Leavening
In August 1969, George Mackay Brown wrote to Stella Cartwright: ‘Dear Stel, not many people have to walk such a hard road. One feels desperate with solitude often; then it is salutary to know that one is not alone, but is “involved with mankind”. And that means, as I understand it, that whenever you are brave, enduring, uncomplaining, then the whole world of suffering is helped and soothed somehow. This is sacrifice, and fulfilment and renewal: an incalculable leavening.’ This ‘incalculable leavening’ is what Christmas, the incarnation of the Word, renders possible. Mackay Brown noted elsewhere that ‘in a sense, everyone is the writer’s concern. The whole of humanity is his family and he must participate in their joys and ennuis and sufferings, otherwise what he does would be as meaningless as an endless game of patience.’ Quotations are from Maggie Fergusson’s George Mackay Brown: The Life, of which A.N. Wilson wrote it was ‘the best biography of a poet I have ever read’.
