From its first sentence - The frowsy chamber-maid of the "Red Lion" had just finished washing the front door steps. - The House with the Green Shutters attacks one's senses. By the end, one has been assailed by a remorseless and almost soul-destroying sense of despair for humanity - particularly of the Scottish ilk. One can view the novel as 'brutally honest' or as a bitter polemic. Either way, Hardy's cruel nature's law seems mild compared with this story of cruel mankind's laws. George Douglas Brown, who wrote as George Douglas, admitted to a friend: "So far, nobody but the Glasgow Herald man has seen that I'm showing up the Scot malignant - which you and I thought, in a way, the raison d'être of the book." Brown, born at Ochiltree in 1869, was educated at Ayr Academy, Glasgow University and Balliol College, Oxford and pursued a career in journalism or, as he described it, 'belle lettres'. He early on formed a deep dislike of the Kailyard School of 'Ian Maclaren' * and others - he hated its maudlin and morbid sentiment and determined to write a violent counterblast, a polemic against the whole genre.
The story of John Gourlay and his family is the chronicle of a pathway to hell. Gourlay dominates the first half of the book as he dominated the village of Barbie, with a virtual monopoly of its carrying trade; his son, also John, is the focus of the second half. Brown skewers Gourlay senior's character mercilessly:
Gourlay, understanding nothing, was able to sneer at everything...The man had made dogged scorn a principle of life, to maintain himself at the height which his courage warranted. His thickness of wit was never a bar to the success of his irony.
When Gourlay approached there was always a competition for who should be hindmost.
The house [with the Green Shutters] was himself; there was no division between them. He had built it bluff to represent him to the world. It was his character in stone and lime.
...for the house which a man has built seems to express his character and stand for him before the world, as a sign of his success.
Strong men of a mean understanding often deliberately assume, and passionately defend, peculiarities of no importance, because they have nothing else to get a repute for.
For, like most scorners of the world's opinion, Gourlay was its slave...
The supreme tragedy for Gourlay, as his wealth, standing and world began to crash around him was that more and more, as his other supports fell away, Gourlay attached himself to the future of his son.
His son is idle, worthless and a braggart. A failure at Barbie's school and at Edinburgh University, he turns to drink and the latter part of the book chronicles his pitiful, occasionally maudlin, decline into alcoholism. Brown skewers him - There is nothing on earth more vindictive than a weakling - as the denouement approaches. He murders his father, commits suicide and he's followed to the grave by his mother and sister in a shocking final chapter: We are by ourselves - the Gourlays whom God has cursed.
The core of the story is about the tragic family, but the book also has the other mission to fulfil - the denigration and cruel depiction of Scots' petty vindictiveness in a small town.
The genus "bodie" is divided into two species: the "harmless bodies" and the "nesty bodies". The bodies of Barbie mostly belonged to the second variety... For many reasons intimate to the Scot's character, envious scandal is rampant in petty towns such as Barbie.
Many Scots walk through life wrapped comfortably round in the wool of their own conceit.
"What they'll think of me at home" - that matters most to Scotsmen who go out to make their way in the world. A Scot revisiting his native place ought to walk very quietly. For the parish is sizing him up.
Common sense...makes the average Scotsman to be over-cautious. His combinations are rarely Napoleonic until he becomes an American. In his native dales he seldom ventures on a daring policy. And yet his forecasting mind is always detecting "possibeelities".
And of an important character in Gourlay's fall: Gibson's [eyes] had the depth of cunning, not the depth of character, and they glistened like the eyes of a lustful animal.
But there was always the demon drink to fortify and sustain the small town harpies (skilfully portrayed in all their meanness and spite by Brown) - and they made for the Red Lion for the matutinal dram...whisky makes the meanest of Scots poetical
One of his targets was the Scots ministry ('Ian Maclaren' was such), which he venomously sent up: 'Of the Rev. Mr. Struthers...[he] had big splay feet, short stout legs, and a body of such bulging bulbosity, that all the droppings of his spoon - which were many - were caught on the round of his black waistcoat, which always looked as if it had just been splattered by a grey shower.' (His accurate sense of humour reminded me a little of Sir Walter Scott and Susan Ferrier). And again:
'Ministers are just like the rest o' folk. They mind me o' last year's early tatties. They're grand when they're gude, but the feck o' them's frostit.' and
(Gourlay speaking of his son) 'I mean to make ye a minister - they have plenty of money and little to do - a grand easy life o't. MacCandlish tells me you're a stupid ass, but have some little gift of words. You have every qualification!'
One felt Brown was berating the prissy Kailyard School novels with "Ou, there's waur than an oath now and than. Like spice in a bun it lends a briskness. But it needs the hearty manner wi't.
Over and above Brown's ceaselessly malign depiction of the Gourlays and small-town Scots, one feels he added, throughout the book, some heartfelt and personal comments - bitter, perhaps?
Our insight is often deepest into those we hate, because annoyance fixes our thought on them to probe.
He was one of the gimlet characters who, by diligence and memory, gain prizes in their schooldays - and are fools for the remainder of their lives.
And the intensity of this remark: It's almost as offensive to ask a man when his book will be out, as to ask a woman when she'll be delivered...A big work's a mistake; it's a monster that devours the brain.
As his closest friend wrote, after Brown's early death aged just 33: There's no doubt that he allowed the moral view to run away with the artistic intention. Humour does leaven the bitter lump - just. However, even the use of the Scots language seems not just humorous but caustic. In fact, it was not, as most think, Brown's first novel. He had written, under the pseudonym of Kennedy King, Love and the Sword - A Tale of the Afridi War (1899), a story for boys. Copies are on the Internet, but the only first edition, published also by John Macqueen, is offered at the monstrous price of £804! I must buy the far cheaper 1905 edition, published by John F. Shaw.
ADDENDUM
Reading George Blake's Barrie and the Kailyard School (1951) leads me to add one or two comments by him.
The house with the green shuitters is finally the mortuary of the Gourlays and their pride.
The supreme literary virtue of the tragedy is Brown's brilliant success in the presentation and characterization of his Greek chorus - the "bodies" of Barbie.
It is still said, sometimes by people who should know better, that it blasted the Kailyard seedlings overnight; and that is to ignore the clear fact that the Kailyard was bound to wither in the changing social and scientific conditions of the early twentieth century.
The last word was probably with Brown's old teacher at Glasgow University, that Walter Raleigh, who liked neither the human race nor its silly face, and wrote:
"I love the book for just this, it sticks the Kailyarders like pigs."
*
Ian Maclaren was the pen name of Rev. Dr. John Watson D.D. (1850-1907) who produced nostalgic tales of rural Scottish Life. His works included
Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush (1894) which sold over 700,000 copies
A Doctor of the Old School (1895)
The Days of Auld Lang Syne (1895)
Kate Carnegie and those Ministers (1896)
Afterwards and Other Stories (1898)
Rabbi Saunderson (1898)
Young Barbarians (1899)
I purchased all of them in first editions, a long time ago. Stimulated by Brown's polemical attack, I must try and re-read some of them! I need also to turn to A.J. Cronin's Hatter's Castle, castigated for plagiarising Brown's novel.
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