With the briefest nod to London as the seat of politics and business and world-weariness, the events of John Macnab (1925) unfold entirely in the western Highlands of Scotland. One hot summer evening, three friends who have known each other since Eton find themselves in their club. Edward Leithen is heavy bored and out of sorts. His doctor has told him, “If you consult me as a friend, I advise you to steal a horse in some part of the world where a horse thief is usually hanged.” His friends are Palliser-Yeates, an international banking magnate, and Charles Merkland, Lord Lamancha, a rising politician (who like Leithen, is playing hooky from the House and “an important division advertised by a three-line whip”). An acquaintance at the club, Archie Roylance, a former airman in the war, is just enough younger to look up to the three as models of worldly success, and he is dumbfounded when all three confess that they are bored with everything. “Archie was truly shocked. Then a light of remembrance came into his eye.”
Roylance’s head gamekeeper Wattie Lithgow had been right-hand man to a white hunter back from East Africa bored with ordinary sport who challenged Scottish landowners to stop him from shooting a stag. “In-var-i-ably” he made his kill and removed it from under the nose of the keepers before delivering it to the owner, “for he wasn’t a thief.” The three soon hatch a plan to roost at Roylance’s remote estate, Crask, and inform the owners of several larger sporting estates in the vicinity that John Macnab will take a salmon on the fly or shoot a deer on their grounds.
Shortly before I re-read John Macnab for this note, in the beat-up copy of the Houghton Mifflin edition that has followed me all these years, I wrote to Mark Valentine that this is the one Buchan novel that approaches Wodehouse in its playful deployment of coincidence and trope and cliché. And then, when I did some bibliographical digging to verify a spelling that gave me pause, I found that the serial publication in Chambers’s Journal (from December 1924 to July 1925), has a subtitle. John Macnab: A Comedy for Poachers appears at the head of each new feuilleton and as a running head in the journal! After the heyday of the Victorian triple-decker, publishers have generally avoided subtitles for novels, but magazine publishers follow their own rules. All is now clear! The impoverished Highland family clinging to the land; a showpiece mansion and salmon river leased to wealthy Boston Brahmins, “with no trace of an accent”; a riddle of Viking archaeology; the newly ennobled Lord Claybody, an industrialist arriviste, and his spoiled son; the yappy Highland terrier; the speech at a political meeting (Buchan does this chapter well); tweed in all hues, from an “aggressively new” kilt of fawn-coloured tweed to “a suit of clothes that would have been refused by a self-respecting tramp, but which, as a matter of fact, had been his stalking outfit for a dozen years”; truculent gillies, friendly journalists, and honest navvies (usually demobbed soldiers down on their luck); and even the Old Etonian tramp.
Up in Scotland, things get going quickly, the choreography is great, and the tale plays out with Buchan’s brilliant sense of timing and surprise. The three members of the John Macnab syndicate choose their tasks by lot. Palliser-Yeates and Lamancha draw the shooting estates, Glenraden and Haripol. Leithen gets the salmon river, heavily patrolled except for one patch where “never a man has killed a saumon in it, for the fish dinna bide”. The odds seem to weigh heavily against John Macnab. But Leithen recalls a Canadian river and an aged man from Boston who fished a stretch of still, unruffled, sun-warmed water with a curious technique and very light tackle. There are other factors to shift the probabilities.
Fish Benjie is the most remarkable of Buchan’s minor characters across all his novels and is given an entire genealogy and biography. Fish Benjie is an outcast teenager whose education is informal but practical and he has knowledge of “many things that are not provided for in the educational system in Scotland. [. . .] The boy knew how to make cunning whistles from ash and rowan with which to imitate a snipe’s bleat or the call of an otter, and he knew how at all times and in al weathers to fend for himself and find food and shelter.” Buchan was the son of a minister, so the likelihood of a feral childhood would have been remote, yet he has profound sympathies for the Gorbals Die-hards in Huntingtower (1920) and for Fish Benjie, who with his pony and cart is at the right place to act “as middleman between the fishing-cobles of Inverlarrig and the kitchens of the shooting-lodges [. . .] he lived as Robinson Crusoe lived, on the countryside around him, asking no news of the outer world.” (The Scottish National Dictionary defines coble as a small flat-bottomed rowing boat, used mostly in river or lake fishing, or for salmon-fishing by net near the coast.) The only two Americans I have encountered in the last fifty years who knew John Macnab were two distinguished New Yorkers. The first was a pre-eminent collector, who dubbed his younger friend Fish Benjie. She came from nothing and has risen high on the strength of her intellect and energy, and the collector gave her a practical education in enjoying what New York has to offer. She called him the King of New York and perhaps he was, for a time.
The John Buchan Collection at Queen’s University (Kingston) holds the author’s manuscripts, including John Macnab. The passage reproduced here (chapter III, MS page 9), gives us Fish Benjie in his own words as he quizzes Leithen:
‘My name’s Benjamin Bogle, but I get Fish Benjie frae most folk. I sell’t haddies and flukes to Crask these twa months. [. . .] I bide in my cart. My father’s in jyle and my mother’s lyin’ badly in Muirtown. I sell fish to a’ the gentry.’
‘And you want to know why you can’t sell them at Crask?’
‘Aye, I wad like to ken that. The auld wife used to be a kind body and gie me jeely pieces. What’s turned her into a draygon?’
Fish Benjie fights free of the condescending, even sanctimonious tone of Buchan’s potted biography in chapter IV (curiously lacking from the Kingston manuscript), and rubs along pretty well on equal terms with the lawyer, banker, and politician, and with the landowner’s daughter, Janet Raden, another of the great minor characters in Buchan’s novels. She enchants Archie Roylance and faces down John Macnab after he shoots a deer in the home beat at Glen Raden. Fish Benjie and Janet conspire to change the rules of the game in the final assault on Haripol.
The setting of John Macnab is just over the watershed from Machray deer forest where Richard Hannay waited as live bait in a trap for his foe in John Buchan’s 1924 novel, The Three Hostages. The two novels share a recurring character, Archibald Roylance, but could not be more dissimilar in tone. Edward Leithen figures in Buchan thrillers from The Power-House (written 1913) right up to The Gap in the Curtain (1932) and Mountain Meadow / Sick-Heart River (1941). In Clubland Heroes (second ed., 1974), Richard Usborne wrote that Leithen “stops occasionally to analyse himself, and is modest enough not to find himself very interesting. But as a Buchan character par excellence he is really the most interesting of the lot. And the nicest.” Leithen is usually seen as the author’s alter ego, and if — even in this comedy — the narrator faithfully records the casual prejudices of the English upper classes, these do not issue from Leithen’s mouth. I would say Edward Leithen is chalk and Richard Hannay is cheese, though both men were charter members of The Runagates Club (1928), “of one totem and family, like old schoolfellows”, as were also the other two constituents of John Macnab, banker John Palliser-Yeates and Tory politician Lord Lamancha.
Archie Roylance falls in love during this eventful week and Leithen takes his salmon. Lamancha gets his noble stag, the “old hero”, with a tough shot in dreadful weather and Wattie drags away the trophy. The final scene of the comedy sees Lamancha oozing water and mud onto the marquetry floors and elegant carpets of Lady Claybody’s drawing room as the parties converge. The Claybodys have unsportingly imported navvies to trample round the hills on guard duty, but they could never permit a leading politician to be disgraced, and so the fix is in, the British ruling classes suborn the friendly journalist who releases a discreet, controlled story, and the old order continues. Kate Macdonald writes succinctly in her introduction to The Runagates Club (Handheld Press, 2017): “a closed society will neutralise any threat to its members.”
I first read John Macnab as a teenager, either from my father’s shelves or in the boarding school library. It would have been around the time the family (my parents and their four sons) spent a few weeks driving through Scotland in a VW bus, from B&B to small hotel, from the shores of Loch Lomond up through the highlands to Seil and Skye and then on to the northwest. I concede that I am susceptible to Scottish landscapes; John Macnab is all about the hills and rivers of Scotland. There is even, prominently, a Map to Illustrate the Doings of John Macnab! If I didn’t yet know the word psychogeography in 1977, the terrain I walked through is firmly imprinted in memory: the meadows and bogs and hills, and especially the climb up An Teallach on a day hike. I am not an angler and will never stalk a deer, but the sporting pursuits in John Macnab are so well written — like the epic foxhunt in The Curse of the Wise Woman by Lord Dunsany— that the blood is stirred. It is curious that there seems to be a thing people do now, among the fishin’ and shootin’ classes, known and advertised as “a proper Macnab, by which we mean the modern classic iteration, inspired by John Buchan and tweaked for the modern sportsman in the pages of The Field. That is, to catch a salmon, shoot a stag and finish with a brace of grouse, all taken between dawn and dusk, in one day” (there are also several thematic variations listed). I suspect Edward Leithen would be appalled.
John Macnab is a lot of fun. It’s light comedy, as its readers knew a century ago: don’t pick too hard at the metaphor.
(Henry Wessells)
Note
The manuscript page is reproduced with permission of Rare Books and Special Collections, Queen’s University Library, Kingston. The map is from the Houghton Mifflin edition (the same map that serves as the frontispiece to the Hodder & Stoughton edition).
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