Sick Heart River

John Buchan, 1st Baron Tweedsmuir, GCMG, GCVO, CH, PC

Most people will be familiar with John Buchan's novel The Thirty-Nine Steps. Fewer will know that Buchan wrote some 100 books in addition to graduating from Oxford, being a barrister, publisher, lieutenant colonel in Intelligence reporting to the British prime minister, and for the last 5 years of his life, a much beloved Govenrnor Genera of Canada. Wikipedia gives a list of his many accomplishments and honours. You can even listen to him speaking here.

Nominally Free Church of Scotland, it is hard to pinpoint Buchan's faith but I think that he was a believer tired of orthodoxy.  Nick Baldock discusses the subject well and notes that it is a Catholic priest in The Blanket of the Dark who speaks with Buchan’s voice:

I incline to the belief that in the light of eternity all our truths are shadows, and that the very truth we shall only know hereafter. Yet I think that every truth in its own place is a substance, though it may be a shadow in another place. And I think that all such shadows have value for our souls, for each is a true shadow, as the substance is a true substance.

I am reading Witch Wood at the moment - because it was apparently Buchan’s favourite. If it touches me I'll probably post about it.

I read The Thirty Nine Steps many years back. On a dinner date at my daughter's I picked up a copy of Greenmantle and so started to discover the wealth of Buchan's bibliography.  I particularly enjoyed Mr Standfast (the end made me cry) and have just finished reading Sick Heart River a book full of imagery.  I chose this book following my usual desire, on discovering an artist whose work I enjoy, of checking out their last output. Sick Heart River fits this bill well as it was finished only days before his death and published posthumously.

The pace of the book is slow and, unlike its predecessors, it is not a thriller. The protoganist Sir Edward Leithen, who crops up in other Buchan novels, is diagnosed with TB and given less than a year to live - indeed he dies towards the end of the novel. He travels north in Canada on a quest to find the missing businessman Galliard. After rescuing him and his guide Lew he returns to give his life in rescuing a starving and disillusioned native tribe . The book describes Leithen as not being a "church man" and deals with his deep inward struggles knowing that his days are numbered.

It is about two rivers. One he had often thought about, often determined to go back and look for it. Now, as he pictured it in its green security, it seemed the kind of sanctuary in which to die. He remembered its name. The spring was called Clairefontaine, and it gave its name both to the south-flowing stream and to a little farm below in the valley.

Clairefontaine? A pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God and of the Lamb?

Early in the book Leithen gets to visit this place that he had remembered from his past. It was a cup in the hills, floored not with wild hay, but with short, crisp pasture like an English down. From its sides descended the rivulets which made the Clairefontaine, and in the heart of it was a pool fringed with flags, so clear that through its six-foot depth the little stir in the sand could be seen where the water bubbled up from below. The place was so green and gracious that all sense of the wilds was lost, and it seemed like a garden in a long-settled land, a garden made centuries ago by the very good and the very wise.

The other is the Sick Heart, a fictional river in North West Territories emptying into Hudson Bay, an imagined sort of El Dorado or Eden or paradise sought by four characters in the book and for various reasons. But it turns out to be the very opposite of paradise, it is a place that you cannot easily escape from, a place to die.

The green sanctuary is in fact a water shed - the Clairefontaine flows south but another source flows north and the reader is left wondering whether the northerly stream is in fact the head of the Sick Heart. Thus the sanctuary is a place of choice.

Whilst tending the native tribe Galliard was staring at him with bright comprehending eyes.

(Leithen relies) "In this fight we have each got his special job. I'm in command, and I hand them out. I've taken the one for myself that I believe I can do best. We're going to win, remember. What does my death matter if we defeat Death?"

Lew sat down again with his head in his hands. He raised it like a frightened animal at Leithen's next words.

"This is my Sick Heart River. Galliard's too, I think. Maybe yours, Lew. Each of us has got to find his river for himself, and it may flow where he least expects it."

Father Duplessis, back in the deep shadows, quoted from the Vulgate psalm (Ps 46), "Fluminis impetus laetificat civitatem Dei."

Leithen smiled. "Do you know the English of that, Lew? There is a river, the streams whereof shall make glad the city of God. That's what you've always been looking for."

After Leithen's death, the book closes with Galliard and his wife reunited:

For a little the two did not speak. Their eyes followed the slender north-flowing stream. It dropped almost at once into a narrow ravine, but it was possible to mark where that ravine joined a wider valley, and where that valley clove its way into the dark tangle of forested mountains.

"What happens away up there?" the woman asked. "I should like to follow the water."

"It becomes a river which breaks into the lowlands and wanders through muskegs and bush until it reaches the salt. Hudson's Bay, you know. Dull, shallow tides at first, and then the true Arctic, ice-bound for most of the year. Away beyond are the barrens, and rivers of no name, and then the Polar Sea, and the country where only the white bear and the musk ox live. And at the end a great solitude. Some day we will go there together."

"You don't fear it any more?"

"No. It has become part of me, as close to me as my skin. I love it. It is myself. You see, I have made my peace with the North, faced up to it, defied it, and so won its blessing. Consider, my dear. The most vital forces of the world are in the North, in the men of the North, but only when they have annexed it. It kills those who run away from it."

"I see," she said after a long pause. "I know what you mean. I think I feel it... But the Sick Heart River! Wasn't that a queer fancy?"

Galliard laughed.

"It was the old habit of human nature to turn to magic. Lew Frizel wanted a short cut out of his perplexities. So did I, and I came under the spell of his madness. First I came here. Then I went to the Ghost River. Then I heard Lew's story. I was looking for magic, you see. We both had sick hearts. But it was no good. The North will always call your bluff."

"And Leithen? He went there, didn't he?"

"Yes, and brought Lew away. Leithen didn't have a sick heart. He was facing the North with clear eyes. He would always have won out."

"But he died!"

"That was victory—absolute victory... But Leithen had a fleuve de rêve (dream river) also. I suppose we all have. It was this little stream. That's why we brought his body here. It is mine, too—and yours—the place we'll always come back to when we want comforting."

"Which stream?" she asked. "There are two."

"Both. One is the gate of the North and the other's the gate of the world."


One cannot help but think that Leithen is Buchan. He was a man with many facets - friend of Cecil Rhodes with all the implied intrige, Pilgrims Progress as his favourite book after the Bible, involved in government, inventor of the modern thriller. Without doubt a remarkable man. I identify at least in in part with some of his characters and I figure that he was a good man. The lesson? Perhaps "shew me thy faith without thy works, and I will shew thee my faith by my works."

He died on February 11th 1940 from an accident whilst taking a bath, aged 64.  My age.

There is a river that flows

from God above;

there is a fountain

that’s filled with his great love.

Come to the waters;

there is a vast supply;

there is a river 

that never shall run dry.