Putting Hugh MacDiarmid's poetry into perspective

Why the revival? Well, in these days of unreliable witnesses (sometimes even witnesses of their own words) we felt it was important to reintroduce MacDiarmid and show something of his wayward range. He said some terrible things but he was a great poet and there are works of terrific beauty, humour, charm and challenge.

Hamish MacPherson (“Why fascism did not flourish in pre-war Scotland”, The National, August 7 2018) was perfectly correct to draw attention to MacDiarmid’s 1923 writing on Scottish fascism, and importantly to emphasise that at that time the word signified universal suffrage, progressive taxes, confiscation of church estates and radical reform of land-ownership, an eight-hour working week and a minimum wage. Words change their meaning and we have to be sensitive to intention as well as what we know in retrospect.

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So, what MacDiarmid said in the course of his long career has to be read back into its own history before we can carry it forward into ours. And this is a performance, not a lecture or explanation, far less an apology. So what did he say that’s worth hearing today?

Some biography first. Born in Langholm, Dumfriesshire, August 11 1892, Christopher Murray Grieve was one of the founders of the National Party of Scotland in 1928, a regular contributor on literary, political and general matters to many British and foreign newspapers and periodicals, was given numerous honorary awards in later years and published more books than he cared to remember. In a late interview, he said he would hate like hell to see them all gathered in one place.

Examples from the 1920s to the 1970s include Annals of the Five Senses, Contemporary Scottish Studies, Albyn or the Future of Scotland and The Present Condition of Scottish Arts and Affairs, Sangschaw, Penny Wheep, A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle, Scottish Scene (co-author, Lewis Grassic Gibbon), At the Sign of the Thistle, Scottish Eccentrics, The Islands of Scotland, To Circumjack Cencrastus, First Hymn to Lenin and Other Poems, Stony Limits and Other Poems, Second Hymn to Lenin and Other Poems, Lucky Poet (an autobiography), Dìreadh, The Golden Treasury of Scottish Poetry, In Memoriam James Joyce, The Battle Continues, The Kind of Poetry I Want, Collected Poems, More Collected Poems, Selected Poems and Complete Poems. And many others.

In Who’s Who, notoriously, he put down as his one and only hobby as Anglophobia.

What did he mean by that?

Let’s start with his evaluation of Edinburgh. He dismisses the fantasy of Edinburgh as described either in terms of Walter Scott, “Mine own romantic town”, or Tennyson, “the grey metropolis of the North”, and instead asks us to consider its reality, “its outline resembling the saw-backed graph on a fever-chart”.

What would it be like to someone who had never seen the city before? Forget “all the guide-book chatter, all the intellectual rabbits’ food of historical tittle-tattle … ”

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Anyone looking at the capital of Scotland – or as Norman MacCaig put it, the “capital-in-waiting” of a country yet to be reborn – afresh, might rather dismiss “the whole thing with a shrug, and comical expressions of despair at the impossibility of meeting anyone in it who was really alive”.

He had no use for the famous sights and hackneyed tributes and concluded that Edinburgh “does not include a single person ... who is in even the smallest measure vital, a creative worker, a ‘free-spirit’ in Goethe’s phrase, to his or her science or art – any more than one could find in the whole of Scotland, if one was inclined to revolutionary methods (which God forbid!) a single person worth killing in the sense of being a person in a key position and really responsible for the ill governance of our country. This absence of a real and responsible personality gives a feeling as of trying to fight malaria with a bayonet. Criticism has no effective target. It is said that one cannot indict a whole nation.”

It was Edmund Burke who said it in his Second Speech on Conciliation with America: “I do not know the method of drawing up an indictment against a whole people.”

MacDiarmid’s comment takes it further: “In Scotland the trouble is that one cannot do anything else – except, perhaps, call the offending nation England instead of Scotland itself. In any case even thinking on these matters is like trying to get to grips with Ibsen’s great Boyg; a similar vague diffused spirit of evil, emasculating the whole life of the nation and rendering any creative effort, any real spiritual activity, impossible. It has the whole of Scotland in its toils, and Edinburgh is its headquarters.”

These quotations come from Scottish Scene (1934) and we might want to say that if it was true then, it isn’t true now. But I wonder how much of it MacDiarmid would change if you could ask him to revise it.

Hugh MacDiarmid loved Edinburgh. He loved Scotland. And he despised and fought all his life against that dishonest pseudo-patriotism which wallows in flattery and exalts the corrosive forces destroying the city and country it claims to love. More than any other person he could claim to be the founder of modern Scottish nationalism which at its finest hurls scorn on the sins of the country it loves.

MacDiarmid preached a patriotism characterised by incessant denunciations of pseudo-patriotism. He wasn’t unique in this – the great Edinburgh Socialist James Connolly had made the case before him, arguing that the true patriotism is that which denounces and exposes the false, exploiting parasite, and MacDiarmid paid homage to Connolly.

MacDiarmid, following Connolly and John MacLean, fought for the ideal of the small country preserving its identity while rejoicing in the advent of Socialism. His admiration for John MacLean bridged the gap between Connolly’s application of Marxism to nationalism and his own.

“That so great a proportion of our people know nothing of MacLean except his name – if that! – is not surprising in Scotland, where owing to the educational system scarcely anything of value in relation to our literature, history, national biography, or economic facts get through the filter. I bracket with MacLean’s name the names of John Murdoch, the crofters’ leader – MacLean’s agrarian counterpart – and John Swinton who aided the Negroes in South Carolina before the Civil War, and became a friend of Walt Whitman and knew Karl Marx, as examples of Scots who are far too little known – and yet in my opinion, of more consequence than most of those who figure prominently either in our own history books or in contemporary life.

It was part of MacDiarmid’s genius as an educator that he rescued so much that was lost in his anxiety to conserve the richness of Scotland’s radical tradition.

So what did he mean by “Anglophobia”? Perhaps what MacDiarmid most detested was the cringe of his fellow Scots before English manners, accents and money.

MacDiarmid founded modern Scottish nationalism by setting up the character of what was to follow: positive self-criticism shooting through endlessly sparkling mockery and humour, damning the tawdriness of false Scottish consciousness which was nothing more than a snivelling deference to the might and snob appeal of metropolitan English culture.

It was not for nothing that MacDiarmid claimed and received equal status with Dunbar as well as with Burns. Words in his finest work are precision-tools being administered by a hawk-eyed surgeon.

Come and see – and hear – for yourself, at 7pm on August 15 at Saltire Society HQ. Admission is free but seats are limited so please book on the Saltire Society website.