Scottish Authors > John Buchan Novelist, Publisher & Politician 1875-1940

Buchan was born on 26th August 1875 in Perth, son of a Free Church of Scotland minister, later domiciled in Glasgow and Peebles. Like his sister Anna (1877-1948) the popular novelist "0. Douglas", he was educated at Hutcheson's Grammar School, Glasgow. At Glasgow University Buchan produced an anthology of Bacon's essays, and a novel deriving from Conan Doyle's recent Brigadier Gerard stories, blended with the Borders and their Covenant legends he knew so well, Sir Quixote of the moors. Thence he went to Oxford which made him take another first degree as though Glasgow could not award one.

Buchan's acquiescence in this dishonour to his country of origin, and the first laurels it had given him, symbolised the dilemma of his literary life. The English establishment received his deference and gave him rewards, but Scotland provided both his richest sources and his bedrock of reassurance. His devotion to Scott and Stevenson would repay itself with historical novels such as John Burnet of Barns (1898), and Witch Wood (1927), both showing their sense of Scots divided loyalties. Buchan spoke to his less fortunate counterparts through popular anthologies and biographies of writers such as Izaak Walton, Edmund Burke, Walter Scott, Walter Raleigh, Montrose, Julius Caesar and - less literary - Augustus and Cromwell.

But Buchan's greatest literary triumphs reveal his own insecurity as to his conquest of and by England. The terror of the young lawyer suddenly surrounded by agents of an establishment intent on his destruction (The Power house); the alienated South African fleeing to a womb-like Scotland pursued by police and enemy spies (The Thirty-nine steps and, with transfer to a German setting, Greenmantle); the dream of Scottish fortune colliding with the vision of a liberated black Africa (Prester John); new ideals in the promise of slum Scottish schoolboys (Huntingtower); the fascination of landed and moneyed success briefly (and fraudulently) risking all in a wild outlaw adventure (John Macnab); the early ethnic rivalry implicit in his anti-Semitic flashes being replaced by a celebration of Jewish integrity culminating in the death of the hero at the hands of Nazis (A Prince of the captivity, 1933, almost certainly the first major anti-Nazi popular novel).

Buchan crowned his political career as Baron Tweedsmuir, Governor-General of Canada (1935-40) and Chancellor of Edinburgh University; and crowned his literary career with the posthumous Sick Heart River, virtually describing his own dying in the metaphor of his hero Leithen giving his last months to the aid of doomed Indians. A Catholic priest obituarises Leithen:

"His noble, frosty egoism was merged in something nobler. He had meant to die in the cold cathedral of the North, ceasing to live in a world which had no care for life. Now he welcomed the humblest human environment, for he had come to love his kind indeed, to love everything that God had made."

Buchan died in Canada on 11th February 1940, almost on the date he evidently intended for the passing of Leithen.

Owen Dudley Edwards

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