Whatever Happened to James Kennaway?

I have been re-reading, with fresh admiration, James Kennaway’s Tunes of Glory, his first novel, written in 1956, twelve years before he died (reputedly of a heart attack) in a car crash, after which his reputation as one of Scotland’s most gifted writers sank - or so it is claimed - almost without trace. 

Born in Auchterarder, Kennaway was educated at Trinity College, Glenalmond, but moved south to develop his career as a novelist and screen writer.  He was not, he liked to say, a Scottish novelist but a novelist from Scotland. Tunes of Glory, filmed by Ronald Neame and still to be found on DVD as well as in print, remains his most famous book, inspired by the familiar old antagonism between Scotland, in the guise of a drunken army major who has risen through the ranks to become commanding officer of a Highland regiment, and England, personified by a chilly Oxford-educated colonel who is appointed his superior.  In today’s Scotland its plot might sound like a tired old tale, but in fact it retains all its original power and anguish. 

Tension tingles from the start. Jock, the Scotsman, is to be court-martialed for punching an enlisted bagpiper, his daughter’s secret boy-friend . Basil, the new commander, is persuaded not to press charges, but worse is to follow as the story moves towards tragedy.  Kennaway himself served in the Cameron Highlanders. Neame’s film starred Alec Guinness as the aggressively  loud-mouthed major and John  Mills as the nervy, brittle colonel. The setting, with its portrayal of pipers playing tunes by Malcolm Arnold as they paraded through ths snow,  remains strong. 

Writing for The Scotsman’s London office half a century ago, I interviewed Kennaway at his home (in Chelsea if I remember rightly) where he was working on one of Tunes of Glory’s several successors. His study was the friendliest of dens. He seemed the most relaxed of interviewees. But, as things were soon to turn out, relaxation was not what characterised him as he moved through his thirties.  

The triangular relationship that arose between him, his wife, and his fellow novelist John Le Carre seems not, by the sound of things, to have been relaxed.   But it resulted in two novels with autobiographical undertones,  Le Carre’s atypical and seriously underrated The Naive and Sentimental Lover, and Kennaway’s own Some Gorgeous Accident.   It is time we had a chance to get to know his books anew. They deserve by now to be available in an  established, collected edition. 

Their titles, after Tunes of Glory, are Household Ghosts (1961), The Mindbenders (1963), The Bells of Shoreditch (1963), Some Gorgeous Accident (1967), The Cost of Living Like This (1969), and finally the stark little novella, Silence, published four years after his death. If you happen to possess any of these, you are a lucky reader.

26 May 2014