Something Old

 Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published year or two ago.  

     “THE HOUSE WITH THE GREEN SHUTTERS” by George Douglas (First published in 1901)

 

            Imagine you are a young Scotsman who is very intelligent and has won a scholarship to the university of Oxford. He reads a lot, including current fiction set in Scotland. Imagine you have become sick of all the sweet little Scottish novels that are being churned out – about charming, picturesque small Scottish towns where people get on very well with one another, look after one another, occasionally have a harmless dram and make cheerful, harmless jokes about the dominie and the deacon as they watch the beautiful sun go down over the brae. They always have happy endings of course.  Imagine if the young man wants to hit back at this romanticised rubbish. He rebels. He decides to write a novel about what small Scottish towns are really like – the back-biting and nasty parochialism where poisonous gossip is the main currency and people are always scheming to take successful people down a peg.

So the young author writes his novel. It is called The House With the Green Shutters. When it is first published, it immediately becomes what we would now call a best-seller. George Douglas  [full name George Douglas Brown, born 1869 – died 1902] intended to write more novels. But he died relatively young (aged 33) in 1902, the year after his only novel came out. Douglas certainly depicted small Scottish towns as they often were over a century ago, and for some years The House With the Green Shutters was regarded as a minor classic. But few now see it that way. The hard fact is that, despite Douglas’s attempted reality, the novel goes over-the-top. In The House With the Green Shutters nearly every character is venal, underhanded, bullying or cowardly. Is this plausible, even in one small town? Worse, gradually what started out as a sort of reality turns into raw improbable melodrama.

 

                                George Douglas apparently with a very severe Scottish gaze

Synopsis as brief as I can make it: The setting is a small town in Ayrshire called Barbie. The time is the late 19^th century. John Gourlay is the most wealthy man in town. He is a big, bullying man. He intimidates his wife and daughter and he regards his one-and-only son John [sometimes called Jock] as a weakling and perhaps a simpleton – certainly not a worthy heir for aggressive John Gourlay, especially when the boy is so easily beaten up by other boys at the local school. Gourlay owns a large, dominating house, grander than other houses in the town and commonly referred to as “the house with the green shutters”. Much of his wealth comes from being a carter, with a string of underpaid employees who, in Gourlay’s many carts, deliver coal and various goods to the town and environs. Many people envy Gourlay’s wealth as well as hating his bullying ways. A group of men known as the “bodies” [only one of the hundreds of Scottish words when there is dialogue in this novel] gather around in the evening and gossip, always negatively and denigrating anybody who seems to be succeeding in any way. Provost and Deacon – who are supposed to be pillars of the council and the church – are part of the “bodies”. And of course they hate Gourlay. So they are delighted when a new entrepreneur comes to town, Wilson, who not only has acquired  a modern “emporium” [fancy old-fashion name for a store selling all sorts of goods] but who is also savvy enough to know that railways are now taking over carts for carrying goods. Gourlay begins to lose his customers. He makes less and less money until he begins -  without telling his wife -  that he bit by bit has mortgaged his house. His nemesis Wilson has a bright son and Wilson has the wealth to send his son to the University of Edinburgh. Foolishly, to keep up with what he thinks is his prestige, Gourlay also pays for his son to go to the University of Edinburgh. So more of his money drains away. He is humiliated when he discovers that, without knowing it, he has taken up some work by a company that is really run by Wilson. He is now openly ridiculed for all his bluster. There is only one moment in the novel when he says something positive to his son. Young Jock wins, at the university, a prize for an essay he has written. Gourlay congratulates him, but only because Wilson’s son hasn’t yet won any prize. What Gourlay doesn’t know is that Jock is hardly doing any study at Edinburgh. He has fallen in with a group of more wealthy students who can waste a lot of time carousing and drinking. Jock joins them, gradually takes to drinking whisky and bit by bit becomes an incurable alcoholic. He thinks he is being witty when he insults a professor… and he is expelled from the university. He comes home in disgrace… to the glee of all the town’s gossipers and to the wrath of Gourlay. Dear reader, let me simplify how it all wraps up. Gourlay shouts, intimidates and almost beats up his feeble son to the tears of his timid wife. His son runs away, drinks even more whisky and feels he can deal with his father. He goes back home and kills his father by bashing him with a fire-poker . His mother wants to shield her son from being hanged, so they clean things up to look it as if Gourlay fell. But Jock, by now plagued with delirium tremens and completely disoriented, commits suicide by drinking poison. Mother is now riddled with cancer. Mother and daughter now discover that the mortgage cannot be paid and they are going to be thrown out of their house. They have nowhere else to go. So, after reading a soothing chapter from the Bible, they both commit suicide by drinking such poison as Jock had left. The “bodies” and other gossipers think Gourlay got what he deserved. 

I do implore you not to blame me for this messy and in many ways ridiculous final melodrama. The House With the Green Shutters has many other faults. For those who do not understand Scottish dialects [and I am one of them] it is difficult to plough your way through some of the conversations on the page. Then there is George Douglas’s habit of describing characters physically in detail, but never making it clear why they behave the way they do. In other words, we do not really understand how they think, especially when it comes to the “bodies” and others. It is just taken for granted that they are malicious, just as we have to take it for granted that Gourlay is a violent bully without learning how he came to be that way. Boil the novel down and it’s essentially about the hubris and downfall of a tyrant in a small-minded town.

But this isn’t doing full justice to Douglas. First, there is obviously the truth that, in Scotland in the 19^th. century, technology was moving on and for the first time small towns were also moving on from horse-drawn carts to railways. That of course is part of Gourlay’s downfall, but it is dramatized clearly. Then there are some episodes that have a certain brilliance. In the early chapters, when young Jock is still an unhappy schoolboy, Douglas examines clearly how Jock thinks – intimidated by his father naturally, but he has his own perspective on the world. Jock is daunted by the thought of how huge the universe must be and how small and insignificant he must be. He escapes from his father by hiding in the loft and reading trash which he cannot follow. There are other high points in the novel, such as the vignette in which a pompous church-man, hearing that Jock has gained a prize for an essay, collars Jack and proceeds to try proving how erudite he is – which he clearly isn’t. There are other characters who stand out and – even if there are only one or two –they are compassionate and refuse to ridicule those who are down, such as the baker who calls out the “bodies” for their hypocrisy and their vicious gossip. 

Having said all this, though, The House With the Green Shutters fails to be a classic. There is little depth to it. Apparently, recently in Scotland there have been dramatized versions of the novel for the stage, but the novel is not likely to become a best-seller again.  

            Now for one of my awful confessions. I first read the novel by picking it off my father’s shelves when I was a young teenager, maybe aged about 14. I was intrigued by it, identified with the intimidated young boy [not that I had a father like Gourlay] and, at that age, shared some ideas about how vast the universe was and how daunting. As for the Scottish dialect words, I just put up with them. At that age I thought it was a great book. But that was then and this is now. I kept the book and it is the one that I now have on my shelves. It was published in 1933 by the old Collins Clear-Type Press. Included were five pictures by the artist Sidney Stanley, some of them almost surreal. The one that depicted Gourlay’s son overwhelmed by the “vast totality of things” still haunts me.

            Nasty Footnote: In 1932, the popular novelist A.J.Cronin wrote his first novel Hatter’s Castle. He went on to write such novels as The Citadel, The Stars Look Down, and The Keys To the Kingdom. All of them were turned into films, including Hatter’s Castle and very many others. He also invented the character of Doctor Findlay who became a British television favourite. But after Hatter’s Castle was published, some pointed out that it was very like George Douglas’s The House With the Green Shutters. I found on-line a letter that was published in The Spectator in the mid-1930s. It went thus: SIR,— No reviewer pointed out about “Hatter's Castle”… is nearly a replica of “The House With The Green Shutters”, the almost forgotten masterpiece of George Douglas….In both books a dour, avaricious Scot is the central figure—the hatter of Dr. Cronin's book is the alter ego of John Gourlay of The House With The Green Shutters—and the children of each are weaklings, with similar destinies. Whilst not suggesting plagiarism, I think that Dr. Cronin was sub-consciously influenced by the plan and general theme of the earlier novel.” Oh dear. How often writers steal ideas from other writers.