AN IRISH poet flies into a Scottish island, and, as the propellers flutter to a standstill, Seamus Heaney hears across the moorland runway on Orkney Mainland the liquid lament of a curlew. This moment informed his strangely abstract poem “From the Republic of Conscience” in his 1987 collection The Haw Lantern, and equally provides an opening to Passion Partners, Alison Gray’s study of the influence of twinned “piety” which she detects between the writings of the Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins and his intense student the Orcadian poet, journalist, and novelist George Mackay Brown.
The link is provided by unpublished postgraduate notes and essays that Mackay Brown assembled, largely while a postgraduate student, somewhat marooned in Edinburgh from 1962 to 1964. Mackay Brown was dismissive of these studies. “I’m sure no publisher would give these essays a second glance. Nor would I want them read by others,” he wrote in his autobiography, For the Islands I Sing. So, there is a dutiful determination, in which Gray, who knew Mackay Brown and lives in Orkney, argues for a Christian partnership between the two writers, not least in their regard for the Society of Jesus, and their high calling to the mass.
Understandable tensions sustain her study, echoing those between the academic agenda that Mackay Brown felt impelled to research and the poetry that he wished to develop. Gray argues that Mackay Brown’s poetic voice was effectively finalised by the time he arrived at university, but that his literary and theological alliance with Hopkins strengthened his confidence as a Christian writer.
Temperamentally, the poets were similar: both endured depression during, and perhaps because of, spiritual pilgrimage that led them to become Roman Catholics, and both had an intense determination to marinate their faith in writing that contested contemporary secularism. Gray also detects a sense of shared displacement: “Mackay Brown could see Hopkins as the literary outsider, on the margins because of his sensational visionary art immersed in Catholicism.”
Mackay Brown sat lightly to the type of theory in which Hopkins was engrossed, not least his concept “inscape”. Gray argues that Mackay Brown had a deep understanding of this, but chose to represent it within his poetry rather than venture too deeply into critical thickets. Mackay Brown “was more interested in the sense phenomena itself and then what Hopkins himself recorded in his journals and crafted into his poems”, Gray argues. Nor was Mackay Brown limited by Hopkins, venerating King Magnus as a saint among distinctly Orcadian sagas. His requiem mass was held on 16 April 16 1996, St Magnus’s Day.
“Mackay Brown and Hopkins make their readers work hard,” writes Gray, whose density of research and literary style similarly tests her readers. Biographical background would have enhanced our understanding of her twinned subjects, as would some sense of Mackay Brown as a person. Other poets and theologians have walk-on parts with insufficient development, and Heaney’s curlew proves ultimately elusive. Gray concedes that the legacy of the notes and essays is uncertain, while usefully sharpening our focus on Mackay Brown’s achievement.
Dr Martyn Halsall is a poet and journalist.
Passion Partners: The piety of George Mackay Brown and Gerard Manley Hopkins
Alison Gray
Angelico Press £21
(979-8-89280-024-2)
Church Times Bookshop £18.90