For the Islands I Sing: An Autobiography

by George Mackay Brown

``A hauntingly beautiful memoir.'' The Literary Review The celebrated Scottish writer George Mackay Brown wrote this moving memoir in the years before his death in 1996, wishing it to be published posthumously. Here, his simple poetic honesty is turned upon himself. 192 pp 5 1/2 x 8 1/2

Genres: Biography, Nonfiction, Autobiography, Scotland, Memoir, Literature

192 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1997

About the author

George Mackay Brown, the poet, novelist and dramatist, spent his life living in and documenting the Orkney Isles.

A bout of severe measles at the age of 12 became the basis for recurring health problems throughout his life. Uncertain as to his future, he remained in education until 1940, a year which brought with it a growing reality of the war, and the unexpected death of his father. The following year he was diagnosed with (then incurable) Pulmonary Tuberculosis and spent six months in hospital in Kirkwall, Orkney's main town.

Around this time, he began writing poetry, and also prose for the Orkney Herald for which he became Stromness Correspondent, reporting events such as the switching on of the electricity grid in 1947. In 1950 he met the poet Edwin Muir, a fellow Orcadian, who recognised Mackay Brown's talent for writing, and would become his literary tutor and mentor at Newbattle Abbey College, in Midlothian, which he attended in 1951-2. Recurring TB forced Mackay Brown to spend the following year in hospital, but his experience at Newbattle spurred him to apply to Edinburgh University, to read English Literature, returning to do post-graduate work on Gerard Manley Hopkins.

In later life Mackay Brown rarely left Orkney. He turned to writing full-time, publishing his first collection of poetry, The Storm, in 1954. His writing explored life on Orkney, and the history and traditions which make up Orkney's distinct cultural identity. Many of his works are concerned with protecting Orkney's cultural heritage from the relentless march of progress and the loss of myth and archaic ritual in the modern world. Reflecting this, his best known work is Greenvoe (1972), in which the permanence of island life is threatened by 'Black Star', a mysterious nuclear development.

Mackay Brown's literary reputation grew steadily. He received an OBE in 1974 and was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1977, in addition to gaining several honorary degrees. His final novel, Beside the Ocean of Time (1994) was Booker Prize shortlisted and judged Scottish Book of the Year by the Saltire Society. Mackay Brown died in his home town of Stromness on 13th April 1996.

He produced several poetry collections, five novels, eight collections of short stories and two poem-plays, as well as non-fiction portraits of Orkney, an autobiography, For the Islands I Sing (1997), and published journalism.

Read more at:
http://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org....

Reviews

[Lorna · Rating 5 out of 5]

A few weeks ago I noticed this autobiography of one of my all-time favourite authors. I put it on my to-read list and thought about it a lot. Then, just before Christmas a package arrived from our old neighbours - an older couple - the sort of people you pop round to for a cup of tea and end up talking to for hours and hours because somehow you share niche interests and values that no one else does. Gordon grew up in Stromness and remembers George Mackay Brown - not as a writer but as an old man fond of drink. He was amazed I was such a huge fan of his and I was amazed the Gordon was likely one of the children in Greenvoe. Gordon is an amazing man - an adventurer who left the little island and did great things with his life - making the world a better place. I don't want to be too specific for his own privacy but I admire him and his wife and wish the world have many more like them.
Anyway, I opened my Christmas package and there it was, the book! It even has a bookmark from a Stromness book shop. Gordon had brought me it back from his trip home in the summer. I still can't believe it. Stranger still, on the cover George Mackay Brown looks exactly like my husband and throughout Christmas his children and nephew commented on the uncanny resemblance.
I'm not a huge reader of poetry and so have always preferred Brown's prose but I think him being primarily a poet gives him a gorgeous way with words whilst his kind, sensitive and earthy nature makes him the very best storyteller. His writing is vivid yet relatable; evocative yet friendly.
There were so many wonderful moments I wanted to quote here but I didn't want to pause.
I loved it! I wish I'd met him!

[Fiona · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found myself revelling and wallowing in GMB’s beautiful prose. It reminded me how much I’d loved his writing in Vinland which I read a few years ago. This is an autobiography but reads more like deeply personal reflections. It was important to him to be honest with himself as well as with the reader and so he sometimes pulls himself up short if he feels he’s giving a less than accurate account. I felt as if I was in conversation with him.

GMB was born in Orkney in 1921. He grew up in Stromness, a place of fishermen and crofters, of visiting merchant seamen and others passing through from the North Sea to the Atlantic or vice versa. It was a place of storytelling reaching far back to Norse rule and before. It’s not surprising it has inspired so many artists, writers and musicians.

Despite having been schooled some 40 years after him, his account of Scottish education was strikingly familiar to me. We were still parsing sentences in the late 1960s and my secondary education is littered with abandoned home readers.

I shudder when I recall how English was taught. The language was a corpse, and we were little apple-cheeked apprentices of post mortem. A sentence would be taken from some text - the duller the better - and we spent long periods applying ‘parsing’ and ‘analysis’ to this piece of dead meat. I still cannot understand how parsing and analysis ever helped one of us to enjoy the bounty and richness of the language.

He speaks of how the force-feeding of ‘important books’ can set the delicate minds of children against literature for ever.

Happily none of this turned GMB away from his deep love of words, poetry and literature. Many years of illness, first measles and then TB, afforded him the time to read and to hone his writing skills. He went into further education later in life than most, first studying with Edwin Muir in Newbattle and then taking a degree in English Literature at Edinburgh University. As a young man, he quickly developed a love of alcohol that over the years threatened to ruin his fragile health further as well as to disrupt his education and later his career. After his degree studies, he was granted funds to allow him to study for two years as a postgraduate, choosing as his subject the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins. By his own admission, his choice was led by the limited number of poems written by Hopkins but he also admired his work. In later life, he converted to Catholicism and although he doesn’t say so, Hopkins must surely have been an influence in that choice.

This book led me down so many rabbit holes. Discussions of poetry and literature and references to little known or forgotten poets and authors has left me with a long list to follow up. At times, if I had little interest in a particular writer or genre, only the rhythm of his prose kept me interested. That alone was enough to keep me turning the pages, however. This isn’t a perfect book. He does ramble a bit at times. I can only give it 5 stars though because, as I’ve said, I wallowed and revelled in his beautiful prose.

[Tom Ireland · Rating 4 out of 5]

Books about books always offer a bonus. They lead you to other books. I first heard of Orkney-born poet George Mackay Brown through reading Howard's End is on the Landing (well worth a read in itself). For the Islands I Sing is his autobiography.

I got my copy secondhand and it is not in the best condition. The first page is torn and it is warped from a soaking (I hope it was dropped in the bath rather than the toilet). Oddly for me, this did not put me off, rather, it added character to the book. Rumpled and careworn, it suited my image of the author.

The book itself is well written and easy-going. Mackay Brown seems to have lead a charmed life and we read mostly pleasant reminiscences of beer, whisky and friends. The poet we find is not a sturm und drang writer of high flown ideals but one of real life. It is his homeland of Orkney which inspires him. His gentle prose lets us share in that.

The book is only let down by a number of 'impressionistic essays' which seem forced and stilted. In these he seems to be trying hard to write Literature and it contrasts oddly with the smooth flow of the rest of the book.

The poet writes:

"A good book belongs to all ages, it is an oasis of water and greenery, it is watched over by its own generous spirit."

Mackay Brown's book definitely belongs in this category.

[Richard Thomas · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's beautifully written and as with pretty well everything else, George Brown hid more than he revealed but what's wrong with being private? In the book he traces his life which, with a digression to Edinburgh in his relative youth, was spent in Stromness and indeed rarely did he leave Orkney. But then read his poetry and novels and get how the islands were his life blood and inspiration. His was a modest life from a material sense but rich in imagination and in the mysticism of the Orcadian past.

[Neil Fulwood · Rating 4 out of 5]

This brief memoir was published, at the poet’s instruction, only after his death. I’m not sure why because, apart from some reminiscences about his less salubrious moments as a drinker and an admission that he was unrequited romantically, there’s nothing particularly controversial or provocative within its pages. Indeed, Mackay often seems a little bored talking about himself and tends to wax lyrical instead about landscapes, friends and the writers who inspired him. And, above all else, of Orkney.

[Leif · Rating 4 out of 5]

In my opinion, even if I quarrel with some of the trajectories his thinking takes, George Mackay Brown is one of the most significant writers - novels, poems, and essays - to come from Scotland in this century.

This, his autobiography, signals a moment of reflection in his life, and possibly a coming to terms with many of the darkest sides of his personality such as the tendency towards alcoholism and the dependence on his mother's care. It also hints at the immense burden of living with tuberculosis, a very contemporary concern in Canada's north, and the struggles to live and work that Brown faced in that regard.

And finally, illuminatingly, it presents a dynamic cast of persons, environments, and ideas in which Brown's work and thought can be contextualized: the eternal hope for the poor and the downtrodden, for women and for those unsung; the lasting regard for the sunny desert of Orkney and the long history of place that living in one region can imbue; and, finally, the humility with which Brown takes up the mantle of writing.

Not perhaps a place to begin, but an important journey in the road to reading GMB.

[Kirkwall · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lovely writing, capturing the feeling of a memoir rather than an autobiography. Beautiful, lyrical words from one of Orkney's best.

[Kirsten · Rating 4 out of 5]

George Mackay Brown (1921 - 1996) ist einer der bekanntesten schottischen Dichter, wenn nicht sogar der bekannteste unter ihnen. Er war das jüngste von sechs Kindern und lebte mit seiner Familie auf den Orkneyinseln. Er verließ seine Heimat nur selten, was auch einer langen Tuberkuloseerkrankung geschuldet war und konnte deshalb erst spät mit dem Studium der Anglistik beginnen. Noch später wurde er mit seinen Werken bekannt. Über seine Autobiografie verfügte er, dass sie erst nach seinem Tod veröffentlich wurde.

Ich kannte die Arbeit von George Mackay Brown bereits durch die Sammlung von Kurzgeschichten "Hawkfall (and other stories)". Leider ist aus dem Vorsatz, danach mehr von ihm zu lesen, in den letzten zehn Jahren nichts geworden.

Seine eigene Geschichte hat mich zuerst weniger beeindruckt, als es seine Kurzgeschichten getan haben. Dem Kind war es peinlich, den Vater in der Kirche singen zu hören. Der junge Mann wusste zunächst nichts mit seinem Leben anzufangen. Natürlich war es für ihn nicht leicht, Pläne zu machen, wenn es mit der Gesundheit nicht zum Besten steht. ​​Trotzdem hat es für mich auch immer ein wenig wie eine Ausrede gewirkt, in seinem Zimmer zu bleiben und das Leben an sich vorbeiziehen zu lassen.



Das änderte sich, als er zur Abendschule geht. Dort entdeckt er etwas, was ihn wirklich berührt: das Schreiben. Mit Mitte dreißig beginnt er sein Studium an der Newbattle Abbey, wo unter anderem auch Edwin Muir lehrt. Aber auch da hinterlässt er den Eindruck bei mir, dass er lieber feiert als zu studieren und erzählt mehr über das Leben außerhalb der Universität als über sein Studium.



George Mackay Brown erzählt in seiner Autobiografie mehr über andere schottische Autoren als über sich selbst, dabei auch mit einem gewissen Sinn für Humor. Die einzige Begegnung mit Hugh MacDiarmid, von der er erzählt, ist die an einem Urinal in einem Kino. Sicherlich gab es davon noch mehr, aber darüber äußert er sich nicht.

So leicht die Erzählung über seine frühen Jahre auch wirken, später wirkt er nicht mehr so unbeschwert. Auch wenn er es nicht ausspricht, wirkt George Mackay Brown so auf mich, als ob ihn eine Last niederdrücken würde. Er wirkt einsam, obwohl es viele Menschen gibt, die ihm wichtig sind und denen er auch wichtig ist.

Ich habe ein paar Seiten gebraucht, um mich mit der Person George Mackay Brown so anzufreunden, wie ich es mit seinen Geschichten getan habe​, dann hat mich seine Lebensgeschichte gepackt. Ich hoffe, dass es nicht wieder zehn Jahre dauert, bis ich wieder etwas von ihm lesen.

[Ruth Brumby · Rating 3 out of 5]

Although he died only in 1996 and this was written mostly in 1985, it has a very fifties flavour. The friends and poets he writes about are all men. Women mostly have roles as partners, hostesses and muses. We saw the painting of the Poets' Club in the Edinburgh Modern Two gallery and from reading this I know that it was quite a conscious effort to know the other recognised male writers, from Orkney and Scotland particularly.
However the writing is clear and enjoyable to read and his ideas are interesting.
The extent of his reading and the effort he put into writing are inspiring.

[Gill · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was an unusual biography in many ways, largely glossing over his early, difficult years, as a child lacking good health. But his student days are fully explored, and one gets a feeling of how his mastery of language, and the subjects that appealed to him to write about, developed.
His story is intrinsically bound up in the place he knew as home, with the stimulus of years of study and meeting of like minds thrown in for good measure at Newbattle and Edinburgh. A good read.

[Paul Jenkins · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautifully written autobiography oy the Orkney writer George Mackay Brown whose novels I have previously much enjoyed. Particularly good at describing his interest in writing and the people and places which have inspired his work. One of those autobiographies which, more than anything, heighten the disappointment of never having been able to meet the author in real life.

[Cooper Renner · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’ve read virtually none of Brown’s poetry, but this is a fine memoir which makes me curious about his writing.

[Chiefdonkey Bradey · Rating 5 out of 5]

I must seek out once more the lonely beauty of the north

[Peggy · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read this to help me get a sense of the Orkneys, where I'll be spending a week later this summer, and it does provide a strong sense of place. The initial chapters give a short history of the islands and their people that was very evocative. After that, Brown comes across as a willfully eccentric person who lived a rather lonely life, with a lot of alcohol. I admit I found the long literary passages too rambling and skipped over them.

[Ade Bailey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Off to the Orkney Islands next week. What better way to prepare than reading again the words of the lovely poet.

[Stuart Macbeath · Rating 2 out of 5]

GMB beautifully describes certain sections of his life, then either omits or rushes through sections of others.

[Lizzy · Rating 4 out of 5]

A few too many words and a bit rambling but I liked the descriptions of Orkney my fathers birthplace.