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Scottish Modernism

and its Contexts 1918–1959

Literature, National Identity and Cultural Exchange

Margery Palmer McCulloch

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 suffi ciently unfragmented
literary history to entitle it to claim what he called a distinctive ‘Scotch lit-
erature’.

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 inter-
national infl uences; and that there was in the post-1918 period a Scottish liter-
ary modernism drawing on artistic infl uences 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
signifi cance 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 con-
sider 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

2 Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959

awareness and understanding of Scottish culture, it is hoped that it will also
assist in the ongoing international project of expanding perceptions of mod-
ernism 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 con-
ditions 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 move-
ments 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 character-
ised in critical discussion as the period of the ‘Auden generation’ and a marker
of the supposed end of modernism.

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 modern-
ism. Some cultural critics would put the starting point in the later nineteenth
century, with the work of Impressionist painters in France, the infl uential
drama of Ibsen in Norway, the fi ction 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 signifi cantly infl uenced 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 infl uenced by
Nietzsche and Dostoevsky while Virginia Woolf described the latter as ‘this
great genius who is beginning to permeate our lives so curiously’.

In her essay

‘Character in Fiction’ (1924), Woolf also designated 1910 as the year in which

Introduction 3

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 exhi-
bition of paintings in London (soon to be followed by its infl uential 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 defi ning 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 infl uential. 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 chal-
lenges 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.

4 Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959

Scotland too had a modernist presence in the pre-1914 years. Although

Scottish poetry and fi ction were in decline as a result of increasing
Anglicisation, the visual arts were prospering and interacting with develop-
ments in Europe as Scottish painters travelled and exhibited internationally,
bringing new forms into their own work. J. D. Fergusson fi rst 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 infl uence of the southern light as well as of post-Impressionist move-
ments. 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 fl ourishing 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 fl owering 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
fi rm Reid and Lefevre in 1928.

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

Introduction 5

of European modernism itself. The previous self-chosen emigration of artists
and intellectuals to the international creativity of European metropolitan cul-
tural 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 infl uence 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’.

In the after-

shock 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 infl uential and experimental novel Ulysses in
1923, placed it in a context of ‘the immense panorama of futility and anarchy
which is contemporary history’.

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 diffi culty of interpre-
tation 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 modern-

ism – 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 fi nd 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 fi nd their living
outside Scotland, were supportive of the new initiatives. The revival move-
ment itself became popularly known as the ‘Scottish Renaissance’ and this
terminology has lasted through to our own time as the signifi er of an inter-
war literary movement with several adherents but centred primarily on the
poetry and nationalist politics of Hugh MacDiarmid. While such a percep-
tion 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 infl uential 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

6 Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959

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 moder-
nity 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 fi rst 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’.

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 philo-
sophical, ideological and technological as well as artistic change – alongside
more specifi cally 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 Scots-
language 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’,

Introduction 7

such as MacDiarmid or Pound. Similarly, John Buchan was an early supporter
of the new movement, appearing as poet in MacDiarmid’s fi rst 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 experimen-
tal. 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 infl uenced by contemporary modernist
writing. And while in the 1930s, Lewis Grassic Gibbon developed a modern-
ist fi ctional 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 fi ction 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 fi ction, 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 fi nd an identity in the early decades of the century,
and its priorities were survival rather than competition with the modernist
drama of Europe. Such qualifi cations 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
specifi c discussion will be those who consciously sought to fi nd 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 modern-
ist 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 con-
tribution 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 infl u-
ences in new ways. A poet such as Sydney Goodsir Smith, for example, was an

8 Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959

outstanding new late modernist writer in Scots, while Sorley MacLean brought
the long-awaited development of Gaelic as a modern – and modernist – liter-
ary 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 percep-

tion 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’.

MacDiarmid’s diffi culty in fi nding publishing outlets after the out-

break 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 infl uences. 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.

Chapter 1

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

None of those signifi cant little periodicals – crude, absurd, enthusiastic, vital
– have yet appeared in Auchtermuchty or Ardnamurchan. No new publish-
ing houses have sprung up mushroom-like [. . .] It is discouraging to refl ect
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.

The principal fi ghting 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 fulfi lled, 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’.

As a fl edgling

newspaper reporter in Wales in 1911, he had written to Ogilvie about his
overactive brain: ‘I wish some device could be patented whereby my fl ying
thoughts could be photographed: that might give me a chance to express my
present mental stage with some adequacy’ (Letters, p. 6). Now, fi ve years later,

12 Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959

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 qualifi ca-
tion, 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 psychologi-
cally insecure, despite the confi dent, even arrogant, persona adopted in many
of the letters; uncertain that he will ever be able to fi nd 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 exemplifi ed 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 scientifi c 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 ver-
nacular 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,

Towards a Scottish Modernism 13

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.

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 increas-
ing awareness of and identifi cation 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 fi rst 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 rela-
tion to Grieve’s post-school education in philosophy, European literature,
and contemporary artistic, intellectual, scientifi c 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 con-
temporary 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 defi nite 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 fi ve years than a vegetable
for fi fty’, he writes to Ogilvie on 27 December (Letters, p. 30). His ideas,
however, appear more focused, and his own creative writing occupies a
higher profi le 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

14 Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959

also of a completed study ‘Triangular’ which is ‘an essay in futurism’ (Letters,
p. 33). What is interesting in relation to the specifi cally 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 cor-
respondence. 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 favour-
ably 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 diffi culties 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 liter-
ary 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 cosmopoli-
tan metropolis.

His fi rst venture was a series of anthologies of contempo-

rary 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 fi rst Northern Numbers collection, published by Foulis in Edinburgh
in 1920, stressed that it did not aim to be a comprehensive anthology of con-
temporary 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, signifi cantly, ‘and to-morrow’. This
modest ‘manifesto’ therefore looked to the future and confi dence grew when
it was found to be ‘selling splendidly’.

The journalist and poet William Jeffrey

may even have made the fi rst use of the term ‘renaissance’ to defi ne 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 fi nancial diffi culties 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

Towards a Scottish Modernism 15

replaced by younger, more adventurous contributors. Grieve’s own English-
language 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 diffi cul-
ties 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, fi rst 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 signifi cant little periodicals – crude, absurd, enthusiastic, vital’, adding:
‘it is discouraging to refl ect that this is not the way the Dadaists go about the
business’.

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 ‘signifi cant 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, suffi ciently 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)

16 Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959

Suffi cient 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 fi ction 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 uncompro-
mising 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’).

Its general objective

was to ‘meddle wi’ the thistle’ and specifi c 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’.

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 crea-
tive 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 fi rst 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.

Towards a Scottish Modernism 17

The Scottish Chapbook was probably more truly a modernist ‘little maga-

zine’ – shortlived, impecunious and iconoclastic – than was Eliot’s more
securely founded and structured Criterion. Its capacity for polemic was dem-
onstrated 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 diffi culty in expressing themselves
in an English which they yet made distinctively Irish’ (Letters, p. 751). In
addition, he had recently come under the infl uence of Gregory Smith’s
Scottish Literature: Character and Infl uence 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 Scots-
language 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 fl avouring’ that made him fear that a fl ight from
the kailyard could not possibly be achieved through the medium of Scots.

(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 vernacu-
lar 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 fi lled with the spirit of Burns’.

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

18 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 intro-
ducing 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’.

Such qualities have apparently attracted his mythical friend also,

and the result is ‘The Watergaw’ and ‘The Blaward and the Skelly’, pub-
lished in the Dunfermline Press shortly before the more ‘offi cial’ 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’.

In the Chapbook appear-

ance, he more confi dently draws attention to his friend ‘M’Diarmid’ and his
activities, describing him as:

the fi rst Scottish writer who has addressed himself to the question of the extend-
ability (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 con-
temporary 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 disfi gured by none of the
usual sentimentality. It has a distinctively Scottish sinisterness for which expression
is too seldom found nowadays.

And in a fi nal fl ourish, 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.’

Towards a Scottish Modernism 19

What is noticeable about Grieve/MacDiarmid’s continuing debate with

himself and his readers about the viability of Scots as a modern literary lan-
guage 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’.

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.

Whatever the

reason, it is interesting that in the course of ‘A Theory of Scots Letters’ we
fi nd 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 main-
stream 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 signifi cant sound.

Over the course of these Chapbook editorials, Grieve had succeeded in estab-
lishing 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 contribu-
tion 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 iden-
tity distinctive from English; it had become the signifi er 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

20 Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959

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 fi ction
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

suffi ciently fl exible 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
diffi culties about changing it: but I shall do so at the earliest possible oppor-
tunity’ (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 infl uence (perhaps to encourage
support from the nationalist businessman R. H. Muirhead, which in the end
did not materialise in a fi nancial 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 regu-
larly 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 per-
ceived 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

Towards a Scottish Modernism 21

for literary purposes. The Scottish Nation can therefore be seen as symbolic
of the attempt to create a new intellectual and European-oriented move-
ment 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 profi t)
proved impossible to sustain without fi nancial 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, briefl y, 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 fi rst collection of Scots lyrics, the principal Scottish newspa-
pers 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’.

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 encour-
aged by his earlier example. Although these magazines were not avant-
garde in nature, or even specifi cally 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

22 Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959

was commissioned by the editor of the Scottish Educational Journal to write
a series of assessments of Scottish literary fi gures, a project he had tenta-
tively 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’,

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’.

In the early 1930s, The Free Man, edited in

Edinburgh by Robin Black, and associated with no specifi c 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 specifi c 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 fi nancial 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 advan-
tage 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 confi rmed 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 suc-
cessfully 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

Towards a Scottish Modernism 23

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 con-
tinued 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 infl uenced 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 begin-
ning 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 fulfi lled Grieve’s early vision of an inspi-
rational aesthetic and political Scottish periodical than did his own hand-
to-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
fl ourish for a longer period.

The continuing problem, however, was the absence in Scotland of a

24 Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959

suffi ciently large and adventurous audience interested in the promotion of
new ideas, both Scottish and emanating from beyond Scotland. In the mid-
1930s, 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 pre-
publication 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 lan-
guage 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 fi rst 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’.

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 found-
ing 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 eco-
nomic accounts of the condition of Scotland). As with the lack of forward-
looking 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 diffi culty 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 infl uences
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

Towards a Scottish Modernism 25

as in the elliptical narratives of the ballad tradition, and her haunting, enig-
matic 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 fi rst collection of short stories by Neil M. Gunn, whose next fi ve
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 func-
tion 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 crea-
tive activity and opportunity.

Neil M. Gunn and Edwin Muir were among the movement’s early sup-

porters. The success of Muir’s fi rst book We Moderns had resulted in a con-
tract 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, eventu-
ally 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 fi rst fl ight of contemporary critics of welt-
literatur [. . .] a Pan-European intervening in the world-debate on its highest
plane’.

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 signifi cant work as novelist of the Highlands came in the 1930s and early
1940s, as opposed to the poetry-driven 1920s. Nevertheless, on the publica-
tion of his fi rst 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 engulfi ng sea” of
English literature’.

He was also a signifi cant member of the movement in

view of its commitment to the regeneration of the Highlands. An outstanding

26 Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959

new associate in the 1930s was Lewis Grassic Gibbon whose trilogy A Scots
Quair transposed MacDiarmid’s earlier Scots language experimentation from
poetry to fi ction, bringing it together with a stream of consciousness meth-
odology 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 characteris-
ing both as ‘sham bards of a sham nation’ in his poem ‘Scotland 1941’.

As in his diffi culties 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 tal-
ented 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’.

Catherine Carswell fi rst 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’,

and both Scott and the later Stevenson

certainly wrote in a valedictory way about Scotland’s distinctive tradi-
tions: 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’.

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

Towards a Scottish Modernism 27

MacDiarmid’s lyrics and A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle as well as in Grassic
Gibbon’s Marxist Scots-language fi ction; 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’.

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 specifi cally 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 fi ction writer Fionn
MacColla (Tom MacDonald) was born there, and his parents were close neigh-
bours of the Grieves in Links Avenue.

5. Letter to George Ogilvie, 19 December 1920, in MacDiarmid, Hugh MacDiarmid-

George 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 Infl uence, 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.

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 fl ee.

‘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 interna-
tional – in the 1930s. In addition, while poetry is the dominant art form of
the earlier decade, in the 1930s there is a signifi cant amount of new fi ction
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.

As we have

seen in the previous chapter, MacDiarmid’s self-conversion to Scots was hard
won and initially fi ercely resisted. Edwin Muir may have incited the modern
writer to ‘wrestle with his age’,

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 tradi-
tion 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

30 Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959

autobiography Lucky Poet, published in 1943, he tells of his ‘fi rst 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.

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.

Mallarmé’s disciple Paul Valéry and the American Ezra Pound were among
other early poetic infl uences. This eclectic, cosmopolitan, poetic gathering
then interacted with home-grown infl uences 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 lan-

guage 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’.

Eliot, in his ‘Refl ections 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 withdraw-
ing from it, or taking no form at all, and constantly approximating to a very
simple one’.

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 fl exibility 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

Hugh MacDiarmid 31

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),

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 signifi cant sound’.

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 percep-
tion 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.

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 signifi cant differ-
ences 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’.

In the essay ‘Symbolism, Decadence and Impressionism’, Clive Scott con-

siders the seminal role of Mallarmé in the development of late nineteenth-
century 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.

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 litera-
ture ‘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 exemplifi es this change:

Ce toit tranquille, où marchent des colombes,
Entre les pins palpite, entre les tombes;
Midi le juste y compose de feux

32 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!

There is ‘music’ in this poetry, but it is impersonal, self-refl exive, 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 infl uenced 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;

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 appreci-
ate 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 fi rst 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 infl uence of Pound’s Imagist credo, while,

as with the infl uence 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

Hugh MacDiarmid 33

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’

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-of-
the-valley’.

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 question-
ing 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 infl uential part of MacDiarmid’s

early schooling (as with the infl uence 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 re-
energises 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:

34 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
fi elds 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 fi elds, 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 fi nal 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 qualifi ed 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 fi nal rhyming ‘then’, a retro-
spective term which does not bring the poem to a defi nite 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
scientifi c idea of relativity:

Hugh MacDiarmid 35

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 fi nally 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 fi rm, clear images.

What is so surprising about these lyrics – in addition to their verbal inven-

tiveness 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 recap-
ture 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 obses-
sion 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-refl exive, 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’ fi nger/For the back-lill o’ death!’
(‘back-lill’ being the thumb-hold on a bagpipe chanter). In the second move-
ment, 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 fl ee.

The moon image itself fl uctuates 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 recognis-
able image of Diana with ‘her luchts o’ yellow hair [which] fl ee oot ayont
the storm’ as she rides the sky and brings the ‘oceans to her heels’. Only in

36 Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959

the last stanza of this fi nal 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 imag-
istically. In ‘The Dead Liebknecht’ (adapted from the German of Rudolf
Leonhardt), the impact and implications of the communist’s death are com-
municated 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.’

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’ underfi t’ (CP, I, p. 57).

In an interview with MacDiarmid on the eve of his eighty-fi fth 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
fi rst three or four books. They become a trick. You lose integrity, you see.’

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 innova-
tion, 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 characteris-
tically 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 fi rst edition, MacDiarmid describes his poem as

Hugh MacDiarmid 37

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’.

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.

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 confi dent 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.

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 infl uences where he found them and
converting them to fi t 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.

That MacDiarmid’s use of the word ‘gallimaufry’ did not accurately

refl ect 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

38 Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959

in the past, the most important of his comments were in letters to George
Ogilvie. He wrote on 6 August 1926, shortly before the fi nal 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 fi nish me so far as Braid Scots work, & Messrs Blackwood’s are con-
cerned. 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 master-
piece – 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 fi nished –
despite all the faults and fl aws 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 obvi-
ously 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 specifi c 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 impor-
tant 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

Hugh MacDiarmid 39

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 roman-
tic, playboy conception of poetry [. . .] essentially belittling, acridly belittling
in Dunbar, and genially, almost affectionately belittling in Burns’.

) 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 infl uenced MacDiarmid, have suggested ‘Menippean satire’ as
defi ned 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 defi nition 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 reli-
gious elements with coarse and primitive naturalism, often set in bars; brothels,
highways etc.

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’.

McCarey’s diagnosis is persuasive, for, in addition to its satiric and fan-

tastical 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 affi nities 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 satisfi ed 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 seem-
ingly negative searching which belies a fi xed position of ‘disbelief in ultimate
answers’. The Drunk Man, in fact, has no ‘fi xed 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

classifi cation, A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle is overwhelmingly a poem

40 Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959

of the modernist period, with its eclectic poetic interpolations and intertex-
tual references, its shifting symbolism and its Joycean stream of conscious-
ness 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
signifi cance, 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-nine-
two-fi ve’ (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 relation-
ship 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 fl uctuating applications fl ow

in and out of relationship with each other, just as the moonlight, like the tide,
ebbs and fl ows, pulling with it the Drunk Man’s thoughts. The thistle with its
jaggy grey-green leaves and the unexpected beauty of its soft purple fl owers
is the symbol whose applications are most often in fl ux. 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

Hugh MacDiarmid 41

himself, this ‘mongrel o’ the fi re and clay’ (CP, I, p. 126), where the jaggy
leaves represent the negative aspects of his nature and the soft purple fl owers
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 crucifi es its own roses
– or a symbol of the contrast between Scotland and England, with its fl owers
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
Crucifi ed 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 Crucifi ed
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 drink-
ing 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 condi-
tion of Scotland itself, thus launching his long ontological investigation on
its course:

Forbye, the stuffi e’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 metaphysi-
cal 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
briefl y into his narrator’s shoes to proclaim ‘I want a hero’

, so in the opening

42 Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959

of A Drunk Man MacDiarmid, for a moment, speaks through his fi ctional
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 fi xed 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 fi nd himself ‘like staundin’ water in a pocket o’/Impervious clay
[. . .] Cut aff and self-suffi cient, 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 adapta-
tion of Blok’s poem ‘The Lady Unknown’, transformed here into a poem of
artistic inspiration whose roots lie in a revivifi ed 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’.

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 fi delity 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 fi xt sentens or mater’ as opposed to writing ‘all ways at liberte’,

but

by the early twentieth century ‘writing at liberty’ had become more fashion-
able. 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’.

Yet

both Pound and MacDiarmid believed in the transformative power of trans-
lation, its capacity to act as a ‘guide to secret places of the imagination’.

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 vision-
ary fi gure linked to Sophia, goddess of wisdom. As with his previous use

Hugh MacDiarmid 43

of the poetic ideas of Mallarmé and Pound, MacDiarmid does not follow
closely Blok’s interpretation of this symbol, although he keeps its vision-
ary 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 crea-
tivity, 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 communi-
cates 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).

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 emo-
tional 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 disturb-
ing 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 fl oat,/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 fi end-
ish 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)

44 Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959

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 philosophi-
cal 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 land-
scape 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 fi nal 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.

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’.

Despite its Scotch comedy and satire, its jaunty jazz-like rhythms – ‘O

Scotland is/THE barren fi g./Up, carles, up/And roond it jig’ – (CP, I, p. 105); its
fi ne 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

Hugh MacDiarmid 45

the poem marks it out as a work of the modernist period. Yet, despite its pes-
simism, 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 capac-
ity 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’.

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 diffi culty
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’.

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 fi nish with a
focus on the potential creativity within Silence (a theme MacDiarmid returns

46 Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959

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.’

The editor of the

Scottish Educational Journal (where Grieve/MacDiarmid’s assessments of
Scottish literary fi gures 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.’

Muir was also one of the early support-

ers 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’.

Another 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.

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 exemplifi ed in the long poem which he has just published under his mys-
terious pseudonymn of Hugh M’Diarmid’) made ‘sair reading’ (as he wrote
to Ogilvie).

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 coher-
ent account of a poem so deliberately and provocatively incoherent’.

As always, MacDiarmid did not waste time over his troubles, and his atten-

tion 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

Hugh MacDiarmid 47

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 debilitat-
ing infl uence 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 trans-
ferred 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 fi nd alternative employ-
ment 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’.

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 predica-
ment 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 fi nd 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 them-
selves that a Scottish literature is possible or desirable, nor any opportunity, fi nally,
of making a livelihood by his work.

48 Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959

The fi nal 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 suffi ciently 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 sacrifi ce 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 preoccupa-
tions 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,

Hugh MacDiarmid 49

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.

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 diffi culty:

O wad at least my yokel words
Some Gaelic strain had kept [. . .]
– Fain through Burns’ clay MacMhaighstir’s fi re
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 satisfi ed 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 fi ne 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 old-
fashioned 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

50 Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959

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 sur-
roundings, 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 fi lled 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.  Grieve, reprinted in McCulloch, Modernism and Nationalism, pp. 27–8.
2.  Muir, Transition , p. 7.
3.  MacDiarmid, Lucky Poet, pp. 82–3
4.  MacDiarmid, Lucky Poet, p. xxiii.
5.  Pound, ‘A Retrospect’, in Literary Essays, pp. 12–13.
6.  Eliot, ‘Refl ections on Vers Libre’, pp. 98, 102, 99–100.
7.  MacDiarmid, Complete Poems 1920–1976 is hereafter referred to in the text

as CP.

8. Grieve, Scottish Chapbook, March 1923, reprinted in McCulloch (ed.), Modernism

and Nationalism, p. 28.

9. Stephane Mallarmé, quoted by MacDiarmid in ‘Paul Valéry’, New Age, p. 54,

reprinted in McCulloch (ed.), Modernism and Nationalism, p. 181.

10. 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).

11. 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 founda-
tion 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.’

Hugh MacDiarmid 51

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 fi res 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 fi rst 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 transla-

tions 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.

52 Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959

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 illu-
sions 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-determi-
nation 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.

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 fi nally justifi es 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 fi rst of the new Scottish writers to engage publicly with the condi-
tion 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 fi rst-hand knowledge of a cultural infl u-
ence 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 trans-
lations 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 signifi cant artistic work came from
this attempt to ‘wrestle’ with the age.

His pithy pronouncements in We

Moderns testify to the continuing presence of nineteenth-century philoso-
phers and writers such as Nietzsche and Dostoevsky, infl uences 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

54 Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959

dim and populous underworld of the mind’s consciousness where desires and
impulses are moving blindly beneath the sod’.

In contrast to his continuing

awareness of the contemporary signifi cance of Dostoevsky, Nietzsche was to
prove a temporary infl uence for Muir, providing a philosophy which helped
him cope with the diffi culties 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’.

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.

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 suffer-
ing much psychological distress and alienation. He catches the shock of this
emigration memorably in the fi rst 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 fi fty 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 fi fty 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.

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 fi rst visit to
Europe in the early 1920s introduced him to the poetry of the German neo-
Romantic 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 espe-
cially in the life of the artist. Now in Prague and Dresden, he found that ‘it was
the fi rst 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 ‘diffi cult’ 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)

Criticism and New Writing in English 55

Among the poetry which most infl uenced 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 fi tted 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.

(I played there safe and good
With the fl owers 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 classifi ed
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 fi rst 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 fi rst 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.’

‘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’.

Whether, even with

56 Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959

more training and experience, he could have found a satisfactory language-
based 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 fl oat spatially in a timeless land-
scape; 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
modifi ed by infl uences from Coleridge’s ‘Ancient Mariner’ was most prob-
ably 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 infl uence,
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 autobi-
ography, 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.

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
fi gures 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.

In contrast,

Muir’s images (and taking account of their poetic immaturity) belong to a
modern age of dislocation, to Rainer Maria Rilke’s defi nition of Sehnsucht,
as opposed to Goethe’s idealised longing. For Rilke, whose poetry was an
infl uence 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 fl ux/and to have no homeland in the world of Time).

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,/

Criticism and New Writing in English 57

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 diffi culties 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 diffi culties 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 infl uenced by Eliot’s views in his own criticism. One pos-
sible 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, empha-
sising that ‘the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him
will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates’.

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 fi gures which move in the world
of classic tragedy’.

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’.

At some point during his early struggle to make poetry out of his exile from
his past, such critical ideas must have begun to fi lter 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 fi rst 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 signifi cant 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 trans-
lating Leon Feuchtwanger’s Jüd Süss. This simply told, metaphysical story
of a young mentally-retarded boy who, through the infl uence 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

58 Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959

especially in the fi nal 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 transla-
tor of modern German fi ction. His fi rst 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 con-
trast, 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.

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 charac-
ters in the ‘Nighttown’ episode are ‘fi gures in a folk-lore which mankind
continuously creates, or carries with it’; a voice which ‘is not inarticulate;
but it expresses itself anonymously’. He fi nds 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 fi elds 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

Criticism and New Writing in English 59

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 fi ction of the
present age’;

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 philo-
sophical 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 reshuffl ed, in Space’.

He sees Proust’s À la

recherche also in spatial terms. Contrasting Proust with Thackeray’s ‘in the
beaten track’ fi ction, 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 psychologi-
cal movement behind it, into which the various scenes fi t 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.

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 insist-
ing that, as with Lawrence, much twentieth-century art has taken a wrong
turning. Thus, as we have seen, he was one of the fi rst 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

60 Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959

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 dif-
ferent styles, making up a whole which is loose and redundant, but not unimpressive.
[my emphasis]

One could say, therefore, that as critic Muir is himself representative of what
he called the writer who ‘wrestles’ with his age and who ‘fi nally justifi es 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 fi ction writing
– to be the principal literary genre. He was supportive, however, of Neil
M. Gunn’s early fi ction, 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 engulfi ng
sea” of English literature’; and ‘is our nearest equivalent to the Irish Liam
O’Flaherty’.

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 encour-
aged him to learn Gaelic), and he was to be described later, and ironically,
by Lewis Grassic Gibbon as ‘a brilliant novelist from Scotshire’.

Yet his

boyhood in the Caithness fi shing and crofting village of Dunbeath, and his
adult employment in the Civil Service as an excise offi cer 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 signifi cant fi ction 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
fi nd the right kind of magazine for the factual and psychological explora-
tions 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

Criticism and New Writing in English 61

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.

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 fi ction, 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 fi shing 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”’

– 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 fi lls his
pipe and leaves his cottage for his regular nightly walk down to the harbour,
hesitating at a little patch of wildfl owers:

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 fl owers 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, roofl ess 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

62 Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959

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 rhyth-
mically, as mains’l went aloft. A fl eet of them, dozens and scores, making out of
this same harbour-basin to court the sea, that passionate, fi ckle mistress of theirs.
(WH, p. 219)

The old man’s narrative ends obliquely, with the ‘hypnotic sea, catching
utterly within its rhythm that swaying fi gure 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 fi nd 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 sea-
going 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 specifi c 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 com-
municated 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;

a death in accord with his life

as he has lived it, as opposed to the institutional death with which the com-
munity 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 fi shing villages, ‘Down to the
Sea’, though modest in size, is a signifi cant 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 fi nancially.

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 fi rst long fi ction book, The Grey Coast, was published in June 1926

by Jonathan Cape who had been especially enthusiastic about the charac-
terisation 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

Criticism and New Writing in English 63

enthusiastic about what he called ‘some “fi ne writing” [. . .] that you would
be well advised to tone down.’

However, as Gunn’s response to Cape makes

clear, for its author the signifi cance 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 ‘fi ne 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 ‘fi ne 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 affecta-
tion in such a study as mine would not merely be unpardonable: it would damn.

What Gunn’s comments imply, as MacDiarmid recognised in Contemporary
Scottish Studies, is that The Grey Coast is attempting ‘something new’ in
Scottish fi ction, 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 signifi cance 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
fi ction, and the ‘fi ne writing’ which troubled his publisher could well have
been the descriptive passages through which Gunn captures both the auster-
ity 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 perspec-
tives 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 fi shermen travel out to the West Coast islands and beyond, bring-
ing 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, politi-
cal and other signifi cance of the decay of Highland life which colours the story

64 Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959

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 ‘fi ne writing’, now
felt that ‘you yourself are perhaps too Gaelic, too “poetic” to write a strong
novel’.

Gunn’s fi rst 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 fi ction, in the creation of the sparse
beauty of the landscape, the fi erce power of the sea and the emotional hold
both had on the inhabitants of this remote region. As in D. H. Lawrence’s
fi ction, 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 fl ower or stretch of woodland; in the
evocation of silence or the violence of a seastorm.

In these early struggles to fi nd both a satisfactory fi ctional 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 fi ction project; a proposal Gunn did not seem over-anxious to pursue.
MacDiarmid was especially supportive over the diffi culties 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 pub-
lisher 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 fi ction

writer who was attempting to fi nd 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 tenta-
tive movement to encourage a new Scottish drama in the interwar period.

Criticism and New Writing in English 65

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 infl uence:

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 confl icts 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 fi rst 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.

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 post-
World 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 dra-
matic 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.

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 fi ction, Gunn himself wished to fi nd 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
fi ercely 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

66 Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959

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 fi shing 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 fi shing seasons provokes. Back Home takes up a theme recur-
rent in his fi ction: 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 fi ction 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 dual-
theme 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’

from his main work as a fi ction 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 else-
where. These women were mostly fi ction 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 fi nding 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 con-

sidered a writer who refl ected 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 defi ne this period more generally.

Criticism and New Writing in English 67

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 quota-

tions 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.

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 fi rst through the intellect, living too much
with ideas and not suffi ciently 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 fi rst 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’.

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 under-
standing of what constitutes Modernism so that it is not so exclusively defi ned by
the valorization of formal as well as thematic characteristics (vast unifying mythic
themes) associated with masculinity.

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.

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 signifi cant extent achieved an equal presence with men on
the cultural stage. Yet this situation is a relatively recent phenomenon in

Women, Modernism and the Modern World 69

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;

and in Bonnie Kime

Scott’s ‘Tangled Mesh of Modernists’ map in her Refi guring Modernism of
1995 he is linked up with Rebecca West, a writer with a tangential rela-
tionship 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.

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’;

and there were others whose

fi ction 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 fi nd 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 fi nd 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.’

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?’

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 percep-
tions 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

70 Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959

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 fi ction 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 benefi cial); 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 mani-
fested in their writing, the search for self-determination in a gender sense
came fi rst. 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’,

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 pri-
marily creative writers) were directly involved with political organisations
and in writing about politics; Nan Shepherd and the expatriate Lorna Moon,

Women, Modernism and the Modern World 71

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 specifi c gender
focus of the feminist criticism and theory responsible for rediscovering their
creative writing.

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’.

For all these reasons, it seems both necessary and appropriate to devote this
chapter (inadequate in space as it is) specifi cally 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 outstand-

ing 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 differ-
ence 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 suffi cient con-
fi dence (even if mixed with what Catherine Carswell called ‘the irritability
of diffi dence’)

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 mod-
estly 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

72 Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959

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 fi rst-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 profi le in relation to

Scottish modernism: both in relation to the innovatory nature of their fi ction
and their non-fi ction 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: fi ction 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 fi ction, and sometimes
in the events of their own lives, all of these writers provide narratives of a
female struggle for self-determination and fulfi lment: for a public as opposed
to a domestic role in society; for what Lorna Moon’s Nancy calls ‘a personal
door’;

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’.

Catherine Carswell’s Open the Door!, the fi rst of these new female-

centred 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 fi ction: a nar-
rative 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 pro-
vincial nature of Glasgow society and takes fl ight fi rst 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 fi lm-like presenta-
tion 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

Women, Modernism and the Modern World 73

reader into Joanna’s thoughts and feelings; and by the vitality and fl uidity 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 fi ction which had been largely
historical in nature and infl uenced by the social and psychological repercus-
sions of Scotland’s Calvinist religious heritage and the 1707 Union with
England, while at the turn of the century the couthy, escapist kailyaird fi ction
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 abstrac-
tion 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 fi lled 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 mar-
riage; in her introspection, home again in Glasgow after the death of her
husband, as she watches the river Kelvin in its ‘full, brown February fl ood’,
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 fl ood? 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.

The poetry is present also in the way Carswell uses descriptive or meta-
phorical 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 fi rst love, the dif-
fi dent 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 fi rst
time: ‘Its known contours were all disfi gured by moonlight, and by the strag-
gling 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,

74 Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959

but as a monotonous pulse of sound.’ (OD, pp. 67, 97, 172) Open the Door!
was awarded the Melrose prize for fi ction 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 presenta-
tion of his female characters in his fi ction in contrast to his ‘far more positive
assertion’ in defi ning male characters.

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 fi ctional
narratives they have their own autonomy. Edwin Muir commented in his
autobiography that ‘every one should live his life twice, for the fi rst attempt is
always blind’ (Muir, An Autobiography, p. 192), and in Carswell’s fi ctional sce-
narios there is the sense of an exploration of two life journeys: in the fi rst 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 fi ction for the
Glasgow Herald and later writing drama criticism for the Observer as assist-
ant 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 friend-
ship – 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 fi ctional plot of Open the Door!

Just as Carswell had been supportive (although not uncritical) of Lawrence’s

fi ction, so he was similarly involved with her Open the Door! project: nagging,
praising, sending drafts back for rewriting; aware of the narrative’s relation-
ship 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 marvel-
lously good.’ Later, after reading her revised draft, he wrote:

Women, Modernism and the Modern World 75

I have just fi nished 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.’

The reader, too,

senses with him that the writing of this novel, and in particular the charac-
terisation 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 fi nished.’

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 signifi cant 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 fi nd an answering response to her own emotions in a hesitant fi rst
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 fl ying 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 hon-
eymoon 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 mar-
riage! 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 fi re! 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 fi ction

is confi rmed 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

76 Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959

the Door!, for example, Joanna’s fi rst (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 fi ngers [. . .] she imagined
herself a little fl uttering 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 inno-
cent 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 odd-
jobs 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 igno-
rance 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
fi rst 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, conversa-

tional, almost at times stream of consciousness style which, despite what

Women, Modernism and the Modern World 77

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 fi nds 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.

In Ellen’s case, hostility from her fi ancé to the serious-

ness of her writing becomes a reason for her breaking the engagement. In
a passage which anticipates C. M. Forster’s depiction of his expatriate com-
munity 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 busi-
ness. 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?

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

78 Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959

wrest from her’.

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 fi ancé’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 commu-
nication between mothers and daughters. Confi ned 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 func-
tion satisfactorily without her husband to order their affairs. Yet she is also
a tragic fi gure, a woman with strong religious feelings to whom the Scottish
Presbyterian Kirk cannot offer any public role where she might feel fulfi lled.
Similarly, she has never felt fulfi lled sexually in her marriage with her con-
ventional 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
fl its 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 iden-
tity as that of ‘a minister’s sister’.

The mother has abandoned her daughter

in Moon’s Dark Star and is slovenly and antagonistic to her daughter’s ambi-
tions in Nan Shepherd’s The Quarry Wood. She is a passive fi gure 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,

Women, Modernism and the Modern World 79

what ships sailed into her harbour when she sat alone’.

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’.

This question of the nature of ‘womanhood’ and female roles in society

was taken up by Willa Muir in her fi rst 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 fi nd 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’.

In itself the exploration of such an essentialist position is not nec-

essarily objectionable or even unique in the period, although it differs from
the insistence of Dora Marsden in the New Freewoman that human individu-
ality (male and female) is what is important as opposed to individuals being
‘lumped together into a class, a sex, or a “movement”’.

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’.

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.

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 emo-
tions, 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 fi rst through the intel-
lect, living too much with ideas and not suffi ciently trusting to the truths that
would come to us through the deeper sensual and emotional channels. So we
get confused, uncreative and “pathological”’.

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 equal-
ity 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

80 Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959

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 unfor-
tunate 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.

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, affi nity 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 personal-
ity 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-fi ve 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 suffi cient power of exe-
cution to show that she might have had a great deal more. Why is she not a Murillo?
From a material diffi culty, 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

Women, Modernism and the Modern World 81

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

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 fi eld.

Most present-day critics, including the present writer, who come to

Women: An Inquiry after fi rst 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 fi ction, fi nd this early essay puz-
zling, 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 psychol-
ogy and education, the views she expressed in Women: An Inquiry were widely
held and considered to be ‘scientifi c’. 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’.

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 fi xed, 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 fi xed 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.

This too is

very close to Muir’s argument in her inquiry. It seems, therefore, as if she

82 Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959

had internalised such ‘scientifi c’ reading (for the parallels are so close it seems
unlikely that she had not read the works, or reviews of them) without subject-
ing 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 fl at [. . .] 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 inter-
ested. However – I shall launch bombs next time!’

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!

While Muir’s desire to become pregnant may excuse her preoccupation with
motherhood in her Inquiry, the essay is still disappointing in its unwilling-
ness 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 fulfi lled public role and
their contrary emotional drive to fulfi l 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 fi ction 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 fi ction 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 fi nds 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
confl icts [. . .] 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.’

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

Women, Modernism and the Modern World 83

philosophy into her ironic, omniscient narrative, while at the same time laying
bare the confl icting emotional responses of her principal female character.
As with George Eliot’s fi ction, 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 self-
discovery begins with marriage, as opposed to ending more traditionally in
marriage as in Carswell’s Open the Door! In this respect, Imagined Corners might
superfi cially 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 oppor-
tunity 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 fl uidity 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
fi ction 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 imper-

sonality of the art work, in contrast to Romantic period subjectivity. Pound
insisted on the need for a hard, clear image with no extraneous referential-
ity; 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’.

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 condi-
tion 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 fi ction
to maintain narrative impersonality and distance from characters, as we see
in the work of the modernist D. H. Lawrence; and it is especially diffi cult
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 fi ction is closely related to life-writing. Muir deals with this
diffi culty 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:

84 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 fl owed 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 terrify-
ing 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 iden-
tity. 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 terrifi ed
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 fi nds 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 fl ux, although not exactly as Bergson had declared
it to be, and instead of regarding the phenomenon with scientifi c 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 subjec-
tivities 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 signifi cance of dreams. Such dream

Women, Modernism and the Modern World 85

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
identifi cation 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’,

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.

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 argu-
ment put forward in Women: An Inquiry about a woman’s role as ‘the creator
of human beings’ – a role which the author briefl y acknowledged in her dis-
cussion could be used destructively as well as positively. In her recent book on
Willa Muir’s writings, Moving in Circles, Aileen Christianson writes insight-
fully about Muir’s unpublished fi ction and her journal entries, pointing to the
signifi cance of dreams and the operation of the unconscious in Muir’s own
life as well as in her critical thinking about human psychology.

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 fi gure which came
to life in the pages of her second novel. Even more surrealistic is the connec-
tion 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

86 Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959

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.

Such an idea is uncannily close to events in the Muir household sub-

sequent 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 terrifi ed
the boy by her stories of the devil and hellfi re 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’.

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 fi ctional 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 fi rst
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 muffl ed, breathless place. All the trees’ strength went into their strag-
gling height and each one seemed to be stretching upwards in an attempt to
see over its neighbour’s untidy head.’

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 fi ngers 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’,

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 fi rst choosing; and with the minister
father’s conventional message that all is for the best subverted by Lisbet’s

Women, Modernism and the Modern World 87

fi nal 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 fl agship 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 ammuni-
tion 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 superfi cially 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 fi ctional Scots-language
experimentation of Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Sunset Song, although neither
used the modifi ed ‘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
fi ction 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?

88 Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959

She continues:

But it is no wonder that I tricked you, because, I also put it over on a Scotch pro-
fessor, 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?

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 litera-
ture 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’.

As with Bonnie Kime Scott’s

account of ‘the women of 1928’, Moon’s comment is applicable more gener-
ally 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 com-
mented further, ‘the clear thinking bravery of 1929 girlhood’.

Notes

  1.  Lynn Abrams et al. (eds), Gender in Scottish History Since 1700, p. 2.
  2.  Marianne Dekoven, ‘Modernism and Gender’, p. 182.
  3.  Ibid., pp. 182–3.
  4.  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 fi ction 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.

Women, Modernism and the Modern World 89

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 mar-

ginalised 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 celebra-
tion of the twenty-fi rst 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 quota-

tions 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.

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 begin-
nings 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’,

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’,

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 coun-
terparts, 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 fi eld 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.’

94 Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959

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 sup-
porter 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 implemen-
tation; 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 fi rmly 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.

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 specifi c 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 objec-
tives of what Denis Saurat had called le groupe de la Renaissance Écossaise was
a literary one, culminating in MacDiarmid’s ambitious long Scots-language

Politics and Society between the Wars 95

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 Crucifi ed 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 govern-
ment seemed insensitive to the actuality of local Scottish situations, politi-
cal 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 uncompro-
mising 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’)

, sought to

remind readers of the history and considerable achievements of the fl edgling
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 settle-
ment in 1922 gave Celticism a new attraction for many of the literary fi gures
in particular. These looked not only towards Irish success in obtaining self-
determination 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 signifi cant Irish politicians and lit-
erary fi gures. ‘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 fl ew in an Avro-Anson fi ve-cylinder plane. He stayed in Ely Place with

96 Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959

Gogarty who entertained him with tales of his drinking days with Joyce
and took him to Joyce’s favourite bars.’

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’.

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 fi rst issue
of August 1922 and repeated in all subsequent issues of the magazine, pro-
claimed 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 con-
trary tendencies never developed’.

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.’

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 maga-
zine 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 Anglo-
Celtic peoples, with whom are the destinies of the generations to come’.

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.

Politics and Society between the Wars 97

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
fl ung into the nearest ashbin with other rubbish’.

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 estab-
lishment of a counterforce to the dominance of English in British literature.
He fi nds 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 litera-
tures 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 assimila-
tion 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’.

As in the earlier Albyn, MacDiarmid points here to

the journey the revival movement still has to travel: ‘and it is these [potenti-
alities] 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 unscientifi c fashion. The conditions
for a success of a Renaissance movement have not yet been received.’

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 eco-
nomics. ‘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 qualifi es it.
Soviet economics are confronted with the Gaelic system with its repudiation of

98 Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959

usury which fi nds 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.

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.’

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 signifi cant 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!)’.

So far as MacDiarmid’s ‘Gaelic Idea’ is concerned, one signifi cant 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 exist-
ing 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 infl uence 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

Politics and Society between the Wars 99

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.

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
infl ammatory 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 eve-
rything – the famous slum smell, to the making of which centuries of fi lth, damp,
soot, bad air, and decay have gone. Over the door there may be a small label with a
number. This signifi es that the house is ‘ticketed’, i.e. liable to entrance and search
at any time of the day or night by the sanitary offi cials [. . .] Half Scotland is slum-
poisoned. 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.

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 pilfer-
ing are easy and safe, wheresoever dirty acts of sexual baseness are committed, there
you will fi nd the Irishman in Scotland with all but a monopoly of the business.

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’.

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 immi-
gration 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 fi ght to keep
Scotland from being ‘corrupted by the introduction of a horde of immi-
grants’. 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

100 Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959

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 ques-
tion 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.

Muir’s description of the Catholic Grotto at

Carfi n – ‘the only palpable assertion of humanity that I came across in the
midst of that blasted region’

– 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
diffi cult to think of a creative writer of substance who expressed hostility to
Catholicism at this time, although attacks on Calvinism and on institutional-
ised 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’

was, artistically, no easy

task, and the problems arising out of Irish immigration showed that it was no
less diffi cult 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 Gaelic-
speaking and founded on Scotland’s Celtic heritage. His position was fi ercely
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 condi-
tion 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,

Politics and Society between the Wars 101

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’.

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 English-
ascendancy ideology which our rulers have been at such pains – largely
through the agency of those same schools – to build up.’

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.

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 lan-
guage 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 fi ction 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 vali-
dated as ‘statistic after statistic showed the Scottish economy and society

102 Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959

more adversely affected than those in the south’.

A seemingly insoluble

problem for Ramsay MacDonald’s Westminster minority Labour govern-
ment 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 unifi ed 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 diffi culties 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 national-
ist 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.

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’.

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 refl ected
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 self-
determination. As he stops for the night at Melvich before the fi nal part
of his journey over the Pentland Firth to Orkney, he thinks over Scottish
history, ‘hoping to fi nd 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 fi ghting, 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 exagger-
ated individualism will no longer be able to work the harm to Scotland that it has

Politics and Society between the Wars 103

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.

As the above quotation suggests, Muir’s Scottish Journey is not a conven-
tional travel book. His is an interior journey in which description of land-
scape 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’.

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’.

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 fi rst 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’.

Similarly, he drew attention in his articles to the need for a more

active approach to fi nding local solutions for local needs, pointing to the
negative impact of fi shing 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 fi fty 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

104 Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959

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 some-
thing 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 commodi-
ties, including the more complicated agricultural machinery.’ Glasgow and
Edinburgh ‘both artifi cially 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 thou-
sands 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’.

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’.

Other news-

papers and magazines advertised the health benefi ts 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 contribu-
tions 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 heart-
breaking 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 fl ares 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.

Simultaneously with this new-found interest in the country, the unem-

ployed of the cities were taking to the streets in Hunger Marches while

Politics and Society between the Wars 105

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 fi ction, 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 move-
ment 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 prin-
cipal 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 mul-
tiple 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 international-
ism 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 fi nds 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
fl attening steam-roller of mass’.

Such national/international concerns took an increasingly dark turn, espe-

cially 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 pro-
gramme. In contrast, MacDiarmid, in the Free Man of July 1932, reviewed

106 Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959

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 misrepre-
sentation 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 diffi culties 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 fi ght when, where, and as they can.’

Wyndham Lewis had been one of MacDiarmid’s modernist heroes when

he started out on his own attempt to revolutionise Scottish literature and pol-
itics 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 diffi culties 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 assist-
ant 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 diffi cult 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 fi re’)

, there is a dangerous careless-

ness 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.

More questionable, however, is his recommen-

dation 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 fi nds that Lewis’s Hitler brings
out the ‘essential difference excellently’ between Marxism and the national

Politics and Society between the Wars 107

socialists in Germany in that ‘the fact that a man is a sorter at the Post Offi ce,
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.

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 domi-
nated by his ‘multifarious reading’; and his capacity to single out and trans-
form 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 admira-
tion of Wyndham Lewis and his continued trust in his opinions.

Contributions to periodicals and newspapers were soon showing how dan-

gerous 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 sup-
porter 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.’

Creative writers who in the 1920s had found themselves

inspired by the intellectual and artistic ideas of the continent now found them-
selves 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

108 Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959

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
fi lled 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!’

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 correspond-
ence and the mail of those who corresponded with him opened and checked.

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.

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 fi rst issue of the
European Quarterly which he founded with Janko Lavrin, denounced both
Russian communism and Scottish Calvinism as impersonal systems, destruc-
tive 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 coffi n of human freedom.’

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’,

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 fl eeing 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’.

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.

Politics and Society between the Wars 109

Neil Gunn’s position in relation to political extremes was more uncer-

tain. 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 fi nd a compromise that would bring the warring factions of the national-
ist 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?

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 affi rmation
that ‘members of PEN should at all times use what infl uence 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.’

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

110 Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959

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 fi ght 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.

It is diffi cult 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.  Michael Levenson, ‘Introduction’, in Cambridge Companion to Modernism, p. 2.
2.  Camilla Gray, The Russian Experiment in Art 1863–1922, pp. 221, 219.
  3.  Edwin Muir, letter of 20 December 1923, Selected Letters of Edwin Muir, p. 30.
4.  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).

5. Hugh MacDiarmid, Albyn (1927) in MacDiarmid, Albyn: Shorter Books and

Monographs, ed. A. Riach, p. 17.

6.  Alan Bold, MacDiarmid, pp. 233–4.
  7.  Ibid., p. 234; also MacDiarmid, The Thistle Rises, ed. Alan Bold, p. 291.
8.  McCulloch (ed.), Modernism and Nationalism, pp. xii, 270. As previously, sources diffi -

cult to access will, where relevant, be referenced from this collection of documents.

9.  MacDiarmid, Albyn, pp. 4–5.
10.  William Sharp, ‘Introduction’, Lyra Celtica , pp. 274–5.
11. McCulloch (ed.), Modern and Nationalism, p. 276.
12.  ‘English Ascendancy in British Literature’, in MacDiarmid, Selected Prose, ed.

Riach, pp. 63, 67, 72.

13. Ibid., p. 73.
14. MacDiarmid, ‘The Caledonian Antisyzygy and the Gaelic Idea’, Modern Scot,

Summer 1931, reprinted in MacDiarmid, Selected Essays of Hugh MacDiarmid, ed.
Glen, p. 67.

15. Ibid.
16. Hugh MacDiarmid, ‘Second Hymn to Lenin’ (1932), in Complete Poems 1920–

1976, I, p. 323.

17. Edwin Muir, Scottish Journey, p. 122.
18. George Malcolm Thomson, Caledonia, reprinted in McCulloch (ed.), Modernism

and Nationalism, p. 228.

19. Andrew Dewar Gibb, Scotland in Eclipse, reprinted in McCulloch (ed.), Modernism

and Nationalism, p. 235.

Politics and Society between the Wars 111

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.

112 Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959

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; Anti-
Chamberlain 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.

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 diffi cult to memorize, because they had no bearing on any-
thing tangible. They were sounds in the empty spaces of history.

Neil M. Gunn, Highland River (1937)

As discussed previously, Neil M. Gunn fi rst came to attention as a short fi ction
writer, contributing stories to MacDiarmid’s Scottish Nation and Northern
Review magazines, and with his fi rst novel The Grey Coast being praised by
MacDiarmid as ‘something new, and big, in Scottish Literature’.

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 fi shing is no longer
profi table, 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.

114 Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959

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 com-
municated by the earlier poet’s adult refl ections 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

fi ction the idea of a lost ‘golden age’, a pre-history civilisation of innocence
and peace among human beings. His biographers draw attention to his arti-
cles 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

Neil M. Gunn 115

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 inno-
cence of its own golden age’.

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 fi nd 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.

This description by Gunn of the childhood innocence he fi nds 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 diffi cult 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’

to the distressed peoples

of the present; and given also the interest in mythology and primitive civi-
lisations 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 explo-
ration of the primitive in his fi ction 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 infl uenced 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 ‘uncon-
scious responses’ to be recovered through his synthetic or re-integrated Scots
language are part of that same early twentieth-century interest in minds ‘dif-
ferent from our own’, which contain something that ‘civilisation’ (for many,
in the form of industrialisation) has destroyed. Gunn’s ‘spatial’ narratives, his
fi ctional explorations of race memory and the collective unconscious, of how
traces of time past can live on in the present subconscious lives of his charac-
ters, 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 fi ctional involvement with myth, Gunn’s procedure in

the more deeply historical novels Sun Circle (1933), Butcher’s Broom (1934)
and The Silver Darlings (1941)

relates also to the ideas about historical

fi ction discussed in H. Butterfi eld’s The Historical Novel: An Essay, published
in 1924, and Georg Lukács’s The Historical Novel written ‘during the winter

116 Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959

of 1936–37’

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 Butterfi eld’s. What is important, however, is that all three accounts
– Butterfi eld and Lukács’s critique of historical fi ction and Gunn’s actual
historical novels – were produced in the same historical time-frame and were
therefore subject to the infl uence 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’.

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’.

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 prima-
rily antiquarian. In the fi nal chapter of Waverley, for example, he describes
his task as one of ‘tracing the evanescent manners of his own country’,

and

although his historical novels at their best succeed in being what Butterfi eld
calls works of ‘resurrection’,

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 histori-
cal writing was ‘untrue’, but that ‘it no longer enriched or infl uenced 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’.

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
specifi cally 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 regen-
eration in Highland history for his settings, do give some credence to a trilogy
defi nition. These three historical novels differ also from his more character-
istically 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

Neil M. Gunn 117

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 specifi c 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,

there was little specifi c 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.

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 foreknowl-
edge. 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 reli-
gion 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 confi rm 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)

118 Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959

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 fi ctional reconstruc-
tion 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 wildfl ower 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
pacifi cation. 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 indistin-
guishable 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 fl ock of sheep on these hills there is the ‘piner’.
(BB, pp. 14–15)

Neil M. Gunn 119

Mairi herself, if not a ‘piner’, is something of a lost sheep in the village com-
munity. 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 signifi er
of something that has been lost in the community as a whole.

Gunn initially establishes the corporate identity of the village com-

munity 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;

and helping each other out when in diffi culty. 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 fi ght 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 fi nds 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 signifi cance 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 signifi cant narrative episodes in Butcher’s

Broom occurs when the action is moved from the remote Highland glen to the

120 Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959

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 time-
world 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, fi ctionalised documentary from histori-
cal 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 bed-
ridden 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 fi ery spirit and courage, and her support
of the pregnant Elie, herself becomes the historical pregnant woman who
defi ed 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.

The novel ends with

the people exiled to the cliff tops, left to teach themselves how to make a
living from sea fi shing, 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 fi nd 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 injus-
tice 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 fi shing industry.
Gunn wrote of The Silver Darlings which completed the ‘trilogy’ in 1941,

Neil M. Gunn 121

that he ‘was moved by what happened to our Highland people during and
after the Clearances’,

and this epic narrative tells the story of the almost

miraculous rise of the east-coast herring fi shing 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 fi ction 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 confi -
dent 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 fi ction 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 fi rst 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 boul-
ders’ 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 fl uttered 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.

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 fi sh. 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

122 Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959

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 environ-
ment 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 fl ows 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 fi rst – 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 signifi cance 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 artifi cial in the narrative com-
munication 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 affi nity between Gunn’s presentation of the relation-
ship 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:

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.

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

Neil M. Gunn 123

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 affi nity
between these two writers at certain stages of their work. Yet the introduc-
tion 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 inter-
ventions, ministry/More palpable, and so she dealt with me’.

In contrast,

while the river may have become the river of life for Gunn’s boy, his relation-
ship 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 com-
municated in Gunn’s evocations of the sea-coast and its qualities:

Strength was the keynote of this coast, a passionless remorseless strength, unyield-
ing 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 fl uidity 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 infl u-
ence 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, fi nding that ‘the French
boy is father of the man in a way that is strangely fi xed to the boy of the Strath
running wild in a fl uidity that never got fi xed’ (AD, p. 80). On a surface inter-
pretation 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 manipula-
tion 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 fi xed time point in a chronological
plot pattern, Gunn’s narrative time fl ows 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

124 Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959

the Scottish and French writers. Gunn’s comment about Proust’s boy being
‘father of the man in a way that is strangely fi xed’ (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 re-
creation. 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’.

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 experi-
ence 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 narra-
tive. 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 fl ows 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 impor-
tance 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, fi nds 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 ini-
tiator of the younger boy into the skills of hunting and salmon fi shing. 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 fi ction and essay writing as a whole and his mission to restore self-belief
in the values of the Highland way of life through his fi ctional 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

Neil M. Gunn 125

is not at all interested in the past history of his people. Unlike Kenn, he has
no time for attempting to fi nd 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 offi cial 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 fl at, 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 fi rst 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 diffi cult to memorize, because they had no bearing on any-
thing 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 con-
quering 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 fi rst words on regaining con-
sciousness 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 scien-
tist and he remembers how he saw – and still sees – the skill and precision

126 Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959

of his fi sherman father and his crew as part of a progression of scientifi c dis-
covery and achievement: ‘Galileo, Tycho Brahe, Kepler, the great Newton,
Cavendish, Faraday, Röntgen. . . . They were the men who stood beyond the
fi shermen in Kenn’s growing mind. From the fi shermen 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 scientifi c colleague
Radzyn who agonises over his inability to fi nd 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’.

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 sur-
roundings. 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’,

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 fi nal 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 fi shing on
the Moray Firth: ‘a busy, fabulous time among the common people of that
weathered northern land’.

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 coura-
geous participation in the modern enterprise of the herring fi shing. 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 gov-
ernment press gang vessel as they haul their fi rst 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

Neil M. Gunn 127

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 north-
wards, 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 fi shing community developing
on the coast below the Dunster croft.

Catrine’s heroic journey alone over the Ord of Caithness is the fi rst 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 tra-
ditional 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 fi shermen, is both a participant in that new
way of life and also a fi gure 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 fi rst time visits his mother’s people after his
own fi rst 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 infl uence 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. Signifi cantly, 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 com-
ments 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 fl ees 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

128 Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959

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 fulfi ls
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 signifi cant 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 signifi cant 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 fi sher, 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 fi rst aroused when, as a young child, he chases a butterfl y 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 butterfl y,
only it was very much stronger than he was, just as he was stronger than the but-
terfl y. 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 signifi cance 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 butterfl y but fi nds it dead under his hand: ‘His
palm was covered with silvery dust. On the broken leaf the butterfl y 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 understand-
ing of who he himself is, thus making him a fi t 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’.

Neil M. Gunn 129

The Silver Darlings has remained the most popular of Gunn’s novels, a

book which exposes what Lukács calls ‘those vast, heroic, human potentiali-
ties which are always latently present in the people’.

In addition to its sym-

bolic connotations, one of its principal strengths is its historical authenticity,
its artistic resurrection of a world of fi shing 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 narra-
tive of The Silver Darlings is itself a dynamic one, with the Scottish north-east
fi shing 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 sig-
nifi cance, that The Silver Darlings itself has become a fable, a work of legend.
For its narrative does not take the fi shers 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 fi shing 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 understand-
ing 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 per-
petual Provincialism which had hitherto condemned it to structural and spir-
itual obsolescence’.

Despite the fact that the success of the east-coast herring

fi shing 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 fi ction have therefore created a new perception of the Highlands as
an essential part of the place we call Scotland, while placing that fi ction itself
among the revitalising literature of the modernist period.

130 Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959

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.  Butterfi eld, The Historical Novel, p. 5.
9.  Lukács, The Historical Novel, pp. 22–3.
10. Walter Scott, Waverley, p. 478.
11. Butterfi eld, 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.

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 politi-
cal 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 fi rst 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 signifi -
cant 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 fi ne 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 fi relight, 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 fi ght. 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.

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

132 Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959

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
fi nds 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’.

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 signifi cant in relation to the nature of
his writing and its infl uences. 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.

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 litera-
ture. Gibbon, in contrast, did not share this motivating infl uence 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, profi teering and injustice are the indictments
against the war found in his Scottish fi ction and essays, not the philosophical
awareness of a cataclysmic break with the past found in much art of the mod-
ernist period; and not, in the particular Scottish context, the need to recover
Scottish self-determination. For him, the defi ning event of the early century
was the Russian Revolution of 1917, a political happening of immediate and
formative signifi cance for the seventeen-year-old newspaper reporter who
attended the foundation meeting of the Aberdeen Soviet in 1918 and lost
his professional objectivity suffi ciently to become elected (temporarily) to its
Council.

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

A Scots Quair and City Fiction 133

manhood, MacDiarmid’s socialism was always interconnected with nation-
alism 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 mate-
rial of Orage’s New Age. Nevertheless, in both Gibbon and MacDiarmid in
particular, this unsystematic education produced an eclectic mix of infl uences
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 vital-
ity 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 foun-
dations 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 nation-

alism, 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 charac-
ters, emphasising that ‘getting rid of that standard third party narrative voice
is getting rid of a whole value system’.

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 fl exible medium for
a new fi ction 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 fi ction itself – are to be
found in Scottish Scene and especially in the essay ‘Literary Lights’ where

134 Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959

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
infl uences) 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 versifi cation’ (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 industrial-
ized 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 fi ction, this passage does not say what fi rst
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 fi n-
ished writing the “Second Hymn to Lenin” [1932]’;

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 briefl y, 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 ‘unintelligi-
bilities’ of Finnegan’s Wake)

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

A Scots Quair and City Fiction 135

story and the story of her ‘folk’ to us through her memories of the past hap-
penings which have brought her to her present situation: a fl owing 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 (fi elds) 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 fi nal 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’.

This comment is, however, applicable to A Scots Quair

from its beginning in Sunset Song, fi rst 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:

136 Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959

Jump up if you like. And she cried back I like fi ne! 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 laugh-
ing 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 strug-
gle 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 unwill-
ingness 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 modifi ed 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 comple-
ment 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 determinis-
tic, 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 ironi-
cally 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

A Scots Quair and City Fiction 137

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 acceler-
ates the death of the farming traditions of Kinraddie. Gibbon’s presentation
of the responses of the people to this unexpected and little understood disas-
ter includes the hypocrisy, self-seeking, and susceptibility to media and reli-
gious 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, includ-
ing 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 profi t from the prevailing con-
ditions. 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

138 Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959

community is fragmented as a result of confl ict 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 carica-
tured 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 fi rst 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 ulti-
mately 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 infl exible Jehovah may have been replaced
by Robert’s humanistic Christ who as inspiring leader will bring a new exist-
ence 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 hill-
side 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 fl ushed,
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

A Scots Quair and City Fiction 139

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’.

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 meta-
phorically through differing cloud formations. The new hopes of the fi rst
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 interest-
ing similarities here between Gibbon’s fi ctional portrayal of the strike and
MacDiarmid’s ‘Ballad of the Crucifi ed 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 fl owering of the previously barren thistle where
the poem’s speaker ‘saw a rose come loupin’ oot/Frae a camsteerie [unman-
ageable] plant’. And just as the Drunk Man’s rose ‘grew till a’ the buss/Was
hidden its fl ame’, 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 fulfi lled 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’ fi re burned’. Then in
both fi ctional 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.’

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’

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 previ-
ously in Sunset Song, Gibbon leaves open a way forward to be interrogated in
the fi nal 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

140 Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959

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 fi nal
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 fl esh 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 fi nished: ‘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 fi nal book and to
the impersonal rationality of Chris’s son Ewan who has been characterised
throughout Cloud Howe in terms of fl int 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 empha-
sises 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 fi nd her not by the ancient stand-
ing 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 require-
ments in completing my trilogy) have hitherto failed to build’.

The new

environment is communicated immediately – the quicker pulse of the city,
its damp air, the swish of traffi c 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 fi ctional 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

A Scots Quair and City Fiction 141

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 stratifi ed 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 com-
municating 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 fl ung 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 fi ve 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 repre-
sentative voice and thoughts of the man give way to the woman’s conscious-
ness 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 fi nd’; 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

142 Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959

is, as we fi nd out at a later stage of the book, that in spite of her determina-
tion 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 fl oodings 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 fl ooding into his present thoughts:

the rain and stink and that fi rst 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 fi nally, 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 hap-

penings 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

A Scots Quair and City Fiction 143

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 revolu-
tionary 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 charac-
terisation 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?’

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 fi ght
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 communica-
tion 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 fi nal 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 fi ght that maybe will never have a fi nish, whatever
the names we give to it – the fi ght 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 fi t 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 fi nally

144 Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959

advocated, but also that behind his commitment to it, despite its imperson-
ality, 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’,

is stylisti-

cally the most innovative city novel of the interwar revival, interweaving the
individual yet representative voices of the various classes of Gibbon’s imag-
ined 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 fi ctional 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 signifi cant 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 educa-
tion 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 revolu-
tionary 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 transfi gured: 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 defi nite place to a defi nite place, but part
of a perfect rhythm which had arisen, he did not know how.

A Scots Quair and City Fiction 145

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.’

Like Gibbon, Barke was a young man in

the early 1930s (born in 1905 to Gibbon’s 1901) and their shared fl amboyant
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.

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 fi ctional 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 destruc-
tive 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
fi rst principal section, ‘Second City Lullaby (The Two Worlds)’, the remain-
ing 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 briefl y 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 Infi rmary where both
men fi nd 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

146 Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959

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 narra-
tive 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 refl ective passages.

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 fi nd 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 pro-
vides 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 fi lm-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 fl ashed into action’ (MO, p. 16).

This new feature of electric street lighting – what the narrator calls the

Corporation’s robbing the sun ‘of its fi nal dying-swan curtain’ (MO, p. 16)
– is characteristic of the markers of modernity in this ‘Second City’ section.
Typists are busy in offi ces 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

A Scots Quair and City Fiction 147

acquaintances, brought together by their business occupations in the imper-
sonality 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
affl uent. Ice-cream sellers abound, the department stores display their new
season bathing costumes and tennis shirts; ‘only the fl appers 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 fi elds 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 some-
where 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 fi sh 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 affl uent 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 commu-
nicated largely through images of time and speed, through the new language
of ‘motoring-speak’: ‘took the Bowling hill at fi fty-fi ve’; ‘car take the Rest [and
be Thankful hill] in top, George?’ . On Loch Lomondside, the road narrows,
traffi c ‘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).

148 Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959

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 fi rm, 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, espe-
cially for the slum-dwellers, seems to have stopped: there is no movement in
their lives, no hope of ever escaping from their unsatisfactory living condi-
tions, 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 fi rst 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 fi nal National Hunger March, and so to
his own death:

Starvelings arisen from their slumbers. Criminals of want on the march: two
hundred and fi fty 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 fi nished 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, fl ags 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 popu-
lation 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 starting-
point of the March becomes both a temporary refuge and a communications
centre for the life-stories and perspectives of its accidental visitors. Allan’s

A Scots Quair and City Fiction 149

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 pre-
sented 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 convinc-
ing 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 per-
spective 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 specifi c 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 fi nd 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 fi nd 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’.

His Kelvinside home, as befi ts its wealth,

is, on the surface at least, cultured in a modern way with a ‘Duncan Grant
[painting] over the open fi replace’ in the ‘lounge’, and on the table ‘a copy of
Ulysses in its yellow paper covers was conspicuously exposed’. Evening visi-
tors 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 continu-
ing sense of responsibility. Danny lives with his wife and three children in a
room and kitchen tenement fl at 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 stuffi ness’, and its stairs worn and
dirty, but the fl at 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 ‘fi tba’. 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 fl âneurs:

150 Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959

The tides of people fl owing backwards and forwards along Dumbarton Road
delighted him. It was fi ne 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 fi les 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 affl uent; the overnight sleeper between
Glasgow and London which takes Leslie Pagan between his Kelvinside resi-
dence and the south of England where his English wife wishes the family to
settle now that the collapse of the shipbuilding fi rm 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 attrac-
tive, 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 Dreffi eld 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

A Scots Quair and City Fiction 151

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 Fairfi eld 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
fi nal visit to the closed yard and he observes the place where ‘so many men
had, honestly and with love of craft, done so much fi ne work [but] where now
grass and docken and dandelion had the fi eld to themselves’ (Sh, p. 367) – an
image reminiscent of Gunn’s story ‘Down to the Sea’ with its similar narra-
tive 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 fi nd
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 north-
ern 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 fl ow in the opposite direction; and unlike
Anderson’s and MacKelvie’s decision to fi ght against seemingly overwhelm-
ing 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 fi nancially, 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 fi t
in; work which Danny refuses, although he remains admiringly grateful to
the ‘Major’. And there is a similar expression of nostalgia and false conscious-
ness 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 fi ctional work of the interwar period, all of these
urban novels bring something stylistically and thematically new into Scottish
fi ction. As with the female fi ction writers considered previously, there is a

152 Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959

new awareness of the modern world in these urban scenarios, a presenta-
tion of the fl ow 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 fl ow 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”?’, apply-
ing its defi nition 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 fi eld 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’.

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 fi ctional
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 ‘social-
ist realist’ fi ction as that terminology is usually understood, but imaginative
writing which seeks to fi nd 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 fi rst 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 transi-
tion 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 refer-
ence to Finnegan’s Wake.

8. Gibbon, A Scots Quair, Introduction to Grey Granite, pp. xv–xvi.
9. Dickens, Hard Times, pp. 107, 146.

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 cel-
ebrating the onward march of technology and taking up themes of socialist
commitment including, in the later 1930s, the fi ght 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 middle-
class 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’.

As discussed in previous chapters, the principal male Scottish modern-

ist 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 fi ctional 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’,

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

Poetry and Politics 155

directly into poetry. He wrote in 1936: ‘I fi nd 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.’

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.

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, electrifi cation 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’.

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 fi rst two in particular are more the-
matically 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
falsifi ed 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 great-
est 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’.

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 fi ts
with his democratic theme. As in the earlier A Drunk Man, his basic form is a
modifi ed 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 fl ex-
ible 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

156 Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959

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 fl ower and iron of the truth’ (CP, I, p. 298). It ends with the asser-
tion 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’.

The weak fi nal 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’, fi rst 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 signifi cant 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 amplifi ed 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 fi rst ballad inter-
polation is characterised as a poet who argues with himself as to whether his
poems are ‘spoken in the factories and fi elds,/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 exter-
nal – 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 – the-
matically 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 locomo-
tion,/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

Poetry and Politics 157

to Day Lewis’s image of Lenin: ‘his mind like an oxy-acetylene fl ame’; and to
what he sees as MacDiarmid’s reference to Lenin as ‘a means o’ world locomo-
tion’.

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).

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 Marx-
withoot-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 fi nal section of the poem (both main argument and interpolations) is explic-
itly 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 fi ne 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 fi nal ‘Third Hymn’ is different from both its
predecessors in that it takes up the theme of Glasgow and its slums omnipres-
ent in discursive prose and fi ction writing from the late 1920s onwards, but
absent from MacDiarmid’s own earlier poetry as well as from most of the new

158 Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959

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 anthol-
ogy of 1933 and its criticisms of Ernest William Barnes’s Scientifi c 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’.

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 fi nd it acceptable for New Writing’,

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 fi rst 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 fl air,
That resolution to understand all bearings
That is the essence of a seaman’s character . . . (CP, II, p. 893)

and its fi nal 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 turn-
ing-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

Poetry and Politics 159

undeserved degradation (CP, II, pp. 895, 896). This inability to fi nd a satisfac-
tory 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 ‘Refl ections in a Slum’
reputedly part of the projected (but not completed) Impavidi Progrediamur
of the late 1930s and fi rst 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 fi nd
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 rhe-
torically in an inappropriate and artifi cially 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 per-
suade 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’

160 Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959

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 signifi cance of the birth of the Christ child into rela-
tionship 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 fi sh,/Dropping into the world like a ripe fruit in due time – ’.
The verse form approximates to Eliot’s defi nition 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 nega-
tive 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

Poetry and Politics 161

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 fi nal 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 Rifl e; 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 diffi cult, physically, eco-
nomically, and intellectually, his life was at that time: ‘The weather here is
unspeakable – bitterly cold and wet, and life in Whalsay now is like immure-
ment 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 refer-
ence resources here are utterly useless’.

‘The Gangs’ never did appear,

although ‘What Has Been May Be Again (Timely footnotes to famous pas-
sages 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

162 Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959

and European situation. Whatever the reason, the poem was lost until discov-
ered 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 artifi ci-
ality of much of his previous poetry of ‘commitment’.

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 misunderstand-
ing through unintentional ambiguity of expression. Yet, as with MacDiarmid’s
very different diffi culties 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 fi rst 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.

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’.

Broch and

Kafka were most probably infl uences 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
infl uences, the fi rst two sections of Variations in particular strike a modernist
keynote, with their fragmented, free-verse form and striking imagery which
is both specifi cally mundane yet also philosophically intertextual in its evoca-
tion of Eliot’s The Waste Land and the circuitous and blocked roads of Kafka’s
fi ction. As its title proclaims, time is the principal theme of the collection:
personal time and the time of human history; time dislocated, unstable, frag-
mented, yet paradoxically ‘fi xed’ by the fact of mortality. The fi rst poem opens
with its impersonal speakers ‘waiting for life,/Turning away from hope, too dull
for speculation’.

Yet these are not Eliot’s Wastelanders, only too willing to

Poetry and Politics 163

be kept covered by winter’s forgetful snow, fi nding April the cruellest month,
with its ‘mixing/ Memory and desire, stirring/Dull roots with spring rain’.

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 fi ction, whatever its other causes or implications, comes from a desire
still to fi nd, rather than create, a meaning’.

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, never-
theless believed that there was a way to be sought for and a meaning to be found
in relation to human life. The seeming infl uence of Eliot in the opening lines
of the fi rst 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 speak-
ers here, a seeking to fi nd 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, fl apping 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 fi elds seemed blasted by disease, as if the swamp were invisibly spread-
ing 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 fi lthy 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.

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,

164 Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959

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 fi fteen
lines, has a similar imprisoned-in-time theme with almost every line of con-
strictive 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 ‘fi sher’ whose catch brings
mortality; or, in a reverse image, a ‘fi re-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 wolfi sh 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 mor-
tality (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 confi ned

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
suffi cient 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’.

Yet the hors texte problem

did not derive only from his diffi culty 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 genealo-
gies 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

Poetry and Politics 165

all others are right – not because it is “truer” than any other, but because it
was believed in a different way’.

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 confi rmed 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 fi ctional crea-
tions 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 suffi ciently 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 suffi ciently 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’, fi rst 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 fl exibility 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 fi delity is possible, just as his inability to see that the time for fi ghting 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 specifi c to

the 1930s, but as Muir uses the myth, their stories relate to the wider human
history of confl ict 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.

166 Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959

Notes

  1.  Jean Paul Sartre, What is Literature?, p. 82.
2.  Wallace Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, p. 997.
3.  Muir, Selected Letters of Edwin Muir, p. 92.
4.  G. Robert Stange, ‘The Victorian City and the Frightened Poets’, Victorian

Studies Summer 1968, pp. 619–40.

5. Valentine Cunningham, British Writers of the Thirties, p. 398.
6. MacDiarmid, Complete Poems 1920–1976, I, pp. 297, 298. This work is abbrevi-

ated to CP throughout this chapter.

7. MacDiarmid’s life-long omniverous reading made him frequently a careless

reader, seizing on ideas which on the surface seemed to fi t with his current preoc-
cupations, as we see in his early interest in Italian fascism as well as in some of his
artistic infl uences. But it is diffi cult 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).

8. Cunningham, British Writers of the Thirties, p. 398.
9. The grammatical implications are ambiguous here. However, since MacDiarmid’s

references to Christ in his poetry are usually positive, I would think that the nega-
tive image is directed to Trotsky alone as opposed to suggesting that Christ too
is artifi cial, a poseur. Of course, ‘Christ’ could also be an expletive, but in that
case there would probably have been an exclamation mark.

10. Bold, MacDiarmid, p. 326; MacDiarmid, Letters of Hugh MacDiarmid, p. 679.
11. MacDiarmid, Letters of Hugh MacDiarmid, p. 593.
12. National Library of Scotland Acc. 10488/1, letters 19, 20.
13. 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.

14. Peter Butter’s annotated edition of the Complete Poems of Edwin Muir has helpful

contextual information about individual poems, including those mentioned here.

15. Willa Muir, Belonging, p. 152.
16. Muir, Complete Poems of Edwin Muir, p. 51. Page numbers for further quotations

will be given in the text, prefaced by ‘CP’.

17. T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land, Collected Poems, p. 63.
18. Michael Bell, Cambridge Companion to Modernism, p. 14.
19. Edwin Muir, An Autobiography, p. 92.
20. Muir, Selected Letters, p. 98. For quotation from Spender’s review, see Muir,

Complete Poems, p. 321.

21. Graham Hough, An Essay in Criticism, pp. 155–6.

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 signifi cant 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.

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’.

As we have seen in earlier chap-

ters, 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 fi rst
and foremost deeply concerned with what he had to say’;

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

170 Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959

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’.

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 fi rst 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 fi rst 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 fi rst stages in
the writing of poetry as a sort of apprenticeship, to be learned like any other’.

His own apprenticeship was a lengthy one, and it included the writing skills
he acquired as critic, translator, novelist and life-writer between these fi rst
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 tenta-
tive 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 fi nd 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

Late Muir and MacDiarmid 171

(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 fl ame – from the fi re 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.

Muir did not serve

in World War One, having been rejected as not suffi ciently fi t 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 per-
sonal, 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’ fi rst 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

172 Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959

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, fi nding 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 fi nal 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 fi ssure we watched gently grow
The tame domesticated danger,
Yet lived in comfort in our haunted rooms.

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
specifi c defi nition in its fi nal 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 fi eld, 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

Late Muir and MacDiarmid 173

wave/Among the grass and wild-fl owers.’ 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 specifi cs of the immediate war situa-
tion 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 stretch-
ing back into human history, but also a continuing modernity, bringing to
mind as we read it in the early years of this twenty-fi rst century not only what
we know about the two World Wars of the twentieth century, but also the
‘always homeless’ victims of the confl icts which have followed them.

As discussed in the previous chapter, one of the most signifi cant 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 briefl y 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 fi rst 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 fi gures 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 ‘catch-
ing’ of the aspects of existence (nothing so easy!), but a symbolizing of the deepest
questions and enigmas of life – a thing infi nitely more noble, profound and subtle
than realistic art.

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 repre-
sentation 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 gov-
erning 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 reproduc-
tion of everyday life, Ayers’ discussion points to their view of ‘actual histori-
cal 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

174 Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959

permanent importance in a transient world’.

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 pre-
destination 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.

The stories of Greece were therefore able to act as objective cor-

relatives in his poetry; not in any fi xed allegorical relationship, but fl exibly
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 fi nd
their past lives ‘trite and strange’ (CP, p. 125); while the story of Penelope
and Odysseus, which Muir reworked in several poems, showed how faithful-
ness 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 fi ckle-
ness 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 jurisdic-
tion 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 pow-
erful presence through themes of duality and determinism in Scottish post-
Reformation writing, both historical and recent,

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 infl uenced his creativity when he went there as Director of the

Late Muir and MacDiarmid 175

British Council Institute in 1945. In the extended version of his autobiogra-
phy, published in 1956, he recalls his journey through Europe to the Czech
capital and his sense of unreality when he fi nally 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 philo-
sophical 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 fi elds 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 starting-
point, 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’:

a sentence of thirty-fi ve 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
fi nal 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 counter-
pointed 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).

Some commentators on Muir’s poetry have attempted to interpret this

176 Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959

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’.

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’,

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 fi nds that the
‘vision of the reconciling gods derives from outside’.

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-infl uenced ‘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 ideo-
logical 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’.

Late Muir and MacDiarmid 177

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 seem-
ingly 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 fi nal line with its three heavy stresses: ‘And still the interroga-
tion is going on’. The sense of waiting is increased by the irregular rhyming
where words ‘chime’ only infrequently and without specifi c pattern as in the
‘hesitated’ of line one and the ‘waited’ of line fi ve. 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 intensifi cation 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 fi eld 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 fi nds that ‘The Interrogation’ in particular ‘anticipates by a couple
of decades the note which would be heard when A. Alvarez began to edit his
infl uential 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 fi nds 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 futil-
ity which is contemporary history’.

As we see in his reworkings of the Penelope story, and more consist-

ently 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 col-
lections 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 implica-
tions: ‘The helmet on his head/Has melted fl esh and bone/And forged a
mask instead/That always is alone.’ In addition to the strong visual image

178 Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959

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 responsi-
bility through the repetition of ‘we’. Its relentless move to the negative, yet
unspecifi ed 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 fi ll 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’

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 par-
ticular) than into the later’, fi nding 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 specifi c, separate thing’ (SL, p. 110). He himself had experienced ‘waking
dreams’ as a result of Jungian psychoanalysis in the early 1920s, and dream-
ing 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’.

Such contrasting yet linked states of being, and a new con-

fi dence 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 fi rmly 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

Late Muir and MacDiarmid 179

mind the theme of Incarnation and I feel that probably I shall write a few poems
about that high and diffi cult 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 infl uence behind his return
to the use of biblical myth in this fi nal 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 apprehen-
sion 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 polysyl-
labic words such as ‘afl oat’, ‘foundering’ and felicity’ with the short ‘skiff’
and ‘keep’. Yet the details of the scenario are left dream-like, unspecifi ed:
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 fi nal 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 confi dent than the many Fall-theme poems
in early collections, are still limited to some extent by the continuing pres-
ence – 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 unspecifi ed. On the other
hand, despite the rhythmic energy of ‘Adam’s Dream’ in which Adam watches
a few small fi gures on the plain who ‘ran,/And fell, and rose again, and ran,
and fell,/And rising were the same yet not the same’, before fi nding 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,

180 Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959

of struggle, in these resolutions. The transformation of the fallen Adam, ‘his
terror drowned/In her [Eve’s] engulfi ng 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 fi eld and blackened tree/Bear fl owers 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’, fi rst published in Muir’s Scottish Journey of 1935, is
reprinted in this fi nal 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 sea-
gull’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 determin-
ism 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 fl esh’ to an illiterate people
are contrasted with the ‘iron pen’ of Scottish Calvinism through which ‘the
Word made fl esh 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 post-
humous 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 fl exible blank verse form, its imagistic approach is
initially metonymic, with the commitment to technology and dehumanis-
ing ideologies which has led to the fi nal disaster of nuclear war represented
by the ‘dumb’ radios, the tractors idle in the fi elds ‘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

Late Muir and MacDiarmid 181

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’, fol-
lowed by the stronger and alliterative sound of ‘deepening drumming’ to the
‘hollow thunder’ of the fi nal 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 destruc-
tion that nuclear war would bring, and were written at a time when offi cial
propaganda, at times backed by scientifi c advice, put forward the view that
such a confl ict 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 philoso-
phy’. ‘After a Hypothetical War’ points to the consequences of ignoring that
lesson: a message still relevant to the early twenty-fi rst 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 diffi culty in writing, having only a number of unfi nished 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 fi ve sections, each meditating on the

182 Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959

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 distin-
guish 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 fi rst 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 fi nal poem in Peter Butter’s edition of the Complete Poems, was ‘a dif-
fi cult MS draft at the end of the B[ritish] L[ibrary] notebook’.

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
fi nal 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 fi ction, continues a philo-
sophical 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 fi nal 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’.

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

Late Muir and MacDiarmid 183

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 affi li-
ations are primarily methodological and to a large extent forced upon him
by circumstances beyond his control. In contrast to Muir’s late fl owering 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 fi nancial 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’.

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 signifi cant 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 auto-
biography 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 fi rst 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.

Briefl y, for the purposes of discussion

here, it would appear that it was originally part of a lengthy epic poem enti-
tled 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

184 Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959

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.

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.

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”’.

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’.

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 [. . .] improvisa-
tory 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’.

While this might seem unfair, especially since many of the publishing diffi cul-
ties in relation to the late work were not of his own making, such an improvi-
satory 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 Scots-
language To Circumjack Cencrastus; while scholars have long suspected that

Late Muir and MacDiarmid 185

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 fi rst 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 dimen-
sion. 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 fi rst-person ‘I’ or ‘we’, no obvious unifying persona to bring
these varied fragments of ideas and illustrative references together. The
grammatical fi rst-person pronoun is not to be equated with subjectiv-
ity; 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 fi nding
What will suffi ce. It has not always had
To fi nd: 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 fi nd what will suffi ce. It has
To construct a new stage.

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

186 Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959

infl uence 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’.

On the other hand, MacDiarmid’s posi-

tion would appear to differ from that expressed by Stevens in that he is not
merely seeking ‘to fi nd what will suffi ce’, 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.’

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 fi nding 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 signifi cant or valid.’

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.

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

Late Muir and MacDiarmid 187

with the invention of an artifi cial world language, but is concerned, as in all
his previous work, with the expansion of human consciousness and the crea-
tive 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-fi elds like
mammoth ploughlands/And mountainous séracs which would puzzle an
Alpine climber’.

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 confi rmed that the ‘delight in Scots words, fi nding
them in the dictionary’ which produced the early Scots lyrics had been trans-
ferred in his later work to ‘obscure scientifi c terms’.

MacDiarmid’s fascina-

tion 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 specifi cally rejected. We saw this fasci-
nation earlier in his Dunfermline Press account of his ‘friend’ who happened to
come across Sir James Wilson’s Lowland Scotch and fi nd the Scots words and
phrases which created ‘The Watergaw’; and in relation to ‘The Eemis Stane’
where the fi rst 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

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, cyathi-
form’ (CP, I, p. 422) – ‘On a Raised Beach’ opens with even more inaccessible

188 Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959

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 fi nd, 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

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

airman

given

When he fi rst sees a cloud’s upper surface below
Him carved dazzlingly like a fi eld 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 refl ective
voice, although that voice is more subjective than the impersonal fi rst-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”’.

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 fi t in well with the poet’s new ideo-
logical 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 philosophi-
cal arguments of A Drunk Man).

In addition, the borrowing brings a the-

matic 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

Late Muir and MacDiarmid 189

consideration of the essay brings hitherto neglected elements of the poem
into the foreground’.

‘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’.

His bringing of

the Travers borrowing into the apparently personal philosophical context of
‘On a Raised Beach’ therefore brings that poem itself into connection the-
matically 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 diffi cult 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 meth-
odology, 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 fi nal 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

190 Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959

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 impo-
tence 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 signifi cance’; ‘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 infl ated lies, truth became truly unspeakable.
Kraus realised the defeat of satire.
‘Mir fällt zu Hitler nichts ein [. . .]
Ich bleibe stumm’.

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 fi nd a way to go on.

Another signifi cant 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

Late Muir and MacDiarmid 191

of work was the discovery by Kenneth Buthlay in the late 1980s that this
passage which appeared so much to fi t 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 unsuccess-
ful 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.

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 ethi-
cally different from the quotations of scientifi c 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 mate-
rial at fi rst hand. On the other hand, Martin’s descriptive prose, overlooked
in its original fi ctional 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 diffi cult 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’.

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 fi nal 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 informa-
tion-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 ‘scientifi c 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-justifi ed in dwelling on
minutiae and seeking to penetrate their signifi cance. This way has all knowl-
edge, though not necessarily all wisdom, come’.

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 diffl uent imagination’), and with other quoted or perhaps
his own comments on topics such as Jung’s idea of ‘archetypal patterns’,

192 Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959

‘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 electrifi es the whole
thing’.

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 affi rmation, 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 scientifi c analysis, points up in a powerful
way the mystery and the magic of creative art, how it cannot ever be reduced
to scientifi c or psychological enquiry as in the lists being compiled; and
through the musical metaphor of Orfeo singing in affi rmation of his love in
his moment of deepest despair, it provides an affi rmation 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 fi nal 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 fi rst 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.’

His comments are particularly relevant to creative writing borrow-

ings, 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

Late Muir and MacDiarmid 193

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 pro-
duction to positions that can clearly be identifi ed as Postmodernist’, fi nding
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’.

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 con-
sciousness 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 limi-
tations of the human mind’

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 evo-
lutionary 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 impersonal-
ity, its refusal of closure and deferral of meaning appears to conform to what
is understood by postmodernist art. Through its many linguistic, scientifi c,
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

194 Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959

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!’ trans-
lated as ‘I won’t let things get the better of me’,

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 convic-
tion 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 con-
sciousness. This ‘poem’ defi es closure as it defi es analysis, there seeming to
be an endless stream of poetry possibilities fl owing from the limited passages
included within Lucky Poet and A Kist of Whistles to the fi nal ‘offi cial’ publica-
tion 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, ‘fi nding its universal material in
the people’; ‘a poetry like an operating theatre’; ‘poems like the bread-knife/
Which cuts three slices at once.’

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 tech-
nology 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

Late Muir and MacDiarmid 195

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 fi nd 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
confi dently 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
fi nd 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 expan-
sion 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 quota-

tions 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 Justifi ed 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.

196 Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959

17. Whyte, Modern Scottish Poetry, p. 79.
18. Heaney, ‘The Impact of Translation’, The Yale Review, Autumn 1987, pp. 8–9.
19. Spender, review of Journeys and Places, in Muir, Complete Poems, p. 321.
20. Muir,

We Moderns, p. 147, reprinted in McCulloch (ed.), Modernism & Nationalism,

p. 169.

21. Muir, Complete Poems, p. 366.
22. Heaney, ‘The Impact of Translation’, pp. 8–9.
23. Bold, MacDiarmid, p. 346.
24. 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.

25. See MacDiarmid, Letters of Hugh MacDiarmid, p. 470; Bold, MacDiarmid, pp.

378–9.

26. Bold, MacDiarmid, p. 373.
27. MacDiarmid, Letters of Hugh MacDiarmid, p. 452.
28.  Ibid., p. 453.
29.  Herbert, ‘Mature Art’.
30. Wallace Stevens, Collected Poems, p. 240.
31.  Nancy Gish, Interview with MacDiarmid, Contemporary Literature, 20.2, Spring

1979, pp. 143–4.

32. ‘Author’s Note’ to 1955 edition of In Memoriam James Joyce, p. 14. This fi rst

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 deco-
rations by J. D. Fergusson. For convenience, quotations here will be referenced
from the Complete Poems of 1978.

33. Craig, ‘Hugh MacDiarmid’s Poetry’, Voice of Scotland, 7 April 1956, p. 10.
34. Edwin Morgan, ‘Jujitsu for the Educated’, Twentieth Century 160, September

1956, p. 230.

35. 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.

36. Gish, Interview with MacDiarmid, p. 144.
37. Whitworth, ‘Culture and Leisure in Hugh MacDiarmid’s “On a Raised Beach”’,

Scottish Studies Review 9.1, Spring 2008, pp. 123–43.

38. Buthlay, Annotated edition of MacDiarmid, A Drunk Man passim where rel-

evant, but see especially references in relation to closing philosophical section,
p. 187ff.

39. Whitworth, ‘Culture and Leisure’, p. 124.
40. MacDiarmid, Raucle Tongue II, p. 342; Whitworth, ‘Culture and Leisure’, p.

126.

41. CP, II, p. 775. ‘I can do nothing with Hitler – I remain silent’.
42. Buthlay, ‘The Ablach in the Gold Pavilion’, Scottish Literary Journal 15.2,

November 1988, pp. 39–57.

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 fi ne sturdy years.

Eric Linklater, Poetry Scotland 3 (1946)

Most accounts of the cultural and political revival movement known as the
Scottish Renaissance fi nish 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 conse-
quence, 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
infl uences 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 diffi culties. 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 fi ctional form might have
developed after Grey Granite. His companion revolutionary writer James
Barke turned to the fi ctionalising 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,

Continuities and New Voices 199

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 explo-
rations of racial memory and the collective unconscious as well as through
infl uences from the modernist fi ction 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 signifi cant
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 benefi t 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’.

This is a relevant lesson in relation to the fasci-

nation 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 chal-
lenging 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 fi nal 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

200 Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959

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 invis-
ible 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 mod-
ernist 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.’

New Voices

Despite diffi cult wartime conditions, there were new voices making them-
selves 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 mod-
ernism 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.

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 col-
lections by writers associated with the magazine; and fi ve issues of Scottish
Art and Letters between 1944 and 1950. He also published Million, subtitled

Continuities and New Voices 201

in its fi rst 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 arti-
cles 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 subti-
tled 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 fi rst issue was dedicated or ‘inscribed’ to ‘that
discriminating artist who is the friend of so many of the Scottish poets, Meary
J. Tambimuttu’.

Maurice Lindsay, then on active service in the army, was

the editor of Poetry Scotland, and in his fi rst 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’.

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 fi fteenth 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 fi rst issue). W. S. Graham was
another English-language contributor with some affi nities in his early poetry
with the New Apocalypse writers. Adam Drinan was a Highland writer con-
tributing 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

202 Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959

in Number One, Neil M. Gunn in Number Two), thus maintaining a sup-
portive 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 fi rst 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 specifi cally named
as the Literary Editor for the 1950 special PEN Congress Edinburgh Festival
number. J. D. Fergusson was the Art Editor for all fi ve 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 maga-
zine 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, fi lm 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 specifi c 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 confi dence in a Scottish artistic
identity that was at the same time outward-looking towards European and
other infl uences; 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, modern-
ist painters and writers in Paris in the early years of the century who inter-
acted with each other and their supporters face-to-face in the many émigré
groupings in the city. Nevertheless, MacDiarmid’s contributors and support-
ers, though scattered throughout the country as opposed to being situated

Continuities and New Voices 203

in a specifi c 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 fulfi lled in relation to the regeneration of
their country’s literature; and a sense also of the kind of adventurous reader-
ship 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 contribu-
tors 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 pacifi st reasons; Norman MacCaig was a con-
scientious objector for pacifi st reasons; while Sydney Goodsir Smith was
rejected as unfi t 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 Offi ce. 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 contribu-
tors 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 signifi cant 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 non-
MacDiarmid) 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

204 Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959

Scottish Art and Letters, for example, apologises for the time which has elapsed
since the fi rst issue, citing wartime restrictions but still looking forward opti-
mistically 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 fi rst 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 signifi cant 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 specifi c 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 editori-
als 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’.

And while, perhaps responding to readership views

or to the diffi culties of getting material in wartime conditions, issues after
the fi rst 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 fi rst, 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’.

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

Continuities and New Voices 205

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 defi ciency captured unforget-
tably 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 fl eer,
– But wha the deil spoke like King Lear?

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 consid-
ered 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’

– 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)

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 fi ve 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 rela-
tionship 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 publish-
ers. 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 fi gures 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 fi ne Festival issue
was also the fi nal 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-fi rst century, speak strongly

206 Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959

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 encourag-
ing feature of the 1948 Scottish Art and Letters editorial is its reference to
drama which is having ‘new and increasing life in Scotland’.

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 fi ction. As James Bridie commented in
his article ‘Notes for a Scottish Theatre’ in the fi rst 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’.

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 pro-
duction which showed that there could be an experimental, even ‘modernistic’
theatre in Scotland. The infl uence of this Festival production reverberated
down future years until its innovative, non-naturalistic scenario and presenta-
tional 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 fi rst 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 signifi cant part of the Scottish literary scene, showing Scottish writing
to Scotland itself and to the outside world, and at the same time bringing
the infl uences 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 inter-
war period, not all new poets of the 1940s and 1950s could be considered
as modernist writers, although there was much revitalising work going on

Continuities and New Voices 207

in poetry at this time. The Apocalyptic group certainly had some affi nity
with modernism in its imagistic methodology and frequently obscure dis-
course, but the writers involved did not necessarily continue with this poetic
approach nor become infl uential in Scottish poetry. The most notable of the
group is Norman MacCaig, who did become a signifi cant 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 fl exible and
conversationally demotic, drawing on the Scots language poetry of the eight-
eenth-century Robert Fergusson as opposed to MacDiarmid’s twentieth-
century 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 infl uences 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 Crucifi ed 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’.

Scott’s most modernistic poetry in Scots, close to Pound’s

insistence on using ‘no word that does not contribute to the presentation’,

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

208 Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959

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 transla-
tions ‘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 fi nest 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 (briefl y 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 fl ash of
lightning to my unawakened and groping faculties [. . .] until reading The
Drunk Man [sic] I might say I hadn’t been born.’

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

Continuities and New Voices 209

especially with the poetry of the late fi fteenth 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.

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 urban-
based 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 fl eet, and nou
Ae boat alane gaes out. (Smith, CP, p. 41)

The image of the sole black drifter in the crimson dawn in this fi rst stanza
provides an ‘intellectual and emotional complex in a moment in time’,

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

210 Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959

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 fl akes: ‘Slaw, dear, slaw the white fl akes 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
fi tting 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 creativ-
ity 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 wonder-
ful rhythmic force in the poetry of the Eldon Tree sequence, an intensity of
expression that fl ows and pauses and is constantly alive, with long and short
lines interacting with each and contributing to its variety, and this is espe-
cially 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 relation-
ships 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 fi nal 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 [. . .]

Continuities and New Voices 211

Wi ase on the sheets, ase on the cod,
And crumbs of toast under my bum,
Scrievan the last great coronach
O’ the westren fl ickeran 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 motion-
less on the shore, ‘a stane in Dido’s breist’, and watching: ‘At the heid o’ yon
fause fl eet the fause and gowden sail/O’ her fause luve Ænee’: that ‘“Fause
black Æneas that I natheless loe!”’ (CP, p. 175). The poem’s fi nal 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 expe-
rienced as a whole.

Goodsir Smith’s Sydney Slugabed suggested affi nities with Joyce as well as

with the poets of late medieval and modernist times, an alliance confi rmed 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 fornica-
tion in Edinburgh after the style of Finnegans Wake.

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 lit-
erary 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

212 Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959

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 confi dence
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 specifi cs 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 interna-
tionally, 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 diffi cult choice, and the tensions of those years
confi rmed self-expression in poetry not in action.

This struggle is given form in the Dàin do Eimhir sequence, and seems
expressed specifi cally 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

Continuities and New Voices 213

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, speak-
ing 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 fi nd, 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 fi rst three lines, and the stresses on ‘girl’ and on the fi rst syl-
lables 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 fi nal line of this fi rst 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’.

Crichton Smith has commented of MacLean’s political

poetry that ‘in no previous Gaelic poetry is there this political European com-
mitment [. . .] one of the important things that Sorley MacLean did was to
open Gaelic poetry out to the world beyond purely parochial boundaries’.

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

214 Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959

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 diffi cult times, for the ‘mild mad
dogs of poetry’ to hunt out the distraction of ‘beauty’, ‘a hunt without halt,
without respite’.

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 fi nal, 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 prin-
cipal 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 follow-
ing decades, there was a new cultural spirit abroad from the beginning of the
1960s, with the national-international axis replaced by a diversity of ‘local-
isms’ making contact with the international, and drawing in more infl uences
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 infl uential study, The Scottish Tradition in Literature, the fi rst lengthy
modern study of Scotland’s literature to take account of the literary revolu-
tion 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

Continuities and New Voices 215

literary culture, its infl uence 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-confi dent, distinctive and varied Scottish
culture we enjoy today.

Notes

1. Neil M. Gunn, ‘On Belie

f’

, 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 quota-

tions 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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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

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
Butterfi eld, 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

224 Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959

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

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

Index 225

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

fi shing’, 66

  ‘The Ferry of the Dead’, 100
  fi shermen 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’,

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: modern-

ist 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

  ‘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

226 Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959

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

‘borrowings’, 185, 187, 188, 190–1
‘The Caledonian Antisyzygy and the

Gaelic Idea’, 97, 106

‘Casualties’,

  ‘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’,

  ‘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. postmodern-
ism, 193–4; reception, 186; transforma-
tive 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
‘Refl ections 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’,

Index 227

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

  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,

  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,

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

228 Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959

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

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,

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

Index 229

  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 fi ction,

140, 141–2, 144, 146, 147; in poetry,
158–9

socialism, 93, 102, 132, 144, 155
socialist marches, 104: in fi ction, 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

Jamieson’s Etymological Dictionary, 17,

literary revival of Gaelic, 201
literary revival of Scots: in fi ction, 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

affi nities: 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
  fi ctional 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

230 Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959

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

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

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

fi ction, 72, 78

  counter-narratives, 70, 74
  écriture feminine, 79
  education and social class, 71–2
  female subjectivity, 68,75, 86
  feminist criticism, 71, 79
  fi ctional 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 fi ction, 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 fi ction’, 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 fi ction, 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

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

Document Outline