John Buchan and a different pair of shoes

My drinking friends at the pub and I have, over recent weeks, been working extra hard to put the world to rights. My mate Phil, for example has recently re-read Orwell’s ‘1984’ and has been providing a commentary on its uncanny relevance to the modern state of things. For my part, I’ve been enthusing about the writings of John Buchan. Taking a break from my usual high-fibre diet of literary fiction, I’ve been indulging in a few of the ‘ripping yarns’ of the Scottish-born author, best known for ’The Thirty-Nine Steps’.

Buchan (1875-1940) had a remarkable life as a novelist, historian and diplomat who ended up as Governor General of Canada. His literary speciality was writing what he called ‘shockers’, by which he meant an adventure story that combined personal and political dramas, where the events were pretty implausible but the reader is just able to believe in them. If you can disregard the casual, unselfconscious racism and misogyny that was characteristic of early 21^st century writing Buchan’s adventure stories are still great fun. Part of the fun for me is his use of curious contemporary words and phrases which have since become anachronisms - but are surely worth reviving.  

For example, in ‘Mr Standfast’ there’s the use of the phrase “a different pair of shoes” where, nowadays, we’d be more likely to refer (with no greater logic) to “a different kettle of fish”: “Letchford was a different pair of shoes. He was some kind of a man, to begin with, and had an excellent brain and the worst manners conceivable...”

When reading ‘The Thirty-Nine Steps’ I had to look up the word ‘ulster’ which, if you didn’t know, is a rather long, double-breasted coat, with two vertical, parallel rows of buttons, as in: “He lent me a big driving coat—and never troubled to ask why I had started on a motor tour without possessing an ulster...”

And do you know what it is to feel ‘hipped’? In ‘The Power-House’ the protagonist Leithen admits: “I had had a bad reaction from the excitements of the summer, and in these days I was feeling pretty well hipped and overdone...” In US English ‘feeling hipped’ seems to mean being excessively interested or preoccupied with something, (which could the case here,) but there is an old-fashioned use in British English of ‘hipped’ meaning depressed or melancholy. This seems to fit better with the feeling of being “pretty well hipped and overdone.”

Apart from these linguistic curiosities, Buchan could make some serious and prescient observations through the vehicle of his ‘shockers’. In ‘The Power-House’, Leithen meets Lumley ­- a man who inhabits a world “without the ring of civilisation”, a man of “pure intelligence … stripped of every shred of humanity”. In a chilling exchange Lumley says:

“Did you ever reflect, Mr. Leithen, how precarious is the tenure of the civilisation we boast about?"

"I should have thought it fairly substantial," I said, "and the foundations grow daily firmer."

He laughed. "That is the lawyer's view, but believe me you are wrong. Reflect, and you will find that the foundations are sand. You think that a wall as solid as the earth separates civilisation from barbarism. I tell you the division is a thread, a sheet of glass. A touch here, a push there, and you bring back the reign of Saturn..."

We have only to think of President Trump’s supporters storming Congress in January 2021 or Putin’s forces directly targeting a children's hospital and a maternity ward in Mariupol in March 2022 to see how thin is the line between civilisation and barbarism.  

‘The Power-House’ was published in 1916 but what Lumley tells Leithen about our politicians could have been inspired by the pandemic’s PPE scandal or the financial instability caused by Liz Truss’s brief tenure as Prime Minister: “Take the business of Government. When all is said, we are ruled by the amateurs and the second-rate. The methods of our departments would bring any private firm to bankruptcy. The methods of Parliament—pardon me—would disgrace any board of directors...”

It wasn’t just George Orwell who predicted the state in which we would find ourselves.