The Nine Lives of Naomi Mitchison: A Biography by Jenny Calder Virago 340pp, £20 in UKNovember 1st this year will mark the 100th birthday of the Scottish writer Naomi Mitchison. This year's Edinburgh Book Festival celebrated her contribution to culture and literature in Scotland. All around one of the tents in the Charlotte Square site sideboards notate her longevity. This biography seems to have established a reputation.
It is therefore graceless to record but essential to understand the central theme of this ill-conceived book. It is written by an academic. Jenni Calder has previously written detailed works on Sir Walter Scott, George Orwell and Robert Louis Stevenson. The intellectual vigour present in those books is absent here. Gender questions emasculate, if her publishers will excuse the terms, criticism. Mitchison in this reading is a gadfly turned into a butterfly. She becomes interesting as a social cipher rather than a literary commentator.
Naomi Mitchison was born in Edinburgh and educated at the Dragon School, Oxford. Her brother was the geneticist J.B.S. Haldane and her best work is the evocative portraits of their childhood in Small Talk (1973) and All Change Here (1975).
In 1916 she married the barrister and Labour MP Richard (Dick) Mitchison, later Baron Mitchison. From 1937 they lived in some splendour as Laird and Lady of Carradale, Kintyre, where she has been active in local politics. In the Sixties she travelled extensively in Africa and was adopted as Mmarona (Mother) by the Bakgatha tribe in Botswana.
She has published over seventy books including novels, essays, short stories and a volume of verse, The Cleansing of the Knife (1978). These are the facts. Calder, unfortunately, also relates fictions. Mitchison's selective account of her "open marriage" with Dick is accepted uncritically. "Such a relationship is not incompatible with being in love with someone else," she quotes, reasonably enough. But Mitchison's own behaviour and responses to infidelity by others, both in Scotland and Africa, give a totally different impression.
She is petulant at rejection, impatient at criticism, indignant at charges of being fickle. She is downright manipulative in interviews and a close reading of her own words suggests she held some very odd notions of loyalty. By the end of the book, "love" is a four-letter word given abusive connotations. Calder fails to examine these contradictions to the public image.
So much for the personality. Does Calder justify her subject's literary status? Is she, as some pundits have it, "part of the great Scottish renaissance started by MacDiarmid"? No, to both rhetorical questions.
Historical mythology informs the better early work, The Corn King and the Spring Queen (1931). Plundered family history gives The Bull Calves (1947) a certain curiosity value. The writing, however, in all her books is a mixture of the fey and the fanciful and comes across as artificial in tone and rhythm. Calder, so good on Stevenson, again seems unwilling to discuss this imperative in a literary biography.
Respect for one's elders is a basic covenant in this reviewer's ethical code. This book is challenging only in that respect. As the subject said to the hagiographer: "Adequate love making is hard for tired people".
Hayden Murphy is a poet and arts journalist based in Edinburgh
