Volume 6, Number 2 · February 17, 1966
The Sweet Smell of Success
By Noel Annan
John Buchan
by Janet Adam Smith
Little, Brown, 528 pp., $7.50
Buchan has been lucky in his biographer. Like him Janet Adam Smith is the child of a Scots minister. (Her father, who was a distinguished academic, was indicted for heresy by among others Buchan's father. The indictment failed.) Like him she knows the two Scotlands of post-Jacobite days. There was the democratic, strenuous, puritan tradition, despising English softness and worldliness, which bred tough individualistic men of brains and push who sought their fortune in England, the Empire or America; and there was the other Scotland from which they fled—the mawkish, rhetorical, self-righteous, juicy, unctuous society pilloried in literature from Holy Willie's Prayer to The House with the Green Shutters. The Scots kept an eye on their bright boys and deflated them if they assimilated too smoothly to English ways; but they were proud that in their poverty-stricken country a man rose by his merits and not by birth. To seek success was part of the national myth. Buchan simply set out to be successful in the classic Scots way.
Review, 2219 words
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