Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918-1959: Literature, National Identity and Cultural Exchange 9780748634750

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Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959

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For Ian who is also a Scottish modernist

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Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959 Literature, National Identity and Cultural Exchange

Margery Palmer McCulloch

Edinburgh University Press

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© Margery Palmer McCulloch, 2009 Edinburgh University Press Ltd 22 George Square, Edinburgh www.euppublishing.com Typeset in Janson by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 3474 3 (hardback) The right of Margery Palmer McCulloch to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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Contents

Acknowledgements

vi

Introduction: Modernism and Scottish Modernism

1

Part I Transforming Traditions 1 Towards a Scottish Modernism: C. M. Grieve, Little Magazines and the Movement for Renewal 2 Hugh MacDiarmid and Modernist Poetry in Scots 3 Criticism and New Writing in English 4 Beyond this Limit: Women, Modernism and the Modern World Part II Ideology and Literature 5 Whither Scotland? Politics and Society between the Wars 6 Neil M. Gunn: Re-imagining the Highlands 7 Modernism and Littérature Engagée: A Scots Quair and City Fiction 8 Poetry and Politics

11 29 53 68

93 113 131 154

Part III World War Two and its Aftermath 9 Visionaries and Revisionaries: Late Muir and MacDiarmid 10 Continuities and New Voices

169 198

Bibliography of Works Cited Index

216 223

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Acknowledgements

I would like to express my thanks to staff at Glasgow University Library, the National Library of Scotland, the Mitchell Library, Glasgow, and the Poetry Library, Edinburgh for their helpfulness, and to the several research colleagues who have willingly answered queries or offered additional information. I am especially grateful to Dr Gerard Carruthers, Head of the Department of Scottish Literature at Glasgow University, for continuing academic and conference support. Much encouragement for this Scottish modernist project has been provided by members of the recently established Scottish Network of Modernist Studies (SNOMS), and by the enthusiasm of international delegates at Modernist Magazines conferences in Leicester and Le Mans. My thanks are due also to the editorial staff at Edinburgh University Press and, as always, to Ian and Euan for practical help.

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Liberté j’écris ton nom Paul Eluard

Don’t put ‘N. B.’ on your paper; put Scotland and be done with it [. . .] The name of my native land is not North Britain, whatever may be the name of yours.

Robert Louis Stevenson

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Introduction: Modernism and Scottish Modernism

There cannot be a revival in the real sense of the word [. . .] unless these potentialities are in accord with the newest tendencies of human thought. C. M. Grieve, Scottish Chapbook (1923)

In a review article in the Athenaeum in 1919 T. S. Eliot posed the question ‘Was there a Scottish literature?’, rapidly concluding that there was not, since Scotland had neither a single language nor a sufficiently unfragmented literary history to entitle it to claim what he called a distinctive ‘Scotch literature’.1 If Eliot were alive today, his question might well be ‘Was there a Scottish modernism?’; and many academic scholars and critics – Scottish as well as non-Scottish – would probably join him in doubting that there was any such thing. A perusal of critical studies of modernism in the past twenty to thirty years, including the most recent, will rarely reveal a listing of ‘Hugh MacDiarmid’ in their indexes, while the potential Scottish modernist territory as a whole remains unexplored. Similarly, studies of early twentieth-century writing in Scotland seldom have the word ‘modernism’ in their indexes. On the surface, then, it might appear that there was no manifestation of literary modernism worthy of discussion in that part of the United Kingdom which in the early twentieth century was still called North Britain. This study starts from the dual premise that there was and still is a varied and distinctive Scottish literature interacting with both traditional and international influences; and that there was in the post-1918 period a Scottish literary modernism drawing on artistic influences from European modernism and rooted in the desire to recover a self-determining identity for Scotland both culturally and politically. The book’s purpose is therefore a positive one which seeks to situate Scottish culture in the modernist context of the early twentieth century by expanding the existing limited and potentially inward-looking idea of an interwar ‘Scottish Renaissance’ movement to include its international significance as a Scottish manifestation of modernism. In addition, and in common with what is happening currently in other areas of modernist studies, the conventional boundaries of modernism will be extended in order to consider a late or transitional Scottish modernism, especially in poetry, in the 1940s and 1950s.While the primary aim of the study is therefore to further

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awareness and understanding of Scottish culture, it is hoped that it will also assist in the ongoing international project of expanding perceptions of modernism more generally through its documentation of the Scottish experience and the ways in which artistic experimentation and a response to ‘the new’ can simultaneously interact with political and social agendas, thus allowing the modernist artist a more active role in a changing world. As these previous comments imply, modernism as a movement has been undergoing fresh critical scrutiny and interpretation in recent years, with the earlier ‘high modernism’ emphasis on avant-garde artistic experimentation and withdrawal from direct involvement in social and political affairs being replaced by an understanding that there were in fact many modernisms and that their distinguishing qualities could, and did, vary, depending on the conditions of place and time. In the Anglophone literary scene, for example, it is noticeable that the focus has now expanded from the group of male authors whom Wyndham Lewis characterised as ‘the men of 1914’ – Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats and Lewis himself – to include a fuller consideration of participants in the early decades of the century. This includes the contribution made by women writers and the importance of American modernist movements such as the Harlem Renaissance in addition to previously recognised poets such as William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens. Reassessment is also taking place in relation to the creative work of the 1930s, long characterised in critical discussion as the period of the ‘Auden generation’ and a marker of the supposed end of modernism.2 As with historical transnational cultural movements such as the Renaissance or Romanticism, it is not really possible to pin down precisely an end or a beginning to what is now known as modernism. Some cultural critics would put the starting point in the later nineteenth century, with the work of Impressionist painters in France, the influential drama of Ibsen in Norway, the fiction of James and Conrad in England and the poetry of Whitman in America. Others would see its beginnings even earlier in the developments of the mid-century, with the crisis of belief which took place then as a result of increasing industrialisation and its disruption of traditional social patterns; with the loss of religious faith brought about, at least in part, by Darwin’s evolutionary theories and by geological discoveries about the nature of the physical world. Just as new political and social practices had to come into being to deal with the human and social actuality of this changing world, so new art forms had to be created to give it expression, and new philosophical and intellectual approaches had to be developed to analyse its implications and possibilities. Some of the writers and thinkers who significantly influenced the art and ideas of the early years of the twentieth century, such as Nietzsche and Dostoevsky, came from this mid-nineteenth-century period, entering into the later and wider public perception through translation of their work. Scottish writers such as Edwin Muir and Hugh MacDiarmid were both influenced by Nietzsche and Dostoevsky while Virginia Woolf described the latter as ‘this great genius who is beginning to permeate our lives so curiously’.3 In her essay ‘Character in Fiction’ (1924), Woolf also designated 1910 as the year in which

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it seemed to her that the human character itself changed, her marker of the arrival of modernism. This was the year of the major post-Impressionist exhibition of paintings in London (soon to be followed by its influential showing at the Armory in New York), an exhibition in which the iconoclastic work of artists such as Cézanne, Gauguin, Matisse and Picasso seemed to capture the unfamiliar identity of a newly arrived and still strange, modern world. Wherever modernism’s beginnings are seen to be situated, it is undeniable that by the early years of the twentieth century terms such as ‘modernity’ or ‘the modern’ or ‘the new’ had established themselves as defining terminology for the new age. In London, The New Age journal under the editorship of A. R. Orage became a principal line of communication for the new ideas and art forms being developed in Britain and internationally. This journal was an important educational medium for Scottish autodidacts such as Muir and MacDiarmid, both of whom became regular contributors, Muir in the World War One period, MacDiarmid in the mid-1920s. The American Ezra Pound arrived in London in 1908 and immediately began to activate a critical and creative revolution through his own writing, the little magazines he edited or became involved with, and the avant-garde writers he championed such as his fellow American T. S. Eliot who settled in London in 1915. The Italian Futurist, Marinetti, took London by storm in 1914 and inspired, in response, the short-lived Blast magazine founded by Pound and Wyndham Lewis, together with their Vorticist movement: activities monitored with interest by MacDiarmid during his war service in Salonika. The French philosopher Henri Bergson, author of Creative Evolution, lectured internationally on his theories of memory and personality, including lectures in Edinburgh in 1914 which were reported in the Glasgow Herald and Scotsman newspapers, while Sigmund Freud’s writings about the unconscious mind and James Frazer’s anthropological theories became increasingly influential. On the continent, Paris developed as the principal centre of an avant-garde visual art which interacted with music, ballet and literature. One notable peak of this ferment of creativity was reached in 1913 in the performance by Diaghilev’s Ballet Russe of The Rite of Spring to the music of Stravinsky and designs by Picasso: a performance of primitive power which caused a public furore on its opening night. This pre-1914 modernism was thus marked by its international nature, its culturally interactive nature, and by its metropolitan nature. For this was a cultural movement centred on large European cities, including London, bringing together artists and intellectuals who were responding to the challenges of the modern age. And at this point in the century, these challenges were taken up with energy and exhilaration – even with a violent exuberance – with a sense of active participation in the making of a new world. Marinetti and the Futurists embraced the new world of technology and the speed of the machine; the anarchist movement was idealistic in a way that is foreign to our present-day perceptions of anarchism; and in the years before the 1917 Revolution, artists in Russia such as Malevich and Tatlin were insisting and demonstrating that artists could also be the transformers of their societies.

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Scotland too had a modernist presence in the pre-1914 years. Although Scottish poetry and fiction were in decline as a result of increasing Anglicisation, the visual arts were prospering and interacting with developments in Europe as Scottish painters travelled and exhibited internationally, bringing new forms into their own work. J. D. Fergusson first went to Paris in the late 1890s, before setting up an atelier there in 1905 and becoming involved with the many international artists who had made their home in the city. Like the painters who became known along with himself as the ‘Scottish Colourists’ (S. J. Peploe, F. C. B. Cadell and Leslie Hunter), Fergusson also lived for periods in the south of France, in Nice and Antibes, and came under the influence of the southern light as well as of post-Impressionist movements. He later co-operated with Middleton Murry in the publication of his Rhythm magazine, acting as Art Editor between 1914 and 1916 and producing striking modern covers for the magazine. These early years of the century also saw a flourishing of the arts in Glasgow when the Art School underwent a period of revival under its director Francis (‘Fra’) Newbery. This artistic activity was related to the innovative Arts and Crafts movement in Scotland at the turn of the century and was especially strong in female designers and painters such as Jessie M. King, Margaret and Frances Macdonald, Bessie MacNicol and Newbery’s wife Jessie who established a revolutionary (in artistic terms) Department of Embroidery at Glasgow School of Art. The architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh was the outstanding modernist of this group of Glasgow artists, designing the Glasgow School of Art building and bringing his awareness of new forms into all his design work. Mackintosh, the Macdonald sisters and Herbert McNair exhibited to acclaim at the Vienna Secession exhibitions and in Turin, while Bessie MacNicol, Jessie M. King and other women artists also exhibited in Vienna and elsewhere in Europe. From 1904, the art dealer Alexander Reid’s gallery – La Société des Beaux Arts – was situated in West George Street in Glasgow, bringing Impressionist paintings to the city which were bought by wealthy business men and acquired by Kelvingrove Art Gallery. Reid himself had his portrait painted on several occasions by Van Gogh. However, unlike the literary modernism which was to develop in the post-1918 period, this earlier visual arts flowering did not have an ideological or national renewal element in its innovatory artistic work which might have sustained it in adverse circumstances, and it did not survive World War One. By the end of the war European exhibiting connections had been disrupted, artists began to go their individual ways, most often out of Scotland, and economic decline made it all too clear that Glasgow was no longer the ‘second city of the Empire’. Reid’s gallery continued to sell French Impressionist paintings during the early 1920s, along with paintings by the Scottish Colourists, but public taste changed, there was not the same interest in post-Impressionist work, and the gallery’s business moved to the London firm Reid and Lefevre in 1928.4 This disruption of the Scottish visual arts situation patterned in some respects the effect of the outbreak of war on the early and celebratory phase

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of European modernism itself. The previous self-chosen emigration of artists and intellectuals to the international creativity of European metropolitan cultural centres was transformed into a philosophical exile of lost idealism as well as an actual displacement of peoples from destroyed homes and destroyed national identities as frontiers changed as a result of ‘peace’ settlements. The experience of World War One – a war unlike any previous European war in terms of human carnage and civilian involvement – was an unexpected and diabolic manifestation of the potentiality of the new world so recently celebrated. It was thus a powerful influence on the character of the phase of modernist artistic expression which developed in the post-1918 period. In a pre-war essay on Cavalcanti, Ezra Pound, talking of the need to revitalise the art of poetry, had commented that ‘we appear to have lost the radiant world where one thought cuts through another with a clear edge’.5 In the aftershock of the war, it was clear that the loss of the radiant world had taken on more widespread and sinister cultural, social and political implications. T. S. Eliot, discussing James Joyce’s influential and experimental novel Ulysses in 1923, placed it in a context of ‘the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history’.6 Eliot’s own fragmented long poem The Waste Land, published in the previous year, was ‘celebrated’ by many of its readers as a paradigm of just such a futility, both in its difficulty of interpretation and the negativity of its message once interpreted: a negativity which appeared to give formal expression to their own sense of despair. This post-1918 situation was the context in which a new Scottish modernism – this time literature-led and ideological in nature – was born. It was given impulse by the journalist and poet C. M. Grieve (Hugh MacDiarmid) who returned from war service in Europe determined to make a name for himself as a writer of consequence and determined also to find a way to regenerate both his country’s literature and its capacity for self-determination. The little magazines he edited from the small east-coast town of Montrose on his return from the war soon generated a group of activists willing to support him in his self-appointed task, including the writers Neil M. Gunn, Edwin and Willa Muir, Catherine Carswell, and in the 1930s Lewis Grassic Gibbon, together with the musician Francis George Scott and the painters William McCance and William Johnstone, who, although they were forced to find their living outside Scotland, were supportive of the new initiatives. The revival movement itself became popularly known as the ‘Scottish Renaissance’ and this terminology has lasted through to our own time as the signifier of an interwar literary movement with several adherents but centred primarily on the poetry and nationalist politics of Hugh MacDiarmid. While such a perception has some truth in it in relation to MacDiarmid’s prominence, artistically and polemically, it offers a partial view which ignores both the diversity and strength of other participants and the interactive, outward-looking nature of Scottish culture in this period. Tom Nairn’s influential book The Break-up of Britain (1979) which considers MacDiarmid’s A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle to be the expression of a delayed Scottish Romantic nationalism, has

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encouraged a focus on what some critics have seen as a national essentialism in the movement, a looking backwards and inwards as opposed to the modernity and internationalism of the context in which these Scottish Renaissance writers considered themselves to be working. What is needed for a more accurate understanding of this important period in Scottish literary culture is a return to the writings of the participants in the movement and so to an understanding of how they perceived their relationship with the world in which they operated. For these writers were in no doubt that what they were engaged in was a modern project. Edwin Muir’s first published book was titled We Moderns (1918); MacDiarmid’s editorials in his Scottish Chapbook, founded in 1922, consistently used the word ‘modern’ and emphasised that ‘there cannot be a revival in the real sense of the word [. . .] unless these potentialities are in accord with the newest tendencies of human thought’.7 One of Catherine Carswell’s earliest essays was on Marcel Proust (1923) and she was a supportive reviewer of D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers (1913) and The Rainbow (1915), and a regular correspondent until his death. Her memoir of Lawrence, The Savage Pilgrimage, was published in 1932. In addition, for these post-World War One writers and their supporters, nationalism and internationalism were two sides of the one coin, not opposing positions, while in the national context they believed that any lasting artistic revival must be accompanied by renewal in the life of the nation as a whole. They were not in the business of a narrow ‘art for art’s sake’ or of a narrow nationalism, but were seeking to reach out from an aesthetically and politically revitalised Scotland to interact with the international scene. A primary aim of this book, therefore, is to resituate the Scottish revival of the post-1918 period in the context of the Anglophone and European modernism of the early twentieth century, and in the context of how it was perceived by its principal activists in its own time. Such a context will allow a wider, less fragmented and less insular view of Scottish cultural developments in the postwar period, including Scottish responses to modernity – to philosophical, ideological and technological as well as artistic change – alongside more specifically national questions. This Scottish modernism, on the other hand, is not entirely synonymous with what we have become used to calling the Scottish Renaissance, although it is closely related to it. The Scottish Renaissance movement included many supporters who were encouraged by the new optimistic atmosphere to work for change in Scotland both politically and artistically or behind the scenes as ‘enablers’. Not all such activities could be characterised as ‘modernist’, even in an expanded sense. The journalist William Power was one such enabler, both behind the scenes and in print through articles and editorials, as were the writers F. Marian McNeill and Helen Cruickshank. Alexander Gray took up the international and the Scotslanguage challenge by translating German and Danish ballads into Scots, thus bringing to attention similarities between the European and Scottish ballad traditions. Gray’s focus, on the other hand, was on accuracy of translation and on a shared heritage. He was not a modernist ‘re-creator’, or ‘transformer’,

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such as MacDiarmid or Pound. Similarly, John Buchan was an early supporter of the new movement, appearing as poet in MacDiarmid’s first Northern Numbers anthology and writing the foreword to his collection of Scots lyrics, Sangschaw. Yet as Buchan’s introduction to his own historical anthology of Scottish poetry The Northern Muse (published like Sangschaw in 1925) makes clear, he, as with Stevenson before him, did not believe that there was a future for Scots-language poetry and so his anthology is valedictory as opposed to forward-looking, while his own poetry is traditional rather than experimental. This non-modernistic involvement is true of several writers in the period who contributed to the recovery of Scots as a literary language by revitalising existing traditions as opposed to being influenced by contemporary modernist writing. And while in the 1930s, Lewis Grassic Gibbon developed a modernist fictional form and innovative use of Scots which matched MacDiarmid’s experiments in poetry, and adapted this to deal with the depiction of the proletarian city, not all new fiction writers associated with the literary revival who wrote about the contemporary world could be considered as modernist writers. For example, Eric Linklater’s 1930s novel Magnus Merriman provides an ironic, at times farcical, account of the political and artistic performances of Scottish Renaissance activists with a barely disguised MacDiarmid in the character of Hugh Skene. Yet Linklater’s fiction, although admired by many readers, is by nature picaresque rather than consciously challenging in order to build something new (artistically or politically). Despite some ‘modern’ themes, it cannot be considered ‘modernist’ writing. In addition, drama was an art form struggling to find an identity in the early decades of the century, and its priorities were survival rather than competition with the modernist drama of Europe. Such qualifications mean that although the present study will attempt to provide the contexts out of which a Scottish modernism of the post-1918 period developed and in which it operated, the writers selected for specific discussion will be those who consciously sought to find new forms in their creative work both for artistic purposes and in order to critique and give expression to the changing, modern world around them. This is therefore not an historical account of Scottish writing published in the period, but an account of what I would see as Scotland’s contribution to the phase of modernist culture which developed after the ending of World War One. One of the more provocative aspects of the study may be its extension into the late 1950s in order to take account of the late poetry of Edwin Muir and Hugh MacDiarmid as well as new poetry in the 1940s and 1950s. While the early revolutionary and optimistic phase of the literary revival had come to an end by the late 1930s, and the outbreak of war (as in World War One) brought many writing careers as well as lives to an end, the narrative of this Scottish contribution to modernism is left incomplete if it does not include this late phase. Several of the poets who came to attention in the 1940s drew on the legacy of MacDiarmid’s revitalisation of Scots as a modern literary language and on the ideas behind the revival movement, although experimenting with these influences in new ways. A poet such as Sydney Goodsir Smith, for example, was an

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outstanding new late modernist writer in Scots, while Sorley MacLean brought the long-awaited development of Gaelic as a modern – and modernist – literary language to fruition with his Dàin do Eimhir (Poems to Eimhir) published by William Maclellan of Glasgow in 1943. Maclellan also published a new series of little magazines and poetry anthologies in the 1940s which supported the new poetry, as well as publishing MacDiarmid’s In Memoriam James Joyce in 1955. The late poetry of Muir and MacDiarmid is also left in limbo by the perception of a Scottish literary revival that ended in 1939. Muir took a long time to mature as poet, although his strong reputation as critic dates from the World War One period. Yet his most achieved and innovative modern poetry comes in the 1940s and 1950s under the pressure of what he called this ‘single, disunited world’.8 MacDiarmid’s difficulty in finding publishing outlets after the outbreak of war and his consequent abstracting, borrowing and collaging practices have resulted in him being considered by some critics as a proto-postmodernist writer as opposed to the continuing modernist poet the visionary nature of his objectives and the initial context of his compositions might well show him to be. For all these reasons, it seems relevant to propose a Scottish modernism which extends selectively from the publication of Edwin Muir’s We Moderns in 1918 to his death in 1959, and which thus takes in late work by the writers associated with the principal phase of the movement as well as new voices which draw on its influences. The study will begin with a chapter on C. M. Grieve (Hugh MacDiarmid), his correspondence from Salonika and Marseilles during the war, and the little magazines he founded and edited in the early 1920s, thus initiating this Scottish contribution to literary modernism.

Notes 1. Eliot, ‘Was There a Scottish Literature?’, The Athenaeum, 1 August 1919, pp. 680–1; reprinted in McCulloch (ed.), Modernism and Nationalism, pp. 7–10. 2. As, for example, in Samuel Hynes, The Auden Generation. 3. Woolf, review of Feodor Dostoevsky’s The Eternal Husband, trans. Constance Garnett, Times Literary Supplement, 22 February 1917, p. 91. McCulloch (ed.), Modernism and Nationalism, p. 162. 4. See Frances Fowle, ‘Art Dealing in Glasgow Between the Wars: The Rise and Fall of La Société des Beaux-Arts’, Journal of the Scottish Society for Art History, vol. 12 (2007). 5. Ezra Pound, ‘Cavalcanti’, in Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, p. 124. 6. Eliot, ‘Ulysses, Order and Myth’, The Dial, November 1923, p. 483. 7. Grieve, ‘A Theory of Scots Letters’, Scottish Chapbook, February 1923, p. 182. McCulloch (ed.), Modernism and Nationalism, p. 26. 8. Muir, An Autobiography, p. 194.

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Chapter 1

Towards a Scottish Modernism: C. M. Grieve, Little Magazines and the Movement for Renewal

None of those significant little periodicals – crude, absurd, enthusiastic, vital – have yet appeared in Auchtermuchty or Ardnamurchan. No new publishing houses have sprung up mushroom-like [. . .] It is discouraging to reflect that this is not the way the Dadaists go about the business! C. M. Grieve, Scottish Chapbook (1922)

Christopher Murray Grieve was born and brought up in the small town of Langholm in the Scottish Borders. He enlisted in the war in late 1915 and after a period of training was posted to Salonika in Macedonia with the Royal Army Medical Corps, arriving at the 42nd General Hospital there in August 1916. A record of his war service and – more important for the poet Hugh MacDiarmid he was to become – a record of his psychological and intellectual development during these years is provided by the series of letters he wrote from Greece and later from France to George Ogilvie, his former English teacher at Broughton Junior Student Centre in Edinburgh. Grieve’s letters to Ogilvie continued after the war, through the development of what came to be known as the Scottish Renaissance movement and into the early 1930s, thus offering what might be seen as the ‘growth of a [Scottish] poet’s mind’. At this early stage, however, the European correspondence of the war years charts Grieve’s gradual progress towards his postwar role as modernist editor and poet by way of a multiplicity of eclectic reading and writing projects, while at the same time capturing his early interest in the cultural avant-garde.1 The principal fighting in Greece was over when Grieve’s unit arrived in the summer of 1916. It appears from his letters that once his various duties at the hospital and as quartermaster were fulfilled, he had considerable time left over for reading and thinking about his future plans. Indeed, ‘thinking’ – in Salonika as throughout his life – appears to have been an obsession and something of a trial to Grieve whose thoughts, like those of his future poetic persona the Drunk Man, tended to ‘circle like hobby-horses’.2 As a fledgling newspaper reporter in Wales in 1911, he had written to Ogilvie about his overactive brain: ‘I wish some device could be patented whereby my flying thoughts could be photographed: that might give me a chance to express my present mental stage with some adequacy’ (Letters, p. 6). Now, five years later,

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he was still trying to bring order to thoughts threatening to overwhelm him. He wrote in a long letter of 20 August 1916: [M]y thoughts are thus forever like a man moving through the ever-increasing and various confusion of an enormous higgledy-piggledy lumber-room [. . .] But I cannot get that breathing space. Nor can I hit on any super shorthand to keep pace with my continuing mental ‘spate’ and make up back-time. (Letters, p. 11)

Grieve had left Broughton Student Centre without taking a teaching qualification, and his letters give the impression of a young man of enormous ambition, but of as yet unfocused talent, an enthusiastic and eclectic reader, pouncing on whatever is new and intellectually and artistically challenging. He is anxious to compete with the authors he reads, but at the same time appears psychologically insecure, despite the confident, even arrogant, persona adopted in many of the letters; uncertain that he will ever be able to find a way to give expression to the latent creativity he feels he has within him. These letters are interesting not only for the light they throw on the psychology of their immature writer-to-be, but also for the information they contain about Grieve’s reading material in the war years and the proposed projects deriving from it. One series of Scottish studies concerns Scottish visual art, a topic of continuing interest throughout his life and one which at this point indicates his growing interest in Wyndham Lewis and avant-garde developments as well as implicitly looking forward to the visual quality in the imagery of his future Scots-language poetry: I have my The Scottish Vortex (as per system exemplified in Blast), Caricature in Scotland – and lost opportunities, A Copy of Burns I want (suggestions to illustrators on a personal visualization of the national pictures evoked in the poems), Scottish Colour-Thought (a study of the aesthetic condition of Scottish nationality in the last three centuries) and The Alienation of Our Artistic Ability (the factors which prevent the formation of a ‘national’ school and drive our artists to other lands and to ‘foreign portrayal’). (Letters, p. 9)

Such Scottish projects – or as he calls them, his ‘Scots Bureau’ (Letters, p. 20) – are documented as a part only (‘extracted from my notebook at random’) of his ‘ceaseless reading, wide as the world of books, in every conceivable subject’, while his interests range ‘from gardening to bacteriology and from fox-hunting to scientific indexing – I have planned books and articles on a thousand and one topics’ (Letters, pp. 8, 14). Such mental tentacles might certainly be seen to stretch forward to the author of the late intellectual and cultural collage of In Memoriam James Joyce, but there is as yet little to suggest the instigator of a vernacular literary revival in the years immediately after World War One. These letters to Ogilvie are notable for the absence of vernacular Scots in his writing, despite his Borders upbringing. (Like the letters of the eighteenth-century Burns, Grieve’s wartime correspondence appears to be the product of a carefully constructed persona.) Similarly, despite the fact that ‘most of my reading comes from “The Soldiers’ Recreation Friend,

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29 Drumsheugh Gardens, Edinburgh”’ (Letters, p. 24), he mentions no Scottish periodicals alongside the English, Irish and European magazines which were part of his regular reading material. Grieve would appear to have been at least one Scottish soldier for whom the British war propaganda in Blackwood’s Magazine was not required reading.3 On the other hand, what is relevant to Grieve’s future situation as a Scottish modernist is his interest in the cultural avant-garde and his increasing awareness of and identification with European artistic movements, as well as his recognition of the importance of Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis in the London avant-garde scene. Grieve had been introduced by Ogilvie to The New Age under the editorship of A. R. Orage when he was at Broughton, and had himself contributed an article ‘The Young Astrology’ in 1911, when he was nineteen. As with Edwin Muir, whose first book We Moderns (1918) began life as a series of articles in Orage’s magazine, The New Age had acted, and continued to act, as a kind of ‘Open University’ in relation to Grieve’s post-school education in philosophy, European literature, and contemporary artistic, intellectual, scientific and social ideas. Now in Greece, and later in France, his reading included not only The New Age and other English periodicals such as The Spectator, Nation, and English Review, together with the Irish Dublin Review and Dublin Leader, but also modern writers such as the American Henry James, the Irish playwright J. M. Synge and the Russians Maxim Gorky and the earlier Ivan Turgenev. From 1918 onwards, such contemporary references predominate in his correspondence. He continues his early interest in Wyndham Lewis by discussing the Little Review’s obscenity problems with his short story ‘Cantleman’s Spring-Mate’ (‘The case of “Cantleman” was taken into court in New York and brilliantly and humorously defended, but to no avail’, Letters, p. 20); and refers also to Emily Dickinson, Rebecca West and the Sitwells as well as to composers such as Debussy, Stravinsky and Rimsky-Korsakov. La Revue Trans-Macedonienne as well as La Vie Parisienne and Le Rêve have been added to his periodical reading. He writes that he is reading ‘in the original a big anthology of contemporary French Poets and am in communication now with Paul Valéry, André Gide, Albert Samhain and a few others’ (Letters, p. 33). His travels include visits to the French/Spanish border area, to Lourdes, to Biarritz, and to Paris. By December 1918, therefore, when Grieve is waiting impatiently in Marseilles for demobilisation, there are more definite signs of the editor and writer he would become in the postwar years. His projects continue to multiply: ‘It is better to be an electric current for five years than a vegetable for fifty’, he writes to Ogilvie on 27 December (Letters, p. 30). His ideas, however, appear more focused, and his own creative writing occupies a higher profile in the activities planned. He is negotiating for the publication of a small poetry collection titled A Voice from Macedonia, and is continuing with plans for a trilogy of novels. His atmospheric sketch ‘Casualties’ is to be published in the Broughton Magazine in the summer of 1919. He writes

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also of a completed study ‘Triangular’ which is ‘an essay in futurism’ (Letters, p. 33). What is interesting in relation to the specifically Scottish situation is that he is now beginning to make contact with other Scottish writers, some of whom are, like himself, ex-pupils of Ogilvie. The name of Roderick Watson Kerr (the future co-founder of Porpoise Press) appears frequently in the correspondence. Kerr’s war poems had been published in the English Review and in his collection War Daubs, and Grieve is anxious for news of their reception. Although his own war poems from Macedonia had apparently been favourably received by John Buchan, they had not achieved book publication as planned due to a number of misunderstandings and confusions (a foretaste of many similar publishing difficulties to come). He refers also to the political situation at home – ‘Exciting rumours of industrial happenings are trickling through’ – and expresses a wish to be part of it (Letters, p. 34). We can see in these later letters, therefore, the steps being taken towards the Scottish literary and national ventures which were to move centre stage from the summer of 1919 onwards. Grieve’s main place of residence from his demobilisation in 1919 until the late 1920s was Montrose, a small town on the north-east coast of Scotland, where he worked as a journalist on the Montrose Review, became elected as an Independent Labour Party Councillor, and began his family life. It was therefore from Montrose that he launched the ambitious programme for cultural and national renewal that became known as the Scottish Renaissance Movement: a Scottish modernism deriving from the periphery of a peripheral small country, as opposed to the high modernism of a European cosmopolitan metropolis.4 His first venture was a series of anthologies of contemporary Scottish poetry titled Northern Numbers, modelled on Edward Marsh’s Georgian Poetry anthologies. Although Marsh’s anthologies could not be considered as avant-garde, Grieve had read and admired them during his war service and was impressed by their popularity with readers. His Foreword to his own first Northern Numbers collection, published by Foulis in Edinburgh in 1920, stressed that it did not aim to be a comprehensive anthology of contemporary Scottish poetry, but consisted of ‘representative selections (chosen by the contributors themselves) from the mainly current work of certain Scottish poets of today’ – and he added, significantly, ‘and to-morrow’. This modest ‘manifesto’ therefore looked to the future and confidence grew when it was found to be ‘selling splendidly’.5 The journalist and poet William Jeffrey may even have made the first use of the term ‘renaissance’ to define the new movement when his positive review in the Glasgow Bulletin on 17 January 1921 was titled ‘Is this a Scottish poetry renaissance?’ (p. 6). Foulis published the second series in October 1921, with additional authors allowing Grieve to claim in his Foreword that the contributors ‘now represent poetically every district in Scotland including London’. By the next year, however, Foulis was in financial difficulties and Grieve published the third series himself from Montrose. Whether by coincidence or not, this third anthology appears the most forward-looking, with several of the older, more traditional writers

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replaced by younger, more adventurous contributors. Grieve’s own Englishlanguage contributions, although eye-catching, show him still struggling linguistically and thematically to articulate his metaphysical ideas, with only the imagistic ‘Cattle Show’ (later collected in Stony Limits of 1934) achieving resolution. The loss of Foulis also meant that his own experimental collection of poetry and prose, Annals of the Five Senses, which derived from his time in Macedonia, was now without a publisher. As with the third Northern Numbers, Grieve eventually published this collection himself from Montrose in 1923. Grieve had achieved much since returning to Scotland in 1919, but it was becoming increasingly clear to him that in order for any lasting renewal movement to take place, there had to be some ‘place of exchange’, a forum or market place for forward-looking literary and national debate and for the presentation of new creative writing. The collapse of Foulis and the difficulties he himself was experiencing in placing his various projects only served to emphasise the need for a more controllable outlet. In the inaugural issue of The Scottish Chapbook, first discussed with Foulis in 1920, but eventually edited and published by himself from Montrose in August 1922, he lamented the lack in Scotland of ‘phenomena recognisable as a propaganda of ideas [. . .] these significant little periodicals – crude, absurd, enthusiastic, vital’, adding: ‘it is discouraging to reflect that this is not the way the Dadaists go about the business’.6 Yet, although Tristan Tzara’s Dada Manifesto of 1918 may have introduced a new phase of European avant-garde art in the postwar period, and ‘significant little periodicals’ such as Blast, The Egoist and The Little Review had launched new aesthetic ideas and creative writing in cosmopolitan centres in these early years of the century, Grieve was ironically idealistic in looking for them in Scotland at this time. Edinburgh was now a provincial North British city as opposed to an Enlightenment capital, and the great publishing days of the Edinburgh Review and Blackwood’s had come to an end, although the latter magazine had enjoyed a temporary return to prosperity in its role of purveyor of British propaganda during the war. Nor could the generalist and conventional nature of the Scottish periodical press as a whole offer a platform for experimental literature and innovatory polemics. As so often in his future literary life, Grieve in this early period did not sit down to his publishing troubles, but set about providing his own solutions. In a letter published in the Glasgow Herald on 15 May 1922, he advertised his intention to publish a new monthly magazine under his editorship to be called The Scottish Chapbook, giving its aims and intended readership, and asking for supporters to contact him. He stated his belief that a minority in Scotland, sufficiently interested or capable of being interested in experimental poetics, is now quite large enough to justify the publication of such a monthly periodical as is indicated [. . .] The venture is not to be a commercial one. It is intended to cover expenses and no more [. . .] Only a very limited number of subscribers at 10s annually (for which they will receive the twelve monthly issues post free) are needed. (Letters, p. 757)

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Sufficient subscribers (including the writers Helen Cruickshank, Neil M. Gunn and William Soutar, who also became contributors) were achieved to launch The Scottish Chapbook in August 1922, shortly before the launch of the Criterion under the editorship of T. S. Eliot in October of that year. As has often been remarked, 1922 was something of an annus mirabilis in postwar English-language literary modernism, since in addition to the Criterion under Eliot’s editorship, the year saw the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses by Sylvia Beach of Shakespeare & Co. in Paris in February, Eliot’s The Waste Land in the American magazine The Dial in November, and the appearance in London of new fiction by D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf. To this was added in Scotland not only Grieve’s editorship of a new mould-breaking magazine, but, even more important for the revival of Scotland’s literary reputation, his appearance in its third issue of October 1922 as the modernist Scots-language poet ‘Hugh M’Diarmid’. With its red cover, lion rampant cover image and motto proclaiming ‘Not Traditions – Precedents’, The Scottish Chapbook offered an uncompromising platform for a ‘propaganda of ideas’. Its manifesto, The Chapbook Programme, featured prominently in the inaugural and all subsequent issues, and took as its motto the quotation: ‘Il far un libro meno e che niente/Se il libro fatto non rifa la gente . . .’ (‘To make a book is less than nothing unless the book, when made, makes people anew’).7 Its general objective was to ‘meddle wi’ the thistle’ and specific aims included: ‘to encourage and publish the work of contemporary Scottish poets and dramatists, whether in English, Gaelic or Braid Scots’; ‘to insist upon truer evaluations of the work of Scottish writers than are usually given in the present over-Anglicised condition of British literary journalism, and, in criticism, elucidate, apply, and develop the distinctively Scottish range of values’. Most importantly, it sought ‘to bring Scottish Literature into closer touch with current European tendencies in technique and ideation’.8 This, then, was to be a forward-looking movement which would not only seek to revitalise Scottish writing in all three of Scotland’s indigenous languages, but would also seek to bring these Scottish traditions into contact with modern European creative and intellectual ideas. And instead of lamenting Scotland’s linguistic diversity as a hindrance to the development of a distinctive literature (as Eliot had considered it to be in his review article ‘Was there a Scottish literature?’), Grieve looked in his first Book Review column to the earlier European example of La Jeune Belgique for a way forward in relation to the several languages of Scotland: What Belgium did, Scotland can do. Literary Scotland, like Belgium, is a country of mixed nationality. Instead of two languages, Flemish and French, we have Braid Scots, Gaelic and English. Let the exponents of these three sections in Scottish Literature to-day make common cause as the young Belgian writers [. . .] did in La Jeune Belgique and elsewhere; and the next decade or two will see a Scottish Renascence as swift and irresistible as was the Belgian Revival between 1880 and 1910.9

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The Scottish Chapbook was probably more truly a modernist ‘little magazine’ – shortlived, impecunious and iconoclastic – than was Eliot’s more securely founded and structured Criterion. Its capacity for polemic was demonstrated in its third issue of October 1922 by the unexpected introduction of the new Scots-language poet ‘Hugh M’Diarmid’, and by its editor’s ‘Causeries’ arguing out the case against and for Scots which culminated in the important series ‘A Theory of Scots Letters’ in February and March 1923: a debate which changed the future course of Scottish writing. The new magazine had in fact been launched in the context of its editor’s dispute with the London Burns Club over the Club’s establishment of a Vernacular Circle with the aim of promoting the Scots language: a dispute which had been conducted in an acrimonious correspondence in the Aberdeen Free Press from December 1921. At this earlier point Grieve believed that the modern Scottish literature he envisaged would of necessity have to be developed in English, since the decline of Scots since the time of Burns had left the language unsuitable for ambitious literary purposes. In this he looked to the Irish literary revival for support, arguing that ‘Synge, Yeats and other great Irish writers found no difficulty in expressing themselves in an English which they yet made distinctively Irish’ (Letters, p. 751). In addition, he had recently come under the influence of Gregory Smith’s Scottish Literature: Character and Influence of 1919, whose coining of the term ‘Caledonian Antisyzygy’ as the descriptor of the contradictory nature of Scottish writing he was later to adopt in his own work. In his dispute with the Burns Club, however, it was Smith’s sarcastic dismissal of the Scotslanguage poet who ‘waddles in good duck fashion through his Jamieson [Scots-language dictionary], snapping up fat expressive words with nice little bits of green idiom for flavouring’ that made him fear that a flight from the kailyard could not possibly be achieved through the medium of Scots.10 (Ironically, as we shall see, this was exactly the practice that brought him, as MacDiarmid, to prominence as a modernist poet.) In his disagreement with the Burns Club’s position, therefore, he insisted that ‘any attempt to create a Doric “boom” just now – or even to maintain the existing vernacular cult in anything like its present tendencies – would be a gross disservice to Scottish life and letters’ (Letters, p. 755). What brought about Grieve’s change of mind is uncertain, although, as we have seen, the inaugural Chapbook Programme emphasised renewal in all three of Scotland’s languages, and by its second and third issues of September and October 1922 he was becoming more conciliatory towards the Burns Club, commenting that ‘the struggle is really between those whose allegiance is to the letter of Burnsiana and those who are filled with the spirit of Burns’.11 He continued to equivocate, however, and this ambivalence is even more sharply illustrated by his ‘Scottish Books and Bookmen’ columns in the Dunfermline Press, which ran in parallel with his Chapbook deliberations. On 5 August 1922, for example, he is reiterating the position taken months previously in the Aberdeen Free Press, as he insists that

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Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959 most of it [Scottish Literature] is, of course, and must continue to be, written in English. But it is not English on that account, although it is denounced on that score by the ardent minority bent upon the revival of the Doric [. . .] It is no more English in spirit than the literature of the Irish Literary Revival, most of which was written in the English language, was English in spirit.

Yet, just a few weeks later on 30 September 1922, he purports to be introducing a ‘friend’ who has discovered a copy of Sir James Wilson’s Lowland Scotch in the corner of his (Grieve’s) bookshelf. Reminding his readers of his previously expressed ‘strong view in regard to the literary uses of the Venacular’, he nevertheless confesses his ‘great delight in words; and the obsolete, the distinctively local, the idiomatic, the unusual attract me strongly’.12 Such qualities have apparently attracted his mythical friend also, and the result is ‘The Watergaw’ and ‘The Blaward and the Skelly’, published in the Dunfermline Press shortly before the more ‘official’ appearance of ‘The Watergaw’ under the name of ‘Hugh M’Diarmid’ in the October Scottish Chapbook. Grieve commented in relation to the poems’ appearance in the Dunfermline Press that they ‘serve a useful purpose [. . .] in rescuing from oblivion and restoring to literary use forgotten words that have a descriptive potency otherwise unavailable [. . .] but apart from that philological interest they have, in my opinion, some genuine merit too’.13 In the Chapbook appearance, he more confidently draws attention to his friend ‘M’Diarmid’ and his activities, describing him as: the first Scottish writer who has addressed himself to the question of the extendability (without psychological violence) of the vernacular to embrace the whole range of modern culture [. . .] what he has to do is to adopt an essentially rustic tongue to the very much more complex requirements of our urban civilisation – to give it all the almost illimitable suggestability it lacks (compared, say, with contemporary English or French) but would have had if it had continued in general use in highly cultured circles to the present day. A modern consciousness cannot fully express itself in the Doric as it exists.

In contrast to its present limitations, however, he emphasises the potential of the language as achieved in his friend’s poem: [T]ranslate it into English – that is the test [. . .] Not only so, but the temper of the poem is modern and the Doric is adequate to it. It is disfigured by none of the usual sentimentality. It has a distinctively Scottish sinisterness for which expression is too seldom found nowadays.

And in a final flourish, he cuts himself and Mr M’Diarmid off from some of his previous Northern Numbers colleagues as he insists that: ‘The whole trouble with the Doric as a literary language to-day is that the vast majority of its exponents are hopelessly limited culturally – and that the others (such as Mrs Violet Jacob, Mr Charles Murray, and Miss Mary Symon) only use it for limited purposes.’14

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What is noticeable about Grieve/MacDiarmid’s continuing debate with himself and his readers about the viability of Scots as a modern literary language is the emphasis he places on the importance of the ‘modern’. What he does not want is some ‘museum department of our consciousness’, adding: ‘The rooms of thought are choc-a-bloc with far too much dingy rubbish as it is.’ Any revival must have ‘potentialities [which] are in accord with the newest tendencies of human thought’.15 Alan Bold has suggested in his biography of MacDiarmid that his move to Scots may have been encouraged by James Joyce’s linguistic experimentation in Ulysses, which he may have read either through its serialisation from 1918 in Margaret Anderson’s Little Review or by acquiring a copy of Sylvia Beach’s 1922 Paris edition.16 Whatever the reason, it is interesting that in the course of ‘A Theory of Scots Letters’ we find that instead of the earlier relationship postulated between a modern Scottish literature in English and the work of J. M. Synge and Yeats, he now sees a link between the Scots Vernacular and the more recent modernist language experimentation of James Joyce. In particular, he comments that he has been enormously struck by the resemblance – the moral resemblance – between Jamieson’s Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish language and James Joyce’s Ulysses. A vis comica that has not yet been liberated lies bound by desuetude and misappreciation in the recesses of the Doric: and its potential uprising would be no less prodigious, uncontrollable, and utterly at variance with conventional morality as was Joyce’s tremendous outpouring.

By March 1923, the Scots Vernacular has replaced English as the language of a new Scots literature which will take Scottish culture back into the mainstream of Europe. Scots is now the only language in Western Europe instinct with those uncanny spiritual and pathological perceptions alike which constitute the uniqueness of Dostoevski’s work [. . . and] is a vast storehouse of just the very peculiar and subtle effects which modern European literature in general is assiduously seeking [. . .] It is an inchoate Marcel Proust – a Dostoevskian debris of ideas – an inexhaustible quarry of subtle and significant sound.17

Over the course of these Chapbook editorials, Grieve had succeeded in establishing in his own mind at least the potential and viability of Scots as a literary language for a modern Scotland and one that could also make its contribution to European culture. From this point onwards, at least from Grieve/ MacDiarmid’s perspective, the Scots language was not only something to be encouraged along with the Gaelic, but was to be the cornerstone of a modern literary revival, and at the same time the marker of a revitalised Scottish identity distinctive from English; it had become the signifier and the symbol of both the aesthetic and political objectives of the revival movement. The Chapbook continued publication until November/December 1923, and although its Causeries lost momentum to some extent after the end

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of the language debate, it continued to publish poems by MacDiarmid in Scots, with the August 1923 issue containing some of these translated into French by Denis Saurat, Professor of French at Glasgow University, who had become involved with the revival movement. Edwin Muir and Neil M. Gunn also began to appear in its pages, Muir contributing from Europe where he was then living, and, unusually, with a poem in Scots (‘The Black Douglas’). Gunn, equally unusually, contributed as poet, although his short fiction was published in Grieve’s subsequent magazines. Contributions in Gaelic, ‘Continental Sonnets’ in English by C. M. Grieve and the exploration of a ‘Russo-Scottish Parallelism’ pointed to its continuing internationalism in addition to its Scottish objectives. On the other hand, it may be that the format of the Chapbook was not sufficiently flexible for the wider cultural and national agenda Grieve had initially intended to pursue, especially when the editor’s Causeries on the topic of the Scots language dominated its content. He had made an admission of this kind himself at the outset of his venture when he wrote to Ogilvie in October 1922: ‘I quite agree with you as to the format of Chapbook. There are difficulties about changing it: but I shall do so at the earliest possible opportunity’ (Letters, p. 78). Instead of changing The Scottish Chapbook, however, he began in May 1923 a new weekly magazine The Scottish Nation, again edited and published by himself from Montrose. Although its opening issue called for the freeing of Scotland from English influence (perhaps to encourage support from the nationalist businessman R. H. Muirhead, which in the end did not materialise in a financial form), The Scottish Nation’s agenda was not explicitly a political one, but was modelled on the international and eclectic format of Orage’s New Age. In the Scottish context, the new magazine regularly covered music in Scotland (with some of the articles written by Grieve himself under the byline of ‘Isobel Guthrie’), new novels, contemporary art, religion and ethics, Gaelic language matters, education and employment and political questions relating to the Labour Party in Scotland and the perceived problem of the Irish in Scotland. ‘International Art and Affairs’ was a regular feature. Edwin Muir contributed the important two-part essay ‘The Assault on Humanism’, an attack on what he saw as the nihilistic direction D. H. Lawrence was pursuing in his work, a charge refuted by Grieve in a subsequent issue. Muir also introduced the German poet Hölderlin to an English-speaking public in his essay ‘A Note on Friedrich Hölderlin’ and there were reviews of Babette Deutsch and Avrahm Yarmolinsky’s Modern Russian Poetry and Contemporary German Poetry, translations which may well have encouraged Grieve/MacDiarmid’s future experimentation with adaptations from European poetry in A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle. The literary revival itself featured regularly in Grieve’s series ‘At the Sign of the Thistle’ and included items such as ‘Burns and Baudelaire’, ‘Braid Scots and the Sense of Smell’ and ‘The Neglect of Scottish Literature’. In addition to Scots-language poems by MacDiarmid, there were poems in Scots by Lewis Spence, a supporter who took a different route to the revival of Scots

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for literary purposes. The Scottish Nation can therefore be seen as symbolic of the attempt to create a new intellectual and European-oriented movement in Scottish culture, but one which was also rooted in contemporary Scottish life. Unfortunately, such an ambitious weekly magazine attempting to follow the format of The New Age (which itself had never made a profit) proved impossible to sustain without financial backing and without a stronger contributor and readership base. And these, apparently, were not yet to be found in Scotland. Nor was there the type of rich, cosmopolitan patron who had been willing to support the early projects of Pound, Eliot and H. D. In contrast, The Scottish Nation was once again edited and funded from Montrose through Grieve’s activities as a journalist, and supported by the goodwill of his unpaid contributors (many of whom, and often the most stimulating, were eventually himself wearing diverse disguises). The magazine ran in parallel with the monthly Scottish Chapbook until December 1923 when both ceased publication. They were followed, briefly, by a return to monthly publication with The Northern Review, edited by Grieve with two assistant editors and a London agent. This too was without external funding, and it ran for four issues only from May to September 1924. Although these periodicals initiated and edited by Grieve were short-lived, as with little modernist magazines elsewhere, they had an impact beyond their brief lives. By 1925, when Grieve’s alter ego MacDiarmid published Sangschaw, his first collection of Scots lyrics, the principal Scottish newspapers regularly included articles and letters on the new direction in Scottish literature and cultural life, and the terminology ‘Scottish Renaissance’ was in common use to describe the new movement. Professor Denis Saurat took it abroad in his article ‘Le groupe de “la Renaissance Ecossaise”’ published in the Revue Anglo-Americaine in April 1924, and it gained even greater currency after MacDiarmid’s Penny Wheep and A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle followed Sangschaw in 1926, with all three works being reviewed in Scottish newspapers and in periodicals outwith Scotland such as the Times Literary Supplement, Nineteenth Century and the American Saturday Review of Literature. A few years later, in October 1933, the London Spectator was to announce an editorial policy of regular coverage of Scottish affairs because ‘developments are in progress in Scotland that are far too little understood or discussed outside Scotland [. . .] The cultivation of Gaelic and the conscious development of a modern Scottish literature are movements demanding not only observation but discussion’.18 Grieve himself ceased to have a magazine under his editorship after the demise of the Northern Review but he continued to be a presence on the periodical scene, contributing both to established journals and to several new ones which began to appear in the later 1920s, most probably encouraged by his earlier example. Although these magazines were not avantgarde in nature, or even specifically literary or arts-based, most of them were characterised by their commitment to the regeneration of the life of the country, culturally, politically and economically. In May 1925, Grieve

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was commissioned by the editor of the Scottish Educational Journal to write a series of assessments of Scottish literary figures, a project he had tentatively begun in the Scottish Chapbook. This caused much controversy in the Journal’s pages, while at the same time furthering awareness of the revival movement and its challenge to existing traditions. The series was published in London in 1926 as Contemporary Scottish Studies. The same year also saw the founding of the Scots Independent, a nationalist political magazine, and the Scots Observer: A Weekly Journal of Religious & National Interest edited by William Power. Despite its stated purpose ‘to strengthen and make socially manifest the spiritual leadership of the Scottish Protestant Churches’,19 the Scots Observer carried a wide range of literary and other cultural and social material and many of its contributors were associated with the literary revival movement. Another new magazine was the Pictish Review, edited by the Celtic nationalist Ruairidh Erskine of Marr whose inaugural editorial in 1927 included the aim ‘to re-elucidate the values implicit, and explicit, in Pictish history and civilisation’.20 In the early 1930s, The Free Man, edited in Edinburgh by Robin Black, and associated with no specific political party or organisation, offered its pages to those committed to the renewal of Scotland and, among a wide range of topics, provided space for discussion of Highland regeneration and, especially, for discussion of the present condition and revitalisation of the Gaelic language. Highland regeneration was also the principal theme of the many articles written in the 1930s by Neil M. Gunn for the established Scots Magazine, under the editorship of J. B. Salmond. Of more specific relevance to the literary and European-oriented revival initiated by Grieve in the early 1920s was The Modern Scot which took over his avant-garde role in the early to mid-1930s, when he himself was living in a kind of voluntary exile on the small Shetland island of Whalsay. The Modern Scot was both owned and edited by James Whyte, a wealthy young American who ran a bookshop with his partner in St Andrews, a douce university town which was somewhat scandalised by Whyte’s bisexuality and what were seen as his and his bookshop’s avant-garde activities. His comfortable financial background meant that he was able to conduct his magazine independently and, unusually, to pay his contributors well. The Modern Scot therefore had something of the kind of patronage enjoyed by cosmopolitan magazines such as The Little Review or The Egoist – an advantage sorely lacking in Grieve’s earlier precarious journals. Despite being a non-Scot, Whyte was strongly supportive of the political and cultural aims of the Scottish Renaissance and confirmed his magazine’s intention to continue to encourage new writing and criticism within Scotland, and in all three of Scotland’s languages, while maintaining the connections with continental Europe established by the Grieve magazines. Even a cursory reading of the indexes to the various annual volumes indicates how successfully this commitment, as well as the interaction of the political and the aesthetic, was carried out, aided by Whyte’s large stable of contributors and also, no doubt, by the greater amount of time he himself was able to give to

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planning his issues coherently. For example, the Winter issue of Volume One included reviews of André Gide’s L’Immoraliste and his Dostoevsky and a study of Marcel Proust by Armand Dandieu alongside reviews of Catherine Carswell’s Life of Robert Burns (a ground-breaking, novelistic biography which focused on Burns’s sexuality and attracted much hostility from the traditionalists of the Burns Clubs). The issue also contained reviews of Scottish Gaelic publications and one (under the initials C. M. G.) of La Langue de Relations Interceltiques by Louis de Roux: thus bringing together in the one issue French, Celtic and Scots connections. New creative writing represented included a poem by Edwin Muir and a review of Neil Gunn’s novel Morning Tide. This interactive Scottish and European pattern continued throughout the magazine’s life, with a noticeable increase in the work from Scotland being featured, including not only creative writing and reviews of new writing, but also visual art images and articles, together with the music for Francis George Scott’s settings of some of MacDiarmid’s early Scots lyrics – the music itself influenced by European modernist experimentation of the early century. There are articles that focus on the development of Scottish drama, something that had disappeared in the wake of the Calvinist reformation of the sixteenth century, but was beginning hesitantly to re-emerge in the interwar period (although it was not until the re-emergence of political nationalism in the 1970s that anything approaching an avant-garde or agit-prop theatre movement developed in Scotland). In a decade such as the 1930s, politics were inescapable, and in addition to the expected critiques and endorsements of Scottish national politics – including the editor’s own acute analysis of the difference between national and nationalist literature – there were uncompromising critical analyses of Wyndham Lewis’s book on Hitler, politicial poems by MacDiarmid and both positive and negative reviews of his Hymns to Lenin, with the ‘First Hymn’ reviewed by A. R. Orage. In excerpts from her Russian Diary, Naomi Mitchison considered her own equivocal responses to what she called the ‘she-sailors’ on the boat which took her to Russia, and to the supposed emancipated condition of women generally under the Soviet system. The Muirs presented translations of Kafka’s Aphorisms and work by Hermann Broch, whose trilogy Die Schlafwandler (The Sleepwalkers) they were also translating. And there were praises for and explanations of Major Douglas’s social credit system, an almost obligatory item in anti-capitalist modern magazines in these early decades of the century. Altogether, The Modern Scot was a splendidly interactive and cosmopolitan modern journal which probably more successfully fulfilled Grieve’s early vision of an inspirational aesthetic and political Scottish periodical than did his own handto-mouth little magazines. Yet, ironically, it was his iconoclastic, unstable and short-lived ventures that had created the climate in which a more sophisticated modern magazine such as The Modern Scot could emerge and flourish for a longer period. The continuing problem, however, was the absence in Scotland of a

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sufficiently large and adventurous audience interested in the promotion of new ideas, both Scottish and emanating from beyond Scotland. In the mid1930s, The Modern Scot merged with another journal to become Outlook. This merger produced a magazine which, although less culturally adventurous than its predecessor, achieved lasting notoriety as a result of printing prepublication excerpts from Edwin Muir’s 1936 book Scott and Scotland in which he suggested that the only way forward for an ambitious writer in Scotland was to use the English language and literary tradition – a proposal that seemed to be a denial of all that had been achieved as a result of MacDiarmid’s language experimentation in the 1920s, and one that caused a breach between the two poets that was never healed. In 1937 Outlook itself ceased publication as the political climate in Europe darkened and James Whyte returned to America; and in 1938 MacDiarmid himself returned to periodical publication with The Voice of Scotland which he edited from the Shetlands assisted by a young managing editor in Edinburgh: an initiative that will be discussed in later political chapters. In 1926, the poet and journalist Lewis Spence had claimed that Grieve was ‘amongst the first to recognise that post-war Scotland was ripe for a new literary dispensation’, and had described his activities in these years as the creation of ‘a veritable kulturkampf in Scottish literary circles, a tumult in which his ideas have been greeted with the most savage condemnation mingled with praise almost extravagant’.21 Grieve was certainly both the instigator and, as MacDiarmid, the outstanding artistic practitioner of the modern renewal movement during the 1920s in particular. Yet he was not alone, for as the contributor lists for his own magazines and the periodicals which followed after them show, there were many others willing to support the debate about national identity he had launched and to contribute to it through creative and discursive writing of their own. For example, 1922 had seen not only the launch of The Scottish Chapbook but also the founding of the Porpoise Press by two students from Edinburgh University: Roderick Watson Kerr (author of the War Daubs poetry collection Grieve asked about so often in his war correspondence with Ogilvie), and George Malcolm Thomson (who was later to publish controversial social and economic accounts of the condition of Scotland). As with the lack of forwardlooking little magazines that could provide a home for innovatory work, the absence of a Scottish publishing house for such new writing was one of the obstacles in the path of the early reformers. Porpoise Press was a modest venture, but it was especially important in its encouragement of Scots-language poetry, both by new writers and others who had previously experienced difficulty in putting out a solo collection of work in Scots. One such poet was Marion Angus from the north-east of the country – on the surface a more traditional poet than MacDiarmid, drawing her influences from the Scottish ballads. Yet in her poetic scenarios, written from a female perspective, Angus explored the tropes of time, memory and other-worldly states of being which are found in the art of the modernist period as well

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as in the elliptical narratives of the ballad tradition, and her haunting, enigmatic poems have probably received more appreciative attention in our own time than in the male-dominated poetry context of the 1920s. Porpoise also published work by supporters of the revival movement such as Lewis Spence and William Jeffrey as well as poems by Kerr himself; translations of Ronsard by Charles Graves and translations by Alexander Gray of the Heine poems set to music in Schumann’s Dichterliebe. It reprinted poems by Robert Henryson and Robert Fergusson from earlier periods of Scotland’s literary tradition as well as Grieve’s experimental English-language Annals of the Five Senses which he had previously published himself as a result of the failure of Foulis, and in which the poetry and prose contributions in English show that he was potentially a modernist writer before he revitalised Scots as a modern literary language. An important addition in 1929 was Hidden Doors, a first collection of short stories by Neil M. Gunn, whose next five novels were published under the Porpoise imprint. Porpoise was taken over by Faber when its founders had to leave Scotland in order to further their careers, but it maintained its original name and a continuing editorial function for a number of years, and while it existed was an important presence on the Scottish publishing scene. As with the articles and discussions in the Grieve magazines, the advertisements for new writing carried in the various Porpoise pamphlets and broadsheets helped create an atmosphere of creative activity and opportunity. Neil M. Gunn and Edwin Muir were among the movement’s early supporters. The success of Muir’s first book We Moderns had resulted in a contract with the American Freeman magazine which allowed him and his wife Willa to live in Europe in the early 1920s, and his letters to relatives show that he watched the new developments in Scotland with interest, eventually becoming a contributor to Grieve’s magazines. Although his reputation is now principally as poet, throughout the 1920s Muir was developing a strong reputation as an international critic, contributing to London-based and American periodicals, travelling in Europe and translating and writing about German literature. He was therefore an important acquisition for the movement, giving it a tangible European dimension. Grieve described him as ‘a critic incontestably in the first flight of contemporary critics of weltliteratur [. . .] a Pan-European intervening in the world-debate on its highest plane’. 22 Muir would also prove to be one of the most perceptive critics of MacDiarmid’s modernist Scots-language poetry and his reviews did much to help its early reception. Gunn was another important recruit, although his most significant work as novelist of the Highlands came in the 1930s and early 1940s, as opposed to the poetry-driven 1920s. Nevertheless, on the publication of his first novel The Grey Coast in 1926, he was praised by Grieve as ‘the only Scottish prose-writer of promise, that is to say, in relation to that which is distinctively Scottish rather than tributary to the “vast engulfing sea” of English literature’. 23 He was also a significant member of the movement in view of its commitment to the regeneration of the Highlands. An outstanding

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new associate in the 1930s was Lewis Grassic Gibbon whose trilogy A Scots Quair transposed MacDiarmid’s earlier Scots language experimentation from poetry to fiction, bringing it together with a stream of consciousness methodology adapted from Joyce and Woolf. Scottish Scene, the book he published jointly with MacDiarmid in 1934, showed that he was also a match for his co-author in outrageous polemic. What emerges from this ferment of activity in the post-1918 years, as evidenced in the arguments of the discursive periodical writing and in the movement’s ambitions for a modern, outward-looking Scottish literature, is an unprecedented challenge by the nation’s writers and their supporters to the increasingly subservient position of Scotland as a North British region of the Union. In the process, many of the country’s existing cultural icons were toppled from their pedestals. Burns and Scott both fared badly in this reassessment, with Muir famously characterising both as ‘sham bards of a sham nation’ in his poem ‘Scotland 1941’.24 As in his difficulties with the Burns Club over the revival of the Scots language, Grieve/MacDiarmid was equivocal in his attitude to Burns: at times denouncing him for the sentimental legacy he had left to less talented imitators; at others – as in A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle – seeing him, like Christ, as the victim of those who took them as ‘an /Excuse for faitherin’ Genius wi’ their thochts’.25 Catherine Carswell first came into association with the revival movement by taking issue with Grieve’s Radio Times article ‘Scotsmen Make a God of Robert Burns’ in January 1930. Her response, ‘The “Giant Ploughman” Can Withstand His Critics’, while seeing off his criticism, showed that she was also on his side in relation to the need for renewal. Walter Scott was even less popular than Burns and this had much to do with his support of the Union and the fact that his historical novels did not envisage a Scottish future being built on the past he portrayed. Muir found ‘a very curious emptiness [. . .] behind the wealth of his imagination’,26 and both Scott and the later Stevenson certainly wrote in a valedictory way about Scotland’s distinctive traditions: Scott in his postscript to Waverley (1914) referring to his task ‘of tracing the evanescent manners of his own country’; and Stevenson in his note to the Scots-language poems in Underwoods (1887) seeing his wish to have his ‘hour as a native Maker’ as ‘an ambition surely rather of the heart than of the head, so restricted as it is in prospect of endurance, so parochial in bounds of space’.27 Such elegiac attitudes were foreign to the ambitions of the Scottish modernists. Grieve’s Chapbook may have had as its slogan ‘Not Traditions – Precedents’, but, as in much modern art of the time, he and other writers committed to renewal often creatively transformed outworn traditions by adapting them and allowing them to interact with very different ideas and forms from the modern period in order to produce something new. We will see this practice in action in the new literature discussed in the chapters which follow: in, for example, the recreation of Scots as a literary language in

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MacDiarmid’s lyrics and A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle as well as in Grassic Gibbon’s Marxist Scots-language fiction; in the way that women writers adapt and redirect male literary traditions in order to suit their new female needs; and in Gunn’s use of Celtic myth and legend, drawn from both Scotland and Ireland, in order to re-imagine the Highlands. All such ‘recreations’ involve the aim to restore what Gunn called ‘belief in ourselves’. 28

Notes 1. The letters from Grieve to George Ogilvie are reprinted in Hugh MacDiarmid, The Hugh MacDiarmid-George Ogilvie Letters (1988), ed. Catherine Kerrigan, and in Hugh MacDiarmid, The Letters of Hugh MacDiarmid (1984), ed. Alan Bold. Although Kerrigan has more editorial material specifically related to these letters, for convenience any page references in the text will relate to the Bold edition. This will be abbreviated in the text as Letters. 2. Hugh MacDiarmid, A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle (1926), in MacDiarmid, Complete Poems 1920–1976, Vol. I, p. 112. 3. For Blackwood’s role during the war, see David Finkelstein, ‘Literature, Propaganda and the First World War’, pp. 1–28. 4. A surprising number of creative people came together in Montrose in the 1920s. Willa Muir was brought up in Montrose and she and Edwin visited her mother there and met with the Grieves and with Francis George Scott who also visited. The painter Edward Baird lived and worked there, and the fiction writer Fionn MacColla (Tom MacDonald) was born there, and his parents were close neighbours of the Grieves in Links Avenue. 5. Letter to George Ogilvie, 19 December 1920, in MacDiarmid, Hugh MacDiarmidGeorge Ogilvie Letters, ed. Catherine Kerrigan, p. 67. This letter is not reprinted in Bold. 6. Grieve, Scottish Chapbook l .1, August 1922, pp. 4–5; reprinted in MacDiarmid, Selected Prose, p. 7. 7. This Italian quotation comes from Giuseppe Giusti (1808–50). I am grateful to postgraduate student Thomas Murphy for this information. 8. Grieve, Chapbook Programme, reprinted in McCulloch (ed.), Modernism and Nationalism, p. xii. 9. Grieve, Scottish Chapbook, August 1922, p. 28, reprinted in McCulloch (ed.), Modernism and Nationalism, p. 53. 10. Smith, Scottish Literature: Character and Influence, pp. 138–9. 11. Grieve, Scottish Chapbook, September 1922, p. 38. 12. Dunfermline Press, 5 August 1922, p. 6; 30 September 1922, p. 7, reprinted in McCulloch (ed.), Modernism and Nationalism, pp. 23–4. 13. Ibid. 14. Grieve, Scottish Chapbook, October 1922, pp. 62–3, reprinted in McCulloch (ed.), Modernism and Nationalism, pp. 24–5. 15. Grieve, Scottish Chapbook, February 1923, p. 182.

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16. Bold, MacDiarmid: Christopher Murray Grieve, p. 192. Future page numbers will be given in the text. 17. Grieve, Scottish Chapbook, February 1923, p. 183 and March 1923, p. 210. 18. Spectator, October 1933, p. 434. 19. Scots Observer, 2 October 1926, p. 1. 20. Pictish Review, November 1927, p. 1. 21. Spence, ‘The Scottish Literary Renaissance’, The Nineteenth Century, July 1926, p. 123. 22. Grieve, Contemporary Scottish Studies, p. 108. 23. Ibid., p. 268. 24. Muir, Complete Poems of Edwin Muir, p. 100. Page numbers for future quotations will be given in the text. 25. MacDiarmid, Complete Poems, I, p. 84. Page numbers for future quotations will be given in the text. 26. Muir, Scott and Scotland, p. 2. 27. Scott, Waverley, p. 478. Stevenson, Underwoods, p. xii. 28. Gunn, Landscape and Light, p. 158.

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Chapter 2

Hugh MacDiarmid and Modernist Poetry in Scots

An’ the roarin’ o’ oceans noo’ Is peerieweerie to me: Thunner’s a tinklin’ bell: an’ Time Whuds like a flee. ‘Au Clair de la Lune’, Sangschaw (1925)

The interwar phase of Scottish modernism appears to divide itself into two decades: the movement towards artistic renewal in the 1920s, and a more intense involvement with politics and social concerns – national and international – in the 1930s. In addition, while poetry is the dominant art form of the earlier decade, in the 1930s there is a significant amount of new fiction writing. In both decades, however, the principal writers contribute to the national and artistic renewal debate through critical and discursive prose as well as through their creative writing. The narrative of the movement, as presented here, is therefore a continuous one, led by aesthetic developments and the contexts from which they derived, rather than by any intentional chronological periodisation. Just as poetry was the dominant literary activity of the 1920s, so poetry itself was dominated by MacDiarmid’s revival of the Scots vernacular as a modern, avant-garde medium: ‘a vast storehouse of just the very peculiar and subtle effects which modern European literature in general is assiduously seeking’, as he claimed in the Scottish Chapbook of February 1923.1 As we have seen in the previous chapter, MacDiarmid’s self-conversion to Scots was hard won and initially fiercely resisted. Edwin Muir may have incited the modern writer to ‘wrestle with his age’,2 but for MacDiarmid the struggle was less with modernity itself than with the outworn traditions of his country which seemed to him to be holding Scotland back from entering the modern world. In the literary context, the Scots language and the now debased poetry tradition of Burns were among these impediments. In contrast, MacDiarmid had early been attracted to European poetry, to the poetry of Yeats and the Irish Revival, and to the new ideas about poetry and other art forms being discussed in the New Age and the other magazines he read when serving in Greece and France during World War One. In his

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autobiography Lucky Poet, published in 1943, he tells of his ‘first introduction to Rilke’s work’ through Jethro Bithell’s translation of his poems: and to Stefan George’s, Richard Dehmel’s, and many another German poet who has since meant so much to me, away back in 1909, when a young poet friend, John Bogue Nisbet, who was killed at Loos, and I used to go cycling and camping in Berwickshire and elsewhere with Bithell’s little volumes in our jacket pockets.3

Later MacDiarmid became interested in the Symbolist movement, in the poetry and ideas of the Russian Alexander Blok, and the French Stéphane Mallarmé with whom he shared a belief in ‘the act of poetry being the reverse of what it is usually thought to be; not an idea gradually shaping itself in words, but deriving entirely from words’, as he described it in Lucky Poet.4 Mallarmé’s disciple Paul Valéry and the American Ezra Pound were among other early poetic influences. This eclectic, cosmopolitan, poetic gathering then interacted with home-grown influences such as the Scottish ballads and in some instances the legacy of the English Romantics to produce the unique, modernist, Scots-language lyrics collected in Sangschaw (1925) and Penny Wheep (1926). By the beginning of the twentieth century, poetic forms and poetic language were generally considered to have become outworn, unable to meet the conditions of a new age. One innovation was the introduction of vers libre or ‘free verse’, of especial interest in France in an attempt to escape the straitjacket of the Alexandrine, but used also by English-language poets such as D. H. Lawrence, Edith Sitwell, Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, although the two last-named also warned against it. In his ‘Re Vers Libre’ of 1917, Pound acknowledged his experimental use of the form while suggesting that ‘one should write vers libre only when one “must”’ and that ‘progress lies rather in an attempt to approximate classical quantitative metres (NOT to copy them) than in a carelessness regarding such things’.5 Eliot, in his ‘Reflections on vers libre’ of the same year, denied the reality of a vers libre ‘school’, instead proposing that there is ‘no escape from metre’ and that ‘the most interesting verse that has been written in the language has been done either by taking a very simple form, like the iambic pentameter, and constantly withdrawing from it, or taking no form at all, and constantly approximating to a very simple one’.6 And this is the method that characterises the various sections of his long poem of 1922, The Waste Land. For MacDiarmid, on the other hand, the standard form to approach or withdraw from was not the iambic pentameter of Shakespeare and later canonical English poets. Neither did he turn to the familiar Scots ‘Standart Habbie’, better known as the ‘Burns Stanza’; nor attempt to revive other now obsolete Scottish poetic forms. Instead, he chose the demotic form of the Scottish ballads, which provided him with both the flexibility and the unobtrusive shaping medium he needed for his new poetry: its oral origins allowing him to vary stress patterns as the speaking voice required, to accept the customary four line abcb rhyming verse form or depart from it by adding

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lines and/or varying the rhyming pattern, or by using it unrhymed. In ‘Gairmscoile’ from the Penny Wheep collection, the speaker insists that ‘it’s soon’ [sound] no’ sense, that faddoms the herts o’ men’ (CP, I, p. 74),7 and this credo seems peculiarly applicable to MacDiarmid’s new Scots-language lyrics, linking as it does with his earlier Chapbook description of the vernacular as ‘an inexhaustible quarry of subtle and significant sound’.8 The ‘Gairmscoile’ quotation is also provocative in its rejection of ‘sense’ in relation to a poet who was to prove himself to be very much a poet of ‘ideas’, and in the way that rejection opens up for enquiry his understanding of Mallarmé’s perception of poetic language as expressed in his statement ‘Ce n’est pas avec des idées qu’on fait des vers, c’est avec des mots’: a quotation used supportively by MacDiarmid in his New Age essay on Paul Valéry.9 Mallarmé’s insistence on the importance of language per se was no doubt important to MacDiarmid as he attempted to raise the standard of Scots as a modern, avant-garde literary language. Yet there are significant differences between the two poets’ understanding and use of language, not least in relation to the question of sound and sense. Mallarmé’s Symbolist practice proceeded from a belief that language was pre-eminent in poetry and that its importance was for itself, not for its referential use in communicating previously conceived ideas to the reader. Appreciation of a poem should derive from appreciation of the structure of its syntax and from the symbolic nature of the language selected. And although Mallarmé, like the later Pound, insisted that the rhythm of poetry should not be that of the metronome, the ‘music’ of his Symbolist poetry seems as much music for the eyes scanning the page as it is for the ears. This is very different in effect from MacDiarmid’s lyrics, where the actual ‘soon’ [. . .] faddoms the herts o’ men’.10 In the essay ‘Symbolism, Decadence and Impressionism’, Clive Scott considers the seminal role of Mallarmé in the development of late nineteenthcentury Symbolism, and the characterisation of that Symbolist aesthetic by his “‘direct” successor’, Paul Valéry. Scott quotes from Valéry’s essay ‘Littérature’ in Tel Quel: Longtemps, longtemps, la voix humaine fut base et condition de la littérature . . . Un jour vint où l’on sut lire des yeux sans épeler, sans entendre, et la littérature en fut tout altérée.11

Here we have, not as in the long past days of the oral ballad tradition ‘la voix humaine’, the human voice, at the foundation of literature, but a new literature ‘sans entendre’, which does not depend upon orality, upon hearing the ‘sound’ of a poem communicated by a speaker, but where the eyes moving freely across its lines can enjoy a variety of language effects impersonally and without sound being linked to meaning. As with Mallarmé, Valéry’s own poetry exemplifies this change: Ce toit tranquille, où marchent des colombes, Entre les pins palpite, entre les tombes; Midi le juste y compose de feux

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Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959 La mer, la mer, toujours recommencée! Ô récompense après une pensée Qu’un long regard sur le calme des dieux!12

There is ‘music’ in this poetry, but it is impersonal, self-reflexive, as opposed to the music of MacDiarmid’s lyrics, where sound and rhythmic movement interact with visual imagery to create a poetics in which there is almost always an implicit human and philosophical communication behind the immediacy of its formal elements. The difference between MacDiarmid’s new poetry and the modernist poetry which influenced him may be made clearer by looking at the detail of ‘The Eemis Stane’ (CP, I, p. 27) from the Sangschaw collection. MacDiarmid’s lyrics certainly started from ‘words’ as opposed to a preconceived ‘idea’, as we can see from his dictionary-raiding for Scots-language vocabulary. The evocative opening of ‘The Eemis Stane’ – ‘I’ the how-dumb-deid o’ the cauld hairst nicht’ – was given life by an example of now obsolete Scots vocabulary in Jamieson’s Dictionary of the Scottish Language;13 and the poem as a whole enables ‘la voix humaine’ to continue to have its say by means of the way the sounds of words, their syntactical and rhythmic arrangement and the allusive potential in their image-making, can create a poem which communicates a modern human sense of insecurity in a world which seems to have become unfamiliar and philosophically unstable; yet simultaneously communicates the continuing human need to search for understanding, to search for what has been lost. MacDiarmid’s lyrics are poems to be spoken aloud as opposed to being read with the eyes alone; for only by listening can one fully appreciate the rhythmic effect of lines such as ‘the warl’ like an eemis stane/Wags i’ the lift’ where the rising rhythm leads to an almost imperceptible pause like a silent beat in music after the stress on the first syllable of the unfamiliar ‘eemis stane’, and again with a longer pause after ‘lift’ (sky) at the end of the line. The listener, like the poem’s speaker, seems held by the rhythm in a kind of dream-state, looking up at the sky where the world (in an uncanny anticipation of future space exploration) hangs unsteadily. Then the rhythm falls back as the speaker’s ‘eerie’ (uneasy, ghostly) thoughts and memories also fall back to earth and human history. The transition between stanzas one and two is carried through by the sound of ‘yowdendrift’ which both ends the falling rhythm of stanza one and restarts the rising movement of stanza two. The Scots dictionary glosses the word as ‘snow driven by the wind’, and both rhythmic effect, and, especially, sound effect, pattern the obliterating action of the snow. The poem also shows the influence of Pound’s Imagist credo, while, as with the influence of Mallarmé, turning this to new uses. Imagism was primarily an attempt to capture in language-based poetry the instantaneous effect achievable in the visual arts, which had been enjoying a remarkable period of innovation and development in continental Europe since the later years of the nineteenth century. Pound himself was especially interested in

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the Post-Impressionist exhibition of paintings shown in London in 1910. His characterisation of an ‘image’ as ‘that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time’, his demand for a poetry that was ‘hard and clear’, for ‘direct treatment of the “thing” whether subjective or objective’, and his insistence that the poet should ‘use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation’14 were therefore directed towards harnessing the immediacy of painting in the attempt to revitalise a poetry which he considered had become over-referential. A poem such as ‘The Eemis Stane’ certainly presents the reader with images offering ‘an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time’: the eemis stane warld adrift in the sky; its transposition into a tombstone covered with an obliterating snowfall; and the extension of this image into the tombstone of human history whose truth is buried by ‘history’s hazelraw’ (lichen) and the ‘fug o’ fame’. In most reprints of the poem, ‘fug’ in this last phrase is glossed as ‘moss’, a variation of the ‘hazelraw’ image, with ‘fame’ left without comment. Yet, although this word could be a variant of ‘faem’ or ‘foam’ (another obliterating medium), the verbal strength of the alliterative phrase calls to mind the older idea of ‘fama’ as it is used, for example, in the ‘Induction’ to Shakespeare’s Henry IV Part II where the character of Rumour spreads ‘false reports’ and disaffection across the land. MacDiarmid’s poem thus offers the imagistic clarity Pound asks for, but a very different clarity from Pound’s static, painterly image of the faces of the crowd in the Metro: ‘Petals on a wet, black bough’; or his description of the woman lying beside her lover in ‘Alba’: ‘as cool as the pale wet leaves/of lily-ofthe-valley’.15 In their individual sounds as well as their visual qualities, and in the ways in which they interact with each other, the images in MacDiarmid’s poem pass beyond a static and impersonal ‘intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time’ to a wider (although implicit) philosophical questioning about the nature of human life itself. On the other hand, while his poetic voice is not the impersonal voice of Pound’s Imagism or Mallarmé’s and Valéry’s Symbolism, neither is it the subjective lyric voice of Romantic period poetry nor the confessional voice of Lawrence in Look, we have come through!. MacDiarmid’s voice is, rather, akin to the anonymous speaking voice of folk poetry, although the associations and responses aroused belong peculiarly to the modern world. The English Romantic poets formed an influential part of MacDiarmid’s early schooling (as with the influence of English literature generally in Scottish schooling at this period); and while the speaking voice in his Scots lyrics may avoid Romantic subjectivity, there are reminders of Wordsworth in particular in ‘The Watergaw’ and ‘Empty Vessel’. A ‘watergaw’ is a ‘rainbow’, an image much associated with Wordsworth’s ‘My heart leaps up’, but one which by the early twentieth century had become clichéd. MacDiarmid’s use of the Scots word ‘watergaw’ defamiliarises and reenergises this image, and this kind of proto-Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt is strengthened by the strangeness of the vocabulary which precedes the image in the opening lines:

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Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959 Ae weet forenicht i’ the yow-trummle I saw yon antrin thing, A watergaw wi’ its chitterin’ licht Ayont the on-ding . . . (CP, I, p. 17)

Yet although ‘yow-trummle’ may initially be unfamiliar, the sound of the word captures in an auditory image the sheep trembling with cold in the fields after sheep-shearing, an image which is then transferred visually to the watergaw/rainbow with its similarly ‘chitterin’’, or shifting, colour spectrum as perceived in the rainy sky. As opposed to the mundane image of the sheep in the cold fields, the rainbow’s quivering licht is an ‘antrin’ thing – something other-worldly; and this ‘beyond the human’ quality is then brought back to interact with the human world in the final image of the stanza as the speaker thinks of the ‘last wild look ye gied/Afore ye deed’. The speaker in Wordsworth’s poem was able to use the rainbow symbol as an assured link between present, past and future: So was it when my life began, So is it now I am a man So be it when I shall grow old . . . (Wordsworth, Poetical Works, p. 62)

In contrast, but in common with the unsettled mood of ‘The Eemis Stane’, there is no such certainty in MacDiarmid’s poem. Any hint of resolution in the last lines is qualified by ‘mebbe’ and the rhythmic movement is hesitant, pausing on the ‘ken’ at the end of the penultimate line as if the speaker is still musing, reassessing, before moving to the final rhyming ‘then’, a retrospective term which does not bring the poem to a definite close but leaves the reader’s imagination still in the uncertain past with the puzzle of that ‘wild look’. ‘Empty Vessel’ (CP, I, p. 66), one might dare say, is the poem that Wordsworth had in mind when he set about writing ‘The Thorn’ (Poetical Works, p. 157), the lyrical ballad much mocked by Byron for its pedantry. Commentaries on ‘Empty Vessel’ usually suggest that MacDiarmid took his starting point from the folk-song ‘Jenny Nettles’ and its story of ‘Robin Rattle’s bastard’; and this may well be the case, making it an early example of his borrowing and adapting practices. However, with awareness of MacDiarmid’s youthful interest in Wordsworth in mind, it seems possible that ‘The Thorn’ made some contribution to this modernist poem about the immeasurable power of human love. Wordsworth’s mossy mound is there in the related form of ‘the cairney’ as is his girl with her ‘tousie hair’ and the possible reason for her grief-stricken demeanour: ‘Singin’ till a bairnie/That was nae langer there’. However, as with ‘Jenny Nettles’, the similarity ceases at this point. Stanza two, without warning, moves this earthly narrative into the philosophical and cosmic world with allusive reminders of the medieval music of the spheres linked to the modern scientific idea of relativity:

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Wunds wi’ warlds to swing Dinna sing sae sweet, The licht that bends owre a’ thing Is less ta’en up wi’t. (CP, I, p. 66)

As in ‘The Bonnie Broukit Bairn’, in which the (ironic) grandeur of the cosmos is contrasted and finally superseded by the needs of a neglected earth (a transformation carried through in a circular abccddba rhyming verse form which patterns the earth’s globe), so in ‘Empty Vessel’ it is the human context, the primacy of human love and the relieving of human needs, which is the ultimate ‘message’ of the poem. Yet this is communicated implicitly through the interaction of word-sound and rhythm and by the evocative quality which lies behind its firm, clear images. What is so surprising about these lyrics – in addition to their verbal inventiveness and synaesthetic vitality – is the range of scenarios presented within the space of their various tiny frames. ‘Hungry Waters’, written for ‘a little boy at Linlithgow’ conjures up the ‘auld men o’ the sea/Wi’ their daberlack [sea-weed] hair’ who harry the coasts of the country as did the Vikings in the past. These new raiders, however, ‘gobble owre cas’les,/Chow mountains to sand’ (CP, I, p. 52). This is a splendidly evocative poem for a child young enough to be captivated by fairy stories (and for the adult who can recapture a childhood imagination), while for a present-day audience it offers an uncannily prescient metaphor for the effects of global warming. If ‘Hungry Waters’, like ‘Crowdieknowe’ (an ironic presentation of the Calvinist obsession with Judgement Day), is one of the more narrative lyrics, then ‘Au Clair de la Lune’ (CP, I, pp. 23–5), a theme and variations in four movements, is among the most self-reflexive, with some of its most powerful images musical ones. In the opening section, Prelude to Moon Music, the earth lies ‘littered wi’ larochs [fragments] o’ Empires’, but the strange music heard is not the traditional life-giving music of the spheres, but a sound that makes the winds hold their breath: ‘The Moon has a wunnerfu’ finger/For the back-lill o’ death!’ (‘back-lill’ being the thumb-hold on a bagpipe chanter). In the second movement, Moonstruck, it is again a musical image that communicates the Moon’s disorienting effect on the speaker when he is struck with her ‘quihther o’ cauld gowd’: An’ the roarin’ o’ oceans noo’ Is peerieweerie to me: Thunner’s a tinklin’ bell: an’ Time Whuds like a flee.

The moon image itself fluctuates across movements, yet is predominantly female: a ‘licht-lookin’ craw o’ a body’ sitting ‘on the fower cross-win’s’ in the second, and in the fourth, The Huntress and her Dogs, a more recognisable image of Diana with ‘her luchts o’ yellow hair [which] flee oot ayont the storm’ as she rides the sky and brings the ‘oceans to her heels’. Only in

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the last stanza of this final section is there a hint of a ‘message’ behind these moonlight variations when the image of Diana bringing the oceans to heel is compared to ‘the sang/That frae the chaos o’ Thocht/In triumph braks or lang’, thus pointing to MacDiarmid’s consistent belief in the power of thought to transform human lives. MacDiarmid’s political and social concerns were to be argued out more directly in his ideological poetry of the 1930s, but already in these compact Scots-language lyrics he demonstrates how a modernist technique need not be an obstacle to ideological or philosophical communication. Poems such as ‘Empty Vessel’ and ‘The Bonnie Broukit Bairn’ make their points imagistically. In ‘The Dead Liebknecht’ (adapted from the German of Rudolf Leonhardt), the impact and implications of the communist’s death are communicated more directly and in a strong iambic tetrameter metre that calls to mind the ‘charter’d streets’ of William Blake’s ‘London’: ‘His corpse owre a’ the city lies/In ilka square and ilka street.’16 Like Blake, MacDiarmid consistently preaches the need to throw off ‘mind-forg’d manacles’. Yet his ‘Liebknecht’ poem is not the angry pessimistic condemnation found in ‘London’, but, although angry, is ultimately a poem of triumph in relation to the arousal of the people against dictatorship that this death will bring about. For as ‘the factory horns begin to blaw/Thro’ a’ the city, blare on blare’, so ‘wi his white teeth shinin’ yet/The corpse lies smilin’ underfit’ (CP, I, p. 57). In an interview with MacDiarmid on the eve of his eighty-fifth birthday in 1977, the American scholar Nancy Gish asked him about whether he saw a coherence in his work from the early lyrics to the later poetry. In response, he commented that he saw ‘a consistency in all the kinds of work that I’ve done’, and went on to talk particularly about his abandonment of the lyric, saying: ‘The modern world is far too complex; the issues that arise today are far too pressing and complex. You can’t express things in short lyrics as I did in my first three or four books. They become a trick. You lose integrity, you see.’17 This is an acute comment about the artistic temptation to stay with a successful formula (one to which MacDiarmid himself rarely succumbed, although many of his early supporters wished that he had). It suggests also that after Penny Wheep he himself realised it was time to move on. For despite his success in (implicitly) combining social and political concerns with modernist innovation, there is a sense throughout the Penny Wheep collection, despite its many achievements, that the tight form of the impersonal, imagistic lyric can no longer provide the developmental space its author needs. For the characteristically ideological MacDiarmid, the move into the long poem was inevitable.

A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle was published in Edinburgh by Blackwood’s in November 1926 a few months after the publication of Penny Wheep in June. In his Author’s Note to this first edition, MacDiarmid describes his poem as

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a ‘gallimaufry’ (a heterogeneous mixture, a medley) and dedicates it to ‘my friend, Francis George Scott, the composer, who suggested it, and to whom, during the course of writing it, I have been further indebted for co-operative suggestions and for some of the most penetrating and comprehensive of modern European criticism’.18 At an earlier stage of his life, F. G. Scott had been the schoolboy Grieve’s teacher in Langholm and they had come together again when Scott wrote excitedly to the new (yet still ‘anonymous’) Scots-language poet MacDiarmid asking for permission to set his lyrics to music. As previously with Ogilvie, Scott in the 1920s became an important supporter and sounding-board for MacDiarmid as he developed his new poetry. Given the singularity of the Drunk Man poem in the Scottish context, both the uncharacteristic modesty of the ‘gallimaufry’ designation and the ostentatious comments about the author’s indebtedness to Scott’s critical acumen were to generate much speculation and myth-making surrounding the poem’s conception and completion. A comparison might be made with the similar gossip about Pound’s involvement with Eliot’s The Waste Land – although the latter situation, unlike that of A Drunk Man, was eventually to produce convincing documentation to support it.19 An earlier and more reliable authorial comment might be found in MacDiarmid’s Glasgow Herald advertisement on 17 December 1925, almost a year before the poem’s publication and before he had approached Blackwood’s about it. Although he also uses the term ‘gallimaufry’ in this advertisement, there is an expanded and more confident account of what he means by this: Mr Hugh M‘Diarmid [sic] has now completed a gallimaufry in braid Scots verse, entitled ‘A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle’. It is, in fact, a long poem of over a thousand lines split up into several sections, but the forms within the sections range from ballad measures to vers libre. The matter includes satire, amphigouri, lyrics, parodies of Mr T. S. Eliot and other poets, and translations from the Russian, French and German. The whole poem is in braid Scots, except a few quatrains which are in the nature of a skit on Mr Eliot’s ‘Sweeney’ poems, and it has been expressly designed to show that braid Scots can be effectively applied to all manner of subjects and measures.20

In this we can recognise both the editor of the Scottish Chapbook arguing out and eventually convincing himself about the extendability of the Scots vernacular as a modern, avant-garde literary language; and the modernist magpie of the lyrics, picking up poetic influences where he found them and converting them to fit with his own objectives. While the author, perhaps pragmatically, reduced the length of his work to ‘over 600 lines’ when he approached Blackwood’s regarding publication, it soon recovered the Glasgow Herald’s reported length and continued to grow throughout 1926 until it was eventually published in November at a length of 2,685 lines.21 That MacDiarmid’s use of the word ‘gallimaufry’ did not accurately reflect the seriousness and ambition of the work can be seen in the letters he wrote to friends in the months leading up to its completion. As so often

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in the past, the most important of his comments were in letters to George Ogilvie. He wrote on 6 August 1926, shortly before the final manuscript was sent to the publisher: I realise fully the importance of what you urge in regard to the Drunk Man. It will either make or finish me so far as Braid Scots work, & Messrs Blackwood’s are concerned. I dare not let them down with a work of such magnitude [. . .] It’s infernally intractable material: but I’ve spared no pains and put my uttermost ounce into the business. I’m out to make or break in this matter. There are poems in the book (which is really one whole although many parts are detachable) of extraordinary power, I know – longer and far more powerful and unique in kind than anything in Sangschaw or Penny Wheep; but that’s not what I’m after. It’s the thing as a whole I’m mainly concerned with, and if, as such, it does not take its place as a masterpiece – sui generis – one of the biggest things in the range of Scottish literature, I shall have failed. (Letters, pp. 88–9)

Later, in December 1926, after the publication of the poem in November, he again wrote to Ogilvie: Many thanks for your kind and reassuring letter. I always suffer from reaction after putting out a book: and am ridiculously sensitive to what reviewers say – even when I know their incompetence and malice. I say to myself: what can reviewers be expected to make of a thing like the Drunk Man – yet I am horribly vexed when they make nothing of it or something utterly stupid.

And he continues: I set out to give Scotland a poem, perfectly modern in psychology, which could only be compared in the whole length of Scots literature with ‘Tam o’ Shanter’ and Dunbar’s ‘Seven Deidly Sins’. And I felt that I had done it by the time I finished – despite all the faults and flaws of my work. (Letters, p. 90)

‘A masterpiece – sui generis’ – what kind of a poem, then, is A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle, so far as genre is concerned? Perhaps it can most obviously be seen to be related to the dramatic monologue, an impersonal form inherited from nineteenth-century poets such as Tennyson and Browning, but used also by Eliot and Pound to distance the speaker of a poem from its author. MacDiarmid additionally adopts Yeats’s device of the ‘mask’, creating a specific persona for the speaker of his poem in the identity of a drunk man; but a drunk man who is also (as we discover when we follow him on his many adventures) a creative artist, a poet. Although this additional identity as poet is not foregrounded in the poem, it is implicitly recognisable, and is important in relation to the poem’s exploration of artistic creativity and the role of the artist, a theme close to the heart of the author. Yet to categorise the poem as a dramatic monologue is also too simplistic for such a complex and unusual work. In his early Glasgow Herald advertisement, MacDiarmid drew attention to its satire and amphigouri (nonsensical verses), and this satirical aspect is emphasised again in the references to ‘Tam o’ Shanter’ and Dunbar’s ‘Seven

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Deidly Sins’ in his December letter to Ogilvie. Both historical poems deal satirically with human foibles, Burns’s poem amiably, Dunbar’s with bitter mockery mixed with scurrility. (Edwin Muir found in both poems ‘the romantic, playboy conception of poetry [. . .] essentially belittling, acridly belittling in Dunbar, and genially, almost affectionately belittling in Burns’.22) Again, MacDiarmid’s poem is not really of this kind. Some recent critics, including Peter McCarey who has written on the Russian writers and philosophers whose ideas influenced MacDiarmid, have suggested ‘Menippean satire’ as defined by Bakhtin as an appropriate genre for A Drunk Man. While Bakhtin has most often been quoted by contemporary Scottish theorists in relation to his ideas about dialogic discourse and its relevance to a multilingual Scotland, McCarey’s summary of his definition of Menippean satire seems apposite to MacDiarmid’s long poem. He describes the genre as having: greater comic element than Socratic dialogue; free thematic and philosophical invention; fantastic episodes and adventures whose sole purpose is the testing of philosophical ideas; combination of fantasy, symbolism, and mystical or religious elements with coarse and primitive naturalism, often set in bars; brothels, highways etc.23

For McCarey, to consider A Drunk Man as a dramatic monologue leaves the work appearing ‘bitty and inconclusive’, while regarding it as a product of Menippean satire combined with the vision poem allows us to see it as ‘an enquiry into the ultimate questions of life, a poem whose open-endedness proclaims its disbelief in ultimate answers’. And he adds: ‘As with Crime and Punishment, the author gives the work an ending but no conclusion’.24 McCarey’s diagnosis is persuasive, for, in addition to its satiric and fantastical qualities, the poem is also a vision poem where, like the dreamer in medieval literature, its protagonist ranges the heights and depths of the cosmos in his exploration of material and spiritual reality. Yet the poem also has affinities with the Romantic quest poem, for even if its author ‘gives the work an ending but no conclusion’, it is not so certain that that open ending proclaims the poem’s ‘disbelief in ultimate answers’. One of the notable qualities of the poem is its protagonist’s need to search for understanding; and although he will not be satisfied with easy or conventional answers, and is thrown into deep despair at his own impotence in the face of an inexplicable universe and – in the mundane world – of a Scotland that has lost all sense of itself as a distinctive entity, there is nevertheless a positive quality in his seemingly negative searching which belies a fixed position of ‘disbelief in ultimate answers’. The Drunk Man, in fact, has no ‘fixed points’ of belief or unbelief, apart from his certainty that he himself will ‘aye be whaur extremes meet’ (in itself a dialectical position) and that he ‘maun feed frae the common trough ana’’ (CP, I, pp. 87, 86): an insistence which emphasises his experiencing and therefore subject-to-change self. In the end, however, whatever suggestions are made towards its genre classification, A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle is overwhelmingly a poem

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of the modernist period, with its eclectic poetic interpolations and intertextual references, its shifting symbolism and its Joycean stream of consciousness which interacts creatively with the dramatic monologue aspects of its methodology to take the Drunk Man and his readers on their sublunary and cosmic journeys. The creation of the Drunk Man persona itself is of much significance, for this kind of characterisation, like the Lord of Misrule in Elizabethan drama, has already within it a traditionally accepted licence to depart from what is considered normal behaviour: to be inconsistent in mood and opinions, to talk nonsense, or even, in contrast, to talk a ‘sense’ released by drink: ‘in vino veritas’ or ‘there’s nocht sae sober as a man blin’ drunk’ (CP, I, pp. 89, 91). The changing moods produced by drink also give validity to the author’s use of antisyzygal juxtapositioning and surrealistic imagery, both artistic features of the modern period. And as ‘Gairmscoile’ had proclaimed that ‘it’s soon’ no’ sense, that faddoms the herts o’ men’, so in A Drunk Man it is the sound of the Drunk Man’s dramatic speaking voice which ultimately binds together the multifarious, often discordant, thematic sections of the poem from its garrulous Scottish opening to the metaphysical ‘silence’ at its end. Considered thematically, A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle is both a poem about the condition of Scotland, ‘a scene/O’ Scottish life A.D. one-ninetwo-five’ (CP, I, p. 92), and at the same time a philosophical exploration of the nature of human existence itself. Within these two major themes are related motifs such as artistic creativity and human sexuality (and the link between these), the legacy of religious belief and the loss of this, the relationship between past, present and future and our human perception of Time. The poem’s investigations proceed not by way of rational argument and a logical cause and effect sequence, but through what one might call a logic of the imagination where unexpected juxtapositionings open up new areas for speculation. Themes and their related motifs are presented imagistically through lyrical and satirical passages, through the synaesthetic effects of the Scots language used, and through a series of shifting symbols such as whisky and moonlight, both of which can delude as well as inspire; and through the creative female symbol of woman in the persona of Alexander Blok’s ‘Beautiful Lady’ (the ‘silken leddy’ of the poem’s ballad adaptation of Blok’s ‘The Lady Unknown’), and her earthly counterpart, the Drunk Man’s wife Jean. Another symbol of creativity is the sea-serpent from the Penny Wheep collection of lyrics, appearing less frequently in A Drunk Man but continuing into the later To Circumjack Cencrastus where it is the titular symbol of the poem. Throughout the poem, its symbols and their fluctuating applications flow in and out of relationship with each other, just as the moonlight, like the tide, ebbs and flows, pulling with it the Drunk Man’s thoughts. The thistle with its jaggy grey-green leaves and the unexpected beauty of its soft purple flowers is the symbol whose applications are most often in flux. Sometimes it is just its botanical self: a spiky, unwelcome plant to stumble against on the hillside at midnight; at others a phallus or the mythical tree Yggdrasil, whose roots and branches join hell, earth and heaven. Often it symbolises the Drunk Man

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himself, this ‘mongrel o’ the fire and clay’ (CP, I, p. 126), where the jaggy leaves represent the negative aspects of his nature and the soft purple flowers his idealistic aspirations. Such an individual application can then expand philosophically into the contrary nature of human life itself, and in its more local manifestation, either into the lost or unrealised potential of the Drunk Man’s country, Scotland – a Presbyterian thistle which crucifies its own roses – or a symbol of the contrast between Scotland and England, with its flowers or ‘roses’ representing English achievement, and its spiky stalks Scotland’s poverty. A late addition to the poem, in May 1926, was ‘The Ballad of the Crucified Rose’ or ‘The Ballad of the General Strike’ as it has also been called by its author, who wrote to the younger poet J. K. Annand on 25 May: Nothing ever so shook me to my foundations as this Strike – and the hellish Betrayal of its Collapse. I have been unable to think of anything else. Inter alia I have incorporated in my Drunk Man a long ‘Ballad of the General Strike’ which I think will rank as one of the most passionate cris-de-coeur in contemporary literature. (Letters, p. 364)

MacDiarmid’s achievement here was to incorporate this new poem into the existing metaphorical machinery of the poem as the ‘Ballad of the Crucified Rose’, while preserving its passionate cri-de-coeur, now directed not only to the immediate disaster of the Strike, but to a wider history of human betrayals. A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle opens with the theme of Scotland as the Drunk Man’s speaking voice draws the reader or listener into his company: ‘I amna fou’ sae muckle as tired – deid dune’. He introduces us to his drinking companions Cruivie and Gilsanquhar and to the deteriorating quality of the whisky which seems no longer to have its previous inspirational effect on him, a decline which his stream of consciousness transfers to the condition of Scotland itself, thus launching his long ontological investigation on its course: Forbye, the stuffie’s no’ the real Mackay. The sun’s sel’ aince, as sune as ye began it, Riz in your verra saul: but what keeks in Noo is in truth the vilest ‘saxpenny planet’ [. . . ] It’s robbin’ Peter to pey Paul at least. . . . And a’ that’s Scotch aboot it is the name, Like a’ thing else ca’d Scottish nooadays – A’ destitute o’ speerit juist the same. (CP, I, p. 83)

In contrast to the Drunk Man’s own perception of the physical and metaphysical extent of his undertaking – ‘Whilst I, puir fule, owre continents unkent/ And wine-dark oceans waunder like Ulysses’ (CP, I, p. 95) – critical analyses of the poem too often leave him becalmed in the waters of Scottish national identity. Yet, just as Byron in the opening of the First Canto of Don Juan steps briefly into his narrator’s shoes to proclaim ‘I want a hero’25, so in the opening

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of A Drunk Man MacDiarmid, for a moment, speaks through his fictional persona to admit that, as author, he must begin with what’s expected of him as a Scot, and gradually ‘spire up syne by visible degrees/To heichts whereo’ the fules ha’e never recked’ (CP, I, p. 83). The Scottish context is thus most prominent in the opening pages of the poem where the Drunk Man’s thoughts wander from the decline of whisky to the decline of Scotland, to parallels between Burns and Christ and their misrepresentation in Scottish life, to the personal credo he has adopted ‘to dodge the curst conceit o’ bein’ richt/ That damns the vast majority o’ men’ (CP, I, p. 87). His thoughts ‘circle like hobbyhorses’, yet what is fixed is his belief that in order to grow and to avoid false consciousness he must be an experiencing self, that he must be ‘whaur extremes meet’, and ‘maun feed frae the common trough ana’’ (CP, I, pp. 112, 87, 86). In an evocative image drawn from the Scottish weather, he prays that he will never find himself ‘like staundin’ water in a pocket o’/Impervious clay [. . .] Cut aff and self-sufficient, but let reenge/Heichts o’ the lift and benmaist deeps o’ sea’ (CP, I, p. 88). And at this mention of sea his thoughts turn again to water and whisky, and the hot water he will be in if his wife catches him, before the inspirational aspect in the water/whisky symbolism leads into the adaptation of Blok’s poem ‘The Lady Unknown’, transformed here into a poem of artistic inspiration whose roots lie in a revivified Scottish poetry tradition. Ezra Pound remarked in the essay ‘Elizabethan Classicists’ that ‘a great age of literature is perhaps always a great age of translations’.26 This is true of the modernist period, and the translations which brought European authors to English-speaking readers in the early years of the twentieth century were of great importance to a Scottish modernism committed to look outwards from Scotland. In addition, individual Scottish writers such as MacDiarmid, Edwin and Willa Muir, William Soutar, J. K. Annand and Alexander Gray became involved in translation or, as so often in the case of the translation of poetry, in the adaptation into Scots of existing translations of European poets. MacDiarmid’s translation or adaptation procedures in regard to the foreign poems he incorporated into A Drunk Man are interpretative as opposed to the fidelity advocated by his sixteenth-century compatriot Gavin Douglas, who translated Virgil’s Aeneid into Scots in an earlier attempt to strengthen Scottish culture and its language. Douglas’s advice was to ‘traste weill to follow a fixt sentens or mater’ as opposed to writing ‘all ways at liberte’,27 but by the early twentieth century ‘writing at liberty’ had become more fashionable. Thus the translations of Ezra Pound, although giving the impression of transporting the reader into the world of Cathay or the Italy of Cavalcanti, are in fact marked by Pound’s own distinctive voice (or voices), being, as the present-day poet Edwin Morgan has called them, ‘lively but inaccurate’.28 Yet both Pound and MacDiarmid believed in the transformative power of translation, its capacity to act as a ‘guide to secret places of the imagination’.29 We see this process at work in MacDiarmid’s adaptation of ‘The Lady Unknown’, one of Blok’s early Symbolist poems featuring the ‘Beautiful Lady’, a visionary figure linked to Sophia, goddess of wisdom. As with his previous use

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of the poetic ideas of Mallarmé and Pound, MacDiarmid does not follow closely Blok’s interpretation of this symbol, although he keeps its visionary element. Instead, his ‘silken leddy’ appears to relate to the world of the Scottish ballads with their equally enigmatic and elliptical narratives. There are associations too with Fergusson and Burns, produced by the sound of the verses, where word-choice and phraseology create an atmosphere which evokes but does not attempt to copy the eighteenth-century Scottish literary context. The translation or adaptation therefore allows the interpolation of a poem about the visionary nature of creativity at this early point of the Drunk Man’s journey, while at the same time enabling his author to make contact in a linguistically revitalised way with his literary past. This struggle with creativity, with language, with inspiration or its absence, is a main theme of the poem. The inspirational meeting with the silken leddy – ‘a sun is gi’en to me to haud’ – is then counterpointed by the second Blok adaptation, ‘The Unknown Woman’ (called by MacDiarmid ‘The Unknown Goddess’) which communicates the terror and despair felt by a poet who fears he will not recognise his muse when she comes: ‘The ends o’ space are bricht: at last – oh swift!/While terror clings to me – an unkent face!’ (CP, I, p. 89, 90).30 Such interpolations of European poetry are therefore very much part of the elliptical, antithetical process of the poem as a whole. Equally important is the imagery of the poem through which the Drunk Man’s ideas and emotional responses are communicated. In addition to the poem’s unexpected secular and sometimes satiric use of Christian religious imagery, an unusual imagistic feature is its non-traditional use of natural world imagery which combines with surrealistic and expressionist elements to produce disturbing effects. Sea imagery, both tactile and visual, points up the process from creativity to its loss: ‘My harns [brains] are seaweed – when the tide is in/ They swall like blethers and in comfort float,/But when the tide is oot they lie like gealed /And runkled auld bluid-vessels in a knot!’ (CP, I, p. 95). To the Drunk Man’s overstrung mind, ‘munelicht’ can appear as ‘leprosy’, the thistle on the hillside as ‘my ain skeleton through wha’s bare banes/A fiendish wund’s begood to whistle’ (CP, I, p. 94). Elsewhere, the lack of creative thought in Scotland, historically and in the present, which he considers has resulted in the loss of self-determination and distinctive identity, is presented through the image of an east-coast haar or mist, enveloping like the Dullness in Alexander Pope’s The Dunciad: O drumlie clood o’ crudity and cant, Obliteratin’ as the Easter rouk That rows up frae the howes and droons the heichs, And turns the country to a faceless spook, Like blurry shapes o’ landmarks in the haar The bonny idiosyncratic place-names loom, Clues to the vieve and maikless life that’s lain Happit for centuries in an alien gloom. (CP, I, pp. 107–8)

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Later, in a long philosophical section, he struggles to come to terms with the realisation that instead of human beings being at the centre of a divinely ordered universe, man is merely an ‘atom o’ a twig’ in the great tree of life, ‘the michty trunk o’ Space’: – The trunk wi’ centuries for rings, Comets for fruit, November shoo’ers For leafs that in its Autumns fa’ – And Man at maist o’ sic a twig Ane o’ the coontless atoms is! (CP, I, p. 130)

It is again the natural world (linked to imagery suggestive of the empty glens of the Highland Clearances) that provides the metaphor for one of the moments of deepest loss and alienation in the poem. This comes in the philosophical section MacDiarmid originally titled ‘Farewell to Dostoevski’ where the Russian and Drunk Man speaker, who cannot even communicate with each other – ‘I ken nae Russian and you ken nae Scots’ – wander in a snow-bound landscape in a world which seems to have lost all sense of place and purpose: The wan leafs shak’ atour us like the snaw. Here is the cavaburd [heavy snowfall] in which Earth’s tint [lost]. There’s naebody but Oblivion and us, Puir gangrel buddies, waunderin’ hameless in’t. The stars are larochs [ruins] o’ auld cottages, And a’ Time’s glen is fu’ o’ blinnin’ stew. Nae freen’ly lozen [window-pane] skimmers: and the wund Rises and separates even me and you. (CP, I, p. 151)

The final image in this section is of the thistle: ‘its leafs like snaw, its growth like wund –/The thistle rises and forever will!. . . ’. These words have sometimes been interpreted optimistically, especially by nationalist readings of the poem, as a change of mood at the end of this pessimistic passage, offering a celebration of the Scottish thistle’s capacity to ‘rise’, to overcome disaster.31 Yet the stanzas which follow make it clear that this thistle, that gathers the generations under it, is a ‘barren tree, dry leafs and cracklin’ thorns’ which has ‘choked the sunlicht’s gowden grain,/And strangled syne the white hairst o’ the mune’. Here is no optimistic Scottish symbol (although the Scots are included within its despairing metaphor), but ‘the mind o’ a’ humanity/ – The empty intellect that left to grow/’ll let nocht ither be’ (CP, I, p. 152, lines 2232–43). There is no comfort here. Only what Neil M. Gunn called ‘the terrible sobriety of the Drunk Man’.32 Despite its Scotch comedy and satire, its jaunty jazz-like rhythms – ‘O Scotland is/THE barren fig./Up, carles, up/And roond it jig’ – (CP, I, p. 105); its fine lyrical passages such as the Drunk Man’s ‘hymns’ to his wife Jean and the enigmatic ballad ‘O wha’s the bride that cairries the bunch/O’ thistles blinterin’ white?’ (CP, I, pp. 102–3), the pessimism which predominates in

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the poem marks it out as a work of the modernist period. Yet, despite its pessimism, both about Scotland and about humanity at large, it is not quite the partner of Eliot’s The Waste Land. As discussed previously, one of the striking qualities of the poem is its energetic questing nature, the Drunk Man’s capacity to pick himself up and move on again after so many defeats. As in much of MacDiarmid’s work, there is something of Shelley’s evolutionary optimism here, together with his Defence of Poetry belief in the poet as ‘unacknowledged legislator’. At an earlier stage of the poem, the Drunk Man quotes from Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, adapting it for his own purposes: God gied man speech and speech created thocht, He gied man speech but to the Scots gied nocht Barrin’ this clytach [gabble] that they’ve never brocht To onything but sic a Blottie O As some bairn’s copybook micht show. (CP, I, p. 115)

In contrast to this angry outburst against the state of the Scots language and the inability of the Scots themselves to exercise the power of thought, in Shelley’s scenario Prometheus gives man not only speech and thought ‘which is the measure of the universe’ but also ‘Science’ and a ‘harmonious mind [which]/ Poured itself forth in all-prophetic song’; and the earlier Romantic period poem closes with the optimistic belief that ‘Hope creates/From its own wreck the thing it contemplates’.33 Despite his willingness to keep searching, and his author’s belief in the potential of the human mind, the Drunk Man can never reach such a stable point in his journey, and MacDiarmid’s poem comes to an end with his protagonist’s inability to accept his Scottish place on the Great Wheel of Life, deciding to ‘tak it to avizandum’ (to defer his decision), and with his silence – actual and metaphysical – ‘Yet hae I Silence left, the croon o’ a’’ (CP, I, p. 166). In his notes to the poem, Kenneth Buthlay comments that there is in existence a holograph version of this last poem section in A Drunk Man which ends with the repeated line ‘O I ha’e Silence left, the croon o’ a’’. On the other hand, A Drunk Man as published has two further lines: ‘ – “And weel ye micht”,/Sae Jean’ll say, “efter sic a nicht!”’, which Francis George Scott claimed he invented when MacDiarmid was having difficulty bringing his epic journey to an end. This story has been told so often that it is now mostly accepted as having happened as Scott claimed, although Buthlay comments that while MacDiarmid did not say that this was untrue, he did repeatedly state that ‘he did not recollect it as having happened’.34 It may well be true, however, because although in some ways the added lines make a pithy ending to the poem, bringing the wild night to a close with a return to the safety of the Drunk Man’s wife Jean, there is something of what Muir called ‘the romantic, playboy conception of poetry’ in this ‘Tam o’ Shanter’ ending which seems false to the seriousness of the earthly and metaphysical searching of both the Drunk Man and his author. It seems too ‘couthy’ an ending for the kind of poem we have just read. In contrast, to finish with a focus on the potential creativity within Silence (a theme MacDiarmid returns

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to in the late In Memoriam James Joyce), although leaving the poem open, without closure, seems a more appropriate ‘ending’ for this important poem of the modernist age.

After A Drunk Man MacDiarmid’s letter to Ogilvie of December 1926, quoted previously, shows how nervous he was about the reception of his poem. Responses to Sangschaw and Penny Wheep had on the whole been positive, although neither had sold well, and the anonymous reviewer of both collections in the Times Literary Supplement had seemed more concerned with an occasional lack of accuracy in the obsolete vocabulary than with the aesthetic qualities of the poetry. On the other hand, Edwin Muir wrote in the Saturday Review of Literature about the poem ‘Country Life’ in Sangschaw: ‘It is a pure inspiration; nothing could be better of its kind, and the kind is rare. This vision is profoundly alien to the spirit of English poetry; the thing which resembles it most, outside other Scottish poetry, is perhaps the poetry of Villon.’35 The editor of the Scottish Educational Journal (where Grieve/MacDiarmid’s assessments of Scottish literary figures had been arousing much controversy) commented: ‘As a poet he is ever so much happier than a prose-writer [. . .] Wings are not handy when one is walking.’36 Muir was also one of the early supporters of A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle, writing that the poem ‘never gives one the impression [. . .] of being too long for the imaginative energy which seeks expression through it’; that its form is ‘characteristic and original’ and that the ‘synthetic Scots which the author has created himself’ is used ‘with ease and force’. He was also acute about the ‘psychological or philosophical scheme’ of the poem and about MacDiarmid being ‘as much interested in the possible as the actual’.37Another positive review came from Oliver St John Gogarty in the Irish Statesman, and there was praise also from its editor ‘AE’ (George Russell) who had commissioned the review.38 Sales, however, were again slow, and early unsympathetic reviews from Scottish newspapers such as the Aberdeen Press & Journal and the Glasgow Evening News (which suggested that ‘all the worst faults of Mr Grieve’s literary ideals will be found fully exemplified in the long poem which he has just published under his mysterious pseudonymn of Hugh M’Diarmid’) made ‘sair reading’ (as he wrote to Ogilvie).39 The Times Literary Supplement, whose reviewer had previously niggled over the Scots-language vocabulary in the collections of lyrics, was no more encouraging in relation to A Drunk Man: ‘It is idle to attempt a coherent account of a poem so deliberately and provocatively incoherent’.40 As always, MacDiarmid did not waste time over his troubles, and his attention was soon turned to his next poetry project, the long poem To Circumjack Cencrastus. He wrote that this would be ‘a much bigger thing than the Drunk Man in every way [. . .] But where the Drunk Man is in one sense a reaction from the ‘Kailyaird’, Cencrastus transcends that altogether – the Scotsman gets

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rid of the thistle, ‘the bur o’ the world’ – and his spirit at last inherits its proper sphere [. . . it is] ideally complementary to the Drunk Man – positive where it is negative, optimistic where it is pessimistic, and constructive where it is destructive’ (Letters, p. 91). At the same time he was becoming more actively engaged with the Home Rule movement, syndicating articles in various local newspapers, and taking up again his earlier campaign against the debilitating influence of the Burns Clubs. In the summer of 1927 he succeeded in founding a Scottish branch of the international PEN organisation, supported by writers such as Helen Cruickshank, R. B. Cunninghame Graham, Neil M. Gunn, Lewis Spence and William Soutar. Compton Mackenzie transferred his membership from the London branch and the Muirs also became members. In the summer of 1928 he accepted an invitation to be the guest of the Irish Free State at the Tailtean Games in Dublin and the following year went as honorary Secretary of Scottish PEN to the International PEN Congress in Vienna. With all this activity and the additional pressure to earn more money to support a growing family, Cencrastus had to sit on the back burner. In 1929, frustrated at his inability to find alternative employment in Scotland that would allow him to escape from the tyranny of the Montrose Review, he accepted an offer from Compton Mackenzie to be the London editor of his new weekly magazine Vox which was to be devoted to the increasingly important medium of radio. He moved to London with his family, but the venture was ultimately unsuccessful, leaving him unemployed and with his marriage at an end. In the midst of such turmoil, Cencrastus was completed and sent to Blackwood’s in the summer of 1930. It was published on 29 October 1930. Most critics, contemporaneous and later, have been lukewarm about To Circumjack Cencrastus, and the author himself commented in retrospect that he ‘ought to have done a great deal better’.41 Edwin Muir, on the other hand, wrote positively in his Criterion review of April 1931, placing the poem in the context of its author’s attempt to revitalise Scottish poetry, linguistically and in intellectual content. It was Muir also who was later to write in Scott and Scotland (1936) that ‘a really original Scots poet like Hugh MacDiarmid has never received in Scotland any criticism of his more ambitious poems which can be of the slightest use to him’; and to analyse what he called ‘the predicament of the Scottish writer’. Muir’s view was as follows: that a Scottish writer who wishes to achieve some approximation to completeness has no choice except to absorb the English tradition, and that if he thoroughly does so his work belongs not merely to Scottish literature but to English literature as well. On the other hand, if he wishes to add to an indigenous Scottish literature, and roots himself deliberately in Scotland, he will find there, no matter how long he may search, neither an organic community to round off his conceptions, nor a major literary tradition to support him, nor even a faith among the people themselves that a Scottish literature is possible or desirable, nor any opportunity, finally, of making a livelihood by his work.42

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The final part of this statement is an acute comment which is unfortunately most often overlooked by critics in favour of the earlier, more sensational part of Muir’s paragraph which stresses the need to ‘absorb the English tradition’. For Muir is not making only a literary point here. The choice he puts forward is one which emphasises that writers, artists of any kind, cannot be created in a vacuum. There needs to be an interested, open-minded public which can run with the new ideas and forms and enter into dialogue with them. For this reason, artists of all kinds emigrated to cosmopolitan European cities in the modernist period. And although MacDiarmid may have launched his modernist literary revival from the peripheral location of Montrose, he was unable by himself to create a sufficiently large supportive public which would allow the revival movement and its creative members to continue to develop as artists. This, in fact, was the conclusion of his Drunk Man, as he contemplated his Scottish place on the Great Wheel of Life and listened to the Wheel’s message. For, although, as author, MacDiarmid believed with the Russians Blok and Dostoevsky that a writer must become involved with his country’s sufferings, the Wheel’s message is that, as far as Scotland is concerned: ‘Mony ha’e tried, but a’ ha’e failed. Their sacrifice has nocht availed. Upon the thistle they’re impaled. You maun choose but gin ye’d see Anither category ye Maun tine your nationality.’ (CP, I, p. 165)

Despite the future fury directed at Muir by MacDiarmid and his supporters, there seems little here that separates Muir’s Scott and Scotland conclusion from that of MacDiarmid’s Drunk Man as he decides to ‘tak’ it to avizandum’. On the other hand, and as Muir’s Criterion review suggests, To Circumjack Cencrastus is not quite the disaster it has been painted. It certainly lacks the imaginative cohesion of its predecessor despite that poem’s irrational process. Its eponymous symbol, the Curly Snake, is a symbol in name only, with its creative potentiality never really developed in the poem. The poem itself is more truly a ‘gallimaufry’, a collection of varied poetic items, most of which can be taken out of the main poem to stand as separate pieces; and many of these seem to relate directly to their author’s personal preoccupations in the world outside the text, as opposed to having artistic autonomy. Yet there is much of interest among these fragments, as, for example, the lyric section ‘Aodhagán ÓRathaille sang this sang/That I maun sing again’. This poem follows after previous references to the ‘Gaelic Idea’, thus linking it with MacDiarmid’s prose writings on this subject in the late 1920s and early 1930s, and with his growing interest in Irish connections and in Scotland’s Celtic culture. Daniel Corkery’s The Hidden Ireland had been published in 1924 and its account of Irish Celtic culture including the Aisling tradition,

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the Irish Clearances and their links with the history of the Scottish Highlands was at that time of much interest to writers such as MacDiarmid and Gunn, as was also Corkery’s view that it was necessary for renewal to go back beyond the classical renaissance to the roots of a distinctive vernacular culture.43 In Cencrastus, therefore, we see its poet moving away from the Scottish muse of A Drunk Man to the ‘Brightness of Brightness’, the Celtic muse of the Irish Aisling tradition, and its poet Aodhagán Ó Rathaille. Yet we see also that the attempt to adopt a Celtic identity was no easy matter, and that, as so often in the Scottish context, language was at the heart of the difficulty: O wad at least my yokel words Some Gaelic strain had kept [. . .] – Fain through Burns’ clay MacMhaighstir’s fire To glint within me ettled. It stirred, alas, but couldna kyth, Prood, elegant and mettled. (CP, I, p. 225)

Another independent section is the splendidly satirical and self-deprecating Frae Anither Window in Thrums, written in a strong, lively Scots register, where the poet/speaker laments both his mind-deadening journalistic occupation: ‘“Cut oot this poetry stuff, my lad. Get on/Wi’ advts. and puffs, and eident con/The proofs [. . .] Apply yersel’ to what’s worth while/And I’ll reward ye: that’s my style”’ (CP, I, p. 235); and his own inability to write ‘hokum’ and so gain an audience for his work: ‘But what I canna accoont for’s no’/Bein’ able to gie folk hokum. [. . .] I wish I was Neil Munro’ (CP, I, p. 253). Interspersed with these satirical passages are the reasons for his inability to provide ‘hokum’ or be satisfied with his humdrum job: the foreign references: ‘Cette antique union du Poète et du Prêtre’ (CP, I, p. 241), the characteristic insistence that ‘if it’s no’ by thocht that Poetry’s wrocht/It’s no’ by want o’ thocht’ (CP, I, p. 232); and the speculative passages (less successful in Cencrastus) about how this freeing of the mind’s potential might be brought about. On the positive side, in addition to the fine adaptation of Rilke’s memorial poem to Paula Mödersohn-Becker, ‘Requiem: Für eine Freundin’ (CP, I, pp. 197–203), there are the individual lyrical sections which bring to mind the Romantic legacy often implicit in Scottish modernist writing, as also in the work of Yeats, Eliot and Lawrence. One of these is North of the Tweed (CP, I, pp. 269–71), numbered ‘XI’ in a series of twenty poems ‘of true Scottish pride’, but of a much higher level of achievement than the rest of its companions here. This poem begins with its poet/speaker in a mood of despondency in relation to his artistic achievement, tempted by the beauty of the landscape around him to use it as his inspiration, yet chiding himself for being seduced in this oldfashioned way: ‘Gie owre a’ this tomfoolery, and sing/The movin’ spirit that nae metaphor drawn/Frae water or frae licht can dim suggest’. The process of the subsequent poem is reminiscent of that in Coleridge’s ‘This Lime Tree Bower my Prison’, where absence is transformed into presence through the creative power of imagination and memory. As MacDiarmid’s speaker names

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the details of the natural world around him which he believes are no longer suitable raw material for the impersonal ‘inhuman splendours’ of the poetry he aspires to, his responses to the beauty and vitality of his immediate surroundings, together with memories of similar experiences and responses in the past, result in a reawakening of his creativity: And hoo should I forget the Langfall On mornings when the hines were ripe but een Ahint the glintin’ leafs were brichter still Than sunned dew on them, lips reider than the fruit, And I filled baith my basket and my hert Mony and mony a time?

And he ends, positively and creatively: Noo I’ll pipe insteed – what tune’ll you hae? – On Rudha nam Marbh. [The Point of the Dead] (CP, I, p. 271)

This rediscovery of belief in poetic imagination continued to be given formal expression in the several collections MacDiarmid was to write from the remote Shetland island of Whalsay during the 1930s.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

11.

Grieve, reprinted in McCulloch, Modernism and Nationalism, pp. 27–8. Muir, Transition , p. 7. MacDiarmid, Lucky Poet, pp. 82–3 MacDiarmid, Lucky Poet, p. xxiii. Pound, ‘A Retrospect’, in Literary Essays, pp. 12–13. Eliot, ‘Reflections on Vers Libre’, pp. 98, 102, 99–100. MacDiarmid, Complete Poems 1920–1976 is hereafter referred to in the text as CP. Grieve, Scottish Chapbook, March 1923, reprinted in McCulloch (ed.), Modernism and Nationalism, p. 28. Stephane Mallarmé, quoted by MacDiarmid in ‘Paul Valéry’, New Age, p. 54, reprinted in McCulloch (ed.), Modernism and Nationalism, p. 181. MacDiarmid, ‘Gairmscoile’, CP, I, p. 74. MacDiarmid interpolates a small section from Mallarmé’s ‘L’Après-midi d’un faune’ into A Drunk Man in a passage dealing with the fear of artistic and human failure, relating to Mallarmé’s artistic ‘doubts’, which also makes clear the difference between their poetic method, despite the apparent theoretical similarity (CP, I, p. 117). Scott, ‘Symbolism, Decadence and Impressionism’, p. 207. The Valéry quotation translates as: ‘For a long time, for a long time, the human voice was the foundation and the condition of literature . . . A day came when one was able to read with the eyes only without having to spell things out, without having to hear [the words] and literature was completely changed by this.’

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12. Valéry, ‘Le Cimetière marin’, in The Penguin Book of French Verse 4 The Twentieth Century, p. 64. (‘This quiet roof, where doves walk, shimmers among the pines, among the tombs; the just noon composes there out of fires the sea, the sea, always beginning again! Oh, what a reward after a thought is a long look at the calm of the gods.’) 13. Jamieson’s Dictionary of the Scottish Language, abridged and revised (1867), p. 282 under ‘How-dumb-dead of the nicht.’ This is the kind of dictionary raiding mocked by G. Gregory Smith (see Chapter1, note 10), but MacDiarmid does wonderful things with it. 14. Pound, ‘A Retrospect’, in Literary Essays, pp. 3, 4. 15. Ezra Pound: Selected Poems, p. 53. 16. Blake, Selected Poems, p. 36. 17. MacDiarmid, interview with Nancy Gish, Contemporary Literature 20.2 Spring 1979, pp. 135–54. 18. The best edition of A Drunk Man is the annotated edition by Kenneth Buthlay published by Scottish Academic Press for the Association for Scottish Literary Studies Annual Volume series in 1987. This has recently been reprinted by Polygon (2008). It reprints the ‘Author’s Note’ to the first edition and has extensive explanatory and source material for the poem. For convenience in this present study, quotations from A Drunk Man, as from other MacDiarmid poems, will be referenced from Complete Poems. 19. Buthlay’s Introduction to A Drunk Man, pp. xviii–xxiii discusses the rumours and the likely extent of Scott’s input to the poem. 20. MacDiarmid, A Drunk Man, ed. Buthlay, p. x. 21. Ibid. 22. Muir, Scott and Scotland, pp. 60, 66. 23. Peter McCarey, MacDiarmid and the Russians, p. 20. 24. Ibid., p. 21. 25. Byron’s Poetry, Norton Critical Edition, p. 187. 26. Pound, ‘Elizabethan Classicists’ (1917), reprinted as ‘Notes on Elizabethan Classicists’ in Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, p. 232. 27. Douglas, Virgil’s Aeneid, Book I in Selections from Gavin Douglas, p. 8. 28. Morgan, ‘Poetry and Translation’ in Nothing Not Giving Messages, p. 228. 29. Hugh Kenner, Introduction to Pound, The Translations of Ezra Pound, p. 12. 30. For his Drunk Man interpolations of Blok’s poetry, MacDiarmid adapted translations made by B. Deutsch and A. Yarmolinsky in their Modern Russian Poetry of 1923. See A Drunk Man, ed. Buthlay, pp. 17–21. 31. See, for example, Alan Bold’s biography of MacDiarmid, p. 214 and his Introduction to MacDiarmid, The Thistle Rises, p. xv. His interpretation was anticipated by Anne Edwards Boutelle in her 1980 study Thistle and Rose. 32. Neil M. Gunn, quoted by Hugh MacDiarmid in ‘Neil Gunn and the Scottish Renaissance’, in Scott and Gifford (eds), Neil M. Gunn: The Man and the Writer, p. 361. 33. Shelley, Prometheus Unbound, in Shelley: Selected Poems, pp. 59, 64. 34. A Drunk Man, ed. Buthlay, p. 193.

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35. Muir, Saturday Review of Literature, 31 October 1925, p. 259. McCulloch (ed.), Modernism and Nationalism, pp. 65–7. 36. Theta [Thomas Henderson], Scottish Educational Journal, 30 October 1925, pp. 1170–1. McCulloch (ed.), Modernism and Nationalism, p. 64. 37. Muir, Nation and Athenaeum, 22 January 1927, p. 568. McCulloch (ed.), Modernism and Nationalism, pp. 73–4. 38. Bold, MacDiarmid, p. 223. MacDiarmid, Letters, ed. Bold, pp. 349–50. 39. Bold, MacDiarmid, p. 223. 40. Anonymous review, Times Literary Supplement, 22 September 1927, pp. 650–1. 41. Letter from MacDiarmid to the present author 12 May 1977. The full comment from MacDiarmid is as follows: ‘I am delighted with what you say about “To Circumjack Cencrastus”. Several recent European and American critics have similarly stressed its importance. This is a very recent development up to which it was generally passed off in silence or condemned. I myself am under no illusions about it. I wrote it at a very bad time in my life and was quite aware that I had failed to realise my conception of it. I ought to have done a great deal better. The idea was certainly a good one.’ This letter is now in the MacDiarmid archive in the National Library of Scotland. See also Margery Palmer McCulloch, ‘The Undeservedly Broukit Bairn: Hugh MacDiarmid’s To Circumjack Cencrastus’, Studies in Scottish Literature 17, pp. 165–85. 42. Muir, Scott and Scotland, pp. 22, 4. For further debate by MacDiarmid and Muir on the Scott and Scotland controversy, see Scottish Studies Review 6.1 (2005), pp. 59–73. 43. Daniel Corkery’s book and his ideas are now seen as backward-looking by Irish cultural historians, but one can see how they answered a need in the Scottish situation at that mid-1920s period, just as the achievement of Irish self-determination in the Free State and the success of writers such as Yeats and Joyce was an inspiration to the Scottish reformers. In both cases (Corkery’s book and the Free State), the reality was not quite as it seemed from the outside.

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Chapter 3

Criticism and New Writing in English

There are two ways in which the writer may avoid being assimilated by the age; one is by struggling with it, the other is by escape [. . .] But it is he who wrestles with the age who finally justifies both it and himself. Edwin Muir, ‘The Zeit Geist’, Transition (1926)

Although as editor, polemicist, and Scot-language poet MacDiarmid was the dominant presence in the early years of the revival movement, he was not the first of the new Scottish writers to engage publicly with the condition of modernity. In 1918, the Orkney-born Edwin Muir published (under the pseudonym of Edward Moore) We Moderns: a collection of what he called ‘aphorisms’, dedicated to A. R. Orage. These were short, polemical, ‘manifesto-like’ essays, and had originally appeared as a series in Orage’s New Age to which Muir was a regular contributor. The success of the book in Britain and America resulted in Muir obtaining a contract with the American Freeman magazine which enabled him and his wife Willa to travel in Europe between 1921 and 1924, thus gaining first-hand knowledge of a cultural influence known previously only through print media, and especially through the articles published in the New Age. The Muirs’ sojourn in Prague and Dresden also led to their acquiring the facility in German which later led to their translations of modernist writers such as Franz Kafka and Hermann Broch. Muir’s reponses in We Moderns provide an interesting barometer for the period, as he puts forward the new preoccupations of the modern age while simultaneously struggling against them. He was later to argue in his essay collection Transition (1926) that the most significant artistic work came from this attempt to ‘wrestle’ with the age.1 His pithy pronouncements in We Moderns testify to the continuing presence of nineteenth-century philosophers and writers such as Nietzsche and Dostoevsky, influences still vital in this modernist period as we have seen in relation to MacDiarmid also. Both Muir and Virginia Woolf referred to Dostoevsky in relation to the workings of the unconscious: Muir describing his capacity ‘to experience two opposite feelings at one and the same time’ and seeing him as one who ‘wrote of the unconscious as if it were conscious’; Woolf commenting that Dostoevsky ‘is able to follow not only the vivid streak of achieved thought, but to suggest the

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dim and populous underworld of the mind’s consciousness where desires and impulses are moving blindly beneath the sod’.2 In contrast to his continuing awareness of the contemporary significance of Dostoevsky, Nietzsche was to prove a temporary influence for Muir, providing a philosophy which helped him cope with the difficulties of his Glasgow years. Helen Gardner wrote of Muir that he was in the outward circumstances of his life ‘deeply involved in the long crisis of this century’ while he was also ‘through his own personal distresses, profoundly affected by the revolution in our whole conception of human personality brought about by the genius of Freud and Jung’.3 Elements of Muir’s own early life-story could certainly be seen as offering a paradigm of the ‘shock of the new’ which has given modernism its often disturbing psychological character.4 He was born into a struggling farming household in the Orkney Isles in 1887, and in the winter of 1901 he and his family set sail in search of a better life for Glasgow, second city of the Empire and the heart of industrial North Britain. So great was the trauma of that transplantation that within four years both parents and two brothers had died, and Muir at the age of eighteen found himself alone in Glasgow, physically and mentally unwell, without employment and suffering much psychological distress and alienation. He catches the shock of this emigration memorably in the first version of his autobiography, The Story and the Fable, published in 1940: I was born before the Industrial Revolution, and am now about two hundred years old. But I have skipped a hundred and fifty of them. I was really born in 1737, and till I was fourteen no time-accidents happened to me. Then in 1751 I set out from Orkney for Glasgow. When I arrived I found that it was not 1751, but 1901, and that a hundred and fifty years had been burned up in my two days’ journey. But I myself was still in 1751, and remained there for a long time. All my life since I have been trying to overhaul that invisible leeway. No wonder I am obsessed with Time.5

Muir’s early poetry and criticism is marked by the presence of this time theme, itself a characteristic artistic trope as well as an everyday preoccupation of the early years of the century. So far as his poetry is concerned, his first visit to Europe in the early 1920s introduced him to the poetry of the German neoRomantic Hölderlin, and encouraged him to write poetry himself. One of his themes in We Moderns had been the necessity of leisure in human life, and especially in the life of the artist. Now in Prague and Dresden, he found that ‘it was the first time since I was fourteen that I had known what it was to have time for thinking and daydreaming [. . .] I began to learn the visible world all over again’ (A, p. 189). He was to say also about his ‘difficult’ entry into poetry: Though my imagination had begun to work I had no technique by which I could give expression to it. There were the rhythms of English poetry on the one hand, the images in my mind on the other. All I could do at the start was to force the one, creaking and complaining, into the mould of the other. (A, p. 205)

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Among the poetry which most influenced Muir in these early years was that of the English Romantics, and especially the poetry of Wordsworth, with whom he shared a vision of childhood as a time of especial insight in relation to human interaction with the natural world. His discovery of the poetry of Hölderlin reinforced this childhood insight, for in his poem ‘Da ich ein Knabe war’, Hölderlin too writes of a childhood where, in Muir’s words, ‘the sky fitted the earth and the earth the sky’ (A, p. 33): Da spielt’ ich sicher und gut Mit den blumen des Hains, Und die Lüftchen des Himmels Spielten mit mir.6 (I played there safe and good With the flowers of the grove, And the sky’s heavenly breezes Played with me.)

Yet, as we see from First Poems, published by Virginia and Leonard Woolf at the Hogarth Press in 1925, Muir’s attempt to capture the integrity and security of that childhood experience in poetry was on the whole unrealised, except in the poem titled ‘Childhood’. Nor was his journey to poetic maturity in a formal sense easy, as can be seen not only in First Poems, but also in the poetry which followed in the 1920s and 1930s. Despite his involvement in his critical writing with the modern age and with the work of modernist writers such as Joyce and Woolf, Muir’s own early poetry could not be classified formally as modernist alongside the experimental work of Eliot, Pound and MacDiarmid, although his themes in themselves manifest the dislocation of the modern age. Muir had undergone Jungian psychoanalysis in London while working as assistant to Orage at the New Age and before his departure for Europe in the summer of 1921. London, with its ‘mass of stone, brick, and mortar’ and the ‘impersonal glance of the Londoner’, had brought back all the fears and alienation of his first contact with Glasgow, making him feel ‘that I did not really exist’ (A, p. 155). His sessions with the psychoanalyst recommended by Orage resulted in ‘waking dreams’ of a visionary nature and of such intensity that he began to fear them as much as he did the London cityscape, and it was decided not to continue with their analysis (A, p. 165). Some of the poems he wrote in Hellerau near Dresden derive from these previous waking dreams, as, for example, his first published poem ‘Ballad of Rebirth’, which appeared in the New Age as ‘Rebirth’ in June 1922. He later said of this poem: ‘It was not “I” who dreamt it, but something else which the psychologists call the racial unconscious, and for which there are other names.’7 ‘Ballad of the Soul’, published in the New Age in July 1922 as ‘Ballad of Eternal Life’, was based on a waking trance-like experience which he described as ‘the most strange and the most beautiful experience I have ever had’. He also commented that ‘the dream was wonderful but the poem is all wrong’.8 Whether, even with

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more training and experience, he could have found a satisfactory languagebased form for the communication of such visionary dream experiences is doubtful; they seem to belong more with paintings such as those of Marc Chagall, where weightless human beings float spatially in a timeless landscape; or with other early twentieth-century visual art depictions of surrealist or dream-state scenarios. Muir’s attempt to communicate his ‘waking dream’ experiences in a continuous narrative form derived from the Scottish ballads modified by influences from Coleridge’s ‘Ancient Mariner’ was most probably doomed to remain earth-bound. Muir’s First Poems is a highly eclectic collection in which the apprentice poet tries out various approaches and verse forms. One important influence, in addition to that of the English Romantics, is German Romanticism. Like Nietzsche, Goethe and Heine had been Muir’s companions in his Glasgow years, and their presence continues to be felt in First Poems. In his autobiography, Muir speaks of ‘a sickly graveyard strain in Heine’s poetry’ which lay alongside his ‘exquisite wit’; and of his own obsession with this aspect of Heine when working as a clerk in a foul-smelling bone factory in Greenock: ‘I battened on tombs and shrouds.’ (A, p. 144). He also wrote of the powerful evocation of longing in Goethe’s poetry, especially in Mignon’s song ‘Kennst du das Land’, which he considered held the essence of Sehnsucht found in German literature.9 This longing for a lost land is a constant theme in these early poems as their poet attempts to restore the broken connection between his present life and his childhood. Muir’s imagery, however, does not consist of the idealised forms of Goethe’s Romantic vision where ‘die Zitronen blühn,/Im dunkeln Laub die Goldorangen glühn’; ‘Es glänzt der Saal, es schimmert das Gemach’ (The lemons blossom, the golden oranges glow in the dark foliage; the hall gleams, the room shimmers with light). The marble figures may ask Goethe’s Mignon, ‘what have they done to you, poor child?’, but the memory of that past is alive in the language of the poem.10 In contrast, Muir’s images (and taking account of their poetic immaturity) belong to a modern age of dislocation, to Rainer Maria Rilke’s definition of Sehnsucht, as opposed to Goethe’s idealised longing. For Rilke, whose poetry was an influence on MacDiarmid, but which Muir himself was either not familiar with or was not drawn to in the early 1920s, Sehnsucht is the awareness that there is no secure place in the world of time: ‘Das ist die Sehnsucht: wohnen im Gewoge/Und keine Heimat haben in der Zeit’ (That is what longing is: to dwell in a state of flux/and to have no homeland in the world of Time).11 Thus in Muir’s early poems of longing, not only is the homeland lost through exile, but the very fact of its ever having existed seems under question: the land is ‘the green estranging land’; rooms are ‘closed’; ‘unquiet memories stir beneath the leas,/Whose knolls rise like a green deserted town’; ‘yawning distances’ are ‘vaster than the sea [. . .] on frail paths of sundry destiny’ (CP, pp. 6, 7, 5). In one passage in ‘The Lost Land’, deriving perhaps from his fears in London, ‘towering cliffs hem in the thin-tongued strait,/And far below like battling dragons wait/The serpent-fangéd caves which gnash the sea,/

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And make a hollow barking constantly.’ This land is not the land sought by the speaker: ‘I look again. Alas! I do not know/This place, and alien people come and go.’ (CP, p. 4.) In addition to his difficulties with poetic form, another problem for Muir in his early attempts at poetry was the question of subjectivity. The journey he had to make in the attempt to reconnect his past and present was a highly personal one, yet this very subjectivity contributed to his difficulties in giving his search effective expression. Although in the early 1920s Muir was not enthusiastic about T. S. Eliot’s poetry, he did admire Eliot the critic and was in several respects influenced by Eliot’s views in his own criticism. One possible source of help, therefore, in relation to the problem of giving expression to his own experiences may have been Eliot’s essay of 1919, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, in which he argued for impersonality in art, emphasising that ‘the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates’.12 Muir had argued in We Moderns against what he saw as the modern fashion for ‘realism in art’, against the ‘portrayal of present-day men as present-day men’. Instead, he insisted that the artist should emulate the Greeks in their interpretation of life through the symbolism of ‘those ideal figures which move in the world of classic tragedy’.13 Now he followed Eliot’s ‘impersonality’ essay with his own ‘A Plea for Psychology in Literary Criticism’, published in the Nation and Athenaeum in 1921, in which he attacked biographical criticism, insisting instead that ‘criticism is concerned with the mind and not with the man’.14 At some point during his early struggle to make poetry out of his exile from his past, such critical ideas must have begun to filter into his poetic practice. One of the most successful poems in First Poems exhibits a poetic distancing not present in the others by using, as the objective correlative recommended by Eliot, Homer’s classical Greek story of Hector and Achilles at the siege of Troy. ‘Hector in Hades’ must have been one of the latest poems to come out of his first European sojourn, since it was published in the Adelphi magazine in August 1924, shortly before its inclusion in First Poems in the following year. It was also a significant herald of Muir’s future poetic use of Greek myth as a means of exploring contemporary and personal themes. A similar example of artistic distancing occurs in his short novel The Marionette, set in Salzburg and written in France in 1926 when he and Willa were translating Leon Feuchtwanger’s Jüd Süss. This simply told, metaphysical story of a young mentally-retarded boy who, through the influence of a puppet theatre, learns to leave behind the emotional fears that have trapped him in his unhappy world, patterns the struggle given form less successfully in the alienated imagery of Muir’s early poetry. Writing to a friend in 1929 about his discovery of Kafka’s Der Schloss which he and Willa were then beginning to translate, Muir commented: ‘it appeals particularly to the part of me which wrote The Marionette’ (SL, p. 67). It is generally agreed that Edwin Muir’s most mature poetry came late in his life, in the four collections published between 1943 and 1956, and

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especially in the final two collections The Labyrinth of 1949 and One Foot in Eden of 1956. This poetry, as well as the poetry written during the 1930s, will be discussed in later chapters. In the 1920s, on the other hand, he was gaining a strong reputation as a literary critic and, with Willa, as a translator of modern German fiction. His first collection of essays Latitudes (1924) brought together much of the work sent from Europe to the American Freeman and other periodicals and included essays on Dostoevsky, Ibsen and Nietzsche mediated through Janko Lavrin’s books on these writers. In contrast, the focus of his Transition collection of 1926, dedicated to the musician Francis George Scott, was on the new avant-garde English-language writers working in the post-1918 period such as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence and T. S. Eliot; and his preface to the book emphasised that ‘the things with which it is most essential that the critic should deal are the things of the present’ (T, p. vii). Neither Eliot the poet (as opposed to Eliot the critic) nor D. H. Lawrence were favoured in his assessments: ‘As a poet Mr Eliot lacks seriousness’, like Huxley, putting forward an ‘attitude to life’ (T, p. 141). In Latitudes as in ‘The Assault on Humanism’ in MacDiarmid’s Scottish Nation, he had criticised Lawrence as being guilty of a nihilistic view of life. He is less antagonistic in Transition, drawing attention to his ‘most obviously striking quality [. . .] a kind of splendour, not of the spirit, nor of the mind, but of the senses and instincts’. On the other hand, he has ‘never drawn a complete character’ (T, pp. 49, 57). Here Muir loses his modernist perspective, ignoring the possibility that drawing ‘the old, stable ego of the character’ might not have been Lawrence’s objective.15 His most positive analyses in Transition and in The Structure of the Novel which followed in 1928 were directed towards the work of Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. What interested Muir particularly in relation to Joyce’s Ulysses was not its formal structuring through myth, but the fact that the mythic impulse in the work came out of a folk rather than a literary inspiration. For Muir, the characters in the ‘Nighttown’ episode are ‘figures in a folk-lore which mankind continuously creates, or carries with it’; a voice which ‘is not inarticulate; but it expresses itself anonymously’. He finds that ‘Mr Joyce went over the conscious life of men like a plough and showed the richness of the soil; and Ulysses gives us the sense of black magic which ploughed fields sometimes evoke. This feeling is probably a racial memory of times which saw the birth of magic, when the blackness of the upturned earth was an image to men of blasphemous violation and of inexplicable increase.’ (T, pp. 33, 38) This anonymous, mythic quality is what inspired Muir’s life-long interest in the Scottish ballads in which he found ‘the roots of poetry, where we should all be’ (SL, p. 185) and which eventually led him to Greek myth as a universal story which could be repeatedly told and re-told. His essay on Woolf points to a similar impersonality of form in Mrs Dalloway: ‘although the psychology is subtle and exact, no trace remains of the psychologist.’ (T, p. 76) Drawing attention to one of the most narratively subtle yet rhythmically innovative passages, where Clarissa sits sewing (‘her needle, drawing the silk smoothly

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to its gentle pause, collected the green folds together and attached them, very lightly, to the belt. So on a summer’s day waves collect, overbalance, and fall; collect and fall’), he comments: The transition here is daring, but wonderfully successful. While Mrs Woolf is describing the falling of the waves, we never forget Clarissa sewing. The greater rhythm as it were accompanies the less, and it brings into the room where Clarissa is sitting its serenity and spaciousness. There is something in the ritual of sewing, a memory of another rhythm buried deep within it, which an image such as this, so unexpected, so remote, reveals to us. (T, pp. 78–9)

In The Structure of the Novel, Joyce’s Ulysses and Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu are characterised as ‘the two outstanding works of prose fiction of the present age’;16 and he is especially appreciative of their handling of time. As we see in his chapter ‘Time and Space’, Muir’s time in his preferred form of novel (what he calls the ‘character novel’ as opposed to the ‘dramatic’) is not a literary structuring device as in a traditional chronological narrative where development over time is a predominant element; nor, alternatively, as is found in the anachronistic analysis of Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu by a later critic such as Gérard Genette. For Muir, ‘time in the novel’ is philosophical time, or social time, a spacial form, as created in the passage by Woolf referred to above where ‘Time is assumed, and the action is a static pattern, continuously redistributed and reshuffled, in Space’.17 He sees Proust’s À la recherche also in spatial terms. Contrasting Proust with Thackeray’s ‘in the beaten track’ fiction, he comments: Proust’s starting point, like Thackeray’s is the present, and his work is given a unity, as Thackeray’s was, by the perspective of the present, which puts all the past into its place and composes it into a picture. But in this pictured, spatial past, Proust does not follow the beaten track like Thackeray; he takes any and every way, moves backwards and forwards as he likes, led not by the story, but by a psychological movement behind it, into which the various scenes fit as into a changing mosaic. It is this psychological movement that gives unity, a sort of unity at one remove, to À la recherche du temps perdu.18

Muir may at times seem to be a reluctant modernist, especially in his early poetry, and in his critical struggles with a certain kind of modern writing which he considered destructive of the values which bind us together as human beings. Yet he could be insightful even about such writing. One has at times the sense that his intuitive, imaginative response is reaching out to the new work itself, while his conscious humanist critical criteria are insisting that, as with Lawrence, much twentieth-century art has taken a wrong turning. Thus, as we have seen, he was one of the first and most perceptive critics to comment positively on MacDiarmid’s modernist Scots-language lyrics and his formally innovative A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle. Similarly, it is interesting that the stylistic ‘faults’ he found in Joyce’s Ulysses, despite his championing of the work and its mythic imagination, actually comprise a

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perceptive comment on the kind of fragmentary, collage-like methodology of much art of the modern period, including A Drunk Man, whose author had been inspired by Joyce’s experimentation. Muir says of Ulysses: Mr Joyce uses no transitions at all; he paints a solid block of his canvas, and when it is done goes on to another. The result is [. . .] a succession of parts, done in different styles, making up a whole which is loose and redundant, but not unimpressive. [my emphasis]19

One could say, therefore, that as critic Muir is himself representative of what he called the writer who ‘wrestles’ with his age and who ‘finally justifies both it and himself’ (T, p. 7). Throughout the major part of his writing career, MacDiarmid made no secret of the fact that he considered poetry – as opposed to fiction writing – to be the principal literary genre. He was supportive, however, of Neil M. Gunn’s early fiction, describing him in Contemporary Scottish Studies as ‘the only Scottish prose-writer of promise, that is to say, in relation to that which is distinctively Scottish rather than tributary to the “vast engulfing sea” of English literature’; and ‘is our nearest equivalent to the Irish Liam O’Flaherty’.20 As discussed previously, Gunn was one of the writers who responded to MacDiarmid’s call for subscribers to the Scottish Chapbook and he became a regular contributor, especially to the later Scottish Nation and Northern Review. Gunn himself was not a Gaelic speaker (his home county of Caithness was traditionally English-speaking and his parents had not encouraged him to learn Gaelic), and he was to be described later, and ironically, by Lewis Grassic Gibbon as ‘a brilliant novelist from Scotshire’.21 Yet his boyhood in the Caithness fishing and crofting village of Dunbeath, and his adult employment in the Civil Service as an excise officer with large expanses of the Highlands as his remit, gave him both an emotional commitment and an invaluable knowledge of current conditions in the Highlands. In addition, there was no tradition of significant fiction writing in Gaelic and, as with later postcolonialist writers from African and India who had to choose between English and one of a number of local dialects for their writing medium, the use of English ensured a larger audience for the work written, and so the possibility of creating greater interest in its geographical location and the conditions of the people who lived there. The literary revival movement, and MacDiarmid’s little magazines in particular, were also important for Gunn. He began his professional writing career in the early 1920s with short stories, a genre which had become one of the markers of the modern age. It was important for him, however, to find the right kind of magazine for the factual and psychological explorations of Highland life he was attempting: an investigation of the reality of the situation, as opposed to its romance. In 1923 and 1924 he had two descriptive articles – ‘At the Peats’ and ‘White Fishing on the Caithness Coast – published in Chambers’s Journal: what his biographers describe as a ‘respectable, traditional’ magazine, but one which Gunn knew could offer

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him only ‘a place for short articles of local experience’. Two short stories, ‘The Sleeping Bins’ and the atmospheric ‘Half-Light’, were published in the London Cornhill Magazine edited by Leonard Huxley in June 1924 and November 1925, with Huxley commenting on the ‘curious interest in the wider current of neo-Celticism’ present in the latter.22 MacDiarmid’s magazines, unlike the Cornhill, were unable to pay contributors, but they did provide Gunn with a regular platform for his developing craft as a writer, as the Scots Magazine under the editorship of J. B. Salmond was to do in the 1930s in relation to his articles on social and economic conditions in the Highlands. Six of his stories were published in the Scottish Nation between July and December 1923 and three in the Northern Review between July and September 1924. Such publication may also have facilitated a contact with the Dublin Magazine which published ‘The White Hour’ and ‘Such Stuff as Dreams’ – psychological stories of approaching death and exile – in March 1924 and February 1925, as well as his connection with the Cornhill from 1924 onwards. Gunn’s most impressive story published by MacDiarmid, in relation to its formal qualities and its anticipation of the themes of his later long fiction, is ‘Down to the Sea’, printed in the Scottish Nation in September 1923. It is a ‘framed story’, where the narrative of an old sailor and his memories of the glorious past of his now derelict fishing village is placed between opening and closing comments by members of the community on their way home from his funeral. Its opening words (unusually for Gunn, in Scots) – ‘“Poor Lachie”, said the precentor to me, “it ‘id hev been better for him, mebbe, if they hed pit him to the poorhouse”’ 23 – signal an uncertainty surrounding his death and the community’s uneasy, equivocal response to it. The implications in the main narrative are brought out obliquely through a detailed but objective description of the old man’s actions on the last evening of his life, as he fills his pipe and leaves his cottage for his regular nightly walk down to the harbour, hesitating at a little patch of wildflowers: Lately, indeed, he had been in the habit of pausing in the descent and gazing at that grassy patch, yellow with dandelions and buttercups. Flowers on a grave have a respectable decency, and that women should be interested in them is characteristic and as it should be. But that wild flowers should be growing there, on that little level stretch, was, for a man, a thought full of desolation, more full of desolation than the gaping, roofless curing-shed which sagged stricken beside it. For in the prime of his manhood no grass nor yellow weed had grown there – because of the salt and the herring-brine. (WH, p. 217)

The contrast to this abandonment, to the ‘cooperages, with their boarded windows like blind eyes’, comes when he climbs up on to the quay-wall and sits ‘hunched and motionless [. . .] with the darkness settling about him. No sound but the sea’s and the intermittent, cavernous crying of the gulls’ (WH, pp. 217, 218). Then, suddenly, and unexpectedly, the living reality of the old man’s memories of his past life comes alive for the reader also, as the pace and

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colour of the narrative changes, and we are tempted to believe that the boats have somehow miraculously returned to the deserted cove: Ah, the boats! There they were, with their brown sails, magical sails. Hear the Gaelic chant of the ‘hired men’ as mast left crutch and halyards creaked rhythmically, as mains’l went aloft. A fleet of them, dozens and scores, making out of this same harbour-basin to court the sea, that passionate, fickle mistress of theirs. (WH, p. 219)

The old man’s narrative ends obliquely, with the ‘hypnotic sea, catching utterly within its rhythm that swaying figure drooping forward, forward . . . A suddenly shocked gull sets up a cavernous crying, and the dim line of the quay-wall against the grey sea is unbroken once more’ (WH, pp. 220–1). We are left with the framing words of the funeral-goers, attempting to find some acceptable explanation of the old man’s end: ‘Ay, he wis a bit queer [. . .] in the end he wis a bit queer, mebbe’; and we are left too with the implicit awareness that the community, unlike the old man, has now turned away from its seagoing past to a crofting present: ‘There’s wind in that sky, and it’s rain they need’ (WH, p. 221). This is a subtle story, obliquely and imagistically told, moving from an impersonal, yet specific account of the man’s movements to a more interior style of narration which allows the reader to enter some way – but not entirely – into his thoughts and feelings. His death is again communicated obliquely, and despite the suggestions in the opening and closing frames that the community should ‘mebbe’ have made sure he had been more safely looked after in the poorhouse, the vitality of the old man’s memories which come to life as he sits on the quay wall, offers a different narrative of his ending. As readers, we sense that he has died what the poet Rainer Maria Rilke called ‘der eigne Tod’, his own death;24 a death in accord with his life as he has lived it, as opposed to the institutional death with which the community might have felt more comfortable. In the poetry of its descriptive narrative, its psychological understanding and its representative evocation of the decline and triumphs of the north-east fishing villages, ‘Down to the Sea’, though modest in size, is a significant herald of Gunn’s future career as novelist of the Highlands. MacDiarmid wrote to him on its publication in the Scottish Nation: I follow your work with keen interest. ‘Down to the Sea’ was a great piece of work – easily the best of yours I’ve seen. Quite a number of friends wrote me anent it in high terms – people whose opinions are worth-while. Go ahead! You’ll do. And your instinct’s right. Chambers and the like are no good to you – except financially.

And having written as the editor of the Scottish Nation, C. M. Grieve, he added: ‘I’ve a confession to make. I’m Hugh M’Diarmid’ (Letters, p. 198). Gunn’s first long fiction book, The Grey Coast, was published in June 1926 by Jonathan Cape who had been especially enthusiastic about the characterisation of its heroine Maggie and the dramatic interplay between her and the two men who seek a relationship with her. The publisher was not so

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enthusiastic about what he called ‘some “fine writing” [. . .] that you would be well advised to tone down.’25 However, as Gunn’s response to Cape makes clear, for its author the significance of the book lay in neither of these aspects. Commenting that his novel ‘is certainly a study from life in the sense that the material conditions touched upon have a reality in fact’, Gunn continues: I note your remarks about ‘fine writing’ and shall very carefully study what Mr Garnett has to say, particularly if the offending passages are indicated. I cannot altogether agree with you [. . .] Believe me, I can appreciate how ‘fine writing’ offends the sincere modern nostril. It certainly does my own! The implication, however, is affectation in the exquisite sense, and there’s the snag! For such affectation in such a study as mine would not merely be unpardonable: it would damn.26

What Gunn’s comments imply, as MacDiarmid recognised in Contemporary Scottish Studies, is that The Grey Coast is attempting ‘something new’ in Scottish fiction, and especially in writing about the Highlands. In accordance with the revival movement’s regenerative aim, the book’s action is situated in the reality of contemporary Highland decline, and its significance lies not in the minor details of plot and characterisation but in its overall attempt to interrogate the tensions in the condition of life on that ‘grey coast’: the endurance needed to survive and the contrasting initiative required to attempt new ways forward; the impenetrable harshness of land and sea, yet the emotional ‘pull’ it exerts over the minds and hearts of its inhabitants. The land itself therefore seems a character in this novel, as in Gunn’s subsequent fiction, and the ‘fine writing’ which troubled his publisher could well have been the descriptive passages through which Gunn captures both the austerity and the beauty of this northern landscape and seascape. In addition, and in keeping with its author’s determination to depict the reality of his homeland as opposed to giving a romanticised narrative of the Highlands, the perspectives in the novel come from its focus on the Balriach community. In narrative time and space, this ‘peripheral’ area becomes the centre of the world from which its fishermen travel out to the West Coast islands and beyond, bringing back stories of adventures and other ways of life. Similarly, portrayals and assessments of life in Balriach come from the inside. We do not form our views of this remote community through the observations of visitors from the more populous, sophisticated south, as in Johnson and Boswell’s tours of the Western Highlands or in the historical novels of Walter Scott. We are taken into the action by its narration from the inside of the community, as opposed to observing it from outside. Gunn’s second novel, The Lost Glen, was rejected by several publishers before being published in the wake of the success of his novel Morning Tide which became a Book Society Choice for 1931. Hodder & Stoughton, for example, were unhappy about what we would nowadays call The Lost Glen’s ‘postcolonialist’ aspects, the ‘animalism’ with which the English expatriate colonel is depicted in the narrative. They thought that ‘the economic, political and other significance of the decay of Highland life which colours the story

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so much would not have much appeal to the non-Scottish general reader’. Jonathan Cape, who had been enthusiastic about the interplay of characters in The Grey Coast, but lukewarm about what they saw as ‘fine writing’, now felt that ‘you yourself are perhaps too Gaelic, too “poetic” to write a strong novel’.27 Gunn’s first contributions to MacDiarmid’s magazines had in fact been poems not prose pieces, but it was clear from them that poetry per se was not his literary form. Yet ‘prose poetry’ was an important element in his attempt to re-imagine the Highlands in fiction, in the creation of the sparse beauty of the landscape, the fierce power of the sea and the emotional hold both had on the inhabitants of this remote region. As in D. H. Lawrence’s fiction, the poetry of Gunn’s prose has the capacity to bring that landscape (and also in Gunn’s case, that seascape) immediately within the reader’s experience: in the description of a single flower or stretch of woodland; in the evocation of silence or the violence of a seastorm. In these early struggles to find both a satisfactory fictional form and a publisher able to recognise what he was attempting, MacDiarmid was Gunn’s strong ally: encouraging, nagging, always ready with advice, and at one point after the publication of The Grey Coast making an offer to collaborate in a prose fiction project; a proposal Gunn did not seem over-anxious to pursue. MacDiarmid was especially supportive over the difficulties with The Lost Glen. Writing in response to Gunn’s information about Cape’s rejection of the book, he says: That they (or rather one man – Garnett) has reacted unfavourably is not a bad sign; on the contrary it probably only means that you have done something another publisher coming fresh to your work from a different point of view, will snap up [. . .] Any author worth his salt knows whether he has done good work or not. He may not know how good. But if you are conscious that what you have done whatever it is has been done in a spirit of complete artistic integrity it is infallibly all right for its right public, and for yourself – which matters most. What you say of style modulation – altering to suit subject, mood etc. – is beyond a doubt right. Right in principle. All the best writers on the Continent are doing something along these very lines. Conservative critics hate it – it bewilders the general public – it is only a matter of time.

And he adds: Joyce in Ulysses has whole sections in which (as you will see from Muir’s essay in Transition – I don’t know if you’ve read Ulysses itself) he does this very thing in a perfectly miraculous way. Go ahead with it for all you are worth. It is undoubtedly the prose method of the future. The old undifferentiated ‘simple direct English’ is as dead as a door-nail. (Letters, pp. 210–11)

While Gunn’s importance in the literary revival was primarily as a fiction writer who was attempting to find new approaches which would allow him to portray with integrity the history and contemporary conditions of the Scottish Highlands, he was also, for a short time, involved in the more tentative movement to encourage a new Scottish drama in the interwar period.

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In this, he was encouraged by the role drama had played in the earlier Irish literary revival and the movement for Irish independence. Writing in the Scots Magazine in 1938, he looked back to that early influence: In Dublin, Irish national life was so strong that it created a drama out of itself [. . .] It said: We will show you your own life translated into drama, and make you sit up, and look at it, and realise it as you have never done before! Here is Ireland, here is Cathleen ni Houlihan, here are your conflicts and your slums, the plough and the stars, and there goes the all-wise Juno [. . .] I have seen most of the great Abbey plays in the Abbey, and remember vividly still the shock I got when at my first visit many years ago, I heard the Irish voices in The Shadow of a Gunman coming over the footlights into the darkened auditorium. I had forgotten, if I had ever known, that contemporary drama could act on one like this.28

In Scotland, on the other hand, the last time drama might have aroused such a response in its audience was most probably in the mid-sixteenth century, with David Lindsay’s The Three Estaitis; and it was the revival of that late medieval/renaissance play by Tyrone Guthrie at the Edinburgh Festival in 1948 that helped to strengthen the belief of the new writers of the postWorld War Two years that a more adventurous Scottish theatre might be possible. Drama had been a casualty of the Scottish Calvinist Reformation in the later sixteenth century, and despite attempts at revival by Alan Ramsay and others in the more moderate climate of the eighteenth century, no dramatic tradition was able to develop that might have provided a grounding for a modern, never mind a modernist, Scottish theatre movement in the early twentieth century. Yeats may have succeeded in marrying his commitment to Irish self-determination with a modernist aesthetic in plays such as ‘At the Hawk’s Well’ and ‘The Dreaming of the Bones’, but in the Scotland of the post-1918 period the preoccupations were how to arouse support for the establishment of a Scottish National Theatre and what kinds of plays should the newly formed Scottish National Players be performing: an insular debate, nicely mocked by Gunn in Choosing a Play.29 The Scottish National Players were often criticised for their amateur or semi-professional status and for their lack of experimentation, and their inability or unwillingness to attract innovative scripts from Scottish writers then limited their capacity to encouragement new developments in the art of theatre itself. As in his fiction, Gunn himself wished to find a mode that would on the one hand portray realistically the contemporary living conditions in the Highlands, while on the other capturing a psychological race memory of a shared past, a kind of unconscious sense of belonging. This was not an easy marriage to bring about on the stage, as he found when his three-act play The Ancient Fire was performed by the National Players in Glasgow in 1929 and fiercely attacked by reviewers for its lack of dramatic form. More successful were the one-act plays he wrote for the Community Drama movement, which was also developing in the interwar period. These shorter plays do not give scope for attempting to bring together the realistic and the mythical, and so

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have to choose between modes. A play such as Net Results is a companion piece to his Scots Magazine articles on the decline of the fishing industry such as ‘One Fisher Went Sailing’ and ‘The Family Boat: Its Future in Scottish Fishing’ in its dramatisation of the tragedy of debt and loss of self-respect which a sequence of poor fishing seasons provokes. Back Home takes up a theme recurrent in his fiction: that of the young man who returns home from the city because he knows that the Highlands are where he wants to make his life, but who is rejected by his community who see his return as failure. Gunn himself was ‘the man who came back’ and the positive message of his fiction is that what the Highlands need to recover is the kind of belief in themselves which will allow such young people to go away and acquire skills and experience, but then return to put these into practice in the Highlands. Old Music, in contrast, deals with the ‘collective unconscious’ part of his earlier attempts at a dualtheme play in its ironic presentation of the old woman ballad singer intuitively in touch with her ancient tradition, looked upon as a ‘tourist attraction’ by the insensitive visitors who enter her house without invitation. In these simple one-act plays Gunn captures something of the atmosphere created by J. M. Synge in his earlier Irish Revival plays of cultural loss and emigration. Gunn’s play-writing was, as his biographers describe it, ‘a detour into drama’30 from his main work as a fiction writer. A more lasting contribution to the new writing in the interwar period came from the increasing number of women now attempting to earn a living by their pen, in Scotland as elsewhere. These women were mostly fiction writers and, like Gunn, most of them wrote in English – although some, like Nan Shepherd from the north-east of the country, used Scots for her characters’ speech. Some, such as Catherine Carswell and Willa Muir, became involved with the Scottish Renaissance revival movement, contributing articles and reviews of the new Scottish writing to Scottish and London periodicals. Willa Muir was also a partner, with her husband, in the translation of German literature. All of them, however, were, as women, engaged in finding new forms in which to communicate their responses to the changing modern world in which they had to make their lives. Their responses to modernity and the contribution these responses have made to a Scottish modernism will be the subject of the following chapter.

Notes 1. Muir, Transition, p. 7. See also his essay on Huxley, pp. 101–13 whom he considered a writer who reflected as opposed to questioning or analysing modern conditions. Page numbers for future quotations from Transition will be given in the text, preceded by ‘T’. 2. Muir, ‘A Note on Dostoyevsky’, Latitudes, p. 60. Woolf, ‘More Dostoevsky’, p. 91. 3. Gardner, Edwin Muir: The W. D. Thomas Memorial Lecture, p. 7. 4. Robert Hughes’ title for his book on the modernist art of the twentieth century has passed into common usage to define this period more generally.

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5. Muir, ‘Extracts from a Diary, 1937–39’, The Story and the Fable, p. 263. For convenience, unless quotations are to be found only in The Story and the Fable, further autobiographical quotations will be referenced in the text from Muir’s later extended An Autobiography, with page numbers prefaced by ‘A’. 6. Hölderlin, ‘Da ich ein Knabe war’, in Closs and Williams (eds), Harrap Anthology of German Poetry, p. 272; present author’s translation. 7. Muir, Complete Poems, ed. Peter Butter, p. 313. Page numbers for future quotations from Muir’s Complete Poems will be given in the text, prefaced by ‘CP’. 8. Ibid., p. 314. 9. See Muir’s essay ‘North and South – I’, Latitudes, pp. 103–14. 10. Goethe, ‘Kennst du das Land?’, in Closs and Williams, Harrap Anthology of German Poetry, pp. 219–20; present author’s translation. 11. Rilke, ‘Das ist die Sehnsucht’, in Closs and Williams, Harrap Anthology of German Poetry, p. 498; present author’s translation. For Muir’s comments on Rilke, see Muir, Selected Letters, p. 67. Page numbers for future quotations will be given in the text, preceded by ‘SL’. 12. Eliot, ‘Tradition and Individual Talent’, Selected Essays, p. 18. 13. Muir, We Moderns, p. 15. 14. Muir, ‘A Plea for Psychology in Literary Criticism’, Athenaeum, 28 January 1921, pp. 90–1; Muir, Latitudes, p. 100. 15. See Lawrence, letter to Edward Garnet, 5 June 1914, in Lawrence, Selected Letters, p. 198. 16. Muir, Structure of the Novel, p. 124. 17. Ibid., p. 63. 18. Ibid., p. 125. 19. Ibid., pp. 128–9. 20. Grieve/MacDiarmid, Contemporary Scottish Studies, p. 268. 21. Gibbon and MacDiarmid, Scottish Scene, p. 200. 22. Hart and Pick, Neil M. Gunn: A Highland Life, pp. 69–71. 23. Gunn, ‘Down to the Sea’, collected in The White Hour, pp. 214–21 (p. 214). Page numbers for future quotations will be given in the text, prefaced by ‘WH’. 24. Rilke, ‘O Herr, gib jedem seinen eignen Tod/Das Sterben, das aus jenem Leben geht,/Darin er liebe hatte, Sinn und Not’ (Oh, Lord, give to each man his own death, the death which proceeds from the individual life, in which was love, character and necessity’), Das Stunden-Buch, p. 86. 25. Hart and Pick, Neil M. Gunn, p. 75. 26. Gunn, Selected Letters, p. 3. 27. Hart and Pick, Neil M. Gunn, p. 75. 28. Quoted in Hart and Pick, Neil M. Gunn, p. 85. 29. Gunn, ‘Choosing a Play: A Comedy of Community Drama’, Scots Magazine, May 1935, pp. 99–112; collected in J. M. Reid (ed.), Scottish One-Act Plays, pp. 117–40. Other plays published include Back Home, Glasgow: Wilson, 1932; Net Results, London: Nelson [1939]; and Old Music, London: Nelson [1939]. 30. See Hart and Pick’s chapter ‘Detour into Drama’, Neil M. Gunn, pp. 84–92.

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Chapter 4

Beyond this Limit: Women, Modernism and the Modern World

But for a woman or any being whose nature it is to live through the emotions, clarity of mind can only be got by taking the natural order. And I do think many of us thinking and educated women of this age go against our natures by striving to force ourselves to deal first through the intellect, living too much with ideas and not sufficiently trusting ourselves to the truths that would come to us through the deeper sensual and emotional channels. Catherine Carswell (1928)

In the Introduction to Gender in Scottish History Since 1700, Lynn Abrams discusses the difference between ‘women’s history and a history informed by understandings of gender’, commenting that while ‘women’s historians aimed first to achieve visibility for women in the past’, their aim today (at least in relation to the developed world) ‘is to identify women as historical subjects or as social actors and to integrate their stories into the historical landscape’.1 Similarly, Marianne Dekoven in ‘Modernism and Gender’, her contribution to The Cambridge Companion to Modernism, argues that the early phase of feminist modernist criticism was preoccupied primarily with establishing the importance of women modernist writers, both by opening the canon to include them and by broadening our understanding of what constitutes Modernism so that it is not so exclusively defined by the valorization of formal as well as thematic characteristics (vast unifying mythic themes) associated with masculinity.2

Her view is that once a tradition of ‘women’s modernist writing, and the importance of the major female Modernists became better established’, then the focus changed from viewing the work of female and male modernists separately, and moved towards seeing modernism itself as a wider and more varied movement.3 Such a departure from the kind of ‘separate development’ situation of early feminist studies noted by both these writers is certainly the kind of procedure one would want to follow in relation to contemporary literary history where women have to a significant extent achieved an equal presence with men on the cultural stage. Yet this situation is a relatively recent phenomenon in

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women’s studies and it is in many ways still not entirely applicable to studies of women writers and artists in the early years of the twentieth century (with, of course, the outstanding exception of Virginia Woolf). It is certainly not yet applicable to the Scottish context, and to Scottish modernism, where the work of both male and female writers of the early twentieth century is still struggling to be recognised (both within and without Scotland) as having made a contribution to modernism. As discussed previously in the Introduction to this study, MacDiarmid is the only male writer likely to be found in the index of a critical guide to modernism;4 and in Bonnie Kime Scott’s ‘Tangled Mesh of Modernists’ map in her Refiguring Modernism of 1995 he is linked up with Rebecca West, a writer with a tangential relationship to Scottish literary identity. Despite MacDiarmid’s October 1922 Scottish Chapbook sketch ‘Following Rebecca West in Edinburgh’, West was securely situated in the London literary scene as opposed to the Scottish.5 On the other hand, Bonnie Kime Scott’s subtitle is The Women of 1928 and there were indeed a number of Scottish women of that time who could have been included in her survey. Lorna Moon, for example, insisted in relation to the heroine of her novel Dark Star: ‘Nancy is 1929’;6 and there were others whose fiction writing would have supported that call. The situation in relation to a Scottish female modernism is therefore more akin to that proposed by Shari Benstock in ‘Beyond the Reaches of Feminist Criticism’, where she argues that if we were to ‘dig deep enough’ among the ruins of the Panthéon, that ‘burial place for distinguished men’, we would find buried there the forgotten women of modernism: ‘And not just the Virginia Woolfs and Gertrude Steins, acknowledged in their own time as exemplary writers. We will find all the others [. . .] who cooperated in this endeavor.’ She continues: ‘What is frightening about such a critical venture is the very proximity of these women to us: women whose actions were well known to every male modernist sixty years ago are almost beyond recall now.’7 Benstock’s hypothesis and her question: ‘And once we have discovered these women, what will we do with them – how will we treat their lives and works?’8 have much relevance to the situation of Scottish literary women working during the Scottish modernist period. When we begin to ‘dig deep’ into the primary sources for these years, then we may well be surprised to discover how prominent many of the women were in their own time as actors on the literary stage within and beyond Scotland. We may well be surprised also at the various connections they had with the now canonical (within Scotland) male members of the Scottish literary renaissance and the acknowledged contribution they themselves made to it. These women were not violets by mossy stones, half hidden from the public eye (although most – like Willa Muir, ‘wife of Edwin’ – had to struggle against public perceptions of what a woman’s role might be in order to achieve success). They were conscious contributors to the documenting of the changing world of a new and in many aspects revolutionary century. What happened to these Scottish women – as Benstock and others have argued happened to women

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writers generally in relation to modernism – is that they were written out of the history of the time by subsequent critical and theoretical narratives that privileged the ideological perceptions and literary forms of the dominant male writers as characterising features of the period. As a result, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s late-nineteenth-century lament about the absence of poetic grandmothers remained all too relevant a century later in Scotland. Janice Galloway’s mould-breaking, female-centred novel of 1987, The Trick is to Keep Breathing, shares many of the attributes of Catherine Carswell’s Open the Door! of 1920 and of other fiction by interwar women; yet when Galloway’s novel was being written, these earlier books of female identity and emancipation were still buried deep in the cellar of a Scottish male Panthéon. It is important that they are brought to the surface again, both in relation to what they have to tell us about female development and female perspectives in these early years of the century, and in relation to the contribution made by women to modernism. For such women, ‘making it new’ did not necessarily mean responding to the destabilising challenges of the machine age and the loss of old certainties (such machines and such losses could well be perceived by women as beneficial); or to the claims that the outworn traditional literary language and forms needed to be regenerated. It meant, more subjectively, that new forms of society had to be developed in order to allow women to play their full part in shaping that society; and for women personally it meant exploring their natures as intellectual, emotional and sexual beings, as opposed to accepting the conditioned view of themselves which had been handed down by tradition and a male-dominated social order. It also involved the search for new ways of writing which would enable such explorations to be carried through in a female-centred form. It is not surprising, then, that so much writing by women in the period involves ‘counter-narratives’ in which traditions, both social and literary, are broken in order to write a new and more authentic story of women’s lives and values. This divergence in priorities is true in the Scottish context as elsewhere. While the interwar cultural and political revival initiated by MacDiarmid was dominated by the aim to escape from a provincial North British identity and to achieve self-determination – politically in the longer term and more immediately through the rediscovery and renewal of distinctively Scottish forms of literary and artistic expression – for the women, especially as manifested in their writing, the search for self-determination in a gender sense came first. This does not mean that they were insensitive to or completely uninvolved in the national project. Although the novelist Dot Allan found herself ‘not altogether in sympathy with the Scots Renaissance movement and other allied movements, which, in my opinion, tend to cut us off from the rest of the world, instead of making us one with it’,9 other writers became involved either directly, or more often obliquely, with the attempt to make Scotland new. F. Marian McNeill and Nannie K. Wells (who were not primarily creative writers) were directly involved with political organisations and in writing about politics; Nan Shepherd and the expatriate Lorna Moon,

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from the north-east of the country, contributed implicitly through their experimentation with Scots speech and idiom. Others such as Willa Muir and Nancy Brysson Morrison explored the narrow perspectives and social conditioning found in small town and rural communities, while Willa in particular contributed to the European dimension of the revival movement through her joint translations with Edwin of German writers. Catherine Carswell added to the reassessment of Scottish literary traditions through her provocative Life of the iconic Robert Burns and through the reviews she wrote for the Spectator and other magazines. Such women were recognised in their own time as contributing to the postwar renewal in Scottish culture, yet this interactive aspect of their lives and work has over the decades since been marginalised in accounts of the Scottish Renaissance movement. To some extent it has been overlooked also as a consequence of the specific gender focus of the feminist criticism and theory responsible for rediscovering their creative writing.10 Until recently, therefore, the women disappeared from the narrative of the revival movement, just as their out-of-print books became invisible in publishing history generally: an example of what Germaine Greer has described as the ‘phenomenon of the transience of female literary fame’.11 For all these reasons, it seems both necessary and appropriate to devote this chapter (inadequate in space as it is) specifically to the responses of women to the challenges of the modern – and Scottish modernist – world as seen in their creative and related writings. With regard to birth dates, the Scottish women belonged to that outstanding group of Anglophone modernist writers born in the late nineteenth or very early twentieth century who came to prominence in the pre-1914 or immediate postwar period. However, there is an interesting social difference between them and their male counterparts in Scotland in that most of these women came from educated and middle-class backgrounds, whereas men such as MacDiarmid, Muir, Grassic Gibbon and Gunn were to a large extent self-educated and from a more humble social position. While the social order was able to offer the possibility of ‘removable inequalities’ (as the Victorians termed it) to lower-class men of ability such as the Scottish authors mentioned above, this was not the case with similar women. It was therefore the social class and family prosperity of the prominent women writers of the time that provided them with the educational skills and sufficient confidence (even if mixed with what Catherine Carswell called ‘the irritability of diffidence’)12 to bring women’s perspectives and values before the public. Carswell, for example, was born Catherine Roxburgh Macfarlane in 1879, the daughter of a prosperous Glasgow businessman, although her parents were deeply religious members of the Free Church of Scotland and lived modestly despite their middle-class status. She had ancestors active in Scottish legal and political circles and contemporary relatives domiciled in Italy with whom the family kept in touch. She herself studied music at the Frankfurt Conservatorium at the turn of the century and later attended English classes under Professor Walter Raleigh at Glasgow University, although, like many

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women of the time, she did not take a degree. Her background was therefore prosperously Scottish, educated and cosmopolitan. Willa Muir was born Wilhelmina Anderson in 1890 of Shetlandic parents who had emigrated to Scotland and ran a small business in Montrose (that ‘peripheral’ small town which became so central to Scottish modernist activities). She graduated with a first-class honours degree in classics from St Andrews University in 1910, went south to London to study psychology and education, and had become vice-principal of a college for women in the metropolis before she married Edwin Muir in 1919. Carswell and Muir are the women with the highest profile in relation to Scottish modernism: both in relation to the innovatory nature of their fiction and their non-fiction prose, and their interaction with other writers and aspects of the renewal movement. While they will therefore receive the most detailed consideration here, contributions by other women will also be taken into account: fiction writers such as Nan Shepherd and Lorna Moon from the north-east of the country, and Nancy Brysson Morrison and Dot Allan who lived and worked in the Glasgow area. In their fiction, and sometimes in the events of their own lives, all of these writers provide narratives of a female struggle for self-determination and fulfilment: for a public as opposed to a domestic role in society; for what Lorna Moon’s Nancy calls ‘a personal door’;13 for the discovery of one’s sexuality and the right to express this; and for the right to be a professional writer. Alongside the new themes there is also a formal experimentation (stronger in some than in others, but present in all) that will free a female writer from the constrictions of a traditional male prose style: an ‘altering and adapting the current sentence until she writes one that takes the natural shape of her thought without crushing it or distorting it’.14 Catherine Carswell’s Open the Door!, the first of these new femalecentred novels, was published in 1920, thus making it contemporaneous with MacDiarmid’s Northern Numbers anthologies and predating The Scottish Chapbook by two years. The book is that rare thing in Scottish fiction: a narrative of middle-class Glasgow, set principally in the West End of the city with its university and parks, and connecting with the life of Glasgow School of Art and the department stores of Sauchiehall Street. Although not formally as experimental as Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway of 1925 in the sense of Woolf’s stream of consciousness narrative voice and collage-like structure, its designer heroine Joanna, like Clarissa Dalloway, seems at home in the cityscape. The city is her ‘place’, even although she strains against the provincial nature of Glasgow society and takes flight first of all into a misguided marriage in Florence, and then to London where, despite her enjoyment of the sophisticated ambience of the metropolis, her freedom is again curbed by an unsatisfactory personal relationship. In addition to its film-like presentation of the visual space of the city, the modern tone of the novel is created by its primary emphasis on the lives of young women and their attempts to lead independent lives; by the use of interior monologue which allows the

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reader into Joanna’s thoughts and feelings; and by the vitality and fluidity of movement in her writing which enables her to create a number of dramatic scenes and swift, lively dialogue between characters in a short space of time: brief sketches which are yet solidly realised. Like Willa Muir also, Carswell was a splendid letter writer and it is the conversational freedom of her letters that she brings to her two novels, the second actually written in epistolary and journal form. Such social immediacy, especially in a middle-class urban setting, was something entirely new in Scottish fiction which had been largely historical in nature and influenced by the social and psychological repercussions of Scotland’s Calvinist religious heritage and the 1707 Union with England, while at the turn of the century the couthy, escapist kailyaird fiction of Crockett, Maclaren and Barrie had aroused a violent reaction in Brown’s dark The House with the Green Shutters and Hay’s equally dark Gillespie. In contrast, Open the Door! offers the poetry Virginia Woolf asked for in her later essay ‘Women and Fiction’, published in 1929. This poetry element is present throughout the text in passages such as the young Joanna’s abstraction as she looks out of the train window at the steamers and barges on the Clyde: ‘the sunshine on that outgoing vessel and the great, glistening current of brown water filled her with painful yet exquisite longings’; in descriptions of Joanna’s childhood happiness at Duntarvie, the family’s Perthshire holiday home and her later happiness at Vallombrosa in the early days of her marriage; in her introspection, home again in Glasgow after the death of her husband, as she watches the river Kelvin in its ‘full, brown February flood’, and thinks of its relationship with her own life: Ah! How remorselessly the stream swept away all the debris of winter it could reach! As Joanna watched it in fascination she was one with it, and she rejoiced. Her life – was it not as that flood? Was it not muddy, littered, unlike the life she would have imagined or chosen? But it was a life. It moved. It possessed the impulse, the impetus, the inner fount of desire – not of mere detached wishes that succeed each other capriciously, but of desire that springs from some undiscoverable source, and is imperious as the waters in spring-time.15

The poetry is present also in the way Carswell uses descriptive or metaphorical decorative art detail from the Scottish Arts and Crafts movement and other visual images relating to Glasgow School of Art at the turn of the century: the wine glasses Joanna buys when she invites her first love, the diffident Bob, to her studio, which ‘set exquisitely on their octagonal stems [. . .] were like the calyxes of water-lilies’; ‘the pale waxing moon’ which hangs ‘like a beaker of fretted silver’ in Mario’s later November wooing of Joanna; the painterly image of the strangely transformed ‘Antique Class-room’ at the Art School dance where Joanna meets her future lover Pender alone for the first time: ‘Its known contours were all disfigured by moonlight, and by the straggling rays of a street lamp which came mixed with moonlight through the long plaster-coated windows. The statues lurked strangely in corners. [. . .] The music of the schottische came to them from far above, not as melody,

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but as a monotonous pulse of sound.’ (OD, pp. 67, 97, 172) Open the Door! was awarded the Melrose prize for fiction on its publication in 1920. The Camomile followed in 1922, and in 1923 Carswell’s essay ‘Proust’s Women’ was included in Marcel Proust: An English Tribute edited by C. K. Moncrieff. Here she explored what she saw as the tentative nature of Proust’s presentation of his female characters in his fiction in contrast to his ‘far more positive assertion’ in defining male characters.16 In the light of the information available about her early life, Carswell’s two novels can be seen as highly autobiographical in nature, although as fictional narratives they have their own autonomy. Edwin Muir commented in his autobiography that ‘every one should live his life twice, for the first attempt is always blind’ (Muir, An Autobiography, p. 192), and in Carswell’s fictional scenarios there is the sense of an exploration of two life journeys: in the first the road she has actually taken, and in its epistolary sequel a hypothetical journey towards a different, more independent future. Her early life story is itself in the nature of a counter-narrative. After musical education in Frankfurt and English studies with Professor Raleigh in Glasgow, she made a hasty marriage to Raleigh’s brother-in-law who, unknown to her, was mentally unstable, and who attempted to kill her when she became pregnant. She returned to her family in Glasgow with her young daughter, fought a legal battle to have the marriage annulled, and won, thus making legal history. From 1905 she supported herself and her daughter as a journalist, reviewing fiction for the Glasgow Herald and later writing drama criticism for the Observer as assistant to St John Ervine. She was famously dismissed from her Glasgow Herald position for daring to slip a review of D. H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow (shortly to be banned as an obscene publication) into the paper without the editor’s consent, but her early contact as reviewer with Lawrence resulted in a friendship – partially conducted through letters – which lasted until his death. Her memoir, The Savage Pilgrimage, written in response to Middleton Murry’s controversial Son of Woman, was published in 1932. In addition, while still living with her daughter in Glasgow she entered into an affair with the English painter Maurice Greiffenhagen who had come to Glasgow School of Art as Head of the Life Class in 1906. She moved to London, again supporting herself by journalism, and in a later marriage with the Scottish writer Donald Carswell she remained the principal breadwinner of the family. This ‘real life’ experience was later transformed into the fictional plot of Open the Door! Just as Carswell had been supportive (although not uncritical) of Lawrence’s fiction, so he was similarly involved with her Open the Door! project: nagging, praising, sending drafts back for rewriting; aware of the narrative’s relationship to her own life, and therefore of the importance of bringing it to a satisfactory conclusion. He wrote after an early draft: ‘You have very often a simply beastly style, indirect and roundabout and stiff-kneed and stupid. And your stuff is abominably muddled. You’ll simply have to write it all again.’ Then he added: ‘But it is fascinatingly interesting. Nearly all of it is marvellously good.’ Later, after reading her revised draft, he wrote:

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I have just finished the novel. Yes, I think it is very good. The part rewritten is very much improved. Of course the one character you have not really drawn – not conceived even – is Lawrence Urquhart. You haven’t got it in. It wasn’t to be got in, in this book [. . .] Lawrence, in this end, is ex machina.

Lawrence’s sensitivity to the autobiographical nature of the narrative and its ending in Joanna’s union with her faithful friend Lawrence Urquhart is shown in his further comment that the problem of the book is ‘what Urquhart really means to Joanna’, adding: ‘But that is a dark problem, not to be written about now. We will talk some things over when we meet.’17 The reader, too, senses with him that the writing of this novel, and in particular the characterisation of its heroine Joanna, came out of its author’s need to make sense of her own earlier actions, and to validate them to herself at least. As Lawrence wrote: ‘It will be really something overcome, a phase surpassed in you, when the book is finished.’18 Open the Door! is therefore the narrative of a young woman searching for some understanding of her identity as a woman and for a meaningful role in her life, a search that to a significant extent concerns her coming to awareness of herself as a sexual being. We see this unfolding in the child Joanna’s innocent curiosity about sexual difference; in her later young adult’s attempt to find an answering response to her own emotions in a hesitant first boyfriend; and in her impulsive marriage to the passionate but controlling Mario, who takes her to his villa outside Florence to be chaperoned by his sister while he, like one of Marinetti’s futurists, experiments with research into flying machines. Ironically, his death as a result of an accident with his ‘auto-velocipede’ becomes the deus ex machina which releases Joanna from what had become imprisonment in his villa. In the early days of their honeymoon at Vallombrosa, on the other hand, it is his passionate nature that releases her own sexual being, an attribute of her female nature suppressed in Calvinist Scotland: Everything was strange. But strangest of all was to see on the pillow beside hers the dark disordered head of the man who had married her. He was still asleep, his face turned away; and keeping quite still on her side with her knees drawn up and her palm under her cheek, Joanna thought of the past night. Wave after wave of purely physical recollections swept through her; but at the same time in her brain a cool spectator seemed to be sitting aloof and in judgment. This then was marriage! This droll device, this astonishing, grotesque experience was what the poets had sung since the beginning. To this all her quivering dreams had led, all Mario’s wooing touches and his glances of fire! The reality made her feel a stranger in a strange world. (OD, pp. 107–8)

That female sexuality is not a preoccupation peculiar to Carswell’s fiction is confirmed in the frequency with which it appears as motif or larger theme in the work of these women writers. And very often it is the innocence – and ignorance – of the girl or young woman involved that is foregrounded. In Open

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the Door!, for example, Joanna’s first (although not consciously recognised) sexual awareness occurs as a young girl in the presence of an older cousin who shoots and skins small birds at the family’s holiday home in Perthshire. As the child watches his ‘lean wrists and his long fingers [. . .] she imagined herself a little fluttering bird in their cruel yet skilful grasp: and she felt she would gladly have let them crush the life out of her for their own inscrutable ends’. And ‘one wet afternoon it had looked to her as if her fantastic wish might come true’ as her cousin teases her by pointing his pen-knife at her breast and threatening to ‘skin her like a little wild bird’, stopping suddenly as he realises the child’s intensity, ‘dumb and quite still and strange in his grip’ (OD, p. 34). The scene leaves the reader with the awareness that such innocent intensity could, in the hands of a more unscrupulous companion, have been taken advantage of, just as the still innocent yet emotional curiosity of the adolescent Joanna could have been taken advantage of by the village oddjobs boy who (like the male speaker in many a ballad and folk-song) offers to ‘show ye what lads is for [. . .] if ye’ll come up yonder on the moor wi me’ (OD, p. 37). Similar scenes of innocent female awakening sexuality and attempted exploitation occur in Lorna Moon’s Dark Star and Dot Allan’s Makeshift where young girls are subjected to attempted rape by men known to them. Allan’s city heroine is attacked by her employer who expects her to offer her body in addition to her typing skills. Moon’s heroine Nancy – a teenager who, like Joanna, is becoming conscious of her developing sexual feelings but does not understand their wider physical implications – is attacked by a relation of the minister in whose home she lodges. In both cases, the focus is on the innocence of the girls involved, an innocence which includes ignorance of the details of the sexual act. In both cases also there is a point in the attempted attack where the victim seems frozen into immobility, powerless to defend herself, like a bird caught by a cat. In such a situation the innocent girl could so easily be transformed into ‘fallen woman’, a motif developed by Moon through another female characterisation in her book. Such themes of sexual passion, innocence, exploitation, communicate a growing awareness among women of the time about the unsatisfactory nature of the status quo of relationships between men and women; about the need to bring out into the open the hypocrisy which clouds the reality of social codes in relation to sexual relationships within and outside marriage. Nancy Brysson Morrison’s second novel The Gowk Storm, which became a Book Society Choice on its publication in 1933, tells the story of three sisters living in a remote manse on the edge of the Highlands in the later nineteenth century who attempt unsuccessfully to make their own choices with regard to marriage, but her first novel Breakers, with a very similar setting and group of characters, tells an even darker story of a minister’s daughter sent off to an east-coast village to have her illegitimate baby in secrecy, while her father remains in his manse apparently ignorant of his daughter’s condition. Carswell’s second novel, The Camomile, is written in a lively, conversational, almost at times stream of consciousness style which, despite what

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should be the limitations of its actual epistolary form, succeeds in creating a whole world of social interaction and perspectives. It introduces another recurring theme through the wish of its heroine Ellen to be a writer. Ellen, who like her author has trained in Frankfurt to be a musician, has grown up with the family’s belief that her dead mother’s insanity was caused by her attempts to become a writer, yet she finds herself compelled to follow the same road. Thus, several years before Woolf’s 1929 claim for ‘a room of one’s own’, Carswell’s Ellen rents a small room off Glasgow’s Byres Road where she can practise her music and also pursue her still hesitant attempts at writing unobserved and undisturbed. ‘It is so wonderful knowing that one can’t be called upon. Long may it last . . .’ Carswell herself wrote to a friend about her own renting of a room in Hampstead’s Keats Grove in order to work undisturbed.19 In Ellen’s case, hostility from her fiancé to the seriousness of her writing becomes a reason for her breaking the engagement. In a passage which anticipates C. M. Forster’s depiction of his expatriate community in A Passage to India, published two years later in 1924, Carswell’s Ellen writes to her friend Ruby about her proposed new life with Duncan in India: I must not speak of anything abstract or ‘superior’ or of ‘high-brow works of art’, unless I am content to be regarded as a bore and a blue-stocking. I am to keep all my real thoughts for him, and to ‘let others be dazzled by the small change of my wit’. He says life will be all the more thrilling this way. For it will be our delicious secret that he has married ‘such a serious little woman’.

More threatening, however, is Duncan’s attitude to her writing ambitions: ‘Life’, he said, ‘is a bigger affair than books, and life is pre-eminently your business. Wait till your hands are full of life, and I doubt if you will have the time or the wish to add to the mass of feminine writings already in the world.’ [. . .] When I asked – didn’t it seem unfair that men-writers could write, and yet not be stinted of life? – he agreed that perhaps it was unfair, but that things were like that, and had to be faced.

She continues: I feel that he is right, and yet that somewhere there is an untruth in his argument. It is true that if I had to choose between writing and life I should choose life. But then I couldn’t do otherwise, for without living myself I know I couldn’t write: I am not imaginative enough. And is anyone? Besides, I feel that even if I had ten children D. would still want me to play tennis and ride with him. And how are tennis, dancing, riding more ‘life’ than writing?20

Dot Allan’s Jacqueline in Makeshift faces a similar problem. Initially, it is her ambition to be a writer, to use her skill with language to open up a new world, that helps her to resist social pressures to conform to a conventional female role: ‘Words – words – words [. . .] she sat plying her pencil, creating for herself a new heaven and earth [. . .] a kingdom whose key none could

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wrest from her’.21 However, coming from a modest family background, she is persuaded to put her writing ambitions aside and enter into an engagement with the ambitious son of a well-to-do neighbour. Her impulse to write is re-awakened during a chance meeting with a successful author who had encouraged her early work, but she has to face her fiancé’s hostility: – ‘Didn’t he realize she was going to be married – married? Wasn’t that a sight more worth talking about than this “modern movement”! this “rhythmic feeling”, and all the rest’ (M, p. 215). The novel ends with Jacqueline boarding the train for London the night before her wedding, leaving wedding presents and bridegroom behind her, but with her poems in her bag and the prospect of a new life as a writer before her. Allan’s Makeshift differs from most of these interwar novels of female emancipation in that its heroine comes from a humble rural background to work as a typist in the city; initially an exciting venture but one which soon results in her realising that she is ‘a cog in the wheel of commerce that whirs unceasingly from the granite steps of Maryhill to the many-storied buildings that cluster round the Clyde’ (M, p. 32). The book is unusual also in that Jacqueline is inspired in her bid for self-determination by the memory of her mother’s hard life and her protest against having had what was ‘second best’: ‘That’s what my life has been made up of, Jacqueline, makeshift all the time [. . .] I’ve missed it somehow, but there’s more to life than that.’ (M, p. vii) In contrast, a more common plot motif is the absence of such positive communication between mothers and daughters. Confined to the domestic sphere, such older women are unable to provide their daughters with progressive role models, yet they also seem unable or unwilling to encourage them to make more of their own lives. The mother Julie in Open the Door! cannot function satisfactorily without her husband to order their affairs. Yet she is also a tragic figure, a woman with strong religious feelings to whom the Scottish Presbyterian Kirk cannot offer any public role where she might feel fulfilled. Similarly, she has never felt fulfilled sexually in her marriage with her conventional and deeply religious husband: ‘when she felt the stirrings of passion in herself, she was dimly ashamed’ (OD, p. 15). After her husband’s death she flits from church to church, seeking unsuccessfully some form of worship that will satisfy her; and after her own death she is characterised by her daughter as being destined for ‘failure’ (OD, pp. 327, 337). Some mothers are absent from the stage altogether or appear irrelevant for most of the action: The mother is dead in The Camomile and in Willa Muir’s Imagined Corners where her place is taken by an unmarried aunt in the case of the young heroine’s husband, while her own mother is never mentioned. In a subplot family, the mother is also dead, her place being taken by an unmarried woman who thinks of her identity as that of ‘a minister’s sister’.22 The mother has abandoned her daughter in Moon’s Dark Star and is slovenly and antagonistic to her daughter’s ambitions in Nan Shepherd’s The Quarry Wood. She is a passive figure in Brysson Morrison’s The Gowk Storm, so absent from the main action of the narrative that the youngest daughter wonders ‘what she really thought within herself,

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what ships sailed into her harbour when she sat alone’.23 It is interesting too that there are no offspring to the principal characters in these narratives. While the authors may, in some cases, have had children themselves, their plea for their heroines appears to anticipate the response of Toni Morrison’s later heroine Sula who, when asked: ‘When you gone to get married? You need to have some babies. It’ll settle you’, responds: ‘I don’t want to make somebody else – I want to make myself’.24 This question of the nature of ‘womanhood’ and female roles in society was taken up by Willa Muir in her first published work Women: An Inquiry which appeared in 1925 in the Hogarth Essays series published by Virginia and Leonard Woolf. At the outset, Muir gives as her overall aim: ‘to find a conception of womanhood as something essentially different from manhood’; and within that conception, ‘to discover if the division of the human race into men and women involves a division of spiritual as well as of sexual functions, so that the creative work of women is different in kind from the creative work of men’.25 In itself the exploration of such an essentialist position is not necessarily objectionable or even unique in the period, although it differs from the insistence of Dora Marsden in the New Freewoman that human individuality (male and female) is what is important as opposed to individuals being ‘lumped together into a class, a sex, or a “movement”’.26 In the early stages of late-twentieth-century feminist studies, écriture feminine was a prominent area for exploration and analysis, with Hélène Cixous among those who argued that ‘woman must write woman’.27 Virginia Woolf, whose essay Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown had initiated the Hogarth series in 1924, provided ammunition for this future écriture feminine position when she argued in ‘Women and Fiction’ that since the male sentence was ‘too loose, too heavy, too pompous for a woman’s use’, a woman must make a new sentence for herself.28 And Catherine Carswell similarly called on what appears to be an essentialist argument when she gave advice to her friend F. Marian McNeill that ‘for a woman or any being whose nature it is to live through the emotions, clarity of mind can only be got by taking the natural order’, continuing: ‘And I do think many of us thinking and educated women of this age – go against our natures by striving to force ourselves to deal first through the intellect, living too much with ideas and not sufficiently trusting to the truths that would come to us through the deeper sensual and emotional channels. So we get confused, uncreative and “pathological”’.29 Willa Muir was therefore not alone in her belief that women and men were essentially different in nature and, as a result, in the character of their creative writing. Nor is her further argument about the complementarity and equality of these different natures and activities unacceptable. What prevents her from developing a meaningful argument from this essentialist starting-point is her further insistence that men are stronger in ‘conscious life’, women in ‘unconscious’ (WI, p. 7), and the dominant place she gives to ‘mothering’ in relation to female attributes, especially the greater energy motherhood uses up. This leads her to a position where she argues that ‘all women are potential

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mothers, and must have the necessary reserve of energy for this function whether they intend to become mothers or not. They cannot waste it even if they would. Thus men have more energy to waste on their own individual purposes than women: that is to say, men have more energy at their conscious disposal’ (WI, p. 6). From this it is a small step to argue that men’s talents are therefore directed towards the creation of ‘systems of philosophy or government’; whereas women’s qualities are for ‘creating individual human beings’ (WI, pp. 8–9), either as mothers themselves or – if they are unfortunate enough to be among World War One’s legacy of ‘surplus women’ – in the carrying out of succouring roles in the community. In this respect, there seems little difference between this argument of 1925 and that of John Ruskin’s Sesame and Lilies of 1865 which argued that the man’s role ‘is active, progressive, defensive. He is eminently the doer, the creator, the discoverer, the defender. His intellect is for speculation and invention’; while the woman ‘sees the qualities of things, their claims, and their places’, with her own place being ‘the place of peace’ in the protected home.30 Having therefore started her inquiry with a rejection of the negative stereotyping of women produced by a patriarchal society, and a belief in the complementary nature of female and male activities, Muir ends by endorsing the very stereotypes that hindered women from playing a fuller part in public life: ‘women are more irrational and impulsive than men are’; ‘women have a strong, if invisible, affinity with what is called nature’; ‘women rarely achieve a conscious individuality. They are so largely unconscious themselves that they need emotional support for their personalities’ (WI, pp. 14, 15, 16). If such passages had been included in order to give a preliminary account of how things were with women in Ruskin’s late Victorian society, then they would have had some point. However, in 1925, and coming from a mind supposedly trained in psychology and education, one could have expected some investigative discussion of the nature versus nurture argument; some acknowledgement of the conditioning effects over centuries of a lack of education, of economic independence, of the right to vote and so of participation in the public shaping of society; and most importantly, a lack of the knowledge of how to control one’s fertility and so escape from the ‘role’ of persistent childbearing. In addition, Muir’s view of female creativity in the arts in which she relegates women to the performing arts ‘like dancing, singing and acting, where the actual personality is the medium of expression’; and denies that ‘the domination of men is even partly responsible for the lack of great women artists (WI, p. 28), had been answered seventy-five years earlier, in 1850, by Florence Nightingale in her essay Cassandra (not published until 1928) when she wrote in prose that positively leaps off the page in its denunciation: Mrs A. has the imagination, the poetry of a Murillo, and has sufficient power of execution to show that she might have had a great deal more. Why is she not a Murillo? From a material difficulty, not a mental one. If she has a knife and fork in her hand for three hours of the day, she cannot have a pencil or brush [. . .] If she has a pen

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and ink in her hands during another three hours, writing answers for the penny post, again, she cannot have her pencil, and so ad infinitum through life [. . .] Women are never supposed to have any occupation of sufficient importance not to be interrupted, except ‘suckling their fools’; and women themselves have accepted this.31

In this area of female creativity, she had also been answered in Scotland at the turn of the century by what the visual arts scholar Jude Burkhauser called the ‘Glasgow Girls’, that group of women artists associated with Glasgow School of Art under its director Francis Newbery – artists such as Frances and Margaret Macdonald, Jessie M. King, Bessie McNicol – who exhibited in continental Europe as well as in Scotland and who demonstrated that women could achieve a high quality of work and public success in the creative visual arts field.32 Most present-day critics, including the present writer, who come to Women: An Inquiry after first meeting Willa Muir through her novel Imagined Corners (1931), her lively letters to women friends, and her reputation as joint translator with Edwin of Kafka’s modernist fiction, find this early essay puzzling, if not actually incomprehensible – especially since she was later known for her protests against what she perceived to be the subservient public role allotted to women in Scottish daily life as, for example, in her extended essay Mrs Grundy in Scotland published in the mid-1930s. Yet at the time when she took her university degree and underwent her subsequent studies in psychology and education, the views she expressed in Women: An Inquiry were widely held and considered to be ‘scientific’. In ‘Medicine, Science and the Body’, her contribution to Gender in Scottish History Since 1700, Eileen Janes Yeo refers to the research of biologists Patrick Geddes and J. Arthur Thomson into the differences between male and female evolutionary development and their detection of ‘an anabolic tendency towards constructive nurturing which was complemented by a catabolic metabolism that actively consumed energy’. Yeo continues: ‘Regarding “woman as the relatively more anabolic, man as the relatively more katabolic”, they insisted that both were necessary in the public sphere of modern life, and gave the “civic matriarch” important roles’.33 Yeo’s quotations come from Geddes and Thomson’s book Sex (1914) which was published in the Home University Library series which Muir may well have read in relation to her psychology studies and educational work. Sex itself was developed from their previous study The Evolution of Sex (1889) in which their argument in relation to female passivity and male energy or aggression deriving from the differential nature of the metabolism of male and female cells suggests that such gender differences are fixed, essentialist, as Muir argued in her essay. Behind Geddes’ and Thomson’s researches are the views put forward by Herbert Spencer in his Principles of Biology (1867) that human beings have a fixed amount of energy reserves and that women must conserve these reserves in order to carry out their reproductive role, while men can use their reserves intellectually or physically.34 This too is very close to Muir’s argument in her inquiry. It seems, therefore, as if she

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had internalised such ‘scientific’ reading (for the parallels are so close it seems unlikely that she had not read the works, or reviews of them) without subjecting it to the kind of questioning one might expect from a trained mind, and especially from a female mind, in view of the nature of the material. Women: An Inquiry was not overly successful in its own time, with Muir writing to F. Marian McNeill that ‘my old essay has fallen very flat [. . .] The Nation said it was as unexciting as boiled rice. Time and Tide has not reviewed it at all. I thought women’s societies and associations would have been interested. However – I shall launch bombs next time!’35 This letter, however, also gives a personal clue as to why her essay may have become imprisoned in its mothering theme, as she continues: We have had a trying time – you will realise why, when I tell you that shortly after I came home I proceeded to have a bad miscarriage – think of it! I had no idea that I was pregnant (I thought I had got a chill & when I was sick I thought it was caused by lumbago) and then we were worried by a debt which suddenly cropped up – very worried – and then I had the miscarriage, to my own shock & surprise. No wonder I was brooding over the bearing of children!36

While Muir’s desire to become pregnant may excuse her preoccupation with motherhood in her Inquiry, the essay is still disappointing in its unwillingness to interrogate as opposed to endorsing views of female capacity that her own achievements should surely have led her to question. It does, however, retain some interest for the way in which it exposes the dichotomy between the wishes of many women of the time to play a more fulfilled public role and their contrary emotional drive to fulfil themselves as mothers – a dilemma still not satisfactorily solved in our present time. While the authors under discussion may have shelved the problem in their fiction by leaving mothers and offspring out of their principal scenarios, writing it out of their actual lives may not have been so easily achieved. Muir was much more successful in exploring female identity and the dangers of an essentialist perspective in her two novels Imagined Corners of 1931 and Mrs Ritchie of 1933. It has sometimes been suggested that much of the fiction of female development in this early twentieth-century period is a continuation of the realist novel of social concerns which developed throughout the nineteenth century, as opposed to being a manifestation of twentieth-century modernist writing such as one finds in Woolf’s innovative work. In the Scottish context, for example, Muir’s Imagined Corners has been characterised by the American critic Francis Russell Hart as a ‘Middlemarch of a modern northeast Scottish coastal burgh torn by sexual and religious conflicts [. . .] Replacing Eliot’s structural metaphor of the web is the image of a crystal dropped in a solution, suggesting the reactions and precipitations of a taut, traditional, seemingly segmented community when a new element is introduced.’37 Hart’s comparison is to some degree relevant, for one of the achievements of Muir’s novel is the way in which she is able to incorporate unself-consciously her own intellectual background and interest in science and

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philosophy into her ironic, omniscient narrative, while at the same time laying bare the conflicting emotional responses of her principal female character. As with George Eliot’s fiction, Muir’s Imagined Corners is also a novel about small-town social relationships, but it is primarily one of female development in a period of change, an early twentieth-century transformation of the male Bildungsroman form where, for her character Elizabeth, the journey to selfdiscovery begins with marriage, as opposed to ending more traditionally in marriage as in Carswell’s Open the Door! In this respect, Imagined Corners might superficially be compared with Eliot’s Gwendolen Harleth narrative in Daniel Deronda, or Dorothea’s story in Middlemarch, in that both these heroines discover, after marriage, how misguided their earlier judgements have been. Yet, neither of these nineteenth-century novels affords its heroine the opportunity for new growth created by Willa Muir in the open ending of her novel, while her metaphor of precipitation and the introduction of new elements is, philosophically, a metaphor of fluidity and change in a way that Eliot’s closed metaphor of the web cannot be. Despite some surface similarities with Middlemarch, therefore, Imagined Corners is a novel written in the context of the changes and opportunities of a new century, and one which responds to such challenges in a modern, female-centred way. And this changed context, although in varying degrees of formal experimentation, is true of the other fiction discussed here – including Carswell’s Open the Door! in which other innovative qualities compensate for its more conventionally closed ending. Art of the modernist period is seen as placing emphasis on the impersonality of the art work, in contrast to Romantic period subjectivity. Pound insisted on the need for a hard, clear image with no extraneous referentiality; and Eliot’s ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ argued that ‘the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates’.38 MacDiarmid, like Yeats, solved the impersonality dilemma in his early poetry by using a mask: by creating the character of the Drunk Man, thus allowing him to explore at a distance contradictory responses to his country, to himself as an artist, to the condition of human life. On the other hand, Pound, Eliot, Yeats and MacDiarmid spoke for and operated as poets, and as male poets. It is not so easy in fiction to maintain narrative impersonality and distance from characters, as we see in the work of the modernist D. H. Lawrence; and it is especially difficult if, like many women writers, one is creating characters and scenarios which either closely pattern, or are negatively affecting the events of one’s own life. This is a context particularly relevant to Carswell and Muir in the present discussion, whose fiction is closely related to life-writing. Muir deals with this difficulty in Imagined Corners through the formal elements of her narrative. She uses an omniscient but ironic narrator, who, although sympathetic to her university-educated but inexperienced principal character Elizabeth, at the same time points, often through metaphorical imagery, to her self-delusion: as in Elizabeth’s exaggerated and clichéd paean of praise for her relationship with her new husband:

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Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959 They were both wild and passionate; they wanted the whole of life at one draught; they would sink or swim together. Images flowed through her mind: in the air or under the sea or rooted in the earth she saw herself and Hector, living, growing, swimming, breasting the wind together. She thought of his wide shoulders, his strong neck, his swift and lovely feet . . . ‘What have brains to do with it?’ she asked looking up. It’s a miracle, Aunt Janet; a miracle that sometimes takes my breath away’. (IC, p. 50)

She begins the long road to self-discovery after one of what was to be an increasing number of quarrels with Hector when she wakes in the night from a dream: feeling that she was lost and no longer knew who she was [. . .] the world stretched out on all sides into dark impersonal nothingness and she herself was a terrifying anonymity [. . .] When she was almost rigid with terror the name ‘Elizabeth Ramsay’ rose into her mind, and the nightmare vanished. Her body relaxed, but her mind with incredible swiftness rearranged the disordered puzzle of her identity. She was Elizabeth Ramsay but she was also Elizabeth Shand. Hector was there [. . .] Elizabeth Ramsay she was, but also Elizabeth Shand, and the more years she traversed the more inalterably would she become Elizabeth Shand. Those years of the future stretched endlessly before her [. . .] But this was no longer time or space, it was eternity; there was no end, no goal [. . .] She was beginning to be terrified again, and opened her eyes. Mrs Shand, she said to herself. It was appalling, and she had never realized it before. (IC, pp. 64–5)

After another quarrel with Hector, she discovers that in his absence ‘her painful agitation subsided with incredible quickness. Half-an-hour after his departure she was able to sit down to a book by a philosopher Bergson, whom she had discovered just before leaving University and who excited her’. Yet she finds that her earlier agitation returns with the return of her husband. ‘She seemed to have become two separate persons [. . .] The whole of Elizabeth’s world was in flux, although not exactly as Bergson had declared it to be, and instead of regarding the phenomenon with scientific interest she felt as if she were drowning in it’ (IC, p. 115). Muir explores her heroine’s identity dilemma by creating a second Elizabeth, a kind of alter ego, in the person of the older sister of her heroine’s husband, who returns to the small town of Calderwick from a long sojourn on the continent as the sophisticated Frau Mütze, in an attempt to make contact with and measure her present self against the rebellious girl she once had been. If we include that early rebellious self, Lizzie, then Muir offers us three interacting Elizabeth Shands through which to explore female subjectivities in a variety of time and place scenarios: an ‘impersonal’ playing out of the contradictory emotional responses to her own female nature which so confused and upset her in real life. In addition, she brings us close to the two adult Elizabeths through dream sequences and through her own interest in the psychology of the unconscious and significance of dreams. Such dream

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passages, together with occasional use of an interior monologue form of narration, create a deeper understanding of Elizabeth which complements the more detached ironic voice which warns us that she has an unfortunate attachment to the ‘pathetic fallacy’ (IC, p. 243). Similarly, although the seemingly worldly-wise Elise teaches her young relation to be wary of her identification with nature and to distinguish between youthful sexual passion and true compatibility, Elise herself learns that she has within her a buried personality that is closer to Elizabeth’s than she might like to believe; and that she has yet to make peace with her angry young self, Lizzie, who could not accommodate herself to the town’s mores. In the narrative of Elise’s learning to acknowledge her past, there is an interesting exploration of the operation of memory and of human time which again reminds us of Muir’s interest in Bergson’s writings on memory and duration as well as in Freud’s writings on the unconscious. Elise’s re-assessment of her ‘independence’, and her realisation that her contribution to life may have been only as the person who inspired her partner’s work, his ‘sieben Sachen’,39 may also remind us of Muir’s later journal writings about her lack of reputation, and especially her wish ‘to be acknowledged’ in relation to the Kafka translations all too often ascribed principally to Edwin.40 Yet this novel never loses its authorial impersonality; while its ending in the two Elizabeths leaving Scotland for the south of France is completely convincing while at the same time remaining open in its implications. The same cannot be said of Muir’s second novel, Mrs Ritchie, published two years after Imagined Corners in 1933. This book tells the story of a mother who destroys her husband and her two children by her Calvinist obsession with Judgement Day. Its scenario brings a frightening reminder of the argument put forward in Women: An Inquiry about a woman’s role as ‘the creator of human beings’ – a role which the author briefly acknowledged in her discussion could be used destructively as well as positively. In her recent book on Willa Muir’s writings, Moving in Circles, Aileen Christianson writes insightfully about Muir’s unpublished fiction and her journal entries, pointing to the significance of dreams and the operation of the unconscious in Muir’s own life as well as in her critical thinking about human psychology.41 Thus, when we put together what we know of the pressures she was under when writing Mrs Ritchie as a result of the demands of the translation work on Kafka’s The Great Wall of China, the need to look after home, husband and young child, her own poor health as a result of complications from the birth of her child, and Edwin’s preoccupation with his hostile biography of John Knox, then we can perhaps understand how it may well have been her unconscious mind which took control and created in protest against her impossible workload both the surrealistic dream images of imprisonment recounted in her journal and discussed by Christianson, and the monstrous mother figure which came to life in the pages of her second novel. Even more surrealistic is the connection between the scenario of Mrs Ritchie and her own future life. In her 1989 book Writing a Woman’s Life, Carolyn Heilbrun suggests that one of the ways

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in which a woman’s life may be written is through a text in which the future events of that life are unconsciously written by a woman before she has lived them.42 Such an idea is uncannily close to events in the Muir household subsequent to the publication of Mrs Ritchie, when the woman engaged by Muir to look after her young son while she was busy with translation so terrified the boy by her stories of the devil and hellfire that he ran away from her into the path of a petrol tanker and was badly injured. She wrote years later in her memoir Belonging: ‘I kept my sense of guilt under cover [. . .] and so began preparing an inward sump of self-accusation and grief’.43 Muir and Carswell may have been the most notable writers in relation to their explorations of female subjectivity, but as we have seen in previous short references, they were not alone in attempting to ‘make things new’ both in fictional forms and in relation to an understanding of women’s lives. A poetic form is the hallmark of Nancy Brysson Morrison’s The Gowk Storm which is also the most historical of these novels, with a setting around the mid-point of the nineteenth century. Its story of three sisters in a secluded country manse on the edge of the Highlands is told retrospectively by the youngest sister, Lisbet, who often reports what as a young girl she has seen or heard but has not fully understood, thus leaving the adult reader to read between the lines and so participate in the unfolding of the plot without the help of an omniscient narrator or shifts in focalisation. Lisbet’s narrative is framed by a Prologue and Epilogue, which she also speaks, and her first imagistic descriptions of the garden of her childhood create an atmosphere of unease as to what might be to come: ‘Everything grew a little wildly in that muffled, breathless place. All the trees’ strength went into their straggling height and each one seemed to be stretching upwards in an attempt to see over its neighbour’s untidy head.’44 The opening chapter increases rather than dispels the elegiac mood with its imagery of the sky ‘lit by chance rays from another world’, and Lisbet’s reading of the ballad ‘The Unquiet Grave’ while she waits for breakfast. Although this fated atmosphere is broken with the arrival of the second sister Emmy with her lively talk, disobedience to her father’s wishes and musical creativity, it returns with Lisbet’s comment that the manse piano is so associated with Emmy that ‘if anyone else had touched its yellowed keys, no matter where her spirit lay, it would quiveringly awake and her fingers tremble to feel them again’ (GS, pp. 7, 10). It is therefore the poetic discourse that is dominant in this ballad-like economic and enigmatic narrative of destroyed hopes and lives; and as in Carswell’s Open the Door! its dual theme of imprisonment and freedom is at times communicated through the kind of bird imagery referred to by Sandra M. Gilbert in her essay on Sylvia Plath, ‘A Fine, White Flying Myth’,45 although in the case of Morrison’s book, the metaphor is more consistently one of entrapment. It ends with the family leaving their rural manse to live in Glasgow, with one sister dead and another having closed down her emotions in order to make the best of a marriage not of her first choosing; and with the minister father’s conventional message that all is for the best subverted by Lisbet’s

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final memory of the country graveyard ‘with its grey gravestones all blankly facing east’ (GS, p. 178) (my italics). On the other hand, The Gowk Storm is not all passively elegiac. One of the interests of this book is its angry, although obliquely communicated, attack on the insularity of Scottish rural life and on the Scots language as the marker of a particularly closed and prejudiced mind – something entirely contrary to MacDiarmid’s attempt to make Scots the linguistic flagship of his literary revival movement. Scots-speaking characters in Morrison’s narrative are, with very minor exceptions, the kind of prejudiced and parochial characters who work against any possibility of a change to a freer, more life-enhancing social order. Thus it is the Scots-speaking elders of the Kirk who drive the Catholic schoolmaster whom the eldest sister Julia hopes to marry from his teaching post and from the village; and it is the popular village gossip Mrs Wands whose careless tongue and superstitious nature provide the ammunition with which to attack him. Nannie, who runs the home and looks after the sisters as substitute for a mother who is most often absent from the narrative, has a mind equally set against change, although her lively Scots-speaking tongue and proverbial sayings superficially disguise her true inclinations. ‘God’s will is as clear now as it was then’, she admonishes the questioning Emmy, who had asked if human beings themselves shouldn’t try to change things. ‘Ye can do without so muckle ye ne’er thocht ye could – ye can do without almost anything’ (GS, pp. 92–3). A very different perspective on the Scots vernacular is communicated in works by Nan Shepherd and Lorna Moon, both from the north-east of the country and both anticipating to some degree the fictional Scots-language experimentation of Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Sunset Song, although neither used the modified ‘stream of consciousness’ method which Gibbon adapted from Joyce and Woolf. Both writers show that liveliness of conversation and scene-setting which is a characteristic feature of all these female narratives (even in Brysson Morrison’s ultimately tragic tale); and Shepherd’s rural Aberdeenshire Scots is particularly vital, restoring to dialogue in Scottish fiction that linguistic richness found in the speech of Walter Scott’s rural characters, although now in a twentieth-century and north-east Scots idiom. Moon’s short stories too are full of a rich idiomatic Scots, but her novel Dark Star is intriguing in the way it anticipates Grassic Gibbon’s linguistic experimentation by suggesting the language idiom of the north-east while being apparently written in English. Moon took up this question of ‘dialect’ in her correspondence with her American publisher when the book was being prepared for publication, writing: I whooped with delight over your remark that I ‘handled the dialect’ well. Because this shows me that I did what I tried to do: that is: create the impression that the characters spoke in dialect while keeping strictly to English. Do you know that in the whole book there are only six Scotch expressions and only two of those are used in conversation?

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She continues: But it is no wonder that I tricked you, because, I also put it over on a Scotch professor, just over! When he had read the thing he said: ‘Yon’s a grand book. Yon’s a Scotch book’ (which you know is simply wild praise from a Scot). I said: ‘You didn’t miss the dialect?’ He misunderstood me, thinking I meant, ‘you could not understand the dialect’, and answered: ‘miss it, would I be forgetting my mother tongue in a twae month think ye?’ But you know’, I said, ‘there are only six Scotch expressions in the book. The whole thing is written in English.’ ‘Niver! Niver!’ he cried ‘I woulda seen it at a glance! [. . .] When he re-read Divot Meg, he was fairly winded: I couldna hae believed it!’ he cried. And that is the answer! I use the idiom and they supply the pronunciation. If the reader knows the Scotch pronunciation he will supply it himself without realizing it. If he doesn’t he will think he is reading English as spoken by the Scot and never be a bit the wiser. So I think there is no need for a preface. Do you?46

Lorna Moon was equally uncompromising about the modernity of her heroine Nancy. She wrote about the comments prepared for the book jacket: ‘I don’t like the part which says she belongs to the Scottish heroines of literature and that Scott, Stevenson, Barrie would have understood her – because they wouldn’t – (Thank God!) and a comment like that relegates the book to the musty old shelves where women wore rats in their hair and became “fallen”’. And she insists: ‘Nancy is 1929’.47 As with Bonnie Kime Scott’s account of ‘the women of 1928’, Moon’s comment is applicable more generally to the authors as well as to the heroines of these interwar Scottish female novels (even with the slightly historical settings of some of them). In the new spirit which directs their themes and forms, they all exhibit, as Moon commented further, ‘the clear thinking bravery of 1929 girlhood’.48

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4.

Lynn Abrams et al. (eds), Gender in Scottish History Since 1700, p. 2. Marianne Dekoven, ‘Modernism and Gender’, p. 182. Ibid., pp. 182–3. An exception to this is Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents, ed. Vassiliki Kolocotroni et al. (1998), where excerpts of work by Hugh MacDiarmid, Edwin Muir, Lewis Grassic Gibbon and Neil M. Gunn are included (but no excerpts from Scottish women). 5. West was born in London of a Scottish mother and schooled in Edinburgh when her father died. She returned to London and her working life was centred there, although some early fiction had an Edinburgh setting. 6. Lorna Moon, Collected Works of Lorna Moon, p. 267. 7. Shari Benstock, ‘Beyond the Reaches of Feminist Criticism’, p. 221.

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8. Ibid., p. 222. 9. Elizabeth Kyle, interview with Dot Allan, Scots Observer, 25 June 1931, p. 4. McCulloch (ed.), Modernism and Nationalism, pp. 206–7. 10. Scottish feminist critics often comment that these women were deliberately marginalised in the Scottish Renaissance movement, especially by MacDiarmid, but this is not the case. Correspondence involving Carswell, MacDiarmid, the Muirs, Neil Gunn, Nan Shepherd, F. Marian McNeill, Nannie K. Wells, Helen Cruickshank and many others shows both friendship and literary and political interaction between the male and female writers of this period. MacDiarmid’s third volume of Northern Numbers contained as many new female contributors as male. He, Edwin Muir and F. G. Scott contributed to Atalanta’s Garland (1926) published in celebration of the twenty-first anniversary of the Edinburgh University Women’s Union. 11. Germaine Greer, ‘Flying Pigs and Double Standards’, p. 784. 12. Catherine Carswell, Lying Awake, p. xix. 13. Lorna Moon, Dark Star, in Collected Works of Lorna Moon, p. 96. 14. Virginia Woolf, ‘Women and Fiction’, p. 48. 15. Catherine Carswell, Open the Door!, pp. 9, 187. Page numbers for future quotations will be given in the text, prefaced by ‘OD’. 16. Catherine Carswell, ‘Proust’s Women’; McCulloch (ed.), Modernism and Nationalism, p. 197. 17. D. H. Lawrence, letters of 29 June 1914 and 27 October 1917, Letters of D. H. Lawrence, II, pp. 187–8 and III, p. 173. 18. Ibid., letter of 11 May 1917, III, p. 125. 19. Catherine Carswell, letter to F. Marian McNeill, 16 October 1929, Lying Awake, p. 206. 20. Catherine Carswell, The Camomile, pp. 236–7, 250–1. 21. Dot Allan, Makeshift, pp. 12–13. Page numbers for future quotations will be given in the text, prefaced by ‘M’. 22. Willa Muir, Imagined Corners, p. 3. Page numbers for further quotations will be given in the text, prefaced by ‘IC’. 23. Nancy Brysson Morrison, The Gowk Storm, p. 115. 24. Toni Morrison, Sula, p. 92. 25. Willa Muir, ‘Women: An Inquiry’, p. 2. Page numbers for further quotations will be given in the text, prefaced by ‘WI’. 26. Dora Marsden, ‘Views and Comments’, New Freewoman, 15 June 1913. 27. Hélène Cixous, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, p. 227. 28. Virginia Woolf, ‘Women and Fiction’, p. 48. 29. Catherine Carswell, Lying Awake, p. 200. 30. John Ruskin, Sesame and Lilies, pp. 118–19. 31. Florence Nightingale, Cassandra, pp. 245, 246. 32. See Jude Burkhauser (ed.), ‘Glasgow Girls’:Women in Art and Design 1880–1920. 33. Eileen Janes Yeo, ‘Medicine, Science and the Body’, p. 159. 34. For further information on Geddes, Thomson and Spencer, see J. Conway, ‘Stereotypes of Femininity in a Theory of Sexual Evolution’, Victorian Studies 14 (1970), 47–62.

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35. Willa Muir, Letter of 26 January to F. Marian McNeill, McCulloch (ed.), Modernism and Nationalism, p. 201. 36. Ibid. 37. Francis Russell Hart, The Scottish Novel from Smollett to Spark, p. 208. 38. T. S. Eliot. ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, Selected Essays, p. 18. 39. Imagined Corners, p. 149. ‘Sieben Sachen’ is literally ‘seven things, business affairs’; in this case his seven books. 40. Willa Muir, Journal 1951–3, quoted in Introduction, Imagined Selves, p. xii. 41. Aileen Christianson, Moving in Circles, pp. 139–67. 42. Quoted by Joss West Burnham, ‘Twinned Pairs of Eternal Opposites’, p. 39. 43 Willa Muir, Belonging, p. 172. 44. Nancy Brysson Morrison, The Gowk Storm, p. 1. Page numbers for future quotations will be given in the text, prefaced by ‘GS’. 45. Sandra M. Gilbert, ‘A Fine, White Flying Myth’, in Shakespeare’s Sisters, p. 251. 46. Lorna Moon, letter to David Laurence Chambers, in Collected Works of Lorna Moon, p. 262. 47. Lorna Moon, Collected Works of Lorna Moon, p. 267. 48. Ibid.

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Chapter 5

Whither Scotland? Politics and Society between the Wars

There can be no true development of Nationalism under Capitalism, as there can be no true development of Nationalism without Internationalism [. . .] All those writers and intellectuals (and their readers and followers) must ally themselves with the working class and the organisations of the working class, and so assist and be assisted in the realisation of their ideals and aspirations if they are (a) genuine humanitarians, (b) real lovers of their country’s best traditions, etc., (c) haters of war and Fascist bestiality and barbarism, (d) striving honestly to end the human misery and degradation which arises from the exploitation of man by man, and therefore necessarily striving for the betterment and advancement of humanity. James Barke, Left Review (1936)

As discussed in previous chapters, Scottish modernism had from its beginnings an essential ideological dimension. This was no ‘avant-garde art for art’s sake’ movement, nor one which sought to revitalise cultural activity within an existing political system. ‘Making it new’ meant changing not only the artistic culture, but, by what Michael Levenson has called ‘challenging an unfreedom’,1 transforming also the country’s political, social and economic life. Like the Russian artists in the heady early days of the 1917 Revolution – the period of ‘heroic communism’ – who took art into the streets and the countryside in order to create ‘a living factory of the human spirit’,2 MacDiarmid and his associates believed that the artist had a critical part to play in building a new future. Their activities may have been less sensational, and less violent, than those of their Russian or continental European counterparts, but the belief that revolution in art was the prelude to revolution in the organisation of society was relevant to their ambitions also. Even Edwin Muir, a poet not especially known for overt involvement in national politics, wrote from Vienna in 1923 about the political gains then being made by the Scottish Labour Party: ‘The Scottish members should make a move for Home Rule, and then they would have the field to themselves [. . .] When I see things stirring up so much I would like to be back to take a hand in the work.’ And a few lines later: ‘Perhaps in a few years Scotland will be a Socialist Republic. I shouldn’t wonder: things are moving so fast.’3

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This chapter will therefore consider the political developments in the 1920s and 1930s, including the concern over the increasingly depressed economic and social condition of Scotland, which provide the context for the more overt ideological creative writing of the 1930s. While this chapter will include references to discursive prose essays and other writings by the Scottish modernist writers, their creative writing will be considered in the chapters which follow. Political manoeuvrings were indeed ‘moving so fast’ in post-1918 Scotland. In the period before 1914, the Liberal Party had been the principal supporter of Home Rule in Scotland, partly in association with similar Home Rule demands from Ireland, but increasingly urged on by the campaigns of the Young Scots Society, whose members were committed to social reform including Home Rule. A Home Rule Bill had actually passed its second reading in the Westminster House of Commons in 1914, but the outbreak of war destroyed any chance of its being taken further towards implementation; and after the war the political scene changed as the Liberals under Lloyd George became discredited while support for the Labour Party grew. Home Rule, however, was still an issue in Scotland, and the Scottish Home Rule Association was re-formed as a non-party group between 1918 and 1919 led by the business man Roland Muirhead. It soon became dominated by the increasingly successful Labour Party and by 1924 the question of ‘Home Rule’ was firmly in Labour hands. At the same time, the coming of a minority Labour administration in Westminster began to move Labour Party objectives away from the Home Rule issue and towards remaining in power in London: a governing position that could be weakened or destroyed by the withdrawal of Scottish Labour MPs to a Scottish Parliament. The issue of self-government was therefore once again put on the back burner, a situation which was highlighted by an inadequate debate in the House of Commons on 9 May 1924 after which the Speaker refused to allow a vote. This retreat of the Labour Party from the support of Scottish Home Rule, and in particular the apparent lack of commitment on the part of the Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald, himself a Scot, encouraged the growth of various nationalist groupings from the mid-1920s onwards, resulting eventually in the formation of the National Party of Scotland in 1928, the Scottish Party in 1932, and their merger to form the Scottish National Party in 1934.4 Despite this ferment of political activity and position-shifting in the early postwar period, and despite the involvement of individual members of the literary revival movement in specific aspects of Scottish politics (Grieve/ MacDiarmid, for example, acted as an Independent Labour Party Councillor in Montrose, and was later a founder member of the National Party of Scotland; Neil M. Gunn was instrumental in bringing about a merger between the National Party and the Scottish Party), for the major part of the 1920s decade in particular the dominant manifestation of the revolutionary objectives of what Denis Saurat had called le groupe de la Renaissance Écossaise was a literary one, culminating in MacDiarmid’s ambitious long Scots-language

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poem A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle in 1926 and its more fragmented follower To Circumjack Cencrastus in 1930. While A Drunk Man is certainly in some respects an ideological poem of national identity, it is also a poem that is philosophically and metaphorically ideological in contrast to the more direct campaigning political literature of the 1930s; even the section known as the ‘Ballad of the General Strike’ (or ‘Ballad of the Crucified Rose’), a late interpolation made in the summer of 1926 in response to the General Strike in May, is symbolic and philosophical in nature, at times almost elegiac, as opposed to polemical. In contrast, by the later1920s, and especially in the 1930s as economic conditions worsened and measures adopted by a distant Westminster government seemed insensitive to the actuality of local Scottish situations, political issues began to appear more overtly in the public writing of the literary reformers – both in creative writing and in occasional essays and book-length studies. George Malcolm Thomson’s controversial Caledonia or The Future of the Scots, which laid bare many of these existing problems in uncompromising language, was published in 1927, a year before the formation of the National Party of Scotland. MacDiarmid’s Albyn, hastily written as a response to Caledonia (which he considered ‘cogent but far too pessimistic’)5, sought to remind readers of the history and considerable achievements of the fledgling Scottish Renaissance movement, while emphasising how much still had to be done artistically and politically before achievement of its aims could be within sight.

Celtic Connections Among the various prewar and postwar political groupings involved with Scottish Home Rule issues was that associated with the aristocratic Ruaraidh Erskine of Marr, who argued for a return to a Scottish Celtic identity. Marr’s Celticism was always a minority perspective among those campaigning for Home Rule, but the success of the Irish in obtaining the Free State settlement in 1922 gave Celticism a new attraction for many of the literary figures in particular. These looked not only towards Irish success in obtaining selfdetermination but also towards the international success of Irish writers such as Yeats and Joyce. After the formation of the National Party of Scotland in the summer of 1928, MacDiarmid, Compton Mackenzie and Erskine of Marr were invited to be guests of the Irish government at the Tailteen Games in Dublin in late August. According to MacDiarmid’s biographer, Alan Bold, this representation of Scotland in the Free State of Ireland was for the poet ‘an unforgettable experience which he talked about for the rest of his life’. During the visit MacDiarmid met many significant Irish politicians and literary figures. ‘He had an interview with Éamon de Valera, leader of Fianna Fáil, and had tea with the Minister of Defence in the Cosgrave government. He flew in an Avro-Anson five-cylinder plane. He stayed in Ely Place with

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Gogarty who entertained him with tales of his drinking days with Joyce and took him to Joyce’s favourite bars.’6 He also met the founder of the Dublin Magazine Seumas O’Sullivan and the editor of the Irish Statesman AE (George William Russell, who had initiated the Statesman’s positive review of A Drunk Man by Oliver St John Gogarty). He met Yeats at the house of AE and apparently sealed a friendship with him by urinating in the middle of the road as they made their way home: MacDiarmid commented metaphorically: ‘I crossed swords with him and we became friends after that’.7 The Celtic and Gaelic language dimension in Scottish cultural identity had from the beginning been an important part of the revival movement’s agenda. The programme of the Scottish Chapbook, published in its first issue of August 1922 and repeated in all subsequent issues of the magazine, proclaimed its aim ‘to encourage and publish the work of contemporary Scottish poets and dramatists, whether in English, Gaelic, or Braid Scots’; and in the Dunfermline Press in 1923 MacDiarmid had written of the need to overturn the ‘dominance of English’ in the education system and ‘to supply now the sort of literature in Gaelic and Doric that would have existed had the contrary tendencies never developed’.8 Yet the prominence of the arguments and poetic activities associated with the recovery of the Scots language for ambitious literary purposes had, perhaps inevitably, marginalised the Gaelic revival question in the 1920s. Nor at that time was there a creative writer in Gaelic who could take forward the language in a way complementary to that of the Scots language revival. In Albyn, MacDiarmid insisted that ‘the Scottish Renaissance Movement is even more concerned with the revival of Gaelic than of Scots’ and that ‘it regards Scotland as a diversity-in-unity to be stimulated at every point, and, theoretically at any rate, it is prepared to develop along trilingual lines’. He had also to admit that ‘the revival of the Gaelic – and the output of Gaelic letters of quality, despite the efforts of the Hon. Ruaraidh Erskine of Marr, is lagging behind in comparison with Braid Scots, and it is questionable whether Gaelic has any similar alignment with the “becoming tendencies” in Weltliteratur’. More positively, he reported that ‘proposals for the establishment of a great Gaelic college have been taken up enthusiastically by the Clans Association in America, and are already far advanced [. . .] Here again, materialism is giving way to new spiritual ideals, and in Gaelic we return closer than ever to the old Scotland.’9 On the other hand, what is consistently emphasised in the literature of the time is that this interwar interest in Gaelic and Celtic connections is not a return to the turn-of-the-century Celticism of William Sharp (Fiona Macleod) or the ‘Renascence’ associated with Patrick Geddes and his magazine The Evergreen. For Sharp, drawing on Ossian and Matthew Arnold, the Celts were a people who ‘went forth to the war, but they always fell’. Yet, though ‘the Celt falls, his spirit rises in the heart and brain of the AngloCeltic peoples, with whom are the destinies of the generations to come’.10 In contrast, for the Scottish interwar reformers the recent political and artistic successes in Ireland had given the lie to all such defeatist views of the Celts.

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An angry letter in the correspondence pages of the Scottish Educational Journal in 1926 from Donald A. Mackenzie of the Black Isle (a former contributor to MacDiarmid’s Northern Numbers anthologies) reminded readers that ‘it was a Celt who acted as tutor to Julius Caesar’ and that other distinguished Celts included explorers, statesmen and military men as well as the geologists Hugh Miller and Sir Roderick Murchison, and the ‘great translator’ Sir Thomas Urquhart. For this modern Celt, ‘the nineteenth century nonsense about the “Celtic temperament”, the “Celtic gloom” and “Celtic dreamers” should be flung into the nearest ashbin with other rubbish’.11 A more positive perspective on Celtic connections appeared in MacDiarmid’s essays ‘English Ascendancy in British Literature’, published by Eliot in the Criterion in 1931, and ‘The Caledonian Antisyzygy and the Gaelic Idea’ published in James Whyte’s The Modern Scot of the same year. ‘English Ascendancy in British Literature’ is a well-argued essay (even if to some extent conducted, characteristically, by way of quotation) and it continues to have relevance in our own time. For MacDiarmid here, ‘the problem of the British Isles is the problem of English Ascendancy’ and he sees Ireland with its achievements in literature and political autonomy, together with its ancient Gaelic culture, as an essential partner with Scotland and Wales in the establishment of a counterforce to the dominance of English in British literature. He finds it absurd that ‘intelligent readers of English, who would be ashamed not to know something [. . .] of most Continental literatures, are content to ignore Scottish, Irish and Welsh Gaelic literatures, and Scots Vernacular literature’. He believes that this English dominance has not only adversely affected the English reader’s awareness of the indigenous languages and literatures of their neighbours in the British Isles, but, more seriously, has adversely affected these neighbours’ perceptions of their own identity. His optimism for the future is based on a belief that such increasing Anglicisation and assimilation has affected ‘only the “surface minds” (in the Bergsonian sense) of the Scots’, and that ‘beneath the crust of imitation there remain potentialities of incalculable difference’.12 As in the earlier Albyn, MacDiarmid points here to the journey the revival movement still has to travel: ‘and it is these [potentialities] the so-called Scottish Renaissance Movement to-day is attempting to bring into renewed manifestation, not without a certain measure of success, but, so far, in a very “hit-and-miss” and unscientific fashion. The conditions for a success of a Renaissance movement have not yet been received.’13 MacDiarmid’s companion essay, ‘The Caledonian Antisyzygy and the Gaelic Idea’ shows him turning away from the local problems of the British Isles to the situation of Europe, presenting the Gaelic Idea as a necessary counterpoise to the emergence in Europe of the new Russia and Soviet economics. ‘Only in Gaeldom’, he argues, can there be the necessary counter-idea to the Russian idea – one that does not run wholly counter to it, but supplements, corrects, challenges, and qualifies it. Soviet economics are confronted with the Gaelic system with its repudiation of

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Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959 usury which finds its modern expression in Douglas economics. The dictatorship of the proletariat is confronted by the Gaelic commonwealth with its aristocratic culture – the high place it gave to its poets and scholars.14

As so often in his arguing for Celtic connections, he is insistent that this new Gaelic Idea has ‘nothing in common with the activities of An Comunn Gaidhealach, no relationship whatever with the Celtic Twilight’. What could be seen as being of even more interest is his further insistence that ‘it does not matter a rap whether the whole conception of this Gaelic Idea is as far-fetched as Dostoevsky’s Russian Idea in which he pictured Russia as the sick man possessed of devils, but who would yet “sit at the feet of Jesus”’. And he continues: ‘The point is that Dostoevsky’s was a great creative idea – a dynamic myth – and in no way devalued by the difference of the actual happenings in Russia from any Dostoevsky dreamed or described.’15 This capacity to follow what seems to him to be ‘a great creative idea’, an inspiring ‘dynamic myth’ is, I believe, the key to an understanding of MacDiarmid as poet and polemicist; and especially the key to some kind of understanding of his contradictoriness and his apparent lack of consistency in his ideological positions. His nationalism, his Celticism, his Marxism – even, perhaps, his too hurried and facile reading of early fascism – rely to a significant extent on his visionary capacity and the capacity to use the dynamic of change in pursuit of his ideals, whatever obstacles and dangers might lurk in the sublunary world. As he was to say in another political and poetic context: ‘Ah, Lenin, you were richt. But I’m a poet/(And you c’ud mak allowances for that!)’.16 So far as MacDiarmid’s ‘Gaelic Idea’ is concerned, one significant example of just such a split between visionary capacity and the reality of everyday life was the hostility, in central Scotland in particular in the interwar period, to the waves of immigrants from Celtic Ireland coming to Scotland in search of work. There was at that time an increasing and deep concern about existing economic and social conditions in Scotland itself, with emigration from Scotland of young Scots in search of a better life abroad set in the balance against Irish incomers, and fears about the loss of Scottish identity which such population movements might bring. George Malcolm Thomson’s Caledonia (1927) and Scotland in Eclipse (1930) by Andrew Dewar Gibb, Professor of Scots Law at Glasgow University, ranged widely in their analyses of this current ‘distressed’ condition of Scotland (as Thomson called it in his later book Scotland: That Distressed Area, reviewed by Edwin Muir in the Criterion in January 1936). These books covered economics, the professions and the arts as well as social and political topics, but it was their treatment of Irish immigration and the influence of the Roman Catholic Church which brought their authors a notoriety which has lasted to the present day. Both writers discuss Irish immigration in the context of the infamous Glasgow slums, and their statistics and descriptions can be corroborated by other accounts of the period, although perhaps not so sensationally. For Edwin Muir in Scottish Journey (1935), for example, the Glasgow slum-dwellers’ ‘open publication

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of their degradation’ should be recognised as a ‘moral protest’, a protest that there is an injustice in their lives which needs to be proclaimed and righted.17 In contrast, for Thomson and Dewar Gibb, the appalling conditions of the slum-dwellers were primarily the responsibility of the Catholic Irish whose religion forbade birth control and so brought about overcrowding and consequently disease. Thomson’s descriptions in particular bring out the full horror of the conditions he witnesses, but there is no human pity in his inflammatory language, while its extravagance (and that of Dewar Gibb’s accounts) anticipates the kind of accusatory language used against the Jews in the Germany of the 1930s: There, in a backland (a tenement built on what was originally the drying green behind an older tenement) a family of eight people sleep in one bed in a room into which the daylight never penetrates. An unspeakably foul odour permeates everything – the famous slum smell, to the making of which centuries of filth, damp, soot, bad air, and decay have gone. Over the door there may be a small label with a number. This signifies that the house is ‘ticketed’, i.e. liable to entrance and search at any time of the day or night by the sanitary officials [. . .] Half Scotland is slumpoisoned. The taint of the slum is in the nation’s blood; its taint in their minds has given birth to a new race of barbarians.18

For Dewar Gibb, this alien population of Irish ‘low-grade immigrants’ is ‘breeding [. . .] not merely unchecked, but actually encouraged by their own medicine-men’. He sees them not only as ‘fast developing a monopoly of the priesthood, the pawnshops and public-houses’ in Glasgow but also as ‘responsible for most of the crime committed in Scotland’: Wheresoever knives and razors are used, wheresoever sneak thefts and mean pilfering are easy and safe, wheresoever dirty acts of sexual baseness are committed, there you will find the Irishman in Scotland with all but a monopoly of the business.19

It is sobering to realise that Thomson’s and Dewar Gibb’s attacks were made in the context of what the present-day journalist George Rosie has called ‘The Kirk’s Disgrace’.20 A few years previously, in May 1923, the Church of Scotland had published its report Irish Immigration and the Education (Scotland) Act, 1918, which in very similar language to that of the later writers attacked the ‘Irish intruders’ and the ‘disastrous consequences’ their immigration would have for Scotland. The report, supported by many prominent churchmen and accepted by the General Assembly, was the beginning of a church-led campaign against the Irish in Scotland: ‘a people alien [. . .] in faith, and alien also in blood’, according to the Reverend Duncan Cameron of Old Kilsyth Parish Church, who, with Dr John White, minister of the Barony Church in Glasgow, was a main protagonist in the fight to keep Scotland from being ‘corrupted by the introduction of a horde of immigrants’. Ironically, in view of the interwar campaign for Scottish political self-determination, it was the Westminster government which placed a hold on the Kirk’s anti-Irish activities by refuting its immigration and employment

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statistics; pointing out that the Irish Free State was a Dominion of the British Empire and its people therefore at liberty to enter the ‘mother country’ should they wish to do so; and by refusing to take any restrictive action on the basis of the Kirk’s religious and racist scaremongering. This particular anti-Irish campaign eventually came to an end in the mid-1930s when, having been initially sympathetically inclined to the International League for the Defence and Furtherance of Protestantism, the Kirk became wary of the League’s anti-Jewish propaganda, and belatedly realised that the Irish question which preoccupied it in Scotland had a sinister parallel in the Judenfrage of an increasingly totalitarian Nazi Germany. More positively, anti-Irish and anti-Catholic prejudice was something that could not be laid at the doors of the principal writers of the literary renaissance. Both Muir and MacDiarmid were attracted to Catholicism which they saw as having a leavening effect on Scottish Calvinism. MacDiarmid welcomed Irish immigration for that reason as well as for his vision of a revived Celtic component in Scottish identity. In the early 1920s, his Scottish Chapbook had presented a series of Catholic sonnets ‘illustrative of neo-catholic tendencies in contemporary Scottish Literature’, one of them ‘The Litany of the Blessed Virgin’ written by himself.21 Muir’s description of the Catholic Grotto at Carfin – ‘the only palpable assertion of humanity that I came across in the midst of that blasted region’22 – is one of the positive moments in his often bleak Scottish Journey of 1935. Other supporters such as Compton Mackenzie and Fionn MacColla (Tom Macdonald) were both Catholic converts. It is difficult to think of a creative writer of substance who expressed hostility to Catholicism at this time, although attacks on Calvinism and on institutionalised religion per se were frequent in creative and polemical writing. As we saw previously in relation to MacDiarmid’s attempt to draw on a Celtic muse in To Circumjack Cencrastus, what Neil M. Gunn called ‘getting the Gaelic aristocratic idea into Lallans harness’23 was, artistically, no easy task, and the problems arising out of Irish immigration showed that it was no less difficult in the public social context. However, the related questions of Celtic identity and the decline of Gaelic were assuming greater prominence in the little magazines of the early 1930s. As mentioned previously, one of the strongest advocates of a Celtic identity for Scotland was Erskine of Marr, who founded the short-lived Pictish Review in 1927 and whose book Changing Scotland argued out a case for a new Scotland which would be entirely Gaelicspeaking and founded on Scotland’s Celtic heritage. His position was fiercely attacked by an anonymous reviewer in the Winter 1931 issue of the Modern Scot who pointed out that cultural diversity was a strength in nationalism and was indeed pertinent to Scotland’s situation at that time. Other writers looked at the actual conditions existing in the Highlands and especially at the condition of the language, with the Gaelic Association An Comunn Gaidhealach a frequent target. Neil M. Gunn attacked its complacency in his Scots Magazine article ‘The Ferry of the Dead’, and in the Free Man a writer under the byline of ‘Earra-Ghaidheal’ proclaimed that ‘the Gaelic is dying, and dying rapidly,

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and its assassin is An Comunn’. Pointing to the Gaelic Mod as ‘merely a gigantic piece of bluff to gull the public into thinking that all is well with the language’, he quoted a Daily Express correspondent who had visited children competing at the Mod: ‘From Portree, from Oban, from Carradale they have come, these bright-eyed, excited, soft-spoken Children of the Mist. But it was not the Gaelic they were speaking as they chattered among themselves. They only do that, it seems, when they are performing’.24 In contrast, the novelist Fionn MacColla, a Gaelic learner, pointed out that the Welsh language was accepted as a normal part of the school curriculum in Wales, and in the article ‘Welshing the Scottish Race’ argued (in a similar vein to MacDiarmid’s ‘English Ascendancy’ article) that such a policy in Scotland was being blocked by the ‘Anglophile assumptions’ of the education authorities: ‘Admit Gaelic into the schools and you commence the destruction of the whole Englishascendancy ideology which our rulers have been at such pains – largely through the agency of those same schools – to build up.’25 One of the most wide-ranging and practical discussions of Gaelic in the Free Man was written by Iain Ruadh who laid down in a two-part article proposals for the gradual introduction of Gaelic as the teaching medium of all Highland schools, with the ultimate ambitious aim of achieving a Highland university with teaching in Gaelic. Civil servants and public service workers in the Highlands would have to be Gaelic-speaking before they were appointed. Gaelic place-names and signs would be introduced so that Highlanders would not feel as if they were living in a foreign country and their own language would become once more an accepted part of their lives. Gaelic would also be introduced as a part of the language curriculum in Lowland schools so that knowledge of the language would spread beyond the Highlands and it would gradually become accepted more widely as one of the living languages of Scotland.26 Had the political power existed in Scotland in the interwar period to put such a proposal into action, then the decline of Gaelic as a spoken language might have been considerably halted. The condition of the Highlands and its language and culture in this interwar period thus provides a powerful paradigm of the need for empowerment in politics as in artistic matters which fuelled the Renaissance movement’s vision of a new future for their country. The writer who did most to transform perceptions of this neglected Celtic area of Scotland through his periodical essays and, especially, his fiction writing, is Neil M. Gunn, whose ‘re-imagining’ of the Highlands and their history will be discussed in the following chapter.

Economic Conditions in the 1930s Scottish politics in the 1930s were dominated by the effects of the Great Depression. Thomson and Dewar Gibb had argued the severity of Scottish economic and social conditions and their economic arguments were validated as ‘statistic after statistic showed the Scottish economy and society

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more adversely affected than those in the south’.27 A seemingly insoluble problem for Ramsay MacDonald’s Westminster minority Labour government of 1929 was how to deal with increasing unemployment, and in 1931 the decision was taken to form a National government in order to deal in a unified way with the country’s economic problems. This decision had an adverse effect on the Labour Party’s representation in Scotland, with only seven seats being retained. The nationalists too were in difficulties in the 1930s. In the previous decade nationalism in Scotland – both political and cultural – had been led by those who supported socialism, and in some cases, republicanism. Yet, as we have seen in relation to the Celtic dimension, there were many different interests brought together under the Scottish nationalist umbrella; and the merger in 1934 between the National Party of Scotland and the Scottish Party founded in 1932 by more conservative nationalists such as the Duke of Montrose and Professor Andrew Dewar Gibb seemed to exacerbate rather than dissipate such differences. MacDiarmid himself was expelled from the National Party of Scotland in 1933 because of his extreme views which included his supposedly ‘secret’ Clann Albain project, an attempt to set up a nationalist organisation along the lines of the Irish Sinn Féin. How much of this affair was reality and how much imagination is not clear, for it eventually became transformed into a literary publishing project.28 It was enough, however, for him to be denounced both by the Duke of Montrose and by Lewis Spence, the poet who had earlier described him as creating ‘a veritable kulturkampf in Scottish literary circles’.29 As a result of such divisions, the nationalists made little electoral progress in the 1930s, despite the fact that a wish for Home Rule continued to be reflected in opinion polls. It was perhaps this nationalist dissension as much as his own inclination towards socialism that brought Edwin Muir to the conclusion in his Scottish Journey that the way forward for Scotland was socialism, not national selfdetermination. As he stops for the night at Melvich before the final part of his journey over the Pentland Firth to Orkney, he thinks over Scottish history, ‘hoping to find some faint sign that Scotland’s annals need not have been so calamitous as they were, and need not have led to the end of Scotland as a nation’; and as he remembers the betrayals and feuds of Scottish history he also remembers ‘a sight that I had seen as I stood on the banks of an Austrian mountain on a very hot summer day many years before’. He continues: The stream was running very fast, and in the middle I made out two bright green snakes struggling in a death battle; I watched them for a few moments; then they were both swept, still fighting, over a cataract. The comparison was too swift and dramatic, I told myself, for the stubborn anger that burns through Scottish history; but nevertheless it would have been as impossible to put a stop to that at any of the disastrous turns of Scottish history. Perhaps with time this spirit of exaggerated individualism will no longer be able to work the harm to Scotland that it has

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worked in the past. But that time is far away yet, for even the Scottish Nationalist party, which was formed to bring about national unity, has already been weakened by dissensions within itself.30

As the above quotation suggests, Muir’s Scottish Journey is not a conventional travel book. His is an interior journey in which description of landscape and incident becomes a metaphor for a deeper psychological and philosophical search, what MacDiarmid in his later The Islands of Scotland (1939) calls the attempt ‘to expose through the physical form the spiritual meaning of Scotland today’.31 Yet at the same time Muir brings the reader a powerful awareness of Scotland’s need for regeneration: in the empty unproductive glens of the Highlands where he sees a once proud people reduced to being the servants of foreign landlords and the tourist trade, as well as in the slums of Glasgow and the ‘debased landscape’ of the city’s industrial environs ‘in which every growing thing seemed to be poisoned and stunted’.32 Neil Gunn made similar calls for meaningful regeneration in articles such as ‘“Gentlemen – The Tourist!”: The New Highland Toast’ where he argued against tourism as the principal economic way forward for the Highlands. A factory in the Highlands might not be a first choice, but ‘better a factory than starvation; better a self-respecting worker in my own trade union than a half-sycophant depending on the whims of a passing tourist’.33 Similarly, he drew attention in his articles to the need for a more active approach to finding local solutions for local needs, pointing to the negative impact of fishing regulations drawn up in Westminster which were entirely unsuitable for conditions in remote coastal communities and to the negative impact of the ‘dole’, a measure designed to deal with urban employment or conditions in the south, but one which could not readily be applied to unemployment in communities where work was seasonal, varied and unsystematised. What became a symbol of the plight of the Highlands was the evacuation in 1930 of the islanders of St Kilda, a wild, cliff-bound island fifty miles west of the Outer Hebrides, where traditional ways of making a living from the bird-life of the island and a small amount of crop-growing were no longer viable, and where the coming of tourists curious about the island way of life resulted in the introduction of germs against which the islanders had no resistance. Like the nineteenth-century Highland Clearances, the evacuation of St Kilda has remained an iconic episode in the history of the Highlands. As Thomson’s and Dewar Gibb’s passages on the slums suggest, urban conditions, especially among the poorer classes, were also desperately in need of attention and the Douglasite economics recommended by left-wing nationalists (as well as by New Age and Poundian modernists, including MacDiarmid) did not offer a credible way forward in a Scotland in need of large-scale employment projects to counter the effects of the decline of traditional heavy industries. Irritation – or desperation – at the adherence of left-wing nationalists to the economics of Major Douglas was one of

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the reasons behind the movement to establish the moderately right-wing Scottish Party. As with Douglasite economics, other remedies put forward by some of those associated with the literary revival movement seemed to belong more with fantasy literature than with actuality. Naomi Mitchison, for example, published ‘a Socialist Plan for Scotland’ in the 1932 Spring issue of the Modern Scot, arguing that a future Scottish state should be ‘based not on the town but on the country, on a basis not of individual ownership, but of a co-operative group which would in practice work out as something like the Scandinavian or early Scottish steading’. Thus, the ‘good life which it is possible to lead in the country under reasonably favourable economic conditions, would be the basis of civilization; the towns would be comparatively accidental, the necessary producers of certain commodities, including the more complicated agricultural machinery.’ Glasgow and Edinburgh ‘both artificially large and crowded’ would be unnecessary; the main industrial belt could be ‘separated from the rest, becoming culturally united, perhaps, to some extent at least, with the industrial Midland belt of England’. In such a rural civilisation there will be established ‘country factories, with good communications, which will employ hundreds or thousands of workers, who will live near it’ [. . . and] never lose touch with the soil, the seasons, nor with the sense of being part of an intense culture, a small nationality’. And she ends (as well she might): ‘All this, of course, is in the future’.34 Such ‘back to the country’ projects were common, in more modest forms, in this age of unemployment. In 1932 also, the Free Man carried an article advocating the provision of allotments to help the unemployed – a scheme which ‘has the great merit of helping men to help themselves’.35 Other newspapers and magazines advertised the health benefits of getting out into the country, individually, or through joining climbing clubs for young men. In contrast, Lewis Grassic Gibbon argued in ‘The Land’, one of his contributions to Scottish Scene, the book he co-authored with MacDiarmid in 1934: But when I read or hear our new leaders and their plans for making of Scotland a great peasant nation, a land of little farms and little farming communities, I am moved to a bored disgust with those pseudo-literary romantics playing with politics, those refugees from the warm parlours and lights and policemen and theatre-stalls of the Scots cities. They are promising the New Scotland a purgatory that would decimate it. They are promising it narrowness and bitterness and heartbreaking toil in one of the most unkindly agricultural lands in the world. They are promising to make of a young, ricketic man, with the phthisis of Glasgow in his throat, a bewildered labourer in pelting rains and the flares of head-aching suns, they are promising him years of a murderous monotony, poverty and struggle and loss of happy human relationships. They promise that of which they know nothing, except through sipping of the scum of Kailyard romance.36

Simultaneously with this new-found interest in the country, the unemployed of the cities were taking to the streets in Hunger Marches while

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the police struggled to control the rising gang rivalry in deprived areas of Glasgow: a situation that would result in one of the most notorious accounts of the city in fiction, A. Macarthur and H. Kingsley Long’s No Mean City of 1935. There seemed no immediate political, social or economic way forward for either town or country.

Nationalism and Internationalism: Scotland and Europe In addition to its socialist bias, one of the markers of the literary revival movement in the early 1920s was its ambition to look outwards from Scotland towards the international context, and this remained an important element in the creative work of the period as well as in the discursive essays of the principal writers. In 1931 – perhaps in response to the uncertain alliances among the various political nationalist groupings in Scotland and the growing fears internationally about fascism in Italy and Germany – Neil M. Gunn restated this belief in the importance of seeing nationalism and internationalism as complementary positions in his Scots Magazine article ‘Nationalism and Internationalism’. In his argument Gunn is at pains to distinguish between what he understands as true nationalism and the ‘debauched’ patriotism which can be used to divide peoples and prepare them for war, arguing through an artistic metaphor that true patriotism or nationalism ‘creates what internationalism enjoys’; and that it is ‘only when a man is moved by the traditions and music and poetry of his own land that he is in a position to comprehend those of any other land, for already he has the eyes of sympathy and the ears of understanding’. Most importantly, ‘the more varied and multiple your nationalism, the richer and profounder your internationalism’ (yet another answer to the ‘essentialist’ charge so often wrongly levied against the Scottish modernists by later cultural theorists). In addition, what we see in these comparisons is Gunn’s conception of ‘internationalism’ and the belief in the importance of the individual contribution which is present in all his writing. He rejects the ideological, theoretical conceptions of internationalism which were becoming characteristic of communism in the Soviet Union, the intolerance of diversity in fascism, and in general any governmental movement towards standardisation and increased centralisation. In the national context he finds that ‘the small nation has always been humanity’s last bulwark for the individual against that machine, for personal expression against impersonal tyranny, for the quick freedom of the spirit against the flattening steam-roller of mass’.37 Such national/international concerns took an increasingly dark turn, especially after Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933. In the year of Gunn’s ‘Nationalism and Internationalism’ article, The Modern Scot published an anonymous review of Wyndham Lewis’s Hitler, criticising what was seen as Lewis’s irresponsible attitude towards the Nazis and their political programme. In contrast, MacDiarmid, in the Free Man of July 1932, reviewed

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positively a book by John Gasworth which praised Lewis’s Hitler and attacked the British Press for its condemnation of the book and its general misrepresentation of Nazi Germany. MacDiarmid quoted Gasworth’s comments that ‘a general prejudice eliminated any attention that might have been paid [to the book]. Hitler was doomed from the day of publication’, and he then linked this comment with his own publication difficulties at that time: ‘Exactly! This is just what is happening in the Daily Record and elsewhere in the Scottish movement. That is why the Scottish editor of the Daily Express refused an article on the poetry of Hugh MacDiarmid, stating in a covering letter that there were reasons why it was inexpedient to boost Mr C. M. Grieve at this juncture’. He continued: ‘Wyndham Lewis is a splendid protagonist of the free man; and it is just this sickening hypocrisy and endless unscrupulousness all free men must fight when, where, and as they can.’38 Wyndham Lewis had been one of MacDiarmid’s modernist heroes when he started out on his own attempt to revolutionise Scottish literature and politics in the early 1920s, and his response to Gasworth’s presentation of Lewis as a man unfairly condemned by a prejudiced British press shows how he saw Lewis and himself still together on the side of the ‘free man’ and persecuted for that stance by a hypocritical press and society. MacDiarmid was certainly in severe personal and professional difficulties in the summer of 1932: his marriage had collapsed; a son had just been born to his new partner Valda Trevlyn; he had neither money nor employment (except for a small assistant editorship with the Free Man brought about by the goodwill of its editor and the poet Helen Cruickshank); To Circumjack Cencrastus had not been a success; he was in dispute with the National Party of Scotland and many of his earlier supporters; the Scottish Renaissance movement itself seemed to be foundering. The following year, all such troubles were to drive him to take up the offer of accommodation on the remote Shetland island of Whalsay, where he was to remain until the early years of World War Two. Yet although one might have sympathy for MacDiarmid’s predicament at this difficult point of his life (and many people did have sympathy for him, with Catherine Carswell, for example, writing to Helen Cruickshank in February 1933: ‘If I were rich I’d give Grieve £2 a week & and ask for nothing in return. He has the sacred fire’)39, there is a dangerous carelessness in his periodical writing at this time. Like Ezra Pound and others in the post-1918 period, he had been an admirer of Mussolini in the early 1920s, seeing the fascist programme he proposed for Italy as a way of bringing national and socialist agendas together and as a potential model for a socialist self-determining Scotland.40 More questionable, however, is his recommendation in 1931 of Blutsgefühl, the ‘keyword of the Hitler movement’, as the way forward in Scotland in dealing with ‘the particular hatred which Scottish nationalism inspires in Labour-cum-socialist circles’. In the concluding part of his ‘Caledonian Antisyzygy and the Gaelic Idea’ essay, published in the Winter 1931 issue of the Modern Scot, he finds that Lewis’s Hitler brings out the ‘essential difference excellently’ between Marxism and the national

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socialists in Germany in that ‘the fact that a man is a sorter at the Post Office, or a metal-worker, is not of such importance as that he is English, German or French – or Chinese’. He continues: The importance of the fact that we are a Gaelic people, that Scottish anti-Irishness is a profound mistake, that we ought to be anti-English, and that we ought to play our part in a three-to-one policy of Scotland, Ireland and Wales against England to reduce that ‘predominant partner’ to its proper subordinate role in our internal and imperial affairs and our international relationships [. . .] are among the important practical considerations which would follow from the acceptance of Blutsgefühl in Scotland.41

Behind this outburst one can recognise the more reasonable argument about the dominance of England in the Union to the detriment of its other parts which he put forward in his Criterion essay ‘English Ascendancy in British Literature’ as well as the frustration and disappointment of many nationalists at the Scottish Labour Party’s withdrawal from its earlier commitment to Home Rule policies. Yet his apparent position here contradicts so many of his own earlier commitments in relation to Scottish self-determination such as the ‘diversity in unity’ and ‘trilingual’ nature of Scottish culture and the fact that Scottish self-determination would improve relations with other areas of the United Kingdom, including England. From the days of his wartime letters to Ogilvie, MacDiarmid’s thinking can be seen to have been dominated by his ‘multifarious reading’; and his capacity to single out and transform to his own creative or critical objectives an idea or piece of information that was peculiarly appropriate to his needs was always a striking aspect of his magpie methods. In the personal and political crises of the early 1930s, on the other hand, this second-hand method of gaining information and forming his opinions had clearly lost its viability. His opinions about communism in the Soviet Union were formed largely on the basis of D. S. Mirsky’s Lenin and his attitude to Hitler’s Germany would appear to depend on his earlier admiration of Wyndham Lewis and his continued trust in his opinions. Contributions to periodicals and newspapers were soon showing how dangerous such an uninformed trust could be. An anonymous report in the Free Man of July 1933 gave the personal experiences of a teacher in Germany at the beginning of the Nazi regime: of the raids in the middle of the night and the disappearance of neighbours; of beatings and the need to guard one’s tongue in public places; of the silence of the Press. Nannie K. Wells, a nationalist and supporter of the Scottish Renaissance movement, argued strongly in the Free Man and the Scots Independent about the dangers of underestimating the challenge of fascism: ‘Let us not underestimate the power of this Challenge. Democracy is hardly even on its trial any more; it has been condemned and dismissed in too many countries.’42 Creative writers who in the 1920s had found themselves inspired by the intellectual and artistic ideas of the continent now found themselves caught up in its political crises. Willa Muir wrote to Helen Cruickshank, the Secretary of Scottish PEN, about the conditions she and Edwin found in Hungary when they went there as Scottish delegates to the PEN conference

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in the summer of 1932. She wrote of a man tortured because of suspicion that he had been giving out socialist pamphlets; of a ‘general atmosphere [that] is filled with hatred, revenge and cruelty’. She added: ‘Perhaps this should not have depressed us, but it did; and I spent Thursday afternoon of Congress week in roaring and greeting in my bedroom over the State of Central Europe!’43 MacDiarmid, like the Church of Scotland in relation to the Irish immigration question discussed earlier, would appear to have belatedly realised the dangers of Hitler’s Germany, for in the summer of 1934 he joined the Communist Party. He was then subject to monitoring by M15 with his own correspondence and the mail of those who corresponded with him opened and checked.44 Other writers also either moved towards communism or were thought to be sympathisers, and several contributed to a special Scottish issue of the Left Review in 1936.45 In his article on MacDiarmid and M15 in the 2007 Scottish Studies Review, Scott Lyall suggests that the Communist Party of Great Britain was interested in recruiting Edwin Muir to the Party, but there is little evidence that either of the Muirs was seriously tempted to become communist. Edwin’s article ‘Bolshevism and Calvinism’, published in 1934 in the first issue of the European Quarterly which he founded with Janko Lavrin, denounced both Russian communism and Scottish Calvinism as impersonal systems, destructive of the individual; and in October 1937, he wrote to Stephen Spender when Spender himself was having trouble with the Communist Party: ‘I feel I shall never join the Party, indeed I could not. I agree with the ends of communism completely, but the philosophy, the historical machinery, deeply repels me: I cannot think of it except as a coffin of human freedom.’46 Catherine Carswell, on the other hand, wrote to MacDiarmid in May 1936 that ‘I’m moving surely & rapidly toward the Left – & by that I mean Communism – it has taken me some time’,47 but whether she actually joined the Communist Party is not clear. Earlier in 1934 she was one of a group of women asked to go to Berlin to help look after the mother of the communist leader Dimitroff during the Reichstag Fire trial and in 1938 she was attempting to organise a settlement scheme in the Scottish Highlands for Austrian refugees fleeing Nazi persecution. Naomi Mitchison’s Russian Diary records her impressions of the Soviet Union during her visit there in 1932 and her admiration of the way in which ‘they have solved, or nearly solved, the sex question which has preoccupied us for so many years, simply by giving women complete economic freedom and equality’. She was not so sure, however, if she would like her daughter to be one of the ‘she-sailors’ who had worked aboard the boat she travelled on, and knew ‘I wouldn’t like now to be a she-sailor myself’.48 Mitchison and Carswell joined the Muirs, MacDiarmid, Eric Linklater, William Soutar and other prominent literary Scots in writing joint letters to a number of newspapers appealing for funds for the ‘ancient peoples of Catalonia and the Basque country’ in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War. Similarly, the Muirs and Eric Linklater wrote an open letter in 1938 about the shame of Munich, while MacDiarmid, also in 1938, dedicated an anti-Chamberlain poem about the Munich Agreement jointly to Carswell and the Czech writer Karl Cˇapek.49

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Neil Gunn’s position in relation to political extremes was more uncertain. Like Muir, he put strong emphasis on the freedom of the individual as opposed to any ideological system, and in the early 1930s he had worked hard to find a compromise that would bring the warring factions of the nationalist groupings together. In 1938, however, he was strongly criticised by a friend and fellow writer, the Marxist James Barke, for allowing his Highland Clearances novel Butcher’s Broom to be translated into German at such a sensitive time. Barke’s view was that ‘I don’t see anyone getting their books translated into German and published in Germany unless they support in one way or another the ideology of Hitler fascism [. . .] Nor are they above cooking translations and interpolating the desired Nazi ideology’. In his reply, Gunn argued: If I honestly feel that there is something of our common humanity in Butcher’s Broom, should I not want Germans and other peoples to read it as well as my own people? For the Germans as a people, a folk, I have always had a deep respect, and feel that I owe them something for the hours of intense delight I have got out of their music alone. How on earth are we to let the Germans or the Russians or other peoples know that we believe we are all of the common people unless we contrive to let them know?50

Gunn was a strong supporter of the PEN organisation, and his response to Barke does seem to have in it something of the PEN Charter’s affirmation that ‘members of PEN should at all times use what influence they have in favour of good understanding and mutual respect between nations; they pledge themselves to do their utmost to dispel race, class and national hatreds, and to champion the ideal of one humanity living in peace in one world.’51 In the light of what we now know about the Nazis and the holocaust, then Gunn’s view seems at best naïve, as does his actual visit to Germany in early 1939. Yet all his writing, and in particular his dystopian fable The Green Isle of the Great Deep published during the war in 1944, makes it clear that he is against all kinds of totalitarian regimes which suppress individuality and freedom. That critical year of 1938 also saw MacDiarmid’s return to periodical publishing with The Voice of Scotland, edited by himself from Whalsay with the help of a managing editor, the young W. R. Aitken, in Edinburgh. This hectoring and anarchic publication had much in common with MacDiarmid’s political outbursts in the period before his departure to Whalsay in 1933. Having been expelled from the National Party of Scotland for deviant behaviour in 1933, and expelled by the Scottish District Committee of the Communist Party in 1937 on similar grounds, then reinstated the following year by the Communist Party of Great Britain, his editorials and the content of his new magazine also appeared to send out contradictory signals, proclaiming: ‘This is not a Communist periodical although the editor is a member of the Communist Party. But it will be restricted to left-wingers’; while at the same time, attacks are made

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on the left-wing English poets of the 1930s such as Spender, Auden and Day Lewis. English imperialism is attacked as an example of fascism, yet the nationalist Wendy Wood urges the Scots not to fight in England’s war against the fascism of the Nazis. A new political stand-point is announced in the editor’s commitment to ‘Red Scotland and the John MacLean’ line, MacDiarmid apparently having belatedly discovered John MacLean’s politics in the later 1930s, when all other political alliances seemed to have failed him.52 It is difficult to see how this magazine could have continued for long, had the war not intervened and brought about its closure with the summer issue of 1939. This closure also brought to an end the interwar phase of the Scottish Renaissance movement, and with it the interwar phase of Scottish modernism.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4.

5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

Michael Levenson, ‘Introduction’, in Cambridge Companion to Modernism, p. 2. Camilla Gray, The Russian Experiment in Art 1863–1922, pp. 221, 219. Edwin Muir, letter of 20 December 1923, Selected Letters of Edwin Muir, p. 30. For information about Scottish politics in the 1920s and early 1930s, I am indebted to Richard J. Finlay, Independent and Free, and T. M. Devine and R. J. Finlay (eds), Scotland in the Twentieth Century (1996). Hugh MacDiarmid, Albyn (1927) in MacDiarmid, Albyn: Shorter Books and Monographs, ed. A. Riach, p. 17. Alan Bold, MacDiarmid, pp. 233–4. Ibid., p. 234; also MacDiarmid, The Thistle Rises, ed. Alan Bold, p. 291. McCulloch (ed.), Modernism and Nationalism, pp. xii, 270. As previously, sources difficult to access will, where relevant, be referenced from this collection of documents. MacDiarmid, Albyn, pp. 4–5. William Sharp, ‘Introduction’, Lyra Celtica , pp. 274–5. McCulloch (ed.), Modern and Nationalism, p. 276. ‘English Ascendancy in British Literature’, in MacDiarmid, Selected Prose, ed. Riach, pp. 63, 67, 72. Ibid., p. 73. MacDiarmid, ‘The Caledonian Antisyzygy and the Gaelic Idea’, Modern Scot, Summer 1931, reprinted in MacDiarmid, Selected Essays of Hugh MacDiarmid, ed. Glen, p. 67. Ibid. Hugh MacDiarmid, ‘Second Hymn to Lenin’ (1932), in Complete Poems 1920– 1976, I, p. 323. Edwin Muir, Scottish Journey, p. 122. George Malcolm Thomson, Caledonia, reprinted in McCulloch (ed.), Modernism and Nationalism, p. 228. Andrew Dewar Gibb, Scotland in Eclipse, reprinted in McCulloch (ed.), Modernism and Nationalism, p. 235.

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20. George Rosie, ‘The Kirk’s Disgrace’, The Weekend Scotsman, 13 November 1993, pp. 2–4. All quotations in this section are from Rosie’s article. 21. C. M. Grieve, Scottish Chapbook 1.3 October 1922, p. 75; Complete Poems 1920– 1976, II, p. 1216. 22. Muir, Scottish Journey, p. 170. 23. Neil M. Gunn , quoted by Hugh MacDiarmid in ‘Neil Gunn and the Scottish Renaissance’, in Alexander Scott and Douglas Gifford (eds), Neil M. Gunn: The Man and the Writer, p. 361. 24. McCulloch (ed.), Modernism and Nationalism, p. 297. 25. Free Man, 4 March 1933, reprinted in McCulloch (ed.), Modernism and Nationalism, p. 293. 26. Free Man, 7 October and 11 November, 1933, reprinted in McCulloch (ed.), Modernism and Nationalism, pp. 298–301. 27. T. M. Devine and R. J. Finlay, Scotland in the Twentieth Century, p. 78. Further political and economic information in this section comes from Devine and Finlay’s account. 28. See Bold’s MacDiarmid, pp. 238, 244–5, 249; MacDiarmid, Selected Prose, ed. Riach, pp. 54–60. 29. McCulloch (ed.), Modernism and Nationalism, p. 71. 30. Muir, Scottish Journey, pp. 226, 227–8. 31. MacDiarmid, The Islands of Scotland, p. xix. 32. Muir, Scottish Journey, p. 124. 33. Gunn, Scots Magazine, March 1937, reprinted in McCulloch (ed.), Modernism and Nationalism, p. 310. 34. Naomi Mitchison, ‘A Socialist Plan for Scotland’, reprinted in McCulloch (ed.), Modernism and Nationalism, pp. 337–40. 35. J. Gibson, ‘A Scheme for Assisting Scottish Unemployed’, Free Man, 20 February 1932, reprinted in McCulloch (ed.), Modernism and Nationalism, p. 244. 36. Lewis Grassic Gibbon, ‘The Land’, in Gibbon and MacDiarmid, Scottish Scene, p. 295. 37. Gunn, ‘Nationalism and Internationalism’, Scots Magazine, June 1931, reprinted in McCulloch (ed.), Modernism and Nationalism, pp. 327–30. 38. MacDiarmid, ‘Scotland, Hitler and Wyndham Lewis’, in The Raucle Tongue, II, p. 406. 39. Catherine Carswell, postcard to Helen Cruickshank, 10 February 1933, Cruickshank Archive, Stirling University Library. 40. See, for example, ‘Plea for a Scottish Fascism’ and ‘Programme for a Scottish Fascism’ both published in the Scottish Nation in 1923; reprinted in The Raucle Tongue I, pp. 82–7 and Selected Prose, pp. 34–8. 41. MacDiarmid, ‘The Caledonian Antisyzygy and the Gaelic Idea’, part V, Modern Scot, Winter 1931; reprinted in MacDiarmid, Selected Essays of Hugh MacDiarmid, pp. 70–1. 42. Nannie K. Wells, ‘Fascism and the Alternative’, Free Man, 26 August, 1933, reprinted in McCulloch (ed.), Modernism and Nationalism, p. 351.

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43. Willa Muir, Letter to Helen Cruickshank, 26 May [1932], in Edwin Muir, Selected Letters of Edwin Muir, p. 72. 44. See John Manson, ‘Security Police in Whalsay in 1939’, The New Shetlander No. 234, Yule 2005, pp. 39–40; and Scott Lyall, ‘“The Man is a Menace”: MacDiarmid and Military Intelligence’, Scottish Studies Review 8.1 Spring 2007, 37–52. 45. These included James Barke, Catherine Carswell, Neil Gunn, Edwin and Willa Muir, Edward Scouller, William Soutar, and J.H. Whyte. MacDiarmid was not included and commented in a letter to Carswell that his information was that he had been deliberately left out (MacDiarmid, The Letters, ed. Bold, p. 428). 46. Muir, Selected Letters, p. 98. 47. Carswell, letter of 17 May 1936. Edinburgh University Library, ‘Incoming MacDiarmid Correspondence’, MS 2946.1, 22, reprinted in McCulloch (ed.), Modernism and Nationalism, pp. 366–7. 48. Naomi Mitchison, ‘Pages from a Russian Diary’, Modern Scot, Autumn 1932, reprinted in McCulloch (ed.), Modernism and Nationalism, p. 210. 49. See ‘Spanish Relief Appeal’, Scotsman, 16 July 1938, p. 15; Open typed letter signed in ink by Eric Linklater, Edwin Muir and Willa Muir, Acc.10282 NLS, reprinted in McCulloch (ed.), Modernism and Nationalism pp. 377–8; AntiChamberlain poem: Catherine Carswell papers, Mitchell Library, Glasgow, and TLS, 17 March 2000, p. 15. 50. Letter from James Barke to Neil M. Gunn, 20 May 1938 and reply from Neil Gunn of 21 May 1938, Mitchell Library, Glasgow, reprinted in McCulloch (ed.), Modernism and Nationalism, pp. 370–3. 51. McCulloch (ed.), Modernism and Nationalism, pp. 322–3. 52. See Voice of Scotland, 1.1 June-August, 1938, pp. 15–17, 24–5.

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Chapter 6

Neil M. Gunn: Re-imagining the Highlands

A story could have been made of all this for the scholars, but in Kenn’s time no teacher ever attempted it. The Vikings were a people like the Celts or the Picts, concerning whom a few facts had to be memorized. But these facts were really very difficult to memorize, because they had no bearing on anything tangible. They were sounds in the empty spaces of history. Neil M. Gunn, Highland River (1937)

As discussed previously, Neil M. Gunn first came to attention as a short fiction writer, contributing stories to MacDiarmid’s Scottish Nation and Northern Review magazines, and with his first novel The Grey Coast being praised by MacDiarmid as ‘something new, and big, in Scottish Literature’.1 A new way forward came with his third novel Morning Tide which was adopted as a Book Society Choice in late 1930. As with The Grey Coast, the social and economic context of the narrative is one of decline – the fishing is no longer profitable, the young men are emigrating and Old Hector is the only piper left in the village – but such decline is presented obliquely as a result of the narrative focus on the boy Hugh, the central character and the ‘eyes’ of the novel whose positive responses to his child’s world bring the reader new perspectives on the grey coast. In addition, Morning Tide also presents most fully at this early stage of Gunn’s writing career his capacity for bringing the natural landscape or seascape alive for his readers, not merely in a visually descriptive or referential way, but in a prose poetry which seems to catch the very ‘spirit’ of the land, an ‘otherness’ which the human being must respect. And it is this otherness of sea and shorescape which pulls the reader into the narrative when, without any introductory preparation, the scene opens with the boy Hugh gathering bait on the stony beach: The tide was at low ebb and the sea quiet except for a restless seeking among the dark boulders. But though it was the sea after a storm it was still sullen and inclined to smooth and lick itself, like a black dog bent over its paws; as many black dogs as there were boulders; black sea-animals, their heads bent and hidden, licking their paws in the dying evening light down by the secret water’s edge. When he stepped on the ware, it slithered under him like a living hide.2

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Gunn’s metaphorical evocation of the lonely beach is reminiscent of Wordsworth’s ‘Leech-gatherer’ poem, but the imagistic detail, the sounds and rhythms and repetitions and pauses within Gunn’s prose, which itself rises and falls like the sea, bring nothing of the ultimate reassurance communicated by the earlier poet’s adult reflections on his encounter: The dark undulating water rose from him to a horizon so far away that it was vague and lost. What a size it was! It could heave up and drown the whole world [. . .] A short distance away, right on the sea’s edge, he saw one of the boulders move. His heart came into his throat. Yet half his mind knew that it could only be some other lonely human in the ebb. And presently he saw the back bob up for a moment again. Yes, it was a man. Seeking among the boulders there like some queer animal! He looked about him carefully. There was no one else. There were just the two of them in the ebb. Here they were on this dark beach, with nobody else. A strange air of remoteness touched him. It was as though they shared this gloomy shore, beyond the world’s rim, between them. (MT, pp. 14–15)

In contrast to this other-worldly opening, there are many passages of sheer animal enjoyment in the encounters Gunn’s boy heroes have with their natural environment, as there is also the related ‘atom of delight’ experienced by some of his adult characters. Yet despite such positive connections, Gunn’s apprehension of the relationship between human and natural world is very different from the Wordsworthian sense of Nature as foster-mother and teacher. In Gunn’s Celtic world, however much his characters are attached to their particular ‘place’ and its landscape and sea coast, they never forget that ‘nature’ has its own spirit, its own non-human identity, of which it is well to be wary. Gunn’s animism is therefore more the modernist awareness of ‘difference’ rather than the pathetic fallacy characteristic of the Romantic period. However, despite the book’s success and his publisher’s warning that his next publication would be of critical importance for his future, Gunn himself still seemed haunted by the theme of Highland decline and the need to confront and explore this. His next two novels Sun Circle (1933) and Butcher’s Broom (1934) therefore did not follow the successful route of Morning Tide, but moved more deeply into Highland history: in Sun Circle to the ninth century when the Vikings were raiding the northern coasts of Scotland and Christianity was superseding the ancient Druidic religion; and in Butcher’s Broom to the nineteenth century and the period of the Clearances in Sutherland. Gunn has been considered by some cultural historians as endorsing in his fiction the idea of a lost ‘golden age’, a pre-history civilisation of innocence and peace among human beings. His biographers draw attention to his articles on the Irish writer Padraic Pearse written for the Scots Independent in November and December 1929 under the pseudonym of ‘Dane McNeil’, and suggest a correspondence with his own ideas when he moved to the subject of the Celtic and Pictish communities of Sun Circle after his creation of boyhood

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experience in Morning Tide: ‘Having seen his communal past through the innocent eye of the child, he was drawn now to see it in the childlike innocence of its own golden age’.3 Gunn’s own comments on Pearse might seem to give some support to that view: It is with that [Gaelic] tradition behind him that Pearse writes his stories and plays and poems. Here he has something not merely worth writing about, but living for and dying for. But he has to go back through the centuries to find its golden age. And to Pearse it is exactly as though he were going back to the swift felt beauties, the inspirations and aspirations of his own boyhood [. . .] a reality that as yet knows no cynicism and no compromise.4

This description by Gunn of the childhood innocence he finds in Pearse’s work is indeed close to his own future, but more equivocal, portrait of the ninth-century Celts in Sun Circle. It would have been difficult for Gunn to have escaped such mythic interests, given his knowledge as a Highlander of Scottish and Irish Celtic legends and his commitment to re-imagining Highland life in order to restore ‘belief in ourselves’5 to the distressed peoples of the present; and given also the interest in mythology and primitive civilisations which co-existed in the modernist period alongside its avant-garde artistic experimentation. Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough, the writings of Freud and Jung on myth, on race memory and the collective unconscious, Stravinsky’s orchestral Rite of Spring, Picasso’s interest in African masks and sculptural forms were outstanding examples of such an interest in primitivism in the early century; and in British literary modernism there are the examples of Eliot’s use of the Grail myth in The Waste Land, drawing on Jessie Weston’s From Ritual to Romance, Joyce’s use of myth in Ulysses, and Lawrence’s exploration of the primitive in his fiction and essay writing. F. Marian McNeill’s account of the myths and legends of the Scottish Highlands in her book The Silver Bough was itself influenced by Frazer’s earlier work, and although MacDiarmid’s compass characteristically pointed towards the future as opposed to a golden age past, his early linguistic arguments about the ‘unconscious responses’ to be recovered through his synthetic or re-integrated Scots language are part of that same early twentieth-century interest in minds ‘different from our own’, which contain something that ‘civilisation’ (for many, in the form of industrialisation) has destroyed. Gunn’s ‘spatial’ narratives, his fictional explorations of race memory and the collective unconscious, of how traces of time past can live on in the present subconscious lives of his characters, are part of this modern and modernist interest in myth. Interpreted in such a context, myth offers a means of creatively exploring the crises of the present as opposed to escaping from them. In addition to his fictional involvement with myth, Gunn’s procedure in the more deeply historical novels Sun Circle (1933), Butcher’s Broom (1934) and The Silver Darlings (1941)6 relates also to the ideas about historical fiction discussed in H. Butterfield’s The Historical Novel: An Essay, published in 1924, and Georg Lukács’s The Historical Novel written ‘during the winter

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of 1936–37’7 but not published in English until 1962. Gunn could not have known of Lukács’s book although it is possible that he might have read or read a review of Butterfield’s. What is important, however, is that all three accounts – Butterfield and Lukács’s critique of historical fiction and Gunn’s actual historical novels – were produced in the same historical time-frame and were therefore subject to the influence of similar philosophical, aesthetic and – in Lukács’s case in particular – ideological ideas. For all three ‘a true “historical novel” is one that is historical in its intention and not simply by accident’.8 Lukács’s account of the historical novel’s rise during the ‘conscious growth of historicism’ in the nineteenth century, and in particular his reference to its importance in German history, is also relevant to Gunn’s use of the form in relation to the history of the Highlands. For Lukács, ‘it is a requirement of the struggle for this national greatness that the historical causes for the decline, the disintegration of Germany should be explored and artistically portrayed’.9 Gunn may have been struggling for regeneration in the Highlands rather than any idea of national ‘greatness’, but his historical writing is similarly motivated by the need to explore how the decline occurred so that a more meaningful present and future may be created. In this impulse he differs considerably from his predecessor Sir Walter Scott, although both shared a love of land, people and traditions. Scott’s motivation in his historical writing was primarily antiquarian. In the final chapter of Waverley, for example, he describes his task as one of ‘tracing the evanescent manners of his own country’,10 and although his historical novels at their best succeed in being what Butterfield calls works of ‘resurrection’,11 there is no indication that Scott himself saw this artistic resurrection as providing a stepping stone to a future built on that past. Gunn’s complaint against his famous predecessor was not that Scott’s historical writing was ‘untrue’, but that ‘it no longer enriched or influenced a living national tradition [. . .] it was seen backwards as in the round of some time spyglass and had interpretive bearing neither upon a present nor a future’.12 In contrast, his own periodical writing in the 1930s about the condition of the Highlands makes it clear that for him a secure identity in the modern world could only be achieved by imaginatively rediscovering and restoring the broken links between past, present and future. The three novels Sun Circle, Butcher’s Broom, and The Silver Darlings are most often referred to as Gunn’s historical ‘trilogy’, although being widely separated in their time settings across the centuries and therefore not linked specifically through continuity of characters and events, they do not conform to the usual understanding of the term. Nevertheless, Gunn’s overarching theme of the search for the sources of historical decline in the attempt to build a more successful future, and his choice of key periods of loss and regeneration in Highland history for his settings, do give some credence to a trilogy definition. These three historical novels differ also from his more characteristically static and spatial Highland narratives in that, taken together, they provide a narrative of change through time; and each novel is itself set in a period of political and cultural upheaval, although in the earlier two novels

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it is the ‘modern’ outside world that intrudes into the continuous life of the remote community to bring change. Lukács argued that the fundamental principle of a historical novel is its evocation of a context rather than its recall of specific factual events, and this is a viewpoint of much relevance to the problems Gunn faced in his attempt to give imaginative life to the Picts and Celts of ninth-century Caithness. Despite his biographers’ reference to the ‘long list of standard works on prehistoric Celtic Britain and Viking culture’ in his notebook of the time,13 there was little specific historical documentation which could have offered appropriate material for the kind of ‘evocation of a context’ necessary for success. What comes over strongly in Gunn’s re-imagining of the life of his ninth-century Picts and Celts is what appears to be the traditional view of such peoples from Strabo’s early accounts to the writings of Fiona Macleod and other turn-of-the-century Celticists. Strabo’s account of the Celts of Gaul seems equally applicable to the peoples of Sun Circle: And so when they are stirred up they assemble in their bands for battle, quite openly and without forethought, so that they are easily handled by those who desire to outwit them; for at any time or place and on whatever pretext you stir them up, you will have them ready to face danger, even if they have nothing on their side but their own strength and courage.14

And so with Gunn’s Ravens, who were ‘lacking in that battle sense which made the eyes of the grizzled faces before them smile in cunning foreknowledge. The great shields of the Northmen, too, deceived and exasperated young men shieldless and urgent for the encounter that is face to face’ (SC, p. 158). As the community is broken and scattered through its defeat by the Norsemen, so Christianity’s northward spread defeats the old Druidic religion and power is transferred from the Druidic-based chiefdoms of the north to the larger Christian-dominated southern areas of the country. Politically and philosophically, the ending of the novel seems to confirm rather than confront the defeatist philosophy of Fiona Macleod and the Celtic Twilight. The Druid Master foresees the glen burning once more in a future time, and the pupil-Druid Aniel leaves for the south in order to bring back to the people a new Christian chieftain who will rule over the remnant of their scattered community. In an echo of his earlier Scots Independent article on the Irishman Padraic Pearse – an echo which now resonates ironically – Gunn puts into the mouth of the old Master Druid a description of the intrinsic qualities of the peoples of the north which make their defeat by stronger forces inevitable: They are a dark intricate people, loving music and fun, and it is a mark of them that an old man will play with a child, and the old man will pretend to be defeated by the child, for their pretences come naturally to them and twist into many games. Out of their pretences they make stories [. . .] They also make tunes, tunes that possess the mind even more than the stories, and they start with the mother tunes to the children [. . .] How then can they ever lead? They cannot. (SC, pp. 353–4)

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It is not clear what Gunn intends the reader to infer from this ending, although he seems to be placing defeat, in part at least, in the hands of the people and their culture. In addition, his deliberate reminder of the Master Druid’s prophetic vision of the burning glen in the narrative of Butcher’s Broom, published in the following year but leaping over 1,000 years of history to the early nineteenth century, suggests that he was following through some kind of philosophical or ideological continuity in the life-story of the Pictish and Celtic peoples. Butcher’s Broom is set in the period of the Napoleonic Wars in Europe and at a late stage of the Highland Clearances in Scotland. Gunn is therefore on more secure ground in this second fictional reconstruction of Highland history, assisted by a considerable amount of documentation both in relation to the Clearances which took place in Sutherland and also more widely in relation to the political and economic international issues of the time. Alexander Mackenzie’s History of the Highland Clearances (1883) provided especially useful material for Sutherland, as did its incorporation of the Gloomy Memories of Strathnaver stonemason Donald Macleod (written in response to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Sunny Memories which eulogised the Sutherlands’ care for their tenants). Although Gunn is at one with Lukács’s perception of the historical novel as consciously historical and directed towards uncovering the causes of decline, he parts company with him in his introduction of the symbolic and imagistic as well as the intuitive into his exploration of the past, as opposed to a more consistent realist mode of depiction. As a title, ‘Butcher’s Broom’ is ironically symbolic, being the local name for the wildflower depicted on the crest of the ruling Sutherland family responsible for some of the cruellest clearances, and referring also to the local name for the Duke of Cumberland – ‘Butcher’ Cumberland – who was appointed by the British government to pacify the Highlands after the defeat at Culloden and was associated with some of the worst atrocities during that pacification. The opening of the novel has symbolic resonances also as we are introduced to the remote glen of the Riasgan through the person of Dark Mairi who brings healing to the community through her ancient knowledge of herbs. Mairi thus carries with her the old inheritance of the people while she also seems part of the natural landscape through which she moves. As she comes in sight of her inland village after a journey from the sea-coast where she has been gathering seaweeds and plants, the village itself seems indistinguishable from the natural world around it: The round-backed cottages clung to the earth like long animals whose folded heads were always to the mountain. Lying thus to the slopes they were part of the rhythm of the land itself. They grew out of it and merged with it, so that shadow or stillness caught them when it caught the mountain, and the cries of children were no more alien than the sharp cries of moor-birds [. . .] There were little herds of these cottages at long intervals, and every now and then an odd cottage by itself like a wandered beast. Even in a flock of sheep on these hills there is the ‘piner’. (BB, pp. 14–15)

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Mairi herself, if not a ‘piner’, is something of a lost sheep in the village community. Respected for her healing skills, she yet has that quality of human loneliness which Frank O’Connor considered a characteristic attribute of the short story form and which is consistently to be found in Gunn’s novels as well as in his short stories. Called by the people ‘Dark Mairi of the Shore’, she had originally come to the Riasgan from the sea-coast and ‘seemed to have in her an older knowledge than was common to the rest of her ancient kind in these places’ (BB, pp. 9, 11). Mairi is therefore a symbol or signifier of something that has been lost in the community as a whole. Gunn initially establishes the corporate identity of the village community as well as the identity of individuals within it in a life-pattern than seems circular and continuous. We observe the people working and playing together, singing and telling stories in the ceilidh house as the women wauk the cloth;15 and helping each other out when in difficulty. Work and play seem part of the same living pattern as opposed to their status as contrary activities in the modern capitalist world. Yet at the same time we are brought to an understanding of the weaknesses within this apparently holistic way of life. Clearly there is not enough land for the younger generation – and one of the enticements for the young men to sign up to fight in the Peninsular War is the promise of land on their return. The narrow religion practised by the ministers of the community takes the innocent enjoyment out of social gatherings, while at the same time it appears to have weakened the people’s belief in themselves. As we see later, the psychological destabilising effect of the church’s Calvinist teaching means that they are too ready to believe that it is God’s punishment for their evil-doing when Mr Heller, the estate factor, comes to clear the people from the land in preparation for the new industry of sheep-farming. It is disturbing also that the young woman Elie has to go south out of the community when she finds herself pregnant and without her lover who has gone to the wars in ignorance of her condition; and that when she returns with her child, she is not treated sympathetically, except by some of her women friends, including Mairi who gives her shelter. We can see also that the break-up of the clan system in the aftermath of the Jacobite defeats has left the people rootless. They cling to the old belief in their clan chieftain, a faith which no longer has substance but which renders them unable to appreciate the significance of rumours of evictions brought by drovers returning from the south. Gunn’s novel creates a story of the past which accounts for the present, which helps towards an understanding of why things are as they are, as well as showing the worth of so much of that past life which has been lost. There is in addition an awareness that the intrusion of the outside modern world was ultimately inevitable, although the cruelty with which ‘progress’ invaded the community might have been avoided. The Highland Clearances are seen as part of an expansionist, materialistic belief in progress, in subduing nature, in creating wealth, in imposing the perceived values of a dominant civilisation. In this respect, one of the most significant narrative episodes in Butcher’s Broom occurs when the action is moved from the remote Highland glen to the

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London home of the Duke and Duchess of Sutherland, where the opulence of the Sutherlands’ city lifestyle is in contrast with the poverty of the people who inhabit their Scottish lands. In the ironic depiction of the Sutherland servants: ‘doorkeepers in full Highland costume [. . .] a more uncommon possession than Nubian slaves, Spanish pictures, Caiaphas and Christ’ (BB, pp. 250, 251), we observe these Highlanders not as kindred clansmen, but as the exotic ornaments they have now become to their chief. Thus through this narrative shift and the political discussions which take place in the Sutherland household, Gunn demonstrates how diverse developmental time-phases can co-exist within one overarching historical time frame; and how inevitable it was that the political and economic priorities of the more sophisticated timeworld would intrude and dominate over the less developed. The Clearances are therefore placed objectively in the context of agricultural change in Britain as a whole in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; and in the context of the need to feed a growing industrial class. And as we return to the Riasgan and watch the violent repression associated with the eventual clearance of the people from the land, we can see this repression, even though we do not condone it, in the context of the fears among the upper classes of a revolutionary rising of the common people as had so recently occurred in France; and in the smaller-scale home context, in the rising which had greeted the introduction of sheep farming to Ross-shire in 1792. Gunn is particularly successful in his depiction of the clearing of the Riasgan, creating a kind of dramatic, fictionalised documentary from historical accounts. Characters we have become familiar with in the earlier stages of the narrative now take on the role of their actual historical counterparts. Old Morach, the mother of the seer, Seamus Og, becomes the ‘old bedridden hag’ about whom Patrick Sellar (Mr Heller in Gunn’s account) is reported as saying: ‘Damn her, the old witch, she has lived too long; let her burn!’ Seonaid, prominent for her fiery spirit and courage, and her support of the pregnant Elie, herself becomes the historical pregnant woman who defied the evictors and who gave birth prematurely after falling through the roof of her house. Mairi’s meal chest becomes representative of the many meal chests hurled down the hillsides into the river.16 The novel ends with the people exiled to the cliff tops, left to teach themselves how to make a living from sea fishing, to emigrate, or to die of disease. The death of Mairi, mauled by sheepdogs as she wanders the depopulated Riasgan in search of herbs, symbolically marks the death of an old way of life. She is carried to the cliff tops by the young boy Colin and his (unrecognised) soldier father who has returned home to find the devastation of his glen, not the land promised him when he left for the wars. Once again Gunn’s investigation of Highland history has uncovered a community fragmented and a traditional way of life in ruins. It has also uncovered injustice and cruelty, but, ironically, an injustice which in its expulsion of the people to the coast opens up the way for their entry into the modern world of the successful herring fishing industry. Gunn wrote of The Silver Darlings which completed the ‘trilogy’ in 1941,

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that he ‘was moved by what happened to our Highland people during and after the Clearances’,17 and this epic narrative tells the story of the almost miraculous rise of the east-coast herring fishing industry in the wake of the people’s earlier expulsion from their traditional crofting life in the glens. Before turning to that sequel, however, a fuller awareness of the diverse ways in which Gunn presents his creative re-imagining of the Highlands can be gained from a consideration of his Highland River of 1937 in which he leaves history aside and returns to an exploration of more recent Highland life through the perspective of a boy hero. With an anachronistic operation of narrative time which draws on the ideas of Bergson in relation to duration and memory and on the literary exploitation of these ideas in the fiction of Proust and Woolf, Highland River is formally the most modernistic of Gunn’s novels. Earlier implicit pointers to Golden Age mythology in Sun Circle are now replaced by a more confident use of Jung’s writings about archetypes and a collective unconscious. Most importantly, the Celtic Twilight resonances and the foregrounding of the theme of decline in his earlier fiction have been replaced by a more positive and forward-looking thematic context in which the experiences and memories of its dual protagonist – the child and adult Kenn – interact with each other in a journey of discovery and individuation: a process that opens up also the strengths of natural environment and community values which the Highlands can offer. This new direction is signalled immediately in the opening chapter where, as in the earlier Morning Tide, the boy is the first actor on the stage. However, while in Morning Tide Hugh gathers his bait in the growing evening darkness, with the sea hissing around him and the ‘black dog boulders’ haunting the water’s edge, Kenn is sent for water to the well pool where he encounters the salmon in the early hours of the morning. In contrast to the dark menace and endurance of the earlier scene, the atmosphere in the opening pages of Highland River vibrates with the excitement of the hunt, an excitement the reader shares through the linguistic and rhythmic vitality of Gunn’s prose poetry: Out of that noiseless world in the grey of the morning, all his ancestors came at him. They tapped his breast until the bird inside it fluttered madly; they drew a hand along his hair until the scalp crinkled; they made the blood within him tingle to a dance that had him leaping from boulder to boulder before he rightly knew to what desperate venture he was committed.18

The boy has met with the salmon as it swims back to the source of its life in the upper reaches of the river, and in a later allegorical passage Gunn develops more expansively this symbolic parallel between boy and fish. The outcome of the present meeting is that the boy himself is set on a road which will lead to the search for his own source: ‘From that day the river became the river of life for Kenn’ (HR, p. 33). Through this early experience he becomes ‘grounded in a relationship to his river that is fundamental and that nothing

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can ever quite destroy’; and what is especially important is that ‘from his river, the relationship is carried over, in whatever degree, to every other environment in life’ (HR, p. 182). The salmon has a special place in Celtic mythology as the bringer of wisdom, and in most mythologies and throughout literary history water provides a metaphor of rebirth, while river symbolism is most often directed towards a quest for regeneration. Although in the modern period Conrad’s river flows into the heart of darkness and Eliot’s Wastelanders fear water, with the Thames characterised as a river of sterility and lost hopes, Gunn’s river symbolism, like MacDiarmid’s water/whisky imagery in A Drunk Man, maintains its traditional regenerative role, both in its application to the search for renewal in the national context, and in the complementary context of the psychological and spiritual growth or renewal in the life of the individual human being. In addition, Kenn’s unexpected awareness of the physicality of his ancestors within his own body, urging him on to engage with the salmon, is the first – although the most energetic – of many instances in the narrative where the boy becomes aware of presences from the past inhabiting certain places of especial historical significance in the landscape; or awakening in his own senses and mental processes an awareness of behavioural patterns from an ancestral past. Yet there is nothing awkward or artificial in the narrative communication of such moments which rise quite naturally out of the child’s sense of belonging, and sometimes sense of wariness, in his natural environment. Gunn’s unconventional third-person autobiography The Atom of Delight, published in 1956, is very close in its narrative of ‘the boy’ to the philosophy of individuation and ‘creative evolution’ which underpins Highland River. Both books point to the affinity between Gunn’s presentation of the relationship between the child and the natural world and the earlier Wordsworth’s communication of his boy’s ‘spots of time’ experiences in The Prelude. In particular, the Scottish writer singles out the boat-stealing episode in Book I where the boy’s panic on the lake comes not from his stealing of the boat but from his realisation that he has strayed into territory which is beyond the human, where: a huge Cliff, As if with voluntary power instinct, Uprear’d its head. I struck, and struck again, And growing still in stature, the huge Cliff Rose up between me and the stars, and still With measur’d motion, like a living thing, Strode after me.19

In The Atom of Delight, Gunn compares this experience on the lake to that of the boy in the Strath and ‘the feeling he had, when hunting for the salmon in the dark, that the inanimate would move under his hand’; and considers that Wordsworth, despite ‘his “clouds of glory” around childhood [. . .] his nostalgic backward look’, had also been ‘once caught by that animism, which

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we have considered, so directly on the quick of the heart’ (AD, pp. 80–1). The boat-stealing episode is indeed a good example of the animistic affinity between these two writers at certain stages of their work. Yet the introduction to this Prelude passage (which Gunn does not quote) also points to their difference in its praise of a foster-mother Nature who has taught the growing boy, ‘seeking him/With gentlest visitation’ or sometimes with ‘Severer interventions, ministry/More palpable, and so she dealt with me’.20 In contrast, while the river may have become the river of life for Gunn’s boy, his relationship with Nature is not personalised. Despite the intensity of the perceived connection between human and natural world, and the animal delight the boy experiences in his natural playground, this ‘spirit of place’ is no foster mother, but a presence to be respected as ‘other’. This ‘otherness’ is especially communicated in Gunn’s evocations of the sea-coast and its qualities: Strength was the keynote of this coast, a passionless remorseless strength, unyielding as the rock, tireless as the water; the unheeding rock that a falling body would smash itself to pulp upon; the transparent water that would suffocate an exhausted body in the slow rhythm of its swirl. There was a purity about it all, stainless as the gull’s plumage, wild and cold as its eye. (HR, p. 49)

Despite such differences, for Gunn as well as Wordsworth ‘the child is father of the man’, and it is in the fluidity with which he handles memory and the movement between time present and time past that Gunn’s narrative of the child and adult Kenn is most striking. As with MacDiarmid and Muir, the legacy of the Romantics in Gunn’s work is counterbalanced by the influence of contemporary European artistic developments, and so alongside its discussion of Wordsworth, The Atom of Delight considers Proust’s re-creation of his childhood in À La Recherche du Temps Perdu, finding that ‘the French boy is father of the man in a way that is strangely fixed to the boy of the Strath running wild in a fluidity that never got fixed’ (AD, p. 80). On a surface interpretation such a comment can be seen to relate (as Gunn himself suggests) to the narrow parameters set for Proust’s child who, ‘carrying his umbrella and wrapped in his Highland plaid, set out with his parents for a walk on either of two ways – the “Méséglise way” or the “Guermantes way”. Never the two on the same day; never a wild foray from one to the other.’ (AD, p. 78) Critics have sometimes commented on George Scott Moncrieff’s deceptively passive translation of ‘Recherche’ by ‘Remembrance’ in the title of Proust’s work, for, despite the formality of the childhood depicted, Proust’s recherche is not a passive remembering but an active rediscovery of that childhood, bringing it into an immediacy with the adult present through his intricate manipulation of grammatical tense and narrative theme. Past and present interact in a similarly complex way in Gunn’s anachronistic account, as instead of an analeptic movement into the past from a fixed time point in a chronological plot pattern, Gunn’s narrative time flows uninterruptedly between the two states, creating a sense of a living connection between the child and the adult. Yet again, as with Wordsworth, there is a philosophical difference between

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the Scottish and French writers. Gunn’s comment about Proust’s boy being ‘father of the man in a way that is strangely fixed’ (AD, p. 80) can be seen to refer not only to the nature of the French boy’s childhood, but also to the element of adult nostalgia for that childhood even in the vitality of its recreation. In ‘Burnt Norton’ from Four Quartets, Eliot speculates that ‘Time present and time past/Are both perhaps present in time future/And time future contained in time past’.21 For Gunn, this philosophical connection between past, present and future is not merely speculative, but essential (in both meanings of the word). Thus in Highland River, the childhood experience still alive within him is acknowledged by the adult who is then enabled to carry its values with him on his future journey through life. Kenn’s childhood relationship with his river is ‘carried over, in whatever degree, to every other environment in life’ (HR, p. 182). Gunn’s philosophy of this continuing at-one-ness between child and adult is put to its greatest test in the sections of Highland River which relate to World War One, which intrudes without warning into the childhood narrative. In chapter 3, for example, we move from the intense explorations of the boy’s river which follow on from his catch of the salmon to his experience as a soldier at the battle of the Somme where he is subject to a gas attack. In chapter 14 the narrative again flows forward into the war experience where memories of the childhood companionship between Kenn and his older brother Angus interact with their actual meeting in the trenches. Ironically, as an adult Angus had cut all ties with his homeland, emigrating like so many of his youthful compatriots to Canada, but has now returned to Europe as a soldier at the outbreak of war. In The Atom of Delight Gunn talks of the importance for the child’s wellbeing of keeping his ‘second self’ – a kind of inner sense of self – intact, unbroken by a too early intrusion of the adult world. Kenn appears to have carried this childhood integrity into his adult life, and despite his wounding, finds himself able to cope with the mental horror of the warfare while transferring the considerable dexterity and woodland skills learned in the exploits of his boyhood to the war in the trenches. Angus, in contrast, is shut into his present nightmare, unable to think of anything but how to keep out of danger, impatient of any attempt to remind him of his boyhood in the Strath. This is a distressing episode for the reader, for Angus has very much been the ‘big brother’ to Kenn, leader of expeditions, the initiator of the younger boy into the skills of hunting and salmon fishing. Gunn is not so crude as to attempt to make an explicit didactic point out of this later strange and tragic meeting of the brothers in the trenches, but in the context of his fiction and essay writing as a whole and his mission to restore self-belief in the values of the Highland way of life through his fictional re-imagining of it, it is possible to see Angus not only as a victim of shell shock in the war, but also as a victim of that loss of belief in the Highlands and in himself as a Highlander that has so often rendered impotent attempts at regeneration. Like Ewan in Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Sunset Song (a character who also perishes in World War One, in his case shot as a deserter), Angus as a youth

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is not at all interested in the past history of his people. Unlike Kenn, he has no time for attempting to find out the meaning of the signs to be found on the river banks or in the ruined broch on the outskirts of the strath. Ruins are just ‘some old croft houses’(HR, p. 127). And though he has no primal fear when making his way through the dark night-time woods to collect a previously poached salmon, seeming quite free from the animistic responses which arouse wariness in his brother, his learned social subservience and fear of arrest by the estate gamekeeper overcomes him: ‘Kenn looked at Angus’s face. It had whitened, and playing on it was a weak surface smile. All the dark proud life was gone [. . .] The spirit, netted in the white smile, haunted Kenn through all the rest of his years’ (HR, p. 144). And so it is with Angus in the trenches. He is ‘netted’ in the horror of his present and not even the kinship with his brother can release him. Despite his attempts to keep out of danger, he is shot and left to die in a no-man’s land outwith the trenches. The theme of loss of belief in ourselves is signalled more directly in chapter 5 of the novel where Gunn explicitly attacks the educational system prevailing in the Highlands. The river may have become the river of life for the young Kenn, but there was no attempt in the official schooling to teach the children about their present environment or their heritage from the past. As Kenn discovered for himself, the ‘elements of race still existed along the banks of the river, not only visibly in the appearance of the folk themselves, but invisibly in the stones and earth’: On one side of the harbour mouth the place-name was Gaelic, on the other side it was Norse. Where the lower valley broadened out to flat, fertile land the name was Norse, but the braes behind it were Gaelic. A mile up the river where the main stream was joined by its first real tributary, the promontory overlooking the meeting of the waters was crowned by the ruins of a broch that must have been the principal stronghold of the glen when the Picts, or perhaps some earlier people, were in their heyday [. . .] A story could have been made of all this for the scholars, but in Kenn’s time no teacher ever attempted it. The Vikings were a people like the Celts or the Picts, concerning whom a few facts had to be memorized. But these facts were really very difficult to memorize, because they had no bearing on anything tangible. They were sounds in the empty spaces of history. (HR, pp. 52–3)

Kenn was beaten by the schoolmaster for his lack of attention after his conquering of the salmon, instead of that episode being used to initiate a natural history lesson relevant to the pupils’ home environment; and ‘Leicester is famous for boots’ (HR, p. 40) were Kenn’s first words on regaining consciousness after his gassing in the war and being told he was now in a hospital in Leicester – an interesting example of the schoolmaster’s success in the process of de-culturalising his Highland pupils. Highland River ends with the adult Kenn’s return to his river, retracing its journey from river mouth to its unknown source and reliving his childhood experiences as he moves beyond them into new territory. He is now a scientist and he remembers how he saw – and still sees – the skill and precision

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of his fisherman father and his crew as part of a progression of scientific discovery and achievement: ‘Galileo, Tycho Brahe, Kepler, the great Newton, Cavendish, Faraday, Röntgen. . . . They were the men who stood beyond the fishermen in Kenn’s growing mind. From the fishermen to them there was a natural progression’ (HR, p. 47). Yet Kenn is also ‘intuitive’, having been taught by his childhood experiences to accept that there are aspects of his world that cannot be explained by science – unlike his scientific colleague Radzyn who agonises over his inability to find ultimate meaning. Kenn’s position is something similar to what Keats called ‘Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason’.22 What Gunn calls the ‘atom of delight’ is akin also to Joyce’s idea of ‘epiphany’, a moment of intensity which grows out of an accumulation of past responses and which takes one ‘beyond’ or ‘outside’ oneself. Highland River is a book of many themes and intellectual and emotional journeys: a book about the importance of community and individual identity; about history and how the past conditions the present and future; about learning to have belief in oneself; and about the ‘intuition’ of what is beyond rational understanding. It is rich in its imagistic evocations of the natural world and the synaesthetic responses of the boy to his surroundings. Although the novel is central to Gunn’s commitment to Highland regeneration and the reconnecting of the broken links between past, present and future, in its philosophical questing it also points forward to the explicitly philosophical explorations of his late novels and his autobiography The Atom of Delight. Highland River was received with considerable acclaim, with its reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement commenting that ‘the book must be read as one would listen to music’,23 and it was awarded the prestigious James Tait Black Memorial Prize by Edinburgh University. Encouraged by its success and the support of George Blake, Frank Morley and T. S. Eliot, the directors of Faber who now published his work, Gunn decided to resign from the Civil Service and become a full-time writer. In 1941, seven years after Butcher’s Broom and after extensive research, The Silver Darlings, the final novel in his historical sequence, was published by Faber. This sequel to Butcher’s Broom was set at the end of the Napoleonic era and at the beginning of the herring fishing on the Moray Firth: ‘a busy, fabulous time among the common people of that weathered northern land’.24 Gunn’s use of the word ‘fabulous’ in its opening pages points overtly towards the epic nature of the narrative which tells how the people were able to snatch victory from the defeat of the Clearances through their courageous participation in the modern enterprise of the herring fishing. Yet the story begins unpromisingly with yet another tragic episode in the lives of the displaced people as their new young leaders are captured by a British government press gang vessel as they haul their first successful catch of herring into their small boat. Ironically, the sea, which they had earlier celebrated as being free from the landlords who had driven them from their crofts, is now

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seen to have human hazards equally as threatening as its natural world storms. Catrine, the pregnant wife of Tormad, the leader of the captured crew, becomes convinced of her husband’s death and decides to journey northwards, away from the sea which has taken her husband to the land-safety of a relative’s croft at Dunster (Gunn’s home village of Dunbeath). The episodic narrative which follows is structured around Catrine, her son Finn, and their relationship with the leader of the successful fishing community developing on the coast below the Dunster croft. Catrine’s heroic journey alone over the Ord of Caithness is the first of several such testing expeditions in the novel, on land but especially on sea. Gunn’s expeditions offer marvels of seamanship which pay tribute to the traditional skills and knowledge of his father and the men among whom he grew up, while, as with Conrad’s sea stories, they also provide opportunities for self-discovery on the part of his principal characters. In keeping with the epic character of the novel, such principal characters are both archetypal and at the same time convincing and active members of the communities depicted. Catrine’s son Finn, whose growth to young manhood coincides with the growing success of the people as fishermen, is both a participant in that new way of life and also a figure of legend. He shares a name with the legendary Celtic hero Finn MacCoul, a connection which is explicitly made clear in the narrative. When Finn for the first time visits his mother’s people after his own first stormy sea journey to Stornoway on Lewis in the Outer Hebrides, and recounts his adventures to his listeners in the ceilidh house, an old drover comments: ‘You gave me a vision – of the youth of Finn MacCoul himself’; and asks in some wonderment: Are the days of Finn MacCoul coming back upon us?’ (SD, pp. 449, 479). Similarly, when Finn visits remote North Uist, a visit which ‘had the influence on his life of a rare memory that would come and go by the opening of a small window far back in his mind’ (SD, p. 535), he is initiated into the traditions and knowledge of that Celtic community by an old man in whose house he stays. Significantly, this old man is also named ‘Finn’, and it is as if he is passing on his traditional wisdom and knowledge to the young Finn so that he might keep it alive and pass it on in his turn. Again the archetypal connection is explicitly made clear by the narrator who comments that the old man’s name ‘was likewise Finn MacCoul’s, the great hero of the noble Fians, whose marvellous exploits were this storyteller’s province in learning and art’ (SD, p. 538). This symbolic duality in characterisation is found in other characters, if not so pointedly as in the representation of the young Finn. His mother Catrine symbolises the people’s fear of the sea and their continuing rootedness in the land despite their new life on the coast, although in the course of the action she learns to put her fear behind her and move forward in her personal life. Kirsty, the old woman who shelters Catrine when she flees northwards from the tragedy of her husband’s capture by the press gang, has something in her of the ancient wisdom of Dark Mairi of Butcher’s Broom. The characterisation of Roddie, who provides a counterpart to Catrine in his commitment to the

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new life of the sea, also provides an implicit link with the earlier historical novels: in his energetic leadership and capacity for decision-taking he fulfils the Druid Aniel’s vision of the Celtic people of the future being led by those who, like the Norsemen who had conquered the Ravens, could ‘make their own decisions’ (SC, p. 357). It is significant that Roddie himself would appear to be of Viking ancestry. He is described as ‘one of the old Vikings’ (SD, p. 281), and one old man musing on his activities ‘had the sort of feeling that he had come himself up out of the sea like – like one sent to deliver us’ (SD, p. 85). It is clear therefore that Gunn wishes this character, like Finn, to whom he acts as a surrogate father, to be seen in part as archetypal and as a link with his earlier exploration of the history of the people in Sun Circle. In addition to its epic sea episodes and its symbolic as well as convincingly realistic characterisations, The Silver Darlings draws also on the animistic responses and the presentation of awareness of the power of the subconscious mind which was a significant element in the philosophical narrative of Highland River. Catrine’s fear of the sea and her concern at Tormad’s determination to try his luck as a fisher, is presented through a dream sequence in which she sees the legendary water-kelpie draw an unwary traveller and his horse into the depths of a loch: a dream made all the more powerful by its stark visual imagery of blood-red rowan berries, black horse and white frothing water, and by its anachronistic positioning in the narrative immediately after the scene in which Tormad and his inexperienced crew are captured. Her son Finn, like the boy Kenn in Highland River, is especially responsive to his natural surroundings, his awareness first aroused when, as a young child, he chases a butterfly and is led unwittingly into a wood at some distance from his croft: There was something in this wood a little bit like what there was in the butterfly, only it was very much stronger than he was, just as he was stronger than the butterfly. Now and then the wood was like a thing whose heart had stopped, watching. (SD, p. 93)

Like Kenn also Finn grows to sense a kinship with some of the places of special ancestral significance in the crofting lands as, for example, the ‘House of Peace’ grass circle where, in childish guilt and exhaustion, he falls asleep after he has captured the butterfly but finds it dead under his hand: ‘His palm was covered with silvery dust. On the broken leaf the butterfly lay dead’ (SD, p. 94). As he grows older, the House of Peace becomes a regular place of comfort and a place where he senses a communion with the people who have gone before him. His learning of the legends and the songs of his Celtic ancestors when he journeys to the Uists and to Lewis also leads to a new understanding of his mother and her people. It helps him to bring together the ancestral and the modern elements in his own psychological understanding of who he himself is, thus making him a fit person to be a leader of his community in their new life, able to look towards the future while at the same time helping the people to carry with them memories and understanding of the past, so that it would not be ‘nameless’.25

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The Silver Darlings has remained the most popular of Gunn’s novels, a book which exposes what Lukács calls ‘those vast, heroic, human potentialities which are always latently present in the people’.26 In addition to its symbolic connotations, one of its principal strengths is its historical authenticity, its artistic resurrection of a world of fishing communities, both at home and in the foreign parts to which the boats travel. And unlike the static world of the earlier narratives in relation to the intrusion of external forces, the narrative of The Silver Darlings is itself a dynamic one, with the Scottish north-east fishing coast presented as the centre of a modern world of action, not as a passive area on the margins of history. Yet if we return to the word ‘fabulous’ in the introductory sections of the narrative, we realise that it has a dual significance, that The Silver Darlings itself has become a fable, a work of legend. For its narrative does not take the fishers of the north-east coast beyond the high point of the herring industry to its subsequent decline. The sequel to the events depicted lies in Gunn’s earlier narratives of The Grey Coast and the short story ‘Down to the Sea’. And although Gunn continued to depict the strengths to be found in the natural world and the communal values of the Highland way of life, The Silver Darlings is the last novel which presents a narrative of regeneration based in the fishing activities of the north-east coast. The Drinking Well of 1946 looks to the future through the new development of sheep farming clubs, while later novels focus on what the Highlands can offer the individual in search of philosophical and psychological understanding in what Gunn saw as an increasingly destructive modern world. In an address to the Historical Association of the University of Edinburgh in 1924, MacDiarmid put forward his view that only if Scottish history can bring into its research ‘the creative spirit and imagination’ will it rid itself ‘of that perpetual Provincialism which had hitherto condemned it to structural and spiritual obsolescence’.27 Despite the fact that the success of the east-coast herring fishing did not last, thus transforming its celebration in The Silver Darlings into the matter of creative myth as well as of history, the effect of Gunn’s re-imagining of the Highlands in The Silver Darlings and in the works which preceded and followed it has in no way been itself ephemeral. As a result of his narratives of Highland regeneration published in the 1930s and early 1940s, the Romantic strongholds of Scott’s Highland chieftains and their later misty companions in the Celtic Twilight writings of Fiona Macleod were replaced in the public imagination by depictions of coastal and crofting Highland life which, while not ignoring the problems which these areas faced, brought out the strengths of a way of life which had the capacity to foster a sense of human community and relationship with the natural world, as well as encouraging the development of the individual within such an environment. The ‘message’ of these narratives is one that points to diversity and change, to engagement in the modern world, as opposed to nostalgia for a lost past. The imaginative qualities in Gunn’s fiction have therefore created a new perception of the Highlands as an essential part of the place we call Scotland, while placing that fiction itself among the revitalising literature of the modernist period.

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Notes 1. C. M. Grieve, Contemporary Scottish Studies, p. 269. 2. Neil M. Gunn, Morning Tide, p. 1. Page numbers for further quotations will be given in the text, prefaced by ‘MT’. 3. F. R. Hart and J. B. Pick, Neil M. Gunn: A Highland Life, p. 95. 4. Hart and Pick, Neil M. Gunn: A Highland Life, pp. 99, 95. 5. See Gunn’s essay ‘Belief in Ourselves’, Scots Magazine, September 1945, reprinted in Gunn, Landscape and Light, pp. 158–61. 6. Page numbers for quotations from these novels will be given in the text, prefaced by ‘SC’, ‘BB’ and ‘SD’ respectively. 7. Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel, p. 1. 8. Butterfield, The Historical Novel, p. 5. 9. Lukács, The Historical Novel, pp. 22–3. 10. Walter Scott, Waverley, p. 478. 11. Butterfield, Preface to The Historical Novel. 12. Gunn, review of Scott and Scotland, reprinted in Gunn, Landscape and Light, p. 123. 13. Hart and Pick, Neil M. Gunn: A Highland Life, p. 100. 14. Myles Dillon and Nora K. Chadwick, The Celtic Realms, p. 7. 15. To ‘wauk the cloth’ means to ‘full’ the cloth, to make it thick and felted by soaking, beating and shrinking. 16. Gunn, Butcher’s Broom, p. 357; Mackenzie, History of the Highland Clearances, p. 16. 17. Neil M. Gunn, ‘Filming The Silver Darlings’, S. M. T. Magazine (1946), pp. 21–3. 18. Gunn, Highland River, p. 2. Page numbers for further quotations will be given in the text, prefaced by ‘HR’. 19. Gunn, Atom of Delight, p. 81. Page numbers for further quotations will be given in the text, prefaced by ‘AD’. William Wordsworth, The Prelude (1805), Book I, p. 12, lines 406–12. 20. Wordsworth, The Prelude, Book I, p. 11. 21. T. S. Eliot, Collected Poems, p. 189. 22. John Keats, letter of 21 December 1817, Selected Poems and Letters, p. 40. 23. Hart and Pick, Neil M. Gunn: A Highland Life, p. 142. 24. Neil M. Gunn, The Silver Darlings, p. 14. Page numbers for further quotations will be given in the text, prefaced by ‘SD’. 25. Neil M.Gunn, Young Art and Old Hector, p. 251. 26. Lukács, The Historical Novel, p. 52. 27. MacDiarmid, ‘History and Imagination, with Special Reference to Scottish Affairs’, printed in Montrose Review, 24 October 1924, p. 5, quoted by Scott Lyall in Hugh MacDiarmid’s Poetry and Politics of Place, pp. 102, 103.

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Chapter 7

Modernism and Littérature Engagée: A Scots Quair and City Fiction

[M]en are not merely the victims, the hapless leaves storm-blown, of historic forces, but may guide if they cannot generate that storm. Lewis Grassic Gibbon (1934)

In Scotland as elsewhere on the international scene, the 1930s saw political themes enter more overtly into creative writing alongside continuing indications of modernity. A new contender in this respect was Lewis Grassic Gibbon (born James Leslie Mitchell in 1901) who took Scotland’s literary world by storm when Sunset Song, the first novel in his trilogy A Scots Quair, was published in 1932. Over the years since its publication, Sunset Song has become something of a cult book in the Scottish literary context, to a significant extent as a result of Gibbon’s presentation of his heroine, Chris Guthrie, and the psychological tug-of-war she experiences between her love of her land and her native Scots tongue, and her love of learning and the English language that opens up new horizons for her mind: So that was Chris and her reading and schooling, two Chrisses there were that fought for her heart and tormented her. You hated the land and the coarse speak of the folk and learning was brave and fine one day; and the next you’d waken with the peewits crying across the hills, deep and deep, crying in the heart of you and the smell of the earth in your face, almost you’d cry for that, the beauty of it and the sweetness of the Scottish land and skies. You saw their faces in firelight, father’s and mother’s and the neighbours’, before the lamps lit up, tired and kind, faces dear and close to you, you wanted the words they’d known and used, forgotten in the far-off youngness of their lives, Scots words to tell to your heart how they wrung it and held it, the toil of their days and unendingly their fight. And the next minute that passed from you, you were English, back to the English words so sharp and clean and true – for a while, for a while, till they slid so smooth from your throat you knew they could never say anything that was worth the saying at all.1

Sunset Song, however, is more than Gibbon’s evocative presentation of his heroine and the Mearns countryside. As Walter Allen recognised in Tradition and Dream (1964), A Scots Quair as a whole is a highly ideological work. Writing of what was called at the time ‘the proletarian novel’, Allen

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comments that ‘in the only sense in which it has meaning, in the Marxist sense, there were very few examples indeed of it in Britain, the only one that still has interest as a positive literary achievement being the trilogy of A Scots Quair’. And in acknowledgement of Gibbon’s innovative narrative voice, he finds the ‘use of Scots gives his work a folk quality, the sense of a whole people speaking through the author, almost impossible for a novelist to achieve in British English’.2 Although Grassic Gibbon is now regarded as one of the most important contributors to Scottish modernism, there is an age difference between him and the other principal writers which is significant in relation to the nature of his writing and its influences. Like Eliot, Joyce and Lawrence, MacDiarmid, Muir and Gunn were born in the late 1880s or early 1890s, and they shared with these non-Scottish colleagues the inheritance of nineteenth-century literature and ideas which informed the modernist movement alongside its contemporaneous responses to modernity. For all these writers, World War One was an event which shattered this implicit relationship between past and present and changed their view of the world as well as the course of their writing. As Edwin Muir described it in his Autobiography: The generation to which I belong has survived an age, and the part of our life which is still immobilized there is like a sentence broken off before it could be completed: the future in which it would have written its last word was snatched away and a raw new present abruptly substituted.3

Eliot’s response to such discontinuity was The Waste Land and in his critical essays an increasing preoccupation with ‘tradition’. For MacDiarmid, on the other hand, the catastrophe of the war provided the opportunity to make things new in the form of a quest for Scottish national self-determination as well as for the recovery of a distinctive, European-oriented Scottish literature. Gibbon, in contrast, did not share this motivating influence of traditions lost. He was a boy of thirteen when war broke out and it therefore impacted on his life and imagination in a less philosophical and more localised social way. Hypocrisy, jingoism, profiteering and injustice are the indictments against the war found in his Scottish fiction and essays, not the philosophical awareness of a cataclysmic break with the past found in much art of the modernist period; and not, in the particular Scottish context, the need to recover Scottish self-determination. For him, the defining event of the early century was the Russian Revolution of 1917, a political happening of immediate and formative significance for the seventeen-year-old newspaper reporter who attended the foundation meeting of the Aberdeen Soviet in 1918 and lost his professional objectivity sufficiently to become elected (temporarily) to its Council.4 In 1919 he again became involved with communist sympathisers in Glasgow when working as a journalist before joining the armed forces. Although Marxism, or Leninism, became a major theme in MacDiarmid’s poetry and his political essays in the 1930s, and he had been a socialist and a member of the Independent Labour Party for much of his youth and early

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manhood, MacDiarmid’s socialism was always interconnected with nationalism in a way that Gibbon’s was not – despite many similarities in their extravagant political pronouncements. And although both – like Edwin Muir and to some extent Neil Gunn – were autodidacts, Gibbon’s self-education came through travel abroad and voracious reading during service in the British forces as opposed to the philosophical and aesthetic reading material of Orage’s New Age. Nevertheless, in both Gibbon and MacDiarmid in particular, this unsystematic education produced an eclectic mix of influences and oppositions in their writing and a disinclination to take much account of the arguments of others. Yet at its best, it also produced an imaginative vitality which acted as a vigorous tool for regeneration. With his sudden death from peritonitis in 1935, Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s appearance on the Scottish reform stage was tragically shortlived. Yet A Scots Quair, and Scottish Scene which he co-authored with MacDiarmid in 1934, together with the Voice of Scotland series of books which he initiated with Routledge, created the foundations for a new phase of the early twentieth-century literary and ideological investigation of the condition of Scotland. Despite his commitment to revolutionary socialism as opposed to nationalism, Gibbon also brought something new and important to the national dimension of the interwar revival; and in particular to the use of Scots as the medium for a modern, and modernist, literature. Until Gibbon appeared, the revival of the language for modern literary purposes had been almost totally a poetry-based revival. Fiction had continued to be written in English, or, following the example of Walter Scott, written with an English-language narrative voice accompanied by dialogue for country-dwellers or lower-class characters in either a rural or urban dialect of Scots. Later in the century James Kelman was to insist on the right of equality of discourse for his characters, emphasising that ‘getting rid of that standard third party narrative voice is getting rid of a whole value system’.5 Such narrative freedom is, in effect, what Grassic Gibbon’s experimentation with narrative voice achieved half a century earlier. In addition, both writers have ‘foreignised’ English in order to create an illusion of narrated and spoken Scots: in Gibbon’s case the Scots speech of the north-east of the country, in Kelman’s the urban speech of Glasgow. This is a different revival of the Scots language for literary purposes from the synthetic Scots created by MacDiarmid and the more traditional revitalisations of the language undertaken by poets such as Marion Angus or William Soutar; and one which created a distinctive and flexible medium for a new fiction suited to the modern period while at the same time being rooted in Scottish everyday life. Gibbon’s short time at the forefront of Scottish literary politics has left a frustratingly small amount of primary source material relating to his perspectives on modern literature generally and, in particular, on the thinking behind his own approach to language and narrative form in A Scots Quair. What clues he has left – apart from the fiction itself – are to be found in Scottish Scene and especially in the essay ‘Literary Lights’ where

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he chides many of his fellow writers for being writers from the county of ‘Scotshire’ because of their continued use of the English language in their supposedly revolutionary work. Neil M. Gunn is therefore characterised as a ‘brilliant novelist from Scotshire’ while MacDiarmid and Lewis Spence (who went back to the classical Scots of the medieval period for his poetic influences) are seen as ‘the two solitary lights in modern Scots Literature’: with MacDiarmid bringing ‘the Scots language into print again as a herald in tabard, not the cap-and-bells clown of romantic versification’ (SSc, p. 204). Then, in what is probably the most intriguing section of the ‘Literary Lights’ essay, Gibbon turns to his own recent work, speaking of himself in the third person: The technique of Lewis Grassic Gibbon in his trilogy A Scots Quair – of which only Parts I and II, Sunset Song and Cloud Howe, have yet been published – is to mould the English language into the rhythms and cadences of Scots spoken speech, and to inject into the English vocabulary such minimum number of words from Braid Scots as that remodelling requires. His scene so far has been a comparatively uncrowded and simple one – the countryside and village of modern Scotland. Whether his technique is adequate to compass and express the life of an industrialized Scots town in all its complexity is yet to be demonstrated; whether his peculiar style may not become either intolerably mannered or degenerate, in the fashion of Joyce, into the unfortunate unintelligibilities of a literary second childhood, is also in question. (SSc, p. 205)

Although it is precise in relation to how Gibbon creates the illusion of a Scots-language medium in his fiction, this passage does not say what first brought him to experiment in this way: something which remains as much of a mystery as MacDiarmid’s sudden turning to Scots from his previous insistence on the English language. Gibbon certainly knew MacDiarmid’s A Drunk Man and had met MacDiarmid himself in London ‘when we tried to form a section of the Revolutionary writers of the world: He had just finished writing the “Second Hymn to Lenin” [1932]’;6 and his knowledgeable commentary on the various contributors to the literary revival in ‘Literary Lights’ suggests that he had been closely following the development of the movement after leaving the forces and settling in the south of England. So far as narrative form as opposed to language is concerned, ‘Literary Lights’ also points, although more briefly, to the experimentation of Proust, Joyce and Woolf, with its comments that although in the past ‘a Scots Joyce, a Scots Proust’ may have been overlooked, the future may well produce a ‘Scots James Joyce’ who will ‘electrify’ the Scottish literary scene or a ‘Scots Virginia Woolf’ who will ‘astound it’ (SSc, pp. 195, 197). Such hints, as well as the fear expressed – ironically or otherwise – of a descent into the ‘unintelligibilities’ of Finnegan’s Wake)7 point to a deliberate and informed experiment in relation to the modernist prose and narrative form of the Quair: such as is found in ‘Ploughing’, the opening chapter of the main narrative of Sunset Song. Here there is a mixture of the oral and the literary as Chris brings her

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story and the story of her ‘folk’ to us through her memories of the past happenings which have brought her to her present situation: a flowing of the past into the present and thus an interweaving and interconnecting of these time-states and the actions within them. All our senses are brought into play as we read – or better still read aloud and listen – while the intensity of the colours described evokes a painted Fauve landscape: Below and around where Chris Guthrie lay the June moors whispered and rustled and shook their cloaks, yellow with broom and powdered faintly with purple, that was the heather but not the full passion of its colour yet. And in the east against the cobalt blue of the sky lay the shimmer of the North Sea, that was by Bervie. (SS, p. 25)

The countryside where the wind ‘went dandering up the sleeping Grampians [and] the rushes pecked and quivered about the loch when its hand was upon them’ is characterised with a vibrancy that throbs with life, while the everyday and the erotic mingle in the imagery of the parks (fields) which lie like some mythical earth goddess ‘fair parched, sucked dry, the red clay of Blawearie gaping open for the rain that seemed never-coming’. Scots words and phrases such as ‘dandering’, ‘fair-parched’, ‘biggings’ contribute to its linguistic distinctiveness. Then, unexpectedly, there is an intrusion in the form of the motor-cars which went ‘shooming’ through the dusty roads ‘like kettles under steam’ and in the process nearly knocked down the young son of the socialist farmer Chae Strachan – a clever, and at this early point almost unnoticed, narrative detail which points imagistically towards the technology which is beginning to destabilise the traditional way of life in the countryside and which will ultimately, in the form of World War One and its armaments, hasten the final disintegration of the community (SS, p. 26). In his introduction to the third book of the trilogy, Grey Granite, Thomas Crawford makes the perceptive comment that Gibbon’s approach in the book is ‘a method of thinking about contemporary morals and politics in aesthetic terms’ – and most importantly, ‘thinking by means of the images we call characters’.8 This comment is, however, applicable to A Scots Quair from its beginning in Sunset Song, first of all in the small incident of the ‘shooming’ motor-car, and then when the following narrative moves freely and anachronistically to the youth of Chris’s mother: beginning with the voice of Chris remembering her mother, then modulating into the voice of the mother herself remembering her girlhood, and retelling this to her daughter: ‘Oh, Chris, my lass, there are better things than your books or studies or loving or bedding, there’s the countryside your own, you its, in the days when you’re neither bairn nor woman’ (SS, p. 27). This ‘remembering’ which, as in Proust’s À La Recherche du Temps Perdu, seems to bring the past into the immediacy of the present, also portrays the strong sexual attraction between Jean Murdoch and John Guthrie, who carries off the prize at the ploughing competition and at the same time carries off the young woman who will become his wife:

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Jump up if you like. And she cried back I like fine! And caught the horse by its mane and swung herself there till Guthrie’s hand caught her and set her steady on the back of the beast. So out from the ploughing match at Pittodrie the two of them rode together, Jean sitting upon the hair of her, gold it was and so long, and laughing up into the dour, keen face that was Guthrie’s. (SS, p. 28)

This capturing of such early delight in each other is important when later their relationship becomes warped and eventually destroyed in the struggle with the unrewarding land and repeated pregnancies: a narrative which demonstrates through showing, as opposed to telling, how human lives are determined not only by events beyond their control, but also by an unwillingness to question dominant ideologies and social conditioning. Guthrie, for example, refuses to question his Old Testament religion: ‘We’ll have what God in His mercy may send to us, woman. See you to that’, is his response to his wife’s pleading that four of a family is enough. He beats his young son for calling his new horse ‘Jehovah’ – a name that to the child captures the wonder the horse holds for him, but to the father can only be blasphemous. After his wife’s suicide he attempts to persuade Chris that it is her duty to come to his bed. Yet such a monstrous presentation is modified to some extent by our remembering that earlier youthful depiction at the ploughing which remains in the mind as a symbol of what might have been and causes us to think about why Guthrie has become the man we see later. This depiction has its complement in Gibbon’s essay ‘The Land’ in which he talks of the cyclical struggle of marriage and breeding and endless work: [I]t was a perfect Spenglerian cycle. Yet it was waste effort: it was as foolish as the plod of an ass in a treadmill, innumerable generations of asses. If the clumsy fumblements of contraception have done no more than break the wheel and play of that ancient cycle they have done much. (SSc, p. 303)

Gibbon followed Marx in believing that although history was deterministic, carrying human beings along with it, human beings had themselves the power to shape if not to alter that historical process. In the essay ‘Religion’, for example, he stresses that ‘men are not merely the victims, the hapless leaves storm-blown, of historic forces, but may guide if they cannot generate that storm’ (SSc, p. 326). In the course of Sunset Song, therefore, we have the drama of those who attempt to guide or shape events opposed by those who refuse to question but hold to the old ways of thinking, either dogmatically or apathetically. Chris, for example, is notable for making choices where she can with regard to her life: choosing to stay on the land, asking Ewan to share the farm with her, learning how to control her fertility so that she does not go on her mother’s road, keeping her self-possession in the bleak days of the ironically named ‘harvest’ chapter at the end of the novel. The ‘Song’ of Sunset Song is therefore both the story of a young girl growing to full womanhood who learns to take charge of her own life where she can, and also the ‘end of an auld sang’ in relation to a way of life that is increasingly seen as no longer

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viable. Gibbon’s ideological message would appear to be that although the historical process was working against that farming tradition, it did not need to work to its end as harshly and exploitatively as it did. The human beings involved could have responded to the events that came upon them in a way that would have shaped their lives less cruelly. In Gunn’s Butcher’s Broom, external economic and political forces gave impetus to the clearance policy which ultimately and painfully brought the people of the remote Riasgan glen into the modern world. Similarly in Sunset Song it is the external factor of the outbreak of war in Europe which accelerates the death of the farming traditions of Kinraddie. Gibbon’s presentation of the responses of the people to this unexpected and little understood disaster includes the hypocrisy, self-seeking, and susceptibility to media and religious propaganda which is characteristic of many accounts of the home-front in the Great War, including the accounts of soldiers who in the end found the harsh reality of the trenches more bearable than the complacent self-delusion of many of the civilians they met when on leave. In Gibbon’s Kinraddie, Chris and Long Rob of the Mill are considered German sympathisers because they question the accuracy of anti-German reports and other propaganda, including that in the minister’s sermons. Pressure to enlist is strong, with Chae Strachan, the community’s self-proclaimed socialist, rushing off to the war in a burst of emotional fervour which patterns his author’s comment about H. G. Wells: ‘That unique internationalist, Mr H. G. Wells, erupted like an urgent geyser – “every sword drawn against Germany is a sword drawn for peace!”’ (SSc, p. 102). Chris’s husband Ewan, a practical farm worker as opposed to a questioning thinker, succumbs to the pressure to enlist. He is sent to France where he is eventually shot as a deserter – although in our own time he would most probably be recognised as suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. All the horror of the war is brought to the reader through the responses of the Kinraddie community; and it is brought with the realisation that, although the outbreak of war itself is beyond their control, in those parts of their lives where they do have the opportunity to question and evaluate and make an informed choice, most of them do not choose to do so. Instead, they absorb the propaganda put out by the newspapers and churches and in some cases exercise choice in order to make a profit from the prevailing conditions. In this way, the trees that shelter the farming lands from the harsh northern winters are cut down for short-term gain, thus hastening the end of sustainable farming after the war. Sunset Song ends in tragedy, but Gibbon leaves a thread of hope for his principal character at least in the intimation of a forthcoming marriage between Chris and the new Christian Socialist minister Robert Colquhoun who survived a gas attack in the war and has now returned with a mission to build a better life for the broken communities of his country: a mission which will become the ideological concern of the second book of the Quair. Cloud Howe is probably the least known book of the trilogy. It is set in a village still partly rural but becoming increasingly industrialised where the

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community is fragmented as a result of conflict between the old residents and new mill-workers, and these workers are often divided among themselves, as we see in the episode of the General Strike which marks a turning point in the narrative. Chris’s previous place at the centre of the action has to a large extent been taken by Robert in his role as minister and in his involvement with the workers. While each chapter of the book begins, as in Sunset Song, with Chris on high ground above the village returning in her memory to the events which have led up to this particular moment in time, thus bringing past and present into interaction with each other, she can no longer be the principal focaliser or the voice of the community as she was in the previous book. Nevertheless, Chris’s perspective is still an important element in the ideological discourse in the way that it conditions the reader’s understanding and assessment of the events narrated. Given Gibbon’s tirades against religion both in Sunset Song and his later Scottish Scene essays, a minister of religion may well appear a strange choice as the ‘hero’ of this second novel. In the earlier book, religion is caricatured mercilessly with Kinraddie’s gluttonous, lecherous and self-seeking minister displaying most of the seven deadly sins in addition to being both pompous and ludicrous. Yet the religion he preaches on a Sunday is the Old Testament creed that has warped and conditioned unthinking believers such as John Guthrie. In Cloud Howe, on the other hand, Gibbon at first appears to be giving religion in the form of Christian Socialism a second chance, and his depiction of Robert Colquhoun is sympathetic and rounded, if ultimately tragic. Yet although Robert is depicted as genuinely attempting to better the lives of the working people and to take his place alongside them against unjust authority, he is also seen to be incapable of questioning his religious beliefs. John Guthrie’s inflexible Jehovah may have been replaced by Robert’s humanistic Christ who as inspiring leader will bring a new existence to the earth, but the potential weaknesses in Robert’s faith are exposed both through Chris’s questioning perspective and, metaphorically, through the author’s judicious placing of his imagistic detail. At the end of the early ‘Cirrus’ chapter, for example, Chris, unable to sleep, has climbed up the hillside in the early hours of the morning from where she watches dawn break over the countryside and mill town: ‘Pale and so pale: but now it was flushed, barred sudden with red and corona’ed with red, as though they were there, the folk who had died, and the sun came washed from the sea of their blood, the million Christs who had died in France, as once she had heard Robert preach in a sermon.’ She thinks uncertainly about Robert’s ‘dream’ – ‘Was there a new time coming to the earth, when nowhere a bairn would cry in the night, or a woman go bowed as her mother had done, or a man turn into a tormented beast, as her father, or into a bullet-torn corpse, as had Ewan?’ And as she muses, ‘Suddenly, far down and beyond the toun there came a screech as the morning grew, a screech like an hungered beast in pain. The hooters were blowing in the Segget Mills’ (CH, p. 34). The sound of ‘screech’ with its hard consonants and tight, narrow ‘ee vowel’, and the accompanying

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image of ‘an hungered beast in pain’ bring to mind Dickens’s Coketown with the ‘melancholy mad elephants’ of its factories and the hooters which imprison the workers within its ‘factory-time’.9 The placing of such factory images alongside Chris’s uncertainty suggests that Robert’s dream may well turn out to be as illusory as the hopes of the Coketown workers. Whereas the chapters of Sunset Song are related metaphorically and in actuality to the seasons of the farming year, Cloud Howe is structured metaphorically through differing cloud formations. The new hopes of the first chapter are represented by the high, wispy cirrus cloud pattern, while stratus, a lower, more spreading cloud form, characterises the chapter which depicts the failure of the General Strike. This chapter is the political centre of Cloud Howe as well as the turning point in the marriage of Chris and Robert where she loses their unborn child and he his Christian Socialist beliefs as a result of the events leading up to the strike and its outcome. There are interesting similarities here between Gibbon’s fictional portrayal of the strike and MacDiarmid’s ‘Ballad of the Crucified Rose’, interpolated into A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle immediately after the strike in the summer of 1926. Robert’s dream of ‘Man made free at last, Man who is God, Man splendid again’ is like the miraculous flowering of the previously barren thistle where the poem’s speaker ‘saw a rose come loupin’ oot/Frae a camsteerie [unmanageable] plant’. And just as the Drunk Man’s rose ‘grew till a’ the buss/Was hidden its flame’, so Cloud Howe’s strikers grow in courage and decide that the time has come to take charge of their lives in protesting against their working conditions. The dream of revolutionary socialists worldwide seems about to be fulfilled as the rose ‘grew until it seemed/the haill braid earth had turned/A reid reid rose that in the lift/Like a ball o’ fire burned’. Then in both fictional and poetry accounts, the optimism is squashed as quickly as it had arisen: ‘Syne the rose shrivelled suddenly/As a balloon is burst’. Gibbon’s strikers do not trust each other and they do not entirely trust Robert who, in their thinking, should be one of their class enemies, not a supporter. The leaders capitulate, leaving the workers to survive as best they can: ‘The vices that defeat the dream/Are in the plant itsel’,/And till they’re purged its virtues maun/In pain and misery dwell.’10 There are no lasting ideological positives in this book. All political parties are found wanting, including nationalists and socialists; religion is again seen as providing no answers to earthly problems and human beings no more able to remove their ‘mind-forg’d manacles’11 than they were in Sunset Song where at least there was a residual community warmth and helpfulness. What remains constant is the self-possession of Chris, her sense of belonging to the natural world and to the people who had gone before her in history; her refusal to give her unthinking loyalty to any man-made creed. Yet, as previously in Sunset Song, Gibbon leaves open a way forward to be interrogated in the final book. Although after the failure of the strike and the loss of Chris’s child, Robert has withdrawn from his militant Christian Socialist position, he is shocked out of his retreat by news of a homeless family who have taken

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refuge in a pigsty where rats have gnawed their baby. Unwell himself as a result of the gassing he suffered in the war, he preaches what is to be his final sermon in Segget: not a sermon based on his earlier militant Christianity, on ‘the dream of Christ’, but on the need for the people themselves to seek a new creed: ‘not that sad vision that leaves hunger unfed, the wail of children in unending dark, the cry of human flesh eaten by beasts. . . . But a stark, sure creed that will cut like a knife, a surgeon’s knife through the doubt and disease’. Robert suffers a haemorrhage and dies before he has completely finished: ‘all the pages of the Bible below she saw soaked in the stream of blood from his lips’ (CH, pp. 210, 211). The plea in his sermon points forward to the final book and to the impersonal rationality of Chris’s son Ewan who has been characterised throughout Cloud Howe in terms of flint and granite and who takes up work in a city metal foundry after his stepfather’s death. It is therefore Ewan who carries the narrative into the city context of Grey Granite where the new creed to be interrogated is the hard, impersonal ideology of Marxism. In contrast to the separation of books one and two by epilogue and prologue, the second book runs uninterruptedly into book three, a structural device which emphasises the connectedness of their ideological discourse. Gibbon expressed concern in ‘Literary Lights’ that he might not be able to transfer his new narrative medium from the rural – or partially rural as in Cloud Howe – to the city scene. Yet, while his approach in Grey Granite is of necessity different in several respects from that of the previous books, it is recognisably both a continuation and a development of their formal methodologies. The narrative opens, as previously, with Chris’s voice and perspective, and her memories of the events which have brought her to this point in time. In this last book, however, we find her not by the ancient standing stones on the land above Kinraddie, nor on the hillside ruins of Kames Castle in Segget, but pausing for breath on the steep steps which lead up to her lodgings in the anonymous city of Duncairn – an amalgam, perhaps, of Aberdeen and Dundee, but a place which the author characterises ironically as ‘the city which the inhabitants of the Mearns (not foreseeing my requirements in completing my trilogy) have hitherto failed to build’.12 The new environment is communicated immediately – the quicker pulse of the city, its damp air, the swish of traffic in the concealing fogginess. In Duncairn there is the impersonality of city streets, the sense of a variety of classes with separate interests and occupations, of areas of the city outwith each other’s reach and experience. Although the fictional setting has expanded, it has also fragmented, with no possibility of even the limited cohesion found in Segget. And despite the modernist features still present in Gibbon’s narrative style, this is not the modernist city of alienated yet fascinated intellectuals and artists familiar from the Paris, Vienna or London of the early years of the century; not even the philosophically and psychologically ‘unreal city’ of Eliot’s The Waste Land. This is a proletarian city of all too real slums and class warfare, of unemployment, economic deprivation and protest against social injustice. In such a context it is not possible for there to be a dominant

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perspective on the events remembered and narrated; a focaliser who can be both an individual and at the same time a representative voice, as Chris was in Sunset Song and to a more limited extent in Cloud Howe. Nor is it possible to suggest a common language. The speech of the city dwellers of Duncairn is as stratified as their disparate class and educational situations. Chris, for example, does not understand the word ‘keelie’ used by her son in relation to his fellow apprentices in the metal factory. Nor does she understand his dismissive tone: ‘What’s a keelie, Ewan? Your father was a ploughman afore we were wed, and I was a quean in a crofter’s kitchen’. ‘A ploughman’s not a keelie’, he replies. Industrialisation seems to have brought with it a change both in the workers’ self-perception and their perception of each other, as well as in the demands made on them by the bosses (GG, p. 26). Gibbon’s stylistic achievement in this last book is his success in creating such a fragmented social scene so convincingly while at the same time communicating through an adapted stream of consciousness narrative the shared experiences of groups such as the slum-dwellers of Paldy Parish or the men shamed into the unemployment march on the town hall. Paldy Parish is brought to the reader without any narrated introduction, much as Chris’s voice led us into the ‘Ploughing’ section of Sunset Song. In Grey Granite, however, the sense impressions communicated are of a June night where: a wave of heat [. . .] lifted the guffs from the half-choked drains and flung them in under the broken doors down through the courts to simmer and stew, a body could hardly bear the touch of his sark as he lay in bed by his wife of a night, the weans would whimper and move and scratch on the shake-down over under the window – stewing in the front of a half-open furnace. And a man would get up in a Paldy tenement and go along the passage to the WC, blasted thing crowded, served a score of folk, not decent, by God what a country to live in. On the Broo since the War and five kids to keep, eating off your head – och, why did you live? – never a minute of quiet to yourself, nothing but the girnings of the wife for more silver, the kids half-barefoot, half-fed, oh hell. (GG, p. 19)

Then the focalisation changes, as the individual yet at the same time representative voice and thoughts of the man give way to the woman’s consciousness as she lies thinking about the morning – ‘what to give the weans, what to give the man, fed he must be ere he took to the streets to look for that weary job he’d not find’; and so her thoughts run on and on: ‘Hardly believe it was him you had wed, that had been a gey bit spark in his time, hearty and bonny, liked you well; and had hit you last night, the bloody brute coming drunk from the pub’. And as her thoughts turn to her worries about her grown-up daughter, so the stream of consciousness then moves to the daughter and her desperate wish not to follow on her parents’ road: ‘If they couldn’t afford to bring up their weans decent why did father and mother have them? [. . .] and what you brought home they thought should be theirs, every meck that you made, nothing for yourself, stew in the reek of the Cowgate’s drains till you died and were buried and stank to match’ (GG, pp. 19–20). The terrible irony

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is, as we find out at a later stage of the book, that in spite of her determination not to follow her parents, the daughter herself becomes pregnant by a boyfriend and so what Gibbon called the ‘Spenglerian cycle’ (SSc, p. 303) begins all over again. There seems no possibility of escape. Stream of consciousness is also the methodology in the presentation of the march of the unemployed men to the town hall. Here the principal focaliser is an anonymous man on the march but his perspective is at the same time a group perspective for the class of unemployed workers to which he belongs: ‘And a man’d look shamefaced at another childe, and smoke his pipe and never let on till Big Jim himself came habbering along, crying you out by your Christian name, and you couldn’t well do anything else but join’ (GG, p. 53). Within his own stream of thought is contained also the perspective of his wife, and of all wives, who fear the results of protest activity – ‘And a man just waved at her, off-hand-like, seeing her feared face peeking at him’ (GG, p. 53). And as he marches and lets his thoughts roam where they will, the narrative is bringing us simultaneously the noises and visual sensations of the street scene: the ‘clatter of boots on the calsay stones’, the drum booming out, the singing; and the sun ‘shining through drifts of rain, shining you saw it fall on the roofs in long, wavering lines and floodings of rain, queer you’d never seen it look bonny as that’. And as he marches on, his mood changes: ‘you all felt kittled up and high [. . .] you forgot the wife, that you hadn’t a meck, the hunger and dirt, you’d alter that. They couldn’t deny you, you and the rest of the Broo folk here, the right to lay bare your grievances’ (GG, p. 54). Then memories of his past army service come flooding into his present thoughts: the rain and stink and that first queer time your feet slipped in a soss of blood and guts, going up to the front at Ypres – Christ, long syne that, you’d not thought then to come to this, to come to the wife with the face she had now, and the weans – by God, you would see about things! Communionists like Big Jim might blether damned stite but they tried to win you your rights for you. (GG, pp. 54–5)

And finally, there is the slowing of the march, the disbelief when it is turned away from the Town Hall, the anger – ‘the queerest-like sound, you stared at your mates, a thing like a growl, low and savage, the same in your throat. And then you were thrusting forward like others – Never mind the Bulgars, they can’t stop our march! [. . .] Trease crying Back! Take care! Keep the line! [. . .] and next minute the horses were pelting upon you hell for leather, oh Christ, they couldn’t – ’ (GG, p. 56). This march to the town hall and its violent outcome is one of the happenings that bring Ewan into the revolutionary struggle and subsequently results in his mother’s entering into a third – and misguided – marriage in the attempt to save him from imprisonment. Gibbon’s success here lies in the way his narrative methodology and the more complex and explicitly ideological argument of the book communicate a sense of ‘living history’. As the Communist leader Trease comments after an attempted factory strike has failed and Ewan is recuperating from being beaten up by the police: ‘A hell of

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a thing to be History, Ewan!’; and Ewan himself ruminates: ‘A hell of a thing to be History! – not a student, a historian, a tinkling reformer, but LIVING HISTORY ONESELF, being it, making it, eyes for the eyeless, hands for the maimed! – ’ (GG, pp. 147–8). And it is indeed history in the making that Gibbon is dealing with in this proletarian yet modernist narrative. Yet Ewan, as portrayed by Gibbon, is an enigmatic character. He takes to the revolutionary struggle with a fervour which could be seen to match his stepfather’s earlier religious fervour; yet he has none of Robert’s human compassion for the individual person, being all too able to cast aside those (such as the teacher Ellen) who cannot give his level of commitment to the cause. Ewan’s characterisation by Gibbon calls to mind MacDiarmid’s ‘First Hymn to Lenin’ with its simplistic lines: ‘What maitters’t wha we kill/To lessen that foulest murder that deprives/Maist men o’ real lives?’13 Nor is it easy to gauge the author’s attitude towards his ‘hero’. Ewan may be at the heart of the revolutionary struggle but his presentation does not encourage belief that the resolution of that struggle and its social ills lies with his impersonal ideology. His character seems willed, as if his author had decided that he needed a protagonist who would be free from the human emotions and indecisions which so often get in the way of taking pragmatic action, a protagonist who would put the fight for a new order of society before individual needs. Despite her relative marginalisation in this novel, Chris’s perspective (in her new role as boarding-house keeper) is still important in the communication of inter-class relationships, while her memories of her past life in both Kinraddie and Segget provide a foil to the history-less city of Duncairn. As in Cloud Howe with regard to Robert’s dream, her perspective here is important in any attempt to evaluate Ewan’s commitment to the new Marxist religion as well as his author’s commitment to Ewan. As they sit together before her son leaves on the Hunger March south, Chris tells him she was thinking ‘Of Robert and this faith of yours. The world’s sought faiths for thousands of years and found only death or unease in them. Yours is just another dark cloud to me – or a great rock you’re trying to push up a hill’ (GG, p. 202). Ewan’s response, brought to us through Chris’s remembering of their conversation, is that ‘it was the rock was pushing him; and [he] sat dreaming again, who had called Robert dreamer’. His final words are enigmatic and have encouraged many diverse interpretations of the ending of this book and of Gibbon’s objective in it. He tells Chris: ‘There will always be you and I, I think, Mother. It’s the old fight that maybe will never have a finish, whatever the names we give to it – the fight in the end between FREEDOM and GOD’ (GG, p. 202). Here Ewan appears to be recognising that his mother will give allegiance to nothing outside of herself – neither to political ideology nor to religious ideology – and this does fit with her portrayal throughout the three books of the trilogy and with the ending of Grey Granite where she returns to the croft in Echt where her parents had begun their life together. In contrast, Ewan seems to be recognising that not only has he himself found that ruthless secular ‘creed that will cut like a knife’ that his stepfather finally

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advocated, but also that behind his commitment to it, despite its impersonality, is that human need to offer unwavering faith that would appear to be a feature of all religions, even secular ones. Gibbon’s early death precluded any further authorial comment on the ideological context of this last book, and so its characterisations, thematic objectives and its ending must remain open and speculative – perhaps the only appropriate ending for a novel that is ‘living history’.

Writing the City Grey Granite, described by the editor of the Left Review as ‘the best novel written this side of the Atlantic since Hardy stopped writing’,14 is stylistically the most innovative city novel of the interwar revival, interweaving the individual yet representative voices of the various classes of Gibbon’s imagined city with an interrogation of the socialist revolutionary politics being pursued at its time of writing. Yet the economic and political conditions of the 1930s produced a number of outstanding fictional depictions of the actual city of Glasgow, some from unexpected sources. Neil M. Gunn’s Wild Geese Overhead (1939) and The Serpent (1941) both contain significant sections set in Glasgow: in the latter, set at the turn of the century, the city is where its young Highland protagonist learns about socialism and atheism, an education which helps him to deconstruct the social and religious conditioning of his own upbringing as well as the passivity and holding to traditions no longer life-giving which keep his community from moving forward. The ideological passages of Wild Geese take their impulse from the living conditions in the slums and argue out the case for an individual, personalised response to the alleviation of the distress of the slum-dwellers as opposed to the impersonal and ideological (but also effective) response of communist workers in the city. Edwin Muir also is on the whole philosophical as opposed to actively revolutionary in his response to the city conditions he presents in his Scottish Journey (1935), the autobiographical The Story and the Fable (1940) and his novel Poor Tom (1932). Yet his image of Glasgow – both the remembered Glasgow of his youth and that of the depressed 1930s – is compelling in its eloquence as is his evocation of a May Day socialist procession which captures the emotional as well as the ideological solidarity among the marchers: Everything was transfigured: the statues in George Square standing in the sky and fraternally watching them, the vacant buildings, the empty warehouses which they passed when presently they turned into Glassford Street, the rising and falling shoulders, even the pot-bellied, middle-aged man by his side; for all distinction had been lost, all substance transmuted in this transmutation of everything into rhythmical motion and sound. He was not now an isolated human being walking with other isolated human beings from a definite place to a definite place, but part of a perfect rhythm which had arisen, he did not know how.15

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The most ambitious of these 1930s novels, and the one that comes closest to Grassic Gibbon’s Grey Granite in its overt ideological argument and the distinctiveness of its narrative method, is James Barke’s Major Operation, published in 1936. Barke wrote to Gibbon on the publication of Sunset Song that he had read the book ‘with greater and richer and fuller and deeper enjoyment than anything I can ever remember reading – with the possible exception of the Communist Manifesto – on a different plane. And I’d be a mean scrunt if I didn’t tell you so.’16 Like Gibbon, Barke was a young man in the early 1930s (born in 1905 to Gibbon’s 1901) and their shared flamboyant mode of expression and revolutionary socialist politics quickly led to them becoming friends. Gibbon dedicated Grey Granite to Hugh MacDiarmid, the poet of First Hymn to Lenin. Major Operation begins with an epigraph from Friedrich Engels: The forces operating in society work exactly like the forces operating in Nature: blindly, violently, destructively, so long as we do not understand them and fail to take them into account.17

This quotation is reminiscent of Gibbon’s argument about historic forces in the essay ‘Religion’, and his showing throughout the trilogy the effects of the failure to take account of them. Barke’s fictional plotting, however, is more politically didactic and unequivocal than the exploration of ideologies in Grey Granite, with a dialectical methodology which brings the extremes of living hard up against each. Yet such deterministic plotting is not destructive of narrative interest and suspense, but seems to create new insights out of this being ‘whaur extremes meet’. The narrative is thus divided into four principal sections, which are themselves subdivided into a series of short episodes or ‘mini-chapters’ with ironically evocative titles (for example, ‘The Hiker by the Bonnie Banks’; ‘Rhapsody of Fish and Chips’; ‘Wife Yesterday: Class Enemy To-Day’) which alternate between the lives of the working and middle classes of the city. After the visually atmospheric scene-setting of the first principal section, ‘Second City Lullaby (The Two Worlds)’, the remaining three sections chart the rise of the shipyard worker Jock MacKelvie to a foremost position among the revolutionary socialists protesting against unemployment in the city; and the contrary decline and fall of the capitalist George Anderson whose business (and with it his marriage) is destroyed by the economic depression, but who is ultimately converted to the cause of the workers. The narrative ends with Anderson’s funeral after he has been killed while attempting to protect MacKelvie from the hooves of a charging police horse during an unemployment demonstration. Described briefly as above, such a scenario might appear over-idealised, romanticised even, especially when one adds that the foundations for Anderson’s conversion are laid in Glasgow’s Eastern Infirmary where both men find themselves in adjacent beds as a result of accidents during a previous demonstration. Yet the solidarity among the workers and the deprivations in their lives are convincingly captured, as are the ideological arguments

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put forward by MacKelvie. Barke’s irony, often satire, is directed towards the upper and middle business classes, and what is presented as the trivial extravagance of their lives, together with their lack of concern and respect for those beneath them. There is little if any narrative irony in the presentation of the workers and slum-dwellers, but neither are they given heroic status (as, for example, in William McIlvanney’s later Docherty of 1975). MacKelvie and his socialist wife Jess are depicted as positive role models, with MacKelvie much respected by his workmates. Yet his is a rounded characterisation, and although sympathetically presented in relation to their living conditions, the weaknesses of the workers themselves are not ignored. Unlike Gibbon’s adapted stream of consciousness methodology in Grey Granite, Barke’s narrative is communicated more traditionally through an omniscient narrator. Yet the pace of his narrative is swift, with perspectives moving between characters and a lively exchange of direct as opposed to reported speech, together with an interior style of narration in the more reflective passages.18 Although his language is ‘Scottish-English’, the idiom is Scottish, and its spoken register is demotic in the working-class sections in particular, with the inclusion of the kind of Scots terms such as ‘wean’ or ‘the wife’ likely to be found in an urban as opposed to a rural context. Once again we find ourselves in a Paldy Parish environment, or the environment of the slum-dwellers in George Malcolm Thomson’s antagonistic Caledonia (1927); and this recurrent reminder of the conditions of the poor in the industrialised and post-industrialised city provides a powerful context for Barke’s unequivocal ideological message. Alongside this ideological plotting, the opening section of the novel in particular presents us with a city coming to terms with modernity. It begins with a spectacular visual and cinematic description of the city at sunset, ‘the Second City of the Empire on which the sun never sets’: It was an orange, blood-orange sunset and its effect was registered all over the City. In Pollockshaws, Partick: Govan and Gorbals: Dennistoun and Dalmuir. It gave a revolutionary, end-of-the-world effect to the Great Western Road, where people never think of the end of the world and dread the word revolution. (MO, p. 13)

The narrator’s voice, like a film-maker with a camera, maps the city and its districts as it follows the setting sun and the responses of the city inhabitants, before the menace in that repeated ‘orange, blood-orange’, ‘bloody garments of the dying sun’, is dowsed by the City Corporation’s lighting department: ‘switches were pulled on: and down the streets with electrical instantaneous, powerful electric globes flashed into action’ (MO, p. 16). This new feature of electric street lighting – what the narrator calls the Corporation’s robbing the sun ‘of its final dying-swan curtain’ (MO, p. 16) – is characteristic of the markers of modernity in this ‘Second City’ section. Typists are busy in offices taking dictation and answering telephone calls; businessmen in their bowler hats break their mornings with an outing to the coffee shop where talk circles desultorily around motor-cars and gardens, cricket talk in summer, rugby in winter – for these are not friends but casual

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acquaintances, brought together by their business occupations in the impersonality of the city. Newspapers are important for their economic news, and especially for their weather forecasts as the weekend approaches. In the summer heatwave which opens the novel, all who can afford it plan to desert the city at the weekend: on daytrips by bus from Cathedral Street, on sails ‘doon the water’ on the pleasure steamers from the Broomielaw to the Clyde resorts of Dunoon and Rothesay; by car to Loch Lomondside for the more affluent. Ice-cream sellers abound, the department stores display their new season bathing costumes and tennis shirts; ‘only the flappers of the Second City were clad against the heat’ (MO, p. 19). For the slum-dwellers, however, there is no such relief, no excursions out of the city, only the ‘stale decayed air’ of the subway and that ‘warm, odoriferous waft of slumdom’ that features in so many of these proletarian novels and accounts of city conditions in the 1930s. As he gets off the tramcar and walks home, MacKelvie feels that he ‘did wrong to bring children into such an abomination: that he did wrong to tolerate calmly its very existence; that he should drag the place down, destroy it’. He is ‘uncomfortable, uneasy’, for ‘most days he got out of it for a spell. It was his wife and children who were continuously cooped up in it with no chance of escape. Even if he had to slave in the bottom of a dock he got a change of air. He recalled the fields on the opposite bank from the yard – a wide expanse of sunshine and green grass’ (MO, p. 72). His wife hopes they might manage to scrape together enough money to ‘get down the coast somewhere at the Fair. I suppose we’ll can stretch a sail at any rate?’ (MO, p. 78). The only immediate escape is a night at the pictures (still stuffy but at least a ‘change’) with a fish supper to follow. As in much writing of the modernist period, time is a recurring motif in the Second City, given expression here through the imagery of the motor-car. As one of the affluent citizens, George Anderson travels out of the city at the weekend in a private car. Anderson’s party – his wife, child and two married friends – is travelling not to Loch Lomond (already too popular a spot), but to Inveraray, where they will join another friend’s yacht. Their journey is communicated largely through images of time and speed, through the new language of ‘motoring-speak’: ‘took the Bowling hill at fifty-five’; ‘car take the Rest [and be Thankful hill] in top, George?’ . On Loch Lomondside, the road narrows, traffic ‘slowed by cyclists [. . .] bunched cyclists, lone cyclists’ and ‘hikers in ones, two, threes and dozens [. . .] “This hiking”, said George irritably, for he was travelling just under twenty, “is making motoring next to impossible”. “It won’t last”, said Greenhorn. “Just a passing craze”’ (MO, pp. 46, 53, 48). Their whole journey is characterised by the need ‘to slow down, brake and change gear repeatedly [. . .] as the road wound and twisted by the water’s edge’. ‘Above their heads the freshly greened trees swayed and murmured in the faint summer breeze. The loch water lapped listlessly on the fringe of small shingle’. But there is no time for such natural world distractions: ‘For wheels, like money, are made to go round: and to get There and Back is a mighty urge. Get There: Somewhere: Anywhere. And having got There: get Back’ (MO, p. 50).

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Anderson is characterised as a thoughtful, if dull and conservative man, and for him time has more anxious relevance than car-speed. Still in his thirties, he feels time is sweeping him onwards without his being able to take charge of his life, although to the outsider he might appear to be in the fortunate position of making his own time. Like many businesses in the depression, his is not performing well, but having inherited the firm, he does not know how to go about building an economic future. In contrast to Anderson’s sense of time running away with him, time for the unemployed workers, and, especially for the slum-dwellers, seems to have stopped: there is no movement in their lives, no hope of ever escaping from their unsatisfactory living conditions, only one generation taking over from another in the same unchanging life pattern. Their lives are stilled. As in Grey Granite, the unemployment marches act as catalysts in Barke’s narrative: the first one bringing Anderson and MacKelvie accidentally together and so setting in train the events which ultimately lead Anderson to come to MacKelvie’s aid in the final National Hunger March, and so to his own death: Starvelings arisen from their slumbers. Criminals of want on the march: two hundred and fifty thousand of them: a quarter of a million. Marching from every point of the city. In a waste bit of ground in Springburn the Aberdeen and Dundee contingents finished their dinner of potatoes and stew. When they took to the tram lines half the population of Springburn followed them into the City [. . .] An army with banners. And what banners! Elaborate designs of trade union branches. The Hammer and Sickle of the Communists, the white initials of the Independent Labour party. Portraits of Lenin and Marx and John MacLean [. . .] there were miles of banners, flags and slogan-boards. It was like ten May Day processions. (MO, pp. 482–3)

The narrative ends with Anderson’s funeral and MacKelvie taking his place ‘at the head of the long column of South Partick unemployed, lined up at the cemetery gates, for the march home. [. . . ] That was the end of George Anderson; but it wasn’t the end of them’ (MO, p. 495). George Blake’s The Shipbuilders (1935) and Dot Allan’s Hunger March (1934) are both less militantly ideological than the novels of Gibbon and Barke, and both are also more personalised as opposed to representative accounts of the way economic depression is affecting the lives of the working and middle classes in Glasgow. Allan’s novel uses the Hunger March as an event which results in individuals from disparate sections of the city’s population coming together in the location of the March – either by deliberate choice, or, in several cases, accidentally by reason of the disruption of the city’s transport system. The action of the book takes place in the time-frame of one day, and its plotting to some extent anticipates that of the present-day Hotel World by Ali Smith in the way an hotel located close to the startingpoint of the March becomes both a temporary refuge and a communications centre for the life-stories and perspectives of its accidental visitors. Allan’s

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eponymous Hunger March is therefore not the kind of ideological climax presented in the Hunger and Unemployment Marches of Grey Granite and Major Operation, but an event which allows a day in the lives of the characters (and through that day, the typical mode of their everyday lives) to be presented through their responses to the March and its effects upon them. Blake’s The Shipbuilders is closer in theme and presentation to the novels of Gibbon and Barke, although his plot has a national dimension as opposed to a revolutionary socialist one. The novel is distinguished by its convincing depiction of the economic disaster of the 1930s as it affects the working and capitalist classes in post-industrialised Glasgow, while, in keeping with Blake’s greater national commitment, and in contrast to Barke’s ironic perspective on Glasgow’s imperial past, it is also a moving elegy for a once great city now apparently in terminal decline. Blake offers a personalised account of that decline, with the lives of the two representative class families brought to the reader in specific detail. He uses a traditional omniscient narrator, together with some interior narration, and his methodology communicates the lives of his families in a way which leads the reader to empathise with the situations they find themselves in, while at the same time it offers a critique of their lifestyles. And once again, alongside the depiction of a city in economic trouble, we find ourselves observing a city confronting modernity – Glasgow style – in the detail of its everyday life. Blake’s representative middle-class family is that of the wealthy Pagans, shipbuilders with a long history on the Clyde. The narrative opens on the day of the launch of the Estramadura, their most recent ship: a launch spoiled for Leslie Pagan (the man principally responsible for the running of the yard, but still subject to the wishes of his elderly father) by his awareness that ‘there was not a single order on the books’.19 His Kelvinside home, as befits its wealth, is, on the surface at least, cultured in a modern way with a ‘Duncan Grant [painting] over the open fireplace’ in the ‘lounge’, and on the table ‘a copy of Ulysses in its yellow paper covers was conspicuously exposed’. Evening visitors include ‘a Scottish Orchestra man’ (Sh, pp. 25–7). Pagan’s working-class counterpart is Danny Shields, a skilled riveter at the yard, who was his batman during World War One, and for whom he has affection as well as a continuing sense of responsibility. Danny lives with his wife and three children in a room and kitchen tenement flat in Partick; yet, cramped as it is, it is no slum. Danny’s street may be ‘featureless’, squashed in between the River and the Main Road, its close smelling of ‘cats and stuffiness’, and its stairs worn and dirty, but the flat has an inside bathroom, a priceless asset among the poorer inhabitants, even if ‘dark and ventilated only through a barred window going on to the common landing’ (Sh, pp. 33, 34). The family’s pastimes involve the pub (in which Danny is a too frequent visitor), the ‘Pictures’ (mostly for his wife Agnes) and the ubiquitous ‘fitba’. Great Western Road may have been Glasgow’s answer to the Hausmann boulevards of Paris in Barke’s setting, but for Danny and his mates Dumbarton Road in a less salubrious part of the city provides a location for the working-class flâneurs:

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The tides of people flowing backwards and forwards along Dumbarton Road delighted him. It was fine to see folks out and about, he thought: lads and their lasses, decent middle-aged and elderly couples making home from the Pictures, and bold files of girls abreast, many a bonny piece among them. (Sh, p. 50)

A different crowd scene characterises the Old Firm football matches between Rangers and Celtic, as ‘the scattered procession, as it were of an order almost religious, poured itself through the mean entrance to the Subway station at Partick Cross’. Although the narrator comments that the Glasgow subway system ‘smells very strangely of age’ and that its ‘endless cables, whirling innocently over the pulleys’ appear ‘at once absurd and fascinating’ to the stranger, to Danny and his fellow football supporters ‘there was no strange spectacle here: only a means of approach to a shrine; and strongly they pushed and wrestled when at length a short train of toylike dimensions rattled out of the tunnel into the station’ (Sh, p. 98). Travel is therefore once again a recurring motif in the narrative: the subway and tramcars for the lower classes; the private motor-car, personally or chauffeur driven for the more affluent; the overnight sleeper between Glasgow and London which takes Leslie Pagan between his Kelvinside residence and the south of England where his English wife wishes the family to settle now that the collapse of the shipbuilding firm is unavoidable. As the ‘Night Scot roared across the Border’ in one of his journeys north – an image reminiscent of John Grierson’s documentary ‘Night Mail’ and Auden’s poem of the same name – Pagan’s thoughts are of the contrast between the attractive, yet alien, south where he has left his family, and the bond which holds him to this northern land: It was Scotland that streamed before his eyes; no other country could present that particular aspect [. . .] The sense of a return to a natural element grew upon him as the train entered the narrow valley of the Annan and climbed towards the watershed of Beattock. Now the hillsides closed in upon his window, and the bronze-green of them, stained with fans of fallen stones from occasional torrents and marked by a rare, wind-blown thorn, was as recognizably Scottish as a Glasgow street [. . .] But it struck him as even more fantastic that he should be on the point of deserting this land that was so inveterately his own for that shallow, foreign vale of Hampshire, with its fat kine, its enormous trees, and the clock tinkling out the quiet hours from the belfry of Dreffield Church. Here he belonged, there he could never be else but a colonist, uneasy and without foundations. (Sh, pp. 361–2)

There is in this book what one might call a kind of modernist nostalgia, a mood completely absent from the previous novels considered; and this is linked in the narrative with a presentation of ‘false consciousness’: shown negatively in relation to Pagan, idealistically and class-consciously in his former batman, now shipyard employee, Danny. At an earlier stage in the narrative, Pagan sails with the Estramadura on her trial run down the Clyde and out into the Firth, and he has a sense of participating in a ‘high tragic

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pageant of the Clyde’ as from his forward vantage point on the ship ‘yard after yard passed by, the berths empty, the grass growing about the sinking keel-blocks’. Like a litany, or a roll-call for the fallen in the war, he counts and names the yards as they pass them: the historic place at Govan, Henderson’s of Meadowside at the mouth of the Kelvin, and the long stretch of Fairfield on the southern bank opposite. There came Stephen’s of Linthouse next, and Clydeholm facing it across the narrow, yellow ditch of the ship-channel. From thence down river the range along the northern bank was almost continuous for miles – Connell, Inglis, Blythswood and the rest: so many that he could hardly remember their order. (Sh, p. 174)

Leslie is genuinely distressed by this scene of desolation, as he is later on his final visit to the closed yard and he observes the place where ‘so many men had, honestly and with love of craft, done so much fine work [but] where now grass and docken and dandelion had the field to themselves’ (Sh, p. 367) – an image reminiscent of Gunn’s story ‘Down to the Sea’ with its similar narrative of a lost seafaring way of life. Yet Leslie himself has chosen to abandon the yard and its craftsmanship by selling up, as opposed to even trying to find another way forward for the business and the skilled men he employs; just as he has chosen – despite his protestations about being bonded with this northern land – to accept his wife’s decision that the family’s future, and especially his son’s future, should be in the warm, cultured English-speaking south, not in the cold climate and harsh accents of Glasgow. Unlike Chris Guthrie’s conscious decision to return to her rural roots at the end of Grey Granite, despite the tide of life appearing to flow in the opposite direction; and unlike Anderson’s and MacKelvie’s decision to fight against seemingly overwhelming forces in Major Operation, Blake here portrays the pain of the shipbuilder’s situation, while at the same time showing how he has pragmatically given in to the lure of an easier life, personally and financially, while persuading himself that this is inevitable but that his emotional ties to his shipbuilding past and his country are still strong. There is a similar false consciousness in his attempts to keep up the protective master and man relationship with his former batman, now an unemployed, although skilled, riveter from his yard, offering him handyman work in Hampshire where he knows he will never fit in; work which Danny refuses, although he remains admiringly grateful to the ‘Major’. And there is a similar expression of nostalgia and false consciousness in the corporate scene of the regimental dinner, where masters and men meet to celebrate the camaraderie they remember from World War One, but where it becomes clear by the end of the meeting that this remembered equality-in-adversity is largely illusory, with the masters at least glad to return to their normal lives. While Gibbon’s trilogy is clearly the most outstanding ideological and modernist proletarian fictional work of the interwar period, all of these urban novels bring something stylistically and thematically new into Scottish fiction. As with the female fiction writers considered previously, there is a

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new awareness of the modern world in these urban scenarios, a presentation of the flow of life in its variety, including a depiction of the working classes which gives them an ‘equality of dialogue’ in the way their working lives, leisure pursuits and language idiom are presented objectively as part of that varied flow of life. In an essay on Lewis Grassic Gibbon, ‘Shouting too Loudly: Leslie Mitchell, Humanism and the Art of Excess’, William K. Malcolm quotes from Max Adereth’s ‘What is “Littérature Engagée”?’, applying its definition to Gibbon’s work. For Adereth, drawing on the ideas of the French Marxist Louis Aragon, ‘“Littérature Engagée” is the application of commitment to the special field of literature’, its only requirement being ‘that the writer should take part in the struggles of the age’, that he should not be a bystander, or an escapist (a position very similar to that put forward by Muir in his Transition essays). It has ‘no special themes, styles or methods’, being ‘distinguished only by greater realism and by the author’s attitude to life’.20 All of the foregoing books are distinguished by their participation in ‘the struggles of the age’. They do not merely describe the lives of their fictional urban characters, and they certainly do not romanticise them, but are actively engaged in an objective – and realist – critique of the conditions under which they live and how these can be altered. Yet at the same time, this is not ‘socialist realist’ fiction as that terminology is usually understood, but imaginative writing which seeks to find new forms of expression for its modern themes: at its best a new form of modernist ‘littérature engagée’.

Notes 1. Gibbon, A Scots Quair, Sunset Song, p. 32. Page numbers for further quotations will be given in the text, prefaced by ‘SS’. Cloud Howe is abbreviated to ‘CH’, and Grey Granite to ‘GG’. 2. Allen, Tradition and Dream, pp. 229–30. 3. Muir, An Autobiography, p. 194. 4. Gibbon and MacDiarmid, Scottish Scene, pp. 243–4. Page numbers for further quotations will be given in text, prefaced by ‘SSc’. 5. James Kelman interviewed by Kirsty McNeill, Chapman 57 (1989), pp. 4–5. 6. Gibbon (under name of James Leslie Mitchell), ‘Grieve – Scotsman’, Free Man 2, 9 September 1933, p. 7. 7. Gibbon and MacDiarmid, Scottish Scene, p. 205. I was puzzled when I first read this comment, thinking that it must refer to Ulysses, since Finnegan’s Wake (a more appropriate reference) was not published until 1939 and Gibbon died in 1935. I have since realised that parts of Finnegan’s Wake were serialised in transition as ‘Work in Progress’ in the late 1920s and so Gibbon (like MacDiarmid, a voracious reader) would most probably have read these, thus making the reference to Finnegan’s Wake. 8. Gibbon, A Scots Quair, Introduction to Grey Granite, pp. xv–xvi. 9. Dickens, Hard Times, pp. 107, 146.

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10. MacDiarmid, A Drunk Man, in Complete Poems 1920–1976, I, pp. 119–21; Gibbon, Cloud Howe, A Scots Quair, pp. 143, 148–57. 11. William Blake, ‘London’, in Selected Poems, p. 36. 12. Gibbon, ‘Cautionary Note’ to Grey Granite, p. viii. 13. MacDiarmid, Complete Poems 1920–1976, I, p. 298. 14. Quoted by Tom Crawford in Gibbon, Grey Granite, p. ix. 15. Muir, Poor Tom, pp. 103–4. 16. Barke, typed copy of his letter to Gibbon of 12 December 1932. James Barke archive, Mitchell Library, Glasgow. 17. Barke, Major Operation, p. 6. Page numbers for further quotations will be given in the text, prefaced by ‘MO’. 18. The liveliness with which Barke uses direct speech in his narrative is confirmed by the fact that Major Operation was made into a play and became one of the most popular and often-repeated plays given by the Glasgow Unity Theatre in the 1940s. 19. Blake, The Shipbuilders, p. 10. Page numbers for further quotations will be given in the text, prefaced by ‘Sh’. 20. Malcolm, ‘Shouting Too Loudly’, pp. 79–80. Adereth, Commitment in Modern French Literature, pp. 15–51.

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Chapter 8

Poetry and Politics

‘But why were all the poets dumb?’ William Montgomerie, ‘Glasgow Street’ (1933)

In English poetry the 1930s have been seen as the political decade, with middle-class, left-wing poets such as Day Lewis, Spender and Auden celebrating the onward march of technology and taking up themes of socialist commitment including, in the later 1930s, the fight against fascism in the Spanish Civil War. Such attempts to bring politics directly into poetry were not without their critics, especially in relation to the seemingly willed nature of much of the celebratory material, and the outsider status of the middleclass poet attempting to enter into the lives of the deprived classes. Poetry as a genre does not lend itself easily to such unambivalent ‘messaging’, and in his What is Literature?, written in the aftermath of World War Two, Jean Paul Sartre went so far as to argue that by the very nature of his medium ‘the poet is forbidden to commit himself’.1 As discussed in previous chapters, the principal male Scottish modernist writers came themselves from a lower-class background (if not actually ‘deprived’ in the sense applicable to many urban working-class families in the 1930s). In addition, the literary revival movement from its beginnings was able to contain within it a modern – and modernist – concern with the remaking of artistic forms, together with an ideological concern to renew the life of the nation socially, economically and politically; and in the outstanding creative writing of the time these two aims on the whole managed to cohabit without inhibiting artistic autonomy. On the other hand, the worsening depression of the 1930s and fear of the consequences of the growth of fascism in Europe urged a more direct socialist commitment in the art work as well as in politics. As the novels of Grassic Gibbon and Barke in particular have shown, such an ideological commitment could be accommodated within an innovative and imagistic fictional form. Poets, on the other hand, seemed more equivocal. The American modernist Wallace Stevens wrote that ‘the more realistic life may be, the more it needs the stimulus of the imagination’,2 while Edwin Muir’s letters to Stephen Spender in the 1930s show his deeply-felt concern at social and political conditions, yet also his inability as poet to translate this

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directly into poetry. He wrote in 1936: ‘I find that while consciously I am a socialist, and would like to write poetry that would in some way express that fact, when I actually start to write, something else comes up; which seems to have nothing to do with socialism, or is connected with it in some way too obscure for me to detect.’3 Nor did the interwar Scottish poets seem able to tackle the subject of the city, a source of much social and economic concern. G. Robert Stange’s essay title ‘The Victorian City and the Frightened Poets’ would appear to have some relevance to the interwar Scottish situation also.4 The poet who appeared to tackle the question of poetry and politics most directly was MacDiarmid whose ‘First Hymn to Lenin’ was published in 1931, followed by the ‘Second Hymn’ in 1932, thus predating the political poetry of the so-called ‘Auden Generation’. In British Writers of the Thirties, Valentine Cunningham points to Walter Benjamin’s ‘Moscow’ essay and its endorsement of ‘the revolutionary nature of true technology’ (such as the ‘canal construction, electrification and factory building’ celebrated by many English poets), and the complementary need to ‘endorse the endeavours of the “engineers of the human soul” such as Gorki or Lenin’.5 MacDiarmid’s ‘Hymns’ can be seen as early supporters of this idea of Lenin as a revolutionary hero of the mind and soul, although the first two in particular are more thematically equivocal than their committed titles might suggest. (An additional provocative detail – apart from the connotations in the ‘Hymn’ title itself – is the dedication of the supposedly revolutionary ‘First Hymn’ to the aristocratic ‘Prince’ D. S. Mirsky; as has been seen in other contexts, MacDiarmid was no conventional revolutionary.) In A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle, Christ and Burns were brought together as exemplars of heroes whose words had been falsified by others for their own ends. Now in the ‘First Hymn to Lenin’, Lenin is brought together with Christ as one who ‘Tho’ pairtly wrang [. . .] cam’ to richt amang’s/Faur greater wrangs’. Lenin is seen here as ‘the greatest turnin’-point since him [Christ]’, and as one in a series of such turning points in human history. What is especially interesting is that Lenin is seen also as a ‘Descendant o’ the unkent Bards wha made/Sangs peerless through a’ post-anonymous days’, thus making him a symbol of the creative power of the people as seen in the anonymous folk tradition and still potentially present in the mass of the people, ‘shared by ilka man/Since time began’.6 And it is for his capacity to release that innate power in ordinary people that the poet is celebrating Lenin as hero here. MacDiarmid’s verse form in the poem fits with his democratic theme. As in the earlier A Drunk Man, his basic form is a modified ballad verse form, in this instance rhyming abcb with an additional two lines of varying length rhyming dd. Linked to a light Scots linguistic medium and a forceful but freely moving verse rhythm, this provides a flexible conversational verse form, communicating a sense of the poem’s speaker talking to Lenin, at times talking to himself, or to any supporters of their cause who might overhear the discussion. Stanza seven, however, with its angry rejection of Christ’s teaching about the need to become as little children, is seen in retrospect to act as a transitional stanza, after which the poem becomes

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more unquestioningly ‘on message’ with its infamous lines about the ‘Cheka’s horrors’: ‘What maitters’t wha we kill/To lessen that foulest murder that deprives/Maist men o’ real lives?’; and its poet’s rhetorical commitment to Lenin in ‘the flower and iron of the truth’ (CP, I, p. 298). It ends with the assertion that Lenin’s secret – ‘yours and oors’ – lies ‘in the real will that bides its time and kens/The benmaist resolve is the poo’er in which we exult’ followed by the bathetic lines: ‘Since naebody’s willingly deprived o’ the good; /And, least o’ a’, the crood!’ (CP, I, p. 299). Although this ending may be intended to refer back to the innate power of the ‘unkent Bards’ who were previously linked with the potential within ordinary people, it sits unhappily with that impetuous, unthinking willingness to go along with the Cheka’s killings for the sake of a supposedly better future for ‘maist men’.7 The weak final couplet (as often in MacDiarmid when he has painted himself into a dialectical corner) points up the implausibility of his argument and his loss of artistic control. ‘Second Hymn to Lenin’, first published by Eliot in the Criterion in July 1932, is a much more coherent and substantial work. Its theme, like the earlier stanzas of the ‘First Hymn’, is not a conventional Marxist-Leninist poem of commitment, but is ultimately a poem in praise of the power of poetry and the central role of the poet, as its opening lines proclaim: ‘Ah, Lenin, you were richt. But I’m a poet [. . .] Aimin’ at mair than you aimed at’ (CP, I, p. 323). The poem is therefore to a significant extent about the relationship of the artist to the people and the nature of art itself – ‘frae hoo deep/A life it springs – and syne hoo faur/Up frae’t it has the poo’er to leap’ (CP, I, p. 323). Formally, it is again written in a light Scots, with a conversational style that builds on an adapted ballad verse form, but it is more overtly dialogic than the earlier ‘Hymn’. The argument of the principal speaker is itself amplified by internal references to the ideas of other thinkers which then interact with his own, while this main discourse is interrupted by ballad-like interpolations, distinguished on the page by an italicised font and by their song-like sound and rhythm when read aloud. Like the speaker in the main argument, the speaker in the first ballad interpolation is characterised as a poet who argues with himself as to whether his poems are ‘spoken in the factories and fields,/In the streets o’ the toon?’; and if they are not, ‘then I’m failin’ to dae/What I ocht to ha’ dune’. As in the Great Wheel passage of A Drunk Man, this voice is itself broken in upon by another voice putting a contrasting argument: ‘“Haud on, haud on; what poet’s dune that?/Is Shakespeare read,/or Dante or Milton or Goethe, or Burns?”’ (CP, I, p. 323). Identifying the individual speaking voices – whether internal or external – is not what is important here. What matters is the creation of the sense of an interactive dialogue between voices – a kind of polyphony of claims and counter-claims – that brings the argument about poetry alive. Then, after the ballad voices come to an end, the original argument continues as before – thematically and grammatically, as if it had not been interrupted at all – about how ‘a work o’ art [. . .] s’ud be like licht in the air – [ . . .] A means o’ world locomotion,/The maist perfected and aerial o’ a’ (CP, I, pp. 323–4). In his discussion of the hero worship of Lenin among 1930s poets, Valentine Cunningham refers

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to Day Lewis’s image of Lenin: ‘his mind like an oxy-acetylene flame’; and to what he sees as MacDiarmid’s reference to Lenin as ‘a means o’ world locomotion’.8 However, as the above quotation from the ‘Second Hymn’ suggests, and the complete passage including the ballad interpolation (marked here with the omission sign) makes clear, it is the ‘work o’ art’ which is claimed to be ‘a means o’ world locomotion’, not Lenin himself. Lenin, on the other hand, is admitted to be the one whose name has at this point in time ‘gane owre the haill earth’, while the poets have been left behind: What hidie-hole o’ the vineyard d’they scart Wi’ minds like the look on a hen’s face, Morand, Joyce, Burke, and the rest That e’er wrote; me noo in like case? (CP, I, p. 324)

And again the dialogic internal argument about the status of the poet develops with the ‘Great poets’ dismissed as ‘Geniuses like a man talkin’ t’m sel’?’, with this ‘genius’ opinion then contradicted as ‘nocht but romantic rebels/Strikin’ dilettante poses’, before being drawn into a comparison with ‘Trotsky’, who is negatively likened to ‘Christ, no’ wi a croon o’ thorns/But a wreath o’ paper roses’ (CP, I, p. 324).9 After this denouncement of the current incapacity of poets, the poem returns to Lenin, ‘Barbarian saviour o’ civilization’ who by his actions has shown such poets how they should be moving forward: ‘Poetry like politics maun cut/The cackle and pursue real ends,/Unerringly as Lenin [. . .] Nae simple rhymes for silly folk,/But the haill art, as Lenin gied/Nae Marxwithoot-tears to workin’ men/But the fu’ course insteed’ (CP, I, pp. 324–5). Then, as before, this main argument is broken into by a Brechtian ballad: Oh, it’s nonsense, nonsense, nonsense, Nonsense at this time o’ day That breid-and-butter problems S’ud be in ony man’s way. (CP, I, p. 325)

The final section of the poem (both main argument and interpolations) is explicitly concerned with the role of the poet in contrast to which the ‘sphere’ of Lenin is ‘elementary and sune by/As a poet maun see’t’; and with the impersonal and disinterested nature of poetry. ‘For a poet maun see in a’thing [. . .] A subject equal to ony’; he has ‘nae choice left/Betwixt Beaverbrook, say, and God’ (CP, I, pp. 326–7). It ends with a lyric on the theme of the equality of all men and women before returning to Lenin and the importance of the poet’s role: ‘Ah, Lenin, politics is bairns’ play/To what this maun be!’ (CP, I, p. 328). As its acceptance for publication by Eliot might suggest, ‘Second Hymn to Lenin’ is a fine poem, but the theme of commitment suggested by its title is a commitment to poetry and to the autonomy of the poet’s role as opposed to that of any political ideology. The final ‘Third Hymn’ is different from both its predecessors in that it takes up the theme of Glasgow and its slums omnipresent in discursive prose and fiction writing from the late 1920s onwards, but absent from MacDiarmid’s own earlier poetry as well as from most of the new

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Scottish poetry of the interwar period. Alan Bold suggests that the poem was probably written in 1934 as part of a projected long poem to be called The Red Lion and intended as an ‘urban counterpart of A Drunk Man, dealing with the slums of Glasgow and the whole range of contemporary working life’; and he cites the poem’s topical references to Michael Roberts’s New Country anthology of 1933 and its criticisms of Ernest William Barnes’s Scientific Theory and Religion (1933) as pointers to this date. MacDiarmid’s own letter to Sydney Goodsir Smith of March 1962 says, ‘I should think 1935 would be the main date of composition’.10 Either date would place the poem’s composition close to Grassic Gibbon’s Grey Granite and his city essays in Scottish Scene, as well as the Glasgow novels of Blake and Barke, and as part of the ongoing debate about Glasgow’s slums which followed from Thomson’s Caledonia and Dewar Gibb’s The Eclipse of Scotland. Although MacDiarmid sent the poem to John Lehmann in June 1938, writing that ‘it has not yet been published anywhere’ and ‘in the hope that you may find it acceptable for New Writing’,11 the ‘Third Hymn’ was not published in its entirety until 1955 when it appeared in MacDiarmid’s Voice of Scotland magazine. It was subsequently brought together in one publication with the first two ‘Hymns’ in Three Hymns to Lenin published by Castle Wynd Printers in Edinburgh in 1957. Imagistically, its two most memorable sections are the opening with its Sargasso Sea metaphor: Glasgow is a city of the sea, but what avails In this great human Sargasso even that flair, That resolution to understand all bearings That is the essence of a seaman’s character . . . (CP, II, p. 893)

and its final invocation to the spirit of Lenin, ‘thou Fire of Freedom’, to ‘light on this city now!/Light up this city now!’ (CP, II, p. 901). In between, there is, as in the previous poems, the praise of Lenin as one of the ‘revolutionary turning-points’ in human history, with his ‘great constructive, synthesizing mind’ and the self-discipline not to be distracted by ‘siren voices’, such as ‘Culture’ which ‘lure us up this enchanting side-line and up that/When we should stay in stinking vennel and wynd [. . .] doing some honest service to mankind’ (CP, II, pp. 894, 898). As in the Glasgow poems written around the same time, the weakest parts of the ‘Third Hymn’ are those that attempt to deal with the living conditions of the poorest in the city, where an exaggerated rhetoric too often takes the place of insider knowledge or imaginative understanding (of the slums or the rest of the world): ‘The whole of Russia had no Hell like this./There is no place in all the white man’s world/So sunk in the unspeakable abyss’ (CP, II, p. 895). Neither is his presentation of the slums and their infamous slum smell helped by a rhetorical question about remembering ‘Proust’s account of a urinal’s dark-green and yellow scent’ and other such literary references at far remove from the lives of the slum-dwellers and probably from his reader’s awareness also. It is in the end the interpolated prose quotation from Bolitho’s The Cancer of Empire which brings imaginatively to the reader the horror of the slums and the varied responses of the slum-dwellers in the face of their

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undeserved degradation (CP, II, pp. 895, 896). This inability to find a satisfactory way to deal with the city in poetry is unfortunately all too characteristic of MacDiarmid’s city poems which include ‘In the Slums of Glasgow’ from the Second Hymn to Lenin collection of 1935, ‘Glasgow 1960’ published in the London Mercury in 1935, ‘Glasgow’ from Lucky Poet and ‘Reflections in a Slum’ reputedly part of the projected (but not completed) Impavidi Progrediamur of the late 1930s and first published in the Collected Poems of 1962. None of these poems is successful, with the exception of the witty little ‘Glasgow 1960’ which ironically imagines the speaker’s future return to the city in 1960 to find its obsession with football replaced by an obsession with intellectual pursuits: ‘“Special! Turkish Poet’s Abstruse New Song./Scottish Authors’ Opinions” – and, holy snakes,/I saw the edition sell like hot cakes!’ (CP, II, p. 1039). In contrast, the long poems on the social problems of the city are presented rhetorically in an inappropriate and artificially intellectual manner. ‘In the Slums of Glasgow’ is particularly offensive with its comment that ‘every one of the women there,/Irrespective of all questions of intelligence, good looks, fortune’s favour,/Can give some buck-navvy or sneak-thief the joy beyond compare [. . .] The bliss of God glorifying every squalid lair’ (CP, I, p. 564). A Drunk Man and the early Scots-language lyric ‘In the Hedgeback’ both celebrate successfully the emotional warmth and potential ‘transcendental’ nature of sexual relations between men and women, but the reference here is distasteful and patronising; especially in relation to the self-absorbed speaker’s opening statement about having ‘caught a glimpse of the seamless garment [. . .] Of high and low, of rich and poor’ and having been assisted in this philosophical search by the nature of the slums: ‘Life is more naked there, more distinct from mind’ (CP, I, p. 562). Unfortunately, MacDiarmid’s ‘committed’ poems, and especially his city poems, too often oscillate between self-indulgent philosophising and shallow attempts at commitment. Much more successful is a group of imagistic poems, some of them quite small, which deal in a metaphorical and/or philosophical way with the theme of the need to build a better and fairer world for all. Among these is ‘The Seamless Garment’ from the First Hymn to Lenin collection, a personalised conversation poem in which the speaker (clearly related to MacDiarmid himself) goes back in imagination to his home town of Langholm to speak with his cousin in the mill in order to try to bring him to an understanding of what Lenin has done for the working people through his revolutionary thinking. Written in a light Scots, this poem has been highly praised for its comparative imagery of the skilled, intricate work of the weavers at their looms and Lenin’s skill in dealing with working class life: ‘At hame wi’t a’./ His fause movements couldna been fewer,/The best weaver Earth ever saw.’ One of MacDiarmid’s poetry heroes, Rilke, is also brought in as an example of such skilled activity, praised for the way in which he made ‘a seamless garment o’ music and thought’ (CP, I, p. 312). The speaker’s aim is to persuade his mill-worker friends that they too have a part to play in learning about Lenin’s teaching so that they, like their machinery, can be ‘improved’

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and so help bring Lenin’s work to fruition. This poem weaves together the political and the aesthetic in a clever way which makes poetry as opposed to propaganda. Yet one could argue that even here there is a condescension in the argument, a kind of ‘showing off’ on the part of the educated speaker who discourses about Rilke and Lenin to the less educated mill-worker who, he acknowledges, is ‘owre thrang wi’ puirer to tak’ tent o’ it’ (too preoccupied with poverty to pay heed to it) (CP, I, p. 312). There is no such quibbling in relation to poems such as ‘Lo! A Child is Born’, ‘On the Ocean Floor’ and ‘O Ease my Spirit’ from Second Hymn to Lenin and Other Poems, and ‘Milk-Wort and Bog-Cotton’ from Scots Unbound. As can be seen throughout his poetry, MacDiarmid has a capacity to use the biblical Christ story imagistically and disinterestedly in his poetry, without the religious belief-system associated with it destroying a poem’s autonomous identity. In ‘Lo! A Child is Born’, the title creates an intertextual reference which brings the human significance of the birth of the Christ child into relationship with the human birth metaphor in the poem as a whole, with both events pointing both to the wonder of creation and to the potential within humankind: the child in the womb ‘a strategic mind already, seeking the best way/To present himself to life, and at last, resolved,/Springing into history quivering like a fish,/Dropping into the world like a ripe fruit in due time – ’. The verse form approximates to Eliot’s definition of free verse where the verse seems to be constantly approaching a particular verse form, but remaining ‘free’ from it; and although MacDiarmid’s language here is English, the sounds and images and the movement of the lines and phrases within the lines interact with each other to create a mood of expectation: ‘the smiling anxiety/That rules a home where a child is about to be born’. The poem closes with a negative comparison with the external world: ‘Who cares for its travail/And seeks to encompass it in like loving kindness and peace? [. . .] where is the Past to which Time smiling through her tears/At her new-born son, can turn crying: “I love you”?’ (CP, I, p. 548). In ‘O Ease my Spirit’, with its epigraph from Ezekiel, each of the two four-line stanzas comprises one long sentence, the rising rhythm of which slowly envelops and draws together the personal and communal thought of the poem, just as its poet envisages ‘how easily/I could put my hand gently on the whole round world/As on my sweetheart’s head and draw it to me’ (CP, I, p. 539). An even smaller English-language poem is ‘On the Ocean Floor’, its single stanza again a single sentence which ends with the evocative ‘sound and sense’ of the phrase ‘as the foraminifera die’. This poem is most often interpreted as its poet’s recognition of the contribution of the anonymous masses in society as well as the acknowledged contribution of its outstanding leaders. Yet, in accordance with the recurring theme of poetry and the poet’s role in his other ideological poems of this period, ‘the lifted waves of genius’ and ‘the lightless depths that beneath them lie’ (CP, I, p. 535) could also relate to the realisation that outstanding artistic achievement does not come out of a vacuum; there are the smaller achievements which build up and eventually create the context out of which the exceptional work of art

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can come: a meaning of some relevance to MacDiarmid as he struggled with personal and professional adversity and an indifferent Scottish public in the 1930s. The final imagistic poem here is ‘Milk-Wort and Bog-Cotton’ from Scots Unbound, which returns to the Scots-language and song-like quality of many of the early Scots lyrics. This poem was set to music by Francis George Scott, with a rising and falling melody reminiscent of pibroch, accompanied by a simple accompaniment like a ground bass – a setting which respects and leaves undistorted its own linguistic music. The poem is a love song to the earth, composed in the metaphor of human love: ‘Cwa’ een like milk-wort and bog-cotton hair!/I love you, earth, in this mood best o’ a’.’ Its imagistic pattern is a contrasting one of clear sky and shadow, light and darkness, which moves in the second stanza into the philosophical and moral context of our human world and the enigma of its similar contrasting patterning: ‘But deep surroondin’ darkness I discern/Is aye the price o’ licht. Wad licht revealed/ Naething but you, and nicht nocht else concealed’ (CP, I, p. 331). There is no ambiguity here about the poet’s deeply-felt commitment to his human world, and no ambiguity either about his poem’s artistic autonomy in its bringing together of ideological and aesthetic values. As the 1930s came to a close and conditions in Europe worsened, MacDiarmid’s political poetry returned to polemical form with The Battle Continues written hurriedly in 1939 in response to Roy Campbell’s poem of support for the forces of Franco, The Flowering Rifle; and with ‘When the Gangs Came to London’, an anti-Chamberlain, anti-Munich, anti-Hitler poem dedicated jointly to the Czech playwright Karl Cˇapek and the Scottish writer Catherine Carswell. Neither poem was published in its own time. The Battle Continues had to wait until 1957 when the immediacy of its original composition and potential impact had long been lost and its opening lines – ‘Anti-fascism is a bit out of date, isn’t it?’ (CP, II, p. 905) – must have echoed ironically. The feasibility of publishing ‘When the Gangs Came to London’ in MacDiarmid’s own Voice of Scotland was a recurring topic of discussion between him and his young Edinburgh managing editor during late 1938 and 1939 alongside comments which show how difficult, physically, economically, and intellectually, his life was at that time: ‘The weather here is unspeakable – bitterly cold and wet, and life in Whalsay now is like immurement in a damp and almost light-less dungeon’; ‘I am wallowing away – up to the eyes – in the ocean of miscellaneous drudgery in which I have involved myself’; ‘I’m entangled in a jungle of points of that sort for which my reference resources here are utterly useless’.12 ‘The Gangs’ never did appear, although ‘What Has Been May Be Again (Timely footnotes to famous passages in George Buchanan’s Epithalamium for Mary Stuart and the Dauphin of France and in Corneille’s Horace)’ – a poem on a similar theme, but with a metaphorically opaque as opposed to a polemical methodology – did achieve publication. It may be that as war seemed increasingly inevitable, the more cautious Edinburgh assistant decided that the Buchanan/Corneille poem could less provocatively present an attack on the politics of the current British

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and European situation. Whatever the reason, the poem was lost until discovered at the turn of the century among Catherine Carswell’s papers, when it to some extent made amends for MacDiarmid’s intemperate Voice of Scotland editorials by making clear his condemnation of Hitler and fascism, and his simultaneous condemnation of Chamberlain’s attempt at appeasement in Munich. It also succeeds in producing much interesting, lively poetry in a variety of registers (including the wonderfully bathetic anti-Chamberlain/ anti-Hitler lines ‘Even littler/than Hitler!/The rat in power!’) which create a sense of genuine response and argument as opposed to the polemical artificiality of much of his previous poetry of ‘commitment’.13 Although several Scottish poets continued to publish solo collections in the 1930s, Edwin Muir is the only one besides MacDiarmid who can be seen to be attempting to combine a response to the uncertainties of the time with an attempt at new poetic approaches which might give such concerns a modern form of expression. Muir’s apprenticeship as poet was a long one, and he was also wary about realism in art, as can be seen in his early We Moderns. He is therefore not always successful in his attempt to deal with the problems of the present, especially as his concerns and responses are communicated metaphorically and therefore implicitly, something which can leave them open to misunderstanding through unintentional ambiguity of expression. Yet, as with MacDiarmid’s very different difficulties with ideology and artistic expression, the best of Muir’s poetry of the 1930s does capture the philosophical uncertain spirit of the times, if not the everyday details of the socialist commitment debate. Muir’s first collection of the 1930s is Variations on a Time Theme, published by Dent in 1934. It contains ten poems or ‘variations’ which, with the exception of IV, V and VII, had previously appeared with individual titles in periodicals such as the Spectator, Listener and Modern Scot.14 They were written during the period when the Muirs were translating Kafka and Hermann Broch, and when Muir himself was recalling his young adulthood in Glasgow in the writing of his partly autobiographical novel Poor Tom. In her later memoir Belonging, Willa Muir wrote that ‘Broch’s ambience of bleak despair affected us deeply enough during 1931 and set the tone for Edwin’s next book of poems’.15 Broch and Kafka were most probably influences on Muir’s work at this time, but his novel Poor Tom also shows his concern about the conditions of urban life, a concern which brings together his memories of the pre-1914 Glasgow of his youth with the current local and international sense of crisis. Perhaps because of such influences, the first two sections of Variations in particular strike a modernist keynote, with their fragmented, free-verse form and striking imagery which is both specifically mundane yet also philosophically intertextual in its evocation of Eliot’s The Waste Land and the circuitous and blocked roads of Kafka’s fiction. As its title proclaims, time is the principal theme of the collection: personal time and the time of human history; time dislocated, unstable, fragmented, yet paradoxically ‘fixed’ by the fact of mortality. The first poem opens with its impersonal speakers ‘waiting for life,/Turning away from hope, too dull for speculation’.16 Yet these are not Eliot’s Wastelanders, only too willing to

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be kept covered by winter’s forgetful snow, finding April the cruellest month, with its ‘mixing/ Memory and desire, stirring/Dull roots with spring rain’.17 In his discussion of the intellectual ideas current in the modernist period in the ‘The Metaphysics of Modernism’, Michael Bell comments that ‘the anguish in Kafka’s fiction, whatever its other causes or implications, comes from a desire still to find, rather than create, a meaning’.18 Such a comment is applicable to Muir also, who, while he may have all his life as man and artist argued against Scottish Calvinism and the idea of an impersonal, predetermined fate, nevertheless believed that there was a way to be sought for and a meaning to be found in relation to human life. The seeming influence of Eliot in the opening lines of the first variation is therefore interrupted and contradicted by the poem’s subsequent urgent questioning: ‘How did we come here to this broken wood?’; ‘Where did the road branch?’; ‘Or did we choose [. . .] Did we choose idly?’; ‘Can we build a house here? [. . .] Can we sing our songs here?’ (CP, pp. 51–2). In contrast to Eliot’s poem, there is action instead of apathy among the speakers here, a seeking to find out how the disaster has come about and also how to move forward. Muir’s imagery is striking: surrealistic, yet deriving from a mundane natural world despoiled by industrialisation: How did we come here to this broken wood? Splintered stumps, flapping bark, ringwormed boles, Soft milk-white water prisoned in jagged holes Like gaps where tusks have been. (CP, p. 51)

The initial source of such imagery is made clear in his later autobiography, as he describes his ‘escape’ as a young man from the slums of Glasgow into the countryside on its outskirts: I soon made a habit of escaping into the surrounding country in my free time, but even the fields seemed blasted by disease, as if the swamp were invisibly spreading there too. My nearest access to the country lay through a little mining village, where grey men were always squatting on their hunkers at the ends of the houses, and the ground was covered with coal-grit. Beyond this, if you turned to the left, there was a cinder path leading past a pit, beside which was a filthy pool where yellow-faced children splashed about. Tattered, worm-ringed trees stood round it in squalid sylvan peace; the grass was rough with smoke and grit; the sluggish streams were bluish black.19

Variation II opens with equally striking although very different imagery: more philosophically abstract, less grounded in a recognisable world: At the dead centre of the boundless plain Does our way end? Our horses pace and pace Like steeds for ever labouring on a shield, Keeping their solitary heraldic courses. (CP, p. 52)

Space as opposed to time, appears dominant here, yet as the poem develops, time takes on the character of the timeless, human journey, and the horses,

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both heraldic and of this world with their ‘great coal-black glossy hides’, become the physical manifestation of human time, carrying ‘generation after generation’ in a ‘stationary journey’. Poem VII, an ‘almost-sonnet’ of fifteen lines, has a similar imprisoned-in-time theme with almost every line of constrictive imagery ending with a phrase which itself ends with ‘Time’, thus reinforcing the sensation of restriction. The second stanza consists of a series of conditional statements about the hold time has over us, ending with the bleak supposition that ‘If there’s no power can burst the Rock of Time [then] Imprisonment’s for ever; we’re the mock of Time/While lost and empty lies Eternity’ (CP, p. 58). Yet despite this apparently bleak ending, throughout the poem there is an energy of language and verse movement that indicates a philosophical wrestling with such a conception of time as opposed to the kind of distressed acceptance of loss which characterised Muir’s First Poems from the 1920s. And throughout the Variations this preoccupation with time is given form in a series of evocative images which have both an immediate imaginative identity and a philosophical context: ‘Time is a sea’ on which one might envisage sailing ‘for ever’, but Time is also a ‘fisher’ whose catch brings mortality; or, in a reverse image, a ‘fire-wheel whose spokes the seasons turn,/ And fastened there we, Time’s slow martyrs, burn’ . Time is also ‘stilled’ as in the earlier image of ‘Time at the dead centre of the boundless plain’. Plato is seen as ‘Time’s poor harper/Playing to bid him pause’; and Shakespeare ‘a wile/To make him turn his head and once beguile/His wolfish heart’ (CP, pp. 58–9). Whatever the clothing of the time image, however, what it ultimately points to is an apprehension of the human ‘sad stationary journey’ of mortality (CP, p. 58), a theme which Muir develops more explicitly in his later collection Journeys and Places of 1937. In addition to its recurring motifs of stationary journeys and confined spaces, a new development in Journeys and Places is its employment of myth, both biblical and Greek, as a means of achieving the artistic ‘impersonality’ recommended by Eliot in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’. Reviewing the collection in the London Mercury, Stephen Spender characterised Muir as a ‘metaphysical poet’, but found that the symbols he employed were not sufficient in themselves: ‘they carry always the weight of their references to an argument which, although it is contained within the poem, exists outside the poem’. Muir accepted Spender’s criticism, writing to him that ‘the remedy is for me to get more outside myself’.20 Yet the hors texte problem did not derive only from his difficulty in objectifying his themes, some of these still deriving from his sense of dislocation as a youth in Glasgow. It was also related to the nature of the myths he selected in the attempt to achieve impersonality, especially his use of biblical myth. In an interesting discussion of the use of Christian myth in An Essay on Criticism, published in the myth-criticism age of the 1960s, Graham Hough comments that while ‘in very early mythologies alternative creation myths, alternative genealogies of the gods make their appearance’, it is not so with Christian myth. For Hough, ‘those who maintain that the Christian myth is different from

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all others are right – not because it is “truer” than any other, but because it was believed in a different way’.21 This is the dilemma which faces Muir in his metaphorical use of Old and New Testament characters. King David, Samson and Delilah, Adam in Eden, Judas Iscariot and Christ all have had their narratives taught as ‘God-Given’, and confirmed by the written record of God’s word in the Bible. They cannot therefore offer the artist the necessary freedom to rework and re-create myths for a new age. Unlike the outcome hoped for in his poem ‘The Stationary Journey’, such imagery cannot make ‘the dead world grow green within/Imagination’s one long day’ (CP, p. 66). The apple cannot be put back on the tree and Judas’s betrayal of Christ cannot be undone. The use of real-life artists or their fictional creations is similarly unsuccessful, although for a different reason. In ‘Ibsen’, the information given about Ibsen and his characters Solness and Brand, Nora and Hedda, is not sufficiently clear for the reader to be aware of how this is being transformed for the purposes of the poem, and therefore the poem’s own communication remains unclear. And this is the case also with ‘Tristram’s Journey’, where the details of his journey are too numerous yet not sufficiently connected to enable a reader (who may well know little of his story) to understand what they mean to the author and what he is trying to convey through them. Greek myth is a different matter. As with ‘Hector in Hades’ in Muir’s First Poems, the two most powerful and resolved poems in Journeys and Places are the late ‘Troy’, first published in the Listener in June 1937 before the publication of the collection as a whole in September of that year; and ‘A Trojan Slave’, published in the London Mercury in March 1937. In these poems, the flexibility afforded by the Troy story as a result of its secular nature, the familiarity of its basic outline, yet the multiplicity of adventures and happenings associated with it, allows Muir an imaginative reworking of experiences of dislocation, of false consciousness combined with bravery, of loyalty accompanied by a realisation of betrayal, of longing for a lost land: experiences which have their meaning within the poem and yet resonate beyond it. The ‘brave, mad old man’ who ‘fought the rats for Troy’ may not have featured in Homer’s story, but we can believe that such a fidelity is possible, just as his inability to see that the time for fighting was past is credible. And the tragedy of all such wars for the people left behind is captured in his ‘chance’ death at the hands of opportunistic robbers. In ‘A Trojan Slave’, the rulers would rather allow their city to be captured than allow their slaves, those who do not belong to their ruling race, to take part in its defence. Yet these outsiders too loved their home: ‘Troy was our breath, our soul, and all our wit,/Who did not own it but were owned by it./ We must have fought for Troy’ (CP, pp. 76–8). These Greek myth poems do not tell a story of commitment specific to the 1930s, but as Muir uses the myth, their stories relate to the wider human history of conflict and commitment and personal involvement of which the 1930s story is a part. This theme of the ‘single, disunited world’ would be the dominant theme of Muir’s mature poetry from the 1940s onwards.

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Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

Jean Paul Sartre, What is Literature?, p. 82. Wallace Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, p. 997. Muir, Selected Letters of Edwin Muir, p. 92. G. Robert Stange, ‘The Victorian City and the Frightened Poets’, Victorian Studies Summer 1968, pp. 619–40. Valentine Cunningham, British Writers of the Thirties, p. 398. MacDiarmid, Complete Poems 1920–1976, I, pp. 297, 298. This work is abbreviated to CP throughout this chapter. MacDiarmid’s life-long omniverous reading made him frequently a careless reader, seizing on ideas which on the surface seemed to fit with his current preoccupations, as we see in his early interest in Italian fascism as well as in some of his artistic influences. But it is difficult to believe that a phrase such as the ‘Cheka’s horrors’ did not bring with it awareness of the immensity of these killings, which makes it inexcusable. In his essay ‘Did Stalin Dupe the Intellectuals’ (in Watson, Politics and Literature in Modern Britain, pp. 46–70), George Watson considers MacDiarmid’s poem as evidence that communist intellectuals in the 1930s were aware of the oppressive nature of the new Soviet state (pp. 53–4). Cunningham, British Writers of the Thirties, p. 398. The grammatical implications are ambiguous here. However, since MacDiarmid’s references to Christ in his poetry are usually positive, I would think that the negative image is directed to Trotsky alone as opposed to suggesting that Christ too is artificial, a poseur. Of course, ‘Christ’ could also be an expletive, but in that case there would probably have been an exclamation mark. Bold, MacDiarmid, p. 326; MacDiarmid, Letters of Hugh MacDiarmid, p. 679. MacDiarmid, Letters of Hugh MacDiarmid, p. 593. National Library of Scotland Acc. 10488/1, letters 19, 20. For more information about ‘When the Gangs Came to London’, see the present author’s article in Scottish Studies Review 1.1 Winter 2000, pp. 94–8; also The Scotsman, 25 November 1999, pp. 1, 3; and TLS, 17 March 2000, p. 15. The poem will hopefully be included in future editions of the Complete Poems. Peter Butter’s annotated edition of the Complete Poems of Edwin Muir has helpful contextual information about individual poems, including those mentioned here. Willa Muir, Belonging, p. 152. Muir, Complete Poems of Edwin Muir, p. 51. Page numbers for further quotations will be given in the text, prefaced by ‘CP’. T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land, Collected Poems, p. 63. Michael Bell, Cambridge Companion to Modernism, p. 14. Edwin Muir, An Autobiography, p. 92. Muir, Selected Letters, p. 98. For quotation from Spender’s review, see Muir, Complete Poems, p. 321. Graham Hough, An Essay in Criticism, pp. 155–6.

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Chapter 9

Visionaries and Revisionaries: Late Muir and MacDiarmid

A poetry in which the disorder and irrelevancies Of the real world are seen As evidence of the order, relevance, and authority Of the law behind, so that what Is misleading (private or untidy) becomes By its very irrelevance significant of a reality Beyond the bewilderment of external reality. Hugh MacDiarmid, ‘The Kind of Poetry I Want’ (1943)

Edwin Muir and Late Modernism In an article in the Listener in 1958 Edwin Muir referred to Scotland as his ‘second country’, and this ‘half-a-Scot’ perspective characterised his attitude to things Scottish throughout his life.1 He similarly distanced himself from orthodox Christianity, claiming a belief in the immortality of the soul but rejecting the doctrines of any of the religious institutions, seeing himself as ‘a sort of illicit Christian, a gate-crasher’.2 As we have seen in earlier chapters, such liminal positioning is relevant also to his relationship as poet with modernism, especially if modernism is interpreted narrowly as an aesthetic movement focused primarily on formal experimentation in the arts. Muir was never this kind of formal innovator. T. S. Eliot commented that he did not believe ‘that technique was ever a primary concern with Edwin. He was first and foremost deeply concerned with what he had to say’;3 while Muir himself acknowledged that he did not feel comfortable with the word ‘technique’, writing to the poet and translator Michael Hamburger in 1952 that ‘it always gives me a slightly bewildered feeling; if I can translate it as skill I am more at home with it, for skill is always a quality of the thing that is being said or done’ (SL, p. 161). And he was certainly estranged from the analytical procedures of the New Criticism which developed from the 1940s onwards, commenting in his late essay ‘A View of Poetry’ that although New Criticism had ‘many virtues [. . .] I cannot read it myself without a slight onset of claustrophobia

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and a feeling that I am being shut in with the critic and the poem, which is generally quite a short one, knowing that I shall not get away until all three of us are exhausted’.4 Muir’s problem, however, was less that he did not think form to be important, but rather that he himself had come late and untutored to the writing of poetry. His poetic imagination had been awakened as a result of the leisure and freedom he experienced for the first time in his life during his travels in Europe in the early 1920s, but he had ‘no technique by which I could give expression to it’. As he revisited these days for the first version of his autobiography, published in 1940, he commented that he had ‘come to realize since that Pound and Eliot were wise in regarding the first stages in the writing of poetry as a sort of apprenticeship, to be learned like any other’.5 His own apprenticeship was a lengthy one, and it included the writing skills he acquired as critic, translator, novelist and life-writer between these first attempts at poetry in the early 1920s and the maturity of his poetry from the early 1940s onwards. One reason for extending the period of Scottish modernism to the date of his death in 1959 is to allow this late poetry to be taken account of in an assessment of his position in early twentieth-century literature. For while his interwar criticism of both European and British modernist literature, his translations (with Willa Muir), of Kafka and Broch, and his persistent critiques of the Zeitgeist of this challenging and disorienting period establish his credentials as a writer of the modernist age, the tentative nature of much of his early poetry and its lack of the noticeable formal innovation which marks the art of ‘high modernism’ in the work of Eliot and Pound, has led to an absence of consideration of Muir as a modernist poet. He is less easily neglected as a kind of ‘illicit’ modernist, ‘a gate-crasher’, if this late poetry is given the attention it deserves. In addition, by the early 1940s when Muir came into his maturity as poet, the aesthetic revolution we now call modernism had itself evolved beyond the early century’s focus on formal experimentation in response to changing social conditions. Yet although what the art historian Robert Hughes has called ‘the shock of the new’ might have lost its immediacy over the years, the challenges of the machine and science-based modern age were still present, in increasingly depersonalising forms, as economic and social conditions worsened and Europe became involved in the second world war within a half century. The expansion in critical perceptions of modernism which has developed in our own time from the early 1990s onwards is therefore related not only to a new awareness of a ‘variety of modernisms’ in time and place deriving from a variety of national, gender, social and intellectual contexts, but also to the attempt in the later stages of modernism itself to find a way in which the problems presented by the modern age could be addressed more overtly in the work of art. It is such a combination of the aesthetic with an exploration of the meaning of human life which gives Muir’s late poetry its strength and modernistic artistic identity. This account of his late poetry will therefore focus primarily on the poetry of what he himself characterised as ‘the single, disunited world’ (A, p. 194): the war poetry of The Narrow Place

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(1943) and The Voyage (1946); the poetry of The Labyrinth (1949) which was inspired largely by his experience of the communist regime in Czechoslovakia in the late 1940s and early 1950s; and poems from his last collection One Foot in Eden, including the posthumously published ‘Last Poems’. ‘His work [. . .] has caught a flame – from the fire that is burning the world’. This was how Neil M. Gunn characterised Muir’s new poetry in his review of The Narrow Place in the Scots Magazine of May 1943.6 Muir did not serve in World War One, having been rejected as not sufficiently fit for service. He did not refer to that war in his early poetry or other writings of the time, and a brief comment in his autobiography about his attempt to enlist gives the impression that any apprehension he may have felt was subsumed into his general state of ‘incipient dissociation’ (A, p. 147) at that time as he tried to piece together his personal fragmented life-journey from the security of pre-industrial Orkney into the modern, urbanised world. By the outbreak of World War Two, on the other hand, he was ready to move beyond the personal, and his letters from the late 1930s onwards show his increasing concern about the disintegration of Europe manifested in events such as the Spanish Civil War and the unchecked fascism of Hitler’s Germany. His letters are especially concerned about the treatment of the Jews in Germany and about his own sense of a corporate responsibility for the disaster unfolding. He wrote to Sydney Schiff in January 1939: But everything is dark, and is getting darker: the horrible persecution of the Jews is the most obvious symptom of the madness which tinges all the new movements in Europe [. . .] There is a real denial of humanity here, as Broch says; there is more, a contempt for humanity, hatred of anyone with a separate, unique life of his own. The capacity to recognise immaterial realities is almost dead, it seems to me; is quite dead in the sphere of action at any rate, the sphere in which Hitler, Mussolini and Chamberlain move. And in the last resort we live by immaterial realities; that is our real life; the rest is more or less machinery. We are moved about, caught, wedged, clamped in this machinery; and that is what is called history.

And he ends: I am as sick, I think, as you can be, over the dreadful things that are being done to the Jews, and the darkness that has fallen over them. I am ashamed, as every citizen in this country should be of the part England has played. And I share, with everyone else, part of the responsibility for it; for we have all been too easy-going and thoughtless and hopeful. (SL, p. 108)

Such comments about shared responsibility have a special relevance to his Narrow Place poem ‘The Refugees’ first published in New Alliance in the autumn of 1939. He wrote that this was a theme which ‘keeps coming back to me’, and it may be that his autobiographical writing in the late 1930s about his travels in Europe in the early 1920s reminded him of how he and Willa had lived self-containedly in the community of A. S. Neill’s school in Hellerau unaware of the deprivations suffered by so many Germans as a

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result of the reparations demanded after World War One, and blind also to the implications of the unchecked anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria. He was not happy with the published version of his poem, finding that despite its ‘wonderful theme’ and its being ‘inspired by quite sincere feeling [. . . it] never rose to the right height [. . .] except in one or two lines in the last part’ (SL, p. 112). This ‘last part’ is the final version of the poem as it appears in The Narrow Place collection, a haunting exploration of the mystery of good and evil and of corporate responsibility: A crack ran through our hearthstone long ago, And from the fissure we watched gently grow The tame domesticated danger, Yet lived in comfort in our haunted rooms.7

Muir’s childhood upbringing in Orkney with its strong sense of communal values, the ‘timelessness’ of its pre-industrial farming landscape and the reminders of ancient civilisations in its standing stones and other Neolithic remains, would appear to have instilled in him a sense of the continuity of the human life-story, a continuity in this instance presented negatively in the form of recurring wars and a human incapacity to devise a more satisfactory way of living with one another. This pattern of recurrence is emphasised in the poem by the repetition of simply-worded phrases and everyday images: We saw the homeless waiting in the street Year after year, The always homeless, Nationless and nameless, To whose bare roof-trees never come Peace and the house martin to make a home.

In its penultimate stanza the poem moves imagistically into a consideration of the mystery of good and evil, with implicit references to the religious doctrine of Original Sin and Calvinist determinism. Yet it does not stay with the religious explanations, but returns to the theme of human responsibility: ‘For deaf and blind/Is rejection bred by rejection/Breeding rejection [. . .] We must shape here a new philosophy’ (CP, p. 99). Other war poems from this Narrow Place collection include ‘The Wayside Station’ in which the prevailing unexplained mood of despondency is given specific definition in its final lines by the image of the ‘stream’ which ‘leaps the gap of light [. . .] and starts its winding journey/Through the day and time and war and history’ (my emphasis). In ‘The River’, which follows it in the collection and which Muir said was written soon after the invasion of France (SL, p. 153), ‘the stream/Runs on into the day of time and Europe’ with short descriptive phrases capturing metonymically the historical disasters brought by warfare: ‘a blackened field, a burning wood,/A bridge that stops half-way, a hill split open/With scraps of houses clinging to its sides,/Stones, planks and tiles and chips of glass and china/Strewn on the slope as by a wrecking

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wave/Among the grass and wild-flowers.’ In addition to such fragments of destroyed lives, there is the mindlessness of the destroyers as ‘the disciplined soldiers come to conquer nothing,/March upon emptiness and do not know/ Why all is dead and life has hidden itself’ (CP, p. 97). This is not a combatant’s war poetry, the kind written by World War One poets such as Rosenberg or Sassoon or Owen, which deals with the specifics of the immediate war situation and its inhumanity. Yet Muir’s sense of the continuity of the human story gives his poetry of this World War Two period not only a relevance stretching back into human history, but also a continuing modernity, bringing to mind as we read it in the early years of this twenty-first century not only what we know about the two World Wars of the twentieth century, but also the ‘always homeless’ victims of the conflicts which have followed them. As discussed in the previous chapter, one of the most significant formal developments in Muir’s late poetry was his metaphorical use of Greek myth in order to explore contemporary ideological and philosophical themes: a methodology he adopted briefly in ‘Ballad of Hector in Hades’ in First Poems and in the poems ‘Troy’ and ‘A Trojan Slave’ in Journeys and Places. Muir had always been interested in the stories of Greece. In his autobiography he talks of his fascination as a boy with the tales of Perseus and Andromeda, and Atalanta and the apples, retold in William Morris’s The Earthly Paradise, a book he had bought by chance in an Orkney bookshop with some ‘pennies’ given him by an elder brother (A, p. 76). In his own first published work, We Moderns, he had argued against ‘modern realism’ in art, recommending instead the aesthetic approach of the Greeks: For the Greeks did not aim at the reproduction but the interpretation of life, for which they would accept no symbol less noble than those ideal figures which move in the world of classic tragedy. To the Greeks, indeed, the world of art was precisely this world: not a paltry, sober and conscientious dexterity in the ‘catching’ of the aspects of existence (nothing so easy!), but a symbolizing of the deepest questions and enigmas of life – a thing infinitely more noble, profound and subtle than realistic art.8

Muir’s argument here is similar to the points made by David Ayers in ‘Modernist Poetry in History’, his contribution to the Cambridge Companion to Modernist Poetry. Ayers points to the duality of meaning in the word ‘history’, to its interpretation as either ‘the actuality of events or the representation of those events’; and looks back to ancient Greece as a time when poetry had ‘its own history which constitutes its self-consciousness as an art of ancient origin [. . . and] history and poetry could be set alongside each other as textual forms without giving priority to history as the metalanguage governing the existence of poetry’. And as with Muir’s perception of the Greeks’ aesthetic interest in the ideal or eternal, as opposed to the realistic reproduction of everyday life, Ayers’ discussion points to their view of ‘actual historical events as ephemeral’, while ‘the writing of history had in common with poetry the aim of providing images or examples of that which was eternal, of

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permanent importance in a transient world’.9 It is such an understanding of the function of literature which is at the heart of Muir’s creative and critical writing, and one which caused him to be responsive to Joyce’s Ulysses as well as to the poetry of Yeats. Greek myth was also of interest to Muir in that it shared with Scottish Calvinism that belief in human subservience to the determined will of the Gods (or God). Muir fought all his life against the religious concept of predestination with its absence of individual human agency, and in the 1930s he came increasingly to recognise communism as it had developed in Stalin’s Russia as a similarly restrictive ideology: a perception he explored in the article ‘Bolshevism and Calvinism’, published in May 1934 in the European Quarterly.10 The stories of Greece were therefore able to act as objective correlatives in his poetry; not in any fixed allegorical relationship, but flexibly and creatively in the opening up of psychological scenarios and ideological dilemmas. For example, ‘The Return of the Greeks’ from The Voyage explores the disorienting effect of war, its destruction of past identity and relationships as ‘the veteran Greeks came home/Sleep-wandering from the war’ to find their past lives ‘trite and strange’ (CP, p. 125); while the story of Penelope and Odysseus, which Muir reworked in several poems, showed how faithfulness to human relationships or to an ideal could be possible under extreme conditions. In contrast, the context of ‘Oedipus’ from The Labyrinth brings together Greek myth and Calvinist predestination as it uncovers the fickleness of the gods towards the humans whose lives they control. Oedipus is ‘made to stumble’, and the opening of the poem portrays his acceptance of his guilt as determined by the gods while at the same time making clear his own intuition of his innocence of conscious wrongdoing: ‘one/Who as in innocent play sought out his guilt’. Despite his acceptance of the jurisdiction of the gods, he is unwilling to reject the love existing between him and Jocasta: ‘Desiring good to each other, bringing, we thought,/Great good to each other? But neither guilt nor death’ (CP, p. 178). As poet, Muir’s stance is impersonal, allowing the poem to speak for itself and so leaving the reader free to take it as a re-imagining of the Oedipus story, or to interpret it ideologically. In the context of Scottish Calvinism, however, and its powerful presence through themes of duality and determinism in Scottish postReformation writing, both historical and recent,11 it is reasonable to see one interpretation of Muir’s ‘Oedipus’ as a negative critique of the dehumanising elements within the religious doctrines of Predestination and Original Sin, as well, perhaps, as an attack on the similarly dehumanising practices he was observing contemporaneously in Czechoslovakia as communist rule began to turn the country away from its brief moment of freedom after the defeat of the Nazis towards incorporation into the Soviet system of governance. Muir may have sought impersonality in his poetic methodology, but as man and poet he was very responsive to the atmosphere of place. Prague and Dresden had released his poetic imagination in the early 1920s, and Prague once again influenced his creativity when he went there as Director of the

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British Council Institute in 1945. In the extended version of his autobiography, published in 1956, he recalls his journey through Europe to the Czech capital and his sense of unreality when he finally arrived in the city of his earlier happiness: a Prague that was ‘the same and yet not the same, whose streets I or someone very like me had walked many years before’ (A, p. 255). The journey itself re-enacted in actuality scenarios previously imagined in poems such as ‘The River’ and ‘The Refugees’ while at the same time it reinforced his philosophical sense of the recurring nature of the human journey through history: When we reached Germany there seemed to be nothing unmarked by the war: the towns in ruins, the roads and fields scarred and deserted. It was like a country where the population had become homeless, and when we met occasional family groups on the roads they seemed to be on a pilgrimage from nowhere to nowhere. In the towns and far out in the countryside we met them pushing their belongings on hand-carts, with a look of dull surprise on their faces. Few trains were running; the great machine was broken; and the men, but for the women and children following them, might have been survivors of one of the mediaeval crusades wandering back across Europe to seek their homes. Now by all appearances there were no homes for them to seek. (A, p. 50)

The Labyrinth collection was written in the context of this experience which ended for Muir personally in a breakdown in mental health and his return to the United Kingdom in 1948. Its title poem, ‘The Labyrinth’ (CP, pp. 157–9), which uses the Greek myth of Theseus and the Minotaur as its startingpoint, is outstanding in the way its poetic qualities create a psychological drama of fear and dislocation. As most often in Muir’s use of Greek myth, the story of Theseus is not re-told in detail but is left to stand referentially through the poem’s title and occasional words and phrases such as ‘Since I emerged that day from the labyrinth’, ‘in the maze time’ ‘the ‘bull [. . .] dead upon the straw’. It opens with what its author called ‘a very long sentence, deliberately labyrinthine, to give the mood’:12 a sentence of thirty-five lines, where meaning is continually obscured by complex syntax and parenthetical comments. Intertextual references include Dostoevsky’s novel The Double and the experience of its hero Golyadkin , which is suggested in the ‘swift recoils, so many I almost feared/I’d meet myself returning at some smooth corner,/Myself or my ghost’; K’s frustrated attempts to reach the Castle in Kafka’s novel of that name are evoked in imagery of ‘deceiving streets/That meet and part and meet, and rooms that open/Into each other – and never a final room’. The rhythmic surge of attempts to escape the maze: ‘In sudden blindness, hasten, almost run,/As if the maze itself were after me’ is counterpointed by the slow pace of the advice of the ‘bad spirit’ who, like Despaire in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, preaches the futility of resistance: ‘No need to hurry. Haste and delay are equal/In this one world, for there’s no exit, none’ (a powerful image Muir had used previously in his account of the unemployed in Scottish Journey).13 Some commentators on Muir’s poetry have attempted to interpret this

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poem in a biographical context. For Peter Butter, for example, ‘it deals with Muir’s state of alienation in his Glasgow years, his escape from it and his later efforts to reconcile apparently contradictory conceptions of human life’.14 Both Butter and Christopher Wiseman accept the validity of the portrayal of the gods which follows the labyrinth nightmare – ‘Each sitting on the top of his mountain-isle [. . .] And their eternal dialogue was peace [. . .] and this our life/Was a chord deep in that dialogue’ (CP, p. 158). Yet although it is possible that Muir himself intended the image of the gods to be seen as a reassurance that ‘all that is confusion down here is clear and harmonious as seen eternally’,15 the aesthetics of the poem tell a different story. For it is the poetic energy with which the labyrinth nightmare is communicated, imagistically and rhythmically, which tells us most about human experience. In contrast, the depiction of the gods is lifeless and conventional, lacking in poetic intensity. Elizabeth Huberman, an early critic who most often has interpreted Muir’s poetry in a Christian context, nevertheless finds that the ‘vision of the reconciling gods derives from outside’.16 In 1940 Muir wrote to Stephen Spender that ‘I distrust myself when I am monitory’, and later in 1944 he wrote in response to Spender’s comments about the problems of human existence which were then so pressing: The problems are terrifying, as you say. The religions exist, I suppose, to provide an explanation of them. I can’t accept any religious explanation that I know of, any more than you. I would rather have the problems themselves, for from an awareness of them and their vastness I get some sort of living experience, some sense even of communion, of being in the whole in some way, whereas from the explanations I should only get comfort and reassurance and a sense of safety which I know is not genuine. (SL, pp. 124, 137)

Such comments are relevant to this ‘Labyrinth’ poem, in which Muir does appear to be ‘monitory’ in the section about the gods, trying to impose ‘comfort and reassurance’ from his Hölderlin-influenced ‘explanations’ regarding the life of the gods and their relationship to earthly life, but in fact creating a scenario that the pulse of the poetry tells us is not ‘genuine’. This is not his approach in his Greek-myth poetry as a whole, where his practice is to use the myth to open up the contradictions in a given situation, and it may be that he is deliberately presenting the reader with two contrary ideological possibilities with the poem returning to the labyrinth nightmare in its closing lines – ‘The maze, the wild-wood waste of falsehood, roads/That run and run and never reach an end’ – before itself ending enigmatically with the comments that ‘these deceits are strong almost as life’ and ‘I did not know the place’ (CP, p. 159). From a formal point of view as opposed to an interpretative one, it may also be, as Christopher Whyte has suggested in a recent discussion of this poem in his Modern Scottish Poetry, that it is in fact this very ‘tension between assertion and enactment, between what the poem states and what it actually does, that makes “The Labyrinth” a high point in Muir’s poetic career’.17

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Other psychological poems in the Labyrinth collection include ‘The Interrogation’ (CP, pp. 172–3) where the drama is constructed in everyday terms out of the operation of choice and chance and with a more obvious connection to the Prague situation: ‘We could have crossed the road but hesitated,/And then came the patrol’. Tension here is created out of seemingly interminable waiting as opposed to constantly frustrated action, although again rhythmic movement is important for the effect achieved: in the silent ‘beats’ or pauses as in music in the middle or the end of lines, and in the long slow final line with its three heavy stresses: ‘And still the interrogation is going on’. The sense of waiting is increased by the irregular rhyming where words ‘chime’ only infrequently and without specific pattern as in the ‘hesitated’ of line one and the ‘waited’ of line five. In contrast to this inaction is the agitated rhythmic movement of the questioning of the arrested group: ‘who, what we are,/Where we have come from, with what purpose’. And underlying the surface action is the chance nature of the happenings – they could have crossed, but hesitated; and the intensification of the sense of chance and imprisonment is created by the fact that people around them appear to be going about their business in the usual way and the natural world too is indifferent: ‘the thoughtless field is near’. In his 1987 essay ‘The Impact of Translation’, which laments what he sees as the absence of a ‘native British modernism’, the poet Seamus Heaney points to Muir as the translator of Kafka and witness of the Communist takeover in Czechoslovakia, whose ‘two postwar volumes, The Labyrinth in 1949 and One Foot in Eden in 1956, are not like anything that was going on just then on the home poetic front’. Heaney finds that ‘The Interrogation’ in particular ‘anticipates by a couple of decades the note which would be heard when A. Alvarez began to edit his influential Penguin Modern European Poets series in the late 1960s, a note as knowledgeable as it was powerless to survive with any sort of optimism in the light of what it knew’, and concludes: ‘So Muir’s poem is “European”.’ He also finds that in contrast to Eliot’s ‘Little Gidding’ which puts forward ‘imaginary proof than an ordained and suprahistorical reality persists, and it is of course one of the poetry’s triumphs to make such a faith provisionally tenable’, it is this European persona in Muir’s ‘The Interrogation’ ‘who seems to be more truly our representative, stunned and ineffective at the center of a menacing pageant, what Eliot called the vast panorama of violence and futility which is contemporary history’.18 As we see in his reworkings of the Penelope story, and more consistently in his last collection One Foot in Eden, Muir, like the later Eliot, did write poems in which he at least attempted to show that a ‘suprahistorical reality’ existed, but The Labyrinth collection is different from his other collections in that it is pervasively bleak as well as poetically strong. His formal approach in ‘The Helmet’ (CP, p. 168) is what might be termed imagiste in its clarity of presentation, while it is disturbing in its human implications: ‘The helmet on his head/Has melted flesh and bone/And forged a mask instead/That always is alone.’ In addition to the strong visual image

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of the masked head, throughout its six short stanzas the poem creates the dehumanised world of the warrior behind the mask through an interchange and destabilising of pronouns, moving from a personalised ‘his’ to a neuter, depersonalised ‘its’, and then bringing in the sense of communal responsibility through the repetition of ‘we’. Its relentless move to the negative, yet unspecified ending is frightening in its implicit narrative of the destruction of humanising values and the capacity for personal interaction: ‘But he can never come home,/Nor I get to the place/Where, tame, the terrors roam/ Whose shadows fill his face.’ There is little place here for what Muir himself called ‘immaterial realities’ (SL, p. 108) alongside such presentation of social and psychological disintegration. Stephen Spender described Muir as a ‘metaphysical poet’19 and Muir’s more characteristic acknowledgement of his belief in something beyond material existence, together with his less complex poetic forms and language, brings him into relationship with seventeenth-century poets such as Herbert, Vaughan and Traherne. Muir wrote of the way in which ‘dream is much more organically knit into the older English literature (seventeenth century in particular) than into the later’, finding that ‘in Sir Thomas Browne and Bunyan and Traherne it is as a part of waking life; in De Quincey and Coleridge it is a specific, separate thing’ (SL, p. 110). He himself had experienced ‘waking dreams’ as a result of Jungian psychoanalysis in the early 1920s, and dreaming continued to be part of his experience, if less frightening than in his early years. This interest in dream related to his interest in the relationship between the conscious and unconscious mind, with one of the reasons for his early interest in Dostoevsky being that ‘he depicted the subconscious as conscious’.20 Such contrasting yet linked states of being, and a new confidence in portraying them, provide the thematic material for many of the poems in Muir’s last collection One Foot in Eden. Muir was uncertain about the title of this collection, suggesting to Eliot who was reading it for Faber that the provisional title of One Foot in Eden should perhaps be changed to The Succession – a suggestion Eliot asked him to reconsider. One Foot in Eden is certainly the more striking title, but its disadvantage is that it appears to situate Muir’s poetry more firmly in a traditional Christian context than his often-stated scepticism about ‘any religious explanation that I know of’ would warrant (SL, p. 137). As with The Labyrinth, this last collection developed out of Muir’s responsiveness to the atmosphere of place; in this case, two places: his short period between January 1949 and July 1950 as Director of the British Council Institute in Rome, and his return to the harsher social and philosophical climate of Scotland as Warden of the re-opened Newbattle Abbey Adult Education College in Dalkeith, outside Edinburgh. He wrote to Joseph Chiari in December 1949: I’m much struck with Rome, and all its wealth of associations; you feel the gods (including the last and greatest of them) have all been here, and are still present in a sense in the places where they once were. It has brought very palpably to my

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mind the theme of Incarnation and I feel that probably I shall write a few poems about that high and difficult theme sometime: I hope so.

And he added: Edinburgh I love, but in Edinburgh you never come upon anything that brings the thought of Incarnation to your mind, and here you do so often, and quite unexpectedly. (SL, p. 154)

Rome, therefore, would appear to have been the influence behind his return to the use of biblical myth in this final collection which is divided between poems which unite the immaterial and the earthly, dream-state and actuality, and those which continue to pursue the problems of the contemporary world. Greek myth, however, is also an important formal device. ‘Orpheus’ Dream’, for example, creates through its poetic detail the excitement and apprehension of Orpheus’ search for Eurydice in Pluto’s underworld kingdom: the immediacy of its opening statement ‘And she was there’; the catching of the rocking movement of his boat through the balancing of alliterative polysyllabic words such as ‘afloat’, ‘foundering’ and felicity’ with the short ‘skiff’ and ‘keep’. Yet the details of the scenario are left dream-like, unspecified: where are these ‘perilous isles of sleep’? Has he really succeeded in regaining Eurydice, or is she a dream-vision? Who are the ‘we’ of the final stanza? As usual in his use of Greek myth, Muir does not attempt to recreate the original story and in this poem he implicitly points to the power of love as he reverses the ending of the mythical scenario by allowing both lovers ‘at last to turn our heads and see/The poor ghost of Eurydice [. . .] Alone in Hades’ empty hall’ (my emphasis) (CP, pp. 200–1). This capacity to create a sense of poetic resolution through imagistic and other formal qualities, while at the same time leaving the actual narrative scenario unclear, open to interpretation, is characteristic of the strength and complexity of Muir’s Greek-myth poems. Those reliant on biblical myth, while much more mature and confident than the many Fall-theme poems in early collections, are still limited to some extent by the continuing presence – implicit or explicit – of their original scenarios. ‘The Annunciation’, which apparently took its starting point from a painting on a wall plaque in a Rome street (A, p. 278), probably comes closest to the successful Greek-myth poems in its creation of a moment out of time, an ‘immediacy/Of strangest strangeness’ in its capturing of the intense love between angel and girl, while allowing the details of the happening to remain unspecified. On the other hand, despite the rhythmic energy of ‘Adam’s Dream’ in which Adam watches a few small figures on the plain who ‘ran,/And fell, and rose again, and ran, and fell,/And rising were the same yet not the same’, before finding himself among them and recognising their faces as his face, his earthly children and future children; and despite the iconic quality of the title poem, ‘One Foot in Eden’, with its memorable concluding lines: ‘Strange blessings never in Paradise/Fall from these beclouded skies’, there is an absence of complexity,

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of struggle, in these resolutions. The transformation of the fallen Adam, ‘his terror drowned/In her [Eve’s] engulfing terror’ into the human father who remembers God’s promise and is ‘at peace [. . .] in Eve’s encircling arms’ (CP, pp. 196, 197) seems too easily achieved. And despite the assertion in ‘One Foot in Eden’ that ‘famished field and blackened tree/Bear flowers in Eden never known’, the concept of Eden continues to dominate the poem, with the life of the world under the ‘beclouded skies’ remaining distanced in its heraldic imagery (CP, p. 213). ‘The Incarnate One’, with its Calvinist theme, is of a different order. Muir wrote very few poems inspired by Scotland, but those he did write could not be termed ‘hesitant’. ‘Scotland 1941’ from The Narrow Place castigates ‘Burns and Scott, sham bards of a sham nation’ and the ‘thriftless honour’ and ‘wasted bravery’ of Scotland’s internecine history (CP, pp. 100, 101). ‘Scotland’s Winter’, first published in Muir’s Scottish Journey of 1935, is reprinted in this final collection, and it speaks imagistically of a country which has lost its identity, whose people ‘are content/With their poor frozen life and shallow banishment’ (CP, p. 214). ‘The Incarnate One’ is a complex, angry poem which opens with an auditory, visual and philosophical image of Muir’s ‘second country’, iconic in its intensity: ‘The windless northern surge, the seagull’s scream,/And Calvin’s kirk crowning the barren brae’. The poem brings together the contrasting worlds of Catholic Italy and Calvinist Scotland, and, by implication, the similar ‘abstract calamity’ of Calvinist determinism and the contemporary communist ideology he had argued against in his European Quarterly article ‘Bolshevism and Calvinism’. The paintings of the Italian Giotto which brought ‘the Word made flesh’ to an illiterate people are contrasted with the ‘iron pen’ of Scottish Calvinism through which ‘the Word made flesh here is made word again [. . .] and God three angry letters in a book’. On the ‘logical hook’ of such a system ‘the Mystery is impaled and bent/Into an ideological instrument.’ As in the ‘Bolshevism and Calvinism’ essay, the poem then moves against all those ‘who can/Build their cold empire on the abstract man’ (CP, pp. 212–14). The consequences of such a depersonalising of human existence, together with the submission to the values of the modern machine world which he argued against in the essay ‘The Poetic Imagination’ are played out in the companion poems ‘The Horses’ (from One Foot in Eden) and ‘After a Hypothetical War’ (from the group of ‘Last Poems’ included in Muir’s posthumous Collected Poems). ‘The Horses’ opens with a reversal of the Genesis creation myth in its reference to ‘the seven days war that put the world to sleep’. Written in a flexible blank verse form, its imagistic approach is initially metonymic, with the commitment to technology and dehumanising ideologies which has led to the final disaster of nuclear war represented by the ‘dumb’ radios, the tractors idle in the fields ‘like dank sea-monsters couched and waiting’, a warship ‘heading north/Dead bodies piled on the deck’, ‘a plane [which] plunged over us into the sea’ (CP, pp. 226–7). Then, in a second, contrasting section, the imagery changes to a metaphorical mode

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with the coming of the strange horses, their approach created by an auditory perspective through the initial soft ‘d’ and ‘t’ sounds of ‘distant tapping’, followed by the stronger and alliterative sound of ‘deepening drumming’ to the ‘hollow thunder’ of the final appearance. A long pause in the short line ‘We saw the heads’ leaves watchers and readers in suspense until it is completed by the surging movement of the following line with its ‘Like a wild wave charging and were afraid’. Unlike the menace in the image of the sea-monster tractors, the sea imagery of the ‘wild wave’ seems to convey a cleansing natural power in the strange horses which appear to the watchers like ‘fabulous steeds set on an ancient shield’. We are not told where they have come from, only that their coming renews a ‘long-lost archaic companionship’ between human and natural worlds: ‘their coming our beginning’ (CP, p. 227). ‘The Horses’ is a much anthologised poem, although some readers have found its thematic approach simplistic, preaching a mystical, ‘back to nature’ philosophy and offering an account of a post-nuclear attack situation which is not credible. Such a reading ignores both Muir’s imagistic methodology and his practice of offering alternative poetic scenarios to human dilemmas. For a contrary, but complementary statement of Muir’s response to the threat of nuclear war, we have to turn to ‘After a Hypothetical War’ in his ‘Last Poems’. There is no saving myth in this poem, only its imagery of a ‘chaotic breed of misbegotten things,/Embryos of what could never wish to be’ and men who are ‘dumb and twisted as the envious scrub’ (CP, p. 243). Taken together, the two poems dramatise imaginatively the choices facing human beings in a machine age that has run out of control. They must be among the earliest artistic imaginings – particularly in poetry – of the destruction that nuclear war would bring, and were written at a time when official propaganda, at times backed by scientific advice, put forward the view that such a conflict could be contained to ‘theatres’ of war and that there would be survivors who could carry on the life previously known. Muir’s survivors in ‘The Horses’ have learned that they cannot carry on as before, that, as he wrote in his earlier poem ‘The Refugees’, ‘we must build here a new philosophy’. ‘After a Hypothetical War’ points to the consequences of ignoring that lesson: a message still relevant to the early twenty-first century. Despite his partial return to biblical myth in One Foot in Eden, Muir’s late poetry as a whole, including the poems collected posthumously under the title of ‘Last Poems’, shows him pursuing urgently the theme of ‘how we live together’ in an increasingly dangerous and depersonalised modern world. Outstanding among the ‘Last Poems’ is ‘The Last War’, mentioned in letters to Norman MacCaig in April and May 1958. Muir wrote to MacCaig: ‘I keep seeing poems by you everywhere, with friendly envy’, and he lamented his own difficulty in writing, having only a number of unfinished parts the best of which he was thinking of integrating into a ‘longish poem’. He added: ‘that may be what they are best suited for. Time will tell. The Waste Land was made out of splinters’ (SL, pp. 202–3). ‘The Last War’ eventually emerged out of Muir’s splinters as a poem of five sections, each meditating on the

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coming disaster and our communal responsibility for it: ‘No place at all for bravery in that war [. . . ] No way to save/By our own death the young that they might die/Sometime a different death’ (CP, p. 256). The speaker tries to imagine how the end will come, and as so often in these late poems the coming death of nature and human life is imaged metonymically, with ‘bird and tree/Silently falling’ and ‘our bodies buried in falling birds’(CP, p. 257). ‘The articulate breath’, the phrase used by Muir in an earlier poem to distinguish human life from the animal, is now destined to become ‘the lexicon of a dream’ (CP, pp. 193, 257). Perhaps the most painful awareness is that the disaster is self-engendered, brought about by indifference to what is outside our own lives: an insight captured in the image of ‘a tree thin sick and pale by a north wall,/A smile splintering a face’, followed by the acknowledgement that ‘we could not wait/To untwist the twisted smile and make it straight/ Or render restitution to the tree’ (CP, pp. 257, 258). Companion ‘last poems’ such as ‘The Refugees Born for a Land Unknown’ and ‘The Day before the Last Day’, ‘a mechanical parody of the Judgment Day/That does not judge but only deals damnation’, dramatise the need to ‘Choose! Choose again’ while at the same time suggesting that it may be ‘Too late! Too late! [. . .] Where and by whom shall we be remembered?’ (CP, pp. 269–70). ‘The Last War’ was first published in the New Statesman in June 1958 while Muir was still alive, but a number of poems in the ‘Last Poems’ section were left in manuscript form only. The ‘only authority’ for ‘I have been taught’, printed as the final poem in Peter Butter’s edition of the Complete Poems, was ‘a difficult MS draft at the end of the B[ritish] L[ibrary] notebook’.21 By allowing this unpublished poem, with its assertive statement that I perceive that Plato’s is the true poetry,/And that these shadows/are cast by the true’ to stand as the final poem of the collection, Muir’s editor appears to reinforce conventional and partial interpretations of his poetry which emphasise the transcendent at the expense of the problem of ‘how we should live with one another’ – the second of the ‘three mysteries’ of human life he spoke of in An Autobiography (A, p. 56). Yet while Muir’s poetry, like Kafka’s fiction, continues a philosophical search for the hidden way which he believes is there to be found, the late poems from the 1940s onwards, and especially the poems in his final two collections, speak overwhelmingly in that European modernist voice which Heaney recognised in his ‘Impact of Translation’ essay: a ‘visionary’ voice but also one which addresses ‘the historical moment in postwar Europe’, where ‘still the interrogation is going on’.22

Hugh MacDiarmid, Modernism and Postmodernism In addition to the expanded perceptions of modernism relevant to Muir’s late poetry, late modernism has also been recognised by some recent critics as a period of transition between modernism and postmodernism, a kind of overlapping as opposed to the binary division noted in early discussions of

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postmodernist writing. This idea of transition is relevant to a consideration of the late poetry of Hugh MacDiarmid, although it can also be argued that this late work is a continuation of the modernist orientation of his early poetry rather than a departure from it in that MacDiarmid’s postmodernist affiliations are primarily methodological and to a large extent forced upon him by circumstances beyond his control. In contrast to Muir’s late flowering as poet in the 1940s and 1950s, MacDiarmid’s poetic career saw a reversal in the World War Two period. Although he had spent most of the 1930s on the small Shetland island of Whalsay in a considerable degree of isolation, with straitened financial circumstances and little critical encouragement, this had been a productive time artistically, with several collections published which are now considered important contributions to his oeuvre. In contrast, the 1940s and 1950s saw little poetry that was new. According to his biographer, ‘the years 1937–1939 represent the last great creative effort of MacDiarmid’s poetic career’.23 Alan Bold’s comment uncovers one of the problems facing the newcomer to MacDiarmid’s late poetry, for when the Contents list of the Complete Poems (1978) is consulted, there would appear to be a significant amount of poetry dating from the post-1945 period. Volume Two, for example, is given over entirely to poetry with a post-1945 publication date, including In Memoriam James Joyce (1955), The Battle Continues (1957) and The Kind of Poetry I Want (1961). There is also an additional ‘The Kind of Poetry I Want’ listed in a collection titled A Kist of Whistles (1947) and ‘Further Passages from the Kind of Poetry I Want’ is listed even earlier under selections from his autobiography Lucky Poet (1943). Such poetic fecundity is, however, an illusion, created by the confused publishing history of the late work. As mentioned in the previous chapter, The Battle Continues was written in 1939 as an angry response to Roy Campbell’s support of the fascists in the Spanish Civil War. Similarly, much of In Memoriam James Joyce was written in the late 1930s, although some passages, such as the long section on the Austrian satirist Karl Kraus and his periodical Die Fackel (The Torch), ‘borrowed’ from the Times Literary Supplement of June 1955, were added in later years. This section on MacDiarmid’s late poetry will focus primarily on the Joyce poem. The Author’s Note to the first edition of In Memoriam James Joyce remarks that the poem ‘was written in the Shetland Islands where I was then living immediately after James Joyce’s death’, its ambivalent wording giving the impression that the poem was written as a tribute to Joyce who died on 13 January 1941. Its composition, however, is not nearly such a straightforward matter and various scholars have attempted detailed reconstructions of its compositional and publishing history.24 Briefly, for the purposes of discussion here, it would appear that it was originally part of a lengthy epic poem entitled Mature Art which Jack Kahane of the Obelisk Press in Paris had agreed to publish in 1939. Unfortunately Kahane died, and although his son wanted to continue with publication, this became impossible after the outbreak of war and especially after the fall of Paris. MacDiarmid’s prospectus for Mature

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Art, the preparation of which he mentions in a letter to the painter William Johnstone in October 1939 and which was distributed in December of that year, describes it as: an enormous poem of over 20,000 lines, dealing with the interrelated themes of the evolution of world literature and world consciousness, the problems of linguistics, the place and potentialities of the Gaelic genius, from its origin in Georgia to its modern expressions in Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Cornwall, Galicia and the Pays Basque, the synthesis of East and West and the future of civilization.25

After the failure of the intended Paris publication, MacDiarmid attempted to interest British publishers in a revised version (or versions) of it, but without success. Earlier, in February 1938, he had approached T. S. Eliot to see whether Faber might be interested in publishing ‘what I believe to be an important long poem [. . .] entitled Mature Art’, although this previous version was much smaller than the future Kahane poem, being ‘between 4,000 and 5,000 lines’. Faber was unable to publish the poem, but a section of it, ‘Cornish Heroic Song for Valda Trevlyn’, which had appeared as its ‘First Appendix’, was taken by Eliot for the Criterion and published in January 1939.26 Now, two years later, after the cancellation of the Paris publication and immediately after the announcement of the death of James Joyce, MacDiarmid wrote again to Eliot, asking if he might be interested in publishing an adapted ‘small portion’ of the greatly increased Obelisk Press version of Mature Art ‘dealing with linguistic matters and the limitations of the human mind’. He thought that ‘it would appeal to all Joyce enthusiasts and probably become a “collectors’ piece”’.27 This attempt at publication was also unsuccessful, although Eliot said that he had read the poem ‘with great interest’ and wished ‘that we could publish it’. He also commented that he was ‘afraid that it gains no advantage from the [Joyce] association until such time as Joyce’s later work is properly appreciated’.28 It was therefore not until 1955 that William Maclellan of Glasgow published a long poem entitled In Memoriam James Joyce which would appear to have been derived from the language and world consciousness themes of the earlier projects, with new material added and/or substituted. Writing of MacDiarmid’s working methods in the article ‘Mature Art’, published in the Scottish Literary Journal of November 1988, the younger poet W. N. Herbert comments that ‘MacDiarmid was by nature [. . .] improvisatory in his modes of presenting work to the public; essentially anything that appeared in print is likely to be stuffed with much that he feared might not’.29 While this might seem unfair, especially since many of the publishing difficulties in relation to the late work were not of his own making, such an improvisatory methodology is familiar in a more modest form in MacDiarmid’s earlier poetry: for example, in the way that the English-language ‘A Moment in Eternity’ (an early visionary poem which appears to have been close to MacDiarmid’s heart) reappears somewhat incongruously in the Scotslanguage To Circumjack Cencrastus; while scholars have long suspected that

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much of the material in Cencrastus consists of leftovers from A Drunk Man. However, so far as In Memoriam James Joyce is concerned, it is important to realise that this was not a deliberately structured proto-postmodernist poem of the 1950s, but a necessarily improvised coat of many colours collaged from different periods and from a variety of previous compositions, including some which are not the poet’s own work. The phrase ‘not the poet’s own work’ calls attention to the second major problem to be confronted in the Joyce poem: that of MacDiarmid’s unacknowledged ‘borrowings’. The first readers of In Memoriam James Joyce were aware that this long poem was much more of a ‘gallimaufry’ than A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle or, more relevantly, To Circumjack Cencrastus, had been. It was clearly a poem of many varied registers, voices and experiences, with dissimilar sections brought up against each other without warning as is common in much modernist art and as is found in A Drunk Man, although without that poem’s imagistic and symbolic dimension. However, while the voice and persona of the Drunk Man act as an overall unifying device in the earlier poem, there is in the Joyce poem, despite its first-person ‘I’ or ‘we’, no obvious unifying persona to bring these varied fragments of ideas and illustrative references together. The grammatical first-person pronoun is not to be equated with subjectivity; the voice is anonymous, impersonal, except that we might interpret it as standing in for all the writers who have unwittingly contributed to MacDiarmid’s poem and so share in the communication of its ‘message’. For what we have here is not a work written by one author, but a kind of anonymous anthology of excerpts from the writings of others, writings which have been given a new identity by being transposed into the context of MacDiarmid’s language quest, and sometimes by being translated into verse form from their original prose. In his poem ‘Of Modern Poetry’ (1942), the American poet Wallace Stevens wrote of the problems of the modern poet and of the kind of poetry needed in a changed modern world: The poem of the mind in the act of finding What will suffice. It has not always had To find: the scene was set; it repeated what Was in the script. Then the theatre was changed To something else. Its past was a souvenir. It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place, It has to face the men of the time and to meet The women of the time. It has to think about war And it has to find what will suffice. It has To construct a new stage.30

MacDiarmid’s poetic career had begun with the need ‘to construct a new stage’ in the context of the attempt to free Scottish writing from the

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influence of English cultural domination and from the parochiality of the Scottish kailyard tradition. His distinctive Scots-language modernist poetry of the 1920s utterly changed perceptions of what was possible in Scottish writing, both in poetry and other genres, and brought Scottish literature, after a long absence, once more into the international scene. However, for much of the 1930s, and especially in work from the late 1930s, MacDiarmid, like Stevens in 1942, was again searching for a new poetry that would meet changed conditions, commenting in a late interview that ‘the modern world is far too complex; the issues that arise today are far too pressing and complex’ to be dealt with in short forms such as his previous lyrics which in such circumstances would ‘become a trick. You lose integrity, you see’. And he added that this ‘would have been incompatible with my general position, my ambitions or desires’.31 On the other hand, MacDiarmid’s position would appear to differ from that expressed by Stevens in that he is not merely seeking ‘to find what will suffice’, but more ambitiously to show how language in its various forms can re-create how we think about the world and bring forward both expanded consciousness and integration. He writes in his ‘Author’s Note’ to the Joyce poem that ‘it is now during the second quarter of the twentieth century that we are aware of the appearance of a literature which assumes that the world is an indivisible unit. Its subject has become planetary life. [. . .] for better or worse, world literature is at hand. Our consciousness is beginning to be planetary.’32 MacDiarmid’s ‘vision of world language’ was most often misinterpreted by early commentators on In Memoriam James Joyce who seemed to understand his objective as being the establishment of some superior kind of Esperanto or synthetic international language, along the lines of his previous creation of a synthetic or re-integrated Scots language for literary purposes. The reaction of the Marxist critic David Craig, writing in MacDiarmid’s Voice of Scotland in 1956 shortly after the publication of the new poem, was typical of such early responses in finding the poem a failure. For Craig, ‘the “world language” he tries to envisage apparently does seem to him possible. The inadequacy we notice everywhere in these poems [. . .] casts doubt both on the idea which has failed to get itself realised and on the mentality which thought that it had in that idea something significant or valid.’33 Even Edwin Morgan, who was later to become one of the most perceptive critics of MacDiarmid’s work as a whole in essays and in his British Council booklet on the poet, initially found that the poem offers no obvious practical solution to the curse of Babel, and invokes the idea of a world language almost in a void [. . .] It has nothing to say about translation, and about the last decade’s experiments towards mechanical translation – or indeed about cybernetics and electronics in general, which are having so much effect on our ideas about human communication.34

Yet, as the ‘Author’s Note’ states clearly, and as the several epigraphs and the poem’s fragments themselves confirm, MacDiarmid’s quest has little to do

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with the invention of an artificial world language, but is concerned, as in all his previous work, with the expansion of human consciousness and the creative power of thought that can be brought about through the potential within language: ‘There lie hidden in language elements that effectively combined/ Can utterly change the nature of man’ (CP, II, p. 781). In the Joyce poem he celebrates this creativity and diversity of language and of the individual human beings who display creative thinking in their personal area of activity: especially those whom he sees as unconventional and avant-garde writers such as Joyce, the Pound of the Cantos, the Welsh author of The Anathemata David Jones, Charles Doughty of Arabia Deserta, Gerard Manley Hopkins and of course himself: all writers who have contributed to the expansion of the boundaries of language and to our understanding of the possibilities inherent in language. One example of this celebration of language occurs in the second section of the poem, ‘The World of Words’. Here MacDiarmid includes a passage about ‘adventuring in dictionaries’ where the mental excitement in ‘all the abysses and altitudes of the mind of man,/Every test and trial of the spirit/ Among the débris of all past literature/And raw material of all the literature to be’ is compared to ‘climbing on to the ice-cap a little south of Cape Bismarck’ and travelling in good and adverse weather conditions ‘on ice-fields like mammoth ploughlands/And mountainous séracs which would puzzle an Alpine climber’.35 The imagistic language here is borrowed from John Buchan, but MacDiarmid himself spoke similarly, although more plainly and succinctly, in his 1970s interview with Nancy Gish when he declared ‘I love reading dictionaries’ and confirmed that the ‘delight in Scots words, finding them in the dictionary’ which produced the early Scots lyrics had been transferred in his later work to ‘obscure scientific terms’.36 MacDiarmid’s fascination with ‘language’ is therefore very much a fascination with words, with Mallarmé’s mots, although in his later poetry in particular these are explicitly linked with the idées which Mallarmé specifically rejected. We saw this fascination earlier in his Dunfermline Press account of his ‘friend’ who happened to come across Sir James Wilson’s Lowland Scotch and find the Scots words and phrases which created ‘The Watergaw’; and in relation to ‘The Eemis Stane’ where the first line ‘In the how-dumb-deid o’ the cauld hairst nicht’ comes straight from Jamieson’s Dictionary. ‘Water Music’ from Scots Unbound (1932) is full of the excitement of the sound of language as well as the delight in the unknown, the obscurity of meaning that excites the imagination: Archin’ here and arrachin there, Allevolie or allemand, Whiles appliable, whiles areird, The polysemous poem’s planned. (CP, I, p. 333)

‘All is lithogenesis – or lochia,/Carpolite fruit of the forbidden tree [. . . ] Celadon and corbeau, bistre and beige,/Glaucous, hoar, enfouldered, cyathiform’ (CP, I, p. 422) – ‘On a Raised Beach’ opens with even more inaccessible

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synthetic English, the penetration of which might well be compared to the adventuring in the Joyce poem’s ice-cap metaphor, as it leads the reader into the new worlds of knowledge and other states of literary being found in the new pared-down sparseness of the discourse of the ‘Raised Beach’. And it appears as if the poet is deliberately cultivating this sparseness in order to complement the severity of his new living conditions in the Shetlands and his re-assessment of his ideological priorities as we find, for example, in ‘Skald’s Death’: I have known all the storms that roll. I have been a singer after the fashion Of my people – a poet of passion. All that is past. Quiet has come into my soul. (CP, I, p. 482)

or as in ‘The Progress of Poetry, also from the Stony Limits collection: Now I am loosed. There seems a vaster change in me. [. . .] Familiar objects of my thought are separated From all their usual aspects and stand In a strangeness fools might deem sublime Like that appearance of a new earth and heaven To an airman given When he first sees a cloud’s upper surface below Him carved dazzlingly like a field of mountainous snow. (CP, I, p. 456)

‘The Progress of Poetry’, like ‘On a Raised Beach’, is anticipatory of In Memoriam James Joyce in its imagistic sparseness and its muted reflective voice, although that voice is more subjective than the impersonal first-person speaking voice of the Joyce poem. ‘On a Raised Beach’ also anticipates the Joyce poem in method as Michael Whitworth has shown in a recent essay ‘Culture and Leisure in Hugh MacDiarmid’s “On a Raised Beach”’.37 Whitworth’s discovery is that the passage beginning ‘A culture demands leisure and leisure presupposes/A self-determined rhythm of life; the capacity for solitude/Is its test’ (CP, I, p. 431), which appears to fit in well with the poet’s new ideological and geographical location as well as the sentiments expressed in other poems in the Stony Limits collection, is actually taken from an essay by H. J. Travers in the ‘Views and Reviews’ section of The New English Weekly of 28 July 1932, an issue which also carried MacDiarmid’s poem ‘Cheville’. This is therefore an earlier example of the unacknowledged borrowing practices for the purposes of presenting or sustaining an argument which form the main structural methodology of In Memoriam James Joyce (although, as Kenneth Buthlay has shown, they were present in his work as early as the philosophical arguments of A Drunk Man).38 In addition, the borrowing brings a thematic as well as a structural link with the later long poem, for as Whitworth comments, although ‘MacDiarmid takes fewer than twenty words from it, a

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consideration of the essay brings hitherto neglected elements of the poem into the foreground’.39 ‘On a Raised Beach’ has most often been interpreted in a philosophical or metaphysical/religious context, even – in relation to the current preoccupation with environmental issues – on an ecological basis: ‘we must reconcile ourselves to the stones,/Not the stones to us’ (CP, I, p. 428). Yet as argued in Whitworth’s essay, the lines borrowed from Travers bring ‘On a Raised Beach’ into the context of the debate about culture, leisure, the expansion of human consciousness and the contrasting potential destruction of this capacity by the increasingly mechanised nature of mass culture, conducted in the periodicals of the time as well as in books such as Q. D. Leavis’s Fiction and the Reading Public and F. R. Leavis’s New Bearings in English Poetry. MacDiarmid himself reviewed F. R. Leavis’s book in the Scottish Educational Journal of 23 September 1932 under the initials A. K. L. (one of his literary pseudonyms), the year before he moved to Whalsay, and in his conclusion endorsed Leavis’s view that ‘the short-circuiting of human consciousness [. . .] should be a matter of urgent concern’.40 His bringing of the Travers borrowing into the apparently personal philosophical context of ‘On a Raised Beach’ therefore brings that poem itself into connection thematically and structurally with In Memoriam James Joyce, showing how early the prose borrowing methodology and human consciousness theme became established in his English-language poetry of the 1930s; while at the same time looking backwards to its connections with the ‘human consciousness’ theme and the creative potential of his imagistic Scots language in A Drunk Man. In Memoriam James Joyce would appear not to have been such a new departure as its surface identity might suggest. Given the nature of the objectives as laid out in his ‘Author’s Note’ to the poem, it is difficult to envisage how MacDiarmid could have carried them through without some kind of quotation procedure. What is so interesting about the poem’s methodology, however, is the way in which its author, or more accurately editor, has been able to put his hand on exactly the right quotation for his purpose at any given time. This is not the place for a detailed exploration of the borrowings or of the effectiveness of MacDiarmid’s methodology, but a few varied examples may give some idea of its nature. Thus, the exuberance of the opening section ‘In Memoriam James Joyce’ which calls together the ‘funny ones’, those who like himself are ‘concerned with “the living whole/of all the poetry that has ever been written”’ and with ‘making language at once more rich and more precise’ (CP, I, pp. 738, 740, 741); and the similar celebratory quality of the ‘adventuring in dictionaries’ section from ‘The World of Words’ section discussed previously, is opposed by the passages on the Austrian writer Karl Kraus and his journal Die Fackel which were taken from an article in the Times Literary Supplement of 8 May 1953 and added to the poem at a late stage of its final assembly (just as the equally ideological and defeated ‘Battle of the General Strike’ had been added to A Drunk Man when it was about to be sent off to the publishers in May 1926). This Kraus interpolation brings the poem into connection with

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the First World War period and Kraus’s Die Letzten Tage der Menschheit (The Last Days of Mankind) as well as with the advent of Hitler in the early 1930s. It also communicates both the richness and power of language when used by a master satirist and the contrary pessimistic realisation of the impotence of language when faced with conditions such as pertained in Hitler’s Germany. Like MacDiarmid, Kraus was a believer in the creative power of language and the importance of using it for the purposes of social as well as creative purposes, warning of the dangers to human consciousness of a debasement of language – much as MacDiarmid in the Joyce poem and in his periodical articles of the 1930s was concerned about the debasing effect of an increasingly mechanised mass culture. Kraus’s periodical Die Fackel had satirised decadent Vienna in the First World War period and had explored through the vitality of its language the gulf between reality and surface illusion: He reproduced ‘the common talk of the town [. . . and] suddenly forced it/Into a key of ultimate significance’; ‘People gossiped about a War; he heard them/Lament the loss of their souls’ (CP, II, p. 769). In the Hitler era things were different: Where the truth of facts took on the shape Of inflated lies, truth became truly unspeakable. Kraus realised the defeat of satire. ‘Mir fällt zu Hitler nichts ein [. . .] Ich bleibe stumm’.41

It is especially interesting that in the middle of this section on Kraus, MacDiarmid interpolates a quotation relating to the creative silence of the German poet Hölderlin, who ‘often miraculously found/The word with which silence speaks’ (CP, II, p. 771) – an interpolation reminiscent of the silence with which the Drunk Man ended – ‘Yet ha’e I Silence left, the croon o a’’ (CP, p. 166) – an indication, perhaps, of a faith that the artist cannot forever be silenced but will find a way to go on. Another significant borrowing which appears to give expression to exactly that belief is the lyric section which compares the speaker’s life work as poet to the life cycle of the hawthorn tree: Let the only consistency in the course of my poetry Be like that of the hawthorn tree Which in early Spring breaks Fresh emerald, then by nature’s law Darkens and deepens and takes Tints of purple-maroon, rose-madder and straw. (CP, II, p. 756)

This passage is one of the most aesthetically enjoyable sections of In Memoriam James Joyce, and one that has been cited as proof that MacDiarmid did not entirely lose his lyric gifts in his late work. It had, however, seen previous life as a separate poem titled ‘In the Fall’ and had been published as a tribute to Yeats on his death in 1939. Of more account than this recycling

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of work was the discovery by Kenneth Buthlay in the late 1980s that this passage which appeared so much to fit with what was known of MacDiarmid’s life and to suit exactly the point of the Joyce poem’s process at which it had been placed was in fact one of his borrowings: this time from an unsuccessful novel by a forgotten writer, John Smellie Martin, the only distinction of which appeared to lie in a few sections of sensuous description of the natural world.42 Buthlay is harsh in his condemnation of this particular borrowing, and certainly this unacknowledged use of a piece of creative writing, however undistinguished the author more generally might appear to be, seems ethically different from the quotations of scientific and other discursive prose material where it is fairly obvious to the reader that the ostensible author of the complete work would be unlikely to be able to communicate such material at first hand. On the other hand, Martin’s descriptive prose, overlooked in its original fictional context, has here been transformed and raised to a new level by its translation into verse by MacDiarmid, being in the process, and after Buthlay’s discovery of its origins, rescued from oblivion. And given his aim of bringing together the diversity and richness of language, wherever it is found, it is difficult utterly to condemn him here, although it remains an uncomfortable episode. Edwin Morgan has commented that ‘most observers of MacDiarmid’s work are struck by its curious mixing of a desire to bring poetry and science together on the one hand, and on the other hand the recurring element of metaphysical speculation’.43 This is true of his early work not only in the philosophical context of A Drunk Man, but also in his imagistic short lyrics. Such apparently contrasting elements continue to be a feature of the Joyce poem, where music often provides the metaphor for the metaphysical or transcendental as is seen in the final section of the poem as a whole ‘Plaited like the Generations of Men’ with its opening ‘Realm of Music’ passages from Busoni. It is present too in the opening of ‘The World of Words’, an information-giving and analytical section which explores the psychology of aesthetic experience through quotations from June Downey’s Creative Imagination: Studies in the Psychology of Literature, published in 1929. In the introduction to her book, Downey registers her belief that ‘scientific analysis has much to bestow in the way of clarifying our understanding of the human activities that lead to art-creation and that it is perfectly well-justified in dwelling on minutiae and seeking to penetrate their significance. This way has all knowledge, though not necessarily all wisdom, come’.44 MacDiarmid demonstrates his interest in this kind of procedure by combining lists of quotations from Downey’s work relating to research activity (‘the following order represents the success with which/Images of a given kind were aroused/Through direct suggestion’) with her bibliographical items for further reading (‘Givler on “The Psycho-physiological Effect/Of the elements of Speech in Relation to Poetry”’; ‘Ribot’s “L’Imagination Créatrice” with its distinction between/the plastic versus the diffluent imagination’), and with other quoted or perhaps his own comments on topics such as Jung’s idea of ‘archetypal patterns’,

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‘the great inequality of his powers/Of language and thought’ found in the eighteenth-century surgeon and anatomist John Hunter, who was ‘a master of facts’, but not ‘a master of words’; and with many other such information lists and topics (CP, II, pp. 806, 809, 812–13). Edwin Morgan suggests that much of the material here and elsewhere in the Joyce poem is exactly the kind of thing satirised by Joyce in Finnegan’s Wake ; and the author/editor himself at times seems self-mockingly aware of its potential for ridicule when he comments that parts of it ‘might well have been written by Edward Lear and Wilhelm Busch/With occasional advice from Lewis Carroll’ (CP, II, p. 806). Yet elsewhere he has expressed his excitement in the reading of Whitman’s cataloguing passages where ‘suddenly one word just electrifies the whole thing’.45 And so in this long catalogue of psychology of language information, just as the reader is about to go into information over-drive, there comes a passage referring to Gluck’s Orfeo and the lament Orfeo sings when he has for ever lost Eurydice because he could not refrain from looking back when leading her out of the Underworld: Critics have thought it strange that Orpheus should At this ineffable moment sing an aria at all, And that this aria should be in C major. (CP, II, p. 809)

In music C major is a key of affirmation, of resolution, a key traditionally used to express joy, and the unexpected reference to its use here at this tragic moment in Gluck’s opera, and in the midst of the seemingly interminable lists of language information and scientific analysis, points up in a powerful way the mystery and the magic of creative art, how it cannot ever be reduced to scientific or psychological enquiry as in the lists being compiled; and through the musical metaphor of Orfeo singing in affirmation of his love in his moment of deepest despair, it provides an affirmation also of human life and experience, a triumph of humanity. The long quotation from Ferruccio Busoni’s The Realm of Music of 1910 which forms a large part of the final section of the poem acts in a similar way. Music, of course, is already a ‘world language’ where peoples of all cultures can come together and share the experience of listening. It is also a medium which can encapsulate the material and the immaterial, a medium through which time itself can appear to be transcended. In his Sketch of a New Aesthetic in Music (not quoted by MacDiarmid), Busoni discusses his own borrowing practices, defending himself from criticism of his piano transcriptions from the works of Bach. He writes: ‘Every notation is, in itself, the transcription of an abstract idea. The instant the pen seizes it, the idea loses its original form [. . .] from this first transcription to a second, the step is comparatively short and unimportant. And yet it is only the second, in general, of which any notice is taken.’46 His comments are particularly relevant to creative writing borrowings, such as the John Smellie Martin descriptive prose used by MacDiarmid. Yet even in the Joyce poem’s language lists and other passages quoted more or less directly from their original source, a transformation also take place as a

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result of their new context and the interaction with other elements within it. It is not an inert process, but as MacDiarmid himself suggested in yet another analogy with music: When a Chinese calligrapher ‘copies’ The work of an old master it is not A forged facsimile but an interpretation As personal within stylistic limits As a Samuel or Landowska performance Of a Bach partita. (CP, II, p. 765)

In his discussion of In Memoriam James Joyce in Modern Scottish Poetry, Christopher Whyte comments that ‘the poem as a whole shows us MacDiarmid moving, at a surprisingly early stage, from the Modernism of his earlier production to positions that can clearly be identified as Postmodernist’, finding that ‘its play takes the form of turning accepted ideas and procedures on their heads’ in relation to the impersonality of his compilation practices and in ‘the freeing of language from those subservient functions of representation and mirroring which had hitherto been ascribed to it’.47 Yet one could argue that turning traditional ideas upside down and the impersonal collaging of authorial and non-authorial material was an early modernist practice in the visual arts, music and literature; and was a feature of MacDiarmid’s own work from its beginnings (even in the English-language and still immature Annals of the Five Senses). In addition, MacDiarmid has never sought to use language in order to represent the world, but as with Pound and other modernists has seen language as the means of creating a new world, of expanding human consciousness and the power of thought. I would suggest, therefore, that there is in In Memoriam James Joyce, alongside its more humorous or playful passages, that seriousness in relation to making things new formally and in laying bare what MacDiarmid called in one of his advertisements for the poem ‘the limitations of the human mind’48 as well as its potentialities that is characteristic of modernist art. MacDiarmid is never ludic for the sake of being ludic, just as he was never a poet who believed in art for art’s sake only. He was from the beginning, however, a poet who, like the earlier Shelley who shared his evolutionary optimism, believed in the power of poetry. As in the earlier Hymns to Lenin where the importance of the poet’s role often challenged the Marxist message, I would suggest that in this late compilation poem it is that same belief in the power of poetry and the poet to re-create our human world that predominates over a methodology that in its intertextuality and impersonality, its refusal of closure and deferral of meaning appears to conform to what is understood by postmodernist art. Through its many linguistic, scientific, medical and musical metaphors, this is a work which continues to search through the potential in the human mind into the possibilities within human life: ‘The supreme reality is visible to the mind alone’ (CP, II, p. 888). And despite the bleakness of some parts such as the Karl Kraus passages and the

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opening of ‘The Snares of Varuna’ section which quotes from his own The Battle Continues, written during the Spanish Civil War and the Hitler regime in Germany, the trajectory of the poem is towards a more positive future, to the potential within human life. In Memoriam James Joyce ends as it began with a return to Joyce and the excitement of language use: ‘how a man will leave an impression/By the way he mushes his “r’s”/Or buzzes his “y’s” or swallows his “d’s”/So that you automatically think/“Guatemala” or “Argentina” or “Colombia”’; and comes to a stop with a quotation from Horace: ‘non me rebus subjungere conor!’ translated as ‘I won’t let things get the better of me’,49 and followed by a Gurkhali sentence, ‘Sab thik chha’, translated as ‘Everything’s O.K.’: an ending which we are told ‘indicates that the author shares Werner Bergengruen’s conviction of what the German writer calls “the rightness of the world”, despite all that may seem to enforce the opposite conclusion’ (CP, II, pp. 888–9). This determination to be optimistic is characteristic also of The Kind of Poetry I Want, the other lengthy publication of this late period, which puts its faith in a poetry of the future rather than one actually being written in the present: a continuation of his long-held New Age belief in the expansion of human consciousness. This ‘poem’ defies closure as it defies analysis, there seeming to be an endless stream of poetry possibilities flowing from the limited passages included within Lucky Poet and A Kist of Whistles to the final ‘official’ publication by Kulgin Duval in Edinburgh in 1961, all of which point to something the author does not yet have: ‘a poetry concerned with all that is needed/ Of the sum of human knowledge and expression’; ‘a poetry full of erudition, expertise, and ecstasy’, or one, in contrast, ‘finding its universal material in the people’; ‘a poetry like an operating theatre’; ‘poems like the bread-knife/ Which cuts three slices at once.’50 In some respects it may be easier for us today to read both In Memoriam James Joyce and The Kind of Poetry I Want, situated as we are in the internet/information age, where information sources seem inexhaustible and ‘planetary integration’ via the internet a possibility at an everyday level that not even MacDiarmid dreamt of. MacDiarmid and Muir were both ‘visionaries’ as well as ‘revisionaries’, yet it is interesting to observe the contrasting way in which each poet dealt with the changing modern world. Muir, too often considered in the past as a transcendent poet, concerned mostly with spiritual matters, appears in his late poetry, essays and letters as a poet of the sublunary world, concerned with how we live with one another, and about where our eager embrace of technology may lead us in the future. In addition to his warnings about nuclear disaster in his poetry of the 1950s, an essay such as ‘The Poetic Imagination’ returns to the topic of our dependence on machinery and how this machine mind-set results in human beings themselves being expected to perform like machines, continually improving, as opposed to the actual pattern of the human lifecycle where each new life has to begin at the beginning with the same innate features as opposed to those of an improved model. Similarly, in The Estate of Poetry, the published version of the lectures Muir gave at

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Harvard as Visiting Professor of Poetry in the mid-1950s, he worries about the future of poetry and the audience for poetry in the new mechanised world of mass media and mass culture. How will the poet find an audience in the midst of such diversity? How will the poet know what kind of an audience he or she is writing for? In contrast, MacDiarmid’s compass appears to point confidently to the future, ready to celebrate and appropriate whatever new methodologies, materials or opportunities might come his way. Despite his past revolutionary socialism and nationalism, however, and his continuing loyalty to communism in the 1950s, this commitment to the future – at least as expressed in his poetry – is an intellectual commitment, a continuing belief in the power of creative thought, in the expansion of the human mind, as opposed to a commitment at the social level of how we as individuals and societies learn to live together with each other in a more fruitful way, as we find in Muir’s late work. Yet, in their different ways, both these poets have contributed immensely to the redirection of Scottish poetry in the twentieth century and both poets, I would argue, have contributed also to the expansion of our perceptions in regard to the possibilities within modernist poetry more generally.

Notes 1. Edwin Muir, ‘Nooks of Scotland’, The Listener, 16 January 1958, p. 120. 2. Muir, Selected Letters, pp. 107, 116. Page numbers for further quotations will be given in the text, prefaced by ‘SL’. 3. T. S. Eliot, Introduction to Edwin Muir, Selected Poems, p. 10. 4. Muir, ‘A View of Poetry’, in Essays on Literature and Society, pp. 231–2. 5. Muir, An Autobiography, p. 205. Page numbers for further quotations will be given in the text, prefaced by ‘A’. 6. Gunn, Scots Magazine, May 1943, p. 163. 7. Muir, The Complete Poems of Edwin Muir, p. 98. Page numbers for further quotations will be given in the text, prefaced by ‘CP’. 8. We Moderns, pp. 15–16, reprinted in McCulloch (ed.), Modernism and Nationalism, pp. 163–4. 9. Ayers, Cambridge Companion to Modernist Poetry, pp. 12–13. 10. European Quarterly, May 1934, pp. 3–11, reprinted in McCulloch (ed.), Modernism and Nationalism, pp. 354–7. 11. For example, see Hogg’s Justified Sinner, Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde, and Jenkins’ Fergus Lamont and Just Duffy. 12. Muir, BBC broadcast, 3 September 1952, quoted by Butter, in Muir, Complete Poems, pp. 339–40. 13. Muir, Scottish Journey, pp. 143–4. Complete Poems, p. 158. 14. Butter, Edwin Muir: Man and Poet, p. 216. 15 Muir, quoted by Butter in Edwin Muir: Man and Poet, pp. 215–16. 16. Huberman, The Poetry of Edwin Muir: The Field of Good and Ill, p. 167.

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196 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

33. 34. 35.

36. 37. 38.

39. 40. 41. 42.

Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959 Whyte, Modern Scottish Poetry, p. 79. Heaney, ‘The Impact of Translation’, The Yale Review, Autumn 1987, pp. 8–9. Spender, review of Journeys and Places, in Muir, Complete Poems, p. 321. Muir, We Moderns, p. 147, reprinted in McCulloch (ed.), Modernism & Nationalism, p. 169. Muir, Complete Poems, p. 366. Heaney, ‘The Impact of Translation’, pp. 8–9. Bold, MacDiarmid, p. 346. See, for example, Alan Riach, Hugh MacDiarmid’s Epic Poetry, chapter 2 ‘In Memoriam James Joyce’; W. N. Herbert, ‘MacDiarmid: Mature Art’, Scottish Literary Journal 15.2, 1988, pp. 24–37; also references throughout Alan Bold’s chapter ‘Mature Art’ in his MacDiarmid biography. See MacDiarmid, Letters of Hugh MacDiarmid, p. 470; Bold, MacDiarmid, pp. 378–9. Bold, MacDiarmid, p. 373. MacDiarmid, Letters of Hugh MacDiarmid, p. 452. Ibid., p. 453. Herbert, ‘Mature Art’. Wallace Stevens, Collected Poems, p. 240. Nancy Gish, Interview with MacDiarmid, Contemporary Literature, 20.2, Spring 1979, pp. 143–4. ‘Author’s Note’ to 1955 edition of In Memoriam James Joyce, p. 14. This first edition (reprinted in 1956) is the easiest and most enjoyable edition to use for the Joyce poem, with its large pages and generous spacing, and its Ogam script decorations by J. D. Fergusson. For convenience, quotations here will be referenced from the Complete Poems of 1978. Craig, ‘Hugh MacDiarmid’s Poetry’, Voice of Scotland, 7 April 1956, p. 10. Edwin Morgan, ‘Jujitsu for the Educated’, Twentieth Century 160, September 1956, p. 230. MacDiarmid, Complete Poems, II, p. 823. See also Riach, Hugh MacDiarmid’s Epic Poetry, p. 22 and note 48 where he discusses information given him by Edwin Morgan about the source of this passage in John Buchan’s 1933 novel A Prince of the Captivity. Gish, Interview with MacDiarmid, p. 144. Whitworth, ‘Culture and Leisure in Hugh MacDiarmid’s “On a Raised Beach”’, Scottish Studies Review 9.1, Spring 2008, pp. 123–43. Buthlay, Annotated edition of MacDiarmid, A Drunk Man passim where relevant, but see especially references in relation to closing philosophical section, p. 187ff. Whitworth, ‘Culture and Leisure’, p. 124. MacDiarmid, Raucle Tongue II, p. 342; Whitworth, ‘Culture and Leisure’, p. 126. CP, II, p. 775. ‘I can do nothing with Hitler – I remain silent’. Buthlay, ‘The Ablach in the Gold Pavilion’, Scottish Literary Journal 15.2, November 1988, pp. 39–57.

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43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49.

Morgan, Hugh MacDiarmid, p. 26. Downey, Creative Imagination, pp. vii–viii. See Gish interview, p. 143. Busoni, Sketch of a New Aesthetic in Music, p. 85. Whyte, Modern Scottish Poetry, pp. 92, 94. See correspondence with Eliot, Letters, pp. 452–3. The Maclellan edition of the poem has the word conjugere as opposed to subjungere in the Latin quotation. However, the Latin verb is coniugare, meaning ‘to form a friendship’ with an –are as opposed to an –ere infinitive, while subiungere means ‘to subordinate’ or ‘to subdue’: a meaning closer to the translation given. It seems that a misquotation of the Latin has been subsequently altered either by the author or by the editors of the Complete Poems. 50. These short quotations are selected at random from ‘The Kind of Poetry I Want’, Lucky Poet, pp. 114–35.

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Chapter 10

Continuities and New Voices

Scotland has poets again, and they are poets who put intellect in service to their passion, whose appetite is large, and their spirit high. If one can believe their evidence the Sangschaw period, now coming of age, is not yet coming to an end; but is about to enter some fine sturdy years. Eric Linklater, Poetry Scotland 3 (1946)

Most accounts of the cultural and political revival movement known as the Scottish Renaissance finish with the outbreak of World War Two in 1939: a convenient but unsatisfactory closure since it robs the movement of its last words. As the previous chapter has shown, such a periodisation is equally unsatisfactory in relation to the later stages of Scottish modernism. In consequence, Scottish culture in the 1940s and 1950s often appears to be stranded in a kind of no-man’s land, cut off from the innovative national and European influences of the previous two decades and waiting to be rescued by the new demotic and largely urban writing which, together with the popular culture of the 1960s generation, will take it on a different journey. Yet this perception of the stationary cultural journey of the 1940s and 1950s is not true to the reality of the period as can be seen from the primary sources of the time. It is certainly the case that as with the changes brought to modernist art generally as a result of two World Wars, World War Two did mark the end of the originating and principal development phase of Scottish modernism, although its character had been altering throughout the 1930s in response to political, social and economic pressures. Of the original Scottish modernists from the post-1918 years, Edwin Muir was exceptional in that his mature poetry came to fruition alongside the new conditions of the 1940s and 1950s. Others experienced a change of direction, or had one forced on them as we have seen in relation to MacDiarmid’s publishing difficulties. Lewis Grassic Gibbon tragically did not survive until the end of the 1930s, so there is no way of telling how his innovations in language and fictional form might have developed after Grey Granite. His companion revolutionary writer James Barke turned to the fictionalising of the life of Robert Burns in a series of novels in the postwar period and is nowadays best known for this work. Neil M. Gunn also changed direction after the outbreak of World War Two,

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although this change is perhaps more clearly seen in retrospect since twelve of his twenty novels were published after 1940 and the setting of most of them was still wholly or partially the Highlands. However, The Silver Darlings, published in 1941 but written as part of his 1930s project to investigate and re-imagine Highland life, is the last book in which he focuses on this epic theme, developed through the use of Celtic mythology and Jungian explorations of racial memory and the collective unconscious as well as through influences from the modernist fiction of Proust. His later books progressively took up the philosophical theme of the individual’s search for ‘the other landscape’ and the integration of the material and the spiritual, with the Highlands having a role as a healing force for those psychologically damaged by the destructive forces of the post-World War Two world. A significant novel in relation to that world is The Green Isle of the Great Deep, published in 1944. This dystopian fable, set in Tir-nan-Og, the Gaelic paradise, and drawing on Celtic legends and motivated by the growth of totalitarianism in the 1930s, both in Soviet Russia and Hitler’s Germany, sets in motion an ironical scenario where individual freedom is destroyed in the attempt to create a paradisal state organised for the benefit of all. As with Orwell’s 1984, control of the mind is the key to ultimate control of the society, a procedure subverted by the arrival of the mythically named Young Art and Old Hector who bring with them a strong sense of individuality and the experience of a genuine interactive community: a Highland heritage which leads them instinctively to evade the state’s instructions and prohibitions. Although Gunn’s ending is a positive one, his book is a salutary moral fable – not of a deliberate intention to harm, as in Orwell’s novel, but a story of how excessive zeal in furthering an ideal, or attempting to bring about the greatest good of the greatest number, can have the opposite effect from that initially intended; how ‘a system of ideology of the highest intention may in practice result in the most barbarous cruelty’.1 This is a relevant lesson in relation to the fascination of MacDiarmid and others with the fascism of Mussolini in the early 1920s and the union he appeared to offer of a socialism linked to a focus on national interests; or to the embrace of Soviet communism in the 1930s by so many creative writers as well as political and social reformers. A casualty of the war period was the contribution of the women writers who had come to prominence in the interwar years, with the disappearance of several prominent names or their continuation as writers in a less challenging form. Nancy Brysson Morrison continued to publish, but while historical novels such The Winnowing Years (1949) and The Hidden Fairing (1951) attracted positive comment, neither challenged the innovative poetic form of The Gowk Storm. Lorna Moon died in 1929; Nan Shepherd wrote no more novels after 1933; and Willa Muir’s final work did not come until the late 1960s when she wrote the book on the ballads for which Edwin had received a Bollingen grant, but which his ill-health and death prevented him from writing, and Belonging, her memoir of their life together which complements his own autobiography. Her creative writing from the postwar

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period remains unpublished and is probably not in a publishable form. The only Scottish modernist woman who did leave something new, although fragmented, was Catherine Carswell who died in 1946 in poor health after the privations of wartime and from pneumonia and pleurisy. She left behind fragments for an autobiography which her son published as Lying Awake. Yet in this fragmented account of her life as a child and as an elderly woman invisible to the passers by; in her thoughts on life and writing and women, crossing over each other and in an unstructured way interacting with each other; and in her own comment, chosen by her son as one the epigraphs to the book: ‘To be bound for ever by the arbitrary accident of one’s memories: what an idea of immortality!’ – in all these aspects of her thinking and note-making about life and about her own life she maintains the connections with female modernist writing found in her two novels of the early 1920s. It is regrettable, but symptomatic of so many women’s lives, that she never did escape from being the family’s main (if meagre) earner in order to write the additional novel she mentioned from time to time in letters to friends, including D. H. Lawrence who had once written to her: ‘I think you are the only woman I have met, who is so intrinsically detached, so essentially separated and isolated, as to be a real writer or artist or recorder [. . .] Therefore I believe your book will be a real book, and a woman’s book: one of the very few.’2

New Voices Despite difficult wartime conditions, there were new voices making themselves heard in the 1940s, and these writers – primarily poets – can now be seen to have initiated a later phase of modern – and in some cases modernist – activity in Scotland: related to the MacDiarmid-inspired modernism of the 1920s, yet at the same time differing from it in several respects. As in the original movement, little magazines were at the forefront of the 1940s activities, but one crucial difference from the previous ‘do-it-yourself’ publishing practices of MacDiarmid was the advent of William Maclellan of Glasgow as publisher. Maclellan was himself a man of wide cultural interests. His wife, Agnes Walker, was a professional pianist and he became involved with Margaret Morris’s Celtic Ballet Club and the New Art Club she and the painter J. D. Fergusson initiated when they returned to Glasgow from France in 1939.3 Having inherited a printing business from his father, Maclellan transformed this in the 1940s into a much needed Scottish cultural publishing house. In addition to important book publications such as Sorley MacLean’s Dàin do Eimhir of 1943, with illustrations by William Crosbie; and Hugh MacDiarmid’s In Memoriam James Joyce of 1955, decorated by J. D. Fergusson, Maclellan published four numbers of the magazine Poetry Scotland between 1943 and 1947, together with a series of solo poetry collections by writers associated with the magazine; and five issues of Scottish Art and Letters between 1944 and 1950. He also published Million, subtitled

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in its first issue New Left Writing, whose editor was the English poet John Singer. MacDiarmid was a regular contributor and other occasional Scottish contributors were Sydney Goodsir Smith, Joe Corrie, Maurice Lindsay, William Montgomerie and J. B. Pick, and its second issue included articles on the Glasgow Unity Theatre and the founding of Glasgow Citizens Theatre. Million, however, was not a particularly ‘Scottish’ magazine, and as with much committed poetry of the 1930s, political content was often more prominent than artistically resolved creative writing. The magazine lasted for three issues only between late 1943 and late 1946, despite a new cover design by the Scottish artist William Crosbie in the third issue, now subtitled The People’s Review, and despite this issue’s editorial looking forward to an expansion of material in the projected Million 4. MacDiarmid’s essay on Scottish Proletarian Literature, marked ‘to be concluded’, also suggests that the magazine’s closure was unintended and sudden. Poetry Scotland and Scottish Art and Letters were more clearly Scottish magazines, although Poetry Scotland was modelled on Poetry London edited by James Tambimuttu and its first issue was dedicated or ‘inscribed’ to ‘that discriminating artist who is the friend of so many of the Scottish poets, Meary J. Tambimuttu’.4 Maurice Lindsay, then on active service in the army, was the editor of Poetry Scotland, and in his first issue he followed Tambimuttu’s internationalist position by including a Welsh, Irish and English section as well as a Scottish one ‘because I do not believe in a strictly national outlook in art’.5 The Scottish section included poems written in English, Gaelic and Lallans, the term that had now replaced MacDiarmid’s earlier ‘Doric’ terminology for the Scots language. Douglas Young and Sydney Goodsir Smith were the principal followers of MacDiarmid so far as language was concerned, although both looked more towards adapting the classic Scots of the fifteenth and sixteenth-century Makars and to a standardisation of spelling than to MacDiarmid’s synthetic mixture of dialects and dictionary vocabulary, complete with apostrophes to mark letters omitted. Edwin Muir was a contributor in English, as was MacDiarmid, while some of the younger English-language Scottish writers such as J. F. Hendry, G. S. Fraser, Ruthven Todd, Tom Scott and Norman McCaig [sic] were involved with the ‘New Apocalypse’ movement headed by J. F. Hendry and William Treece (who also contributed to the Wales section of the first issue). W. S. Graham was another English-language contributor with some affinities in his early poetry with the New Apocalypse writers. Adam Drinan was a Highland writer contributing in English while both George Campbell Hay and Sorley MacLean were important contributors in Gaelic, bringing Gaelic poetry into the modern context envisaged by the Scottish Renaissance programme so many years before. As its title suggests, poetry was the principal focus, but each issue also included an essay on some aspect of poetry (including J. F. Hendry’s explanation of ‘The Apocalyptic Element in Modern Poetry’ in the second collection), an Editorial Letter, and an Introduction by a writer associated with the original literary revival movement (such as Compton Mackenzie

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in Number One, Neil M. Gunn in Number Two), thus maintaining a supportive link with this earlier phase. Book reviews were added to issues after Number One, together with a small amount of illustrative material by young contemporary visual artists. All issues had a specially designed cover by a young Scottish artist, the first one by William Crosbie. Visual art work is an aesthetically satisfying element in both Poetry Scotland and Scottish Art and Letters, even if limited in the former to the cover and occasional internal decorations. This visual art contribution is taken up more fully in Scottish Art and Letters whose Editor for issues One to Four was the poet R. Crombie Saunders, with MacDiarmid becoming specifically named as the Literary Editor for the 1950 special PEN Congress Edinburgh Festival number. J. D. Fergusson was the Art Editor for all five issues, designing the cover and contributing illustrations and reproductions of his paintings. The cover consisted of an abstract composition of squares and rectangles giving a mosaic effect not unlike that of a Glasgow tiled close, with the cool blue, green and grey colours of the basic tile design changing between issues in relation to the intensity of the colour used and/or with a yellow or cerise colour added, thus providing a consistent and modern identity for the magazine as a whole which was at the same time individual to each issue. Internal art work was provided by young artists associated with Fergusson’s New Scottish Group of artists, and there were also colour and black-and-white reproductions of paintings, some of which accompanied articles on the visual arts. Literary material consisted of poetry and short stories, with critical articles such as Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji’s ‘The Songs of Francis George Scott’, J. F. Hendry’s ‘The Element of Myth in James Joyce’, MacDiarmid’s ‘Grassic Gibbon’, Mary Baird Aitken’s ‘The Poetry of Hugh MacDiarmid’, and Sorley MacLean’s ‘Aspects of Gaelic Poetry’. There were also book reviews, articles on music, theatre, film and education, and a topical editorial in each issue. Like James Whyte’s The Modern Scot in the early to mid-1930s, Scottish Art and Letters with its wide coverage of the arts, and Poetry Scotland with its more specific poetry brief, were well-produced, informative and aesthetically interesting modern magazines. Like MacDiarmid’s and Whyte’s magazines in the earlier period, they demonstrated a new confidence in a Scottish artistic identity that was at the same time outward-looking towards European and other influences; and an interest in interaction between the various art forms. Yet there were inevitable differences between these two modern periods, since, because of the war, what we have in the magazines of the 1940s is to some extent a kind of ‘virtual reality’ little magazine scene. In the 1920s MacDiarmid had certainly depended upon print media to create an ‘imagined community’ of creative writers and their patrons as opposed to, say, modernist painters and writers in Paris in the early years of the century who interacted with each other and their supporters face-to-face in the many émigré groupings in the city. Nevertheless, MacDiarmid’s contributors and supporters, though scattered throughout the country as opposed to being situated

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in a specific cultural centre, and interacting mainly through correspondence, the magazines themselves, and occasional political and cultural meetings, did have a sense of a mission to be fulfilled in relation to the regeneration of their country’s literature; and a sense also of the kind of adventurous readership they were aiming at, even if this readership base was smaller than they would have liked. The situation in the 1940s was inevitably different. Maurice Lindsay, Editor of Poetry Scotland, was serving in the forces (hence, no doubt, the unusual title ‘Editorial Letter’ for his editorials); many of the contributors to the magazine were also in the forces with poems such as G. S. Fraser’s ‘Egypt’, Adam Drinan’s ‘Three Women on an Island’, W. S. Graham’s ‘His Companions Buried Him’ and Sorley MacLean’s ‘Glac a’ Bhàis’ (‘Death Valley’) bringing the war situation into the cultural scene. MacLean himself was wounded on the Eastern Front and his ‘Poems to Eimhir’ had to be seen through the press by Douglas Young. Young was a conscientious objector, for national as opposed to pacifist reasons; Norman MacCaig was a conscientious objector for pacifist reasons; while Sydney Goodsir Smith was rejected as unfit as a result of his asthma. George Campbell Hay, who initially attempted to avoid conscription, eventually joined the forces. MacDiarmid, too old to be conscripted, was sent to do manual work in the shipyards (and a photograph of him, boiler-suited, carefully handling a metal plate in an ammunitions factory, sits provocatively among the poetry and the art work in Poetry Scotland 3). Muir, before he was ‘rescued’ by the British Council in the early 1940s and brought to Edinburgh, had been sent to stamp ration books in the Dundee Food Office. J. D. Fergusson, born in 1874, was too old for conscription or non-combatant war work. Modernist little magazines as a genre have been traditionally insecure, unstable and short lived, as were those edited by MacDiarmid. These new magazines of the 1940s, despite their professionalism and their creation of an apparently holistic Scottish arts scene, were insecure as a result of the war: their supporters and contributors were scattered in very diverse situations with few connections between them, and their organisational and editorial activity depended heavily on the older generation of writers and artists who gave Scottish Art and Letters in particular its stability; contributions from younger writers were dependent to a significant extent on what could get through from the front; and they were dependent also on what supplies of paper could be obtained at the necessary time. As the founding editorials of both Poetry Scotland and Scottish Art and Letters make clear, the aim of these new magazines was to present Scottish artistic activity to Scotland itself and to the outside world, but generationally there was inevitably some difference in view as to how this could and should be done, as Lindsay’s hesitation about the ‘national outlook in art’ shows. Neither magazine was polemical, or even openly argumentative in the way that the magazines of the 1920s and early 1930s (both MacDiarmid and nonMacDiarmid) were argumentative. And their readership also was uncertain. Such uncertainties surface in the magazines themselves, implicitly and explicitly, alongside their many interesting features. The second editorial of

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Scottish Art and Letters, for example, apologises for the time which has elapsed since the first issue, citing wartime restrictions but still looking forward optimistically to the possibility of establishing it as a quarterly review. At the same time it draws attention to what might be considered the ‘more conservative nature’ of the second issue, with writing that is ‘experimental’ for the sake of being experimental rejected – a comment that may refer to the strong showing of the ‘Apocalyptics’ in the first issue and their absence from this one. This raises the question of readership, especially of a general arts magazine such as Scottish Art and Letters. Thus the increasing number of advertisements in issues Three and Four, and the nature of such advertisements, suggest that there was not only a need to raise money, but that, with the men in the forces, its readership was to a significant extent a middle-class female one, largely Edinburgh-based. There are, for example, advertisements for Edinburgh department stores such as Darling’s and for Rae Macintosh’s music shop; for Celtic design carpets, the Scottish Gallery, and Douglas and Foulis and other bookshops; for Saxone shoe shops and even for female sanitary protection. MacBrayne’s Steamer Services are advertised over a colour reproduction of a painting of Iona by Peploe. Poetry Scotland’s specific poetry remit probably meant that its readership was more willing to be experimental, although it too suffered disruption in the frequency of its planned issues and its editorials could be cautious, with Lindsay insisting that ‘POETRY- SCOTLAND can have no axe to grind and no creed to further – except the creed of artistic strength for Scotland’.6 And while, perhaps responding to readership views or to the difficulties of getting material in wartime conditions, issues after the first did not include sections on English, Welsh and Irish poetry, Lindsay continued to be equivocal about Scots-language work. While artistic strength must clearly come first, what is missing from both magazines is the polemic that, along with the creative activity, made the MacDiarmid magazines, and in a quieter way The Modern Scot, so challenging. One dispute which did reach the public stage in 1946 was a re-run of the ‘synthetic Scots’ argument of the early 1920s, when a writer in the Glasgow Herald, complaining about the Scots-language poetry of MacDiarmid and his younger associates, gave their writing the inspired description of ‘Plastic Scots’ on the grounds that they made use of ‘any gobbets of language, which, once thrown together, can then be punched into any shape the poet likes’.7 This ‘Plastic Scots’ argument, prominent in the papers of the time, brought the newly demobbed Alexander Scott into contact with the periodical publishing scene, resulting in him becoming editor of the last issues of Scots Review, and of Saltire Review until 1957. It also provoked Douglas Young’s lecture under the auspices of the Dunedin Society in Glasgow in December 1946, published in the Maclellan booklet ‘Plastic Scots’ and the Scottish Literary Tradition: An Authoritative Introduction to a Controversy. Young’s lecture in many respects revisited the ground covered by W. A. Craigie in his 1921 lecture to the Vernacular Circle of the London Burns Club, ‘The Present State of the Scottish Tongue’: a lecture given, and later published, in order to provide a historical context for

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the new interest in Scots language in the post-1918 period. In the context of the interwar attempts to create a new, distinctive Scottish writing, it is depressing to realise that its potential audience had learned so little about literary language over the intervening years: a deficiency captured unforgettably by Sydney Goodsir Smith’s ‘Epistle to John Guthrie’: We’ve come intil a gey queer time Whan scrievin Scots is near a crime, ‘Theres no one speaks like that’, they fleer, – But wha the deil spoke like King Lear?8

MacDiarmid himself was the most polemical of the contributors to these later Scottish magazines, and in an essay in the second issue of Scottish Art and Letters this extended to a surprisingly negative view of what he considered to be Grassic Gibbon’s unintellectual socialism and his capacity to deal with city life: ‘When he comes to deal with city life he doesn’t know it half so well despite all his surface sophistication’9 – a strange criticism from the poet who himself wrote so implausibly about Glasgow and its slums. Yet, while the tendency in MacDiarmid to ‘shout too loudly’ (as Grassic Gibbon said of himself)10 can at times seem unforgiveable, as in his ‘Cheka’s horrors’ comment in ‘First Hymn to Lenin’, this polemical intemperance did often go to the heart of a situation, creatively and critically, if not so often politically. It is interesting that the PEN Congress Edinburgh Festival issue of Scottish Art and Letters which he edited in 1950 is also the most exciting of its five issues. Besides his editorial on ‘The Freedom of the Writer’, a polemical piece in which he questions the ‘freedom’ of the sessions on ‘The Writer and the Idea of Freedom’ being organised under the auspices of PEN and UNESCO, but at which attendance is ‘by invitation only’; and his further article on ‘The Quality of Scots Internationalism’, there is a relevant analytical essay by J. F. Hendry on ‘Dunbar the European’, linking this early European literary relationship to a critique (not always positive) of how contemporary writers exhibit ‘Europeanism’ in their work. There are also strong poetry contributions from a small group of forward-looking poets including MacDiarmid himself, Sydney Goodsir Smith, Norman MacCaig, Douglas Young, J. F. Hendry and Sorley MacLean. There are no short stories, previously the weakest element in the magazine; and there are no commercial, female-oriented advertisements, the small number of advertisements being for quality bookshops and publishers. As in previous issues, the visual art element is strong, with the addition of new painters such as Tom MacDonald and Bet Low who were to go on to be serious figures on the Scottish art scene from the 1950s onwards. Douglas Young’s poem ‘For Wullie Soutar October 1943’, written on the occasion of Soutar’s death, is reproduced in this issue within a Pictish decorative panel and typography designed by George Bain. Unfortunately, this fine Festival issue was also the final issue of Scottish Art and Letters. Despite the trials of their wartime publication context, these magazines, read in retrospect at this early point in the twenty-first century, speak strongly

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of how far Scottish culture had travelled since the split identity days of North British provincialism and kailyaird parochialism in the late nineteenth century and early years of the twentieth century. An especially encouraging feature of the 1948 Scottish Art and Letters editorial is its reference to drama which is having ‘new and increasing life in Scotland’.11 Although the attempt to encourage a Scottish drama had been one of the objectives of the Scottish Renaissance movement, neither the Scottish National Players nor the Community Drama movement had succeeded in establishing a modern drama that could approach in ambition, even less actuality, the success of the new Scottish writing in poetry and fiction. As James Bridie commented in his article ‘Notes for a Scottish Theatre’ in the first issue of Scottish Arts and Letters, ‘Scotland has only recently given up burning down theatres on the grounds that such buildings are unpleasant to God and are hotbeds for all kinds of social vice’.12 In contrast, by this third editorial R. Crombie Saunders is able to point to the establishment of the Gateway Theatre in Edinburgh, the Glasgow Citizens and its success with Robert MacLellan’s Jamie the Saxt; and most importantly, the contemporaneous 1948 Edinburgh Festival production of David Lindsay’s sixteenth-century Ane Pleasant Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis, produced by Tyrone Guthrie in an acting version by Robert Kemp – a production which showed that there could be an experimental, even ‘modernistic’ theatre in Scotland. The influence of this Festival production reverberated down future years until its innovative, non-naturalistic scenario and presentational style, its use of music, mime and other non-verbal performance detail, and its imaginative collaboration with the audience in an open as opposed to proscenium stage, was taken up later in the century by small experimental theatre companies such as 7.84, Communicado, Theatre Babel and others, and by a poet/dramatist such as Liz Lochhead in her Mary Queen of Scots Got her Head Chopped Off. In addition, although the first modern periodicals of the 1940s came to an end with the 1950 Festival issue of Scottish Art and Letters, others such as Saltire Review and the important poetry magazine Lines (later Lines Review) started up. MacDiarmid’s Voice of Scotland from the late 1930s, interrupted by the outbreak of war, restarted from 1945 to 1948, and then started all over again from 1955 to 1959. Even when this late phase of Scottish modernism came to an end in 1959, periodicals of various kinds continued to be a significant part of the Scottish literary scene, showing Scottish writing to Scotland itself and to the outside world, and at the same time bringing the influences from the outside world to Scotland: an objective initiated by MacDiarmid’s Chapbook in the early years of Scottish modernism.

Modernism and the New Poetry As with the writing of the Scottish Renaissance movement in the interwar period, not all new poets of the 1940s and 1950s could be considered as modernist writers, although there was much revitalising work going on

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in poetry at this time. The Apocalyptic group certainly had some affinity with modernism in its imagistic methodology and frequently obscure discourse, but the writers involved did not necessarily continue with this poetic approach nor become influential in Scottish poetry. The most notable of the group is Norman MacCaig, who did become a significant Scottish poet in later decades, but who refused to publish his early Apocalyptic work in his Collected Poems and did not develop a new poetry that could be considered ‘modernistic’, although it was clearly a ‘modern’ poetry for a different age. Edwin Morgan, who began to publish after the war, could be considered a late modernist in relation to the innovatory nature of his language and his willingness to experiment with poetic form; but his career as poet belongs more obviously to the decades from the 1960s onwards. There was also a new Scots-language poetry that although it might not be classed as modernist was certainly furthering and adapting the work begun by the more general Scottish Renaissance movement in the post-1918 period. Robert Garioch, for example, who did not return to live in Scotland until the 1960s, wrote a strong Edinburgh Scots, rich in vocabulary yet flexible and conversationally demotic, drawing on the Scots language poetry of the eighteenth-century Robert Fergusson as opposed to MacDiarmid’s twentiethcentury re-integrated Scots, and linking this with contemporary Edinburgh speech. Douglas Young, author of the ‘Plastic Scots’ essay, was a good linguist and scholar, able to bring together the influences from the Makars with more contemporary language models, and creating an intertextual poetic context which included European and classical references. Alexander Scott was both playwright and poet in Scots, and his poetry is close to MacDiarmid’s early lyrics in its song-like quality and in the way it brings together imagistically the earthly and the cosmic. Yet his poetry does not have the intellectual element that is always present (even if implicitly) in MacDiarmid; or the elder poet’s capacity to be ‘whaur extremes meet’, to juggle with contrairies at one and the same time. Scott’s poem ‘The Gallus Makar’, dedicated to MacDiarmid, evokes the ‘Ballad of the Crucified Rose’ section of A Drunk Man, but while MacDiarmid’s political and philosophical ballad ends in a defeat where ‘like connoisseurs the Deils gang roond/Wi’ ready platitude’ and the Drunk Man prays: ‘Let God forsake me noo and no’/Staund connoisseur-like tae!’ (MacDiarmid CP, I, p. 122), Scott’s national scenario ends in triumph as the ‘callants’ (young men) ‘drave the Suddron roses doun/Frae the rose sae white and smaa’.13 Scott’s most modernistic poetry in Scots, close to Pound’s insistence on using ‘no word that does not contribute to the presentation’,14 is to be found in a small number of poems which might well be called his ‘war poetry’. These are not conventional war poems, for Scott did not talk directly of his war experiences, either in writing or in conversation after the war despite his being awarded the Military Cross for bravery. Edwin Morgan has said of his own wartime experience that he could not write poetry while in the Middle East and that The New Divan, published in 1977, was really his war poem. Alexander Scott also wrote what could be considered his war

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poetry after the war, in the years from late 1945. What is interesting with regard to both Morgan and Scott, however, is that in the early postwar years they both returned to Anglo-Saxon poetry as a model, making translations of the ‘Seafarer’ and ‘Wanderer’ poems. Morgan said that when he began to read Anglo-Saxon poetry on his return to university after war service, it spoke to him with a modern voice. Scott may have found the same thing, and may have found also that such poetry enabled him to speak impersonally about the experience of war, bringing it into a wider context of human isolation in the face of a fate or weird that cannot be understood or controlled. Four translations ‘frae the West Saxon’ – ‘Seaman’s Sang’ (‘The Seafarer’), ‘The Gangrel’ (‘The Wanderer’), ‘Sang for a Flodden’ (an excerpt from ‘The Battle of Maldon’) and ‘Makar’s Lament’ (an adaptation of ‘Deor’) – were written between December 1945 and September 1946. The interaction of sound and sense in the Scots language used, together with the stressed rhythms of the original poems, communicate a sense of endurance in the midst of individual pain: ‘The wise man sees the wershness o’t/whan aa the walth o the warld stands waste [. . .] Sae the Makar o men made mools o the warld/till quaet cam doun on the commontie’s din/and the auld titan-wark stuid toom . . .’ (Scott, CP, pp. 17–18). In addition to these Anglo- Saxon translations, one of Scott’s finest poems is ‘Coronach’, dated 6 June 1946, and headed ‘For the deid o the 5th/7th Battalion, The Gordon Highlanders’. The poem is a lyrical lament for the dead in which the speaker’s memories bring back the voices of his comrades and with them a sense of responsibility to them: ‘But nou that I’m far/Frae the fechtin’s fear [. . .] They croud aroun me out of the grave/Whaur love and langourie sae lanesome grieve’ (CP, p. 27). And the voices remind him also of his duty to them as poet: ‘“You hae the words we spak,/You hae the sang/We canna sing [. . .] Makar, frae nou ye maun/Be singan for us deid men”’ (CP, p. 28). This is a war poem to be ranked with the best from both world wars as well as an outstanding contribution to modern poetry in Scots. The two new poets of the 1940s period who could without reservation be considered contributors to a Scottish modernist poetry are Sydney Goodsir Smith who wrote in Scots, and the Gaelic poet Sorley MacLean. Smith was not a combatant for reasons of poor health, but his Scots-language poetry of the early 1940s turns often to the war for theme. He was a New Zealander, the son of doctor whose ancestors were Scottish, and he was educated at school in England before attending Edinburgh University (briefly as a medical student, in accordance with his father’s wishes, but against his own), and then Oxford. When living in Edinburgh in the late 1930s, a friend sent him a copy of MacDiarmid’s A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle, and the course of his future career was set: ‘As with so many people it was like a flash of lightning to my unawakened and groping faculties [. . .] until reading The Drunk Man [sic] I might say I hadn’t been born.’15 Smith was therefore not a native Scots speaker, nor even one who had heard Scots spoken around him when growing up. He made himself familiar not only with MacDiarmid but

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especially with the poetry of the late fifteenth and sixteenth-century Makars, and began to develop a modern Scots literary language based on the Scots of that early period, although he did not use the verse forms of the period. In 1947, he and a group of the new Scots-language poets published a Style Sheet in the poetry magazine Lines in an attempt to bring consistency to Scots spelling forms. As he comments in the Foreword to his Collected Poems: ‘We agreed on some rules and agreed to abide by these and by these means hoped to remove the “dialect” stigma (as we thought it) so often levelled at the often widely different usages of this ancient and respectable literary language. Our problem was to agree upon a standard spelling so that an Aberdonian and a Borderer would spell a word in the same way while pronouncing it sui generis.’ It is interesting that one of the ‘provincialising’ features of poetry in Scots that they hoped to eliminate as a result of the Style Sheet agreement was the ‘very plethora of apostrophes’ used to approximate the language ‘to the accepted standard English’: a ubiquitous and often confusing element in MacDiarmid’s poetry.16 While not all agreements were carried out as planned, what this attempt at consistency achieved in Smith’s case was to give his poetry the appearance of a distinctive literary language, related to English, but having its own identity and forms, and without the distraction for the reader of the apologetic apostrophes. Smith was therefore an important innovator in Scots-language poetry of the 1940s and 1950s, and he had the imaginative vitality and intellectual qualities, together with an awareness of what had been happening in English-language and European modernist poetry in the earlier years of the century, to join MacDiarmid as a late addition to Scots-language modernism, and an urbanbased one. His war poems of the 1940s, such as ‘On Readan the Polish Buik o the Nazi Terror’ (1942) and ‘The Refugees: A Complaynt’ (1940) bring together, as does Edwin Muir in his war poetry, the present sufferings with a history of past wars, and with a sense of communal responsibility: ‘Poland, the warld is greitan as they read [. . .] Frae Scotland tak oor tears, oor blinnd and burnan dule’ (Smith, CP, p. 251); ‘These have nae hearthstanes, tread the mapamound itsel, whaurever death loups low’ (CP, p. 16). Other poems, such as ‘Largo’ from the Deevil’s Waltz collection of 1946, draw on Pound’s Imagism: Ae boat anerlie nou Fishes frae this shore Ae black drifter lane Riggs the crammasie daw, Aince was a fleet, and nou Ae boat alane gaes out. (Smith, CP, p. 41)

The image of the sole black drifter in the crimson dawn in this first stanza provides an ‘intellectual and emotional complex in a moment in time’,17 directly treated, with no sentimentality or extraneous referential comment, and this objectivity is held through the following stanzas until the last two lines where the strong yet economically and imagistically stated emotion

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makes explicit the extent of personal and communal loss: ‘Whan yon lane boat I see/Daith an rebellion blind ma ee!’ (CP, p. 42). ‘Sang: Lenta La Neve Fiocca, Fiocca, Fiocca’ is also imagist, its dominant image a repeated one of white snow flakes: ‘Slaw, dear, slaw the white flakes faa,/Slaw the snaw,/O, white it faas’: not a static image like the black drifter in the dawn, but a constantly moving, pattern-making, falling image, until in the last two lines ‘white here wi snaw’ is brought unexpectedly and starkly up against ‘this humin,/Eastlins horror-reid wi war’ (CP, p. 34). Smith’s early poems accommodate many themes besides those of war and loss, with ‘Ballant o’ John Maclean’ keeping company with poems on Pompeii, on Beethoven and Hector Berlioz, and especially on love, which gradually becomes his main theme. An outstanding sequence of love poems is Under the Eldon Tree of 1948 which takes it title from the Scottish folk ballad of Thomas the Rhymer who was carried off by the Queen of the Fairies. MacDiarmid’s A Drunk Man led Smith into poetry, and he proved to be a fitting companion both for the Drunk Man himself and his author. Under the Eldon Tree could in some respects be seen as Smith’s Drunk Man, for like MacDiarmid’s protagonist sexual relationships are at the heart of his creativity and sense of self. Love, he tells us, is ‘my subject anerlie, there is nae ither /Fills my musardrie, /Nae word but your name in my dictionarie’ (CP, p. 150). Yet, as with the Drunk Man also, this apparently limited subject matter provides the route to a full experience of life as we live it. There is a wonderful rhythmic force in the poetry of the Eldon Tree sequence, an intensity of expression that flows and pauses and is constantly alive, with long and short lines interacting with each and contributing to its variety, and this is especially true of its opening poem ‘Bards Hae Sung’ (CP, p. 149), his ‘testament’ to Love. ‘O, my great follie and my granderie’. But this testament is a song of faithfulness to poetry also, ‘Infrangible as adamant [. . .] afore/His music turns to sleep, and/The endmaist ultimate white silence faas/Frae whilk for bards is nae retour.’ Throughout the sequence, his testament to love has many identities including laments for the lost love of Dido Queen of Carthage, for Orpheus’s loss of Eurydice to the Underworld, for Burns’s loss of Highland Mary. The speaker’s own sexual relationships, whether long-lasting relationships or casual encounters in the pub, most often also end in loss, giving the whole cycle an elegiac mood alongside its hilarious and demotic episodes. For this is a modern lover, a city dweller, educated but apparently unemployed and happy to be so; a modern Scottish bohemian would-be writer competing with Goncharov’s Oblomov: ‘Sydney Slugabed Godless Smith [. . .] The type, endpynt and final blume/O’ decadent capitalistical thirldom’: Liggan my lane in bed at nune Gantan at gray December haar, A cauld, scummie, hauf-drunk cup o’ tea At my bed-side, Luntan Virginian fags [. . .]

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Wi ase on the sheets, ase on the cod, And crumbs of toast under my bum, Scrievan the last great coronach O’ the westren flickeran bourgeois world. Eheu fugaces! Lacrimae rerum! Nil nisi et caetera ex cathedra Requiescat up your jumper. (CP, p. 154)

Opposed to the comedy of this decadent coronach is the pain and beauty of Orpheus’s lament in the longer poem ‘Orpheus’, with its stark, painful quotation from Henryson’s earlier poem: ‘“Quhar art thou gane, my luf Euridices!”’ (CP, p. 166) – a quotation which brings to mind MacDiarmid’s passage in In Memoriam James Joyce about Gluck’s Orfeo and the singing of Orfeo’s lament in the bright key of C major, with its mystery of the artistic coming together of beauty and pain. In Poem XVI, ‘Dido’, the beauty and pain of loss are conveyed through the image of the queen standing motionless on the shore, ‘a stane in Dido’s breist’, and watching: ‘At the heid o’ yon fause fleet the fause and gowden sail/O’ her fause luve Ænee’: that ‘“Fause black Æneas that I natheless loe!”’ (CP, p. 175). The poem’s final image is of her ‘wild protest’ against such unfaithfulness, a protest that has reverberated down the centuries: Yon nicht the luift owre Carthage bleezed And Dian’s siller disc was dim As Dido and her palace burned – The orange, scarlet, gowden lowes Her ae wild protest til the centuries. Queen Dido burned and burnan tashed Æneas’ name for aye wi scelartrie. (CP, p. 176)

As with MacDiarmid’s A Drunk Man, there is no way justice can be done to this poem sequence with a few comments and references. It has to be experienced as a whole. Goodsir Smith’s Sydney Slugabed suggested affinities with Joyce as well as with the poets of late medieval and modernist times, an alliance confirmed by his Carotid Cornucopius (1947), a novel introducing ‘the Caird of the Cannon Gait, sated in his liebrandie in the Outleak Tower, Edenberg’, and one which Roderick Watson has described as ‘a prose extravaganza that reads as if Sir Thomas Urquhart had got Rabelais to describe the joys of drink and fornication in Edinburgh after the style of Finnegans Wake.18 Smith was a writer of many parts: a unique poet and prose writer, a literary scholar who produced one of the most readable and informative short accounts of the Scottish literary tradition, an art critic, a co-editor with James Barke of Burns’s Merry Muses of Caledonia. That his work is not known as well as it should be, both within and outside Scotland, has much to do with the ‘no-man’s land’ blight

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which has kept the new literary and cultural activity of this World War Two period out of the public eye. The poetry of Somhairle MacGill-Eain – or Sorley MacLean as he is best known to non-Gaelic speakers – has not suffered to the same extent from this kind of neglect, being situated in the context of a revival of interest in Gaelic, and his poetry itself has been of enormous importance in creating confidence in a new Gaelic poetry, since, like MacDiarmid in Scots, MacLean has both revitalised and broken with past traditions in order to create something new. The specifics of MacLean’s work are best discussed by those familiar with the traditions of writing in Gaelic, and in 2002 Christopher Whyte (himself a Gaelic learner and poet) produced an authoritative edition of Dàin do Eimhir (Poems to Eimhir) which is most helpful to both Gaelic and English readers of the work. In addition, Iain Crichton Smith and Derick Thomson, both from the island of Lewis and both writing in Gaelic and English, have translated and commented on MacLean’s poetry, including individual poems from the Eimhir sequence. As mentioned previously, this collection, with twelve poems from the complete sequence omitted, but with other poems added, was published by Maclellan in 1943, with illustrations by the young artist William Crosbie, and it was seen through the publication process by Douglas Young while MacLean was recovering from the severe injuries he received in the battle of El Alamein in 1942. The poems themselves had been written throughout the 1930s, a period of ideological turmoil nationally and internationally, and in the later 1930s a period of turmoil for MacLean personally as he struggled with his need to write the poetry he felt within him, with the pain he felt at the decline of his language and the condition of the Highlands, and the ideological tug-of-war which pulled him towards supporting the socialist and Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War. Whyte quotes from his essay ‘My relationship with the Muse’ which talks in retrospect of this time: My mother’s long illness in 1936, its recurrence in 1938, the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, the progressive decline of my father’s business in the thirties, my meeting with an Irish girl in 1937, my rash leaving of Skye for Mull late in 1937, and Munich in 1938, and always the steady unbearable decline of Gaelic, made those years for me years of difficult choice, and the tensions of those years confirmed self-expression in poetry not in action.19

This struggle is given form in the Dàin do Eimhir sequence, and seems expressed specifically in Poem IV: in English translation ‘Girl of the yellow, heavy-yellow, gold-yellow hair’. Yet it would be wrong to interpret this sequence biographically and simplistically as an opposition between the love of a girl and the demands of ideological commitment. One of MacLean’s many achievements in his poetry is to bring his Celtic inheritance together with European literary references, with classical poetry and with modernist poetry, thus transforming Scottish Gaelic poetry and bringing it again into the mainstream of contemporary European culture, as had been MacDiarmid’s ambition for all Scottish poetry when he started his poetry revolution in the

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early 1920s. Like MacDiarmid in A Drunk Man, like Yeats in much of his poetry, like Eliot and Pound, MacLean uses a ‘mask’ in this sequence, speaking impersonally as opposed to subjectively; and his Eimhir too is a persona, a character from Celtic legend who can in her person epitomise the human as opposed to the public and political element of the speaker’s struggle. And although it would be best to read these poems in their original Gaelic, their power still comes over to the reader in their English translation, especially if read aloud, as we find, for example, in the poems ‘The Cry of Europe’ (IV) and ‘Dogs and Wolves’ (XXIX). Girl of the yellow, heavy-yellow, gold-yellow hair, the song of your mouth and Europe’s shivering cry, fair, heavy-haired, spirited, beautiful girl, the disgrace of our day would not be bitter in your kiss.

This is ‘singing’ poetry, a bard’s utterance, with the slow, yet forward pulsing rhythm of the first three lines, and the stresses on ‘girl’ and on the first syllables of ‘yellow’, heavy-yellow’ ‘gold-yellow’, and again on ‘hair’. And in addition to the music of the poem there is the colour, the repeated ‘yellow’ and ‘gold-yellow’ until this whole opening seems ablaze with the image. Then, as in MacDiarmid’s lyrics, there are the telling oppositions of word and phrase: ‘the song of your mouth’ opposed by ‘Europe’s shivering cry’: a sound image that patterns MacDiarmid’s visual image of the ‘chitterin’ licht’ in ‘The Watergaw’, although MacLean’s image is painful and political as opposed to MacDiarmid’s philosophical pointing to the strangeness of the ‘beyond’. And then there is the final line of this first stanza, which opens the ideological struggle given form in the poem and which falls back rhythmically in accordance with its more equivocal and tempting statement that so great is the power of love that ‘the disgrace of our day would not be bitter in your kiss’. This is a modern European poem as well as a bard’s utterance, and as the poem continues, so does the striking European imagery, ‘the Spanish miner leaping in the face of horror’, ‘each drop of the precious blood that fell on the cold frozen uplands/of Spanish mountains from a column of steel’; and these present-day images are then brought (as in Muir’s late poetry) into relationship with a history of suffering, ‘from the Slave Ship to the slavery of the whole people’.20 Crichton Smith has commented of MacLean’s political poetry that ‘in no previous Gaelic poetry is there this political European commitment [. . .] one of the important things that Sorley MacLean did was to open Gaelic poetry out to the world beyond purely parochial boundaries’.21 In ‘Dogs and Wolves’, the theme of commitment is a commitment to poetry and the role of the poet, a belief that MacLean shares with MacDiarmid and with the earlier Shelley. As in Shelley’s ‘Mont Blanc’ the description of the course of the actual River Arve becomes at the same time a metaphor for the course and the power of the human mind; and as in MacDiarmid’s In Memoriam James Joyce, the borrowed passage about travelling on the ice-cap acts as a metaphor for the power of language and for the author/editor’s

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delight in ‘adventuring in dictionaries’, so MacLean in this poem sees his ‘unwritten poems’ metaphorically as ‘lean greyhounds and wolves [. . .] the spoor of their paws dappling/the untroubled whiteness of the snow’, a wonderful imaginative bringing to life of the independence, the separateness of such creatures (and such potential poems), ‘their baying yell shrieking/ across the hard barenesses of the terrible times,/their everlasting barking in my ears,/their onrush seizing my mind’. And, implicitly, the poem appears to suggest that this separateness, this inability to be distracted in the hunt, is what is needed for the poet also in such difficult times, for the ‘mild mad dogs of poetry’ to hunt out the distraction of ‘beauty’, ‘a hunt without halt, without respite’.22 This study has taken 1959 as the end-date for Scottish modernism. Both the previous chapter which discussed the late poetry of Muir and MacDiarmid and this present chapter which has introduced new voices in the 1940s and 1950s demonstrate that this supposedly fallow period during the Second World War and in the immediate postwar years was in fact full of activity, and that it needs to be taken account of for a more complete understanding of Scottish culture in the years after World War One, and especially for an understanding of the extent of Scottish modernism. 1959 is the year of the death of Edwin Muir, and it also marks the ending of MacDiarmid’s career as a periodical editor with the final, but unpublished, issue of The Voice of Scotland in which he noted Muir’s death, the announcement of which had come in as he was preparing the magazine for the printer. Maclellan’s principal publishing activities had also come to an end by the late 1950s, and although writers such as Goodsir Smith, Sorley MacLean and MacDiarmid himself continued to be presences on the literary stage throughout the following decades, there was a new cultural spirit abroad from the beginning of the 1960s, with the national-international axis replaced by a diversity of ‘localisms’ making contact with the international, and drawing in more influences from American culture. Urban writing and gender writing became dominant genres. So although one might argue that modernism is never truly ‘dead’ (and the novelist Alasdair Gray insists that he is a modernist as opposed to the postmodernist most academic teachers make him out to be), the end of the 1950s does seem to make a relevant ending point for Scottish modernism. It is appropriate too that 1958 saw the publication of the German scholar Kurt Wittig’s influential study, The Scottish Tradition in Literature, the first lengthy modern study of Scotland’s literature to take account of the literary revolution inspired by MacDiarmid and to place it in the context of Scottish literary history: although Wittig called these writers the ‘Modern Makars’ as opposed to ‘Modernists’. He did, however, take account of the writers of the 1940s and 1950s, being especially appreciative of Goodsir Smith and MacLean, and seeing them as belonging to the ‘second phase’ of that same renaissance in Scottish writing, as opposed to being apart from it. And although 1959 may have brought to an end one of the most vital periods in the history of Scottish

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literary culture, its influence has not ended. Although forms of expression and literary fashions changed in subsequent years, the Scottish modernists of the post-1918 period irrevocably changed the course of Scottish literature and opened up the road to the self-confident, distinctive and varied Scottish culture we enjoy today.

Notes 1. Neil M. Gunn, ‘On Belief’, in Landscape and Light, p. 211. 2. D. H. Lawrence, letter of 16 April 1916, Letters of D. H. Lawrence, II, pp. 594–5. 3. See Louise Annand, J. D. Fergusson in Glasgow 1939–1961, passim, and Margaret Morris, The Art of J. D. Fergusson, pp. 180–220. 4. Poetry Scotland, Number One, p. 2. 5. Maurice Lindsay, Editorial Letter, issue Number One, p. 3. 6. Ibid., p. 3. 7 See Douglas Young, ‘Plastic Scots’ and the Scottish Literary Tradition, p. 1. 8. Goodsir Smith, Collected Poems, p. 13. Page numbers for further quotations will be given in the text. 9. MacDiarmid, ‘Grassic Gibbon’, Scottish Art and Letters 2, Spring 1946, pp. 39–44. 10. See William K. Malcolm in A Flame in the Mearns, p. 76. 11. Scottish Life and Letters 4, p. 3. 12. Ibid., 1, p. 29. 13. Scott, The Collected Poems of Alexander Scott, p. 36. Page numbers for future quotations will be given in the text prefaced by ‘CP’. 14. Pound, in Kolocotroni (ed.), Modernism, p. 374. 15. Smith, Saltire Self-Portrait, p. 9. 16. Smith, Collected Poems, p. xv. 17. Kolocotroni (ed.), Modernism, p. 374. 18. Watson, The Literature of Scotland (1984 edn), p. 419. 19. Sorley MacLean, quoted by Christopher Whyte, in MacGill-Eain, Dàin do Eimhir, p. 10. 20. MacGill-Eain, Dàin do Eimhir, p. 48. 21. Quoted by Christopher Whyte, in MacGill-Eain, Dàin do Eimhir, p. 26. 22. Ibid., p. 84

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— (1955), In Memoriam James Joyce: From a Vision of World Language, with decorations by John Duncan Fergusson, Glasgow: William MacLellan. — (1969), Selected Essays of Hugh MacDiarmid, ed. Duncan Glen, London: Jonathan Cape. — (1978), Complete Poems 1920–1976, 2 vols, ed. Michael Grieve and W. R. Aitken, London: Martin Brian and O’Keefe. — (1984), The Letters of Hugh MacDiarmid, ed. Alan Bold, Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press. — (1984), The Thistle Rises: An Anthology of Poetry and Prose by Hugh MacDiarmid, ed. Alan Bold, London: Hamish Hamilton. — (1988), The Hugh MacDiarmid–George Ogilvie Letters, ed. Catherine Kerrigan, Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press. — (1992), Selected Prose, ed. A. Riach, Manchester: Carcanet. — (1996), The Raucle Tongue I, ed. Angus Calder, Glen Murray and Alan Riach, Manchester: Carcanet. — (1997), The Raucle Tongue II, ed. Angus Calder, Glen Murray and Alan Riach, Manchester: Carcanet. Mackenzie, Alexander [1883] (1979), History of the Highland Clearances, Perth: Melven Press. MacGill-Eain, Somhairle (Sorley MacLean) (2002), Dàin do Eimhir, ed. Christopher Whyte, Glasgow: Association for Scottish Literary Studies. Malcolm, William K. (2003), ‘Shouting Too Loudly: Leslie Mitchell, Humanism and the Art of Excess’, in A Flame in the Mearns, ed. Margery Palmer McCulloch and Sarah M. Dunnigan, Glasgow: Association for Scottish Literary Studies. Manson, John (2005), ‘Security Police in Whalsay in 1939’, The New Shetlander 234. Marsden, Dora (1913), ‘Views and Comments’, New Freewoman, 15 June. Mitchell, James Leslie (Lewis Grassic Gibbon) (1933), ‘Grieve – Scotsman’, Free Man 2, 9 September. Mitchison, Naomi (1932), ‘A Socialist Plan for Scotland’, The Modern Scot, Spring. — (1932), ‘Pages from a Russian Diary’, The Modern Scot, Autumn. Moon, Lorna (2002), The Collected Works of Lorna Moon, ed. Glenda Norquay, Edinburgh: Black & White Publishing. Morgan, Edwin (1956), ‘Jujitsu for the Educated’, Twentieth Century 160, September. — (1976), Hugh MacDiarmid, Harlow: Longman. — (1990), Nothing Not Giving Messages: Reflections on his Work and Life, ed. Hamish Whyte, Edinburgh: Polygon. Morris, Margaret (1974), The Art of J. D. Fergusson: A Biased Biography, Glasgow and London: Blackie. Morrison, Nancy Brysson [1933] (1988), The Gowk Storm, Edinburgh: Canongate Classics. Morrison, Toni [1973] (2005), Sula, London: Vintage. Muir, Edwin (under Moore, Edward) (1918), We Moderns: Enigmas and Guesses, London: Allen & Unwin. — (1924), Latitudes, London: Melrose.

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— (1925), ‘The Scottish Renaissance’, Saturday Review of Literature, 31 October. — (1926), Transition: Essays on Contemporary Literature, London: Hogarth Press. — (1927), ‘Verse’, Nation and Athenaeum, 22 January. — [1928] (1979), The Structure of the Novel, London: Chatto and Windus. — (1932), Poor Tom, London: Dent. — (1934), ‘Bolshevism and Calvinism’, European Quarterly 1.1 May. — [1935] (1979), Scottish Journey, Edinburgh: Mainstream. — [1936] (1982), Scott and Scotland, Edinburgh: Polygon Books. — (1940), The Story and the Fable, London: Harrap. — [1949] (1965), Essays on Literature and Society, London: Hogarth Press. — [1954] (1980), An Autobiography, London: The Hogarth Press. — (1958), ‘Nooks of Scotland’, The Listener, 16 January. — (1962), The Estate of Poetry, London: Hogarth Press. — (1965), Selected Poems of Edwin Muir, preface by T. S. Eliot, London: Faber. — (1974), Selected Letters of Edwin Muir, ed. P. H. Butter, London: The Hogarth Press. — (1991), The Complete Poems of Edwin Muir, ed. Peter Butter, Aberdeen: The Association for Scottish Literary Studies. Muir, Willa [1931] (1996), Imagined Selves (including Women: An Inquiry (1925), Imagined Corners (1931), Mrs Ritchie (1933), Mrs Grundy in Scotland (1936), ‘Women in Scotland’ (1936)), Edinburgh: Canongate Publishing. — [1968] (2008), Belonging, Glasgow: Kennedy & Boyd. Nightingale, Florence [1852] (1986), Cassandra, reprinted in Culture and Society in Britain 1850–1890, ed. J. M. Golby, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pound, Ezra (1974), Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot, London: Faber. Pound, Ezra (1975; 1977), Ezra Pound: Selected Poems 1908–1959, London: Faber and Faber. — (1970), The Translations of Ezra Pound, with an intro. by Hugh Kenner, London: Faber. Reid, J. M. (ed.) (1935), Scottish One-Act Plays, Edinburgh: Porpoise Press. Riach, Alan (1991), Hugh MacDiarmid’s Epic Poetry, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Rilke, Rainer Maria (1945), Das Stunden-Buch, Leipzig: Insel-Verlag. Rosie, George (1993), ‘The Kirk’s Disgrace’, Weekend Scotsman, 13 November. Ruskin, John [1865] (1986), Sesame and Lilies, reprinted in Culture and Society in Britain 1850–1890, ed. J. M. Golby, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sartre, Jean Paul [1948] (1990), What is Literature? reprinted in Literature in the Modern World: Critical Essays and Documents, ed. Denis Walder, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Scott, Alexander (1944), The Collected Poems of Alexander Scott, ed. David S. Robb. Edinburgh: Mercat Press. Scott, Alexander and Douglas Gifford (1973), Neil M. Gunn: The Man and the Writer, Edinburgh: Blackwood. Scott, Bonnie Kime (1995), Refiguring Modernism: The Women of 1928, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.

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Scott, Clive (1976), ‘Symbolism, Decadence and Impressionism’, in Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane (eds), Modernism 1890–1930, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Scott, Walter [1814] (1969), Waverley, London: Dent, Everyman’s Library. Sharp, Elizabeth (ed.) [1896] (1924), Lyra Celtica, with an Introduction by William Sharp, Edinburgh: John Grant. Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1977), Selected Poems, ed. Timothy Webb, London: Dent, Everyman’s Library. Shepherd, Nan [1928] (1987), The Quarry Wood, Edinburgh: Canongate Classics. Smith, G. Gregory (1919), Scottish Literature: Character and Influence, London: Macmillan. Smith, Sydney Goodsir (1975), Collected Poems 1941–1975, London: John Calder. — (1975), Carotid Cornucopius, Edinburgh: Macdonald. — (1988), Sydney Goodsir Smith: Saltire Self-Portrait, Edinburgh: Saltire Society. Spence, Lewis (1926), ‘The Scottish Literary Renaissance’, Nineteenth Century, July. Stange, Robert (1968), ‘The Victorian City and the Frightened Poets’, Victorian Studies, Summer. Stevens, Wallace (1955), The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, London: Faber and Faber. — (1997), Collected Poetry and Prose, New York: Library of America. Stevenson, Robert Louis (1887), Underwoods, London: Chatto and Windus. Thomson, George Malcolm (1927), Caledonia or The Future of the Scots, London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner. Watson, George (1977), Politics and Literature in Modern Britain, London: Macmillan. Watson, Roderick (1984), The Literature of Scotland, London: Macmillan. Wells, Nannie K. (1933), ‘Fascism and the Alternative’, Free Man, 26 August. Whitworth, Michael H. (ed.) (2007), Modernism, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. — (2008), ‘Culture and Leisure in Hugh MacDiarmid’s “On a Raised Beach”’, Scottish Studies Review, 9.1, Spring. Whyte, Christopher (2004), Modern Scottish Poetry, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Woolf, Virginia (1917), ‘More Dostoevsky’, Times Literary Supplement, 22 February. —[1929] (1979), ‘Women and Fiction’, reprinted in Women and Writing, London: The Women’s Press. Wordsworth, William [1805] (1970), The Prelude, Oxford: Oxford University Press. — [1905] (1936), The Poetical Works of Wordsworth, ed. Thomas Hutchison, rev. Ernest de Selincourt, London: Oxford University Press. Yeo, Eileen Janes (2006), ‘Medicine, Science and the Body’, Gender in Scottish History Since 1700, ed. Lynn Abrams et al., Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Young, Douglas (1946), ‘Plastic Scots’ and the Scottish Literary Tradition, Glasgow: Maclellan.

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Index

Aberdeen Free Press, 17 Aberdeen Press and Journal, 46 Abrams, Lynn, 68 Adelphi, 57 Adereth, Max, 152 AE (George William Russell), 46, 95 Aitken, Mary Baird, 202 Aitken, W. R., 109, 161 Allan, Dot, 70, 72, 76, 77–8 Hunger March, 148–9 Makeshift, 76, 77–8 Allen, Walter, 131–2 Alvarez, A., 177 Angus, Marion, 24–5, 133 Annand, J. K., 41, 42 Arts and Crafts movement, 4 Athenaeum, 1 Auden, W. H., 110, 150, 154 ‘Auden Generation’, 2, 155 Ayers, David, 173–4 Bakhtin, M. M., 39 Barke, James, 93, 109, 145–8, 149, 158, 198, 211 Major Operation, 145–8, 151 Barrie, J. M., 73, 88 Beach, Sylvia, 16, 19 Bell, Michael, 163 Benjamin, Walter, 155 Benstock, Shari, 69 Bergson, Henri, 3, 85, 97, 121 Bithell, Jethro, 30 Blackwood’s (publisher), 36–8, 47 Blackwood’s Magazine, 13, 15 Blake, George, 126, 149–51, 158 The Shipbuilders, 148, 149–51 Blake, William, 36, 139 Blok, Alexander, 30, 42–3, 48 Bold, Alan, 19, 95, 158, 183 Brecht, Bertolt, 33, 157 Bridie, James, 206 Broch, Hermann, 23, 53, 162, 171 Broughton Magazine, 13 Brown, George Douglas, 73

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Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 70 Browning, Robert, 38 Buchan, John, 7, 14, 187 Bulletin, 14 Burkhauser, Jude, 81 Burns, Robert, 12, 26, 29, 43, 45, 49, 71, 180, 198 Burns Stanza, 30 Tam o’ Shanter, 38–9, 45 Burns Club of London, 17, 26, 204 Burns Clubs, 23, 47 Busoni, Ferruccio, 191, 192 Buthlay, Kenneth, 45, 188, 191 Butter, Peter, 176, 182 Butterfield, H., 115–16 Byron, Lord George Gordon, 34, 41 Campbell, Roy, 161, 183 Cˇapek, Karl, 108, 161 Carswell, Catherine, 5, 6, 23, 26, 66, 68, 70, 71, 72–7, 79, 106, 108, 161, 162, 200 The Camomile, 76–7, 78 and D. H. Lawrence, 74–5, 200 Life of Robert Burns, 71 Lying Awake, 200 Open the Door!, 70, 72–6, 78, 83, 86 ‘Proust’s Women’, 74 The Savage Pilgrimage, 74 Celtic Connections, 95–101 Aisling tradition, 48, 49 An Comunn Gaidhealach, 98, 100–1 Celtic mythology, 27, 115, 127, 128, 199, 213 Celtic Twilight, hostility to, 96–7, 98 dominance of English in British literature, 96, 97, 107 ‘Gaelic Idea’ (MacDiarmid), 97–8 Gaelic language, 96, 100–1 Irish Clearances, 49 Irish Free State, 95 Irish immigration, hostility to, 98–100 Irish literary revival, 17, 18, 65, 95 Neo-Celticism in Scotland,49, 95, 96, 100 see also Neil M. Gunn; Scottish Highlands

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Chagall, Marc, 56 Chamberlain, Neville, 108, 162, 171 Chambers’s Journal, 60, 62 Chiari, Joseph, 178 Christianson, Aileen, 85 Cixous, Hélène, 79 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 49, 56, 178 Conrad, Joseph, 2, 122, 127 Corkery, Daniel, 48–9 Cornhill Magazine, 61 Craig, David, 186 Craigie, W. A., 204 Criterion, 16, 17, 47, 48, 97, 98, 156, 184 Crosbie, William, 200, 201, 202, 212 Cruickshank, Helen, 6, 16, 47, 106, 107 Cunningham, Valentine, 155, 156 Daily Express, 106 Daily Record, 106 Darwin, Charles, 2 De Quincey, Thomas, 178 Dekoven, Marianne, 68 Deutsch, Babette, 20 Diaghilev, Serge (and Ballet Russe), 3 Dial, 16 Dickens, Charles, 139 Dostoevsky, Feodor, 2, 19, 23, 39, 48, 53–4, 58, 98, 175, 178 Doughty, Charles, 187 Douglas, Gavin, 42 Downey, June, 191 Dresden, 53, 54, 55, 174 Drinan, Adam, 201, 203 Dublin, 47, 95 Dublin Leader, 13 Dublin Magazine, 61, 96 Dublin Review, 13 Dunbar, William, 38, 39 Dunfermline Press, 17, 18, 96, 187 écriture feminine see women Edinburgh, 15, 109, 179, 203, 204, 207 Festival, 65, 202, 205 Gateway Theatre, 206 Edinburgh Review, 15 Egoist, 15, 22 Eliot, George, 82–3 Eliot, T. S., 1, 2, 3, 5, 16, 21, 30, 37, 38, 49, 57, 58, 83, 115, 122, 124, 126, 132, 140, 156, 162–3, 164, 169, 170, 177, 178, 181, 184, 213 Four Quartets, 124 ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, 57, 83, 164 ‘Was there a Scottish Literature?’, 1, 16 The Waste Land, 16, 37, 122, 132, 140, 162–3, 181 Engels, Friedrich, 145 English Review, 13, 14 Erskine of Marr, Hon. R., 22, 95, 96, 100 European Quarterly, 108, 174

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Fergusson, J. D., 4, 200, 202, 203 Fergusson, Robert, 25, 43 Feuchtwanger, Leon, 57 Forster, C. M., 77 Fraser, G. S., 201, 203 Frazer, Sir James, 3, 115 Free Man, 22, 100, 101, 104, 105–6, 107 Freeman (American), 25, 53, 58 Freud, Sigmund, 54, 85, 115 Galloway, Janice, 70 Gardner, Helen, 54 Garioch, Robert, 207 Garnett, Edward, 63, 64 Geddes, Patrick (Evergreen magazine), 96 with J. Arthur Thomson (The Evolution of Sex), 81 Genette, Gérard, 59 Gibb, Andrew Dewar, 98–9, 101–2, 103, 158 Gibbon, Lewis Grassic (J. Leslie Mitchell), 5, 7, 26, 27, 71, 87, 124, 131–44, 145, 146, 148, 149, 151, 152, 154, 158, 198, 205 A Scots Quair, 26, 131–2, 134 Cloud Howe, 134, 137–40, 141, 143 Grey Granite, 135, 140–4, 145, 146, 148, 151, 158, 198 ‘The Land’, 104 ‘Literary Lights’, 133–4, 140 linguistic and narrative strategies, 134–7, 139, 140–2 littérature engagée, 131–44 ‘living history’, 142–3, 144 Marxist ideology, 136–7, 140, 143 ‘Religion’, 145 representation of religion, 138–40 Scottish Scene (with MacDiarmid), 26, 104, 133, 138, 158 Sunset Song, 87, 124, 131, 134–7, 139, 141, 145 Voice of Scotland series (Routledge), 133 Gide, André, 13, 23 Gilbert, Sandra M., 86 Gish, Nancy, 36, 187 Glasgow, 4, 54, 55, 71, 72, 74, 77, 86, 104, 105, 132, 158, 164, 176, 184, 200, 201, 202, 204, 206 Citizens Theatre, 201, 206 Kelvingrove Art Gallery, 4 representation in literature, 72–4, 77, 78, 105, 144, 145–51, 159, 205 School of Art, 4, 72, 73–4, 81 Unity Theatre, 201 University, 71, 72 Glasgow Evening News, 46 Glasgow Herald, 3, 15, 37, 38, 74, 204 Gluck, Christoff Willibald (Orfeo), 192, 211 Goethe, Johan Wolfgang von, 56 Gogarty, Oliver St John, 46, 96 Gorky, Maxim, 13, 155 Graham, R. B. Cunninghame, 47 Graham, W. S., 201, 203

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Index Gray, Alasdair, 214 Gray, Alexander, 6, 25, 42 Greer, Germaine, 71 Grierson, John, 150 Grieve, C. M. see MacDiarmid, Hugh Grieve, Valda (Trevlyn), 106 Gunn, Neil M., 5, 16, 20, 22, 23, 25, 44, 47, 49, 60–6, 71, 94, 100, 105, 109, 113–30, 132, 133, 134, 151, 171, 198–9, 202 The Ancient Fire, 65 animism, 114, 122–3, 125, 128 ‘At the Peats’, 60 The Atom of Delight, 122–4 Back Home, 66 ‘belief in ourselves’, 115, 124, 125 boyhood experience and perspective, 113–14, 121–4 Butcher’s Broom, 109, 114, 116, 118–20, 126, 127, 137 Celtic mythology, 122, 127, 128, 199 ‘Celtic Twilight’, 117, 121 The Celts, representation of, 115, 117 Choosing a Play, 65 clan system, 119, 120 collective unconscious, and subconscious mind, 122, 128, 199 ‘Down to the Sea’, 61–2, 129, 151 The Drinking Well, 129 education system, 125 epic narrative, 127 ‘The Family Boat: Its Future in Scottish fishing’, 66 ‘The Ferry of the Dead’, 100 fishermen and scientists, 126 ‘“Gentlemen – the Tourist!”: The New Highland Toast’, 103 Golden Age mythology, 114–15, 121 The Green Isle of the Great Deep, 109, 199: comparison with Orwell’s 1984, 199 The Grey Coast, 25, 62–3, 129 ‘Half-Light’, 61 Hidden Doors, 25 Highland Clearances, 109, 114, 118, 119, 120, 121, 126 Highland decline, 63, 100–1, 103, 114, 116 Highland history, 114, 116, 120, 125, 128 Highland River, 113, 121–6, 128: modernist features, 115, 118, 122–4, 123, 126, 129; transformation of Romantic legacy, 113–14, 115, 122–3 historical novel, nature of, 115–16, 117, 129 The Lost Glen, 63–4 Morning Tide, 23, 63, 113–14, 121 ‘Nationalism and Internationalism’, 105 Net Results, 66 Old Music, 66 ‘One Fisher Went Sailing’, 66 revival of drama, involvement with, 64–6 The Serpent, 144 The Silver Darlings, 115, 116, 120–1, 126–9, 199

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‘The Sleeping Bins’, 61 ‘Such Stuff as Dreams’, 61 Sun Circle, 114–15, 116, 117–18, 121, 128 symbolic representation, 118–19, 120–2, 126, 127–8, 129 ‘White Fishing on the Caithness Coast’, 60 ‘The White Hour’, 61 Wild Geese Overhead, 144 Guthrie, Tyrone, 65, 206 Hamburger, Michael, 169 Hart, Francis Russell, 66, 82, 114–15 Hay, George Campbell, 201, 203 Hay, John MacDougall, 73 Heaney, Seamus, 177, 182 Heine, Heinrich, 56 Hellerau, 55, 172 Hendry, J. F., 201, 202, 205 Henryson, Robert, 25, 211 Herbert, W. N., 184 Hitler, Adolf, 105, 107, 108, 109, 162, 190, 194 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 20, 54, 176, 190 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 187 Hough, Graham, 164–5 Huberman, Elizabeth, 176 Hughes, Robert, 170 Huxley, Aldous, 58 Ibsen, Henrik, 2, 58, 165 Ireland, 27 Irish Free State, 47, 95 Irish immigration, hostility to, 98–100 Irish literary revival, 17, 18, 65, 95 Irish Statesman, 96 Tailteen Games (1928), 95–6 see also Celtic Connections Jacob, Violet, 18 James, Henry, 2, 13 Jamieson, John (Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language), 17, 19, 32, 187 Jeffrey, William, 14, 25 Jeune Belgique, La, 16 Johnstone, William, 5, 184 Jones, David, 187 Joyce, James, 5, 16, 19, 26, 40, 58, 59–60, 64, 95, 115, 132, 134, 174, 183, 187, 192, 194, 202, 211 Finnegan’s Wake, 134, 192, 211 Ulysses, 16, 19, 58, 59–60, 64, 115, 174 Jung, Carl, 54, 55, 115, 121, 191 Kafka, Franz, 23, 53, 57, 81, 85, 162, 163, 175, 177, 182 Kahane, Jack (Obelisk Press), 183, 184 Keats, John, 126 Kelman, James, 133 Kerr, Roderick Watson, 14, 24 King, Jessie M., 4, 81 Kraus, Karl, 183, 189–90, 193

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Langholm, 11 Lawrence, D. H., 6, 16, 20, 30, 33, 49, 58, 64, 74–5, 83, 115, 132, 200 Lavrin, Janko, 58, 108 Leavis, F. R., 189 Leavis, Q. D., 189 Left Review, 108, 144 Lehmann, John, 158 Lenin, Nikolai, 107, 132, 148, 155–7, 158, 159–60 Levenson, Michael, 93 Lewis, Cecil Day, 154, 157 Lewis, Wyndham, 2, 12, 13, 23, 105–6, 107 Blast, 3, 12, 15 Hitler, 105–6 Lindsay, Sir David, 65, 206 Lindsay, Maurice, 201, 203, 204 Lines Review, 206 Linklater, Eric, 7, 108, 198 Listener, 162, 165, 169 Little Review, 13, 15, 19, 22 Lochhead, Liz, 206 London, 3, 4, 13, 14, 16, 47, 69, 72, 74, 78, 134, 140, 150 London Mercury, 164, 165 Lukács, George, 115–16, 117, 118, 129 Lyall, Scott, 108 MacCaig, Norman 181, 201, 203, 205, 207 McCance, William, 5 McCarey, Peter, 39 MacColla, Fionn (Tom Macdonald), 100, 101 MacDiarmid, Hugh (C. M. Grieve), 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 11–21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 29–50, 53, 56, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 69, 70, 71, 83, 87, 93, 94, 95–6, 97–8, 100, 102, 103, 104, 105–7, 108, 109, 113, 115, 122, 123, 129, 132–3, 134, 139, 143, 145, 155–62, 169, 182–94, 195, 198, 200, 201, 202, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207, 208, 209, 210, 211, 213, 214 A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle, 5, 11, 20, 21, 26, 27, 36–46, 47, 48, 59, 60, 95, 122, 134, 139, 155, 156, 158, 159, 185, 189, 190, 207, 208, 210, 211, 213: alleged involvement of F. G. Scott, 37, 45–6; author’s comments on, 38; ‘Ballad of the General Strike’, 41, 95, 139, 189; genre, 38–40; methodology, 40–3; nature imagery, 43–4; reception, 46; themes, 40–3 A Kist of Whistles, 183, 194 Albyn, 95, 96, 97 ‘A Moment in Eternity’, 184 Annals of the Five Senses, 15, 25, 193 ‘Au Clair de la Lune’, 35–6 The Battle Continues, 161, 183, 194 ‘The Blaward and the Skelly’, 18 ‘The Bonnie Broukit Bairn’, 35, 36

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‘borrowings’, 185, 187, 188, 190–1 ‘The Caledonian Antisyzygy and the Gaelic Idea’, 97, 106 ‘Casualties’, 13 ‘Cattle Show’, 15 Clann Albain project, 102 Complete Poems, 183 Contemporary Scottish Studies, 22, 63 ‘Cornish Heroic Song for Valda Trevlyn’, 184 ‘Country Life’, 46 ‘Crowdieknowe’, 35 ‘The Dead Liebknecht’, 36 ‘The Eemis Stane’, 32–3, 34, 187 ‘Empty Vessel’, 33, 34–5, 36 ‘English Ascendancy in British Literature’, 97, 107 expulsion from National Party of Scotland, 102, 109 expulsion from and reinstatement in Communist Party, 109 ‘First Hymn to Lenin’, 23, 143, 145, 155–6, 205: ‘Cheka’s horrors’, 156, 205 First Hymn to Lenin and Other Poems, 159 ‘Gairmscoile’, 31, 40 ‘Glasgow’, 159 ‘Glasgow 1960’, 159 ‘Hungry Waters’, 35 Impavidi Progrediamur project, 159 ‘In the Fall’, 190 ‘In the Hedgeback’, 159 In Memoriam James Joyce, 8, 12, 46, 183–94, 200, 211, 213: ‘Author’s Note’, 186–7, 189; modernism v. postmodernism, 193–4; reception, 186; transformative strategies, 190–3 ‘In the Slums of Glasgow’, 159 The Islands of Scotland, 103 joined Communist Party, 108 ‘The Kind of Poetry I Want’, 169, 183 The Kind of Poetry I Want, 183, 194 ‘Lo! A Child is Born’, 160 Lucky Poet, 30, 183, 194 Mature Art, 183–4 ‘Milk-Wort and Bog-Cotton’, 160, 161 ‘North of the Tweed’, 49–50 Northern Numbers, 7, 14–15, 18, 72, 97 Northern Review, 21, 61, 113 ‘O Ease my Spirit’, 160 ‘On a Raised Beach’, 187–9 ‘On the Ocean Floor’, 160 Penny Wheep, 21, 30, 31, 36, 38, 40, 46 ‘The Progress of Poetry’, 188 ‘Reflections in a Slum’, 159 responses to Wyndham Lewis’s Hitler, 105–7 Sangschaw, 7, 21, 29, 30, 32–4, 38, 46, 198 Scots Lyrics, 29–36 Scots Unbound, 160–1, 187 ‘Scotsmen Make a God of Robert Burns’, 26

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Index Scottish Chapbook, 1, 6, 11, 15, 16–20, 21, 22, 26, 29, 37, 72, 100, 206: ‘A Theory of Scots Letters’, 17, 19; Chapbook Programme, 16, 17, 96 Scottish Nation, 20–1, 58, 61, 62, 113 Scottish Scene see Lewis Grassic Gibbon ‘The Seamless Garment’, 159–60 ‘Second Hymn to Lenin’, 134, 155, 156, 157 Second Hymn to Lenin and Other Poems, 160 ‘Skald’s Death’, 188 Stony Limits, 15, 188 ‘Third Hymn to Lenin’, 157–8 To Circumjack Cencrastus, 40, 46–7, 48–50, 95, 100, 106, 184, 185 Voice of Scotland, 24, 109, 158, 161, 162, 186, 206, 214 ‘The Watergaw’, 18, 33–4, 187, 213 ‘Water Music’, 187 ‘What Has Been May Be Again’, 161 ‘When the Gangs Came to London’, 161 ‘The Young Astrology’, 13 Macdonald, Frances and Margaret, 4, 81 MacDonald, Ramsay, 94, 102 McIlvanney, William, 146 Mackenzie, Alexander, 118 Mackenzie, Compton, 47, 95, 100, 201 Mackintosh, Charles Rennie, 4 MacLean, John, 110, 148, 210 MacLean, Sorley (Somhairle MacGill-Eain), 8, 200, 202, 203, 205, 208, 212–14 MacLellan, Robert, 206 Maclellan, William, 8, 184, 200–1, 204, 212, 214 MacNair, Herbert, 4 McNeill, F. Marian, 6, 70, 79, 82, 115 MacNicol, Bessie, 4, 81 Malcolm, William K., 152 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 30, 31–2, 33, 43 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, 3, 75 Marsden, Dora, 79 Marsh, Edward, 14 Martin, John Smellie, 191, 192 Marx, Karl, 148 Million, 200–1 Mirsky, D. S., 107, 155 Mitchison, Naomi, 23, 104, 108 Modern Scot, 22–4, 97, 100, 104, 105, 106, 162, 202, 204 modernism, 1–3, 5 British literary modernism, 5, 115, 177 Dada, 11, 15 expanded perceptions of, 2, 170, 195, 186 Futurism, 3, 75 and gender, 68–70 Harlem Renaissance, 2 ‘high modernism’, 170 and ideology, 36, 93 Imagism, 32–3 impersonality in art, 31–3, 38, 57, 83, 174 interest in myth and the primitive, 115

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late modernism, 7–8, 170, 182–3 little magazines, 11, 17, 21 ‘men of 1914’, 2 New Criticism, 169 post-Impressionism exhibition (1910), 3, 4, 33 and post-modernism, 8, 182 ‘stream of consciousness’, 134–5, 141 representation of time, 123, 163–4 trope of time, 147–8, 162, 164 vers libre, 30 visual arts, 3, 4, 93 Vorticism, 3 women and modernism see women see also Scottish modernism Moncrieff, George Scott, 123 Montgomerie, William, 154, 201 Montrose, 5, 14, 15, 21, 72 Montrose Review, 14, 47 Moon, Lorna, 69, 70, 72, 76, 78, 87–8, 199 Dark Star, 69, 76, 78, 87–8 Morgan, Edwin, 42, 186, 191, 192, 207–8 Morris, Margaret, 200 Morrison, Nancy Brysson, 72, 76, 78–9, 86–7, 199 Breakers, 76 The Gowk Storm, 76, 78–9, 86–7, 199 Morrison, Toni, 79 Muir, Edwin, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 13, 20, 23, 24, 25, 29, 39, 42, 45, 46, 47–8, 52n42, 53–60, 64, 69, 71, 72, 74, 81, 85, 93, 98, 100, 102–3, 107, 108, 109, 123, 132, 133, 144, 152, 154, 162–5, 169–82, 183, 194, 198, 203, 209, 213, 214 ‘Adam’s Dream’, 179–80 ‘After a Hypothetical War’, 180, 181 An Autobiography, 74, 132, 182 ‘The Annunciation’, 179 ‘A Note on Friedrich Hölderlin’, 20 ‘A Plea for Psychology in Literary Criticism’, 57 ‘The Assault on Humanism’, 20, 58 ‘A Trojan Slave’, 165, 173 ‘A View of Poetry’, 169–70 ‘Ballad of the Black Douglas’, 20 ‘Ballad of Hector in Hades’, 57, 173 ‘Bolshevism and Calvinism’, 108, 174, 180 as critic, 20, 25, 53, 54, 58–60 ‘The Day before the Last Day’, 182 The Estate of Poetry, 194–5 First Poems, 55–7, 165, 173 ‘Hector in Hades’, 57, 165 ‘The Helmet’, 177–8 ‘The Horses’, 180–1 ‘I have been taught’, 182 ‘The Incarnate One’, 180 ‘The Interrogation’, 177 Journeys and Places, 164–5, 173 The Labyrinth, 58, 171, 174, 175–8 ‘The Labyrinth’, 175–6 ‘Last Poems’, 171, 180, 181

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Muir, Edwin (cont.) ‘The Last War’, 181–2 Latitudes, 58 ‘The Lost Land’, 56–7 The Marionette, 57 as metaphysical poet, 164, 178 and modernism, 55, 59–60, 162–4, 169–82 mythical imagination, 57, 58, 164–5, 181: biblical myth, 164–5, 178–9, 180–1; Greek myth, 57, 165, 173–4, 175–6, 179 The Narrow Place, 170, 171–3, 180 Newbattle Abbey College, 178 as novelist, 57, 144, 162, 170 ‘Oedipus’, 174 One Foot in Eden, 58, 171, 177, 178–81 ‘One Foot in Eden’, 179–80 ‘Orpheus’ Dream’, 179 as poet, 54–8, 154, 162–5, 169–82 ‘The Poetic Imagination’, 180, 194 Poor Tom, 144, 162 ‘The Refugees’, 171–2, 175, 181 ‘The Refugees Born for a Land Unknown’, 182 and religion, 169, 174, 176, 178, 180, 182 ‘The Return of the Greeks’, 174 ‘The River’, 172–3, 175 and Romantic legacy, 55, 56, 123: German Romanticism, 20, 56 ‘Scotland 1941’, 26, 180 ‘Scotland’s Winter’, 180 Scott and Scotland, 24, 47, 48 Scottish Journey, 98–9, 100, 102–3, 144, 175,180 The Story and the Fable, 54, 144 The Structure of the Novel, 58, 59 Transition, 53, 58, 152 as translator, 53, 57, 58, 66, 71, 81, 162, 170 ‘Troy’, 165, 173 and the unconscious, 53, 55–6, 178: waking dreams, 55, 178 Variations on a Time Theme, 162–4 The Voyage, 171, 174 ‘The Wayside Station’, 172 We Moderns, 6, 8, 13, 25, 53, 54, 162, 173 Muir, Willa, 5, 23, 25, 42, 47, 53, 57, 66, 69, 71, 72, 79–86, 107, 108, 162, 199–200 Belonging, 86, 162, 199 Imagined Corners, 71, 78, 81, 82–5 Living with Ballads, 199 Mrs Grundy in Scotland, 81 Women: An Inquiry, 79–82, 85 Mrs Ritchie, 82, 85–6 as translator, 53, 57, 58, 66, 71, 81, 162, 170 Muirhead, R. H., 20, 94 Murray, Charles, 18 Murry, Middleton, 4, 74 Mussolini, Benito, 106, 171, 199 Nairn, Tom, 5 Nation, 13, 82

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Nation and Athenaeum, 57 Neill, A. S., 171 New Age, 3, 13, 20, 21, 29, 31, 53, 55, 103, 133, 194 New Alliance, 171 New Apocalypse movement, 201, 204, 207 Newbery, Francis (‘Fra’), 4, 81 Newbery, Jessie, 4 New English Weekly, 188 New Freewoman, 79 New Statesman, 182 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 2, 53–4, 56 Nightingale, Florence, 80 Nineteenth Century, 21 O’Connor, Frank, 119 Ogilvie, George, 11–14, 20, 24, 37, 38–9, 46, 107 Orage, A. R., 3, 13, 20, 23, 53, 55, 133 Orkney, 53, 54, 102, 172, 173 Outlook, 24 Paris, 3, 4, 13, 16, 140, 149, 202 Pearse, Padraic, 114–15, 117 PEN (Poets, Essayists, Novelists), 47, 107, 109, 202, 205 Scottish PEN, 47, 107 Picasso, Pablo, 3, 115 Pick, J. B., 114–15, 201 Pictish Review, 22, 100 Poetry London, 201 Poetry Scotland, 198, 200, 201–2, 203–4 Politics Aberdeen Soviet, 132 anarchism, 3 anti-Semitism, 100, 171, 172 capitalism, 119, 120 Celtic identity see Celtic connections class divisions, 71–2, 137–8, 139, 141, 142, 145, 149–50 communism, 108, 109, 145, 177, 195, 199 Douglas economics, 98, 103–4 English imperialism, 110 economic conditions, 101–2, 103 fascism, 98, 105, 106–7, 109, 110, 154, 162, 171, 199 General Strike (1926), 41: in literature, 41, 95, 139 Irish immigration, 98–100 Labour Party in Scotland, 93, 94, 102, 107, 132 Liberal Party, 94 Marxism, 106–7, 109, 132 Munich Agreement, 108, 162, 171 National Government (London), 102 National Party of Scotland, 94, 95, 102, 106, 109 nationalism: and internationalism, 6, 105 195; and socialism, 102, 106–7, 195 Nazi persecution, 107, 108, 199 North British identity, 1, 15, 26, 70, 73

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Index Reichstag Fire trial, 108 Russian Revolution, 93, 132 Scottish Home Rule, 47, 93, 94, 95, 102, 107, 133 Scottish Party, 94, 102, 104 Scottish National Party, 94 slum conditions, 98–9, 103, 163: in fiction, 140, 141–2, 144, 146, 147; in poetry, 158–9 socialism, 93, 102, 132, 144, 155 socialist marches, 104: in fiction, 141, 142, 144, 145, 148 Soviet Union, 105, 107, 108, 199 Spanish Civil War, 108, 154, 171, 194, 212 Westminster government, 94, 95, 99–100, 103 Young Scots Society, 94 Pope, Alexander, 43 Porpoise Press, 14, 24–5 Pound, Ezra, 2, 3, 5, 7, 13, 21, 30, 31, 32, 33, 37, 38, 42, 43, 83, 103, 106, 170, 187, 207, 209, 213 Power, William, 6, 22 Prague, 53, 54, 174–5, 177 Proust, Marcel, 6, 19, 59, 121, 123–4, 134, 135, 158, 199 À La Recherche du Temps Perdu, 59, 121, 123–4, 135 Ramsay, Alan, 65 Reid, Alexander, 4 Religion Church of Scotland, 99–100, 108: Free Church, 71 representation in literature, 119, 138–9, 144 Roman Catholicism, 98, 100 Scottish Calvinism, 65, 73, 100, 108, 163, 172, 174, 180: in literature, 75, 78, 85, 119, 174, 180 Renaissance, 2 Rhythm, 4 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 30, 49, 56, 62, 159–60 Romanticism, 2, 33, 55, 56, 83 Romantic nationalism, 5 Rome, 178, 179 Rosie, George, 99–100 Ruskin, John, 80, St Andrews, 22, 72 Salmond, J. B., 22, 61 Salonika, 3, 8, 11 Saltire Review, 204, 206 Sartre, Jean Paul, 154 Saturday Review of Literature, 21, 46 Saunders, R. Crombie, 202, 206 Saurat, Denis, 20, 21, 94 Schiff, Sydney, 171 Scotland’s languages decline of Gaelic and Scots, 17 foreignising of English, 87–8, 133, 134

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Jamieson’s Etymological Dictionary, 17, 19 literary revival of Gaelic, 201 literary revival of Scots: in fiction, 26, 27, 71, 87–8, 131, 132, 133; in poetry, 24, 27, 29–46, 155–7, 159–60, 161, 207–12 Lowland Scotch (Wilson), 18 modernist affinities: in Gaelic, 212–14; in Scots, 207–8, 208–12 ‘Plastic Scots’, 204 synthetic Scots, 46, 133 synthetic English, 187 Scots Independent, 22, 107, 117 Scots Magazine, 22, 61, 65, 100, 105, 171 Scotsman, 3 Scots Observer, 22 Scots Review, 204 Scott, Alexander, 204, 207–8 Scott, Bonnie Kime, 69, 88 Scott, Clive, 31 Scott, Francis George, 5, 23, 37, 45, 58, 161, 202 Scott, Tom, 201 Scott, Sir Walter, 26, 63, 87, 88, 116, 129, 133, 180 Scottish Art and Letters, 200, 201, 202, 203–4, 205, 206 Scottish Chapbook see MacDiarmid, Hugh Scottish Colourists, 4 Scottish drama, 7, 23, 64–6, 206 Scottish Educational Journal, 22, 46, 97, 189 Scottish Highlands, 25, 100, 212 An Comunn Gaidhealach, 98, 100–1 clan system, destruction of, 119, 120 clearances, 103, 109, 118, 119, 121 decline of Gaelic, 100–1, 212 economic and social conditions, 103 evacuation of St Kilda, 103 fictional representation, 60–4, 65–6, 113–29, 199 literary revival in Gaelic, 201, 212–14 proposals for cultural and economic revival, 101, 103 Scottish Literary Journal, 184 Scottish modernism, 1, 4, 6, 8, 13, 14, 26, 69, 72, 93, 110, 132, 134, 154, 170, 185–6, 195 characteristics, 5, 6, 7, 16, 25–7, 93, 105, 129, 185–6 European connections, 13, 16, 19, 20, 21, 22–3, 25, 29, 31–3, 42–3, 53, 56, 57, 59, 71, 74, 105–10, 123, 124–5, 137, 159, 161, 171–2, 175, 177, 178, 180, 190, 198, 203, 209, 212, 213 and Gaelic, 8, 201, 212–14 late modernism in poetry, 169–95, 208–12 and littérature engagée, 131–65 little magazines, 15–21, 22–4, 200–6 and Scots language, 19, 29–46, 131–44, 209–12 music, 161

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Scottish modernism (cont.) new writing in English, 61–2, 68–88, 113–29, 168–97 poetry and politics, 154–65 visual art, 4, 202 women and modernism see women Scottish Nation see MacDiarmid, Hugh Scottish National Players, 65 Scottish National Theatre, 65 Scottish Renaissance movement, 1, 5, 6, 11, 14, 16, 21, 22, 66, 69, 94, 95, 97, 106, 107, 110, 198, 206, 207 Shakespeare, William, 30, 33, 164, 205 Sharp, William (Fiona Macleod), 96, 117, 129 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 45, 193, 213 Shepherd, Nan, 66, 70, 72, 78, 87, 199 Singer, John, 201 Sitwell, Edith, 13, 30 Smith, G. Gregory, 17 Smith, Iain Crichton, 212, 213 Smith, Sydney Goodsir, 7, 158, 201, 203, 205, 208–12, 214 Carotid Cornucopius, 211 Collected Poems, 209 ‘Largo’, 209–10 ‘On Readan the Polish Buik o the Nazi Terror’, 209 ‘The Refugees: A Complaynt’, 209 ‘Sang: Lenta la Neve Fiocca, Fiocca, Fiocca’, 201 Under the Eldon Tree, 210–11 Sorabji, Kaikhosru Shapurji, 202 Soutar, William, 16, 42, 47, 108, 133, 205 Spectator, 13, 21, 71, 162 Spence, Lewis, 20, 24, 25, 47, 102, 134 Spencer, Herbert, 81 Spender, Stephen, 108, 154, 164, 176, 178 Spenser, Edmund, 175 Stange, G. Robert, 155 Stevens, Wallace, 2, 154, 185–6 Stevenson, R. L., 7, 26, 88 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 118 Stravinsky, Igor, 3, 13, 115 Synge, J. M., 13, 17, 19, 66 Tambimuttu, Meary J., 201 Tennyson, Alfred, 38 Thomson, Derick, 212 Thomson, George Malcolm, 24, 95, 98–9, 101, 103, 146, 158 Times Literary Supplement, 21, 46, 126, 183, 189 Todd, Ruthven, 201 Travers, H. J., 188–9 Tzara, Tristan, 15

Wells, Nannie K., 70, 107 West, Rebecca, 13, 69 Whalsay, 22, 106, 109, 161, 183, 188, 189 Whitman, Walt, 2, 192 Whitworth, Michael, 188–9 Whyte, Christopher, 176, 193, 212 Whyte, James, 22, 24, 97, 202 Williams, William Carlos, 2 Wilson, Sir James, 18, 187 Wiseman, Christopher, 176 Wittig, Kurt, 214 Women ambition to write, 77–8 artistic creativity, 70, 72, 80–1 city fiction, 72, 78 counter-narratives, 70, 74 écriture feminine, 79 education and social class, 71–2 female subjectivity, 68,75, 86 feminist criticism, 71, 79 fictional form, 72–4, 76–7, 83–4, 86–87 gender difference, 68, 70, 77, 79–82, 84 gender in Scottish history, 68–70, 81 life-writing, 74, 83, 85–6 literary awards, 74, 76 and modernism, 68–70, 82 and modernity, 70, 88 mothers and daughters, 78–9 omission from literary canon, 69, 71 poetry in fiction, 73, 86 and politics, 23, 70, 104, 107, 108 and Scottish modernism, 69, 72, 199–200 and Scottish Renaissance movement, 6, 69, 70–1 sexuality, 70, 72, 75–6, 78, 84 social roles, 69, 70, 71–2, 77, 80–2 ‘surplus women’, 80 women’s values in writing, 71 Wood, Wendy, 110 Woolf, Leonard, 55, 79 Woolf, Virginia, 2, 16, 26, 53, 55, 58–9, 69, 77, 79, 87, 121, 134 Mrs Dalloway, 58–9, 72 ‘Women and fiction’, 73, 79 Wordsworth, William, 33–4, 114, 122–3 World War One, 4, 5, 7, 8, 11, 15, 29, 80, 124–5, 132, 137, 149, 151, 171, 172, 173, 190, 214 representation in fiction, 124–5, 137, 138, 142, 151 World War Two, 7, 106, 110, 170, 171, 173, 183, 198, 199, 203, 212, 214 war-inspired poetry, 171–3, 203, 207–8, 209

Valéry, Paul, 13, 30, 31, 33 Vienna, 4, 47, 93, 140 Voice of Scotland (Routledge series), 133 Voice of Scotland see MacDiarmid, Hugh Vox, 47

Yeats, W. B., 2, 17, 19, 29, 38, 49, 65, 83, 95, 96, 174, 213 and Irish Revival, 29, 65 Yeo, Eileen Janes, 81 Young, Douglas, 201, 204, 205, 207, 212

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