A Last Wintery Reading

As with Spring coming to us, the wind told me so, it gives me time to read one of my favorite books, one last time before the end of Winter.

I knew a man who read Bleak House every Winter. I haven't read Bleak House. I haven't even watched the Masterpiece Theatre production of it, though it is on my que. I just kept thinking to myself, Winter is so bleak. Why read a book that already has bleak in the title? Yes, I know. Juvenile thinking, but it stuck.

But what I do try to read every winter is Farewell Miss Julie Logan by James Matthew (J.M.) Barrie. The subtitle A Wintry Tale just practically begs the reader to wait until the dark days and long nights.

I read this first in Glasgow, Scotland - a place of long nights and early days if I ever knew one. In the winter time the sun went up around 8am and was down by 4 at the latest. And we were in the southern section of the country. Never mind the Highlands. (On the opposite side of the spectrum, in summer the sun was up at 5am and it didn't get fully dark until about 10pm.)

I read this for my class Modern Scottish Literature - abbreviated to Mod Scot. That was where I first fell in love with this book. I didn't have my own copy; another international student and I shared a copy, and I think it eventually went back with her.

What makes this little gem so precious?

Barrie presents the story to us in first person narrative via diary. Rev. Adam Yestreen is in one of his first assignments as preacher, a place way up high in the Highlands. This is the kind of place where people come to visit in the summer, but leave before the fall sets in because once it snows, the glen is locked. There's no getting in or getting out. The wealthy English families before they leave, challenge the young Adam Yestreen to keep a diary of his first winter, saying that sometimes people go strange when they're locked up in the glen. (Didn't The Shining Teach us anything??)

So the thin novel/novella stands as that diary.

The backdrop of historical folklore such as the Jacobites, and the Young Pretender and in a culture where ghosts and the boogeymen are real, make this story a ghostly page turner, easily read in one evening.

This little piece is Barrie' final novel/novella masterpiece, published in 1932. Barrie died in 1937 of pneumonia. (The Boy David, a play written for Austrian Actress Elisabeth Bergner in 1936.) Yet it seems to be least well known.

To quote the bbc:

The novel maintains a powerful ambivalence, common to Scottish writing, between the spectral evocation of the haunted Scottish landscape and the powerful rendering of a fractured psyche torn by repressed desire and human isolation. This novel epitomises the best of Barrie’s work in which the condition of exile and the predicament of human isolation is the basis for the best of his fantasy and the most profound of his considerable psychological perception.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/scotland/arts/writingscotland/writers/j_m_barrie/works.shtml

It took me a good two years to track down the copy I have in my library. I found it hiding in an antiques store in Boston. The cover is a faded green with the title illustration in a ancient gold snowflakes that has now turned brassy with age. It's like holding friends with an old friend.

It was like a song that no one else had heard, that I kept humming the tune to. Today it's much more accessible, though still not commonly found.

While the Scots dialect that features so heavily in this piece may seem a bit off putting to readers, it does best to read the book out loud, or to say the words out loud and remember the Scots is largely phonetic. When all else fails, write down the word, and look it up.

There is such beauty in this book that I have never gotten tired of reading it.

To close, I shall give you a teaser.


from pg 1.

This is December One, 186_

I think it prudent to go no nearer to the date, in case what I am writing should take an ill turn or fall into curious hands. I need not be so guarded about the weather. It is a night of sudden blasts that half an hour ago threw my window at me. They went skirling from room to room, like officers of the law seeking to seize and deliver to justice the venturesome Scots minister who is sitting here ready to impeach all wraiths and warlocks. There was another blast the now. I believe I could rope the winds of the manse to my bidding to-night, and by running from door to door, opening and shutting, become the conductor of a gey sinister orchestra.