Naomi Mitchison’s The Bull Calves (1947); Graham Holloway, Bob Carruthers & Steve Gilligan’s Chasing the Deer (1994)

I like the photo of her on this cover; the book written by her over the period she was also writing The Bull Calves

Carradale House, Kintyre, Scotland — bought by Mitchison by the time of WW2 and her home thereafter

Would Jane Austen have known of this incident, oh yes, and probably read Johnson and Boswell’s twin tours of the Hebrides; did she ever mention it, no; but she did mention and read avidly a number of Scots writers who did: Scott (Waverley), Anne Grant (1802 poem, The Highlanders) among them.

Friends and readers,

The last week or so I’ve been working towards producing a first draft of a paper for a coming 18th century regional conference, whose working title is “At this Crossroads of my Life: Culloden and its aftermath.” I read Naomi Mitchison’s novel about this matter where inside two days characters confront central crossroads of their lives successfully (and finished Jenni Calder’s splendid biography of her, The Nine Lives of Naomi Mitchison, which I recommend) and I re-saw a 1994 movie of the famous massacre, said to be much influenced, almost an imitation of Patrick Watkins’s classic 1965 pseudo-documentary, Culloden, and realized for the first time its individual story’s dramaturgy creates a literal crossroads where several beautifully individualized characters experience ironic destruction. The novel first:

Naomi Mitchison’s impressive novel, The Bull Calves, occurs over 2 days, June 16th to 17th, about 2 years after Culloden, 1747, on a family estate, Gleneagles, in rural Scotland somewhere between Edinburgh and Perth. It brings together members of the Haldane family, most of them now Whigs, and pro-Hanoverian, but much conflicted over its past chequered history of complex allegiances to Tory Jacobitism. At the center of the novel is Kirstie Haldane, a woman in her late 40s, previously miserably wed for many years to an abusive husband, and Black William of Borlum, a forward looking (Whiggish) ex-Jacobite, whose father died in prison after fighting in 1715, and who himself spent many years in exiled, wandering in America. William and Kirstie are recently wed, and burdened with secrets; she, that when her husband died, she was accused of murdering him through witchcraft; he, that he was also married for several years to an Indian woman, assimilated to her tribe until their bouts of barbaric violence so alienated him, he fled back to Scotland.

The story (explaining the title of the book) is concerns poisoned relationships. William is distrusted by Kirstie’s family, his family past, a severe disadvantage to them. Several aggressive young male Haldanes, instigated by another Jacobite, Lachlan MacIntosh of Kyllachy, who, jealous of Kirstie’s love and the powerful men of this now Whig family, accuses William of treachery in harboring yet a third Jacobite wanted for arrest in the house’s attic. In this book the past is in the present; conflicted histories, long held enmities, adversarial personalities, and immediate close relationships (Kirstie to her brothers, her uncle, her niece, and nephews) and responsive behaviors and talk are tightly knotted into a densely observed cultural and social environment. What is remarkable is how inward intimate experience is the medium of the book out of which external events are dramatized through memories. The first quarter of the book consists of Kirstie telling her niece, Catherine, of her traumatic previous life in the context of the present events of a family feast and daily life. The whole of William’s time in America is told by him to her lawyer brother as remembered flashback; Mitchison’s long notes form a third instrinsic part of the novel, and the resolution of the novel in favor of compromises and modernity recall Walter Scott. Her idea is mutual loyalty and trust ought to make people achieve together and know content, something they could not do separately.

I found myself fully absorbed by the intensities of the conflicts, the possibility dangerous outcomes (prison, transportation, more exile), a sense of their feelings, and was anxious over what would happen as our chief couple seeks to invent or continue their new life and re-formed identities. The characters seek to escape loneliness by finding sympathy in what they need to tell; and at the end of each part harmonies shape the action: dancing, feasting, going to bed. The book also felt drenched in layers of Scottish culture, mythical, supernatural, and uses Jungian archetypal theories so William needs the Kirstie’s humane inner self (her anima) and she needs his strength and force (his animus).

It is an analysis of the way Jacobitism poisoned the lives of those who got involved at the same time as it shows why they did so: the movement appealed to the underdog, the exploited and powerless, those who could not join in on the new capitalism and forms of power emerging in the 18th century. She defines Jacobitism complexly through a socialist perspective (you must read the book) and brilliantly in her notes and in the novel’s story. We experience how this complicated movement against Whig Hanoverian regime (capitalist lairds) plays out in real life circumstances then and now. Her use of language, a contemporary idiom mixed with a lyrical interplay of Scots 18th century dialect is also part of the book’s enjoyment.

It was written over the five years of Mitchison’s stay in a more remote part of Scotland during World War Two, managing a household, serving a community as its chatelaine; and she uses the Scottish defeat and struggles to express what she was feeling as the dreadful and later more hopeful end to the conflict. She was a Haldane, her brother, the famous JBS Haldane, and a number of the characters are partly modeled on people she knew and loved.  So the book resembles Daphne DuMaurier’s The King’s General, also written over the years of the war she spent managing a family estate in Cornwall, where a story of the English civil war making heavy use of real historical figures and particulars enabled her to come to terms with and express her anguish and personal experiences; also Iris Origo’s War in Val d’Orchia, Susan Sontag’s 1993 Volcano Lover, while mostly set in the 18th century, also occurs a auction room in 1943. It’s not just women who turned to historical fiction: Winston Graham’s Ross Poldark and Demelza are the products of his five years as a coastguard in Cornwall. Diana Wallace says in her book on women’s historical fiction and romance, that in the 1930s and 40s women wrote books about the repeatedly defeated; they were also seeking reconciliation, commitment to compassion and reasoned progress in the face of nightmare. You can call all of these but Ross Poldark heroine’s texts.

Then this unexpectedly poignant absorbing fine film.

Brian Blessed as Major Eliot in Chasing the Deer

Chasing the Deer may be said to be an improvement on Watkins’s film. The line is from a stanza by Burns:

“My heart’s in the Highlands, my heart is not here,
My heart’s in the Highlands, a-chasing the deer;
Chasing the wild-deer, and following the roe,
My heart’s in the Highlands, wherever I go.”

The thrust of the film is to create intense sympathy for the highlanders caught up in this war. The Scottish countryside is photographed with heart-aching beauty, the colors lovely, lots of sparkling water, indigenous plant-life, the usual stags and deer, small animals everywhere. The music by John Wetton (and others) is original and written for the film, with much bagpipe feel. As with Watkins many of the people were not professional actors at all; they were the people crowdsourced to provide adequate funds. The film is done with considerable integrity, nothing over-flashy, nothing ratcheted up for melodrama or sexual scene’s sake.

It is as anti-war (showing the brutality and horror of war) as Watkins’s film but the overall effect is to project the death and a mourning for a traditional Scottish way of life, however impoverished. The film-makers convey the inner experience of the calamites inflicted on immediately a few thousand men and then long range their families and homes all around them. The public story is conveyed by epitomizing scenes of leading generals, famous people discussing where they are just now. The film-makers present Prince Charles Edward (Dominique Carrara) as someone who is foreigner, there without resources or connections, without any initial understanding of the desperate conditions and lack of manpower and wealth in a group of people he has chosen to base a desperate bid for his family’s power on. Cumberland (Dominic Borelli) is made to seem yet worse: a dense cold fat bully understandably determined to make sure no more of these nuisance uprisings will happen again. We see the irrational glorification of the Prince by the crowds and his incompetence; the story of Murray’s inability to avoid the final disaster is doe full justice to and the horrors wreaked on the losers.

I also find the film also valuable for the human story it tells, which suggests all the people involved could be switched to the other side, so the action is senseless from the point of view of those who die or whose way of life is destroyed. For this we follow the story of Alistair Campell (Matthew Zajac) who wants nothing to do with wars, but is driven to go right the war as a Jacobite because his son, Euan (Lewis Rae) is snatched by a group of Jacobites, and he is told the boy has been put in prison and will be kept there or killed (for shooting someone) and only released if his father fights with them. Euan is re-captured by a group of Hanoverian soldiers, made a dummmer boy, and comes to the attention to a Major Eliot (Brian Blessed) still grieving over his only son’s death in India (so Eliot had taken the boy to the colonies as part of his career), who takes Euan as a servant and son and attempt to teach and protect him insofar as this is possible.

We also see the women isolated, losing their men one by one – sometimes carelessly killed. Euan has impregnated a girl before he left; his mother Morag (Carolyn Konrad) when she discoveres her son is taken by the Hanoverians attempts to find her husband to tell him so he will return home. She cannot and it is too late. In the Shakespearean scene I referred to Euvan is cut down early on at Culloden; as he falls Alistair glimpses him and on the Hanoverian side; the father runs to the son as the son lies dying unaware his father is looking down on him; Eliot, not far off, mistakes Alistair for the murderer, so murders Alistair and carries the boy away in his arms in a state of raging grief. The last scene is of the three woman and a new baby in the house, hugging in a circle, waiting for their home possibly to be destroyed.

On the march from Inverness (I apologize for my inability to block out the constant ad logo, an irritant while watching movies played on TV stations nowadays)

I thought of a line from the serial drama Outlander (I don’t know if it’s in the book): what kind of people do we become and how do we remain ourselves even when we think all is lost ….

Ellen