Grassic Gibbon's debut novel pulled from shelves because of nudity

Times

27-06-2025

Lewis Grassic Gibbon's debut novel sank without trace after it was stripped from shelves and branded 'indecent' because of its sexually explicit content and artwork, previously unpublished documents have shown.
The Aberdeenshire-born author is now regarded as a literary titan and his 1932 masterpiece Sunset Song has repeatedly been voted as the greatest Scottish novel of all time.
However, correspondence recently placed in the Scottish National Library in Edinburgh, shows that Stained Radiance — his now almost completely forgotten first full-length novel — was blacklisted by affronted booksellers.
The 1930 work focused on the lives of three sexually liberated women of the Jazz Age and their relationships with a thinly-disguised version of the author, whose real name was James Leslie Mitchell.
While the subject matter was risqué, a front cover that featured images of a naked man and woman sealed its fate. Gibbon expressed bemusement and exasperation over the matter in letters written shortly after the book was published.
In a missive to a friend he wrote: 'The funniest thing of all about Stained Radiance — and this you'll scarcely believe — is that the picture on the jacket has shocked various people.
'My branch of Mudies' [a bookseller] has four copies, but the jacket has been religiously removed from each!
'Why on earth a rather well-executed picture of two nude, normal and rather good-looking human beings should shock the reading public is a problem that might stagger even Dr Freud.'
In another letter Gibbon disclosed that the bohemian artwork had offended close friends and family members and resulted in his novel being banned by one of the country's largest high street chains. He wrote of his astonishment at 'the amount of stupefied indignation that Stained Radiance seems to have raised'.
He added: 'My mother is shocked, my sister-in-law is coldly polite, the Daily Sketch has a hysteric fit over my 'brutality', while Boots bans the books from their shelves as 'indecent'.
'Most papers refuse to review it at all, while the booksellers are scared to display it with its shocking cover.
'I stand amazed but half inclined to write another novel in the same train, with its theme the selected lives of a number of people who were shocked by Stained Radiance.'
The first novel sold only a handful of copies but was republished decades after his death. After developing peritonitis, Gibbon died aged just 33 in 1935.
However, his correspondence reveals that he was in the process of planning to write an experimental, warts-and-all autobiography entitled Memoirs of a Materialist.
A synopsis, written the year before his untimely death, shows he planned to weave essays on topics such as 'class war', 'the Scots as a people' and a 'consideration of how and where civilisation first arose' alongside candid accounts of his life.
Before becoming an author, and embracing Marxism, Gibbon served with the Royal Army Service Corps in India, Iran and Egypt and the RAF. A number of the proposed chapters are contentious reflections on his years of military service. One is entitled 'The author in Egypt: A morning after a night genteelly engaged in touring the pyramids and the brothels.' Another is provisionally called: 'Essay on the most cowardly, helpless and brainless of beings: the English soldier.'
Despite growing up in socially conservative rural communities in the north east, Gibbon was liberal and ahead of his time on sexual matters.
This is highlighted by his plan to pen a chapter entitled: 'A consideration of the relations between men and women, men and men and men and semi-men.'
Gibbon also wanted to use the work to pay tribute to his mentor, HG Wells.
In 1927 when the Scot was an impoverished clerk, he sent a sample of his writing to his hero; the man who created classic works such The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds and The Invisible Man.
He expected to hear nothing further and to return to his humdrum day job but instead Wells, then a major international celebrity, sent a swift response, stating: 'Very good story. Stick to it! You can do this sort of thing and will certainly come through.'
The authors went on to become firm friends, bonding over their socialist convictions and libertine attitudes towards sex.
Tilting against the staid mores of his age Wells advocated 'free love' and lived a lifestyle which would today be described as polyamorous.
Gibbon is best remembered for Sunset Song and for its main protagonist Chris Guthrie, a sexually liberated feminist living in the fictional Mearns village of Kinraddie.
Nicola Sturgeon, the former first minister, wrote an effusive introduction in a republished edition in 2020: 'In no small way, I owe my love of literature to Sunset Song.'
It spawned a big screen adaptation starring Peter Mullan and Agyness Deyn in 2015, while Gibbon's memory is maintained in a museum in his native Aberdeenshire.
The book, part of a trilogy known collectively as A Scots Quair, topped a BBC poll to find Scotland's most popular novel in 2016.