Witch Wood - Buchan John Canongate Classics

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Novels: a classicist, a humanitarian, a man of some means in a society pervaded by dogma and desperately poor. He is impulsive, romantic, inept, and although, in the person and argument of Montrose, he encounters a polity which could serve his ideals, he cannot cope with the complex political manoeuvres of the time, or with the moral sickness which afflicts his parish.

      The diagnosis of this more intimate drama falls to the dyspeptic James Fordyce, one of a choric group of ministers whose periodic confrontations with David comment on the action. To Fordyce the dogmatics of Covenant theology have tilted the balance too far in the direction of the ‘unco guid’. This corrupting, fanatical spirit, so alive in Fordyce’s confreres, the politic Muirhead and the fanatic Proudfoot, perverts the older, innocently pagan usages of Woodilee into the obscene and vindictive rites of its coven. Ephraim Caird, the Covenanter of 1639, is also Woodilee’s ‘Heid Deil’.

      It is here that we can trace not only Buchan’s political Via Media but his anthropological interests: the concern with ritual and folk-tale that he derived from J. G. Frazer’s The Golden Bough (first published in 1890) and his friendship with Andrew Lang. Buchan’s Christianity was of the ‘modernist’ Scoto-Oxford-Hegelian son which saw God incarnate in man’s capacity to reason. But the traditional and the customary nevertheless remained important. In a poem of the 1900s ‘Wood Magic’ he wrote of a peasant warily respecting an old altar, in a style which echoes Frazer:

      Wherefore to God the Father, the Son, and

      the Holy Ghost,

      Mary the Blessed Mother, and the kindly Saints

      as well,

      I will give glory and praise, and them I cherish the most,

      For they have the keys of Heaven, and save the soul

      from Hell.

      But likewise I will spare for the lord Apollo a grace,

      And a bow for the Lady Venus—as a friend but not

      as a thrall.

      ’Tis true they are out of Heaven, but some day they may

      win the place;

      For gods are kittle cattle, and a wise man honours

      them all.

      The rituals around the Roman altar in the wood could have been innocent; the place is nigh to the Paradise of Katrine Yester (a figure, as Janet Adam Smith rightly points out, of the ballads, not of flesh and blood), but the ‘divided self’ of Calvinism has created the Cairds who make them evil. In this context both David and Montrose are men destroyed by the society they wish to purify: personifications of the Christian atonement and Temporary Kings out of the Frazerian ritual: guardians of the shrine whose fate is to be killed. ‘The madness of Scotland’ stems from the fact that Calvinism broke the continuity of this ritual, and left the country bereft of spiritual self-understanding.

      Anthropological influence also accounts for another, more controversial, aspect of Buchan’s style: the domination of plot and description over character and psychology. Witch Wood is about love and devilish lust, but Katrine is so completely the fairy princess that she seems to have no quality in common with what the Woodilee folk get up to. Buchan’s son William put this down to a low sex-drive in the Buchan family, yet Buchan’s other women characters—particularly Isobel Veitch and Grizel Saintserf—are positive enough to meet most feminist criteria, and his sympathy for the poor victims of the soldiers and the witch-pricker is full-hearted and without prurience. But in Frazerian terms, Katrine Yester’s ‘soul’ inheres in her earthly ‘Paradise’ more than in her character. Thus she represents an ideal of love—‘Agape’ more than ‘Eros’—which could become the archetype underlying an achievable society. As much as his friend Edwin Muir, Buchan had derived therapeutic insights from that other son of a Calvinist manse, C. J. Jung, his exact contemporary.

      It is when we appreciate this ‘re-ifying’ possibility that the tragic element floods the whole novel, not only in Katrine’s death but in the destruction throughout of the good and the well-intentioned. When the robust mercenary Mark Kerr gets David to leave Woodilee for the wars in Germany his comment, ‘I have helped to open for him the gates of Paradise’, is the grimmest of jokes. Paradise will be a bullet in the brain on some Bavarian battlefield, in the war whose desolations would produce that Germanic reliance on ‘blood and iron’ which irrupted in 1914. When Katrine Yester dies, she leaves behind a ‘waste land’ indeed. In this respect Buchan had as full a command of the mythology of post-rationalism as T. S. Eliot, a man of more contorted politics who addressed a much smaller audience in oracular verse. If Buchan styled himself more modestly as a storyteller, he still remained greatly concerned to educate, as M. R. Ridley has pointed out. In the breadth of its canvas, the ‘representative’ nature of its characters, and in the primacy of its didactics, Witch Wood invites comparison with Bertolt Brecht’s great drama of the Thirty Years’ War, Mother Courage (1941). Brecht saw his play as something which should goad the audience into thought. Witch Wood, even when read for the third or fourth time, has this same active force.

      Christopher Harvie

       Prologue

      Time, my grandfather used to say, stood still in that glen of his. But the truth of the saying did not survive his death, and the first daisies had scarcely withered on his grave before a new world was knocking at the gate. That was thirty years ago, and today the revolution is complete. The parish name has been changed; the white box of a kirk which served the glen for more than two centuries has been rebuilt in red suburban gothic; a main railway line now runs down the Aller and the excellent summer service brings holiday-makers from a hundred miles distant: houses and shops have clustered under the Hill of Deer; there may be found a well-reputed boarding school for youth, two inns—both of them reformed—a garage, and a bank agent. The centre of importance has moved from the old village to the new town by the station, and even the old village is no more a clachan of thatched roofs straggling by a burnside. Some enemy of the human race has taught the burn to run straight like a sewer and has spanned it with a concrete bridge, while the thatch of the houses has been replaced by slates of a metallic green. Only the ruins of the old kirkton have not been meddled with; these stand as I remember them, knee-deep in docks and nettles, defended by a crumbling dry-stone dyke against inquisitive cattle from Crossbasket.

      The old folk are gone, too, and their very names are passing from the countryside. Long before my day the Hawkshaws had disappeared from Calidon, but there was a respectable Edinburgh burgess family who had come there in the seventeenth century; now these have given place to a rawer burgess graft from the West. The farmers are mostly new men, and even the peasant, who should be the enduring stock, has shifted his slow bones. I learned from the postman that in Woodilee today there was no Monfries, no Sprot, but one Pennecuik, and only two bearers of the names of Ritchie and Shillinglaw, which had once been plentiful as ragwort. In such a renovated world it was idle to hope to find surviving the tales which had perplexed my childhood. No one could tell me when or why the kirk by the Crossbasket march became a ruin, and its gravestones lay buried in weeds. Most did not even know that it had been a kirk.

      I was not greatly surprised at this, for the kirk of Woodilee had not been used for the better part of three centuries; and even as a child I could not find many to tell me of its last minister. The thing had sunk from a tale to an ‘owercome,’ a form of words which everyone knew but which few could interpret. It was Jess Blane, the grieve’s daughter, who first stirred my curiosity. In a whirl of wrath at some of my doings she prayed that the fate of the minister of Woodilee might be mine—a fate which she expounded as to be ‘claught by the Deil and awa’ wi’.’ A little scared, I carried the affair to my nurse, who was gravely scandalised, and denounced Jess as a ‘shamefu’ tawpie, fyling the wean’s mind wi’ her black lees.’ ‘Dinna you be feared, dearie,’ she reassured me. ‘It wasna the Deil that cam for the Minister o’ Woodilee. I’ve aye heard tell that he was a guid man and a kind man. It was the Fairies, hinny. And he leev’d happy wi’

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