Charlotte Peacock - Into the Mountain: A Life of Nan Shepherd

The original copyright page from the Aberdeen University Press first edition of The Living Mountain.

I believe I that I now understand in some small measure why the Buddhist goes on pilgrimage to a mountain. The journey is itself part of the technique by which the god is sought. It is a journey into Being; for as I penetrate more deeply into the mountains life, I penetrate also into my own. For an hour I am beyond desire. It is not ecstasy, that leap out of the self that makes man like a god. I am not out of myself, but in myself. I am.

Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain.

Contents

PREFACE

During the last weeks of her life, in a letter to her friend, the artist Barbara Balmer, Nan Shepherd said: As for writing about my experiences, if I did that recognisably, Id be for it. She left no journals and much of her correspondence was pitched out. What little is extant in the archives has been heavily censored. Lines are scored through, pages snipped into and in some places completely excised, presumably by Nan herself. Even in her two commonplace books there is rarely any personal comment made alongside the extracts she has carefully copied in. Renowned for her reticence, in death it seems Nan Shepherd wished to remain as enigmatic as she was in life.

Examined for insight into a writers life and works, diaries and journals are often considered an authentic resource, revealing truths unavailable elsewhere. However, as biographers and life-writing theorists know very well, such a supposedly authentic resource is often a careful construct, a conscious act of self-presentation written with an audience of some kind in mind even if it is the diarist themselves, reading in the future. So if Nan Shepherd had left behind endless journals, diaries and correspondence, they could not be relied upon. But as the late Jenny Diski points out, there are infinite ways of telling the truth, including fiction.

A fictional work is, of course, assumed to be an invention, a narrative describing imaginary events and people. Yet because of this assumption, fictions often enable more of truth about a life to be written than a supposedly factual account. A contemporary of Nan Shepherds, Scottish writer Catherine Carswell knew this. The literature of imagination has always been rich in autobiography, confessed and unconfessed, she wrote in Prousts Women in 1923. It is in essence, perhaps one should say in its impulse, largely an affair of passionate reminiscence.

From the correspondence which survives, it seems the only person to whom Nan might have confessed was her close friend, the author and historian, Agnes Mure Mackenzie (known as Mure) and their correspondence, too, has been carefully edited. But what Nan does not divulge in her letter to Barbara Balmer is that she had already written about her life unrecognisably (or so she hoped) in her novels particularly her first, The Quarry Wood.

Mure Mackenzie saw immediately that the book was heavily autobiographical and reported how much she had enjoyed unpicking the transmutation, ordering, supplementing, modifying and blending in Nans creative process. Naturally, she went on, I cant do this as a rule with other peoples work. With yours as you know I can to a large effect (including tracing some bits of my own in it!). In fact, there was so much that was autobiographical in The Quarry Wood that Mure felt it would take a second book to see what Nan could really do creatively. Im not quite satisfied yet that you can get your stuff away from yourself, she wrote in 1927. The Weatherhouse, and A Pass in the Grampians which followed, did show what Nan could do, but even these are, to some extent, drawn from her own experiences.

It is because of this, that rather than devoting discrete chapters to her novels, commentary and reference to them is woven into my version of Nan Shepherds life. Wherever possible, I have drawn on those primary sources available to me, including unpublished material written by her friends as well as the testimonies of those who knew her. But while all these add flesh to the biographical bones of a subject, the biographers job is to try to portray not just what is known about the person, or how they came to be in the context in which they lived, it is to try to reveal their essence.