James Leslie Mitchell was born in Hillhead of Segget, a croft in Auchterless, north Aberdeenshire, to a farming family. The Mitchells moved south of Aberdeen when he was eight years old to a region called the Mearns, where he spent the rest of his childhood. Both his birth name and his pen name are hosts of his heritage: the names Mitchell, Leslie, Gibbon and Grassic are all family names from both his mother and father’s sides and can be traced back in the north-east for around three hundred years. His background was strongly agricultural, but when it came time for Mitchell to enter the world of work, he had a very ambivalent relationship with farming life, and decided to work in Aberdeen as a journalist. In 1917, however, he returned to his family in the Mearns and took up farming once again. Desperate for an alternative career, he joined up for the army in 1919, like many young men his age, and later enlisted in the RAF and was sent to fight in Egypt. He hated the army, but as they say, nothing is wasted on a writer, and his travels provided him with plenty of fuel for his craft, particularly in books such as The Lost Trumpet, another of his SF novels and set in Egypt.
Mitchell was finally was able to devote his life to his writing at the age of twenty-seven, but he was dead by thirty-four. He died from a perforated stomach ulcer. Although the literary world was grieved to lose him so soon, those final seven years of Mitchell’s life were extremely productive. In that time he wrote 17 books; fiction, non-fiction, biography, academic texts and short stories.
Dying so young, he didn’t live to see WWII, but the themes in Gay Hunter are spookily far-seeing with its Fascist characters, nuclear warfare, society divided into Hierarchies, the degradation and exploitation of the ‘Sub-Men’ by a ruling class. Ideas like these have echoes of Hitler’s visions, although the war had not yet happened. The signs were all there in current affairs for Mitchell to read: fascism and communism were on the rise, and the stage was being set for the war and its atrocities to begin. In Gay Hunter, there is a brief mention of Hitler and Mussolini—chilling for the modern reader, knowing what Mitchell did not.
Mitchell’s influences were not only political and scientific. There were exciting social and literary events happening around him that doubtless made an impact on his work. At the time in Scotland the Scottish Literary Renaissance was in full swing, headlined by the likes of Hugh MacDairmid and Edwin Morgan (and Sunset Song is considered one of the movement’s defining works), and 1928, only six years before Gay Hunter’s publication, the suffragists had succeeded in getting women the right to vote in the UK. Like A Scots Quair’s famous heroine, Chris Guthrie, Mitchell’s female protagonist, Gay, is such a well-rendered character that it is almost hard to believe she was written by an early twentieth-century man.
Gay Hunter is generally agreed to be James Leslie Mitchell’s best and most developed science fiction story, and unfortunately it was his last. He intended it as a ‘companion book’ to his 1932 novel, Three Go Back, using a lot of similar ideas of time travel and exploring primitivism to comment on contemporary society.
In a letter to his friend Christopher Morley, introducing Gay Hunter to him, Mitchell writes that “this book has no serious intent whatsoever. It is neither prophecy nor propaganda. It is written for the glory of sun and wind and rain, dreams by smoking camp-fires, and the glimpsed immortality of men”. But, as Edwin Morgan claims in his introduction to an edition of Gay Hunter, this book “affords a good example of trusting the tale rather than the teller”, for Mitchell has more to offer in this story than just a fun, science fiction romance.
There’s a Lewis Grassic Gibbon Centre in Arbuthnott, Aberdeenshire, near Laurencekirk, if you want to know more about him.
Gay Hunter
James Leslie Mitchell (Lewis Grassic Gibbon)
Art: Monica Burns
She looked round the room and its sham antique oak, all solemn lines of fiddley curlicues. A great sloped mirror showed herself. Being still very young, she looked at that self with attention, but not too much. The room was deserted but for the waiter bringing the soup. Then she saw Houghton enter.
He had changed from hiking-dress—perhaps he had carried that lounge suit in the rucksack. It certainly looked a trifle crumpled. And as certainly it improved his appearance. Gay drank soup and looked at him with a faint interest—he had good shoulders and a straight back, and the cool hauteur and rangy straightness of the English Army officer of myth and rumour. As good almost as meeting an ancient Mayan in the flesh.
Funny how much better the lounge suit was than the hiking-shirt and shorts. But she’d thought that often of the feeble attempts at rationalisation in clothes that men and women made. The scantier the garments, the more feeble and ridiculous and lewd the wearers looked. The Victorians were perfectly right and logical, bless their padded bottoms. Either you clothed yourself or you went naked. To sling shorts or the various pieces of a bathing suit over this and that portion of your anatomy was to make those portions suspect and taboo....
Houghton was standing beside her. He was stiff. “I understand the waiter would like us to share a table and save him work. Lazy old devil. Do you mind?”
Gay shook her head, eating tepid fish. “I don’t think so. “She turned away her eyes from another fasces badge, in the lapel of the lounge suit collar this time. “How’s the headache?”
He sat down, half in profile. It was a stern, good, absurd profile. “Gone for the time being; but no doubt it’ll come back. ...No, damn you, I told you I didn’t want soup. A chop, man.”
This was to the waiter. He shook a little, old and servile. Gay gently restrained herself from flinging the remains of the tepid fish at the correct, absurd profile. She had often to restrain herself over bodily assault in matters like that. The damned horror of any animal addressing another like that! Then she saw the twist of Houghton’s face. Poor idiot.
She said: “There’s a stunt in sleep-making that my father and I used to use when we went digging down in Central America. Ever hear of a man J. W Dunne?”
“Eh? . . . No.”
“He’s not a quack doctor or a psychoanalyst. He wrote a book called An Experiment with Time, and Father got hold of it. If you develop the trick you can get to sleep quite easily—unless you grow too interested in tomorrow morning.”
“Oh.”
But Gay was not discouraged. It was two or three years since she herself had tried those experiments at the edge of sleeping to peer into the doings of the next day or so. Father had given it up. He had said it was dangerous without elaborate precautions—funny father, the sternest and best of materialists!—salt of the earth, the materialists, though there was all this half-witted outcry against them these days from the sloppily superstitious Quakers who masqueraded as physicists...Well, this was how...
The old waiter sighed, peering round the edge of the door. That young ‘un from America was at it with the gentleman. Bit sharp, the gentleman, but you supposed he couldn’t be blamed. You were getting old, and a bit deaf, though it made you run cold to think of that, and that the boss would get to know... He looked again. Still at it, she was.
Houghton said, “Sounds rubbish. How can you look into the future—into a time that doesn’t exist?”
Gay shrugged. She was a little bored herself, by now. This bleak militaristic intelligence always bored her—made flirting with ship officers and gendarmes impossible. Kind of people who never thought of the thrill of a kiss as the moment before lips touched, but just the contact and crush and a greedy suction... “The point seems to be that events don’t happen. They’re waiting there in the future to be overtaken.”
He said “Rubbish,” again grumpily; then jabbed at his chop and was suddenly loquacious.
“By God, there would be something worth while if one could have a glimpse of the future—project oneself into it for no more than a blink. All this modernist botching of society and art and civilisation finished, and discipline and breed and good taste come into their own again. Worth while trying half a night of sleeplessness to see that.”
Gay had been about to rise and have her coffee on the verandah; but now she could not, looking at him with bent brows.
“Is that what the future is to be?”
“Of course it is. Service, loyalty. Hardness. Hierarchy. The scum in their places again.” His face twitched. “England a nation again.”
“And beyond that?”
“What would there be? Some dignity in history; the national cultures keeping the balance...”
Gay whistled. “Poor human race! Is that its future? Well, whatever’s awaiting it, I know it isn’t that.”
“Some Amurrican Utopia instead, with every nation denationalised and the blah of your accent all over the globe?”
“That’s just rudeness.”
He coloured, stiffly. “I’m sorry.”
Gay said: “Even tomorrow won’t show a glimpse of anything as bad as that. Or beyond it. If we sat down tonight and tried to glimpse the future, we’d find most things we expect haven’t happened...”
“All right. Let’s put it to the test tonight, according to the formula of this chap Dunne that your father developed. Lie and try a glimpse into the future—and see if it’s your Utopia or a sane history that the future’s going to hold.”
Gay said: “Of course that’s just fantastic. You can see only a little of your own future—through a glass darkly.”
He was holding his head again. He was really ill, Gay thought. He said, with the rudeness of pain and unease: “Afraid, like most softies, eh?”
Gay knew it was silly, but also the project was a little intriguing. She shrugged. “All right. Let’s. But—if we manage to see anything at all—how are we to know when we compare results that each is speaking the truth?”
“I’m not a liar.”
Gay nodded, rising. “Lucky man. Well, I’ll be seeing you.”
IV
The heat grew more stifling as the night wore on. Ascending to her room at eleven, Gay found the warmth swathing the place like a thick close blanket. “Like Coleridge’s pants, in fact.” Coleridge provided one of her gayest memories:
‘As though the earth in thick fast pants
were breathing’
