also involved Buchan in probing German nationality via German psychoanalysis. Catherine Carswell wrote that he had
mastered all the standard texts ‘with attention and respect', which certainly meant Freud and Jung.

Freudian traces in Buchan are pretty limited, although the distinguished Scots psychoanalyst Jock Sutherland argued that his relationship to his mother might repay study. Jung, an exact contemporary and, like Buchan, a son of the Calvinist manse, was likely to be a more agreeable ideologue; but both would lead back to the huge myth-kitty of Victorian anthropology,
The Golden Bough
in particular, because of their interest in custom and habit, totem and taboo.

John Macnab
(1925) seems remote from such concerns, the most lighthearted of Buchan's novels, with its origins in Captain Brander Dunbar's challenge to Lord Abinger at Inverlochy in 1897, and its stunning descriptions of the treacherous beauty of the West Highlands. But it becomes equally freighted with significance. Editing
The Northern Muse
(1924), his fine anthology of Scots vernacular poetry, Buchan doubtless remembered that his great predecessor in this business, Allan Ramsay senior, had used the politics of pastoral in his
Gentle Shepherd
exactly two centuries earlier. This was still acted by village companies into Buchan's childhood, reminding the folk of a protest against misgovernment which was both Jacobite and radical.

This comes out in the election meeting, with its contrast between Lord Lamancha's meaningless party oration, and Archie Roylance's love-kindled idealism. It owes something to Disraeli – Buchan snitching one of his best jokes – but also in the background is Arthur Hugh Clough's
The Bothie of Tober
Na Vuolich
(1848) in which a group of Oxford men on a highland reading party are faced with old inequalities, love, and the prospect of a new beginning. If it doesn't work quite as well as that masterly
réprise
of Peacock and Scott,
Castle Gay
(1930), put this down to Buchan's problems with the highlands and a landscape which, however beautiful, was empty of people. Border pastoral had a somewhat different meaning for those who had been driven forth by the shepherds, the Cheviot and the stag, and Gerard Craig Sellar, Buchan's host at Ardtornish, was the grandson of Patrick Sellar, the Duke of Sutherland's evicter-in-chief, a name which still inspires strong emotions. On the other hand, the highlanders do get the last word, the sporting gents' destinies being firmly in the scaly, crafty, hands of Fish Benjie.

Craig-Sellar also had a hand in
The Dancing Floor
(1926) which followed quickly after
John Macnab
. Inspired by a huge, silent house on one of the Petali Islands, north-east of Athens, visited while on Craig-Sellar's yacht in 1910, it was a reworking, at novel length, of a much earlier short story ‘Basilissa' (1914), published not long after
The Power House
, and also in
Blackwood's
. Vernon Milburne is a young English country gentleman happened on by Leithen after an accident (does Leithen never encounter, by accident, somewhere terribly boring?). He is haunted by an annual dream about a fire in a room, each year advancing towards him. Leithen provides the link to a strange house on a Greek island and an ordeal he must endure, and the mysterious figure of Koré Arabin. Travelling in the Aegean, he discovers the house, residence of Koré's father Shelley Arabin, an English
littérateur
far gone in nameless decadence. Furious against their landlord, the locals perceive Milburne as being the priest-king ‘who slew the slayer and shall himself be slain', who must marry the daughter of the hated house, and then be sacrificed with her. All this has more than a whiff of Arthur Machen, even of Dennis Wheatley, about it. It's with a start that one remembers that the Plakos business was right in the time and place of a quite different sort of villain: Eric Ambler's Dimitrios Makropolos.

In the earlier novels Leithen is energetic and self-confident. It is quite otherwise in
Sick Heart River
(1941), written while Buchan, now Lord Tweedsmuir, was Governor-General of Canada and published after his death. It puzzled his staff, who found it sombre and introverted. The dying Leithen is involved in no thriller plot, but the task of finding a French-Canadian financier, Francis Gaillard, who has disappeared in the Canadian North, something complicated by the fact that Lew Frizel, brother of Leithen's guide, seems to have gone crazily off in search of an edenic valley, the Sick Heart River. The quest for the two deranged men also becomes a quest for a nation. The Sick Heart, although tranquil and green, is dead. When Leithen gets Lew out he has to minister to ‘the madness of the north' which has afflicted all the
voyageurs
. They might also be suffering from the malaise of Canada – its division by region and racial group – something which became obvious to Buchan on his tours as Governor-General. Leithen finds himself acting as a sort of medicine man. His moment of
choice comes in the camp of the Hare Indians, who have, following an epidemic, become totally demoralised. Is Leithen to go back to England – now at war – or to stay and organise, with Gaillard, the hunting of winter food?

Leithen ends up as more than a sacrificial Frazerian priestking. He provides, by hunting, a function which antedates the Demeter goddess, and concurs with a leading myth of the Scots renaissance, particularly salient in Neil Gunn and Lewis Grassic Gibbon: the ‘golden age' of the hunting horde.

Throughout the four books Buchan seems to be preoccupied with what the
literati
of the eighteenth century would have called ‘notions' derived from philosophy and anthropology, or had these confirmed by his wartime experience. The first was the fragility of civilisation. A somewhat thetorical apprehension in his pre-war books, this had now become reality. Man's capability of generating evil was far greater because of the eclipse of the constraints Buchan associated with western Christendom, and Lumley's reference to China introduces the ‘Asiatic' combination of the wielding of power and its abnegation that Buchan elaborated in his master-villain Dominick Medina in
The Three Hostages
(1924). This ‘rebarbarisation' would loom over
The Dancing Floor
– Plakos wasn't far from Smyrna, and its appalling massacre in 1922 – and even the japes of
John Macnab
. Young Claybody's private army – a Highland
Freikorps
? – draws on the unemployed set adrift by the post-war slump. Buchan's German friends like Moritz Bonn would make him aware of where this could lead.

Linked to this was something he derived from Freud via Frazer: the role of repressive doctrine. To Buchan this stemmed from over-mechanistic religion which recoiled from the cycle of nature, and bred evil and sexual perversion. If Shelley Arabin was based on Lord Byron, whose private letters had horrified Buchan – if not Henry James – investigating
them in 1905, then the impact of Calvinist repression of the sort dramatically evident in
Witch Wood
(1928) couldn't be discounted. The young Buchan who had gone to Brasenose hoping to study under Walter Pater, would also have known all about Gilles de Rais,
quondam
ally of Joan of Arc, pederast and child-murderer, central to J.–K. Huysmans'
Là-Bas
(1891).

Finally, myth and ritual gave to a humanity assailed by ‘mass culture' and ‘mass politics' a prospect of ecological harmony. Buchan was reared in an intellectual tradition in which the scientific had always been related to the anthropological and the theological: by the Scottish Enlightenment, by Carlyle, by Robertson Smith and Frazer, and a growing Scots' fascination with psychoanalysis. Getting to the heart of the matter seemed necessary in the post-war turmoil, when the structures of liberal capitalism were collapsing. In
The
Dancing Floor
Vernon Milburne recognises the rituals of Plakos as ultimately benign, going back not just beyond Christianity but predating the ‘noisy, middle-class family party' of the Greek gods: ‘You may call her Demeter, or Aphrodite, or Hera, but she is the same, the Virgin and the Mother, the “mistress of wild things”, the “priestess of the new birth in spring”.'