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Times
27-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
Grassic Gibbon's debut novel pulled from shelves because of nudity
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it was stripped from shelves and branded 'indecent' because of its sexually explicit content and artwork, previously unpublished documents have shown.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.
The Herald Scotland
22-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Herald Scotland
New authorised biography of Lewis Grassic Gibbon
The popular acclaim of James Leslie Mitchell has risen exponentially in the 21st century, with his critical standing in European literature now assured. This is the first full critical biography, authorised by his family, of the author, who found enduring fame by his pen-name of Lewis Grassic Gibbon, universally heralded for the plangent autofictional novel Sunset Song and for the epic trilogy of modern Scotland, A Scots Quair. A native of Speyside, William Malcolm has devoted his career as teacher and academic to the promotion of Scottish literature. His lifelong passion for Mitchell/Gibbon has produced three critical studies, from publication of his Ph.D. study in 1984, as well as scholarly editions of Lewis Grassic Gibbon: The Reader and of Gibbon's masterpiece, Sunset Song, for Penguin Classics. READ MORE: What Scottish literary great should be next in culture war slaughter? 'This has all the hallmarks of a classic' - Nine new books to read next Pardon my French: could this be a record in Scottish literature? Appointed an Honorary Fellow of the Association for Scottish Literary Studies in 2017, Dr Malcolm's privileged position as literary adviser to the Grassic Gibbon Centre and joint administrator of the Mitchell Literary Estate has granted him unique insight to Mitchell's life and work. The culmination of forty years of dedicated research, this volume represents the realisation of the author's long-standing pledge to the Mitchell family to provide an intimate and rounded portrait of the man behind the legacy. Drawing on a wealth of fresh evidence from public and private sources, History of a Revoluter is "the riveting narrative of the social, physical and emotional hardships that Leslie Mitchell had to overcome in order to achieve literary success, abruptly cut short by his early death". Set against the turbulence of the early decades of the 20th century, Mitchell's story traces the complex conditions that forged a uniquely passionate personality whose writings have won unparalleled popular resonance, and whose keen humanitarian appeal has never been so compelling. Scottish novelist James Robertson said: 'This account of the life and work of one of Scotland's greatest modern writers must be the benchmark against which all future studies of James Leslie Mitchell/Lewis Grassic Gibbon are measured. "Wide-ranging yet packed with detail, it leaves no stone unturned in exploring the origins of Mitchell's genius and charting how in his short life he was able to write so much, so well, on so many different subjects and, in his Scots Quair trilogy, create an enduring and much-loved masterpiece.'
