George Mackay Brown: A Literary Executor’s Archive
The 2014 GMB Memorial Lecture was given by Dr Linden Bicket on the work of creating the George Mackay Brown literary archive. When the writer died in 1996, his vast collection of manuscripts, notes and notebooks was given into the keeping of his friend Archie Bevan who became his literary executor. With Brian Murray, he ensured the publication of much of the hitherto unpublished work. When his health deteriorated, the collection was permanently loaned to Orkney Library and Archive. The first instalment consisted of 21 boxes from the attic of his house in Stromness.
Late in 2011 Linden Bicket came to Orkney. She was working on her PhD and was the Research Assistant on the project ‘George Mackay Brown: A Literary Executor’s Archive’ funded by The British Academy at Glasgow University. Now she began the patient, painstaking project of sifting through box after box of material, day after day for six weeks until it was organised and catalogued. It now formed the first archival collection of GMB’s work in Orkney.
It was a process which GMB had himself begun. ‘Why?’ he asked, questioning in Letters from Hamnavoe the interest in writers’ papers. ‘In order, possibly, that some student in the year 2000, avid for a PhD, might sieve through all those blots and scratchings . . . to find out the way a certain person’s mind worked in the nineteen-seventies.’ (1)
‘In 2011,’ Linden Bicket would later write, ‘I was that very student.’ (2) For a literature scholar with a deep interest in the writer’s thought and work, the process was illuminating and rewarding. Among the box contents were early drafts of familiar poems and novels – and a large volume of unpublished material.
Notes and annotations revealed at times the unfolding of the writer’s thought as his work proceeded, and his pains to perfect the writing. Dates occasionally indicated the length of time he might work on a poem, returning to it and redrafting it at intervals over a number of years.
His stated vision of writing as a craft, developing from skills continually learned and practiced, was here, visibly rooted in his drafts and redrafts.
Reflecting on that time in Orkney more recently, Linden said: ‘I’ll never forget working through those boxes of George’s work in Hopedale every day, and trotting downstairs to eat Elizabeth’s delicious lunches and chat to her and Archie . . . Those six weeks were such a special part of my life.’
Dr Linden Bicket
Originally from Ayrshire, Linden Bicket completed an honours degree in Scottish Literature at the University of Glasgow, and was awarded the Neil Munro Medal. In 2011 she completed her doctorate, A God-ordained web of creation: The faithful fictions of George Mackay Brown, also at the University of Glasgow. It was shortlisted for the Ross Roy medal for best PhD in a field relating to Scottish Literature. From 2011-12 she worked as research assistant on the project, ‘George Mackay Brown: A Literary Executor’s Archive’.
She is now a Lecturer in Literature and Religion in the School of Divinity at the University of Edinburgh. She has published widely on George Mackay Brown and is the author of George Mackay Brown and the Scottish Catholic Imagination (Edinburgh University Press, 2017). She is also interested in Scottish children’s fiction and she is currently researching the work of women Catholic writers, including Elizabeth Jennings, Flannery O’Connor, and Alice Thomas Ellis.
(1) George Mackay Brown, Letters from Hamnavoe (London: Steve Savage Publishers, 2002) pp. 126-127
(2) Linden Bicket, ‘Rough Jottings and Shapings: George Mackay Brown in the Archives’ in Open House, May 2016
You can browse the online catalogue for the George Mackay Brown archival collection at Orkney Library and Archive’s website: https://orkneylibrary.org.uk/orkney-archive/
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