John Buchan

John Buchan: The Shocker That Outlived Its Author

In the summer of 1915, readers of *Blackwood's Magazine* met a serial by someone calling himself H. de V. By October it had a book cover and a real name on it, and within three months it had sold more than 25,000 copies. The man who wrote it had done so flat on his back. "While pinned to my bed during the first months of war and compelled to keep my mind off too tragic realities," he explained, "I gave myself to stories of adventure." He called the result "a shocker" and did not think it his finest achievement. A century later *The Thirty-Nine Steps* is the only thing most people know about him, which is a strange fate for a man who would end his life as the King's representative in Canada.

The Manse and the Border Hills

He was born in Perth on 26 August 1875, the son of John Buchan, a Free Church minister, and Helen Jane Buchan, née Masterton. The formative landscape was not the pulpit but the ground around his relatives' farm at Broughton, where he spent childhood holidays. Those Border hills would supply the settings for a great deal of his later fiction, and the chase sequences that made his reputation are essentially an Oxford-trained imagination let loose on remembered country.

A Cabinet Full of Prizes

Buchan's academic record reads like a boast someone else wrote for him. He went from Hutchesons' Boys' Grammar School in Glasgow to the University of Glasgow, where he studied Classics under Gilbert Murray, then to Brasenose College, Oxford, on the strength of a Senior Hulme scholarship. He took the Stanhope essay prize in 1897 and the Newdigate Prize for poetry in 1898, and was elected president of the Oxford Union. He also published six books before leaving the university, among them *John Burnet of Barns* (1898), *Grey Weather* (1899), *A Lost Lady of Old Years* (1899) and *The Half-Hearted* (1900). The pattern of the whole career is already visible: an appetite for work that ran far ahead of any single vocation.

Milner's Kindergarten

Called to the Bar at the Middle Temple in June 1901, he was in South Africa by September as private secretary to Alfred Milner, one of the early members of the group of bright young administrators known as Milner's Kindergarten. He returned to London in 1903. In December 1906 he joined the publishers Thomas Nelson & Sons, and also served as deputy editor of *The Spectator* — a working life split, permanently, between making books and making policy. He married Susan Charlotte Grosvenor on 15 July 1907; they had four children, Alice, John, William and Alastair. *Prester John* appeared in 1910, the same period in which the duodenal ulcers that would trouble him for the rest of his life began.

The Propaganda Machine

The war that produced *The Thirty-Nine Steps* also consumed him. For Nelson's he wrote a twenty-four-volume *History of the War*. He worked in the Foreign Office and went to France in 1915 as war correspondent for *The Times*. In June 1916 he was attached to the British Army's General Headquarters Intelligence Section on the Western Front with a field commission as a second lieutenant in the Intelligence Corps. In 1917 he was appointed Director of Information, running Britain's propaganda effort; in early 1918 he became head of the Department of Intelligence within Lord Beaverbrook's Ministry of Information. The novelist of secret plots spent the war actually managing the state's control of what the public was told. *Greenmantle* came out in 1916, in the middle of it.

The Biographer and the Member

Buchan's non-fiction was not a sideline. He wrote lives of Sir Walter Scott, Caesar Augustus, Oliver Cromwell and the Marquess of Montrose, and the Montrose won him the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1928. Fiction continued alongside — *Midwinter* in 1923 — and so did politics. He was elected Member of Parliament for the Combined Scottish Universities at a by-election in 1927 as a Unionist, and sat until 1935.

Rideau Hall

In 1935 George V appointed him Governor General of Canada on the advice of Prime Minister R. B. Bennett. He was raised to the peerage as Baron Tweedsmuir of Elsfield on 1 June 1935 and sworn in at Quebec City on 2 November — the fifteenth Governor General since Confederation and the first appointed under the Statute of Westminster, chosen by the monarch of Canada in Council alone. He used the office. He travelled the country relentlessly, including the Arctic, and told Canadians bluntly that "a Canadian's first loyalty is not to the British Commonwealth of Nations, but to Canada, and to Canada's King." He founded the Governor General's Literary Awards in 1936, still the country's premier literary prizes, and built the first proper library at Rideau Hall. He supported Zionism, and he and Lady Tweedsmuir were entered in the Golden Book of the Jewish National Fund. He shaped the 1939 royal tour of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth to Canada and the United States, receiving the Knight Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order during it, and played a key part in negotiating the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan late in 1939.

On 6 February 1940 he suffered a stroke at Rideau Hall and struck his head on the edge of a bath. Two operations by Dr Wilder Penfield of the Montreal Neurological Institute could not save him; he died on 11 February. He was given a state funeral at St Andrew's Presbyterian Church in Ottawa, and his ashes were returned to Britain and buried at Elsfield, Oxfordshire. *Sick Heart River* was published posthumously in 1941.

Why John Is Called a Genius

The word has been used, and by a serious person. Sir John Keegan wrote in 2004 that Buchan "was a writer touched by genius," locating the gift in his "moral certainty," which gave him "the power to achieve something particularly elusive: moral atmosphere." That is a precise claim, and worth keeping precise: Keegan is not saying Buchan was a deep thinker but that he could make a landscape and a pursuit feel morally weighted, so that a man running across a moor carries the stakes of a civilisation with him. Graham Greene, writing eleven years after Buchan's death, made the structural version of the same point — the settings and pursuits of *The Thirty-Nine Steps* "were to be a pattern for adventure-writers ever since." David Stafford, fifty years on, judged that "his impact on the genre was profound, and he has left a mark that has remained strong to this day." Tolkien was among those he influenced; the *Guardian* placed the novel 42nd among the hundred best novels in English in 2015.

The counter-case is one Buchan largely made himself. He called the book a shocker and did not rate it highly. The claim rests on craft, not intellect: the engineering of pace, the chase, the atmosphere Keegan named — and on a freakish working capacity that produced novels, a twenty-four-volume war history, four major biographies, a parliamentary career and a vice-regal one from a single lifetime. The historian Roger Hall put the honest qualification best: "a great deal of [Buchan's] success resulted from the extraordinary person he was," a moral compass rather than a prose stylist of the first rank. And the moral certainty Keegan admired was formed inside Milner's imperial project, which is precisely what has aged least well.

Legacy

Canada remembers him for institutions rather than books: the literary awards that still bear the Governor General's name, the Rideau Hall library, a definition of Canadian loyalty that arrived from an unlikely direction. Mackenzie King's radio eulogy called him "one of the greatest and most revered" of Canada's Governors General. Britain remembers the man who taught the thriller how to move.

Achievements

• Knight Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order
• Knight Grand Cross of the Order of St Michael and St George
• Educated at Brasenose College, University of Glasgow and Hutchesons' Grammar School
• Worked as journalist, politician and novelist