The River and Its Source

There are two memorials to Neil Gunn in his birthplace of Dunbeath on the Caithness coast. One is a statue and the other is a squat black typewriter. The typewriter is a mid-1930s Imperial. I have never much cared for the concept of sacred relics, but if pushed I could make a case for that typewriter. It was the one on which Gunn wrote Highland River (1937), a novel so exquisitely wrought that it conferred on his native landscape the gift of immortality.

The statue is not what you might expect: not Gunn himself but a boy with a huge salmon in his arms. This is Kenn, the central character of Highland River, and the salmon is the thirty-pounder he poached with his bare hands as a 9-year-old boy. So what the statue commemorates is a moment in fiction that consumes the book’s first sixteen pages, and if there is a finer opening to any book anywhere in Scotland’s literature of the land, I have never heard of it. The first chapter of Highland River stands alone. If on your travels you should ever chance on Dunbeath, the guardians of the reputation of their village’s most famous son would like you to appreciate the significance of where you stand. Hence the statue, not of the most famous son himself, but rather the fruits of his finest hour. Everything I have ever written that is any good at all began life with a landscape, the book’s bedrock. Whenever I have wavered in the tricky art of writing down a particular portion of the surface of planet Earth so that it gives the book I am trying to write its sure foundation, I renew my conviction by revisiting Highland River, because it is the apotheosis of that art. It must be forty years since our paths first crossed, although I can no longer remember the moment. It wasn’t the first Gunn novel I’d read but it caused me to elevate him into the ranks of the immortals. The Silver Darlings (see SF no. 45) has won many more plaudits, but I think Highland River belongs to a higher order, one of the masterworks of Scottish literature. What I do remember is that about twenty years ago, while I was doing some work with the Caithness-based publisher Keith Whittles, I gave a talk in Dunbeath’s Neil Gunn Centre and without any warning, and with a startling surge of emotion akin to an electric shock, I came face to face with that typewriter. It was like being handed Robert Burns’s quill or Louis Armstrong’s trumpet or Toscanini’s baton. It had a repair label attached with the date 1937, the year Highland River was published. So these were the very keys that typed:

Out of that noiseless world in the grey of the morning, all his ancestors came at him. They tapped his breast until the bird inside it fluttered madly; they drew a hand along his hair until the scalp crinkled; they made the blood within him tingle to a dance that had him leaping from boulder to boulder before he rightly knew to what desperate venture he was committed. For it was all in a way a sort of madness . . . A thousand influences had his young body taut as a bow, when at last, bending over a boulder of the old red sandstone, he saw again the salmon.

The river, unnamed in the book, is the Dunbeath Water, an artery of lifeblood that flowed through Gunn’s young life. Its source lies in the wild but unsung back-country of Caithness, and it binds the source both to the sea and to the lives of centuries of sea-thirled villagers. It laves the salt-smitten walls and waters of their very harbour with its high-moor sweetness, tempering the harshness of their place on the map of the world, softening the natural brutality of the coast.

Strength was the keynote of this coast, a passionless remorseless strength, unyielding as the rock, tireless as the water; the unheeding rock that a falling body would smash itself to pulp upon; the transparent water that would suffocate an exhausted body in the slow rhythm of its swirl. There was a purity about it all, stainless as the gull’s plumage, wild and cold as its eye.

Highland River is a book about belonging, about a sense of place, about how we are shaped by landscape. The first of all our landscapes never leaves us, and wherever life may lead us, we never truly leave that first landscape. The child that absorbs that nursery landscape by osmosis and without questioning it lives on in our adult selves, and it is only as adults that we begin to question who we are and where we belong. Kenn’s life began ‘where the river was lost in the sea’, but his individuality emerged as he began to explore upstream, towards the source. And that, in a nutshell, is Gunn’s plot. The novel slides backwards and forwards in time through eighteen years of Kenn’s life from the day of the salmon through adolescence and university to being gassed in the trenches of the First World War to a glimpse of the mature 37-year-old nuclear physicist. Through it all, his heart and mind are forever drawing on the essence of that childhood, forever embedded in the strath that nurtured it, the strath and its river: ‘It is a lovely strath . . . It is not a glen of the mountains, craggy, stupendous, physically impressive. There is nothing here to overwhelm the romantic mind. Its beauty is an inward grace in oneself akin to what is indefinable in the memory of a masterpiece.’ Slowly, and with deft subtlety, Gunn insinuates the book’s inner theme, a quest to discover the source, a lifelong journey that explores the physical landscape all the way to the source of the river and an inner journey in which Kenn unearths the source of himself. It is a journey fashioned from three elements: his human ancestry (a potent mix of Norse, Gael and Pict, and back beyond that to who knows?), and the very land itself. The third element is nature, those creatures that populate it, and to which Gunn often ascribes eerie symbolism, as though all nature had a double meaning:

The cry of the peewit is the cry of the living human, anxious, swift, flashing to earth. The long cry of the curlew passes overhead, disembodied and unearthly. Once the crying of curlews in the night had made him think of the men and women and children burned out of their homes in Strathnaver more than a century before. The spirits of his people, the disinherited, the nameless, the folk.

And then there is this startling echo during a conversation the 37-year-old Kenn has with his scientific colleague in the laboratory they share:

Radzyn looked narrowly at him, at the smiling, unwavering eyes, and saw deep in the eyes the indissoluble hard core, the native, inalienable residium, saw it with the surprise one might come upon on a face in a mirror or a still adder-head in a pleasant bunch of heather.

What an image! Highland River then, is part fiction, part nature writing. The plot is elusive, almost abstract at times, but as a nature writer myself it delights me. Gunn’s constant interleaving of humankind, wildlife and the land, and the land with the sea through the river and the land-rooted, sea-thirled people’s story . . . all that creates the sense of a single indivisible life force in which there is no distance between any of its constituent parts, and their interdependence is as manifest as it is beautiful. If there is to be any hope at all for our troubled planet and humankind’s place on it, it can only be realized by shrinking the wholly artificial distance that we as a species have put between ourselves and what we like to call ‘the natural world’. But there is no natural world, there is only the world, and the unnatural regime our species insists upon. There is only nature, there isn’t anything else. Neil Gunn knew that more than eighty years ago and articulated it in Highland River. At the end of the book, the adult Kenn returns to the river after an absence of years following the death of his parents, and Gunn finally spells out the nature of the quest for the source, ‘to provide the core of life with warmth and light’.

Out of great works of art, out of great writing, there comes upon the soul sometimes a feeling of strange intimacy. It is the moment in which all conflict is resolved, in which a timeless harmony is achieved. It was coming upon him now.

We should put up a statue to that.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 77 ©  Jim Crumley 2023