Neil M Gunn was born in Dunbeath, Caithness, on 8th November 1891, the seventh of nine children. His father, James Gunn, was a fisherman and his mother, Isabella Miller, a domestic servant. Gunn left Dunbeath in 1904 to live with his sister and her husband in St John's Town of Dalry, Kirkcudbrightshire. There he was privately educated in preparation for Civil Service exams which he passed in 1907. He moved to London experiencing the life of a rapidly expanding metropolis and being introduced to new political and philosophical thinking. In 1910 he became a Customs and Excise Officer and held a series of temporary Highland postings. During the First World War his duties routing ships around minefields exempted him from call-up. In 1921 he married Jessie Dallas Frew (1886-1963) known to her friends as Daisy, the daughter of an Inverness jeweller. They settled in Inverness when Gunn was appointed permanently to the Glen Mhor Distillery.

Gunn published short stories throughout the 1920s and identified with Hugh MacDiarmid's aim of effecting a "renaissance" in Scottish literature. Gunn was friendly with such literary figures as Naomi Mitchison, Nan Shepherd, Eric Linklater and Edwin and Willa Muir. Though his play The Ancient fire (1929) flopped it put him in touch with contemporary dramatists, James Bridie and John Brandane. J.B. Salmond, the editor of the Scots magazine, and George Blake and George Malcolm Thomson, directors of the Porpoise Press, were Gunn's supportive publishers.

In the 1930s Gunn was closely involved in SNP politics in Inverness and was subsequently asked to serve on the Committee on Post-War Hospitals (1941) and the Commission of Inquiry into Crofting Conditions (1951). In 1937 after the publication of Highland river, Gunn felt sufficiently established to resign his job and live by writing. The strath where Kenn plays and the idea of exploring the river to its source provide him with an alternative education, sustaining him even during wartime. Highland river with its narrative innovations and "golden age" themes is a modernist classic.

Gunn's novels open with gloomy accounts of the effects of Highland economic stagnation in The Grey coast (1926) and The Lost glen (1928) but the memories of Dunbeath and its strath engender optimism in the lyrical Morning tide (1931) and the mature Highland river. Highland life is explored historically in Sun circle (1930), Butcher's broom (1934) and The Silver darlings (1941), set respectively in the time of Viking incursions, the Clearances and the prosperous herring fishings of the nineteenth century. The later fiction combines popular forms with universal themes. In the detective story Bloodhunt (1952), good triumphs over evil. In the dystopian The Green isle of the great deep (1944), Highland values prevail over authoritarianism. These metaphysical themes, always present in Gunn's fiction, are inflected in later works by an interest in Zen Buddhism which he outlines in The Atom of delight (1956), an unconventional autobiography.

Gunn was a great exponent of Highland life: Whisky and Scotland (1935) is the work of an aficionado; he enjoyed fishing and the companionship of those such as his brother John and his friend Maurice Walsh, who shared these interests. Neil Gunn died on 15th January 1973.

www.dunbeathvillage.com

email Dunbeath Village

Top