‘A monk at his devotions’: George Mackay Brown the Catholic Artist

In a letter written late in life to his friend Sister Margaret Tournour, a member of the Society of the Sacred Heart, George Mackay Brown (1921–96) reiterates his deeply held belief that despite centuries of beleaguerment and trial, Catholic faith and culture never really vanish. His intimate and cherished correspondence with Sr Tournour – herself a trained wood engraver and book illustrator – reveals the extent to which Brown felt relaxed enough to write freely about his literary craft, and also, frequently, about his adopted Catholicism, the religion to which he converted over thirty years earlier in 1961. Despite Brown's usual reluctance to speak openly about matters of faith, in this set of letters there is no suggestion of guardedness or caution, though there is evidence of autobiographical myth-making in his discussion of the pre-Reformation settings for many of his stories and poems. Brown self-consciously depicts a monkish life of solitude and prayer, in what he calls ‘this little hermitage of mine’, and ‘my own little candle-lit cloister in Mayburn Court’.

Many of the studies of Brown which have appeared since his death in 1996 have been eager to dispel the prevailing image of him as a sombre, isolated figure, cut off from the mainstream of late twentieth-century Scottish cultural circles, and practising an ascetic devotion to his craft. His fifty-two years of writing, spanning journalism, poetry, short stories, novels, plays and children's fiction, have lately been subject to a spate of reappraisals, retrospectives and reprints, due in most part to Maggie Fergusson's awardwinning biography of Brown (2006). Fergusson's biography not only restored a much-needed and balanced view of Brown's life – rendering it neither in hagiographical nor condemnatory terms – it also rescued this author from his ‘odd maverick status’ as a Scottish Catholic convert writer, and one, moreover, working in the apparently peripheral and Presbyterian environment of Orkney.