That Neil Gunn and Maurice Walsh were close friends is a matter of record, attested by the 30 or so letters between them that form part of the National Library of Scotland’s Neil Gunn collection.
Anything that adds to the public consciousness of these very different writers is, of course, to be applauded, although it must be said that this event did not add greatly to the stock of general knowledge of either.
A confessional digression is necessary at this point; this reviewer’s late mother was a cousin of J. B. Salmond, minor Scots litterateur of the first half of the twentieth century. Among his other achievements was the re-founding of The Scots Magazine, then intended as a journal of contemporary Scottish writing and opinion, mainly from the perspective of the then-new Scottish Party, later destined to form part of the Scottish National Party.
The strange path of mid-twentieth century Scottish politics need not detain us further here, save to note that Neil Gunn’s journalism for ‘the Scots magazine’ sustained him while he wrote larger works.
A part of Gunn and Walsh’s friendship was surely based on their somewhat differing nationalist positions as much as on their mutual experience as excise men.
While Walsh is a justifiably unabashed yarn-spinner, who, in his historical novels ‘Blackcock’s Feather’ and ‘And No Quarter’ reminds us of the links between Ireland and Scotland during the period when the reach of Clan Donald South and others across the sheugh was mighty.
Walsh’s work is slight, however, in comparison to Gunn’s major works such as ‘The Silver Darlings’ and Walsh’s animal enthusiasm for experience of the natural world is somewhat at odds with Gunn’s spiritual ecology, echoed in the work of other Scottish writers, most notably John Muir, most recently that of Alastair McIntosh.
Dairmid Gunn gave the impression of being both over-awed and embarrassed by the convictions of his late uncle, and added little to what we already knew of these.
Steve Matheson, Walsh’s biographer, was rightly celebratory of Maurice Walsh as a storyteller while freely acknowledging his limitations.
Walsh is very possibly deserving of selective re-publication, but although Gunn remains rightly widely read, one longs for a through-going study of Gunn’s considerable output in the context of his beliefs and concerns.