Songlines

“It canna be true,” says Osie, the Orkney crofter who appears in Chapter 7 of this memorable book, “but there was supposed to be a creature in the water for every one on land.” And a moment later, insisting again “This canna be true,” he tells the author a story about a stranger cow that came up from the sea and installed herself in a byre on the land. “And she had grand calves. But I forget, now, was it a seal or another cow came years after to the door o’ the byre . . . and the cow went away to the sea again.” And then comes the clinching cadence: “An old woman told me yon,” said Osie. “Well, there was supposed to be cows and sheep and every animal there. But the seals were the people o’ the sea.”

In the presence of such alluring inventions and such a credible voice, there’s hardly any need for commentary. Talk of the willing suspension of disbelief, of the salubrious effect of imaginative narrative, characterizations of the mental habits of pre-industrial societies, conjectures about how the sociological facts got displaced in earlier days into the parallel universe of the mythological--all this seems to lead in the wrong direction. David Thomson’s book is luminously its own thing; it had its origins in one man’s rambles round the Highlands and islands of Scotland and the west coast of Ireland, in search of stories and folklore surrounding the “selchie” or gray Atlantic seal. It was written at a great moment in the history of radio, during the 1940s and 1950s, when the BBC employed poets and writers to record and collect oral material and--most important--gave them permission to re-create it in a new artistic form. Consequently it survives not as a period piece but as a poetic achievement, one of those whose works written by “a man speaking to men: a man, it is true, imbued with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind. . . .”

William Wordsworth’s definition of a poet, which I have just quoted, seems an appropriate characterization of the man who wrote “The People of the Sea.” Indeed, what kept coming to mind as I reread the book was Wordsworth’s poem “The Solitary Reaper.” One of the most haunting lyrics in the English language, this too was written after a tour in Scotland and is about the experience of listening to one of the local people express herself unforgettably in her native Gaelic. The sight of women working in the harvest fields must have been a common one at the time, but interestingly enough, the poet found his immediate inspiration in the manuscript of a book by his friend Thomas Wilkinson: “Passed by a Female who was reaping alone, she sung in Erse as she bended over her sickle, the sweetest human voice I ever heard. Her strains were tenderly melancholy, and felt delicious long after they were heard no more.” Wordsworth’s final stanza uses some of Wilkinson’s exact words, but what was notation in the prose becomes incantation in the poem:

Whate’er the theme, the Maiden sang

As if her song could have no ending;

I saw her singing at her work,

And o’er the sickle bending;

I listened, motionless and still;

And, as I mounted up the hill,

The music in my heart I bore,

Long after it was heard no more.

This famous stanza is like a spell that keeps time, in two senses: It keeps the metrical beat of the octosyllabic line, and it also manages to shift into the eternal present of song-time an incident that might otherwise have remained part of the accidental record. When Wordsworth’s lines are repeated, the reader or listener reenters the prolonged trance that the first listener experienced; “the Maiden” still sings “as if her song could have no ending” because of the entrancing, prolonging power of the rhymes and cadences. The chance words of Thomas Wilkinson’s “Tour of Scotland” have been magicked into the domain of the eternally recurrent, the once-upon-a-time world of story, where the strains of “no ending” and “still” and “more” echo and overflow above the brim of the usual.

The transformations and transports that Wordsworth effects in verse in “The Solitary Reaper,” David Thomson manages to encompass in the prose--narrative, lyrical, dramatic--of “The People of the Sea.” Here too, what was heard in the “chaunt” of the storyteller gets fixed on the page, only to rise in all its formality and down-to-earthness at each rereading. Notations of the author’s different tours of Scotland (and of Ireland) have been re-imagined and represented in an idiom that makes the reader a kind of dual citizen, at once the inhabitant of a poetically beguiling world of pure story and of a realistically documented world of fishermen and crofters. In these pages, by performing the task of the historian he was trained to be and that of the artist he was born to become, Thomson is answering the two calls that reality made upon him. He envisages even as he records, with the result that librarians are probably hard put to find an exact category for the book: It has elements of both “fiction” and “nonfiction.” Readers, on the other hand, will be carried away on the successive waves of pleasure, as the here-and-nowness of the people and scenes evoked by the author gives way to there-and-thenness of the stories they narrate.

Thomson’s achievement is preeminently stylistic; his writing combines a feel for the “this-worldness” of his characters’ lives with an understanding of the “otherworldness” they can credit in their stories. Which is a way of saying that the stylistic achievement depends upon a deep imaginative sympathy. What could have been a matter of field work being written up into a casebook becomes a matter of memory and its contents being liberated into a new and transfigured pattern. The book recovers and revives the old trope of human beings as creatures dwelling in a middle state, caught between the worlds of the angels and the animals; it is obviously an archive of lore about the seal, and obliquely an account of traditional cultures on the verge of dissolution, but at the mythic level it presents us with an image of ourselves in those amphibians we have evolved from, all of us (to quote Wordsworth again) “inmates of this active universe.”

*

What delights is the absence of nostalgia. Even as the men in a cabin give themselves up to an eerie tale of child-kidnap by a seal, one of them is talking about remedies for the warble-fly: “I tried motor oil and sulfur powder mixed.” Even as a storyteller invokes the ancient glamour of the Celtic ceo dralochta, he resolutely demystifies it: “So the seal set up a magic fog, or what is called in modem parlance a smoke screen. . . .” And yet, for all the up-to-dateness of the idiom, the fundamental understanding of these characters is shaped by what the poet Edwin Muir once termed “that long lost, archaic companionship” between human beings and the creatures. Plainly, memorably, repeatedly, instances of this old eye-to-eye and breath-to-breath closeness between living things appear in the narrative. Michael the Ferryman judges the strength of the current he is rowing into by watching the toils of the big seal in heavy water adjacent to the boat; a child escaped from drowning is warmed back to consciousness in a “Black House” in South Uist between the generous bodies of two cows; on Papa Stour in Shetland, in an old cowshed, the author himself gradually attains a state of almost animal consciousness:

“I heard a raven croak twice. I felt the autumn coldly on my face, but because this old cowshed had been lately used for dipping sheep there was a smell of dung as though the warm life of the farm lingered on.”

Muir’s sense of the need for a renewed covenant with all life and a respect for its sacredness was inspired directly by the shadow of nuclear destruction that loomed over the 1950s. It may be pushing things to suggest that Thomson’s book was equally prompted by the prevailing mood, but it is no exaggeration to say that it continues to present itself to the understanding as an elegy for certain salvific elements which “progress” and modernity were bound to destroy.

The sweetness and intimacy of Thomson’s imagination mean that he is able to bring us very close to that vanished world. His complete at-homeness in the crofts and cabins and “Black Houses” he entered, his ability to be all ear and eye, allow the reader access to the otherness of the minds and manners of those he met. Total respect, intuitive understanding, perfect grace and perfect pitch--possessed of such gifts, he was never regarded as an intruder. The naturalness of his presence seems always to have made up for its unexpectedness; he arrived into other people’s lives as simply and mysteriously as Michael the Ferryman arrived into his:

“I stopped to look at a cairn of stones by the roadside. Out of a hole in the ground about fifty yards away, where he was cutting turf, a man came slowly to me.

“ ‘It’s a nice day,’ I said.

“ ‘It is grand drying weather, thanks be to God.’ ”

In this exchange, the one tiny variation that the Mayo man plays on the author’s opening greeting is a guarantee of the complete delicacy and accuracy of Thomson’s ear. The replacement of “It’s” by “It is” indicates the different measure and ever so slight caution of the Irish voice in the English tongue, and reveals in detail the overall trustworthiness of this writing. Little touches carry us at one time out into the exposed spaces of the elemental world, as when he talks of Shetland sheep, “their horns warm to touch in the rain”; at another time, a whole culture of human endurance is conjured up in a single observation, as when the young Ronald Iain Finlay remembers coming to in his mother’s arms. His father had been drowned and the boy had been washed ashore: “My mother was weeping again, and I clung to the warmth of her, watching the faces about us, and the faces were steady.” That steadiness reminds me of Homer’s Odysseus bearing up, “his eyelids steady as wrinkled horn or iron,” listening incognito while the bard Demodicus recites the tale of Troy.

And yet for all the Homeric somberness underlying the attitude of the characters, what is constantly to the fore in the writing is something more gamboling, something more like Arion escaping on the dolphin’s back. It is the benignity and essential justice of the relations pertaining between the people of the land and the people of the sea that give these stories an irresistible holistic beauty. Mother seals that suckle human infants, gentlemen seals that provide seal-back rides to the November fair and then go for a drink afterward, wounded seals that require the hand that cut them open to close them up again, lover seals that arrive “at the seventh stream” to meet the yearning young wife--”and it wasna for good they met so often”--these are not escapist fantasies but a form of poetry, especially if we think of poetry in terms of its definition as a dream dreamt in the presence of reason.

I was lucky enough to get to know Thomson and his wife, Martina, 20 years after the publication of “The People of the Sea.” “Woodbrook” (1974), a book that was at once an erotic idyll and a work of historical reconstruction, had just appeared and was making a great stir. It told of David’s arrival in Ireland in the 1930s as tutor to the young daughter of an Anglo-Irish family in County Roscommon, and through that story contrived also to tell the story of other realities--social, cultural, historical and political--that had been central to Irish life for centuries. Again, this was a version of pastoral, the world regarded through an artfully innocent eye, one that thereby revealed all the more lucidly rights and wrongs, hurts and beauties, usually taken for granted. A result of its success was the increased frequency of the Thomsons’ visits to Dublin and other parts of the country, and the opportunity to become friends. By the time of David’s death in 1988, the writer whom I had first gotten to know in print as the co-author (with George Ewart Evans) of another classic beastbook, “The Leaping Hare” (1972), had published two further books of autobiography, “In Camden Town” (1983) and “Nairn in Darkness and Light” (1987), work in which followed his own creative, truth-telling bent with characteristic unpredictability and sprightliness.

“Nairn in Darkness and Light” takes him back to the house he calls Tigh na Rosan in the first chapter of “The People of the Sea,” and in the later book he recreates the Edwardian order of life that reigned there for a few years after the First World War. As the son of a father who had served in the Indian Army and had been wounded in the trenches, David was sprung from that socially privileged world, but at the age of 11 what might have been an education and a career typical of one of his class was interrupted. Because of an injury to his eye, which would drastically impair his sight for years to come, his parents sent him north out of England to the large, sea-lit security of his grandparents’ home, and it was because of the uncanny purity of his account of that place, and of the life he lived in it, that I found myself one summer night a few years after David’s death, on the pier at Nairn.

Behind me, the big house he had dwelt in was now a hotel, but out beyond, the Moray Firth still clucked at the pier-head and glimmered like cloudy pewter as far as the horizon. Then suddenly in the early dark the strollers were murmuring and halting, hands were pointing toward an agitation in the water farther out. I heard the word “dolphins.” There was a perceptible flitter and rollick in the dark offing, and all through my body a tremor of joy: I couldn’t help imagining our friend in his other world, out there astride the dolphin’s back, scanning the waves for a selchie, haring it for all he was worth toward the open sea.