1957: 1978: Hugh MacDiarmid aka Christopher Murray Grieve
The Nationalists
Hugh MacDiarmid was a well known Scottish poet. His proper "passport" name was Christopher Murray Grieve - or Chris to his friends. The quote below is characteristic. It reveals his belief in what it is that makes some people poets.
‘Most people don’t understand poets; they see them as rebels against a system to which they themselves have automatically conformed. Poets are a very small minority of people who for some obscure reason have failed to grow-up.’
MacDiarmid was a Poet and a Nationalist, while John Aitkenhead, was a Nationalist and a Poet. Not surprisingly they were good friends and often corresponded with each other about their mutual interests.
Hugh MacDiarmid – refer to notes on John’s Politics.
In 1972 Raymond Gardener wrote a piece for the Guardian newspaper Arts pages: MacDiarmid’s Universe:
Introducing Scotland’s Public Enemy Number One – Hugh Macdiarmid. . . He is a fine man for saying things which upset people, and for drinking too much malt whisky – which causes him to collapse into roadside ditches from which he constructs epic poems on the manner and matter of his nation.’
And he says that Anglophobia is not, as ‘Who’s Who’ has it, his hobby but his occupation.
‘When I started this business of Scottish nationalism (MacDiarmid founded the Scottish Nationalist Party in 1928) and language in the early twenties the usual objection was to say that I was trying to put back the hands of the clock. But that’s the right thing to do if the clock is wrong… nobody could say that now because it’s not a Scottish thing, or a Welsh thing, or an Irish thing .
. ., it’s a worldwide phenomenon. And the reason is that there are millions of people everywhere who have been cut away from their roots and in this period of accelerated change and scientific development they are getting back to their roots. Writers everywhere are endeavouring to establish indigenous forms of literature. There was very little American literature until they got rid of the colonial overhang. Now there is better literature in America than there is here.
The poet doesn’t believe that English literature is dying, he considers it dead:
‘I do not claim to have originated the growing belief that English literature is petering out – but I certainly anticipated that it would. I agreed fully with my friend, the French poet and philosopher, the late Professor Denis Saurat, when he wrote that unless the Second World War was to have been fought in vain there must be a profound change in English mentality. And he did not mean that availability of Yankee trash-culture which has developed apace. Saurat used his terms with scrupulous care. He also pointed out that he was not referring to Scottish mentality, but strictly to English mentality.’
13th February 1957
Dear John,
Just a line to say Saturday 9th March will suit us OK. I hope it suits Crombie too, (Crombie Saunders fellow friend and poet).
Incidentally I spoke about poetry and read a number of my poems to the senior pupils of Campbeltown High School, and it came of very successfully.
Love to Morag and yourself, Chris.
19th December 1958
Dear John,
I should have written you long ere this but have been quite exceptionally busy – lecturing in Edinburgh, St Andrews, Nottingham and Birmingham Universities and all sorts of societies, besides being up to the neck in connection with the forthcoming Burn’s Bi-centenary, when I have Burn’s suppers to attend and speak at in Glasgow, Manchester, Whitehaven, Cardenden etc, have written articles for Scottish Field, Labour Monthly, Marxism Today, Irish Democrat, and a book of my own ‘Burns Today and Tomorrow’, which will be out in 3 months time, and broadcasts on Burns from London, Budapest and Sophia.
First things first. Of course, I’m only too glad you should use my name as one of the Appeal Committee. . .
Mike (ex – pupil) as you probably know is in London on the Sunday paper The People and seems to be doing well. His wife Deirdre is on the Daily Mirror, doing women’s features.
28th January 1959
Dear John,
Valda and I are back from Burns doings . . .
I thought above list would complete my Bi-centenary odyssey; but the Czech Government want me in Prague for a special Burns commemoration . . .
So I’ll be, all going well, in Bulgaria when you and Hugh Paton are going to USSR. But I can certainly give you names and addresses of friends in Moscow and elsewhere.
9th May 1959
Dear John,
. . . I hope Hugh and yourself have a splendid tour. As to addresses you might contact:
Lef Roald S., Vorovsky Street, Foreign Commission of Soviet Writers’ Union, Moscow, who is busy translating my poems and from him get the addresses of:
Alexei Surkov who is head of the Writers’ UnionSamuel Marshak, the translator of Burns.Boris Polevoi, novelist.And give them my kindest regards. You can also contact V.O.K.S. – the organisation for cultural relations with foreign countries, and I am sure that they will be helpful. They – or at least the Secretary of the organisation – will know my name, or at least, the name of Hugh MacDiarmid.
26th June 1962
Dear John,
Many thanks for your letter and invitation to the Summer School and Conference. Valda and I would certainly like to come – but your dates are terrible! As you may know my 70th birthday is early in august and all sorts of arrangements are in hand . . . My portrait is being painted and is to be presented to me and then handed over to the National Portrait Gallery.
. . . The Ugly Birds pamphlet will be out any day now. Also a special edition of The Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle is due out on august 1st and also the United Kingdom edition of my Collected Poems (already published in America).
Then on 25th July I’m doing a BBC TV programme in Glasgow (an interview with Prof. Esmond Wright). [Esmond Wright was a Professor of Modern History at Glasgow University in 1960s. His students included future Labour Party leader John Smith and later the first First Minister of Scotland Donald Dewar. During this time he became known in both Scotland and England as one of Britain’s early ‘media dons.’]
A Border TV interview, which I recorded some time ago, will be telecast on 10th August. The August issue of Scottish Field, due out on 1st August will have five articles about my work, and a colour photograph. And the Sunday Observer will have a profile, on august 4th. And I expect my translation of the Swedish epic poem about the dangers of Nuclear Radiation will be published by that time.
Also, the Scottish Home Service BBC are to repeat Alex Scott’s, The Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle programme early in august. . . and in addition I have commitments to address Newbattle Abbey, the Rationalist Press Association in Glasgow, [the purpose of the Rationalist Press Association was to publish literature that was too anti-religious to be handled by mainstream publishers and booksellers.], the Jewish Literary Society in Edinburgh, and the Socialist society at Durham University.
If it was my 100th instead of my 70th birthday I think I’d just call it a day and go to my Heavenly reward. However, if health holds, we’ll be with for a day or two all right, and will certainly be looking forward to it and to a trip to the moor to see the Moore statues – if they’re not buried in snow-wreaths.
23rd March 1968
Dear John,
It gave Valda and I great pleasure to see the Television programme on Kilquhanity last night. It came across splendidly. Congratulations. Love to Morag and yourself and all of you.
Dear John,
I am sorry to be so long in thanking you for the copy of ‘Young Word’ (Kilquhanity Childrens’ poetry collection). . .
The contents of ‘Young Word’ are in many respects better than the contents of many University student and school magazines I see. Particularly in unforced genuine attempts at expression. There is nothing faked, pretentious, or keyed in to silly fashions. The contributors over the years (to the Broadsheet) are to be congratulated on a very worth-while output. Please give the editors my heartiest congratulations and best wishes.
11th September 1978 The Scotsman Newspaper: Editorial
MacDiarmid
Scotland seems a colder and quieter place, since Christopher Murray Grieve died in the first hour of Saturday morning. He was in his eighty-seventh year, and had come to be recognised as one of the great European poets of this century. . . For 50 years this man’s hot and angry integrity radiated through Scotland. It burned holes in the blankets of national complacency, and it warmed those who often felt that their own country was a tundra in which creators must freeze to death. His poetry may be enough for the rest of the world, Scotland needed the man himself, and needs him yet.
A ‘national poet’ is a startling, even alarming possession for any small country. But Hugh MacDiarmid was no nineteenth-century romantic nationalist, to be statued in bronze with a scowl and a flying cloak. . .
MacDiarmid at once destroyed and created his nation. Into his furnace went folk-song, novels, bourgeois nationalism, the Kirk, the Burns cult, psychoanalysis and the whole self-regarding snapshot album of the Kailyard. [Kailyard: characterised by sentimental description of Scottish life such as Whiskey, deer-stalking, salmon fishing] Out of his forge came an energy which spread through Scottish cultural life.
There is very little written, acted, composed, surmised or demanded in Scotland, which does not in some strand descend from the new beginning he made.
It is a German notion that the life of the artist is the supreme, most significant expression of the life of his fellow-men. MacDiarmid, neither parochial nor unduly modest, savoured ideas like that. From a country of seamen and travellers, he journeyed further into the outer space of the mind than any contemporary.
From a country of inventors, he brought forth a new poetic language and a new tradition of criticism. He sprang from a nation of guilty men and women seeking justification, and he gave to them a very special sel-understanding, an identity card valid not so much in Britain or Europe as among the stars. He saw that Scotland needed ‘a great upswelling of this incalculable’, a flinging away of spectacles discarding of safety-belts, and his passing should be observed – as Norman McCaig once wrote – by a ‘two-minute pandemonium’.
17th May 1985 The Scottish Sculpture Trust
Dear Everyone
I write concerning the poet Hugh MacDiarmid and the Memorial Sculpture created for his native town of Langholm. . . A third application . . . is to be discussed by the Dumfries and Galloway Regional Council’s Planning Committee on Tuesday 4th June.
I enclose information concerning a Gathering of people at Dock Park, Dumfries, at 12.00 on that day. . . The Gathering aims to show the Committee that their decision must not be taken lightly, and that there are thousands of people in Scotland, and across the world, who recognise and honour his central position in twentieth century Scottish Culture.
4th June 1985 The Scottish Sculpture Trust
Join Us – At the Bandstand, Dock Park, Dumfries at 12.oo Tuesday 4th June 1985, Speeches, Poems, Music and Song, Et Dejeuner Sur L’Herbe (bring your own)
On the Bandstand: Valda Grieve, Jake Harvey, Hamish Henderson, William Neill, William Wolfe, John Aitkenhead, Andy Hunter, The Stewarts of Blair, David Craig, Norman Buchan, Neil McCormick, Will Maclean, Owen Dudley Edwards, Iain MacLeod, John Law, Barbara Grigor, Ruth McQuillan, Douglas Gifford, Stephanie Wolfe Murray, Alan Bold, Timothy Neat, Tom McGrath, and the Glasgow Boys . . .
Pipers: Iain MacInnes and Freddie Frieman
The Runner: Murray McNaught (winner of the 1985 Dundee Marathon in 2 hours 20minutes 25 seconds – to carry the news from the council Chambers to Dock Park.
