Fivefathers : Interviews with late Twentieth-Century Scottish Poets 9781847600516

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Fivefathers Tamora Pierce The Immortals Interviews with late Twentieth-Century Wild Magic Wolf-SpeakerPoets Scottish The Emperor Mage The Realms of the Gods

Colin Nicholson by John Lennard

Publication Data Text © Colin Nicholson, 2007. The Author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Copyright in images and in quotations remains with the sources given. Every effort has been made to trace the holders of copyright materials. If any other than those acknowledged on page five have not been traced the author will be glad to make the necessary arrangements at the first opportunity. Published in 2007 by Humanities-Ebooks LLP. Tirril Hall, Tirril, Penrith CA10 2JE

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ISBN 978-1-84760-051-6

Fivefathers

Interviews with late Twentieth Century Scottish Poets

Colin Nicholson

Tirril: Humanities-Ebooks, 2007

Contents A Note on the Author Preface Acknowledgements Introduction 1. Sorley MacLean: Against an Alien Eternity 2. Iain Crichton Smith: To Have Found One’s Country 3. Norman MacCaig: Such Clarity of Seeming 4. George Mackay Brown: Unlocking Time’s Labyrinth 5. E����������������������������������� dwin Morgan: Living in the Utterance Bibliography Publishers’ websites

A Note on the Author Colin Nicholson is a Professor of Eighteenth-century and Modern Literature at Edinburgh University, where his teaching includes a seminar in Modern and Contemporary Scottish Poetry. During the 1990s he edited The British Journal of Canadian Studies and has edited collections of essays on Margaret Laurence and on Margaret Atwood. He has published widely in Scottish, English and Canadian Literature and is the author of Writing and the Rise of Finance: Capital Satires of the Early Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), and of Edwin Morgan: Inventions of Modernity (Manchester: Manchester University, 2002).

Preface For some time now students on my Modern and Contemporary Scottish Poetry course at Edinburgh University have been suggesting that I update and reissue interviews I conducted with writers first published in 1992 as Poem, Purpose and Place. Students maintain they still find the interviews useful and the book is long out print. Sadly, four of the poets have died since the conversations took place and Edwin Morgan is terminally ill, though still productive. So I have rewritten and extended the chapters in which they answered my questions. Their words stand; I have added to my commentary to make a fuller presentation of their responses. In Morgan’s case I include material from a subsequent interview. What follows, then, is for my students with thanks for their encouragement, for showing me ways of reading and for helping to make teaching Scottish poetry the pleasure it remains.

Acknowledgements I thank Polygon for returning the original copyright of Poem, Purpose and Place to me; and Neville Moir for permission to quote liberally from Ewan McCaig’s The Poems of Norman MacCaig. I am likewise indebted to Archie Bevan for permission to quote similarly from The Collected Poems of George Mackay Brown, published by John Murray. But where would poetry be without Carcanet? To Michael Schmidt I offer my special thanks for his generous permission to quote from Sorley MacLean’s From Wood to Ridge: Collected Poems in Gaelic and English, from Iain Crichton Smith’s Collected Poems, and from Edwin Morgan’s Collected Poems. I sent Michael a draft of the Edwin Morgan interview to show him what I was about, and noted his controlled response to my extensive quotation. He asked for due web-page acknowledgement for the uses I make of the Carcanet editions, and I am pleased to do this. I am grateful to him beyond measure. My thanks are due to the Scottish Poetry Library for unfailing courtesy, speedy attention and for permission to reproduce photographs of Sorley MacLean, Iain Crichton Smith, Norman MacCaig and Edwin Morgan. The photographer Roddy Simpson promptly agreed to this. The executors of the George Mackay Brown Estate kindly gave permission for use of a photograph from the George Mackay Brown website. Thanks also to Anne Mason for her computer skills, and to Morag McGill for help along the way.

Introduction In 1987 Cairns Craig suggested that ‘both the 1920s and the period of the 1970s and 1980s will go down as major contributions to the total literary achievement of Scottish culture’. He then asked why it was that Scottish Literature should have ‘retained and indeed asserted its independence in a context where the Scottish people—unlike the Irish for instance—have seemed deeply resistant or apathetic about other forms of independence’. Craig was writing under the shadow of the failed 1979 referendum on devolution: the reconvening in 1999 of a Scottish parliament may change the terms of his question and already modifies the apathetic frame of mind he described. But the reasons he gives for the survival of civic difference ‘despite both internal and external pressures’ are a matter of record: ‘Scotland has never been integrated into the culture values of the British state. The texture of Scottish life, in its religious, educational, legal, linguistic forms, remains distinct from that of England to an extent which is little recognised in England, let alone the outside world.’ That recognition is now changing: notwithstanding the absence of formal statehood, the distinctive texture of Scotland’s independently structured historical culture continues to generate structures of feeling that are instantiated and reinforced by systems of schooling and governing belief systems, and by legal definitions of and assumptions about citizenship and subjectivity. I never yet met a Scot who did not accept at some defining level that the word describes who he or she is. The internal and external pressures to conform to values and culture norms developed elsewhere were nonetheless real, are still powerfully influential, and are longstanding. To raise questions about the cultural policing of Scottish custom and practice, Hugh MacDiarmid (writing in 1940) used a 1934 report by a research committee of Glasgow’s local association of the Educational Institute of Scotland. At issue is not whether the subaltern can speak but rather the rules of engagement laid down for its speaking: 

Cairns Craig, ‘Twentieth Century Scottish Literature: An Introduction’, in the History of Scottish Literature, vol. 4, ed. Cairns Craig (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1987), p. 3.

Fivefathers   In most cases Glasgow pupils enter the schools with one language only, the Central Scottish Dialect, and they proceed to learn to write Standard English. As the result of education the vernacular is gradually eliminated from written work, but it persists in colloquial use [and] is the medium of expression naturally used by the Glasgow child, who may interrogate the teacher during a Dictation lesson with such a question as ‘Whit cums efter “after”?’ In the playground children who try to speak Standard English are generally laughed at, whilst in the classroom a lapse into the mother tongue is greeted with hilarity.

In my Scottish poetry seminars at Edinburgh University I have English and overseas students as well as native Scots, not all of whom are familiar with the specifics of this process of acculturation. I find it useful to introduce Liz Lochhead’s testimony from thirty years ago that ‘nothing in my education had ever led me to believe that anything among my own real life ordinary things had the right to be written down. What you wrote could not be the truth. It did not have the authority of the English things, the things in books.’ It is little wonder that disaffection from these anglocentric assumptions should prompt Edwin Morgan to comment: ‘You have a passport which says that you’re UK or British, and you obviously have to acknowledge that in a purely official sense, but I don’t feel British. I don’t feel, certainly, English.’ The experience of Gaels offers an intensifying blueprint for wider aspects of the country’s story. In the western Highlands and offshore islands the effects are still visible of a sustained attempt at ethno-cultural erasure brutally manifested in the nineteenth-century Clearances of subsistence crofters from land where they held immemorial tenure, so that profitable sheep-farming could be introduced in their place. Gaelic writers point to the additional difficulty they face in recovering from an 1872 Education Act that imposed English on their culture by making attendance compulsory in schools with no provision for instruction in the Gaelic tongue. That too is changing, though the survival of Gaelic remains precarious. Iain Crichton Smith writing a century later reminded us that ‘the forces of economics are driving the present population out of the islands’. But he was more concerned by what he called the ‘internal imperialism’ of a homogenising language use:   

Hugh MacDiarmid, ed. The Golden Treasury of Scottish Poetry (London: Macmillan, 1940), p. 363. Liz Lochhead, ‘A Protestant Girlhood’, in Jock Tamson’s Bairns: Essays on a Scots Childhood (London: Hamilton, 1977), ed. Trevor Royle, p. 121. Quoted in Robyn Marsack, ‘A Declaration of Independence: Edwin Morgan and Contemporary Poetry’, in About Edwin Morgan (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1990), eds. Robert Crawford and Hamish Whyte, p. 25.

Fivefathers  10 If there is no Gaelic left, will not the islander live in a disappearing landscape, as an Englishman would if his language were to die? […] For we are born inside a language and see everything from within its parameters: it is not we who make language, it is language that makes us. […] For Gaelic to die would be for the islands to die a more profound death than economics could bring. The imperialism of language is the most destructive of all.

Minority language experience of the kind Crichton Smith describes became a global phenomenon in the colonial era. Many of the Gaels not shipped overseas migrated to the industrial heartland of Glasgow, where Tom Leonard’s nativist techniques record different yet similar effects in the continuing and contemporary operations of internal imperialism as far as demotic speech and linguistic propriety are concerned. Leonard’s innovative phonetic transcription brings working class utterance on to the page, sometimes hilariously, sometimes in angry refusal of homogenization: ‘No caste has the right to possess, or even to imagine it has the right to possess, bills of exchange on the dialogue between one human being and another.’ Dominance and subjection of a class-based kind is also an international social phenomenon. In defense of the sound world in which he grew up, the front cover of Leonard’s Intimate Voices carries a poem that subjects its opening line ‘in the beginning was the word’ to a phonetic reconstruction in which Glasgow vocalizations transform biblical utterance into ‘in the beginning was the sound’. As part of his politically aware interventions on behalf of the local Leonard uses a subversive irony to trace personal and family tensions produced by controlling definitions and preferred acquisitions of literacy. ‘I remember’, the poem ‘Fathers and Sons’ begins, ‘being ashamed of my father / when he whispered the words out loud / reading the newspaper’, and then switches to: “Don’t you find The use of phonetic urban dialect Rather restrictive?”

before ending: The poetry reading is over I will go home to my children. (IV 140)   

Iain Crichton Smith, ‘Real People in a Real Place’, in Towards the Human: Selected Essays (Edinburgh: MacDonald, 1986), p. 20. Tom Leonard, ‘Introduction’, Radical Renfrew: Poetry from the French Revolution to the First World War (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1990), p. xxxi. Tom Leonard, Intimate Voices: 1965–1983 (Newcastle: Galloping Dog Press, 1984). Hereafter IV.

Fivefathers  11 Leonard takes us entertainingly if uncompromisingly into the world of Glasgow’s working-class expressiveness; and he is clear-eyed about the realities of life and language in his native city. A sequence of seven ‘Unrelated Incidents’ explores the power relations contingent on acceptance and exclusion based on voice and speech, and includes advice against casual approaches to his work: fyi stull huvny thoata langwij izza sound-system; fyi huvny hudda thingk aboot thi diffrince tween sound n object n symbol; well, ma innocent wee friend—iz god said ti adam: a doant kerr fyi caw it an apple ur an aipple— jist leeit alane! (IV 87)

The last poem in Leonard’s Situations Theoretical and Contemporary (1986) advertises overlaps between diction, lexis and validating systems of power: And their judges spoke with one dialect, but the condemned spoke with many voices. And the prisons were full of many voices, but never the dialect of the judges.

Fivefathers  12 And the judges said: ‘No-one is above the Law’.

Civic hierarchies of permission and punishment, and the pedagogies that underpin them, are also international phenomena; and they too are subject to the changing fortunes of time and circumstance, as Crichton Smith acknowledges with his sense of Britain’s post-imperial decline and fall: There was a time when they could read Tennyson to docile classes, when poems rhymed. When clad in their gowns they seemed to be masters of of a finally colonized globe. Now there is hubbub. They are the chancy scouts of the frontiers and the chiming pentameters have forsaken them. They are no longer bearers of messages from Rome and Greece, the police of the poem.

Reference to Tennyson as England’s nineteenth-century laureate of Empire makes it all seem a long time ago; but taken together these reconfigurations help to contextualize and validate the grounding and liberated assumption behind Donny O’Rourke’s successful 1994 anthology of younger writers Dream State: the New Scottish Poets—that the work it brings together ‘reclaims the present’: There is a renaissance going on in Scotland across all the arts. The word culture is on the unlikeliest of lips. But we shouldn’t have a culture instead of an economy  

Tom Leonard, Situations Theoretical and Contemporary (Newcastle: Galloping Dog Press, 1986), np. Iain Crichton Smith, Collected Poems (Manchester: Carcanet, 1992), p. 269.

Fivefathers  13 or a parliament. A fully authentic culture requires a fully authentic politics; and a fully authentic politics requires a state.

After a break of three hundred years Scotland now has a parliament if not a fully constitutional state. But O’Rourke’s case is that the poetry he includes had already achieved and is continuing to exercise and develop a fully operational independence of orientation, and a diversely constituted awareness of the discursive economies open to it: The Dream State offered here is vibrant and various, self confident and self-critical. It knows its past and claims its future. Above all it is vigorously alive in Scotland’s noisy and numinous now […] a Scotland no longer riddled with questions of identity, whose citizens just happen to be, and are happy to be, Scots. As ‘King Billy’, one of [Edwin Morgan’s] poems many of these writers studied at school has it: ‘Deplore what is to be deplored / and then find out the rest’. The rest, or some if it, is Dream State. (304)

O’Rourke claims Edwin Morgan (seventy-four years old when Dream State was first published) as the presiding spirit of his anthology, and few will dispute Morgan’s path-finding inventiveness and utility for those who came after him. Together with other writers I interviewed, Morgan belongs to a remarkable group of poets who all published significant work during or not long after the Second World War, when problems associated with Scotland’s cultural autonomy were a lively issue. Each is identified with a particular Scottish locale, and each is fluent in at least one of the indigenous Scottish languages—Gaelic, Scots and English: a complex psychological terrain. I want to suggest that, identity wars notwithstanding—and there can be no doubt that the Kulturkampf inaugurated by Hugh MacDiarmid in the 1920s continued into the 1940s and well beyond—O’Rourke’s claims for the independence of mind and autonomous assumptions that characterise recent pre-devolution poetry hold true for a senior generation. We are usefully reminded that imaginatively Scotland is as multiform as anywhere else; and for all their several and marked differences from each other, the attribute not in doubt though variously inscribed in the poetry of Sorley MacLean, Iain Crichton Smith, Norman MacCaig, George Mackay Brown  

Donny O’Rourke, ‘Introduction’, Dream State: the New Scottish Poets, 2nd edn (Edinburgh: Polygon: 2002), p. 304. Douglas Dunn, ‘”As a Man Sees”: On Norman MacCaig’s Poetry’, Verse (1990) 7, 2, p. 59.

Fivefathers  14 and Edwin Morgan is its Scottishness. With political and cultural objectives in mind, MacDiarmid dubbed his radical 1920s interventions a Scottish Renaissance, which may have had the unintended consequence of separating, or at least clouding, relationships between what he was doing and literary developments in other countries. It seems evident now that together with his Scots lyrics, when MacDiarmid based A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle (1926) on the narrative of ‘Tam o’ Shanter’, he rescued Burns from nostalgia, deployed a West of Scotland vernacular articulation of metaphysics and a host of other registers of feeling, and mapped out specifically Scottish directions for the Modernism that was revolutionising European and American poetics. I first moved to Scotland in 1969, a few years after the term ‘Modernism’ had gained critical currency, and just in time to catch the end of Norman MacCaig’s tenure as Edinburgh University’s first writer-in-residence. As an English undergraduate I had studied no Scottish literature—Tobias Smollett’s cultural identity was ignored and we were allowed to assume that he, like Walter Scott, were significant contributors to an English novel-writing tradition. So I lived an interesting learning curve. MacCaig was followed as writer-in-residence by Sorley MacLean, already celebrated for shifting Gaelic poetry into modernity; and for part of MacLean’s tour of duty my room was next to his on the seventh floor of the David Hume Tower. I could entertain no doubt that I was working in a distinctively different culture. By that time much of the heat and dust generated by what people were still calling the ‘second wave’ of the Scottish Renaissance had settled; and as an incomer reading for the first time the poets included in the pages that follow it also seemed self-evident that as far as their work is concerned whatever struggle for Scottish alterity had been necessary at an earlier time was won game, set and match. That there had been a struggle is beyond question: what is interesting in hindsight is the number of ways in which the technical achievements of American poetry became a significant and stimulating resource. Like all major writers, and certainly the five whose work I discuss, MacDiarmid (1892–1978) took inspiration from wherever he found it. But he also identified his literary project with Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, as well as with James Joyce. He and Sorley MacLean (1911–1996) were fellow communists in the 1930s who struck up an alliance. MacLean claimed that A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle suggested to him that the long medley with lyric peaks might be turned to epic scale in Gaelic. Iain Crichton Smith (1928–1998), who first translated a selection of MacLean’s Dàin do Eimhir (1943) into English as Poems to Eimhir, learned what he called a logic of the imagination from Eliot, and admired the work of Wallace

Fivefathers  15 Stevens. Norman MacCaig (1910–1996), who was a close friend of MacDiarmid’s, steeped himself in Wallace Stevens’ poetry and prose (as MacDiarmid did not), and found a way of adapting the American’s modernist practice to John Donne’s seventeenth-century conversational pyrotechnics—and to Socrates. George Mackay Brown (1921–1996) learned from imagism, and modernised the runes he found on Orkney as equivalents for Pound’s ideogram word-pictures. And Edwin Morgan (1920–); who rejected Pound and Eliot ideologically, took from them what was useful in terms of technique, and reconstructed Scottish senses of modernism by fusing Baudelaire, Mayakovsky, Hart Crane and William Carlos Williams’s democratic localism with a host of others. Like MacDiarmid, with whom he had public disputes and an often difficult literary relationship, Morgan’s range greatly extended Scottish fields of reference. Most unlike MacDiarmid these included science fiction, the American Beat movement, concrete poetry, computer technology and the ‘Projective Verse’ poetics of such Black Mountain luminaries as Charles Olson, Robert Creeley and others. Morgan was one of the earliest writers, and certainly the first Scottish poet, to engage—openly, creatively, critically—with the society of the spectacle and the rapid circulation of its new image-circuits that was opened to public inspection by Guy Debord in 1967. Morgan’s output shifted Scottish poetics irreversibly into domains generally categorised as postmodern, while maintaining and developing his reinvented pathways back to and out from a precursor modernism. His poetry enables us to look again at traditional perceptions of the modernist upheaval in symbolic production that changed writing during and after the First World War. This re-vision is useful because although they made their mark in the 1940s and early fifties, the writers in Fivefathers, with the exception of Sorley MacLean, reached peaks of performance during the 1960s and later, and their work also has the feel of this later modernity. Each of them, MacLean included, discloses tactics, stratagems and effects subsequently associated with the term postmodern. Students are not alone in feeling perplexed at discovering continuities where they are led to expect difference between modernism and postmodernism, and finding networks of connectedness where conventional wisdom proposed a determining breach. The problem lies in a divisive categorisation that belongs to literary theory rather than imaginative practice. Because theoretical identification of postmodern writing clouds the issue of Scottish inventiveness, it is worth glancing briefly at the 

I discuss more fully Morgan’s literary relationships and his reconstruction of modernism in Edwin Morgan: Inventions of Modernity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002).

Fivefathers  16 category that causes the confusion. We are relevantly cautioned that postmodernism should be taken to signify nothing more and nothing less than a genre of theoretical writing that is identifiable by a characteristic series of moves: ‘First, you assume the existence of a historical shift in sensibility, which you call the postmodern; then you define it by opposition to whatever you take the modern to have been; finally, you seek to give a content to the postmodern in terms of this opposition’. But when we look at the content that is then attributed to the postmodern—bricolage of tradition, play with the popular, reflexivity, hybridity, pastiche, figurality—it becomes apparent that the very aesthetic devices or features that are supposed to make postmodernism what it is are in fact characteristics of the modernism it was supposed to displace: ‘no critical break [is] discernible’. According to Perry Anderson, the perception that modernism came to an end with the defeat of European fascism in 1945 is therefore mistaken. As T. J. Clark put it: ‘the strange career of post-Surrealist, post-Expressionist avant-gardism in New York, and even Paris and Copenhagen, in the 1950s now looks more convincingly a part of modernism’ and ‘less a last gasp or rote repetition’. When Clark went on to suggest that modernism ‘was already characterised by a deep, truly undecidable doubleness of mind in the face of the main forms of modernity. And that doubleness was constitutive,’ I knew that although his focus was elsewhere, Scottish particularities were in one way or another always already implicated in the evolution being suggested. The writing we are concerned with reaches into the contemporary by tapping inventively and variously into these continuities, and it is in their expectation of new bearings for reconfigured connections and filiations that Edwin Morgan’s words become appropriate to Fivefathers: The hope is that as the ‘idea of Scotland’ begins again to emerge, the parts and pieces of its literary production will be seen to belong to the same animal, and that this animal will be worth a bit of describing and investigating.     

John Frow, ‘What was Postmodernism’, in Time and Commodity Culture: Essays in Cultural Theory and Postmodernity (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), p. 15. Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity (London: Verso, 1998), p. 80. T. J. Clark, ‘Origins of the Present Crisis’, New Left Review (March/April 2000), second series, 2, p. 87. Clark, p. 91 Edwin Morgan, Nothing Not Giving Messages: reflections on his work and life (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1990), p. 202

Sorley MacLean: Against an Alien Eternity Another day this upon the mountain and great Scotland under the doom of beasts: her thousands of poor exploited, beguiled to a laughing stock, flattered, doctored and anointed by the nobles and godly bourgeois who make a bourgeois of Christ.

During the 1930s when political imperatives were investing cultural commentary with social urgency Sorley MacLean, sometime communist and lifelong socialist was arguing that whereas poetry everywhere ‘reflects social phenomena’; in verse from his native Highland and Island region of Scotland over the preceding century ‘emigration of one kind or another was the phenomenon of phenomena’. Given the parlous state of his minority-language community at the time of looking back, he could speak with feeling when he described the Highland Clearances as ‘one of the saddest tragedies that has ever come upon a people, and one of the most astounding of all the successes of landlord capitalism in Western Europe, such a triumph over the workers and peasants of a country as has rarely been seen achieved with such ease, cruelty and cynicism.’ Referring to ‘the great service of the Highland soldiers to the Empire’, which might have been expected to stand crofters in good  

Sorley MacLean, From Wood to Ridge: Collected Poems in Gaelic and English (Manchester: Carcanet, 1989), p. 83. Hereafter WR. Ris á Bruthaich:  The Criticism and Prose Writings of Sorley MacLean (Stornoway: Acair, 1975) edited by William Gillies, p.48.  Hereafter RB.

Fivefathers  18 stead with the order of capitalism, MacLean quoted Alexander Mackenzie, an earlier Clearance historian, on Britain’s imperial depredations in India and their relationship to colonizing projects closer to home. ‘At the very hour that Nana Sahib was being crushed and Cawnpore taken by the 78th Regiment [once better known as the Ross-shire Buffs], the fathers, mothers and children of the 78th were being evicted within a few miles of Dunrobin Castle [where the landowning Sutherland family was vigorously ‘Improving’ the profitably of its estates]’ (RB 50). It was a lesson in realism that MacLean never forgot, and given the continuing confrontation his writing inscribes between personal passion and political commitment, it has been rightly said that ‘power that can overwhelm features strongly in MacLean’s poetry, as it does in Highland experience.’ When MacLean looked about him as a young man he saw little cause for optimism. The harsh Depression conditions that followed the financial meltdown of 1929 continued to winnow the Islands, and when he went to Mull as a schoolteacher in the winter of 1937 MacLean saw for himself the devastation of a culture region once occupied by family forebears. He wrote later that the two years spent on Mull ‘had much to do with my poetry: its physical beauty, so different from Skye’s, with the terrible imprint of the Clearances everywhere on it made it almost intolerable for a Gael’ (RB 12). For surviving Gaels in the first half of the twentieth century, Clearance events were still genealogically structured as living memory, so that continuing out-migration, with a consequent intensified shrinkage of the local language base, brought forcefully home what some perceived as lengthening evidence of ethnic erasure. The elegiac praise-poem for his native Skye, ‘The Island’, laments generations of enforced migration: Great Island, Island of my desire, Island of my heart and wound, […] there is no hope of your townships rising high with gladness and laughter, and your men are not expected when America and France take them. (WR 59)

Partly for these reasons MacLean’s verse explores traumatising experience of both personal and transnational kinds. Gaelic prospects in the late nineteen-thirties were 

Robert Calder, ‘Celebration of a Tension’, in Sorley MacLean: Critical Essays, edited by Raymond Ross and Joy Hendry (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1986), p. 157.

Fivefathers  19 further jeopardised by the seeming success of a continental Fascism that promised short shrift for his already beleaguered ethnic community. MacLean’s intuitive sense that his ancient culture lay close to the heart of a once-independent country enabled him to generalise as national apocalypse a regional despair for his native Skye. In dire circumstance, the survival of the country itself seemed to be at risk: ‘Pity the eye that sees on the ocean / the great dead bird of Scotland’ (WR 59). Historic memories of ethnic cleansing connect with a continuing and seemingly terminal bleeding of a people and its language from islands of survival. As far as MacLean’s individual circumstances were concerned, personal relationships and family commitments come into conflict with public duty and political desire, and a disruptive sense of betrayal and self-betrayal infiltrates the poetry. Conjunctions of time past with present tensions are used to project an epic scale appropriate to his situation as guardian of the language of his people. Perhaps because of his inherited sense of poet as cultural historian of the tribe, the traditional Celtic bard to his community, the nature and extent of MacLean’s contribution to Scottish versions of literary modernism has only recently been recognised. Yet his ‘truly dazzling range of literary references and intertextualities, indicative of MacLean’s success in turning his bilingual and bicultural situation to advantage’, as well as his early association with Hugh MacDiarmid, and co-publication with Robert Garioch are in these respects instructive. In their different ways the fragments these writers were shoring against the ruin of human localities included a language-use passing out of currency. Given their shared objectives of cultural renewal, passive grieving was not an attractive option; and MacLean is wary of the potential enfeeblement latent in even an historicised poetics of loss. ‘Nostalgia,’ he suggested, ‘is the most common sentiment in nineteenth-century Gaelic poetry, and there is a huge body of verse that says nothing explicitly about the Clearances, but that an emigrant’s sadness pervades. […] It is a remarkable characteristic of the poetry of the clearances that it is mostly retrospective’ (RB 64–5). It can seem to an outsider that MacLean single-handedly wrenched Gaelic poetry out of these earlier preoccupations and into the maelstrom of politicised modernity. Within Gaeldom Iain Crichton Smith testified to the impact of this writing: It is as if a shift in consciousness occurred when these poems appeared: they moved Gaelic poetry on to a new plane, as MacDiarmid did [in Scots] with his 

Christopher Whyte, Somhairle Macgill-eain / Sorley MacLean: Dáin do Eimhir / Poems to Eimhir (Glasgow: Glasgow University Press, 2002), p. 24.

Fivefathers  20 lyrics. [...] While ‘making it new’ MacLean was operating from a traditional base. The confidence to absorb the material was, of course, a result of the pressure and may not be found often, but it is an ideal that one should not neglect.

For Crichton Smith, who first translated a selection for English-speaking audiences, Poems to Eimhir and Other Poems (1943) remained the great achievement. ‘An electrifying book’, he called it, which ‘takes a new leap in consciousness, and a new Highlander emerges […] a Highlander who wasn’t there before.’ This forceful recognition was endorsed when John MacInnes suggested why Poems to Eimhir marked a step change in Gaelic writing: The poetry was so essentially Gaelic and yet it expressed something which hitherto had not found a voice in Gaelic—certainly not in Gaelic poetry—and never in this particular form. It was not just a matter of paraphrasable content, of ideas, or of structure and organisation of themes: the newness was in the very movement and rhythm of the verse.

But it was the ideas and themes energising MacLean’s confident use of aural patterning in Gaelic rhythms that gave immediate impact to his handling of its traditional densities of verbal texture. While his innovative use of internal, cross- and end-rhyming produce effects that are difficult to translate, the political psychology they deliver radically extended expressive possibilities in his native tongue. A tangled and incomplete love-life, family pressures and ideological commitment fuse with anti-fascist struggle and European war in a manner unlike anything else that came out of the period. For those of us who can only enjoy MacLean’s verse in English, the sound of his Gaelic readings is a discovery. He said himself that he ‘could not be primarily a Gael without a very deep-rooted conviction that the auditory is the primary sensuousness of poetry’ (RB 13), and George Campbell Hay was struck by this oral/aural dimension: ‘It is an impressive experience to listen to Sorley MacLean as he performs. […] He is gifted with what the Welsh call Hwyl, the power of elevated declamation, and his declamation is full of feeling.’ Some of this power carries into the English versions that Seamus Heaney first read in the 1970s, when he noted their ‘feeling of    

Iain Crichton Smith, ‘A Poet’s Response to Sorley MacLean’, Critical Essays, p. 50 Iain Crichton Smith, ‘Poetry, Passion and Political Consciousness’, Scottish International (1970), 10, p.10. John MacInnes, Review of From Wood to Ridge, Lines Review (1990), 112, p.40 George Campbell Hay, The Scotsman, 15 February, 1975, p.26.

Fivefathers  21 unspecifiable freedom and intensity’. Heaney recognised a voice in the poems that ‘was at once unleashed and stricken.’ He was speaking of the voice on the page: when Heaney first heard MacLean reading ‘in the deep lamenting register of the Gaelic’, it struck him with ‘the force of revelation’: The mesmeric, heightened tone; the weathered voice coming in close from a far place; the swarm of the vowels; the surrender to the otherness of the poem; above all the sense of bardic dignity that was entirely without self-parade but was instead the effect of a proud self-abnegation, as much a submission as a claim to heritage. All this constituted a second discovery, this time of the true climate of his linguistic world.

Because of what was lost in translation MacLean disparaged his Anglophone versions as ‘transliterations’; but they generate expressive power. The gap which opened up for him between heart and mind, thought and feeling, set reasonable syntax against unreasoning passion in ways that become a source of experimental imagery: ‘The knife of my brain made incision / my dear, on the stone of my love’ (WR 145). When emotional uprooting is given territorial definition, a geography of desire in ‘The Woods of Raasay’ expresses misery that is both personal and historical. No-one but MacLean could have brought into English: It is that they rise from the miserable torn depths that puts their burden on mountains. (WR 181)

Born in 1911 on Raasay, a small island between Skye and the Scottish mainland, MacLean became a schoolteacher of English, in Edinburgh and then in the Highlands. After his retirement from the headmastership of Plockton School in 1972 he lived on Skye itself, a few miles south of its main town Portree. Less than a mile from his home a stone cairn marks where the ‘Battle of the Braes’ took place in 1882, an unprecedented development in crofter resistance, being both well-organised and the first offensive measure to be taken against efforts to remove them. In his garden MacLean pointed to hawthorn bushes planted by a great grand-uncle, Angus Stewart, who was living in the house when he gave evidence before Napier’s Commission in 1883. Not that MacLean allowed these connections to foster illusions about the diffi 

Seamus Heaney, ‘Introduction’, in Sorley MacLean: Critical Essays, p.2. For an account of ‘The Battle of the Braes’, see James Hunter, The Making of the Crofting Community (Edinburgh: Donald, 1976), pp. 133–40.

Fivefathers  22 culties a Highland revival had to confront. The Spanish Civil War prompted realistic fears in MacLean and many others about the likely course of European politics; and given the existential nature of his historical awareness, he would derive little comfort from Marx’s sole reference to the Gaels as ‘a remnant people, left over from an earlier population, forced back and subjugated by the nation which later became the repository of historical development.’ Marx was referring to Scotland’s intellectual heyday, when its Enlightenment writers were widely respected across Europe and beyond. Now it seemed to MacLean that militarised European nationalisms were bent on finishing the eradication of a ‘remnant people’, giving an edge to MacLean’s despair. ‘In 1938 the continuing existence of Gaelic as a spoken language seemed a forlorn hope and Europe itself appeared about to be delivered into the hands of Teutonic racist fascism’ (RB 3): I do not see the sense of my toil putting thoughts in a dying tongue now when the whoredom of Europe is murder erect and agony. (WR p. 157)

He could look at contending systems of European empire and find ‘every one of them loathsome’ (WR 45). Notwithstanding his pessimistic intelligence, MacLean was an optimist of the will in his support for the Spanish Republican forces in a civil war that in some ways appeared to him not unlike the Clearances. It took no great leap of the imagination to perceive in Franco and his landlord, capitalist and Roman Catholic support, a Hispanic version of the landowners of the Clearances and the Church of Scotland at that earlier time. As a politics of necessary resistance and urgent alternatives organizes his imaginative territory, it becomes a formative irony that MacLean was tone deaf from childhood in a family upbringing that was richly musical. He realized early on that he was ‘a traditional Gaelic singer manqué’: ‘for I was born into a family of traditional singers and pipers on all sides, and that in a Free Presbyterian community, of all the most inimical to such “vanities”. [...] I think that the first great “artistic” impact on me was my father’s mother singing some of the very greatest of Gaelic songs, and all in her own traditional versions’ (RB 6). MacLean puts his inability to sing down to a ‘defect in pitch’ for which we can be grateful, since he reckoned in later life that ‘even to this day, I sometimes think that if I had been a singer I would have written no verse’ (RB 9). It won’t be surprising then, that MacLean became ‘obsessed with the 

Karl Marx, The Revolutions of 1848: Political Writings (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), vol. 1, 221.

Fivefathers  23 lyric’ at a young age: ‘first of all because of my unusually rich Gaelic backgrounds, with the lyric in the Greek sense of a marriage of poetry and music; and then, because I was not a musician, with the lyric in the Shelleyan and Blakeian sense of a short or shortish poem suggesting song even if it could never be sung’ (RB 9). His interest intensified when the Scots lyric revival MacDiarmid had accomplished in Sangschaw (1925) moved MacLean ‘in the extreme to whatever I have of sensibility’; to the extent that they ‘might very well have destroyed any chances I ever had of writing poetry’. But MacDiarmid’s innovative radicalism was important to MacLean in other ways, who not only thought ‘A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle’ (1926) ‘the greatest long poem of the century’, but went on to claim it marked his conversion ‘to the belief that the long medley with lyric peaks was the great form for our age’ (RB 11). Like MacDiarmid, but in distinctive cultural mode, it was what MacLean sought to lyricise that gave the shock of the new to his verse. Perceptions of a failing culture connect in his poetry with the complicated stresses of frustrated and misconceived love affairs when at the end of the nineteen-thirties, with fascism, democracy and communism on the brink of battle, his unspoken but intensely felt involvement with two women collapsed in confusion and doubt. For a year or two in the early thirties, he was drawn to a woman on Skye who remained unaware of his feelings. Then in 1937 he met an Irish woman to whom he was strongly attracted, but to whom he likewise never made any approach. [SM] I had never really made any advances to her because I was under the mistaken impression that one of my greatest friends, who had been responsible for me meeting the woman in the first place, wanted to marry her himself. So I held off.

While domestic necessity prevented MacLean from volunteering for Spain, the poetry is haunted by the suspicion that other reasons were keeping him at home. [SM] It was not a case of an actual choice between the woman and Spain. I was prevented from going to Spain by family circumstances. But I realised that if it were a pure choice between the woman and Spain, I’m afraid I would have chosen the woman. I knew, I knew that would have been my choice.

‘Prayer’ records a ‘death-like life’ because ‘I preferred a woman to crescent History’ (WR 19), and asks the question that underlies many of MacLean’s subsequent selfreflections: ‘who will call my white love / surrender, faintness or shadow?’ (WR 21). ‘The Turmoil’ articulates a divided perception of ‘beauty cast[ting] a cloud / over poverty and a bitter wound / and over the world of Lenin’s intellect, / over his pa-

Fivefathers  24 tience and anger’ (WR 9). A sense of division similarly informs ‘Reason and Love’; and ‘The Cry of Europe’ sharpens the pressure of opposing demands and a growing feeling of shame: What would the kiss of your proud mouth be compared with each drop of the precious blood that fell on the cold frozen uplands of Spanish mountains from a column of steel? (WR 9)

The speaker of ‘The Selling of a Soul’ is abject in its insistence on repeating: that I would sell my soul for your sake twice, once for your beauty and again for that grace that you would not take a sold and slavish spirit. (WR 15)

When the Irish woman married in December 1939, it was not to MacLean’s friend: it subsequently transpired that there had never been any question of that marriage taking place, which further demoralised her would-be lover. In an additional and dumbfounding complication, MacLean had again met the Scottish woman earlier in 1939, and by the end of the year declared his feelings for her. According to Joy Hendry, the woman’s response led him to understand that as a result of surgery she was unable to enjoy a full relationship with a man. Her claim that his attentions kept her from suicide left MacLean passionately supportive of her circumstance. [SM] Quite a few of the poems were not published at all in 1943 because they would have been too explicit. There were some in which I actually represented myself almost as a rejected lover, which I wasn’t by any manner of means – as far as I knew then. The part of the Selected Poems called ‘The Haunted Ebb’ was written between December 1939 and late July or early August, 1941. ‘The Woods of Raasay’ was written during the summer of 1940 before I went away to the army. A lot of people think my very best stuff is ‘The Woods of Raasay’—you know, everything else was accelerated by going away to the war. Those poems which are grouped together under the sub-headings ‘The Grey Crop’ and ‘The Broken Image’ are a commentary on my state of mind between December 1939 and August 1941, and they were written after September 1941 and before the end of 1943.

So his obsessive devotion continued through his call-up in 1940, as ‘The Proper 

Joy Hendry, ‘Sorley Maclean: the Man and his Work’, Critical Essays, p. 23 ff.

Fivefathers  25 War’ implies for a departing speaker who ‘will never return’ but intends nonetheless to marry the woman, notwithstanding the fact that ‘The young Lowlander has been before me’: He has done the violence to your body, the unspeakable anguish of our grief, so that you cannot lie with another while you live. (WR 199)

By the time MacLean discovered that he had been misled in all of this, too, he was already on active service against Rommel in the Western Desert, where his perplexity turned to anger and self-disgust which brought, he reported to Douglas Young late in 1941, ‘very frequent moods that approach the suicidal’. This is the stuff of high romantic passion, and the failing myths of MacLean’s modernist impulses were Celtic as well as Mediterranean in origin—Eimhir was the loveliest of women in early Irish sagas. Emotional intensity is delivered through an imagery of ‘tearing’ in the mind which suggests relationship with the ‘consciousness disjunct’ of other modernisms: I do not feel kindly towards Nature, which has given me the clear whole understanding, the single brain and the split heart. (WR 21)

For a speaker intent on ‘put[ting] the people’s anguish / in the steel of my lyric’ (WR 137), political imperatives connect personal turmoil with the impact of international events. MacLean was mobilising and testing the emotional tolerance of his language just as Gaelic territory seemed destined for obliteration. Although there were times when he thought he’d never write again the emotional crisis was, as the evidence suggests and MacLean came to acknowledge, a period of creative anguish that permanently changed the direction of his writing. It would be 1970 before another substantial selection of his work appeared in print. Christopher Whyte has described the tortuous path that led to the Eimhir poems being published in the wartime conditions of 1943, and his research brings to light the calculated reordering and omissions that went into their selection. We are left with traceable references to specific personal relationships with identifiable women and an overall effect that seems to involve a single imaginative addressee, ‘a time 

Hendry, ‘The Man and his Work’, p. 29. The phrase is Ezra Pound’s, from his poem ‘Hugh Selwyn Mauberley’.

Fivefathers  26 less symbol of beauty and pain’. Whyte reminds us that the ‘Dàin do Eimhir’ are ‘much more than a record of two fruitless emotional involvements. They trace how a young poet affirms the gift he is conscious of possessing, by creating a body of work of whose real value he has a very shrewd notion.’ What MacLean came to call his ‘rash folly’ transmutes in the poems into a self-lacerating imagery of constancy become obsessive and of resolution disfigured by a kind of delirium. MacLean’s acute disillusionment tested his belief even in his own capacity to make effective choices, so that Continental developments constituted a dramatic environment of betrayal and deceit through which to express humiliation, loss and exposure. Isolated in a declining language, MacLean feared even more the life and death struggle for the defence of the West. This, at any rate, is in some sense the measure of ‘The Haunting’. [SM] You see, I knew from the beginning, I think, that Hitler would attack Russia, and I considered Russia then the only thing that really stood between us and even a thousand years of fascist domination of Europe. You must remember that America was not yet in the war. ‘The Haunting’ was written in July 1941. Hitler attacked Russia on the 22nd June 1941 and his armies reached the Dnieper on the third of July; a hell of a rapid advance. I really thought the game was up. Good or bad, the behaviour of the Russian government, they saved us.

‘The Haunting’ implicates the survival of Gaelic in syntax that is persuasive and logically sequential in form, yet predetermined by a fatal certainty. At its ending, the poem becomes as much a lament for the misdirection of its creator’s own ‘newly-lit consciousness’ as it is for the absent woman: Though the Red Army of humanity is in the death-struggle beside the Dnieper, it is not the deed of its heroism that is nearest my heart, but a face that is haunting me, following me day and night, the triumphant face of a girl that is always speaking. (WR 165)  

Roderick Watson, The Literature of Scotland: the twentieth century [1984] (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007), vol. 2, 142. Whyte, Somhairle Macgill-eain, p. 23.

Fivefathers  27 Any possibility that ‘The Cuillin’, a long poem begun in 1939 and stopped by all this emotional upset might be further developed was effectively destroyed when, as MacLean puts it, 1944 disgusted him with some of its politics: ‘Especially when Sydney Goodsir Smith convinced me that the behaviour of the Russian government at the time of the Polish insurrection was far worse than Professor Erickson’s Road to Berlin now shows’ (WR xv). Like many of his committed contemporaries MacLean had hoped that Soviet success might instigate improvement on what capitalism was currently offering the wretched of the earth. His poetry raises Gaelic to a different plane, and myth has been read as articulating another plane alongside the material world and in some sense supportive of it. In that sense the fledgling Soviet state promised a mythic expansion of possibility, and ‘The Cuillin’ is concerned to connect the fate of Gaeldom both with oppression world-wide and with global resistance to it. But the workers of the world were not ready to unite and the poem’s epic strain can seem just that—a straining after effect. MacLean never revised the piece, and let only selections see the light of day. As one otherwise admiring reader has suggested, the register of the poem can seem at times ‘over-rhetorical, praising heroism and denouncing the exploitation of the poor with excessively simplistic fervour’. But ‘the Cuillin’ also presents a range of MacLean’s remembered feelings, and its opening hymn to Skye’s landscape as the speaker climbs to a suitable vantage point for view and reflection addresses the human geography of MacLean’s upbringing. Like his kinsman who gave his life to the industrial struggle in Glasgow: ‘the battle-post of the poor, / great John MacLean, / the top and hem of our story’ (WR 47), ‘The Cuillin’ issues a cry for revolutionary transformation in human relationships with an expectation directly related to the pressing realities of the time: I heard that a breaking was seen and a startling on the horizon, that there was seen a fresh red rose over a bruised maimed world. (WR 97)

It was as part of this politics of possibility that MacLean sought to emancipate his language from the stranglehold that Island Presbyterianism still exercised. [SM] Although our people were really rather lax Free Presbyterians, they hadn’t the tremendous rigour of a lot of the others. But still. … 

Douglas Sealy, ‘Literature, History and the Poet’, in Sorley MacLean: Critical Essays, p. 60. Sealy’s historicised readings are invaluable.

Fivefathers  28 Terence McCaughey has shown how Calvinist discourse infiltrates an avowedly anti-clerical poetry opposed to religious thought worlds, where MacLean’s political radicalism secularises a vocabulary hitherto appropriated by Presbyterian sects, using it instead to open up alternative possibilities: ‘stretches of [his] poetry are richly furnished with the terminology of that Protestantism in which he was reared and by which he has been surrounded for a great part of his life [spent among] people for whom the Gaelic Bible and translation of the Shorter Catechism both formed and restricted their intellectual horizon’: No catechist or examiner is needed to see that there is not in my prayer Effectual Calling or sincerity, and though I am clear-sighted in scripture that my spirit is not one-fold. (WR 21)

MacLean’s clear sight of scripture involved a focus ‘not on Calvary / nor on Bethlehem the Blessed, / but on a foul-smelling backland in Glasgow, / where life rots as it grows’ (WR p. 35). The perspective from Skye’s mountaintops measures a wider compass: Jupiter, the brutal coward, has failed, and so has Jahweh the Jew, but a time has never come when rulers have not found a god who hangs on pious mountains the sacrificed bodies of surpassing men. (WR 121)

What is seen on Skye’s earth is a history of ‘chiefs and tacksmen plundering, / with the permission of divines shearing, / clearing tenants and planting brutes’; and the hooded crows of Island Calvinism persist as nightmare:  

Terence McCaughey, ‘Sorley MacLean: Continuity and the Transformation of Symbols’, in Critical Essays, p. 127 Tacksmen were frequently ‘close relatives (often brothers, cousins or younger sons) of the chief, leasing a large block of land for several years or for the duration of one or two lives, and acting as viceroy over this portion of the estate, if necessary training and organising the clan peasants for war and appearing with armed followers at [the chief’s] bidding. The tacksmen also paid rent in money or kind to the chief and obtained a larger rent in money or kind from the peasants, living on the difference between the two. [...] Normally there was no justification for the middleman type of tenure except in a paramilitary society. It was destined to perish in the later eighteenth century when law and order finally made it archaic.’ (T. C. Smout, A History of the Scottish People 1560–

Fivefathers  29 Multitude of springs and fewness of young men today, yesterday and last night keeping me awake: the miserable loss of our country’s people, clearing of tenants, exile, exploitation, and the great Island is seen with its winding shores, a hoodicrow squatting on each dun, black soft squinting hoodicrows, who think themselves all eagles. (WR 67)

‘A Highland Woman’ is as explicit, its voice both compassionate and sardonic in direct address to Christ: ‘Hast Thou seen her, great Jew, /who art called the One Son of God?’: Thy gentle church has spoken about the lost state of her miserable soul, and the unremitting toil has lowered her body to a black peace in a grave. And her time has gone like a black sludge seeping through the thatch of a poor dwelling: the hard Black Labour was her inheritance; grey is her sleep tonight. (WR 29)

The ‘Black Labour’ that is here generalized as a lifetime’s drudgery signifies historically the unpaid work periodically compelled from tenants by landlords in lieu of rent, a system of extortion that had ‘existed for a least three centuries.’ With faith locked into submission, and independence of judgement thus biblically expropriated, political quietism might be expected. So MacLean’s radicalisation of religious terminology is exact and telling. Part III of ‘The Cuillin’ presents the island’s flora and fauna in terms of human, including specifically Christian, values: ‘Every flower that grows has been seen, / even the tortured wounded side’. But a Communist Christ is difficult to embody: ‘in one there has never been seen the judgement of Lenin and the red side of Christ’ (WR 91). Such networks of meaning suggest that Douglas Sealy’s response is accurate and to the point: ‘Viewing the poetry as a whole, it would seem that the great burst of love-poetry found in Dàin do Eimhir was an accidental deflection of the poet’s talents and that the more enduring passion was the cause of justice 

1830 [London: Collins, 1969], p. 138.) Douglas Sealy, p. 76

Fivefathers  30 and equality among men, nourished by his resentment of the waste of lives and land that is still to be seen in Scotland today’ (70). But the issues and uncertainties of that accidental deflection and great burst were no nearer to resolution when MacLean left Britain for active service in North Africa. [SM] I was in the Libyan Desert first, and the Western Desert for most of 1942. And it wasn’t a very pleasant place. Well, the point is, after such an experience, and the fact that the business was not really properly resolved. It was not so much a tragedy now, but a kind of perplexity; not knowing what was what. It was the business of having to go away to the Desert on top of all this; of having made a fool of myself, though what I can only describe as a kind of quixotic rashness. But then, I don’t know in the circumstances what else I could have done except forgotten all about her.

The wartime desert was a testing ground that gave MacLean a necessary distance by occupying his attention and providing a healing time for his self-respect: I go westwards in the Desert with my shame on my shoulders, that I was made a laughing-stock since I was as my people were.

At last he was taking active part in a struggle that was ‘not to be avoided’: ‘And be what was as it was, / I am of the big men of Braes’ (WR 207). Now his priorities could clarify: There is no rancour in my heart Against the hardy soldiers of the Enemy, but the kinship that there is among men on a tidal rock waiting for the sea flowing and making cold the warm stone. (WR 206–7)

‘Going South’ records MacLean’s first experience of battle. [SM] It was a strange business: it was the first day I was in action, and I was out at a forward observation post. Our truck was hit twice and I was slightly wounded, though I didn’t become a casualty; and dammit we were nearly captured the first time.

Fivefathers  31 ‘An Autumn Day’ brought him into closer contact with the grim reaper—‘six men dead at my shoulder’—and MacLean’s existential irony at the absurdity of salvation is symptomatic: ‘One Election took them / and did not take me, / without asking us / which was better or worse’ (WR 215). The range of his compassion helped him to produce a clutch of poems equal to any produced during 1939-45; from the death in battle of an unprepossessing but ‘great warrior of England’ which incidentally poses the question of nation at the level of creaturely pain and vulnerability: a poor manikin on whom no eye would rest; no Alasdair of Glen Garry; and he took a little weeping to my eyes (WR 211)

to his ‘Death Valley’ elegy for a German youth who ‘showed no pleasure in his death / below the Ruweisat Ridge’ (WR 213). Wounded in action in November 1942, MacLean was in various military hospitals until late 1943. [SM] I was in a battery command post, and went up on a landmine. The wheel of the command post was thrown about thirty yards, and it was mostly my bones in my feet broken, metatarsals and heel bones, by blast. I had superficial flesh wounds on my legs, but it was my feet that took it. Mind you, I was hit twice before that but didn’t become a casualty. I got wounded with a bit o’ shell business in the thigh away back in May, ’42. I was dressed for that. The second time, Oh Christ I was lucky. I was hit there [strikes his chest above the heart] by a bit of shell casing as big as that [his fist], but it had ricocheted so much. It would have torn me to bits. That was during the big retreat, which started on 15th June, ’42.

It is difficult to read the last stanza of ‘The Haunting’, or a line like ‘my thought comes on you when you were young’ from ‘Spring Tide’ (WR 193) without catching an echo of Thomas Hardy: What was and what is now of us, Though they would last forever, how would a tale of them come from distant shores. (WR 163)

Both poets are haunted by the absence of a loved woman and for all their acknowledged differences, both combine elegiac historicism with passionate memory; and both press lyric into the service of an ingrained cultural pessimism, a pessimism that MacLean relates to the religious environment against which he sharpened his perceptions.

Fivefathers  32 [SM] I don’t know whether some people are sanguine and some melancholy due to chemical reasons; I suppose there is something in that, but certainly upbringing is important. You see, I have a very great admiration for Hardy’s poetry, and of course I have a very definite pessimism. I was brought up in an island where everybody was of a church which envisioned an eternity of physical and mental torture for practically everyone; where works did not matter unless you were Effually Called, unless you saw the light and all that. Even the best people didn’t necessarily see the light; and that included not only people of other creeds, but the great majority of the adherents of that church itself. So that was bound to cause a pessimism. In any given congregation of the Free Presbyterians, only about 5% of the adults took communion. The rest were just adherents. And although they didn’t say that all the adherents were going to hell, the assumption was that the great bulk of them would—unless they saw the light, unless they were Effectually Called and so on.

It wasn’t easy to determine the line between sincerity and mischief when MacLean added with a twinkle in his eye: ‘Mind you, the Church of Scotland has not believed that for a hell of a long time.’ [SM] The Free Presbyterians and the Free Church talked about the filthy rags of human righteousness. How it didn’t signify unless, unless…. And they still believe that. D’you know, the most remarkable description of the Free Presbyterian hell I have ever read is the sermon in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Oh God, that is a powerful thing! But still, although human righteousness may be filthy rags, they are by-products of a Saving Grace, and their non-existence is a very serious thing. The Roman Catholics had a safety-valve in purgatory, and also the fact that they did not throw the responsibility so much onto the individual. If you were alright in the eyes of the Church, there was at least some comfort in that. It was effectually milder, at least. But there was nothing like that Mass business in the strict Calvinist churches.

The span of his own life had seen trouble enough. [SM] Having been born just before the Great War, I remember being terribly affected by the miner’s strike in 1926, although I’d only be fourteen then. And y’see, actually though Edinburgh hadn’t as many slums as Glasgow, it had some of the worst in Europe. It was 1929 when I came to Edinburgh University, and that’s

Fivefathers  33 when the Wall Street Crash was, and the Great Depression was at its height in 1931. And of course, there came in this hellish National Government.

The interview came to an end with a question that a cultural historian capable of such recall had every right to ask: ‘What is the time now, because I’ve got this damned watch which keeps stopping?’

Iain Crichton Smith: To Have Found One’s Country Iain Crichton Smith found it difficult to be either comic or joyful in his poetry and was aware of ‘a certain pessimism’ which he attributed in part to growing up among an ageing population and in a dying culture. He also associated it with the repressive religious environment of his formative years: ‘I think I feel it more and more strongly now the older I grow that it has done harm … harm to my own psychology—this kind of depressive lack of joy, this kind of uniformity’. Unwavering in his resistance to the religion he refused at an early age, Smith probes the effects on an individual sense and sensibility of an ideological closure he saw operating in the legislated ethics and self-identifying thought world of an insular community. Using his direct experience of this cultural insularity to understand at close range a belief system that defined a community of believers against the vanities of self, he develops a poetics of opposition by centring his own selfhood as rival structure of alterity. That development produced something of a casebook example of rebellion against authority ending up in the return of that repressed authority in the guise of remorse. Smith’s close encounters of a transgressive kind necessarily involve an adaptation to the terms and   

Maurice Lindsay, ed., As I Remember (London, 1979), pp. 118-19. Hereafter AIR. Carol Gow, Mirror and Marble: The Poetry of Iain Crichton Smith (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1992), p. 14. Slavoj Žižek, On Belief (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 17.

Fivefathers  35 codes in dispute, and a measure of internalisation of the values to be refused. ‘I am beginning more and more to realise,’ he said in 1971, ‘that the kind of upbringing I had, even though I may intellectually object to it, and react against it, has probably stained me in a way that I did not at first realise, so I think it is probably true that I am Calvinistic, without theological allegiance’. It becomes important, then, to remember that Smith could be hilariously funny; he was a glorious stand-up entertainer with a dry, dead-pan delivery who was never happier than when reducing his audience to helpless laughter. At Norman MacCaig’s 75th birthday party in Edinburgh’s Queen’s Hall, he had the company in stitches with his delivery of the short story ‘Napoleon and I’. In the crazy comedy of his Murdo Macrae tales he invented an absurdist alter ego through which he could further indulge his anarchic sense of comedy. ‘Like the sad, humble laughable figure of Mr Trill,’ Douglas Gifford suggests, ‘who features in several of Smith’s stories, Murdo is an extreme way of seeing the pretentiousness of culture, the naked quality of actuality, as well as being another strategy for handling the unbearable.’ Smith’s move from island to mainland, from the country to the city, traces a paradigm of delayed modernity, and in that sense his personal evolution encodes an ongoing historical transition in island culture, where the impact of commercial society on traditional values of households, villages and small-scale civic communities remains visible. Conflict between his island’s resistance to change and Smith’s restless desire for individual fulfilment, helped to focus an attention to the mental/linguistic and textual production of social meaning that was as ontological as his antagonistic responses to religiously validated codes and permissions were personal. Since the manufacture of consent to preferred opinions was visibly effective in the creed that administered his island’s meaning-making practices, he understood how the politics of a local language felt on a collective pulse operated as an agent of social construction. Partly as a way of negotiating Calvinistic suspicions of ‘pure’ fiction, direct autobiographical reference is everywhere in Smith’s work. A 1969 novel called The Last Summer attributes details of his own wartime adolescence to its main character Malcolm, whose world, Smith acknowledged, ‘was of course my world’: .

It was a claustrophobic world, it was a split world, split between town and village,  

Iain Crichton Smith, ‘Poet in Bourgeois Land’ (interview conducted by Lorne Macintyre), Scottish International, Sept. 1971, p. 24 Douglas Gifford ed., Listen to the Voice: Selected Stories of Iain Crichton Smith (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993), p. xii.

Fivefathers  36 between town school and village school. It was a world of the aged to a great extent since the other adults were away in the war. It was a world where he had to make his own choices, his own friends. For he had friends in the town and friends in the village. And sometimes living uneasily between the two worlds he wasn’t very sure of himself. […] It was a world without art, without theatre and often without cinema. A barren world really except in the imagination. […] But it was also to a great extent a secure world.

Autobiographical correspondence is similarly traced in the lightly fictionalised Iain who focalises the boyhood narrative of On the Island (1979), which charts a movement away from village to town school, from ‘true real grinding poverty’ to the lure of a future ‘higher position’; and an introduction to Latin that ironically emphasises a developing sense of entrapment: ‘Insulae—of an island or to an island, depending on whether it is the genitive or dative you are using’ (p. 105, 117). It may have been a further residual effect of his island’s Calvinist rejection of the vanity of self-display that Smith had not a shred of self-importance about him. ‘Much poetry that one writes is not very good,’ he told Chapman readers in 1976, ‘and I have written a lot and a lot if it isn’t very good.’ It was an attitude that sometimes perplexed his editors (to say nothing of his readers). He sent Stewart Conn a typescript of Thoughts of Murdo with a scribbled note asking whether it was ‘worth publishing’, and Donald Meek remembers his time as one of Smith’s High School pupils being given ‘(not for the first time!) a flimsy cardboard box containing recent writing by “Mr Smith”’, with instructions to ‘keep it “over the weekend” and tell him what I thought of its contents’. ‘Iain was very prolific,’ Isobel Murray reminds us, ‘and he often relied on other people to sift wheat from chaff. On one occasion he sent Bob [Tait] a boxful of work, saying that if none of it was any good, he should just dispose of it.’ Because Smith thematises exile, dislocation and reconstruction, it is worth remembering that the man who became one of Scotland’s best-loved poets wasn’t born on his formative island but in Glasgow (in 1928), where his sometime merchant seaman father John had moved in search of work. Before Iain was a year old John Smith died of tuberculosis, leaving a deeply Presbyterian widow ‘to burn / all [her]     

‘The Highland Element’, pp. 50–1. Iain Crichton Smith, ‘Why I Write’, Chapman, vol. iv, no. 6 (1976), p. 12. Stewart Conn, ed., Murdo: The Life and Works (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2001), p. xiv. Hereafter M. Donald Meek, ‘Foreword’ to Eimhir by Sorley MacLean (Stornoway: Acair,1999), p. 7 Isobel Murray, ed., Scottish Writers Talking 2 (East Lothian: Tuckwell, 2002), p. 112.

Fivefathers  37 furniture and begin again’ the harsh task of bringing up three young sons during the 1930s on a pension of eighteen shillings a week. The surviving family moved back to Lewis and into one of the sixty or so cottages and homesteads of a Gaelic-speaking village called Bayble. This had been the father’s but not the mother’s birthplace, so that she never felt completely at home on the thin sliver of land called the Eye Peninsular attached to the north-east of Lewis. Smith came to think his life was shaped by an accident of circumstance and a hostile history that together produced ‘a snake pit of contradictions’ and a ‘linguistic double man riddled by guilt’. Gaeldom didn’t come garlanded to young Iain. Brought up a native speaker in a home with neither plumbing nor electricity, he experienced a level of poverty and depressed family circumstances that included going barefoot to school in summer and periodically meant asking neighbours for money loans until his mother’s next pension payment became due. An annual childhood seven-mile bus trip to the island’s single cinema in Stornoway (a small township which nonetheless struck him as Babylon in comparison with Bayble village) was the highlight of a year marked by long periods of isolation where growing up was for him an often frightening experience. During his life on the island (but interestingly not later), Smith was prone to bronchitis and asthma and spent a lot of time laid up in bed. He would wake at night thinking that he was haemorrhaging while all around him ‘the village was palpitant with the symptoms of tuberculosis which the young and the middle-aged were suffering from, and also dying from’. Hellfire and damnation would be the only likely prospect for many of those doing the dying, and out-migration offered a necessary means of mental survival and material deliverance. The treeless island of windswept and featureless moorland became a potently various symbol for what sounds an often grim childhood and adolescence. This real and symbolic context intensified when wartime conscription turned the village into ‘a world of old men and old women and girls’ because ‘all the older boys had suddenly left’ for wartime service (AIR 115). Yet it was paradoxically the island ‘without tree or branch’ that triggered Smith’s responses (CP 179): and if he could sometimes feel his pen ‘like a gull writing the screaming of loneliness’ (CP 185), the record shows that soon after moving to Aberdeen as an undergraduate he began a life-long realisation of Scottish space as ‘a land made to be written on’ not in the  

Iain Crichton Smith, Collected Poems (Manchester: Carcanet, 1992), p. 134. Hereafter CP. Iain Crichton Smith, Towards the Human: Selected Essays (Edinburgh: Lines Review Editions, 1986), p. 51. Hereafter TH; ‘The Double Man’, in The Literature of Region and Nation, ed. R. Draper (London: St Martin’s, 1989), pp. 136-46 (p. 140). Hereafter DM.

Fivefathers  38 prohibitive terms of Free Church Presbyterian codes but ‘with words carved out of a shining sky’. Because his attitude to the belief system and social psychology of island Gaeldom was oppositional and antagonistic, he exploits his perception of the island as ‘the anvil where was made / the Puritanical heart’ (CP 245) in ways that reconstruct a radically different environment from the one developed by his friend and fellow-writer Derick Thomson, a poet and cultural historian who grew up a few years earlier in the schoolhouse not far from Smith’s home. Thomson’s father was an energetic and capable man, both schoolmaster and local preacher, who maintained a bilingual household as he taught English effectively and promoted Gaelic culture wherever he could; his mother an accomplished performer of a repertoire of Gaelic songs. In a poem called ‘Bayble’ Thomson was accordingly able to read in local tides ‘the everlasting movement of the village’, which recalled ‘a thousand hearts swelling and sinking’. With no early sense of his island’s historical culture Crichton Smith lived a very different learning curve. Fatherless and poor, he was brought up by a caring but domineering and rigorously Calvinist mother about whom he wrote compulsively. The impoverished widow’s son experienced Gaelic life as limiting and uncongenial, and in that sense schooling was an open door. When a five-year-old Iain Smith set foot in Bayble primary school he also walked for the first time into the Anglophone world proper, where all lessons were conducted in English. There is irony enough in his later realisation that being allowed to speak his mother tongue only in the playground but not for the advancement of learning ‘probably registered in some obscure corner of my psyche as an indication that English was superior to Gaelic’ (TH 22). His later awareness of Gaeldom’s precarious relationship to what could readily be perceived as a globally invasive but for many an enabling speech and writing, was the Faustian part of a deal he did not initially realise he was making, and the complexities of which he would describe as mind-breaking. But access to global literacy offered the kinds of horizons to which Smith (he first used Crichton in his name after he started publishing in the later 1940s) was compulsively drawn. Meanwhile, Scotland remained his home country and its cultural fault-lines a focus of close attention. At the heart of this cultural matrix of insular constraint and metropolitan opportunity Smith lived an extremely difficult relationship with his mother. He was afraid of her as a child and it would become an added source of guilt that although he cared for  

Iain Crichton Smith, The Long River (Edinburgh: MacDonald, 1955), p. 11. Derick Thomson, Creachadh na Clàrsaich: Plundering the Harp (Edinburgh: MacDonald), 1982, p. 43.

Fivefathers  39 her in her later life as she had for him in the earlier stages of his own, she was unable to show him warmth or affection and he would have to come to terms with disliking her. Because she was a committed Presbyterian during young Smith’s life on the island, her over-determining creed and the Gaelic language that delivered it were not easily separable for a growing boy. He encountered the controlling thought world of Presbyterianism primarily through his mother’s sound world, and consequently knew its ideology as a cognitive psychology formatively effective in the immediate neighbourhood of his upbringing. When he started his secondary school education with the help of a scholarship to Stornoway’s Nicolson Institute, English had to be spoken in the playground as well as the classroom, with Gaelic now a school subject taught in English by adults who were native speakers of the local language. Travelling daily by bus from Bayble to Stornoway—‘seven miles and a whole world away’—he was already moving between two realms of village and town that were socially divided by language use. He soon became aware that speaking in English to someone from his village had the effect of making that person ‘into a stranger [and] oneself in some significant way superior to him’ (DM 136). These defining tensions developed in a time and place where there were no Gaelic books to interest a young boy who was seizing every opportunity the island offered to ‘read and read and read’ anything that held his attention. He borrowed books from friends (including detective fiction which became a lifelong passion), and plundered Stornoway’s public library, spending his lunch-times in its reading rooms, sometimes with his nose in bound copies of metropolitan society magazines: ‘the island boy with the Tatler, London News // in their black leather covers’ (CP 248). Besides the usual adventure stories, his early encounters with Penguin New Writing brought him into contact with work by Auden, Stephen Spender, Louis MacNeice and others whose combined impact he never forgot. He would come to recognise his ‘deep and subtle feeling that English must be superior to Gaelic’ as part of a process that was inevitably ‘consigning the Gaelic speaker to the status of a peasant as the Anglo-Saxon was under the Franco-Normans’ (TH 37). But powerfully drawn as he was to the realms of reference and imaginative reasoning made available by a world language, he also knew that he was instinctively on the side of the invaders. His mature perception of English as a displacing and subordinating instrumentality that introduced and privileged metropolitan norms complicates but does not erase this earlier restrictive sense and experience of the local language into which he was born. Since these feelings of division and self-division are both personal and cultural, they traverse the body of Smith’s writing from the beginning. Thoughts of Murdo,

Fivefathers  40 his laconic and absurdist versions of cultural psychosis, places ‘Murdo and the Language’ first: One half of Murdo, vertically visualised, had the colour red: the other half had the colour black. Also it seemed to him that half his tongue spoke Gaelic, the other half English. There was a smell of salt herring from the black half, and a smell of bacon from the other half. […] When he was at home the colour black pulsed, and when he was in school the colour red glowed. (M 61)

‘One might think this is a classic recipe for schizophrenia’ Crichton Smith noted, and his novel In the Middle of the Wood fictionalises in detail his own mental breakdown. Murdo learns to use ‘long words such as “dichotomy” [and] “traumatic”’ (M 62); and divisive effect impacts correspondingly when a Gaelic poem translated into English as ‘The Fool’ tropes bilingual perplexity (and a fraught relationship to centres of dispensing power) in a medieval jester’s tunic: In the dress of the fool, the two colours that have tormented me—English and Gaelic, black and red, the court of injustice, the reason for my anger, and that fine rain from the mountains and these grievous storms from my mind streaming the two colours together so that I will go with poor sight in the one colour that is so odd that the King himself will not understand my conversation. (CP 196)

Iain Smith first stepped off his island as a seventeen-year-old in 1945, when he took a ferry to the mainland and caught the first train he had ever seen to Aberdeen where ‘the moor and the granite came together in a new synthesis’. His seminal short story ‘The Black and the Red’ traces an island-bred but freethinking undergraduate pilgrim’s progress away from a mother’s controlling and claustrophobic regime; a progress that had begun much earlier. Student independence and city life delivered what felt like a wholesale liberation, and he ‘really began to write poetry, a great deal of it about Lewis’ (AIR 121). He soon gave up joint studies in Celtic and English because as a native speaker Celtic language instruction bored him, and concentrated instead on writing in English; developing his liking for Eliot, Auden, Robert Lowell and others (Auden seemed to him at the time ‘a kind of free spirit as against the bible side of it’). After graduation he enrolled for teacher training at Glasgow’s Jordanhill College. As a National Service conscript from 1950 to 1952 he became a ‘lowest of the low’ sergeant in the Education Corps, charged with teaching ‘letter-writing to the 

Iain Crichton Smith, ‘The Black and the Red’, in The Red Door: The Complete English Stories 1949-76, ed. Kevin MacNeil (East Lothian: Birlinn, 2001), pp. 253-89.

Fivefathers  41 illiterate / easily unearthed, in spite of shame, / since they’re the ones most charged’ (CP 258); but with duties that included preparing candidates for university entrance. He then moved to join his mother who had quit Lewis to live with her younger son in what Murdo describes as ‘a slummy flat on the High Street of Dumbarton’. Smith was repelled by ‘the sheer ugliness of the area’ when he started his teaching career in Scotland’s industrial heartland at Clydebank—remembered as ‘a dreadful period’ in Murdo’s life (M, 200, 203)—and in 1955 he moved north to Oban on Argyle’s West Highland coast, where he joined the staff of the High School and taught there for twenty years. In 1962 his mother came to live with him for the last seven years of her life. Each stage of this itinerary is exhaustively quarried in the writing. After receiving several awards for his writing, including the Silver Pen award in 1971, followed by Poetry Book Society Recommendations in 1971 and 1975, at the age of forty-nine he took early retirement from teaching to write full-time. In 1982 he and his partner Donalda moved to Taynuilt, a quiet Argyle village close to Loch Etive where they lived together until Iain’s death in 1998. Crichton Smith was eleven years old when World War II started, and he remembers military conscription emptying his village of young men so that he grew up in an ageing community. Another childhood memory was the wartime beaming of BBC radio signals to the Outer Hebrides. In 1942 outlying villages on Lewis were for the first time linked by single-wire circuits to their main island township of Stornoway, while a twelve-channel radio link was opened, connecting the island to Gairloch on the West Highland coast. The schoolboy didn’t know it, but changes were taking place that would exercise a continuous and decisive influence over local dispositions. Together with ensuring wartime control over resources, these transforming developments were opening up a hitherto relatively self-contained and self-defining regional and rural ethnic way of life to a broader spectrum of experience and opportunity in which language use is a crucial determinant. As far as their immediate impact was concerned, the changes were irrefutable evidence that a technologically advanced metropolitan centre was coming into compelling interaction with an underdeveloped island periphery, exploiting its human resource for war service while enhancing spoken English as preferred medium. The single radio receiver in Smith’s village was housed in a thatched cottage he visited nightly for the latest news about battlefields in a global conflict that provided gripping narratives for English voices to broadcast their encompassing reference. Young Iain was powerfully impressed by the new transmission system whose wireless set was ‘perched up on a shelf with a white curtain around it, and before the news began the curtain was pulled aside, almost as

Fivefathers  42 if to reveal to us an idol speaking with a godlike voice. And certainly the voices that emerged from it sounded godlike’ (TH 78). ‘1941–42’ a Gaelic poem Smith subsequently translated for an English collection he called The Permanent Island, remembers a young boy bred from birth to native speech listening to Anglophone voices travelling godlike through the ether. The poem secularises revelation, delivering instead events reported over the ether: ‘Those days, on the radio, nothing but ships sinking in grey ignorant seas. I sat in the light of the Tilley listening to Big Ben tolling on the heavy eternal bottom of the sea’ (CP 184). Metropolitan control of the airwaves extended its reach through the spectacular growth in communications systems which develop and enforce their combined instrumentality. A 1972 poem called ‘Gaelic Songs’ shows a broadcasting system exercising its shaping influence over the cultural future by inserting into its English-language medium small examples of native Gaelic singing. The songs in question are heard by an ex-islander and now mainland-dwelling adult for whom the music seems to belong to a different country and a familiar yet distant people. As part of these changed circumstances where local cultural erasure is mediated by an irresistibly mobilising international language, songs in an historic orality are unarguably re-scheduled: taking just a moment between two programmes elbowing them fiercely between two darknesses. (CP 124)

Smith was also seventeen years old when he first read Sorley MacLean’s Dàin do Eimhir, and though he couldn’t fully understand the book at the time, he remembers the impact it had on him. [ICS] It showed me that poetry could be written about modernity, it least in relative terms—it was about the Spanish Civil War. Before that, the Gaelic poetry that I’d read wasn’t liberating in the sense that it didn’t go beyond the Highlands. That was the main thing that interested me then, quite apart from the beauty of the language and the sound. Here was a book of poems presenting a specifically twentieth-century exploration of the crisis between a private world which we inhabit and a public world which is waiting for us to enter. I saw this tug-of-war between the public and the private as being central. MacLean certainly made the leap from inside the Highlands to outside and beyond; a transition which is felt on the pulses. The poems were existential, too, in that Sorley had life-choices which he had to make.

Fivefathers  43 Smith made life choices of his own as he set about demystifying romanticised but marketable perceptions of island life. ‘At the Highland Games’ discloses an exploitative politics concealed by the tartan gallimaufry. The speaker who walks: among crew-cuts, cameras, the heather-covered rock, past my ancestry, peasants, men who bowed with stony necks to the daughter-stealing lord

is alert to their predatory descendants, figured as contemporary ‘Caligulas with canes’, who ‘stalk in their rainbow kilts towards the dance’ (CP 83–4). [ICS] It’s very simple, I think, to idealise the Highlands. I’ve read so many awful books by visitors who come and talk about the sunsets and about the kind of people who live in the Highlands. I don’t romanticise because my feeling is that the people in the Highlands are like people everywhere else, except that they are subject to different conditions. It’s been very damaging for the Highlands to be looked on as if they are different kinds of people from the rest of the world— which they’re not.

Those different conditions produce particular effects in verse that often depicts the actualities of Lewis as being harsh climatically and ideologically unyielding; out of which recalcitrance a taut and vital music is made. Opening a landscape where ‘they have no time for the fine graces / of poetry, unless it freely grows / in deep compulsion, like water in the well, / woven into the texture of the soil / in a strong pattern’, ‘Poem of Lewis’ designs alternative harmonies of imaginative self-making. As they appropriate religiously sanctioned valences for a cold climate of living and dying, metaphors constructed out of daily occupations redirect a protestant work ethic that geared material prosperity to spiritual salvation. They also disclose Smith’s answerable compulsion to supply rhythms that can ‘tailor the material of thought / and snap the thread quickly on the tooth’. As part of the poem’s differential thought and feeling, the figure of the island as succouring mother turned to withering age in the emotional environment of a relentless climate opens a vein of imagery that becomes a resource in Smith’s writing about an actual and symbolic location. On this island: The two extremes, mourning and gaiety, meet like north and south in the one breast, milked by knuckled time, till dryness spreads across each aging bone.

Fivefathers  44 ‘Poem of Lewis’ figures conjunctions between Old and New Testament that are germane to Smith’s purposes, where ‘the Law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ’ (John 1. 17). The law of metre and the grace of rhythmic phrasing becomes a fruitful binary in Smith’s verse, while in ‘Poem of Lewis’ scripture is subverted when its traditional symbol of divine covenant with Noah after the flood is returned to secular nature: The great forgiving spirit of the word fanning its rainbow wing, like a shot bird falls from the windy sky.

The poem looks instead for salvation in the uncompromising setting of its own existential parameters. ‘The sea heaves / in visionless anger over the cramped graves / and the early daffodil, purer than a soul, / is gathered into the terrible mouth of the gale’ (CP 2-3); where ‘Visionless anger’ picks up the ‘rage’ for alternative perception that echoes through the early poetry. In recognition of this continuing form of attention, the second of ‘Eight Songs For A New Ceilidh’ acknowledges that ‘it was the fine bareness of Lewis that made the work of my mind like a loom full of the music of the miracles and greatness of our time’ (CP 180). [ICS] It’s an interesting thing as far as Gaelic poetry is concerned, this century, that most of it has come from the Protestant islands to the North. And I associate Lewis with an austerity both in religion and in landscape which acts as a kind of honing for what I’m doing. It’s almost as if in these islands to the North, you have to fight, in a way, to create poetry.

Calvin held it a divine decree that some are predestined to immortal life and others foreordained to everlasting death, no matter how well or badly they live their lives. Only a small proportion of believers are chosen for eternal grace (the rest being damned); and it is impossible for those who have been granted the grace of election to lose it, as it is unattainable for those who are denied. But since God’s arbitrary decree is secret and inscrutable, all those looking to be saved must live godly lives in the hope of being included among the elective elite. Across Smith’s output the unyielding dichotomy of Calvinism’s election to eternal bliss for the few and damnation for the rest generates a plural and pluralizing invention of dualisms that habitually dissipate the awesome and possessive power of privileged theological codes by adapting their biblical phrasing to secularising rhythms. The permissive alternatives

Fivefathers  45 thus constituted that are often initially figured as opposing binaries: Thistles and Roses (1961), Bìobhuill is Sanasan Reice [Bibles and Advertisements] (1965), The Law and the Grace (1965), Eadar Fealla-dha is Glaschu [Between Comedy and Glasgow] (1974), Ends and Beginnings (1994), The Leaf and the Marble (1998). But in Smith’s handling these pairings typically migrate, intersect and reconfigure each other. ‘Stiff and squat’ Presbyterians are seen as ice-cold and rigid: emblems of sombre Sundays, with their hard black hats that bite into their brows. They are a frieze against a pulsing landscape, against a sky of free and moving cloud.

From its title on, ‘Young Girl’ celebrates the intrusion of gaiety into the world of puritan rancour: Will you speak disparagingly of the diamond because of its glitter or the sea because of its radiance? There is a white ship among the boats and among the black hats there is a crown. (CP 175)

Alert to the difficulty of penetrating closed minds or of dislocating closed systems, but concerned nonetheless to examine his own prejudices, Smith couldn’t remember a time when he wasn’t actively opposed to the Presbyterianism in which he grew up. [ICS] My mother was very Free Church, but I think I must have rebelled against that very early, though I certainly did go to Sunday school, I remember, when I was young. In fact I don’t think I was ever in Church on Lewis.

Talking about the individual damage that fundamentalism inflicts brought to mind an episode after he had moved to Oban, and went to see a film the local minister had shown mid-week in the church hall. [ICS] My mother was talking to another old woman later that night, who was saying ‘That was a terrible thing there,’ and I thought they were talking about the starving millions of India which had been the subject of the film. But they were talking about the fact that the minister had put the film on in the church hall. The 

Iain Crichton Smith, Selected Poems 1955–80 (Edinburgh: MacDonald, 1981), p. 189. Hereafter SP.

Fivefathers  46 starving millions had made no impression on them at all. I thought again, ‘My God, if there’s a religion that can create that kind of effect in people then there must be something definitely wrong with it.’ And I feel this about the Calvinist religion and the Free Church in whose ambience I grew up: that the kind of God in which they believe is the kind of God, to put it bluntly, I would find abhorrent if he were a human being.

These feelings crystallise in the corrosive ironies of ‘The Iolaire’ (CP 237–8), which enters the mind of a Presbyterian minister to see how he might cope with the wreck on Lewis in 1919 of a ship in which over two hundred returning war veterans perished. [ICS] This brought me face to face with the adequacy or otherwise of art. In that part of the world there has always been a cleavage, given the kind of church we have, between art and religion, where art is condemned as a species of vanity. I think there’s always deep within me a dark signal saying that art isn’t enough, that there must be something greater. At times I feel that what I’m doing is important, and at others that it’s vanity. That’s why I keep fighting against religion. I simply couldn’t imagine a God who, if he could control anything at all, would allow two hundred people to be drowned on their own island on New Year’s morning after they’d spent four years in the war.

Smith’s rejection of ideological closure whether religiously or politically generated runs line a vein of fire through his work; yet ‘At the Sale’ suggests a different order of feeling, including respect for conviction and determination: How much goes out of fashion and how soon!    The double-columned leather-covered tomes   recalls those praying Covenanters still adamant against Rome’s  adamant empire. (CP 70)

So his fascination with Presbyterian rigour can include admiration as well as refusal. [ICS] For a long time I was ambivalent about the Free Church and about people like the Covenanters: that on the one hand there was something inhuman about it; on the other that it was attractive to an adolescent that there were people who knew exactly where they stood. It’s not at all like our society, which is more like

Fivefathers  47 Hamlet’s society in many ways, in that we don’t really know what to believe. I think there’s always been that slight ambivalence. That was great courage to have stayed as true to truth as men can stay. From them we learn how certain truths can make men brutish too: how few can watch the bared teeth slow-burn and not be touched by the lumps of fire they chew into contempt and barrenness. (CP 21)

An ambivalent structure of feeling relates in turn to Crichton Smith’s complicated relationship with his forcefully religious mother, and also the old women who figure in his verse. The ‘Old Highland Lady Reading Newspaper’ is seen drawing judgemental satisfaction from the obituary columns that confirm her surviving isolation: ‘bent over print and old remorseless hands / grasping these deaths, the tombstones all in white / her eyes traverse with gritty appetite / in the slow justice of her mouth’s small sounds’ (CP 49). ‘Face of an Old Highland Woman’ sets the tone for this aspect of his writing, identifying enduring religious personality with an uncompromising geography: There’s no grace of any Renaissance on the skin but rocks slowly thrust through earth a map with the wind going over stone beyond the mercies of Nazareth. Here is the God of fist and bone a complex twisted Testament two eyes like lochs staring up from heather guarded by a bare wind beyond the art and dance of Europe. (CP 52)

Though they live an often joyless and harsh existence, these women also figure an impressive if unsettling strength. Had the source for these images been his mother? [ICS] Yes. And the puritanical, Calvinist women I met when I was in Lewis. I realised, talking to these women, that they were much stronger than men. On the other hand, I never heard my mother say she was sorry for anything. I don’t think I’ve heard any of these women say they were sorry for anything. Because of this Calvinistic strength, they knew that they were right. So I felt a kind of stubbornness

Fivefathers  48 in them, and at the same time this feeling that they would go on to the end, that it would take an enormous amount to shift them. I remember the kind of feeling I had talking to my mother, from the conflict between the strength of her religion as opposed to my own atheist ideas. I was always struck by these two things: the strength that could derive from a real belief in an ideology, and at the same time an unreasoning stubbornness. Your set mouth forgives no-one, not even God’s justice perpetually drowning law with grace. (CP 47)

Like black hats, bibles recur in this writing. But whereas the black hats invariably signify a shadow cast across natural potential—‘black hats darkly sailing on a sea of roses’ (CP 178)—bibles can register in different ways. They can and do invoke the tyranny of life-denying prescription, ‘where the black bibles / are walls of granite, / where the heads are bowed / over eternal fire’ (CP 289). ‘Farewell To My Brother’ similarly recalls how ‘the Bible was a hard wall / which we climbed over / to touch the consolations of the heart’ (CP 336). But when the poetry connects bibles with natural phenomena, a transfigured text and alternative possibilities are registered. ‘To An Old Woman’ conjures memories of her wedding-day: You remember other days, a sermon as direct as a bullet a summer pouring around a church, a gold ring and the testimony of roses opening summer like a new Bible in your memory. (CP 177) [ICS] I think what has happened to me is that the religion which I intellectually object to has become internalised in some deep sense, so that I use a symbolism which is imbued with it; which is a difficult situation. So even though I am intellectually against religion, I still find that my poetry is penetrated by symbolism from the Bible.

Smith’s promotion of secular values is reinforced by references to Glasgow that are sometimes coded as soccer rivalry—‘Divided city of the green and blue’ (CP 133) — between the religiously identified teams of Rangers and Celtic, or in the colours which identify a Catholicism of Irish provenance and its rival Presbyterian associations. ‘Orpheus’ ends with the recognition that this is the place that Orpheus must continue to love ‘not as in a dream / but on this smoky field of green and orange’ (CP 170).

Fivefathers  49 [ICS] At times I think of Glasgow as being a theatre for warfare between the two religions. My position now simply is that I’m beginning to think of religion as having caused more damage than it’s worth, and that religious dogma probably has been the single most damaging thing that civilisation has created.

These perceptions find a natural corollary in Smith’s suspicion of history. [ICS] Well, I’ve often been ambivalent about history, too, because I feel that sometimes history can be used simply as a metaphor, and that is too easy. What many people do, if they are not inside a particular culture, is choose certain facts out of an enormous number of facts and put them together in a historical fashion. And Scotland has suffered from bad history of this kind. But what I like to think about is a kind of history lived on the bone rather than an intellectual construction, which is why I think that poets and writers are better historians, often, than the professionals, though of course we need both.

A response like that helps to account for the poem ‘Lenin’ (written with MacDiarmid’s celebrations in mind), where Smith’s awareness of iron in the soul as a Calvinist attribute makes comparison between a dogmatic politics and regimental religion inescapable. Against the ideological self-deception that is contingent on the exclusion of difference, the poem suggests instead that it is ‘Simple to condemn / the unsymmetrical, simple to condone / that which oneself is not’. [ICS] I think what happens is that if one imagines a whole range of what might be possible, then ideology in this sense cuts off certain elements and casts them away because they won’t fit. And there is something here that is antipathetic to poetry. There’s not enough raggedness left of all our powers.

Where ‘the true dialectic is to turn in the infinitely complex’, the poem prefers continuous movement ‘into the endlessly various, real, human, / world which is no new era, shining dawn’ (SP 32). In a related movement, ‘Next Time’ concludes its address to Ulysses with an injunction to: ‘let the tapestry be unfinished / as truthful fiction is’ (CP 227). One of Smith’s strategies for loosening the grip of dogma is a metaphoric merging of the unlike, where terms of similitude collide with those of diversity. In this writing, ‘the hare shakes like a lily’ (CP 197), ‘Weasels quiver like the northern lights’ (SP 75), ‘This April day shakes memories in a shade’ (CP 132), and in ‘The Departing Island’ we read:

Fivefathers  50 Strange how it’s like a dream when two waves passed, and the engine’s hum puts villages out of mind or shakes them together in a waving fashion. (CP 60)

Because bible-based fundamentalism appropriates to itself all pathways to self-discovery and all systems of transformation, Smith worked from the beginning to develop an answerable configuration through what has been called an ‘almost visionary existentialism’ in a poetry of fighting tensions rather than of statement. Where in his fiction he normally preferred a limpid and undemanding empirical style of representation, the verse stretches language to generate effects where the mind races to establish connection and relationship in a struggle for elusive meaning. Robin Fulton noted that a characteristic effect in Smith’s poetry derives from his ‘individual and at times idiosyncratic manner of juxtaposing images’, and the verse is repeatedly drawn towards the kind of experimental correspondence that deconstructs prescriptive clarity in favour of secular possibility: as deer so stand, precarious, of a style, half-here, half-there, a half-way lustre breaking […] like daring thoughts, half-in, half-out this world, as a lake might open, and a god peer into a room where failing darkness glows. (CP 40–1)

‘Deer on the High Hills’, then, prefers the kind of connection and signifying process that can ‘let its leaps be unpredictable’ (CP 38). [ICS] I actually think that the best poetry happens when two or three things come together which one would normally think of as being totally unrelated. I used to read an enormous amount of Kierkegaard, who talks about the leap of faith that one has to make whether in theology or in religious life and there’s something akin to that in the creation of poetry; a joining together of things which aren’t normally joined together. Scientists do this too. It’s the kind of leap that changes something at deep levels, so that we can start thinking in a new way.

Thinking in a new way is always challenging, as Crichton Smith acknowledges.  

Roderick Watson, ‘Internationalising Scottish Poetry’, The History of Scottish Literature, ed. Cairns Craig, (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1987), vol. 4, 328. Robin Fulton, Contemporary Scottish Poetry: Individuals and Contexts (Edinburgh: MacDonald, 1974), p.43.

Fivefathers  51 [ICS] I must confess at the beginning that there are areas of ‘Deer on the High Hills’ I don’t understand! What came out of the poem in the end was the distance between us and the animal kingdom. It concerns how, in relation to animal nature, we are a Hamlet-ish, divided people; and also I link it up with ‘Ben Dorain’ and the strangeness of the deer in that poem. But I began the poem by linking the deer with nobility dancing on a ballroom floor. You can see this connection— the ballroom floor is the icy road on which I actually saw the deer one night coming back from Oban. And there’s something aristocratic about deer, as many people agree, though I don’t know what it is.

We had been talking about Crichton Smith’s admiration for ‘The Waste Land’, and I thought there might be a technical connection between Eliot’s poem and ‘Deer on the High Hills’. [ICS] What Eliot taught me was the way in which you can get a logic of images. In the nineteenth century we get a logic of narrative, things like ‘The Lady of Shallot’, and in Browning to a great extent. But Eliot taught us that you can get a logic of imagery which is in a sense pure poetry. Also, ‘The Waste Land’ is a very extreme poem; I mean he pushes things to extremes. These are the two major things he taught me: his use of images and the extremism of his work. And perhaps ‘Deer on the High Hills’ is close to something of the nature of ‘The Waste Land’ in the sense that what I was doing was a kind of linkage of images. It’s a logic of images, really, and maybe that’s why it’s difficult, because in the way that deer leap about, you have to leap from image to image in order to keep yourself inside the poem.

In a different direction, one of the changes rung on Crichton Smith’s rhythms is the sense of failing Classical values. The elegy ‘For John MacLean, Headmaster, and Classical and Gaelic Scholar’ is the fullest statement of this theme, but elsewhere there are lines and linkages that suggest how powerful, if ambiguous, was the attraction of Classical literature generally, and of Roman virtue in particular. Watching the last hours of ‘Old Woman’ as, helplessly dependent on her aged husband, ‘she munched, half dead, blindly searching the spoon’, the speaker is drawn to that older civilisation, and to what he perceives as its characteristic temper and attitude: There I sat imprisoned in my pity and my shame that men and women having suffered time should sit in such a place, in such a state

Fivefathers  52 and wished to be away, yes, far away with athletes, heroes, Greeks or Roman men who pushed their bitter spears into a vein and would not spend an hour with such decay. (CP 19)

Looking forward more directly to the John MacLean elegy, ‘Mr M.’ regrets the passing of a once shared and sustaining system of values: the order’s broken. We visit its old stones, dishonoured consuls visiting Hades (green fields and ponderous doors) but there are only ghosts there now. We clutch your ghostly gown like Orpheus clutching at Eurydice while Pluto giggles on iron coins. (CP 96) [ICS] This was a period— it’s a number of years ago now, but I remember feeling it, when I actually felt that the Graeco-Roman world was more rational than ours. I set against this civilisation the neon lights of the twentieth century, and I felt that we were entering a period when we would have no knowledge of history, no sense of this Graeco-Roman world, and this seemed to me to be tragic. John MacLean was a representative of what I thought of as Roman values, but Roman values which were at the same time humane, because he exercised what you might call a beneficent control over the school. He wasn’t intolerant; he knew every pupil by name, and he had these tremendous personal virtues which I responded to. I felt that it must to a certain degree be on account of his classical training, that he had this sense of benign order. I’m attracted to order, but I like to work between this sense of order and a sense of creative disorder. In my earlier work, quite often, the order of the metre is in tension with what I call the inspiration or the grace which operates inside the metre. I sway between these two ideas quite a lot.

Classical influences feed back into his own experience of growing up on Lewis, giving depth and definition to feelings of opposing kinds. [ICS] One of the things that interest me, and it comes up time and time again is the clash between Dido and Aeneas. I do link this up with my background.

He is amused by his perception of Aeneas as ‘a kind of Free-Churcher’ who turns his

Fivefathers  53 back on normal, human desires in order to create Rome, and laughs aloud at the idea of a Free-Churcher creating Rome; but Smith holds on to the connection. [ICS] What I mean is that there is a kind of asceticism in Aeneas, and this clash between the erotic and the authoritarian has always interested me in writing. It appears in my own work, perhaps, in the clash between form and what I call grace or inspiration. So these things are linked in my imagination, and the Classics are real to me, perfectly real, because I see so many things going on in the Classical world going on now; authoritarianism is only one example. I find the position of Virgil himself interesting because he seems to me to be a very vulnerable poet who at the same time is creating an image of an authoritarian Rome. Coming from the island that I come from, things like authority and freedom are important to my imagination. Tender Virgil, dead in Mantua, in the ice of perfection, this is not your land, you, exquisite saint of the compassionate metre, sleep elsewhere. [...] From Italy you come to our sky. It is like shifting from a warm flat to a lonely castle hissing with ghosts. (CP 304)

These lines from ‘The Village’ bring us from the envied warmth of Mediterranean culture to the image of a lonely individual that connects with the figure of Hamlet who stalks Crichton Smith’s poetry. [ICS] The fascination is with him partly as a poet but also as a representative of the kind of person who, when he is confronted with power, cannot bring himself, because he is divided, to destroy that power which he knows to be evil. I think that this permeates not just the play, but social reality itself. I suppose, too, it is the contrast between someone who can only think, and another kind of person, like

Fivefathers  54 Claudius, who fascinates me because he doesn’t have this cleavage at all. The crux is how one can be intelligent enough to wield that kind of state power and yet appear to have no doubts. Now I find a personality like that alien and incomprehensible. And there are so many of them on the world’s stage, of whom Claudius is a prime example—running their countries pretty thoroughly as he does.

The poem ‘Hamlet’ develops an organising metaphor out of mirrors: Sick of the place, he turned him towards night. The mirrors flashed distorted images of himself in court dress, with big bulbous eyes, and curtain swaying in a greenish light. […] I see in the warped mirrors rapiers shake their subtle poisons perfuming the hall reflecting accidents, a circus merely, a place of mirrors, an absurd conclusion. Images bounce madly against reason as, in a spoon, wide pictures, fat and jolly. (CP 66)

Given the symbolic omnipresence of Smith’s ‘permanent island’, it is interesting that similar imagery recurs in ‘The Notebooks of Robinson Crusoe’, where poem 33 concludes: I shall leave my bare island, simple as poison, to enter the equally poisonous world of Tiberius, where there are echoes and reflections, a Hall of Mirrors in which my face like all faces swells like a jester’s in a world without sense. (SP 211)

Hamlet’s conscience-stricken isolation in the court at Elsinore and Smith’s troubled separation from Lewis and its artistically unsustaining community begin to come together. In his essay ‘Real People in a Real Place’ he writes: When one is in harmony with the community then one’s identity is reflected back from the others by a plain mirror and not by the exaggerating or attenuating mirrors that one sees in fairs. To be in the community is to be in a home of which one’s real home is a microcosm: thus it is that when one goes out into the wide world one comes back to receive the admiration of the community if one does well. (TH 24)

Fivefathers  55 While Shakespeare sets his play in a remote pre-Christian past when England was a tributary of the Danish crown (an historical irony unlikely to be lost on a Scottish poet), its first scene establishes Christian parameters with Marcellus’ reference to the season ‘Wherein our Saviour’s birth is celebrated’ (1,i, l.160). Then, Hamlet and Horatio are students at a university renowned for a particular kind of theology. They have been studying together at Wittenberg on whose Castle Church doors in 1517 Luther nailed his ‘95 Theses’. Wittenberg, John Dover Wilson reminds us, was ‘the very cradle of the Reformation. [Hamlet and Horatio] are in fact Protestants, and the point has no small bearing upon our interpretation of the play’. The point considerably complicates the figure Hamlet makes for a poet whose attitudes to subsequent and specifically Highland developments of the Reformation are pervasively critical. Wracked by doubt and riven by guilt because of that, Shakespeare’s young Dane is haunted as much by the continued existence of Claudius as he is by the ghost of his murdered father. Murderous fathers will resonate for a Gael who must live with the historical memory of a people betrayed by clan chieftains who saw profit in the Clearances and who continue to exercise power in the land. ‘That’s why Hamlet always talks of death. / Beyond the ruffs and doublets he saw it clear’ (SP 150). Smith’s perception of Hamlet as a figure divided against himself illuminates his own sense of self-division, guilt-stricken as he became by the fact that although he did not learn English until the age of five when he went to school, he wrote more in English than he did in Gaelic. In this respect, Hamlet’s unwilling involvement in systems of power resonates in Smith’s present. [ICS] I really am in a very anomalous position. In ‘Light to Light’ I say: Here in Argyllshire Scotland was begun where the green light was nourished by monks in their careful cells their illuminated manuscripts. (SP 104) I’m saying that this is where Gaelic first came to and yet it’s written in English. So it’s a very complex relationship which goes back, I suppose, to my childhood. I started off by knowing Gaelic and speaking Gaelic: then I went to school and I learned English. So I was speaking Gaelic in the house and English in the school, but Gaelic in the playground. Then I went to the Nicolson Institute [the second

John Dover Wilson, What Happens in Hamlet? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951), p. 68

Fivefathers  56 ary school serving the Island of Lewis] and was speaking English in the school and coming back at night and speaking Gaelic in the home. My first poem was in Gaelic, and I’ve written a fair amount since in Gaelic. But not so much as I used to. It’s by no means a straightforward matter.

His translation into English of ‘Shall Gaelic Die?’ rehearses rhetorically the cultural/ linguistic erasure it fears: ‘He who loses his language loses his world. The Highlander who loses his language loses his world.’ The poem adapts the image of the fool’s motley: ‘When the Highlands loses its language, will there be a Highlands, / said I, with my two coats, losing, perhaps, the two’ (CP 106); and asks with edgy irony, ‘In what language would you say, “Fhuair a’ Ghaidhlig bas?”’ The Gaelic phrase translates as ‘Gaelic is dead’ (CP 107). It is at least understandable that Smith might at times feel acutely the threat posed by dominant cultures to numerically tiny neighbours, and in an essay with things to say about postcolonial conditions of writing, he worries about selves dying as their language use dies. He delivers this possibility in terms of an existing community; real people in a real place speaking their selfhood and community in a language that constructs their self-identifying present. Smith’s themes of cultural and personal displacement include a related postcolonial awareness that the English discourses still actively seeking global acceptance when he was at school and which at that time still effectively valorised far-flung and varied holdings were soon losing their magisterial grip. A hitherto secure possession and practice of preferred imperial codes, including programmes of reading with their associated tactics of interpretations and response, becomes itself subject to a slippage when once dominant educational valences exhibit symptoms of decline and fall. As a British empire loses purchase American power rises and its colonizing energies still presuppose an Anglophone priority against which any small island must seem powerless. Smith left to test an existential alterity: for remaining villagers dispirited by a passage of years that has ‘taught them how to lose, not win’, an evening ‘Ceilidh’ of Gaelic song and story stirs a surviving folk culture that proves to be of limited value and use since the need it satisfies confirms nostalgia as a mark of inner exile. Local participants are reduced to collective indulgence in what the poem calls ‘a late communion of the dispossessed’. When these villagers go home, it is to ‘real glens and hills / depleted townships’ of a harsher, unvarnished actuality (CP 202–3). So when, despite his long-ago island departure, Smith writes ‘I am tied to the Highlands. That 

Ceilidh is a Gaelic word that has passed into wider Scottish usage and signifies either an informal social gathering among neighbours, with or without singing, playing instruments, story-telling etc, spontaneously performed by some or all of those present.

Fivefathers  57 is where I learned my wound’ (CP 181), ‘learned’ arrests the attention for a wound inflicted over time. It is evident—and ‘The Clearances’ is emphatic—that the wound is historically delivered: The thistles climb the thatch. Forever this sharp scale in our poems, as also the waste music of the sea. The stars shine over Sutherland in a cold ceilidh of their own, as, in the morning, the silver cane cropped among corn. We will remember this. (CP 52)

But a double man riddled with guilt at his use of English also articulates both betrayal and deliverance, to deliver on occasion classic symptoms of alienation: It is bitter to be an exile in one’s own land, It is bitter to walk among strangers when the strangers are in one’s own land. It is bitter to dip a pen into continuous water to write poems of exile in a verse without honour or style. (CP 159)

A self-aware participation in globally connecting systems of cultural power complicates native senses of origin and identity: ‘The complexities are enormous, mindbreaking,’ Smith has commented. ‘Only those who have lived through or are living through them can fully understand them. And it is not even a question of understanding it, it is a question of feeling them on the pulse’ (DM 140). This wound was after all love and a deep curse. (SP 88)

Norman MacCaig: Such Clarity of Seeming When I interviewed MacCaig he was seventynine and still busy fulfilling a diary of reading engagements, many under the auspices of the Scottish Arts Council’s ‘Writers in Public’ scheme, others informally set up; but all of them playing to capacity audiences. He was, he said, ‘looking forward to retiring from retirement.’ He worked hard for the accessibility he achieves, and as far as his scrupulous attention to natural ecology is concerned MacCaig seems at first blush happy to obey Classical injunction and give instructive pleasure. Poetry-goers in droves were happy for him to do it. He had a sense of humour that ranged from the sharp to the hilarious, and an attractive speaking voice that managed to sound dry and juicy at the same time. Audiences found it easy to give his poetry their undivided attention partly because of its inexhaustible ability to strike off utterances that connect directly with and extend their own recognitions and perceptions of customary life and the world about them. The pleasure he gives is evidenced by the readership he earned; but time’s chariot and the grim reaper are never far away in this writing. If celebration of being in the world is pervasive, the figure made by death and its associated ghosts as they flit through MacCaig’s pages is omnipresent. Since the entertainment he offers is haunted by transience, for MacCaig the beauty of what passes is sufficient unto the day. Whether he’s noticing a farmyard hen who ‘stares at nothing with one eye, / Then picks it up’; recalling ‘an invisible drone’ that ‘boomed by / With a beetle in it’ (P 72); drawing our attention to a goat ‘with amber 

Ewan McCaig, ed., The Poems of Norman MacCaig (Edinburgh: Polygon, 2005), p. 34. Hereafter P.

Fivefathers  59 dumb-bells in his eyes’ (P 74), or to male pigeons seen as ‘wobbling gyroscopes of lust’ (P 238); smiling as a cock struts past, because ‘one can almost see / the tiny set of bagpipes / he’s sure he’s playing’ (P 328); or that ‘With too much leg and not enough wing / the daddylonglegs helicopters / about the room’ (P 340), MacCaig invites us into the minutiae of life, refining our senses of identification and suggesting correspondences. When his Collected Poems came out in 1990 it became that rare thing a poetry best-seller. In 2005 his son Ewan edited The Poems of Norman MacCaig, including 101 previously unpublished works. Because it provides MacCaig’s dating for each poem, that is the collection usually referenced here. * MacCaig’s own world and time is initially defined by Edinburgh, where he lived all his life. He grew up in Dundas Street, living in a top flat above the chemist shop his father owned, and remembers moving house when he was still at school. [NM] ‘Straight across the road to another top flat. And later we moved to Howard Place, opposite the Botanic Gardens. I think by that time I was at the University.’ That was in 1928, and MacCaig read Classics. He went on to spend a year at the city’s Moray House College of Education, training to be the primary-school teacher he remained for thirty-four years. He had wanted to be a schoolteacher for as far back as he could remember, and discovered early that he was also going to be a poet. [NM] I got interested at school, of course, because the teacher, Puggy Grant, asked us either to write a composition or a poem by next Wednesday. And, with my sturdy Scottish pragmatism, I thought to myself—well, a poem’s shorter. So I wrote my first poem then— got interested and started writing, writing, writing.

Notoriously, it was while MacCaig was serving briefly in the army during the Second World War, that his first book of poems Far cry (1943) was published, a book that like his second more substantial volume The Inward Eye (1946), he later wished had never seen the light of day. [NM] A collection of terrible poems—semi-surrealistic. I have a phrase for them: every poem is a ‘vomitorium of unrelated images’—which nobody could understand. Routledge and Kegan Paul published them during the war. A friend of mine asked to see this terrible book, and when he gave it back he said the only thing about them that was ever of any use to me, spoken or written. He said ‘There’s

Fivefathers  60 your book, Norman, when are you publishing the answers?’ And I came to what was left of my senses: struggled on my hands and knees along the rocky road to lucidity and comprehensibility—which took me a good few years. Any fool can be obscure, but to be lucid is hellish difficult.

MacCaig had contributed four poems to the first Apocalypse anthology in 1939, and nine to the second in 1941, all of which qualify as obscure: The innumerable banks of my river-sword turned in a horse’s bridle until the clouds with a final plunge left the hut of sea-weed and shook up a parachute of little spray. Under it a rainbow spun and burned, crucifying saints in the blue glory of their rich and anointed blood.

Whatever is happening here does not constitute successful transmission of meaning. In their first anthology Henry Treece claimed that Apocalypse writers sought to address ‘the problem of how to write organically’; a project in which myth considered as a living expression of human need was important ‘both psychologically and pathologically for the reintegration of the personality’. Myth embodied ‘a projection of the self [...] into the world at large’ (p. 9). In the second anthology G. S. Fraser suggested that Apocalypticism was a development out of Surrealism and ‘a life movement’ which ‘asks for freedom for man, as a complete living organism’ (p. 3). If the linguistic forcing-house of Far cry makes comprehensibility a hit and miss affair, we do sense a homesick wartime conscript Scot in Devon: ‘Winter my summer is in this dull winter / and snow winds blow a black and gurgling chanter / through the dull sighing of this southern wind’. I asked about the circumstances and was treated to a digression about MacCaig’s imprisonment in Edinburgh Castle. [NM] I was a conscientious objector, and when I was called up, I was supposed to go to Ilfracombe to a unit in the Pioneer Corps. I wrote to the head chap and said ‘I’m not coming, but if you want me I’m generally in by midnight.’ And eventually I was collected—was after midnight—by a couple of policemen who stuck me in a local gaol near the house. The next day or so, a corporal and private came and  

the new apocalypse: an anthology of criticism, poems and stories, by Dorian Cooke, J. F. Hendry, N. McCaig [and others] (London: Routledge, 1939); J. F. Hendry and Henry Treece, eds., the white horseman: prose and verse of the new apocalypse (London: Routledge, 1941). the white horseman , p. 84

Fivefathers  61 bundled me off to the Castle, where I was imprisoned. At the Tribunal I had made it clear that I was willing to join the Royal Army Medical Corps, but that I wasn’t going to kill anyone. Some time after our arrival at Ilfracombe, they put us on a job in a tank depot. I don’t know what we were supposed to do there because I refused to go. And I was court-martialled. In Aldershot no less. And they were very fair. I was drummed out of the army with contumely.

MacCaig’s rejection of his first attempts at writing may have as much to do with the self-disclosure they sometimes deliver as with any sense that their language is systematically deficient. On his own evidence he was treated decently both before and after his court-martial for refusing to work on killing machines; which is not the posture assumed in the first poem of Far cry: Where can courage sound for me its appealing and gentle voice, who visit the dismal courts thumbed by a grimy king and snivelling courtiers whose voices echo emptiness, only the emptiness bred inside them by a destruction of vision[.] (3)

As part of his refusal of the abstract vision of ‘man’ whose unconscious levels Apocalyptic writing sought directly to tap, MacCaig destroyed all trace of his own copies. He was to learn that focusing on specific real world sightings is more likely to bring clarity into play. It was an Apocalyptic priority to personalize myth and legend as lived experience and so internalize their expanded horizons as part of the structure of everyday life. But there was little of the everyday in the hectic and elliptical rhetoric adopted to analogize effects in the unconscious. There are, though, gleamings of things to come in ‘Season of Honour’ from The Inward Eye; notably dissent from the wartime mobilization of biblical figures for propaganda purposes: ‘And do they now sing only, who can carry / Michael and Lucifer on a hackle’s point / to shine as frost, or as the sun be fiery?’ (11). The speaker of ‘Double Time’ similarly subverts the partisan use of epic scale to celebrate heroic combat: ‘how can eyes remember, / being so haunted, in the noose of war / to find in the yelling enemy a goddess / or a god’s hand behind the deceiving spear’ (15). A further difficulty MacCaig had to face down in his search for a fit mode of delivery arose from the fact that he does not write in Scots—a matter of some concern during the 1940s and fifties when the priority for verse in Scots was a public argument that caused dissention and division. Still writing as McCaig he had a poem

Fivefathers  62 called ‘Spinning Minnow’ published in the second issue of Poetry Scotland (1945), alongside Hugh MacDiarmid, Sorley MacLean, Sydney Goodsir Smith and others. Also included was J. F. Hendry’s essay ‘The Apocalyptic Element in Modern Poetry’, which argued that ‘the collapse of old forms and the emergence of new, more organic ones’ is necessary if writers are to describe ‘the liberation of feelings that are breaking down the old social fabric’ (p. 62). Because ‘man’s problems are fundamentally psychological,’ it follows that ‘social palliatives are useless until the psychological factors are treated correctly’ (p. 63). The several Scottish writers who had identified themselves with the movement were therefore concerned with a ‘pure, spontaneous response, as the aim of Society, [rather] than with creeds and shibboleths’: Nowhere is the struggle keener than in Scotland, between individual and society: man and mechanistic environment: liberty and regimentation. From the Religious Wars until the Class Wars Scotland has nourished in her soul an apparently insoluble conflict, yet one that has to be solved if she is to achieve her Identity in the Company of Nations. (p. 65)

If MacCaig nourished a hope that Poetry Scotland might provide a platform for Apocalyptic spontaneity as a way of bringing the unconscious into expression he was to be disappointed. In the pages that followed Hendry’s essay, Hugh MacDiarmid’s review of ‘Six Poets of Today and Tomorrow’ quoted liberally from M. Georges Lemaitre’s 1941 study From Cubism to Surrealism in French Literature to launch an attack on the Apocalyptic desire ‘to achieve an intense and intimate communion between the human personality and the essence of the universe’ as ‘more apt to achieve a grotesque and dismaying incoherence’ (p. 68). He was surely right. None of MacCaig’s poems were included in the third and final Apocalypse anthology The Crown and the Sickle (1945), but a year later Maurice Lindsay put three from The Inward Eye into Modern Scottish Poetry, a collection he subtitled An Anthology of the Scottish Renaissance 1920–1945. Then, MacCaig’s poem ‘Come Live With Me’ was included in Poetry Scotland’s fourth and final issue (1949), guest-edited by MacDiarmid. But whatever possibility of alliance, combination of energies or new directions Apocalyptic writers or MacCaig were looking for was firmly scotched. Under MacDiarmid’s stewardship, Lindsay declared Poetry Scotland to be ‘an organ of the Scottish Renaissance Movement, and the Scottish Renaissance aims at reviving the Scots and Gaelic cultures’: The Apocalyptic poets are the most obvious absentees, but whatever may be the

Fivefathers  63 value of their work to English, it is hardly concerned with the revival and restoration of our national traditions, and so would be out of place here. (1)

MacCaig might well have felt marooned. At a time when cultural self-definition was for some an embattled and defensive positioning, he could not help but be aware of his own difference as ineradicably Scottish and so part of the contemporary debate—if uncomfortably so because of the way he wrote in English. But he overcame whatever isolation he felt to the extent that he became identified with the revival that had seemingly rejected and then selectively included him, and a close friend of its leading practitioners. ‘He is almost the only fellow-writer I know now in Scotland’, MacDiarmid later recalled, ‘with whom I can have a really serious discussion on literary, and other artistic, matters. [...]Norman, Sydney [Goodsir Smith], and I may not resemble the Three Musketeers in the least, but we make an excellent trio—all the more probably because our work is so utterly different from each other’s.’ I asked MacCaig about his feelings for Scots. [NM] I love the Scots Language. My father lived in Dumfries until he was eighteen, and no doubt spoke rich Scots in those days. So that the Scots language does not in any way feel alien to me, not a bit. On the other hand, I’ve lived all my days in Edinburgh, and I talk English—did at school. 99% of what I read is in English. English is my language. And if Edwin Muir was right when he claimed, I think stupidly, that no Scot could write good poetry in English because he is not using his ancestral language—why then my ancestral language genetically is Gaelic, not Scots at all, except that wee bit through my father. So if there’s any truth whatever in ‘the language of the blood,’ then mine is Gaelic, which I can’t even speak! No, English is my language, just as it is the language of almost all Scots people these days. The number of people who speak a rich Scots—Oh you’ll get them in Aberdeenshire, but hardly anywhere else.

Apart from the work he had produced by this time, the strength in MacCaig’s selfidentification derived additionally from the fact that he spoke English with a timbre that immediately identified his Scottishness. The distance and difference between his first poems and what we now recognize as MacCaig’s style is a measure of his self-reconstruction. But ‘Double Time’ had asked ‘how can eyes remember’, and formulating ways of recording what eyes perceive fairly describes the project of many of his subsequent poems. Henry Treece had 

Hugh MacDiarmid, The Company I’ve kept (London: Hutchinson, 1966), p. 235-6.

Fivefathers  64 usefully suggested that the self is ‘a travelling point of intersections,’ and perhaps MacCaig took differently to heart Treece’s recognition that ‘each man has his own space, his own orientation, which must be encouraged or adapted if we are to attain the whole man we are seeking.’ Whereas disclosure of how myth is constructed and politically mobilized was an important part of the Apocalypse project, MacCaig would use instead rational syntax to subject myth, legend and antiquity—and his own orientation towards them—to very different kinds of scrutiny. Learning to do that was a difficult challenge and it was nine years before he published another collection. Whatever change of heart, mind and technique he underwent, it was clear that with Riding Lights (1955) MacCaig at the age of forty-five had effected a remarkable make-over and found a viable voice. His early failure may have been humiliating, but he certainly learned from it. His crucial turn away from abstract ‘man’, eschewing large themes, cod psychology and congested imagery, and into the realm of sensory cognition is self-conscious and already self-aware. A 1952 poem ‘Socrates’ celebrates the figure who ‘walked in his own clarity / That brought close to him what was lives away’ (P 33); and Socrates would serve as MacCaig’s guide, philosopher and friend in the reconstruction of a credible poetic identity. ‘Know thyself’ is perhaps the most famous aphorism attributed to Socrates, and MacCaig would henceforth centre and disclose a construing self at the heart of his writing. From Riding Lights onward the poetry generally avoids large-scale projections, concentrating instead on the sensuous detail of perception: the narrower the focus the better. ‘Rain on fence wire’ marks the shift in attention: What little violences shake The raindrop till it turns from apple To stretched-out pear, then drops and takes Its whirling rainbows to the ground? (P 92)

The Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky claimed that ‘the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged’. Perception signifies in English both ocular and mental activity and this becomes MacCaig’s imaginative dialectic: his existential ‘lust of looking’ (P 71) repeatedly extends its resonance through memorable definition. He combines imagist poetics with a Socratic procedure of surreptitiously connecting enquiry, response, enquiry, as a way of knowing the self in and  

the new apocalypse, p. 11 Viktor Shklovsky, ‘Art as Technique’, in Russian Formalist Criticism: Four essays, trans. L. T. Lemon & M. J. Reis (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965), p. 11.

Fivefathers  65 through its acts of looking and seeing. He would joke about being ‘metaphysical me’, and became compulsively drawn to complex interactions between personalized acts of looking, the material world perceived and their inseparability in linguistic articulation. The ‘I’ that examines the world becomes in consequence a repeatedly examined ‘I’. Yet MacCaig later agreed that ‘you could never call me a confessional poet’; adding ‘I think everybody has his rights to have his reticences’. Reticence was never an Apocalyptic priority. ‘But if one reads the Collected Poems with interest’, MacCaig continued, ‘I think you’d know an awful lot about me; indirectly, you know. Even verbal rhythms give shows away, never mind subject matter and treatment. I think that’s my autobiography really’. If Socrates suggested a possible way through to comprehensibility, MacCaig still needed a grammar of argument to structure his perceptions, a grammar removed as far as possible from Apocalyptic fervour. He found it partly in his affection for what are still called the ‘metaphysical’ poets, the great lyric writers of the seventeenth century. [NM] Oh well, I still have that; especially for John Donne. I love him for—well, he’s extraordinary. His technique alone is admirable, and the fantastic images and metaphors that he creates. And the straightforward almost prosy way in which he states them—only it’s not prose at all, it’s poetry. But he just speaks directly out, you know, very forthright in spite of his metaphors and images, because that’s the way he thought.

And MacCaig made direct use of this technique? [NM] Early on, I would agree, but not for a long time now. There’s one book of mine where two, maybe three poems would make somebody think, ‘Aye aye, MacCaig’s been reading Donne again.’ But that was a long time ago. ‘Poem for a Goodbye’ [P 50–1] that seems to me to be ‘Donneish.’

The ‘one book of mine’ to which MacCaig refers is his first acknowledged collection Riding Lights; though seventeenth-century conceitful thought is more generally congenial both in that book and across MacCaig’s output than his comment suggests. Donne’s creative logic and linguistic daring can produce reasoning effects aptly described as conversationally spectacular: that might appeal to a Scottish formalist looking for unconventional patterns of utterance suitable to his twentieth-century 

Isobel Murray, ed., Scottish Writers Talking 2 (East Lothian: Tuckwell, 2002), p. 110.

Fivefathers  66 contexts and requirements. A metaphorical yoking together of different ideas became a standard resource in MacCaig’s practice of lucidity, offering a way of organizing those surprising conjunctions that produce the ‘visual unexpectedness’ since identified as his ‘fingerprint or signature’. ‘End of a cold night’, a 1949 poem, generates this kind of unexpectedness out of a struck match, presumably to light the speaker’s cigarette: ‘A cock crows thinly and far away / — And a spell is broken; suddenly Time scratches / the hour on its box and up flares a new day’ (P 13). Once he recognized that his long term interest in prosody and rhyme had equipped him to use technique as exploration, MacCaig was set to develop a productive instrumentality out of the ground-breaking syntax of seventeenth-century practice. The surprising angles he engineers for real world perceptions relate to this form of attention: the interrogation of terms of similitude, and a probing fascination with the operation of metaphor in the construction and transmission of meaning mark out his modernity. MacDiarmid thought MacCaig ‘apolitical or anti-political’; but this was confounding party allegiance with personal orientation, and it neglected the politics of perception through which MacCaig registers his distinctively Scottish sensibility. There may, though, have been an anxiety of influence in MacCaig’s almost exclusive focus on the short lyric, given MacDiarmid’s commanding position in the production of longer poems. MacDiarmid had produced his golden lyrics (in Scots) in the 1920s, so MacCaig may have felt on safer ground by taking this tactical option. On the other hand, MacDiarmid was hostile to Surrealism; so it is well to remember that the purging of excrescence and the clarifying of his medium MacCaig put himself through in the interests of effective self-construction did not entail the wholesale abandonment of everything Surrealism had to offer, despite his emphatic claims to the contrary. ‘Out from a lecture’ in 1950—‘The High Street sits drinking his swirling punch / Of buses, fruitshops, mackintoshes, windows / And a sour alley to bring out the flavour’ (P 23)—makes sport of academic science in a quiet riot of precarious sense driven through seeming nonsense: the High Street we witness in its present tense activities is as surreal a representation as anyone could wish for. MacCaig often prefers a surreal stretching of relationship adapted to the unlikely combinations he admired in Donne; and the updated visual unexpectedness he thereby achieves also owes something to a modern movement he otherwise repudiated. Both his metrical finesse and the precision phrasing of his developed style— what he thought of as his distinguishing ‘personal rhythm’—became hallmarks of MacCaig’s craft (P. xlv). ‘I have a very good sense of verbal rhythms,’ he told Bob Tait 

Douglas Dunn, ‘”As a Man Sees ...” — On Norman MacCaig’s Poetry’, Verse 1990, vol. 7, no. 2, p. 55.

Fivefathers  67 and Isobel Murray by way of explanation, and associated this facility with a love of music which, he added, ‘to me is the great art, partly because it’s liberated from dictionaries of course.’ MacCaig’s radical suspicion of authority in any guise is written engagingly across his output, so his response to what he called ‘the bullying authority of the compulsively iambic nature of English’ was intuitive and possibly instinctive. He jealously guarded personal independence in matters of value and discrimination; but whereas individual autonomy is a crucial valorisation in the poetry, and before his later shift into free verse, MacCaig’s way of ‘breaking the neck of the iambic’, as he put it, was essentially adaptive. He experimented with deviant forms and played with scansion in order to ‘rescue [his] metrical lines from a rocking horse Humpty Dumpty by using off beat stresses but not so off beat that the ghostly paradigm of the iambic pentameter (for instance) was not to be noticed behind the frailer metrics I was using.’ He also makes use of ‘the ancient practice, publicized as “sprung rhythm” and often overdone by G. M. Hopkins, of taking liberties with the number of syllables in the foot but, again, still preserving the fundamental iambic movement of the line’ (P xliv); and was fascinated by syllabic music. His vowel and consonant patterning, and ‘all kinds of tricksy little nonsenses like that’, organize stanzaic forms that make frequent use of half-rhyme and assonance (Murray 108). Gregarious as he was, and committed as he became to a poetry of connections, MacCaig knew the separateness of the human condition. He was an avid angler who liked to feel on his fishing trips ‘that there’s nobody within five miles of me.[...] I love being in the hills on my own. And the country up in west Sutherland and Ross-shire is so beautiful. And I love landscape.’ Attention to landscape is a matter of perception, involving the gaze that situates every subject as well as its objects. So landscape is more a matter of what is seen than what is looked at, and MacCaig’s self-reflexive concern is to seize the day by dislocating and re-configuring our meaning-making practices. It is in this sense that he can joke: Landscape and I get on together well. Though I’m the talkative one, still he can tell His symptoms of being to me, the way a shell Murmurs of oceans. (P 294)

Few writers have written Scotland’s landscape so indelibly into the language; to the extent that for many years MacCaig’s autonomous relationship to his environment  

Scottish Writers Talking, p. 109. http://www.scoottishbookcollector.co.uk/writers/features-h-m/maccaig

Fivefathers  68 displaced the need for any formal political identification: My only country is six feet high and whether I love it or not I’ll die for its independence.

This, too, was an existential note already struck in Riding Lights. ‘Environment’, written in 1948, ends on a recognition that: My own self Is what surrounds me and it trembles With my own winter. I hang in ragged Branches and echo like these grassy cobbles. (P 10) [NM] Well, there was a time when existentialism was a kind of craze-cult, and I read some existentialist books at that time. The only philosopher I read with any interest was Kierkegaard, who really was a kind of founder of existentialism.

He may be having fun with Jean-Paul Sartre’s ‘en soi’ as well as with Duns Scotus, in the ‘goat-in-itself, / Idea of goatishness made flesh’ (P 74); but ‘being’ and ‘nothingness’ usually echo in the mind to sobering effect. With no faith-based metaphysics to contain it ‘the old conspiracy of space and time’ produces instead images of unaccustomed concretion (P 47). ‘Wreck’ considers a ‘hulk stranded in Scalpay Bay’: Twice every day it took aboard A cargo of the tide; its crew Flitted with fins. And sand explored Whatever cranny it came to.

That silting of the sand in the ship’s remains, so slow as to be virtually imperceptible enables the poem’s final gesture of movement across an aeon of time: ‘More slow than glacier it sailed / into the bottom of the sea’ (P 29)—which also satisfies Shklovsky’s desire to prolong the act of perception. In post-war contexts, the existentialist assumption that individual human beings have full responsibility for creating the meanings of their own lives seems in hind

Norman MacCaig, Collected Poems: A New Edition (London: Chatto, 1999), p. 266. ‘Patriot’ is omitted from Ewan McCaig’s edition.

Fivefathers  69 sight tailor-made for MacCaig’s necessary project of self-fashioning, providing as it did secular priorities within which a politics of personal identity could reconstruct ontological security: Only existence from its trivial cross (Recalcitrance of tree and hill and bird) Will descend in its lasting property, The limiting differences Making their huge withdrawal, selves away, Behind the first simplicity of the Word. (P 49)

MacCaig’s preference for present-tense perception helps to dramatize his existential inclination: It’s my pretty Now I’m in love with that won’t stand still to be measured. The past has gone to a far country; and as for the future there’s no future in it. But my pretty Now, I love her, I love her, because she shows herself off to me and will always be faithful. (P 284)

As early as 1947 a poem called ‘Instrument and Agent’ was exploring relationship between the seeing eye and the speaking ‘I’, this time through the figure of a primaryschool teacher in a room full of children. His accessibility to them is a mark of his democratic credentials—‘Every one equal, none a stranger’—and when the children modify each other’s classroom behaviour they necessarily modify the speaker’s perception of them. The silenced term in the poem is ‘pupil’, signifying an uncontrollable elision of the perceiving eye into its object; and since language is both instrument and agent for delivering an act of the mind in its ‘short journey [...] to the back of my skull’, small-scale text unfolding on the page is inseparable from the cosmic sightings it synthesizes: So tree is partly girl; moon And wit slide through the sky together; And which is star—what’s come a million Miles or gone those inches further? (P 4)

Fivefathers  70 Seven years later ‘Ego’ revisits the process to express an existential pathos in the disconsolate circularity of any leap of faith: Tree And star are ways of finding out what I Mean in a text composed of earth and sky. What reason to believe this, any more than that I am myself a metaphor. (P 55)

‘Summer Farm’ ends: Self under self, a pile of selves I stand Threaded on time, and with metaphysic hand Lift the farm like a lid and see Farm within farm, and in the centre, me. (P 34)

If it is true that a resulting sense of ‘the impossibility of any truly detached perspective is felt as a tragedy in much of MacCaig’s work’, it is also the case that ‘the poem of the mind in the act of finding / What will suffice’ becomes a crucial quality in the writing. Few poets have introduced ‘mind’ into their work as variously as MacCaig, often in apparent exploration of Wallace Stevens’ aphorism: ‘what we see in the mind is as real to us as what we see by the eye’. Hindsight and MacCaig’s own testimony suggest that Stevens’ life-long conviction that perception and cognition are contingent on the words used to represent them was both challenging and encouraging for a Scot in MacCaig’s position. In his poem ‘Notes Towards the Supreme Fiction’, Stevens uses the phrase ‘theatre of trope’, an apposite formulation for the ways in which MacCaig works in metaphor to give dramatic intensity and a sense of physical presence to his verbal figuring. Beyond such occasional direct echoes of Stevens’ characteristic phrasing as ‘weather of disillusion’ (P 46), ‘opulent ululations’ (P 243), ‘lordly magnifico’ (P 270), or ‘dandified gluttony’ (P 310), the American’s blankverse hymn to self-sufficient and self-sustaining human consciousness in ‘Sunday Morning’ was an early exercise in secular values that could only reinforce MacCaig’s intentions.    

Christopher Whyte, ‘This Trash of Metaphor’, in Norman MacCaig: Critical Essays, edited by Joy Hendry and Ray Ross (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1990), p. 91. Wallace Stevens, Collected Poems (London: Faber, 1955), p. 239. Wallace Stevens, Opus Posthumous (London: Faber, 1959), ed. Samuel French Morse, p. 162. Hereafter OP. Stevens, Collected Poems, p. 397

Fivefathers  71 [NM] When I first came across Wallace Stevens’ work, it was the occasional poem here and there in different magazines, because he wasn’t published in bulk over here for a ridiculously long time. I was very much attracted to his work. I am not saying I am as good a poet as Wallace Stevens, but I felt a sort of affinity with his persistent—perhaps too persistent—talk about the difference between reality and imagination, and what imagination does to reality. He was all for what the imagination does to it. I don’t go that far; in fact rather the opposite. But I felt this interest of his in reality and imagination, and his notion that everything has to be a fiction. And when the books began to appear, I read them gluttonously. I read books about him, and was fascinated. I still think that he’s a great poet, but my direct interest in him stopped quite suddenly. I was saturated, you know, I’d read enough.

Rather than signifying an anxiety of influence, MacCaig’s through-going internalization of American precept and practice made for a sustaining interaction. Certainly he turned to detailed Scottish account Stevens’ sense of poetry as a satisfying of the human desire for resemblance, expressed with clarity in The Necessary Angel: As the satisfying of a desire, [poetry] is pleasurable. But its singularity is that in the act of satisfying the desire for resemblance, it touches the sense of reality, it enhances the sense of reality, heightens it, intensifies it. [...] It makes it brilliant. When the similarity is between things of adequate dignity, the resemblance may be said to transfigure or to sublimate them. Take, for example, the resemblance between reality and any projection of it in belief or in metaphor. What is it that these two have in common? Is not the glory of the idea of any future state a relation between a present and a future glory? The brilliance of the earth is the brilliance of every paradise.

Stevens claimed that ‘The people, not the priests, made the gods’ (OP 208): the secular virtue he assumes and propagates warmed the cockles of a Scotsman’s heart. MacCaig forges a distinctive voice, and no-one is likely to confuse the two; so it is interesting that one of the abler contemporary American critics of Stevens makes a remark that more accurately describes a writer coming to terms with specific Scottish context. ‘For [MacCaig], however, poetry always remains lyric poetry, as late Romantic theory (if not always the poetry) had defined it—the poem as short verse utterance (or sequence of such utterances) in which a single speaker expresses, in figurative language, his subjective vision, a truth culminating in a unique insight or 

Wallace Stevens, ‘Three Academic Pieces’, in The Necessary Angel (London: Faber), 1951, p. 77. Hereafter NA

Fivefathers  72 epiphany that unites poet and reader.’ MacCaig places imagistic precision at the service of a sensuous probing not only of how we construct meaning but of how things come to signify what they do. [NM] I often mention Suilven, but I’m well aware it’s only a lump of sandstone. I don’t put my feelings onto it, or extract new feelings from it. Except that it’s a most beautiful lump of sandstone. That’s what it is.

‘The accuracy of accurate letters,’ Stevens proposes, ‘is an accuracy with respect to the structure of reality’ (NA, 75). MacCaig’s concern with representational accuracy is obsessive. [NM] Take the oyster-catcher. I first described it as having yellow legs. That’s not true. It has orange legs. But by the time I realised that, the poem was already published. And that troubled me for about thirty years, until it appeared in the Collected Poems, when I changed it.

Relationship between Stevens and MacCaig seems at times dialogic. ‘Every image’, the American maintains, ‘is a restatement of the subject of the image in terms of an attitude’ (NA 128). ‘If only’, MacCaig muses, ‘I could see a hazelnut without thinking / of monkish skullcaps’ (P 316). For Stevens it follows that ‘every image is an intervention on the part of the image-maker’ (NA 129). MacCaig’s ‘No Consolation’ wryly ponders the impossibility of detached observation: how hard it is to live at a remove from a common wall, that keeps out and keeps in, and from water, that saves you and drowns you. But when I went on to observe that I could see the pair of them as a trickling wall or as a wall of water, it became clear that I can describe only my own inventions. (P 178)

Most unlike Stevens, though, is the turn back to the real in MacCaig’s closing recognition that carrying a desire for resemblance into the marriage bed results in the 

Marjorie Perloff, ‘The Supreme Fiction and the Impasse of the Modernist Lyric’ in Wallace Stevens: The Poetics of Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985) ed. Albert Gelpi, p. 51.

Fivefathers  73 opposite of fidelity to experience: ‘how odd to suppose / you prove you love your wife / by continually committing adultery / with her.’ No matter how careful the scripted attention to detail, a part of the poetic process will always be that ‘a transference has been made’ (P 165). MacCaig’s reference is to Aristotle’s poetics, where our familiar sense of metaphor as ‘the application to one thing of a name belonging to another thing’ is first categorised. Aristotle states: ‘The transference may be from the genus to the species, from the species to the genus, or from one species to another, or it may be a matter of analogy. As an example of transference from genus to species I give “Here lies my ship,” for lying at anchor is a species of lying.’ In high spirits, MacCaig the sometimes surreal classicist places Aristotle’s example in uncertain seas: A ship sails clean out of its metaphor And birds perch on no simile; and Time Breaks all the rules of reason and of rhyme. (P 56)

In such circumstances, a writer can only embrace the shimmer of signifiers almost as an act of defiance against their inherent duplicities: ‘I won’t give up being deceived by landscape’s / Likenesses and incorrigible metaphors (P 299). Little wonder, then, that ‘A sigh for simplicity’ laments in comic vein: Does the fishing boat at the pier Really rock like a bear? Is a mussel really bearded? It’s time I put the lady moon on my blacklist. I groan and think, if I were only Adam To whom everything was exactly its own name Until one day the other appeared, the shameless Demander of similes, the destroyer of Eden. (P 316)

And, we might add, the bringer of dialogic imagination into the world. Language itself becomes a permanent temptress towards the next created likeness, and the figuring of metaphor as seductive woman reappears. There is congruence with Stevens’ mode of thinking here too, in ways that help to contextualize the many MacCaig poems which address a ‘you’ in the manner of love poetry: 

Aristotle, ‘On the Art of Poetry’, in Classical Literary Criticism, trans. T.S. Dorsch (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), p. 61.

Fivefathers  74 The poet finds that as between these two sources, the imagination and reality, the imagination is false, whatever else may be said of it, and reality is true; and being concerned that poetry should be a thing of vital and virile importance, he commits himself to reality, which then becomes his inescapable and ever-present difficulty and inamorata’. (OP 241)

MacCaig’s ‘you’ often interpellates language, or more particularly the language of poetry. In a famous utterance, Wallace Stevens declared that ‘the final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly’ (OP 163). MacCaig was susceptible to this partly because of his awareness that the Socrates he so admired was always already an effect in Plato’s language, the primary source for what we know of him. As a construct in someone else’s memory and cognition the representation of Socrates is in that sense a fiction, and Stevens’ insistence on fictionality possibly constitutes the only leap of faith with which MacCaig could feel comfortable. Since ‘God’ (like the later phrase ‘intelligent design’) is also an effect in language it, too, is therefore a human construct, a product of the imagination; and since poets are artificers of language, that leaves poetry and not the Bible as the supreme fiction-making instrument. ‘Down-to-earth Heaven’ accordingly grounds a robust transcendence in the harmonies of ‘two harpsichords playing’, and displaces biblical fantasy in favour of continuing invention. Existential writing also values the ceremonial that has been generally appropriated by religious ritual: so the poem secularises a sacramental vocabulary, ‘each in its own distinction’, to celebrate people coming together in ‘a shadowless place’ for an epiphany of the real, a ‘revelation of the ordinary’ (P 329-30). An empirical and materialist tendency is endemic in MacCaig’s work, and I wondered whether he had ever been subjected to religious indoctrination. [NM] I don’t think my parents had any belief at all and, as I like to put it, I was born an atheist. It isn’t the fact of religion that I oppose, it’s what the believers do with it and because of it. There’s more blood shed in the history of the world because of religion than anything else. Religion has consistently, even in primitive tribes, caused cruelty, torture, death.

MacCaig, though, is sensitive to the almost religious function of metaphor as a factor joining poetry and myth. ‘Between two nowheres’ starts with ‘small chaos’ in the

Fivefathers  75 poet’s house and ends by adapting biblical reference to the inventive supremacy of language: We praise the good God for his creation of the universe.—When are the hymns to be written in praise of the unimaginable power of the Word that first made the chaos that made creation possible? (P 272)

He writes the praise himself; and mythologies that seek to situate and explain the natural world become fit subjects for his secularising attitudes. Although for many years he did not re-read the Classical texts he studied as an undergraduate, as reference and allusion they enter his writing in a variety of ways. He came to consider arcane reference to ‘figures that nobody ever heard of and languages that nobody can speak’ to be ‘bad art and bad manners’. His affable, invitational tone and structure accordingly grounds and domesticates the gods and legends of antiquity. [NM] They were an appalling shower, the classical gods—lecherous, treacherous, bad-tempered, cruel; they were fearsome! They’re just enlarged people. So I take the mickey out of them. Also, though, I’m quite careful, if I write about classical figures, either real ones or legendary, mythological ones, I very much restrict the choice to names which even today are known to a lot of people.

Scotland has historical experience of subjection to ‘enlarged people’, including its own clan and landowning aristocracy, and in keeping with the politics of his practice MacCaig’s ironic treatment of legendary pride develops contemporary reference. His play with the traditions and figures of Classicism similarly indicates witty refusal of subordination to narratives traditionally privileged as canonically sacrosanct. ‘The rosyfingered’, written in 1951, uses Homer’s habitual periphrasis for the dawn to bring the mythic into the mundane where humour enriches MacCaig’s treatment of an aged sun rising: And an old myth tries to heave itself to its feet: The phoenix newly feathered in the east Takes wing, blundering; and Phoebus not so fleet Comes cantering after it, but comes at least. (P 30)

Fivefathers  76 Agreeing that this use of Homer conversationalises everyday occurrence, MacCaig’s mischief bubbled to the surface again. [NM] Rosy-fingered my foot! Just have a look at it! What’s more, that’s a mistranslation, though that’s always the way it’s translated: rhododactylos—it’s equally rosy-toed, since dactylos meant both your fingers and your toes!

Fascination with metaphor nonetheless remains a constant: the beauty who walks in the plain field still figures the sunrise as beautiful woman, with MacCaig substituting metaphor for myth. The dryly witty demythologising of a poem like ‘Two ways of it’—‘The duller legends are what you live in’—voices a characteristic scepticism: You are no Helen, walking parapets And dazing wisdom with another beauty That made hard men talk of soft goddesses And feel death blooming in their violent wits With such seduction that they asked no pity— Till death came whistling in and loosed their knees. (P 87) [NM] This is me at it again. This woman is not Helen: she’s not going to be turned into a constellation by some god or other. She is exactly what she is. In that last stanza, I’m objecting, I suppose, to things in the past being curmudgeonly, mystified and ‘rouged’. Helen is a myth, and the poem is written against this mythologizing. You are what you are—five foot four inches high, seven stone eight pounds. This is a very recurring thing with me.

During his time as Edinburgh University’s writer-in-residence MacCaig maintained at a seminar that he was not a writer who went through draft after draft of poems to produce a final polished version. Yet he achieves the kind of lucidity on the page that must always look hard worked for, and I asked about the way he worked. [NM] Well, I can tell you what happens, I can’t explain it. I feel like writing a poem the way you feel hungry or thirsty. And if it’s possible, I sit down always in this particular chair, and with a particular size of blank paper, no lines on it. And I have not an idea what’s coming. Not a clue. And very quickly into my head comes a memory of a place or an event or a person or all three. But far more often it’s a short line, a short phrase—four or five words, nothing extraordinary about them.

Fivefathers  77 Down it goes, and the poem trickles down the page until it’s finished. They come very quickly, very easily. I’m asked ‘how long does it take you to write a poem, Norman?’ And I say ‘two fags’. Sometimes it’s only one. And I can’t work on them. I never write a second version, as most poets do— three, four, five, six, ten sometimes. I just can’t. I don’t want to. I’d rather try to write another poem. And often they come out without any changes. You’d think I just copied them. Now the snag of course is, I write a lot that don’t please me. They’re duds: they don’t come off: boring; dull. And about twice a year I look through what I’ve written and throw them out. I suppose I put five or six out of ten in the bucket. But they come so easily, and I write such a lot.

Pressing him further about this simply brought out his sense of fun: [NM] someone once asked Philip Larkin ‘what gave you the idea of using the toad as a symbol for work?’ ‘Genius,’ Larkin replied.’ But he accepts that for many people his claim is difficult to believe: [NM] ‘After all, most poets have two or three versions at least— sometimes a dozen. I never did that’. How, then, did he account for the formal accomplishment of his writing? But the mischief was in him now. [NM] ‘Well, it’s my Gaelic origins, you see—they’re great formalists the Celts.’ What began as a joke soon developed into something more. [NM] The Gaels are very formal in their arts, even where there is not much, as in sculpture, but did you ever see anything more formal than a Celtic cross? Same with their great music: the pibroch is extremely formal. And you know, I always loved form, which I think may be one of the reasons I took Classics. That, anyway, in turn encouraged this admiration for form; so that I didn’t often write a poem that was formally bad.

MacCaig’s alertness to the conditions of writing makes him both a parodist and an ally of a poststructuralist argument that because everything we know and do is readable as a text, nothing exists beyond textuality. Accordingly, a ‘Swimming Lizard’ ‘twinkled his brief text through the brown and still’ (P 33), or being pricked by thorns becomes ‘I touch / the little jagged word, and my torn skin carries your signature’ (P 64). ‘Bookworm’—‘I open the second volume / of a rose’ (P 257) — makes sport of the idea of experience as textuality, and ‘Sparrow’ reads a blackbird’s song as ‘writing / pretty scrolls on the air with the gold nib of his beak’ (P 251). Similarly ‘Prism’ reads ‘the whole forest’ as ‘illustrations in a book of botany’, and ‘the whole city’ as ‘a code in a foreign language’ (P 277–8). It is evidently not the case, then, that MacCaig entertains any fundamental suspicion about the efficacy of metaphor.

Fivefathers  78 [NM] Not at all. I wrote a wee poem confounding metaphor [possibly ‘No choice’ (P 185)], saying I’m sick and tired of it—except that it consists entirely of metaphor. Which I’m well aware of, because I can’t escape from metaphor and images—I just can’t. It’s the way my mind goes.

Rather than Stevens’ often assertive mode, then, MacCaig the precisionist is fascinated by the uncertainties inherent in scripted representation. J. F. Hendry thought the Apocalypse writers were the ‘new Romantics’, and though it seems at first unlikely, MacCaig’s developed responses may owe something to the plenitude and doubt of Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’, which explores relationship between memory and ‘all the mighty world / Of eye and ear,—both what they half create, / And what perceive’. That at any rate seems to be in some sense the measure of ‘Report’: eyes change what they look at, ears never stop making their multiple translations and the right hand refutes the meaning of what the left hand is doing. (p. 325)

Yet it remains the case that MacCaig considers himself to be a rationalist. ‘I, an adult man / Am reason functioning’ (P 57). [NM] That’s why I admire ‘mind’ so much. Of course no-one really knows what it means, but often to me it stands for reason, an accuracy of that physical kind you know—Suilven isn’t a phallic symbol, it’s a great lump of sandstone. I’m a great admirer of reason, though I know it has its limitations.

His relationship to more direct ancestors was for a long time unexamined. It took him some time to work out an appropriate response to the peopled history of his own past, though it latterly came to occupy significant space in his work. I asked about his own genealogy. [NM] I don’t know much about it, largely because three of my grandparents were dead before I was born and the other one died when I was about eight, and living in Edinburgh. They were all Gaels. I spent three holidays in my teens at my mother’s place in Scalpay, off the Isle of Harris. But it wasn’t until years later that I began to realise what an important thing these holidays were. They shifted me from thinking that Edinburgh consisted of me and my mammy and my daddy and 

‘Lines Composed Above Tintern Abbey’, in The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. by E. de Selincourt, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1944), 2, 259–63 (p. 262).

Fivefathers  79 my sisters. I found on Scalpay my aunties and my cousins. And it did two things. It made me realise that I, like everybody else, come from generations and generations and generations; which was the beginning of an interest, though not a very well exploited one, in actual history. It gave me a channel, a telephone wire to the past, which before that I didn’t have at all.

And MacCaig’s father? |NM] From Dumfries. But his father was from Argyll—another Gaelic speaker.

How then did he feel his relationship to the world of Gaeldom? [NM] Now that’s awfully difficult. I know that I feel more at home when I’m amongst the Gaels at Lochinver—never mind the Outer Hebrides—than I do among Edinburgh people, although I’ve lived here all my days: I really do. I much enjoy the company of Gaels. I feel at home among them—genetics, I suppose. And then, of course, my mother: she was illiterate all her life, yet I never knew anybody who in conversation, without realising it, used metaphors and images as much as she did. If there’s any poetry in me, that’s where it came from: some of the most astonishing images and metaphors—often very funny. It was just the way she thought, and there’s a bit of that in me.

The way MacCaig combines his role as the poet of Edinburgh’s urban landscape with an imaginative possession of the Assynt region of Sutherland earns him the right to claim representative status for his writing. Assynt comes to symbolise a Scottish territory deeply cherished and powerfully preserved. He first discovered it the hard way, during the 1930s. [NM] I cycled all over Scotland, with a tent, when there was no tourism really. I started in my teens, and I poked into all the corners of Scotland, and I fell in love with that particular area. In the first place I was attracted to it just because it is so beautiful; and also it’s scattered and splattered with trout-lochs—my other passion! And also, at Achmelvich near Lochinver there is a beautiful bay with white sand and sand-dunes—wonderful for children, and after the war, we had two very young children. So we started going there, and have gone back every year since.

The area becomes a significant resource for MacCaig, constituting a landscape of the mind where exploration and articulation can take place at many levels, and where durability is written into the surroundings.

Fivefathers  80 [NM] The groundwork on which the mountains there stand are made of a hard, hard, hard rock: I’m told it’s one of the oldest rocks on the earth’s surface— Lewisian gneiss. It’s all over the Hebrides, the west coast, the Highlands. Very hard, comes in different colours, grey, greenish, purplish, that change with the light.

His longest poem, ‘A man in Assynt’, (P 221–28) from A Man in my Position (1969), is interesting not least for a free verse form that orchestrates extended developments of theme and image. A move away from closed forms had begun earlier with the volume Surroundings in 1966. [NM] It was totally unconscious. I had written in strict form, metre and rhyme— often wavering metre, often para-rhyme—but strict form all the same. And one night I sat down to write a poem—felt like it—and the damned thing came out in free verse. Of course, I got interested in the form. I wrote for a good while in both free verse and strict form, but as the years passed, I’ve been writing more and more in free verse.

How did ‘A man in Assynt’ come to be written? [NM] The poem was written because Scottish Television ran a series of fifteenminute programmes called ‘Poets and Places’. Iain Crichton Smith did Lewis, George Mackay Brown did Orkney, Sidney Goodsir Smith did Edinburgh, and so on. They asked me to do one on the Lochinver area. And I said no. I don’t write long poems. I even added, I don’t like reading long poems, why should I write one? Well that series finished, and in the autumn of that year they had another, shorter series, and they approached me again. I said, ‘Well, I’ll have a shot, and if I don’t like it, you won’t get it.’ I sat down one night and wrote the whole poem; just as if someone were dictating it to me. The reason wasn’t brilliance and genius and cleverness: it was all there waiting to be spoken. So I spoke it.

History becomes the subject of the poem. From the ‘Glaciers, grinding West’ in its opening line, the structure modulates to a closing stanza where: the scraping light whittles the cloud edges till, like thin bone they’re bright with their own opaque selves. (p. 230)

Fivefathers  81 ‘A man in Assynt’ weaves its themes of possession and dispossession into a celebration of imaginative independence. From figures and moments ‘clear and tiny in / the misty landscape of history’ comes the suggestion that ‘up from that mist crowds / the present’, before its interconnections, shaped as phrasal repetition and choric echo, confront difficult continuities in a fluent use of Scottish fricatives and obstruents: Or has it come to this, that this dying landscape belongs to the dead, the crofters and fighters and fishermen whose larochs sink into the bracken by Loch Assynt and Loch Crocach? — to men trampled under the hoofs of sheep and driven by deer to the ends of the earth — to men whose loyalty was so great it accepted their own betrayal by their own chiefs and whose descendants now are kept in their place by English businessmen and the indifference of a remote and ignorant government. (p. 226)

Since it marks a shift in perception and perspective for MacCaig, I wondered to what extent ‘A man in Assynt’ represents his own coming to terms with history, even a laying of historical ghosts. [NM] Sutherland, the county, the whole of it, was the most shamefully treated in the Clearances. And it’s a beautiful, beautiful countryside. But it’s also very sad, because there are hardly any people in the place. And you keep coming across ruins of what used to be crofts, in the most unlikely places, from a time when the population was much bigger than it now is. So it’s a sad landscape, in that way. You can walk for miles and miles and miles and miles and never see a house, let alone a person. It’s got that sadness in it, and you can’t help being afflicted by that history in that landscape, because there it is under your very eyes.

In his later work history and topography achieve senses of permanence, durability and security. ‘Old Highland woman’:   has come here through centuries of Gaelic labour and loves

Fivefathers  82 and rainy funerals. Her people are assembled in her bones. She’s their summation. Before her time has almost no meaning. (P 437)

‘Crofter’ answers its own question with a quiet confidence: ‘What’s history to him? / He’s an emblem of it / in its pure state’ (P 450). Did MacCaig accept that the struggle for lucidity has not always entailed such stark effects of simplicity? [NM] Oh well, I don’t mind poems being a bit difficult. I hate poems being obscure. A good difficult poem is trying to say something which is difficult to express and to understand. But an obscure poem is bad writing. That kind of obscurity always brings to my mind a remark in a Peter de Vries novel, where a man and wife are talking about a friend. The man says, in his accent, ‘Oh he’s got a head on him; if he says something it’s worth thinking about.’ And his wife made the splendid reply — ‘Oh I don’t know. He’s very profound on the surface, but deep down he’s shallow’.

Through the depths and shallows of his writing MacCaig earns the conditional optimism that closes ‘A man in Assynt’: And the mind behind the eye, within the passion, remembers with certainty that the tide will return and thinks, with hope, that that other ebb, that sad withdrawal of people, may, too, reverse itself and flood the bays and the sheltered glens with new generations replenishing the land with its richest of riches and coming, at last, into its own again. (P 228)

George Mackay Brown: Unlocking Time’s Labyrinth It is well to remember at the outset that before George Mackay Brown found his voice—Eric Linklater called its mature tone ‘processional’ and its customary mode a ‘visionary understanding’—he wrote journalism and verse criticising the cultural poverty of Orkney life. He came to regret the acerbic and provocative tone of some of these early pieces, and his developed style is evidence of a sustained effort at reconstructing relationship to place, and purifying the language of his tribe. Motivation for this task came from the irreversible passing of a farming and fishing economy that had sustained the islands for generations: there were Orkney crofts that had been worked by the same families for centuries. Brown delivers this transforming narrative with cinematic immediacy through the precision phrasing he employs to project organic community as local memory. If a sense that the islands’ present derives from a shared past is Brown’s signature, his syllabic music is the heart of a craft whose scripted resonance is generally credible because ‘fishermen with ploughs’ accurately describes a recently displaced working way of life. The cycle of poems he named Fishermen with Ploughs (1971) combines myth, miracle and human survival in its celebration of a Viking tribe of fishing folk who were ‘compelled west by the promise of a new way 

Eric Linklater, Orkney and Shetland: an historical, geographical, social and scenic survey (London: Hale, 1971), p. 256.

Fivefathers  84 of life: agriculture’, to make their way to Orkney. ‘The cargo in their hold,’ Brown’s present tense witness tells us, ‘is a jar of seed corn’. That voyage across time and into present perspective lays the keel for many of his explorations of myth as historic memory; though rather than use the term myth he preferred to oppose ‘the facts of our history—what Edwin Muir called the Story’ to ‘the vision by which people live, what Edwin Muir called their Fable’. Alan Bold rightly suggested that in Brown’s work ‘the Story is constantly moving towards Fable’; a move largely effected through Brown’s personalized and idiosyncratic exercise of what some historians call ‘collective or social memory’. We all participate in this kind of remembering on some scale or other, but social scientists are concerned to describe how, in such localised acts of recall and exchange as a traditional country village is taken to generate, the narrative of one life is validated by an interconnecting set of narratives that constitute the wider story of the social group from which individuals derive their identity. Since Brown’s poetry constitutes an archive of such interactive remembering, I wondered how he accounted for the fact that many of his characters draw breath in a memorable present. [GMB] I don’t know; but it might be because the contemporary part of my poetry isn’t set in contemporary Orkney at all, in which I find very little that is poetic. It’s always set in my childhood, when I was maybe twelve or fifteen years old. It’s always seen in the 1920s or 1930s; pre-Second-World-War anyway, because then everything was very vivid and alive. The whole community seemed to be vibrant in a way that it isn’t now. But that might just be an old man talking. I do have a vivid memory, I suppose, and when I was a boy I used to love to listen to the old men talking in that speech, and the women too. And I still remember it vividly. Yet I can’t remember what they said along the street yesterday nearly so well. I think what I do is go back to a child’s memory and a child’s experiences. What you get is an older man remembering a child’s experiences.

If the child is father of the man in these circumstances, then memory grounds cognitions of recognisable neighbourhoods. But recall has to be articulated for it to become memory; and island villages are    

Archie Bevan and Brian Murray eds., The Collected Poems of George Mackay Brown (London: Murray, 2005), p. 89. Hereafter CP. George Mackay Brown, An Orkney Tapestry (London: Gollancz, 1969), pp. 21-2. Hereafter OT. Alan Bold, George Mackay Brown (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1978), p. 11. Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember [1989] (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 1, 21.

Fivefathers  85 good places to watch it happening. Where face to face orality is still a communal norm, gossip is the medium of informally told narratives that connect speakers and define their relations with one another. Brown watched this language use as it worked in daily habit: a newspaper colleague who knew him as a younger man on Orkney tells us that ‘on most afternoons, he could be found sitting on a bench at the Pierhead picking up local gossip.’ Where fact is fictionalised in these exchanges, and fictions believed by speaking subjects, remembering becomes as much a matter of construction as reproduction: memories of time past are always already a partially creative act, in which fact and fiction easily change places. ‘I draw any art I have,’ Brown tells us, ‘from my grandparents, and further back [...] when life was dangerous and the language rich, and the community was invested with a kind of ceremony [...] I acknowledge the gift and the debt, but I would not have wished to live their hard life.’ That is honest enough as far as it goes, leaving us free to ask whether a sense of the ceremonial was existential to those living the hard and dangerous life, or an investment of the poet’s gaze. ‘Fisherman and farmer’, Brown wrote in a 1978 autobiographical essay, ‘are in a sense stark opposites. One is thirled to a perilous unpredictable element [...] the other is bound to the slow sure wheel of agriculture. [...] Land and sea meshed in the one food-provider.’ Out of a time-honoured dialectic of collective self-sufficiency, and the range of contemporary and trans-temporal syntheses he invents for it, he spins a sustaining poetics of purpose and place. Having grown up in daily sight of men in boats ‘bringing in the sea treasures, as the very first men on this shore had done’ (OT 15), a sense of his islanders’ succession—not always glorious—from the fishing folk who followed Christ made patterns of transference and exchangeable codes richly available. Because he claimed that the development of fisherman as symbol came ‘only much later’, it is useful to remember the realist kernel of his ceremonial. It is not the move into formal correspondence that activates Brown’s symbolic order, but the turn back to the material context that prompts the correspondence. The real remains the base: Symbols are made when daily life is seen no longer as a mime, or a game, but as a perilous enduring between birth and death. Then the fisherman, as the original   

Maggie Ferguson, George Mackay Brown: The Life (London: Murray, 2006), p. 68. Hereafter L. George MacKay Brown, For the Islands I sing: An Autobiography (London: Murray, 1997), p. 167. Hereafter FIS. ‘An Autobiographical Essay’, in Maurice Lindsay, ed., As I Remember (London: Hale, 1979), p. 16

Fivefathers  86 food-gatherer, the hunter in the sea, assumes an importance not usually accorded to him by men more safely circumstanced. (OT 15)

‘Without that symbolical figure, the Orkney crofter with a boat,’ he came to think, he ‘could not have written a word of any significance’ (OT 16). To suggest and record the long struggle for existence by farmers who fished and fishermen who farmed to keep themselves and their families alive, he garners a store-house of elemental image and liminal metaphor. While he remained disengaged from much in contemporary Orkney, the islands he constructs and presents focus his attention first and last, across a wealth of poetry and song as well as the substantial body of his fiction, and including tourist handbooks engagingly written with an eye to refashioning the local as mythic relationship. Retiring and latterly agoraphobic he may have been, but he knew the arts of promotion. In his official guide Stromness, in the Orkney Islands Brown quotes Edwin Muir : ‘in Orkney living men turn into legend’ [derived from ‘what is read’ (OED)], so that he can add: ‘The visitor to Stromness should always remember that he is not simply in a place; he is, for a short time, part of an old and still unfinished ballad’. If that prompted interest in his poetry, the visitor to Stromness would learn how the song continues: Brown always wanted his poems to be widely accessible. It would be an advantage if visitors were as familiar with biblical rhythm and event as he knew a native audience to be. An introductory note to The Wreck of the Archangel (1989) advises us not to be surprised by the number of voyages in the pages that follow. ‘Orkney lay athwart a great seaway from Viking times onwards, and its lore is crowded with sailors, merchants, adventurers, pilgrims, smugglers, storms and sea-changes. The shores are strewn with wrack, jetsam, occasional treasure.’ Brown is expert at finding expressive treasure in connections between Orkney’s historical geography and Viking incursions. They articulate a seafaring and farming history that became his source-book. To probe the origin and meaning of community he combines biblical image, heroic tale and folk-lore legend with recorded event and personal memory. As he pursues his interest in the structuring of perception and the shaping of a language to deliver it, his poetry takes inspiration from and weaves variations on Orkneyinga Saga, the medieval chronicle that places Orkney at the centre of the action. His biographer tells us that from Brown’s first reading the Saga in 1941, it was ‘to affect him more deeply  

Quoted by Rowena and Brian Murray in Interrogation of Silence: The Writings of George Mackay Brown, (Edinburgh: Murray, 2007), pp. 61-2. George Mackay Brown, The Wreck of the Archangel (London: Murray, 1989), p. ix.

Fivefathers  87 than any other piece of literature he ever read’ (L. 62); and Orkneyinga was clearly special. But Brown had lessons to learn from heroic legend more generally, and from their surviving systems of transmission. [GMB] I think the Sagas involve the basics of narrative. All the essential structures of narrative are there. Any other kind of writing is an elaboration on their simple, streamlined way of telling a story, without lengthy descriptions of characters, and with everything superfluous stripped away. I liked that very much. My own writing is much more decorative than that, but I think that must come from the Celtic element in me. I’m sure it does.

Brown is a compulsive lyricist and compelling storyteller: besides the bible rhythms he internalised during a Presbyterian childhood, a subsequent basic element in his narrative forms came from extensive research into and a generous sympathy with the evolutions of an island society whose present values he didn’t much like. Archie Bevan and Brian Murray remind us that as long ago as Brown’s first collection The Storm and Other Poems (1954), produced in a small run by the local newspaper he worked for, he had ‘already mapped out his territory’ (CP x). The first poem printed there, which the Orkney Herald had carried a couple of years earlier again, looks to ‘poet and saint’ to rebuild Scotland’s ‘Knox-ruined nation’ (CP 1). So there was, however ironised, something redemptive in this writing well before traditional Catholicism loaned Brown the time-sanctioned carapace of form and ritual he found fulfilling. Form and ritual in Orkneyinga Saga were in that sense a lengthy preparation. Because his long-term attraction to Catholic cognitions of Christian story developed as distinctive ways of looking at the world around him and of assimilating the books he read, it is also worth remembering the pre-conversion world in which Brown grew up. He joins a line of contemporaries in condemning the joyless severity and repressive rigour that had become Knox’s inheritance; not as theological abstraction but in the visible damage done to his society. He was as temperamentally hostile to surviving forms of Presbyterianism as it is possible to be, and everything he read about the Reformation convinced him that it had ‘struck a death blow to the life and spirit of the islands’ (L. 165). He came through, he later claimed, by discarding Calvinism ‘from the age of six or seven’, but he knew there was more to it than that. The Bible remained at the core of his purpose and craft: in contrast to 

Isobel Murray (ed.), Scottish Writers Talking (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 1996), p. 20.

Fivefathers  88 the Catholic experience, scriptural reading for Presbyterians has lasting effects. He once described himself as a ‘cradle Calvinist’, and acknowledged that ‘textures of Calvinism, generations old, are still part of me and I think I will never be rid of them’ (FIS 120). It may not all have been as black as thunder: the left-wing ambience of his home life—his father was ‘always on the side of the poor against the wealthy and over-privileged’(FIS 18)—grafted easily onto, or grew as an outcrop of, the Scots Presbyterian ideal of the Godly Commonwealth. Brown was a habitual Sunday Kirkgoer until he was sixteen, and thought of himself as in some sense politically on the left. He remembered his father as a ‘socialist of the Kier Hardie school’; a school that was also nourished by the Scottish Kirk’s social gospel notion that its ministry is territorial and its leaders and adherents must have regard to the material as well as the spiritual and moral welfare of the people as a whole. These are among the values Brown takes into his rhyme and reason, and while he has a keen eye to what goes on in the world, and a consequent share of pessimism, he seems never to have given up on the conviction expressed in one of his earliest published poems: ‘What love devises, / That is best’ (CP 5). According to its Penguin translators, Orkneyinga Saga also has a special significance for the people of Orkney, ‘having become [...] what might be called their secular scripture, inculcating in them a keener sense of their remote forbears and sharpening their awareness of a special identity’. If the Saga still enjoys that reputation there are grounds for holding Brown largely responsible; and poetry as secular scripture is both a relationship he is entirely at home with and a motive for reinvigorating the language he was given to speak. It is entirely consistent that he cited the ethics of literature as instrumental in his decision to convert. It is the word, blossoming as legend, poem, story, secret, that holds a community together and gives meaning to its life. If words become functional ciphers merely, as they are in white papers and business letters, they lose their ‘ghosts’—the rich aura that has grown around them from the start, and grows infinitesimally richer every time they are spoken. They lose more; they lose their ‘kernel’, the sheer sensuous relish of utterance. Poetry is a fine interpretation of ghost and kernel. (OT 21–2)  

Gerry Cambridge, ‘“A Thread Too Bright for the Eye:” an appreciation of George Mackay Brown’, Chapman 84 (1996), p. 40. Orkneyinga Saga: the History of the Earls of Orkney, translated by Herman Pálsson and Paul Edwards (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), p. 9.

Fivefathers  89 He thought of folklore as an attempt ‘to come to terms with certain mysterious matters in a people’s surroundings and circumstances,’ and from its original Greek suggestion of religious ceremony, ‘mystery’ retains that connotation in medieval Mystery Plays also derived from scripture. ‘What is a poem or a carving on a stone?’ Brown asks, and the easy conjunction of script with chisel is typical: ‘It was, originally, a spell to make the corn grow, to lure fish into the net; beauty and utility were one’ (PO 48). In pursuit of that commendable ideal he reconstructs pagan practice as Christian memorial. Given that Orkneyinga Saga introduces Christian redemption into a cosmos of plural gods, religious reference attached to historical and legendary event also becomes a fertile and sustaining linguistic resource. Like medieval chroniclers elsewhere, its editors suggest, Orkneyinga Saga ‘deepens the sense of continuity by pushing back into a mythic or legendary past’ (11–12): that, too, would suit Brown’s reading of the twelfth-century slaying of Magnus as a story of personal sacrifice for the common good that constitutes an existential fable for our times. * Born in 1921 in the small sea-port of Stromness on the south-west of mainland Orkney, Brown was an uneasy traveller when he went thirty years later to Newbattle Abbey, a residential adult education college near Edinburgh. There his fellow Orcadian Edwin Muir who was then warden gave him the push he needed. [GMB] He gave me great encouragement. When we were there we had to write a monthly essay: it could take any form, it could be a poem, a story, anything really, and Edwin was very helpful. In fact he sent one or two of the poems I sent him to magazines like the New Statesman and The Listener. I wouldn’t have done it myself, but Edwin did it. One of them [‘The Exile’ (CP 4)] was published, and that was a great thrill of course. I write very differently from him and it was tremendous having his support at that early stage.

Brown was twenty when tuberculosis was first diagnosed, and poor health dogged him all his life. But he returned to Newbattle in 1956 prior to enrolling at Edinburgh University where in 1960 he graduated with an M.A. in Philosophy and Literature. After an interrupted attempt at teacher training he went back to the university as a postgraduate studying the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins. [GMB] It was an immediate, instinctive attraction. It was the new way that he did things, and the strangeness and vividness of it.

Fivefathers  90 ‘No English poet’, Brown suggests in his autobiography, ‘ever fell upon the language with such skill, sweetness and boisterous daring’ (FIS 150). Hopkins’s distinctive rhythms and faith-based perceptions of real-world contexts were powerfully attractive in both technique and substance: his celebration of godhead immanent in a ‘landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough; / And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim’ legitimised fields of reference important to Brown. Occasionally we track Brown in Hopkins’s snow: ‘Hoof-fast Njal bore his manseed wombfurled waveward’ (CP 91). But the technical possibilities Hopkins brought into play would be useful in other ways, and it may be that The Wreck of the Archangel echoes The Wreck of the Deutschland by way of acknowledgement. The nineteenth-century Jesuit innovator sometimes uses Old English alliterative patterning for his sprung-rhythm reconstructions; and Brown, too, would rework techniques from an Anglo-Saxon sound world: ‘Fareth a shadow to the ghostly feast-halls’ (CP 92). The opening poem in Fishermen with Ploughs, ‘Building the Ship’, shows both the appeal and the variation: Logs throttled a mountain torrent. A goatherd gaped on the lumbering tons. Saws shrieked, sputtered, were sharpened, sang. Dunes were pale with strewment of boards. Seaward a keel was set. Sprang from that spine a vibrant cluster of ribs. (CP 90) [GMB] I read Anglo-Saxon at Edinburgh and I liked it very much—after I got over the initial difficulties. But Beowulf and other poems like The Seafarer and Deor, I was very interested in. I was quite taken by it all. We had to do it as undergraduates, and I approached it with some dread. I remember I wasn’t looking forward to it because I’m a rather lazy person, and I don’t like to exert myself. But I just had to apply myself, and once I got into the grammar, I think I enjoyed that part of the course better than anything else. It was a wonderful feeling of getting right down into the roots of words and language.

He had mentioned the decorative element in his work and I wondered whether there was any sense of a Celtic connection. [GMB] I never think about these things at all, though I know there must be a Celtic influence through my mother who was a Gaelic speaker from the North of Scotland, and I’m sure some of her mental attitudes and the whole culture of

Fivefathers  91 that ancestry has come into me somehow unconsciously. I know it’s there, right enough, in the imagery and so on, but I never consciously think about it.

When I asked about poetry in Scots he gave me a lesson in long-distance imagined communities. [GMB] Of course, they don’t speak Scots here, really, though naturally there are quite a few Scots words. But the language derives originally from Scandinavian and Icelandic. It’s all been filtered since through the English language, but it retains quite a few of those earlier characteristics. You see, Scotland only came into Orkney’s story fairly late, around 1497, when Orkney was incorporated into Scotland. So we don’t feel entirely Scottish. It’s a very different history we have here.

That breathtakingly permeable sense of history moving into affirmative continuity is characteristic, and he knew how much the possession of a different history was a matter of sustained reconstruction. In 1952 Brown told Ernest Marwick that his love for the islands had ‘quite evaporated’ (L. 121): eight years later he followed the suggestions he had asked Marwick for and steeped himself in Orkney history (L. 163). No mental activity takes place in a vacuum, every thought has a precursor, and every act of creation a predecessor: Brown either intuited or learned early that because memory ‘functions in every act of perception, in every act of intellection, in every act of language’, it becomes ‘the essential condition of our cognition’. His construction of historical memory as the essential condition of his verse was extending its realm of possibility. Brown’s purity of line typically excises sentimentality, while his ritualised rhythms and pared phrasing open up contemporary Orkney with a dramatic clarity that is generally life-affirming and sometimes elegiac partly because the different histories he unfolds contrast root and branch with a commercialised modernity he found singularly underwhelming. [GMB] I think it’s ruined Orkney life, though it has improved it materially and financially. The people have never been better off in those terms, but something has gone out of their speech and their character. Although this might just be an old man talking, when I was a boy and then a young man, Stromness was full of what we call characters, individuals with their own quirks and eccentricities - very 

R. Terdiman, Present Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis (Cornell: Cornell University Library, 1993), p. 9.

Fivefathers  92 marked, some of them. But that seems to be quite ironed out now. Everybody is striving to be as like his neighbour as he can be: so that’s gone from contemporary Orkney life. Or at least, it seems to have gone. But as I say, it’s maybe just that I’m a recluse and I don’t see as many people as I used to.

He nonetheless accommodated his reclusive habits to a remarkable record of productivity; though he never read in public anywhere. Writing in 1940 Edwin Muir remembered the Orkney he was born into half a century earlier as ‘a place where there was no great distinction between the ordinary and the fabulous; the lives of living men turned into legend.’ Mermaids were sighted and fairies seen dancing. ‘There was no harm in them,’ Muir recalls, but ‘all these things have vanished from Orkney in the last forty years.’ That brings us into the era of Brown’s remembering, drawn as it is to characters that lived the magical as the actual and with whom he plays inventive games. But he also excels in real world definition, where he is similarly an impressive innovator. Seamus Heaney recorded his sense that Brown’s writing was ‘crosslit in a way that always appeals to me. On the one hand there was a daytime reliability to it, these scenes and characters could be lifted from a documentary; on the other hand they could have been dreamt, there was a gleam of the uncanny at the northern and western horizon’ (L. 64). Under ‘Harpoonist’, in ‘Runes from a Holy Island’, we read: He once riveted boat to whale. Frail-fingered now He weaves crab prisons. (CP 78)

Seventeen syllables here suggest an affinity with Japanese haiku, a form that influenced modernist poetics and one that Brown uses by name. Elsewhere, semantic compression in his runic practice gives experimental emphasis to sometimes ancient matter. Rune originally signified whisper or mystery and was traditionally associated with incantation and magic. Often the simplest of devices as far as the words used were concerned, and employed centuries back for inscriptions on weapons, coins, or memorial stones, runes occur in Anglo-Saxon as well as Scandinavian and Icelandic poetry. So Brown’s modernising adaptations encode scripted continuities. [GMB] A rune is an inscription incised on stone, very brief and laconic: you find them all over Scandinavia. And in Orkney here, too, especially inside the burial 

Edwin Muir, The Story and the Fable: an autobiography (London: Harrap, 1940), pp. 12–13.

Fivefathers  93 chamber at Maeshowe, where the walls are covered with them. In 1151, I think it was, some of the Norwegian sailors who were going to Rome and Jerusalem on Earl Rognvald’s famous pilgrimage, spent a night inside Maeshowe as a kind of feat of derring-do. They were very forceful, these characters; they weren’t afraid of ghosts or anything like that. But they spent the time incising very brief poems on the walls: things like ‘Ingibjorg is the most beautiful of the women’, and ‘Many a proud lady has come in here low-stooping’—because it was a burial chamber. Those are examples of runes.

Whereas Ezra Pound had sought in the Chinese ideogram antique and continuing validation of his imagistic practice, in the rune Brown discovered an historically antecedent form for his own preferred modes of compressed phrasing; modes that he would tailor accessibly to keep his reader on board. In a seemingly contrary direction from the rune, but signifying another device Brown adapts, kennings that in Skaldic verse were compound expressions used instead of a name or noun become in this handling more like conceitful thought: [GMB] A kenning is just an elaborate way of saying things. We were speaking about the laconic nature of Icelandic narrative, but they have poems too in quite an opposite mode. They would find very roundabout ways of saying things. The sea was ‘the whale’s acre’, or ‘the swan’s path.’ And the more ingenious the way of describing a simple thing, the more highly it was thought of.

‘The Sea: Four Elegies’ includes the examples Brown just quoted and continues: She is the Garden of White Roses. She is the Keeper of Horses. (the Loom also, the Harp with a thousand voices.) She is the Giver of Salt and Pearls. The Vikings, her closest children, hated the sea. She summoned them, twice a year, from plough and love bed. They called her, with cold mouths, the Widow Maker. (CP 168)

In ‘Stations of the Cross: Nine Variations’, the eighth, ‘Creator’, involves kennings as liturgical omnipresence: He is the Pitcher at the fountain. He is the Winter Tree dragged by a peasant. He is Flax and Wheel and fold of linen. (CP 186)

Fivefathers  94 The opening poem in Loaves and Fishes (1959) connects Orkney women with the Daughters of Jerusalem who ‘bewailed and lamented’ Christ; and each page thereafter calls up an ecclesiastical environment of image and symbol. The collection precedes Brown’s 1961 conversion to Catholicism only in a chronological sense, since he had been attending weekly Mass from 1956, and first became interested in the Roman belief system long before that. [GMB] I had thought about it for a long time. It wasn’t a sudden jump by any means; it had been pondered for a decade or more.

One of the reasons he found Christ’s parables so compelling was their use of encounter and event directly related to the life experiences of the farmers and fishermen who were their prime Galilean audiences. This was always familiar occupational territory for Brown, who described the sower and the seed as an expansively faith-based illumination of human involvement and significance. It made everything simple and marvellous. It included within itself everything from the most primitive breaking of the soil to Christ himself, with his parables of agriculture and the majestic symbolism of his passion, and death, and resurrection. ‘I am the bread of life.’ ‘This is my body that is broken for you.’ That image has a universal meaning for me, especially when I can stand among ripening fields all summer. You will find it at the heart of many of my stories and poems.

Seamus Heaney thought that Brown’s sense of Orkney ‘wasn’t just a setting, wasn’t just material [...] it was his gateway to the completely imagined’ (L. 211). Wallace Stevens called his interactive universe of referent, image and symbol ‘my fluent mundo’. Secular American values took Stevens in radically different directions, though news of his possible last-minute conversion to Catholicism would no doubt have pleased Brown. But Stevens’ development of an imaginative domain where ‘the structure of the real is bound up with the figural structuring of thought and perception’ is more widely relevant to Brown’s procedures. Except that for Brown a creating godhead is consubstantial and coterminous with the language that expresses it, ‘fluent mundo’ describes an internal consistency in his writing. From his mid-teens Brown was struck by Catholicism’s ‘majesty and history’, and began to be impressed   

Chapman (1976), vol. iv, no. 4, p. 23. Wallace Stevens, Collected Poems [1954] (London Faber, 1990), p. 407. J. S. Leonard and C. E. Wharton, The Fluent Mundo: Wallace Stevens and the Structure of Reality (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988), p. 14.

Fivefathers  95 by ‘the long history of the church from that stark beginning, that incredibly endured through the changing centuries, always adapting itself; enriched by all that poetry and music, art and architecture could give; and still apparently as strong as ever in our grey twentieth century’. With this fund of story and image at his disposal he developed as a writer whose fields of secular reference constituted the religious oblation he felt called upon to make. [GMB] Catholicism is full of material for poets. It’s a huge quarry of very rich and beautiful imagery; especially the Mass which is in a way a kernel of all life. I think they’ve spoiled it with the modern liturgical translations, using thin, flat, modern English.

So the sacramental was already an established aspect of his poetry? [GMB] I suppose so, vaguely, yes. It’s a part of my mental makeup, and I can’t get away from that.

While Brown’s register of heightened effect roots itself in the everyday, his language habitually implicates an agency within and beyond both a quotidian materiality and its systems of delivery. When tides roll, ‘the sea grinds his salt behind a riot of masks’ (CP 19); a participant in a successful and now distant whaling season remembers women tending to males who were sometimes drunkenly incapable— ‘tranced with corn’—but willing to confront dangerous survival as demanded by ‘the brutal stations of bread’ (CP 47). Peat cutters tear ‘dark squares, thick pages / from the Book of Fire’ (CP 109); and real world memories of a ‘Sea Widow’ include her drowned husband: ‘They unweave him, mackerel and gull’ (CP 178). As in traditional hymnal words echo from poem to poem: ‘Bread’, ‘cornstalk’, ‘seed’, ‘honey’, ‘furrow’, ‘plough’, ‘ship’, ‘whale’, ‘cuithe’, ‘ale’, and ‘jar and tapestry and gold’ are part of this verbal texture. ‘Harp’ is particularly useful since it is a way of not saying ‘psalm’, defined alternatively by the OED as a plucking of the strings of the harp, a song sung to the harp, or any song of a sacred character. Brown plays variations on each of them. His resourceful ability to find another way of seeing and hearing brings a different focus to elemental experience that includes the harsher repetitions of a sea-faring life—there are lots of shipwrecks in this writing —as well as Viking rage and Christian war-fighting. A catechism of numbers is also involved in the pattern of repetition and echo 

Alan Bold, George Mackay Brown, p. 11.

Fivefathers  96 sounding from poem to poem. Ten and twelve recur, but seven is everywhere—‘My particular pattern’, he tells us, ‘is the heptahedron’ (FIS 169): [GMB] I think that that part of my technique, in stories as well as in poems is to look, say, at an incident or character from seven different points of view, and slowly build them up from there. Seven seems for some reason to be an ideal number for that sort of thing. It’s a very important number—the seven days of Creation, following the seven days of the week, and then such things as the seven deadly sins, the seven colours of the spectrum, the five loaves and two fishes of the miracle, the seven oceans and seven continents, Shakespeare’s seven ages of man, and so on. It’s a mystical sort of number and very practical at the same time, as the old Hebrews recognised when they made the seventh day one of rest.

As part of that creation myth a recurrent resource in Brown’s fields of reference is the daily grind of survival—the sweat of the brow—which becomes a prime example of what Heaney called the cross-lighting of real world reliability with dream-like rendition: ‘I rent and till a patch of dirt / Not much bigger than my coat’ (CP 171). But accurate formulations of harsh and demanding existence notwithstanding, when Brown transforms labour in the fields and boats into ritual and ceremony, as he recurrently does, we see moral fable displacing the realist story of back-breaking work. This slippage into mystique is redeemed by vivid perceptions of human toil that are among Brown’s most convincing repetitions; a vividness that connects in turn with readings of the New Testament that for people struggling to live centred on a redeeming figure who loved the poor more than the rich: which justifies Brown’s suggestion that ‘into the crofter’s sackcloth, the life of Christ wove richness and beauty’ (OT 31). He has a brilliant talent for making bible stories interesting, a project in which the birth of its New Testament figure of salvation becomes something of lodestone, attracting treatments that include an innkeeper who radically disenchants the event through his immediacy of speech. In ‘King of Kings’ the innkeeper is a spy who sends ‘secret letters’ reporting on local activity to ‘The Third Secretary (Security)’ (CP 74); and in ‘Bethlehem’ we hear him say: ‘Straw in the cowshed, that’s all I can offer’ (CP 149). [GMB] Yes, the innkeeper does come into several of the poems. I was always fascinated by this part of the Nativity story—why the innkeeper sent them down into his byre or stall below the inn, and whether he was a mean, grasping man. Because his inn would have been very busy, since the tribe of David were coming

Fivefathers  97 in to register for what I suppose was some kind of poll tax. I was always interested as a child by the business people in the town, I mean the shopkeepers and the people who dealt in trade and money. And the innkeeper was based upon my memory of them. Besides which, because of my love of beer in my younger days, I got to know many inn-keepers.

By the time of The Wreck of the Archangel Orkney becomes a credible if elliptical location for the birth of Jesus when ‘The Twelve Days of Christmas: Tinker Talk’ discloses the transmission of fable as internalised thought world by filtering Christian belief through a superstitious speaker: I thought I heard a night cry, a bairn Poorer than me A white dream, surely. In the streets of Kirkwall Talk of troubles. Soldiers in the slush, kestrel-headed. I saw the shepherds. One folded a shivering lamb. They lingered at the door of the inn. The sun was a shuttered hovel Last time we passed. Look now, new bright roofbeams! We took plans and mirrors to Hamnavoe. Three foreign skippers, The pier heaped with bonded cargoes. (CP 279)

As part of the transmission of shifting location and the merging of past into present, speakers and characters reappear in different poems set in different eras. In this transtemporal dimension historic Rognvald Kolson, sometime Earl of Orkney, walks on farms known to the fictional characters Halcro, Mansie and Peero, who in turn seem to move from a field full of folk in ages past to a Stromness fair in the 1920s. In a related tactic, there are lots of ways of reading the Magnus story and Brown offers many alternatives in a variety of forms from elegy to opera. Thus formal stylisation in ‘Saint Magnus in Egilsay’:

Fivefathers  98 They lured you there, a gentle enemy. Bow your blank head. Offer your innocent vein. A red wave broke. The bell sang in the tower. Hands from the plough carried the broken saint Under the arch. Below, the praying sea Knelt on the stones. (CP 32)

is later rehearsed in the realist vernacular of a lyric, the last of six ‘Songs for St Magnus Day’, about the summoning of Lifolf the cook, Magnus’s executioner: ‘Lifolf,’ they sang, ‘here’s better butchering— Come up, come up!’ ‘The lords get hungry after a hunt,’ said Lifolf. he washed his hands in the burn. He went in a slow dance Up to the blank stone in the barren moor. (CP 231)

If the executioner’s guilt is finely interjected, Magnus the victim is part of the historical record. So is the semi-legendary Thorfinn, though the first time we see his lawless behaviour, in Loaves and Fishes, he is set to leave an Orkney where ‘every casual car was the Black Maria’ (CP 20). Each of the eight poems that comprise ‘Fisherman and Boy’ is addressed to Thorfinn, and a coda reads: Thorfinn, you will learn more in Orkney Than Mansie did Who made seven salt circles of the globe. (CP 60) [GMB] Thorfinn is a Scandinavian name and one of the great Earls of Orkney had that name. He was the grandfather of Saint Magnus, and he was also a first cousin of Macbeth. In Thorfinn’s day the Earls of Orkney were beginning to intermingle with the Royal House of Scotland, making alliances. He went on a pilgrimage with Macbeth; they rode over the Alps to Rome together, where Macbeth threw money to the poor people—maybe trying to atone, but more likely because princes were expected to be givers of gold.

Brown’s intra-textual figurings include episodes in the life (and death) of Ikey the tinker, another character we feel we know. When ‘The Scarecrow in the Schoolmaster’s Oats’ says ‘I do not trust Ikey the tinker. / He has a worse coat’ (CP 122), we recall the tinker’s explanation from an earlier collection:

Fivefathers  99 Mansie at Quoy is a biddable man. Ask for water, he gives you rum. I strip his scarecrow April by April. (CP 55) [GMB] Tinkers don’t really exist any longer, though there were plenty of them when I was a boy, and I was half-scared of them and half-fascinated at the same time. There was something slightly menacing, dangerous, about them, and yet they had a kind of vividness and picturesqueness too. They somehow fit into the complex of characters I’m attracted to.

Compression of detail in ‘Ikey’s Day’, and a syllabic organisation of interior monologue that seems runic in its sculpted delivery, mobilises a day in a life as life in one day: A ditch awakening, A bee in my hair. Egg and honeycomb, Cold fare. An ox on the hill, Bulls, ploughman, ploughshare. A sharp wet wind And my bum bare. A fish-brimming corn-crammed house, But a hard door. Chicken, thief, and crab Round a blink of fire. A length of bones in the ditch, A broken prayer. (CP 113)

Economy of form presents a stream of consciousness without verbs in recognition of a mind more shaped than shaping, and a character more sinned against than sinning. With his tinker’s superstition, Ikey would ‘Rather break a crust on a tombstone’ than ‘go near Merran and her cats’, because Merran’s ‘great-great-grandmother / Wore the red coat at Gallowsha’ (CP 56). Orkney’s Christian history has its own blood-lettings, and ‘Witch’ in a later volume shapes the episode differently:

Fivefathers  100 And there at a steep place, Gallowsha, Among tilted bottles, fists, faces —a cold drunken wheel— James saw the hangman put his red shirt on Wilma. (CP 103) [GMB] There was a great witch-hunt in Orkney in the seventeenth century. I don’t know how many women there were who were condemned as witches, but Gallowsha was the place in Kirkwall where they were burnt; strangled first and then burnt. They stood them on a pile of faggots and someone applied the torch and up they went. It was a hellish thing.

While these ‘documentary lyrics’ make music out of harsh actuality, they also document a life-long pacifist’s negotiations with mayhem and slaughter. Social justice and interpersonal harmony have a hard time of it in Brown’s imagined community, though they remain the horizon of intention, even or perhaps particularly when Scandinavian forbears are resurrected in Orkney’s continuing present, and reconstructed event is located in that hinterland where character and episode shade into legend. In this misty region Brown sometimes requires of the reader either an act of faith commensurate to his project, or at least a willing and patient suspension of disbelief. Ventriloquising these characters and contexts, though, gives him space and opportunity to extend and experiment with his mundo; as when the voice he adapts for what he called ‘Imitations’ of the twelfth-century ‘Norse Lyrics of Rognvald Kolson’ takes liberties with their founding texts in order to ‘preserve some of the gaiety, savagery, piety of the originals’. The twelfth poem, about Rognvald’s Mediterranean attack on a high-sided ship called a dromond, carried out while en route for a Jerusalem crusade, remembers Audun, the first warrior to board the African ship and execute his grim reaping: Black sheaves fell on the dromond. Flame-bearded Audun Was complete gules. Erling’s Audun Through fire and blood Bound his red harvest. (CP 163)  

The phrase is Douglas Dunn’s, quoted by Brown’s editors in Collected Poems, p. xiii. George Mackay Brown, Winterfold (London: Chatto, 1976), p. vi.

Fivefathers  101 ‘Pilgrimage’, from The Wreck of the Archangel, uses syllabic rhyming, consonantal repetition and a resonant minimalism to re-work the same event as a lost opportunity for plunder while sailing to the Holy Land: Endured salt of betrayal; burned a tall-masted Moslem dromond, but lost Her molten gold to lobsters. (CP 234)

It seems part of the design of these time-travelling perspectives that there is no secure way of knowing the status of scripted event. When we read in ‘The Stone Cross’, for example: ‘at dawn Havard sighted a hill in Ulster’ (CP 180), was this an intended reference to recorded incident? [GMB] No. The Vikings were always raiding into Ireland and England and down as far as the Scilly Isles. These people from Orkney were terrible; I tell you, they were just pirates, you know. Once the fields were ploughed and sowed, away they went in their long ships and harried in the Atlantic and the Irish Sea. Monasteries were what they went for to begin with, and churches, because that’s where the gold and silver was, and they were undefended. So those places always had a rough time of it. In Lindisfarne they had the famous chant: ‘A furore Normanorum libera nos Domine—from the fury of these Northmen deliver us O Lord.’ It’s that kind of raid the poem is based on.

Similarly, a move from repeated event to credible fiction in ‘Buonaparte, The Laird, And The Volunteers’ (CP 105-6), simulates the tone and temper of a laird’s letter to Lords of the Admiralty which documents press-gang barbarism, though no such document was consulted. On the other hand, apart from being carefully dated the poem ‘William and Mareon Clark’ (CP 217-8) shows every sign of being purely an invention of Brown’s imagination. [GMB] It was a legal document published in 1967 in a book about Stromness; I hadn’t seen it before. But it’s a kind of title-deed of the first recorded house here in Stromness, at the far end of the bay. It was an inn; they had applied to the Earl of Orkney to build an inn. That was the real beginning of Stromness, I think. Before that it must have been just a scattering of fishermen’s huts, bothies and what have you. But by that time sailing ships were taking shelter here. That’s why they built an inn; they wouldn’t have built it for the local fishermen and farmers, who sat at their own fires and ate their own produce.

Fivefathers  102 The title poem of The Wreck of the Archangel tells of the seemingly miraculous survival of a single infant: One thin cry Between wavecrash and circling wolves of wind,    And there, in the lantern pool     A child’s face[.] (CP 223)

Was this unlikely event true? [GMB] Oh yes. It was an emigrant ship, bound for America, I think. As far as can be gathered it was wrecked in a winter storm off the island of Westray. Everybody was drowned, but this child was found on the shore. The ship’s port of registration must have been Archangel, so they must have been people from the Baltic, or from Russia itself. Anyway, that child was brought up on one of the crofts and eventually got married. But since at first they didn’t know anything about him at all, they called him John Angel, after the ship. And that Angel family was still in existence in Westray until a while ago, when the name died out.

Brown described poems in Winterfold (1976) as ‘swatches cut from here and there in the one weave of time’ (p. vi), and of the characters he traces in Fishermen with Ploughs he comments: ‘essentially their lives were unchanged; the same people appear and reappear through many generations.’ Given his keen sense of memory as context for cognition, he was well placed to exploit other aspects of memory that have become a theme in social sciences: The argument that memory is intersubjectively constituted—which assumes that while it is an individual who remembers, his or her memory exists, and is shaped by, their relationship with what has been shared with others and that is, moreover, always memory of an intersubjective past, of a past time lived in relation to other people—seems to be a central characteristic of new sociological theories of memory.

The Edwin Muir who wrote that ‘the life of every man is an endlessly repeated performance of the life of man, was the Muir who opened ‘the door to the marketplace’ where Brown could sell ‘the tapestries [he] had woven’. Perhaps because of an inter  

B. A. Misztal, Theories of Social Remembering (Maidenhead: Open University Press, 2003), p. 6. The Story and the Fable, p. 54. Quoted in Interrogation of Silence, p. 47.

Fivefathers  103 vening lifetime’s work with poems in series; including lyric cycles, elegiac quartets, septets and octets; calendars, liturgies, ecclesiastical orderings and numerologies; seasonal processions and rewritings of heroic and biblical form and fable from year to year, his work becomes itself a kind of extension to Orkney’s saga where what happened forty years ago happened several hundred in the past. [GMB] I believe that is indeed so. It is the way that I work and I think that that is the way things happen.

Edwin Morgan: Living in the Utterance Edwin Morgan has a well-earned reputation for transgressing boundaries. Whereas early cartographers marked territory beyond the known world with a fearful ‘here be dragons’, frontiers of any kind serve instead to trigger his invention. The connections he establishes in and across time and space both intimate and distant between familiar worlds of experience and those to be explored have extended the possibilities of scripted English in quite spectacular ways. From squibs to sonnets, from love poetry to limericks, from Anglo-Saxon alliteration to Russian modernism, from the Middle East to the Pacific Islands, the tenements of Glasgow to the back streets of Naples, from pre-history to the distant future, he shapes an encyclopaedia of human voices for travellers and aliens, philosophers and friends, neighbours and strangers; including as occasion prompts, a hyena, a computer or a crack in glass. Given such diverse fields of operation, Denis Donoghue’s recognition that ‘the force of Morgan’s imagination is its variousness’ can read almost like an understatement. Born in Glasgow in 1920, Edwin Morgan grew up on the South side of the city, in Pollokshields then Rutherglen, going to Glasgow University when he was seventeen. He can remember writing for his school magazine at the age of eleven or twelve, and published poems as an undergraduate. But when he came back from non-combatant wartime service with the Medical Corps in the Middle East, it took him some time to find his range and tenor. His first collection, Dies Irae (1952) is marked by an Apocalyptic rhetoric; and there is an Old Testament plangency elsewhere in his early work. 

Quoted on the back cover of Themes on a Variation (Manchester: Carcanet, 1988).

Fivefathers  105 [EM] There is, and I suppose it does go back to the upbringing I had. My parents weren’t really what you would call religious, but they were church-going, with a strong sense of right and wrong, and I was fairly strictly brought up, going both to church and to Sunday school every week. You had to do it, and I got to know the Bible very well because I had to learn large parts of it by heart. Bible-imagery stays in your mind, whatever your beliefs eventually become, and when I was writing these apocalyptic things, like the one about the atom bomb, it came out in terms of religious imagery: Shall the trumpet sound before the suns have cooled? Shall there not be portents of blood, sea-beds laid bare, Concrete and girder like matchwood in earthquake and whirlwind? Shall we not see the angels, or the creeping ice-cap, or the moon Falling, or the wandering star, feel veins boiling Or fingers freezing or the wind thickening with wings?

He soon moved on from this Apocalyptic manner, but the attraction to heightened language and an ethical commitment that included eloquent opposition to weapons of mass destruction stayed with him. He was also to make further use of other strategies sounded in this first collection: its imitations of Anglo-Saxon are more than technical exercises. [EM] When I was taking the English degree at Glasgow, Anglo-Saxon was a large part of the course, almost a back-bone to it. It was compulsory, and I was one of the few who liked it. I loved the Anglo-Saxon poetry, and so got fairly well into the language. I’ve always liked heroic poetry and I admired the heroic and stoic tones of Anglo-Saxon. I think a mixture of that and its curious elegiac, melancholy quality hit me very strongly. I also admired it from a technical point of view. It was one of the first things that showed me the use of different kinds of metre. This wasn’t a regular beat at all, but it had rhythm, wonderful rhythm, and that appealed greatly.

In the same year as Dies Irae, Morgan published (in California) his modernizing translation of Beowulf, making the poem accessible to contemporary readers. He was also incorporating its rhythms into an ambitious reconstruction of possibilities open 

Edwin Morgan, Collected Poems (Manchester: Carcanet, 1990), p. 25. Hereafter CP.

Fivefathers  106 to Scottish writing in the second half of the twentieth century. That reconstruction similarly incorporated elements of the Russian and French writing he studied as an undergraduate when his life-long engagement with European poetry began. [EM] At school I encountered no modern poetry at all. And then it all burst upon me: a great series of impacts. It was a sudden discovery, between the ages of seventeen and eighteen, of twentieth-century poetry. In French studies I read the French symbolists, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Mallarmé; I liked Baudelaire particularly. In the Russian classes I first read Mayakovsky, whom I translated later. I remember being impressed, too, by the American Hart Crane.

Frontiers were already evaporating, and that early appetite for language finds space in his translations and elsewhere for a use of Scots that marks a significant extension of native sound worlds into cross-border relationship. Morgan recognised a kindred spirit in Vladimir Mayakovsky, and called his Scots versions of the Russian’s poems Wi the Haill Voice, indicating full-throated endorsement of their bonding with proletarian speech. Morgan quotes approvingly Mayakovsky’s insistence that ‘poetry—all poetry!—is a journey into the unknown’, and he warmed to the Muscovite’s essay ‘How Are Verses Made?’: ‘Innovation, innovation in materials and methods is obligatory for every poetical composition.’ ‘In that essay,’ Morgan comments, ‘innovation joins careful craftsmanship, a feeling for the age, and a commitment to social struggle as one of the prerequisites for modern poetry’ (WHV 10). The remark applies equally to the activist energies of his own work: as well as paying homage, he was taking what he needed from European practice. As far as the suitability of Scots for a politically informed reconstruction of modernism is concerned, Morgan says this: There is in Scottish poetry (e.g. in Dunbar, Burns, and MacDiarmid) a vein of fantastic satire that seems to accommodate Mayakovsky more readily than anything in English verse, and there was also, I must admit, an element of challenge in finding out whether the Scots language could match the mixture of racy colloquialism and verbal inventiveness in Mayakovsky’s Russian. (WHV 16-17)

The translations show that Scots met the challenge successfully, and Morgan is relaxed about his relationship to a language use that was still contentious when he began his professional life of writing. 

Wi the Haill Voice: 25 Poems by Mayakovsky (Oxford: Carcanet, 1972), p. 10. Hereafter WHV.

Fivefathers  107 [EM] I started off writing in English, and it seemed the most natural way for me to do it. In the late forties, when I tried Scots, mostly for translations, it seemed that the poets being translated did go better into Scots than into English— Mayakovsky and some translations from Heine. They went very well into Scots and I enjoyed using it, trying it out, accepting the challenge. I was tempted to write more in Scots because at that time what people call the ‘second wave’ of the Scottish Renaissance was in full flood, and it was tempting to fall in with that. But I could never make it my main thing. It goes back to a sense of just what your own voice is. This is not the whole answer because I know, for example, that Sydney Goodsir Smith was able to force himself to use Scots, though it wasn’t his natural voice, really, at all. So it’s not a clear-cut thing. In my own case it is simply not so compelling to use Scots as perhaps it is to some other people.

Morgan had discovered his homosexuality at school and the need for a fairly absolute suppression of any public acknowledgement in the face of legal sanction and a widespread, governing and largely faith-based intolerance in post-war Scotland may have fed an insatiable search for voices in other languages. (Besides Russian and German, a non-exhaustive list would include translations from French, German, Italian and Spanish and, with help, from Hungarian.) Although at the time of the interview he accounted differently for the impulse to experiment, this polyglot evidence suggests a powerful need to break away from constriction in any one mode, and find expressive instrumentality wherever he could. [EM] I think there was probably something of that. I did not want to restrict myself to carrying on a Scots tradition. I didn’t look at it in that kind of way. I didn’t put myself to school with MacDiarmid or with any of the earlier Scottish poetry. It was there and I enjoyed it, but it wasn’t what compelled. Even during my last years at school, and at university, I was feeling my way gradually into other ways of looking at things. It’s hard to say why this should be so, except that perhaps it has something to do with being an only child. I think perhaps an only child gets the imagination going more than someone who belongs to a large family and so is interested straightaway in immediate relationships. With no brothers and sisters you can’t do that. So you look out at things, look up at the stars, go out into the garden and wonder about things, creep up into the attic or whatever.

It is clear nonetheless that Morgan’s pursuit of difference relates more centrally to the public denial his homosexuality compelled him to in the decades after the War. He came to think that ‘creative activity of any kind’:

Fivefathers  108 is not hindered by pressures and difficulties and tensions, in fact it’s often helped by these things, so I don’t think one should rush to get rid of all one’s problems in the hope that this will lead to better art. I don’t think that this would necessarily be true. (NNG 162)

He draws on many sources, and given the revolutionary politics that informs Mayakovsky’s work, it seemed appropriate to move on to the way Morgan’s literary radicalism can sometimes call William Blake to mind, including their shared interest in created worlds of libertarian promise. Morgan’s ‘The Fifth Gospel’ begins:

and continues:

I have come to overthrow the law and the prophets: I have not come to fulfil, but to overthrow I have not come to call sinners, but the virtuous and law-abiding to repentance. (CP 259)

[EM] Blake was certainly one of the poets who made an early impact on me and I still like him a lot. The method he has of often turning ideas inside out or casting a very strange light on accepted ideas appealed to me strongly. So I did go out to Blake, I’m sure of that.

In a related direction ‘Twilight of a Tyranny’ (CP 345) sets polyphonic speech against figures of oppression; and in comic vein ‘The Mummy’ makes its serious point not only by direct reference to Ozymandias through the mummy’s gagged response, ‘—M’ n’m ‘z ‘zym’ndias, kng’v Kngz!’, but in the ironically pacifying words of welcome spoken to the preserved corpse of Rameses II: —Yes yes. Well, Shelley is dead now. He was not embalmed. He will not write about your majesty again. (CP 398)

If the force of Morgan’s imagination is his variousness, then it will hardly settle easily into conventional politics. It has, though, produced some of the most perceptive and challenging political poetry of our time, where we negotiate what it seems proper to call an anarchist aesthetic. [EM] I think there is something like that—anarchist or libertarian; I think it’s probably true. It fits in with the fact that I don’t really like systems of thought

Fivefathers  109 or systems of belief, and I don’t find myself worried by this. Some people have thought that there is a search for belief in my work, but I don’t really think that’s true. Quite often I take up the idea of a search or a quest, maybe in a longish poem or in a sequence, but I don’t think of it as being a quest for a system of belief. I just like to think of things as they are and bring as many of them as I can into my poetry. If I were asked whether I had a philosophy of life, I just couldn’t describe such a thing; I don’t really have one at all.

One of his early pieces, unpublished until the Collected Poems in 1990, was a ‘Conclusion’ for ‘The Triumph of Life’, which adapts the terza rima Shelley had taken from Dante for the poem he was working on when he died. [EM] I like Shelley, yes; both the political element in ‘The Mask of Anarchy’, which I remember enjoying as a student, and also ‘Prometheus Unbound’ which moves right out into the universe and asks serious questions about where power really resides.

It won’t be surprising, then, that Morgan’s poetry habitually mobilizes cross-cultural energies by subverting categorical imperatives wherever it finds them. Using expressive forms derived from concrete poetry he will dismantle, in ‘Levi-Strauss at the Lie-Detector’, a line from The Savage Mind—‘any classification is superior to chaos’ (CP 354). A paired poem called ‘Wittgenstein on Egdon Heath’ takes its first line from the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, ‘the world is everything that is the case’ (CP 355), and performs a similar ludic disordering. A speaker in ‘The World’ defends these deconstructive turns: I don’t see the nothing some say anything That’s not in order comes to be found.

Sensing discoverable potential in apparent chaos, Morgan’s creative disorderings stretch the present into transforming possibility: Imagine anything the world could, it might do; anything not to do, it would.

The poem then teases semantics out of words actively adapting to unexpected movement: A plume of act flies as it spins by. (CP 346–8)

Fivefathers  110 Morgan’s left-wing take on democratic republicanism is as bracing as it is diverse. He wears his clown’s hat to raise pertinent questions about the colonizing power of language when ‘The First Men on Mercury’ has fun with the triumph of strange-sounding aliens over English-speaking astronauts who invade their territory (CP 267–8). Speakers of Glaswegian demotic, Scots more generally, and anyone else alert to the subordination contingent upon unilateral assumptions of the right to set the discursive terms of cultural exchange, might read the encounter as a parable of successful resistance. The range of Morgan’s sympathies suggests a continuing urgency for material alteration in the narratives that order society, and he takes care to register his priorities. Looking at his home city’s underclass prompts the thought that: Hugh MacDiarmid forgot in ‘Glasgow 1960’ that the feast of reason and the flow of soul has ceased to matter to the long unfinished plot of heating frozen hands. (CP 290)

Certainly, orthodox forms of political organisation are found wanting, as ‘On John MacLean’ makes clear by tailoring quoted words from the Glasgow working-class leader to Morgan’s preferred amendment: ‘I for one will not follow a policy dictated by Lenin until he knows the situation more clearly.’ Which Lenin hadn’t time to, and parties never did. (CP 350)

The poem ends by rescuing the Clydesider’s commitment: MacLean was not naive, but ‘We are out for life and all that life can give us’ was what he said, that’s what he said. (CP 351)

In Morgan’s republic the freedom to imagine love-making with Omar Khayyám forms an integral part of any improvement to the general well-being:

Fivefathers  111 There is no paradise (who could believe in such shadows?) but what there is can be so nearly so I’d give the wilderness no other name if you were there. There is no paradise but you, that’s all I know, here or to come. (CP 507)

Perhaps the necessary trade-off for this wager and permission is a constant search for innovation in the mode of imaginative delivery. Whether in concrete poems, sound poems, computer code-poems, Newspoems or elegies; blank verse, triplets or nonsense, there is an inventive play and wrestle with language, probing it for other ways of seeing; pushing it into varying shapes and forms. Wasn’t there a problem here, perhaps a problem with language itself, in that it is rule-bound, whereas Morgan’s well-honed formal skills, including a life-long attention to the sonnet, seem always to be on the lookout for new ways of transgressing regulation? [EM] I don’t think of language as in any way static. I know it’s an ordered system in the sense that we can all use it and understand each other: but in writing, particularly in poetry, I see it as a very extensible and explorable system. Some of the experiments you undertake if you are dealing with language will turn out not to be useful, may be cul-de-sacs. But we have to take that risk, and other things you discover will be useful, and will extend your instrumentation. Hugh MacDiarmid used to speak about the human brain being largely unused. I’m sure that’s quite true, and I think language is like that too.

His belief that the best parts of a poem often spring from what he thought of as ‘lightning discoveries that fly into the mind, unplanned, from sources that may be remote from the ongoing discourse of the poem’ is evident in much of his work, and he has recorded his feelings about why poetry breaches rule-bound procedures: Doubtless everything in the universe has a cause, but in the heat of composition the causes, the concatenations, are like a chain that melts into being instead of out of it. And there are few things stranger than that. If we lose sight of the strangeness, we lose sight of the poetry. (NNG 222)

In this writing Werner Heisenberg’s ‘Uncertainty Principle’ represents both clarify

Edwin Morgan, Nothing Not Giving Messages: reflections on his work and life (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1990), edited by Hamish Whyte p. 222. Hereafter NNG.

Fivefathers  112 ing instrument and challenging complexity: It seems this is a world of change, where we, observing, can scarcely fix the observed and are unfixed ourselves. (CP 337)

Morgan proposes connections and correlations that habitually subvert the security of assumed norms. ‘Surrealism Revisited’ takes advantage of Morgan’s partiality for European styles of representation that were still powerfully influential when he started exploring his talent. Challenging our conceptions of the possible by merging linguistic boundaries to extend the poem’s space, he juggles with syntax to disturb our sense of the fitness of things: ‘A clockwork orange by Fabergé fell out of a magpie’s nest and ate / humble pie. / A brazen yelp escaped from a condemned gasholder and was torn to / pieces in a fight between scavengers and demons’ (CP 411). To different effect we read in the third stanza of ‘Pictures Floating from the World’: Two old painters jailed for representation have escaped: the sirens shriek for them, the black sleek cars are out in magic realism. (CP 342)

His ‘New Year Sonnets’ spring similar surprises; Satan was squatting with his lurid tuba, potting a blackly incandescent coda. Hell is improvisatory. (CP 407) [EM] It gets you into impossible situations now and again. But people say that we can’t go faster than the speed of light; well, that just sets me wondering [laughs]. Or to take another example: professional linguists are fond of putting forward what they call impossible sentence —‘you can’t say that in English!’ I would like to accept the challenge and devise a context whereby you could say that in English. I don’t think there’s anything you can’t say, that wouldn’t make sense if only you could devise a context for it. That kind of thing is in my work a lot, I’m sure.

As part of his assault on the unsayable, Morgan is out to unsettle habits of mind whereby objects or phenomena, including other poems, are assumed to be ready for human recognition. This includes the narrative, conceptual and imagistic resourc-

Fivefathers  113 es of science fiction he uses to stake out uncharted territory from which his voices speak. But Morgan’s interplanetary poems, like Shelley’s in his day, also reference cutting-edge technology: like Shelley too, Morgan politicises its use. ‘Variations on Omar Khayyám’, one of a series of ‘Restructions’, sews phrases and moments from Fitzgerald’s translation of the Rubaiyat into its own reworking, letting them echo in the reader’s mind as the received texture of canonical narrative is redesigned. It comes as a surprise, for example, to realise that the opening we have encountered is a film version—‘almost like life’—of Khayyám’s story being watched by astronauts travelling through the cosmos: Outside the ship asteroids sparkled, hurtled; behind it the train of its flotilla swung past Mars, all space its battered caravanserai. (CP 504)

These astronauts, riotous and creating mayhem as their craft probes the unknown, are themselves being tracked on a screen suspended for ‘one moment in annihilation’s waste’. So the moving finger that inscribes Morgan’s text quietly confounds received ideas about time and space and plays games with the autonomy of the poem. That, too, is typical; and on a broader canvas the studied intertextuality of Morgan’s Collected Poems, let alone his Collected Translations, calls to mind Foucault’s insistence that ‘the frontiers of a book are never clear-cut. Beyond its internal references and its autonomous form, it is caught up in a system of references to other books, other texts, other sentences: it is a node within a network.’ Comparisons between ancient travel and futuristic voyages recur, but I was struck by Morgan’s evident attraction to the kinds of effects that bring surrealist practice to mind. He reached behind him and from among several books on the subject pulled down Herbert Read’s 1936 edited collection Surrealism, well-used enough to need an elastic band to hold it together, laughing as he responded. [EM] Obviously I was interested. When I was at school I took art as one of my main subjects. I only went to university at the very last minute: I was always intending to go to the School of Art, then something changed my mind. At that time, around 1937–38, surrealism was at its height, really; it was in the air, and being discussed. So yes, there’s something there. 

Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (London: Tavistock, 1972), translated by A. Sheridan Smith, p. 23.

Fivefathers  114 Read’s book includes Paul Eluard’s essay ‘Poetic Evidence’ which describes surrealists as: animated by the same striving to liberate the vision, to unite the imagination and nature, to consider all possibilities a reality, to prove to us that no dualism exists between the imagination and reality, that everything the human spirit can conceive and create springs from the same vein, is made of the same matter as his flesh and blood, and the world about him.

Morgan updates these possibilities. Surrealism’s assumption that conventional logic invites dissolution had a technical as well as a political and more generally imaginative appeal. Its restoration of desire in a demand for maximum liberty in every field added to its magnetism. ‘We have contended,’ André Breton argued in The Second Manifesto of Surrealism (1929), ‘that the things which are and the things which so well might be should be fused, or thoroughly intercept each other, at the limits.’ Limits and interceptions continue to interest Morgan. ‘I’ve rather liked the idea,’ he said in 1971, ‘that things are always upon a kind of knife-edge, and always change, and are always in danger, if you like to use the word danger, of being transformed into something else’ (NNG 36). Quite apart from his experimental live performances, Morgan is a multi-media poet in the sense that he incorporates different kinds of signifying systems: tapes, television, video, the virtual spaces opened up by computer technology and, centrally, film. Cinematic influences operate as both subject-matter and technique, in the way that his images can flicker and flash in a seamless continuity, one to another, even when warning about the nuclear obliteration of all signifying systems: We’ve endured the frames per second thing but a reality that rolls off in vapours is still on the cards and when it’s all up we needn’t be surprised with the rushing gravestones and skyscrapers, thrown out like a Harra of slags. (CP 310)

‘Five Poems on Film Directors’ (CP 362-5) suggests a continuing fascination.  

Herbert Read ed., Surrealism (London, 1936), p. 175. Cited in David Gascoigne, A Short Survey of Surrealism [1935] (London: Cass, 1970), p. 60.

Fivefathers  115 [EM] I’ve always enjoyed film and I remember being taken by my parents at quite an early age to what they regarded as ‘good’ films. So I was able to see some of what are now classics of the cinema. Fritz Lang’s Metropolis made a strong impression. I saw more and more when the Cosmo Cinema opened in Glasgow just before the war, what is now the Glasgow Film Theatre. It was a great fascination to discover, as the Russian revolutionists kept saying—Lenin was a great believer in film—to discover that here was, really, the art form of the twentieth century. And it was quite hard in a way for poetry to compete with the effects of the greatest films being made. I felt that quite strongly, and you have to be true to your reactions. As a succession of pictures, film combines art with story-telling, yet at the same time producing totally new effects, which you wouldn’t see anywhere else, certainly not in the theatre; effects which came from the purely technical aspects of how you use a camera. That interested me, too, because although I’m no great photographer, I’ve always taken a lot of photographs; so from that angle I felt I was very much at home with this kind of thing.

‘Memories of Earth’ combines art with story-telling to produce new effects from fragmentary voice-prints playing in a different galaxy, and recording how alien visitors have been affected by the courage and cruelty they see. Morgan verbalizes a zoom-lens effect to represent their entry into the human universe: The stone we are to enter is well marked, lies in a hollow and is as big as my fist.

Either they radically diminish, or the stone expands to form a landscape which: explodes upwards, outwards, the waves rise up and loom like waterfalls, and where we stand our stone blots out the light above us, a crag pitted with caves and tunnels, immovable yet somehow less solid. We climb, squeeze in and one by one tramp through the galleries till we have reached the designated cavern, fan out on the dim rubbly floor, and wait.

The verse then speeds up the process: We shrink again—accelerated this time. The rubble’s a mountain-range, the shallow roof a dark night sky in infinite soft distance.

Fivefathers  116 The gallery we came by’s like a black hole in space. Off we go across the plain into the new foothills. (CP 331)

At this stage the visitors have hardly begun their journey, so it is a relief to realise that alien astonishment matches our own: Surprise comes from old microstructure thinking. We must stop that—

which helps us see our planet through unaccustomed eyes. [EM] The main idea in the poem is the contrast between the very ordered society that the people leave when they shrink to get into our universe, and what they see of change here, and of suffering, which they don’t have in their world. They’re deeply affected by it, and when they return they set about changing their world because they see other things of importance. The poem has something to say about perfectly ordered societies, and whether or not this is a good thing.

Since the visitors’ time and earth’s can never be in phase, they experience human history as an eternal present which seamlessly connects inter-galactic travel with early representatives of earth’s native explorers: The sun begins to walk on the Pacific. And now we see and come down closer to a speck that does not fit that emptiness. A thousand miles from land, this black canoe, long, broad, and strongly built, with high fine prow much ornamented, and many oars, drives forward steady across the zigzag sun-prints. [...] By the gunwale a cock crows. Whatever far-off landfall is their goal, known or unknown, or only hoped-for, they have crossed dangerous immensity Like a field, and dangerous immensity to come lies all about them without land: their life is with the waves and wind, they move

Fivefathers  117 forward in ordinary fortitude, and someday they’ll steer through that Southern Cross they only steer by now. (CP 338) [EM] The part I thought I’d done best in that poem was the bit about the Pacific voyagers. They were quite extraordinary. These Polynesians or Melanesians would be casting off into pretty well unknown seas, going for hundreds and perhaps even thousands of miles in what to us would be rickety boats. The risks they took, and the kinds of hopes they had were just as great as the risks and hopes of the astronauts we have today. That kind of connection appeals to me very much. In the early days of life on earth you sail by the stars. Our job is to sail through them.

While his science-fiction metaphors include speculations on post-nuclear desolation, they generally sketch imaginative possibility, in that they open new areas for language through what his friend and sometime colleague Marshall Walker called ‘the intrinsic optimism of curiosity’: ‘What is that infinite hope / that forces a canoe upon the waters’ (CP 339). [EM] All of these things are a part of the human story, the human adventure. I don’t think we are necessarily bound by what is here about us on earth. We may be at the moment, but I’m not sure that we always will be. In one of the poems, ‘A Home in Space’ [CP 387], I take up this idea, that once we land on and eventually, presumably, live in and have children on other worlds, and then look back at earth, will we always be nostalgic for it, or are we ourselves evolving into creatures who can live contentedly on other worlds? I like to think of that process going on as far forward in time as we can imagine.

Within an achieved plurality of address, one of Morgan’s sound worlds roots itself in the city of his birth, and brings unusual context to light. The well-known ‘Glasgow Green’ dramatises a nightmarish incident of homosexual violence which takes Scottish verse into areas it has normally shunned, to register a plea for compassion, reclamation and renewal. Still exploring urban terror, the Instamatic Poems (1972) freeze with graphic realism such images of violence as a young couple being pushed through a shop window which the hoodlums responsible then proceed to loot: 

Cited by Alan Riach in ‘Poetry and Painting: Sketches for an Essay’ in Edwin Morgan, Beyond the Sun (Edinburgh: Luath, 2007), p. 22.

Fivefathers  118 In the background two drivers keep their eyes on the road. (CP 217)

The ‘Instamatic’ poems tailor economy of presentation to a camera-eye rendition of events reported in the press, and many of the newspaper cuttings Morgan gathered for the purpose had to be thrown away because he ‘couldn’t get them into one camera shot’ (NNG 75). As far as economy of form is concerned, Morgan’s selection and placing of detail is itself ‘a kind of direction to the reader’; the aim being to ‘present a just a picture of something that happened without comment’ (NNG 73): I suppose they are a kind of documentary poetry. […] It wouldn’t be absolutely strictly documentary because I do use a certain amount of imagination, but it’s documentary in a sense that all the poems relate to something that did happen in a certain place and time and […] they could be checked. (NNG 27)

Several of the poems refer to Glasgow events in ways that compensate for the optimism elsewhere in his work. [EM] When you live and grow up in a city you know it fairly well: you know that there are, as in all large cities, dangerous parts, dangerous times, and places that are best avoided. This was particularly true of the old Glasgow I grew up in, which is obviously different from today in the sense that it was then very dark, with sooty buildings and a great deal of fog. At night it was a sinister place even around the city centre and the small streets that lead off from it. It was quite Dickensian at night and that atmosphere was part of it. And Glasgow, of course, still has its problems.

In the sequence of ten ‘Glasgow Sonnets’ included in his 1973 collection From Glasgow to Saturn, urban blight and economic decline create a grim emotional landscape which tests Morgan’s ability to enter traditional form and tune it to the brutish rhythms of modernity. Petrarch never sounded like the third sonnet’s tenement shark preying on homeless people: ‘See a tenement due for demolition? I can get ye rooms in it, two, okay? Seven hundred and nothin legal to pay for it’s no legal, see? That’s my proposition, ye can take it or leave it but. The position is simple, you want a hoose, I say for eight hundred pound it’s yours.’ (CP 289)

Fivefathers  119 Explicit in a different direction, a sympathetic anger in the octet of sonnet five assesses the human cost of de-industrialisation: ‘Let them eat cake’ made no bones about it. But we say let them eat the hope deferred and that will sicken them. We have preferred silent slipways to the riveters’ wit. And don’t deny it—that’s the ugly bit. Ministers’ tears might well have launched a herd of bucking tankers if they’d been transferred from Whitehall to the Clyde. (CP 290)

The echo of obscene expletive in ‘bucking’ suggests an effort at control, and the overall impact of driving corrosive matter against refined form has been well expressed by Douglas Dunn’s suggestion that the ‘Glasgow Sonnets’ create ‘an atmosphere in which each poem feels like a verbal fist in which the immediacy and passion of [Morgan’s] concerns squeeze the form until its pips squeak.’ He goes on to note that ‘some passages [...] feel like revolutionary speeches delivered on the premises of a hostile terrain.’ Morgan designed new departures when he published his long sequence The New Divan in 1977: collage-like, and by turns autobiographical, historical and futuristic, the sequence ranges widely from a defining location in the Middle East. [EM] Though we were there in wartime, the sequence goes right back to history and pre-history. It also goes forward beyond the war to include the kind of violent incident you would have in more recent times, perhaps in the late sixties. Parts of the sequence come from my own experience over there, other parts are invented characters, not me at all. Probably all of them are based on something that I saw or heard, but much of it is fictionalised into bits of story-telling. I don’t think there’s a continuous story; I didn’t see it as that, certainly. There are bits of narrative here and there, and maybe they do impinge upon one another. But the poems are based upon people I met or knew and just slightly built up into fictional characters.

The fourteenth-century Persian poet Hafiz, addressed in the first poem and appearing from time to time in later ones, serves as a kind of model for linkage across difference. Did Morgan have any clear idea of its final shape when he started the sequence? 

Douglas Dunn, ‘Morgan’s Sonnets’, in About Edwin Morgan (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1990), edited by Robert Crawford and Hamish Whyte, pp. 75, 77.

Fivefathers  120 [EM] No, I didn’t have a clear vision of what it was going to be like; it grew as it was written. I quite soon got the idea that it was going to be a hundred poems, but although it doesn’t have much structure in an overall sense, it does have a beginning and an end, and I think the middle one is probably important in this respect: that was slightly arranged. But apart from that, I didn’t want too much structure. I spent almost the whole of the war in the Middle East and got to know something about their arts, and this word Divan is used by them in ways not common with us. From its meaning as couch or sofa, the same word is also used for a council chamber. And the other meaning is a collection of poems. It’s the same word and comes from the same meaning in that the poems are all sitting talking together, as it were, in these collections. They can sit where they like on these sofas, these divans, but there’s something going on between each of these poems, there’s some kind of mysterious conversation going on between them. In Middle Eastern Divan poetry they like this idea. They are not driven quite so hard as we in the West drive our readers. In things like, say, The Divine Comedy or Paradise Lost you are driven along and you can’t escape. Of course you admire their structure, but once you get in there you’ve got to go on to the end. But in Divan poetry they say no; let people wander among the groves, play a flute, watch a fountain, meet someone and not see them again, that kind of thing. And yet they maintain that this poetry is not so chaotic as you may think. I know it’s chaotic in a way, but from that perhaps you get something which you don’t get from the more straightforward driving method. This appealed to me, perhaps because of what we were saying about the libertarian element in my writing. But I make a slight compromise, because I do give it some structure: It’s slightly westernised, it’s not entirely of the East.

If we accept the invitation to wander through these poems, we see and hear sights and sounds of the desert and its characters, its towns and villages; meet an old man under a date-palm, attend a banquet, witness a funeral or go to a bazaar in spaces Jesus may have known, his memory now a trading opportunity: The power and the glory walked here? Buy some statuettes, blue and white, nothing looking blander ever shot from the mould. (CP 316)

An appropriately secular mirage shimmers to fine effect: Paradise in prospect, after sand, after sand, after sand. Hungry for vision yet thirsty for water, we’re gleaming

Fivefathers  121 sweaty ancient pilgrims that go softly past mirages. With thought withdrawn from emptiness a while, we watch the flickering meadows. (CP 328)

Trips to archaeological sites, or the movement of a camel-caravan, combine with futuristic images (‘ships like peacocks / spread vanes near Mars, wear out, become souvenirs’), to compose an intertextual meditation on love and death, time and change. In the stream of discourse that arises from the sands of the Middle East, it becomes apparent that ‘Many and great delusions is the history / of the desert’ (CP 306). Homosexual relationships (‘not in King’s Regulations, to be in love’) are recalled with comedy and affection, while amid: Domes, shoeshines, jeeps, glaucomas, beads— wartime Cairo gave the flesh a buzz, pegged the young soul out full length. (CP 329)

The emotional infrastructure of an autobiography is elliptically plotted and partially pieced, with the war as intensifying context: Swiftly the thud of land-mines brings confusion to the Canal. One star moves, drones. Position on a map’s the universe. The night is Rommel’s tree: searchlights cut it, history the secretion. (CP 328) [EM] Partly it was a kind of delayed war-poem. I never wrote my war-poem during the war. I tried, but I couldn’t write a thing during those years. I must, though, have been storing up all sorts of images and memories. They came out during the seventies probably because the Middle East was in the news so much; it had become again a focus of interest, and these things came rushing back into my mind very strongly.

One of the pleasures of this text is the way it opens larger themes, which are not religious in any accepted sense, as Morgan makes clear in a final address to Hafiz: For you and me, the life beyond that sages mention is this life on a crag above a line of breakers. (CP 330)

Fivefathers  122 The New Divan nonetheless reaches beyond immediate context. [EM] I was in the desert for a large part of the war and in times like that it can be a dangerous and unpleasant place. But desert landscapes do give you long thoughts, you know. I felt very strongly the appeal which so many others have felt before me. There’s no doubt, it lingers in the mind. If it’s peaceful and you’re out in the desert at night you certainly are aware of the vast extent of stars which in our islands you can hardly ever see. But the skies there are so clear, and so black; you can see all these constellations, and you have thoughts that are on the verge of what you might call religious. And while they’re not exactly that, you can begin to understand why monotheism—Islam after all means submission—did arise in those parts.

Typically, Morgan plays these memories and perceptions into an expanding present so that whatever its origins, the free-flowing structure of The New Divan relates more readily to developments in American poetry than to anything happening at home. [EM] I had enjoyed what the Beat Poets had done earlier, in the late fifties; I could see why they were reacting against academic poetry in America. Although it’s another country and another tradition, [Laurence] Ginsberg, [Gregory] Corso and [Laurence] Ferlinghetti loosened up my way of looking at things. Robert Duncan, later, with The Opening of the Field [1969] made some kind of impact. I’d been writing in a fairly tight, perhaps rather rhetorical, somewhat old-fashioned kind of way until the mid-nineteen-fifties. Then after that I felt that there was some kind of liberation coming.

When the impulse to self-government crashed in the Referendum of 1979, Morgan was moved to produce his most ambitious and accomplished sonnet-sequence to date, for which he invented a new rhyme-scheme. The fifty-one poems of Sonnets from Scotland (1984) construct a space-time continuum from Scottish pre-history to speculative futures, and I wondered whether for this undertaking he had any sense of its overall form when he began. [EM] Only slightly, I think, though it has more structure than ‘The New Divan’ in that it has a time-sequence. The first one written was ‘The Solway Canal’ which was, obviously, connected with Scotland’s identity and place, its reality or nonreality as a nation. And the idea of that, and what developed from it, was a reaction to 1979 and the failure of the Referendum to deliver any kind of an Assembly. There was a sense of political numbness after that, I had been hoping that there

Fivefathers  123 would be an Assembly, and the sense of let-down was very strong. But despite that, or maybe even because of it, the 1980s have been a very prolific period for Scottish writing, both in the novel and in poetry. I felt impelled to write a lot in the eighties and this sequence was the first fruits of that. It represents both a determination to go on living in Scotland, and a hope that there might be some political change. And to write about such things too.

Though the collection orchestrates future promise, a sense of disappointment is conveyed in the first poem’s images of Scotland’s primeval formation—‘drumlins black as bruises were grated off like nutmegs’. This leads into memories of primordial creatures in the second sonnet, ‘diving in the warm seas around Bearsden’, and stumbling upon a nest of sharks lurking in the deep: They themselves were dark, but all we saw was the unsinister ferocious tenderness of mating shapes, a raking love that scoured their skin to shreds. (CP 437)

Following evolutionary developments in the 3rd, 4th and 5th sonnets, the sixth proposes, from deep in the ancient forests of ‘Silva Caledonia’, a resurrected utterance for people the speaker cannot see: Yet men, going about invisible concerns, are here, and our immoderate delight waits to see them, and hear them speak, again. (CP 439)

The seventh, ‘Pilate at Fortingall’, draws on an old Scottish legend to excavate the theme of betrayal, and satirise trauma. If ‘The Solway Canal’ was ever to be constructed it would, like the Caledonian canal further up-country, link western seaways to the North Sea, but this time dividing Scotland along its border with England. In the preceding sonnet, a futuristic scenario is differently set for the discovery of a coin inscribed ‘Respublica Scotorum’. The date has been worn away where: as many fingers had gripped hard as hopes their silent race had lost or gained. The marshy scurf crept up to our machine, sucked at our boots. Yet nothing seemed ill-starred.

Fivefathers  124 And least of all the realm the coin contained. (CP 455)

Back in history meanwhile, Scottish republicanism forges links with an historic English counterpart in another sonnet, ‘Thomas Young, M. A. (St Andrews)’—the Scot who was John Milton’s tutor: Yes, I taught Milton. He was a sharp boy. He never understood predestination, But then who does, within the English nation? (CP 442) [EM] I found it interesting that Milton was getting that kind of Calvinism at such an early age. But I also had in mind Milton’s sonnets. I’ve always liked those sonnets, and think they’re underrated. He showed that you could use them for political purposes, so there’s something of that behind the sequence, too. I have, though, tried to avoid the obvious trap of writing about the famous figures and events of Scottish history. And when I do bring in a figure like Robert Burns, [‘Theory of the Earth’ CP 443] I put him in a new context, talking to a famous geologist in Edinburgh. It may have happened, who knows? But I liked the idea that there might be something between them, which might not be seen by someone who just knows Burns.

Another character brought in is Edgar Allan Poe, who visited Glasgow as a boy. The sonnet ends ‘To Arnheim, boy, Arnheim!’, and the reference is to Poe’s story ‘In the Domain of Arnheim’. [EM] The story is basically about landscape gardening, but when Poe goes into landscape gardening it becomes something else; about somebody going gradually into a very strange and beautiful landscape with wonders unfolding before his eyes. It stuck in my mind, and it stuck in the mind of the Belgian surrealist Rene Magritte, who has a painting called ‘The Domain of Arnheim’, so there you are!

In Sonnets from Scotland Morgan’s conversational idiom moves us through the technical accomplishment of each poem so that the sequence becomes something of a paradigm for varied possibilities, presenting us with a poetry of the democratic intellect, an open republic of self-contained techniques that collectively propose a creative revolution in our expectations. When, in the final sonnet, visitors from another planet register their reluctance to leave this territory, the sequence connects traditional concerns of past sonnet-cycles with its ambitions for a political awakening:

Fivefathers  125 If it was love we felt, would it not keep, and travel where we travelled? Without fuss we lifted off, but as we checked and talked a far horn grew to break that people’s sleep. (CP 457)

Within conventional time frames, and long before the 1979 referendum campaign, the ‘whole flow’ of continuous television production was a widely shared social experience. Two years after Morgan’s book of sonnets, his interactive sequence From the Video Box (1986) reworks strategies of transmission to put everyday practices of epistemology, subjectivity and representation under scrutiny. It was the idea of random access to public screening suggested by the ‘Right to Reply’ programme on television’s Channel Four that first provoked Morgan to try embedding screens of talk. [EM] Eventually I came to the conclusion that I would like to write something that would be a kind of equivalent in words but would be different in the sense that it opens the whole thing out imaginatively. I wouldn’t write about actual programmes: my people would go into the box to talk about unreal or impossible programmes, or something that isn’t a programme at all. This actually happens; television people would confirm that individuals go into the video-box in Glasgow just to get something off their chest. This, too, appealed to me. You mentioned Chaucer—I love Chaucer, and I love presenting characters. I’m a kind of nondramatist dramatist: I don’t write plays, but I’ve a strong dramatic instinct. I like to dramatise everything, I do feel that. And in presenting characters I try to make them as distinctive and real as I can in a short space, to give them all the life I can. So you’ve twenty-seven different people going into the box, and each one is meant to be alive, so that you can actually see that person.

The reader does see them: yet if we discount the erect penis displayed for a wager in poem 14 there is no physical description of Morgan’s speaking subjects. The closest we get is poem 24’s hamster-loving psychopath who threatens viewers with a Stanley knife (and who redirects the sequence’s epitaph from Letters to Atticus, Cicero’s friend and a patron of art and literature—‘he came up close to you, as I see’): ‘you can see from the look of me I mean that’ (CP 497). Across the theatres of Morgan’s various imaginings particular strategies flex these developing senses of connection. ‘Ingram Lake or, Five Acts on the House’ (1952) 

Alan O’Connor, ed., Raymond Williams on television (London: Routledge, 1988), p. 9.

Fivefathers  126 and ‘The Whittrick: A Poem in Eight Dialogues’, first published as a whole in 1973, are early evidence of something that becomes a staple of his writing: the preferred form of monologue and serial dialogue. [EM] I’ve always liked the idea of a poet being able not just to speak in his or her own voice, but to project into other kinds of existence. One of my earliest poems, written when I was still at school, fifteen or sixteen years old, was a poem like that. It was called ‘The Opium Smoker’ and was a study of a man dying of opium addiction in the Far East. I liked to imagine that character. He comes from the islands of Polynesia and ends up in some kind of Chinese opium den. So this kind of imaginative attention does go far back with me.

From the Video Box pushes serial soliloquy into strange places to project a variety of subject psychologies in acts of self-disclosure. The sequence derives its visual imaging from trick of speech delivering sense of personality, where a sometimes freaky gallery of voices focalises the performing and interactive reader by dramatising speech acts that presuppose a responsive addressee. To ground the video fantasies he constructs, Morgan operates a fundamental narrative assumption that by the very act of narrating the subject of narration addresses an other and structures the narration in relation to this other. As Julia Kristeva puts it: ‘I speak and you hear me, therefore we are’. As far as writing is concerned, Walter Ong reminds us that audiences are part of the fiction-making process: ‘For a writer any real recipient is normally absent […] the fictionalising of readers is what makes writing so difficult.’ Morgan’s acts of representation institute compromised autonomies by placing each speaker in a point of view; and by varying the subject position for speaking individuals he exercises an assumption that all represented utterances are political in the sense of claiming for their speakers particular positions in language. The poems range from the hilarious to the disturbing. The first three, for example, record a supporter of book-burning in ancient China, a viewer horrified by the burning of the library at Alexandria, and a pompous librarian who has just seen the British Library go up in flames. Arranged in small groups, each treating different aspects of viewing and projection, from scratch video to satellite broadcasting, the poems can be read as an update of The Canterbury  

Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language: a Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980) ed. L. S. Roudiez, trans. T. Gora, A. Jardine and L. Roudiez, p. 74. Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy: the Technologizing of the Word (London: Routledge, 1982), p. 177.

Fivefathers  127 Tales, projecting an electronic series of figures with a story to tell, from a camp male looking for his lost cat in poem 15 to an astrologically inclined hedonist in poem 23 who thinks of his satellite dish as poetry and Agamemnon as a soap opera. Cross-figuring frames of reference are a series motif in the seventy poems of Hold Hands Among the Atoms (1991) marking Morgan’s seventieth year. With the dance between signifier and referent, and the politics of representation again in play, the poems develop some of the issues raised in the video poems by opening up singular event to alternative public inspection. ‘A Needle’ sets a quest for the real as topic for the collection by foregrounding metaphor as signifying context: invisible it cannot be but long unseen and longing to be seen: oh yes and to be used, to swoop through wounds it would knit, banners to be invested with futures of things unknown, frames to be figured to hopes as iron as Homer’s woman fed on, against the odds of only being human.

Being human is tested in encounters where perceptions of and responses to his geopolitical present produce some of the most directly referential poetry Morgan has written. ‘A Ceremony’ locates the volume’s general critique of political violence in Brazilian slums where surviving victims swear solidarity; and ‘The last Intifada’ pays tribute to young Palestinians by projecting ‘a million people’ in a determining insurrection that twists the dialectic between systems of power and people dying (HH 23). Several of the poems here respond to the collapse of the Soviet system. The upsurge of iconoclasm that followed the tumbling of the Berlin Wall in 1989 provides ‘A Statue’ with occasion to measure the depth or otherwise of change; and deregulation brings a welcome revenge of the present when ‘Difference’ remembers the suppression of minority languages and promotion of the second-rate so that ‘the mass [can] move en bloc’ (HH 28). ‘A Warning’ focuses on ‘the better life / that never seems to come, and sees in crumbling ideologies a new world order’s priestcraft resurrecting enchantment: ‘opening of cathedrals, minuet of / vestments as they cross the ancient incense, / ranks of dew-eyes dibbling trembling candles / in waxbound trays that never will grow freedom.’ In tandem with these gothic simulations ‘musty indefatigable reaction’ revives, eager to believe that abolished thrones are again on offer: 

Edwin Morgan, Hold Hands Among the Atoms (Glasgow: Mariscat, 1991), p. 31. Hereafter HH.

Fivefathers  128 ‘What, a republic a kingdom?’ (HH 41). Morgan invests these poems with what he called ‘very strong feelings’: [EM] maybe because of a personal investment in the ideals that lay behind communism, I think that was there. I remember when various regimes began to collapse in 1988, 89, 90, watching extraordinary scenes on TV especially in capital cities of Eastern Europe; enormous crowds gathered together, sometimes suggesting violence, sometimes peaceful demonstrations. It was just the extraordinary surprise this caused even the pundits and Sovietologists and to me too. I had been to various of these countries and thought I knew the history reasonably well; and I too had thought that the regimes then, by the middle 1980s, were still pretty solidly established. I thought perhaps they were going to change bit by bit gradually; there had been little thaws here and there, but I was struck dumb just by what had happened. It was a mixture of feelings: I could understand why the people seemed to be so glad that they had shaken off the shackles of the Stalinist time; but at the same time I felt like warning them through the television set—do you really know what you’ve done, are you quite sure that it was the right thing to do, do you really know what problems lie ahead for you? I felt this very strongly just because I had hoped for so much when I was young, I suppose.

The hopes and fears Morgan designed for Virtual and Other Realities (1997) are strange and various. The collection’s central sequence defamiliarises the sense made widespread by networked computer use, of virtual reality as something ‘not physically existing as such but made by software to appear to do so from the point of view of the user.’ To service this point of view the term is especially applied to ‘memory that appears to be internal although most of it is external, transfer between the two being made automatically as required’ (OED). In 1998 Morgan gave a lecture called ‘Poetry and Virtual Reality’ to an Edinburgh Science Festival, where he quoted Phil Tippett, who runs an animation studio in California: We now have the ability and the technology to make things photorealistic using the computer. But this revolution is going to surpass the industrial revolution, and there’s going to be a lot of blood on the floor […] the computer demands that you be very procedural and use specific language. […] It’s not the same thing at all as having a relationship with materials. My concern is that […] one can tend to lose

Fivefathers  129 touch and sight of the real physical world.

Tippett’s and Morgan’s concerns about alienation from the material world are shared by others: The repetitive structure of what [Jean Baudrillard] calls the simulacrum (that is, the reproduction of ‘copies’ which have no original) characterises the commodity production of consumer capitalism and marks our object world with an unreality and a free-floating absence of the referent (e.g. the place hitherto taken by nature, by raw materials and primary production, or by the ‘originals’ of artisanal production or handicraft) utterly unlike anything experienced in any earlier social formation.

Morgan’s poem ‘In Night City’ refers to William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984), a science fiction adventure that helped to integrate cyberspace into novel-writing territory where there is no community, only relations of dominance. Gibson’s protagonist Henry Case is a paradigm postmodernist hero, transformed by the electronic helmet and gloves he wears as simulations articulate his being. Neural technology occupies his body and invades his mind, and the environment through which he moves alters sometimes decisively his behavioural possibilities. In his world as ours electronic space is where context-changing transactions are routinely communicated, and where jacking in to its virtually existing global network is as ‘real’ as any other terrestrial activity. Directly addressing Gibson and the Japanese-American axis of his novel, Morgan’s decidedly Glaswegian speaker is uncertain about which world he is in: Ur aw thae radgie nuts in Cybernippon Guys and dolls yer hauns kin get a grip on, An if they’re no, whit screens ur they a blip on? 

Morgan’s strategy across the sequence similarly centres the body as it brings into language alternative space for subjectivity as knowable site of comprehending power and motivating agency. Thus, in the real-world time of ‘March’, and while ‘The fax is in the land of numbers’: ‘the dialling hand is up and on its way, / braced by one raffish, restless, rude spring day’ (VR 47). The speaker who goes ‘Under the Helmet’ and presses ‘the sensor to its maximum’ enjoys the experience, and compares it with the virtual reality and interactive space   

Typescript supplied by Morgan. Fredric Jameson, Signatures of the Visible (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 17. Edwin Morgan, Virtual and Other Realities (Manchester: Carcanet, 1997), p. 76. Hereafter VR.

Fivefathers  130 that poetry makes available: ‘You laugh and throw the dizzy gear away’: Someone will pick it up to range again Through all the worlds imagination’s men Loom up with like old Grendel in his fen. (VR 56)

‘The land of rhyme is active’ in ‘The Ferry’ because nothing is static in cognitive experience; and claims of user-friendly mutuality between virtual and bodily realities—‘it searching you, you it’—are vigorously displaced: ‘buffet, buck, breach / dimensions like meniscuses, give speech, / cry out, scrunch your keel right up the beach’ (VR 48). [EM] There’s a kind of dialectic going on as to whether we should rejoice that simulation can now be so expert we don’t always recognise it: on the other hand where does this leave us, what kind of world are we living in if we don’t know what we see and feel and so on. I think that over the sequence as a whole it’s probably left as an ongoing argument in my mind, because I haven’t decided myself. I find very fascinating the idea that if you had the helmet and the gloves and they were more sophisticated than they are at the moment and you were giving yourself and were being given experiences that were possibly more convincing than real life; it’s both a kind of triumph of things that were unimaginable some time ago, yet on the other hand it has an element of fear about it because you maybe think you are no longer in control of what you are doing. It’s the element of control and power that lies behind it that is the worrying thing. [‘Virtual and Other Realities’] does come back to people living in cardboard boxes so maybe that is the interim final statement. [‘The homeless in their doorways clutch the cold. / still real, still waiting for the tale to be told’ (VR 98)] I think there is still an uncertainty in my own mind about the whole thing. I find it very fascinating but I have worries about it as I think probably many people do have.

Through all his worries and fascinations, Morgan responds to his sense of real people waiting for their tale to be told, and telling that tale is a theme he constantly varies. Whatever the formal or technical requirements of the poem at hand, his commitment to story remains firm. [EM] I like that element of poetry and I don’t want to give it up. Even if you have a difficult poem like ‘Waking on a Dark Morning’ [CP 513–15], there’s a story there too: if it’s looked at closely it is actually about waking on a dark morning in a bedroom with curtains, furniture and so on. It’s obviously difficult in many

Fivefathers  131 ways but it’s meant not to be nonsense; it’s meant to show the gradual coming to consciousness of someone who is waking up. I love story telling; I love novels and films too, where there’s still a strong emphasis on story. Anyway, I don’t give up story.

Morgan’s speakers tell many a tale in assembled (and dispersed) legions of alterity that together constitute a post-war metanarrative of cultural and scientific maturation. For all its over-determined logocentrism, Wittgenstein’s proposition that the limit of our words is the limit of our world does at least recognise language as instrumental guidance system for sentient thought. That words limited to fields of reference sanctioned by governing practice thereby sanction governing practice is an intellectual environment ironised in a poem called ‘Realism’ as ‘a mind to green / to kick-start action from the dream machine’. Exploiting the techniques it satirises as culturally convenient and politically quietist, ‘Realism’ turns to a seeing and saying generally preferred by Morgan; an investment of scientific discovery (in this case neutrinos) in a fictive mode that transfigures the object world, not into a fantastic narrative but as a metamorphosis in perception and in things perceived:

Ah but transcending it

are specks we see, and specks we cannot see but must imagine, in that immensity. It is reason sets imagination free. (VR 91)



Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus [1921] (London: Routledge, 1997), trans. by D. Pears and B. McGuinness, p. 56.

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Fivefathers  140 ——, Opus Posthumous, ed. by Samuel French Morse (London: Faber, 1959) Terdiman, R., Present Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis (Cornell: Cornell University, 1993) Thomson, Derick, Creachadh na Clàrsaich: Plundering the Harp (Edinburgh: MacDonald, 1982) Watson, Roderick, ‘Edwin Morgan’s Urban Poetry’, Chapman (1991), 64, 12–22 ——, ‘Edwin Morgan: messages and transformations’, in Gary Day and Brian Docherty, eds, British Poetry from the 1950s to the 1990s: Politics and Art (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), 170–92 ——, The Literature of Scotland: the twentieth century [1984], 2nd edn rev., vol. 2 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007) Waugh, G. H., ed., The Faces of Orkney: Stones, Skalds and Saints (Aberdeen: Scottish Society for Northern Studies, 2003) Whyte, Christopher, ‘“Now You See it Now You Don’t”: Revelations and Concealment in the Love Poetry of Edwin Morgan’, The Glasgow Review (1993), 2, 82–93 ——, Modern Scottish Poetry (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University, 2004) Whyte, Christopher, ed., Somhairle Macgill-eain / Sorley MacLean: Dáin do Eimhir / Poems to Eimhir (Glasgow: Glasgow University, 2002) Wilson, Grant F., A Bibliography of Iain Crichton Smith (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University, 1990) Wilson, John Dover, What Happens in Hamlet? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951) Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus [1921], trans. by D. Pears and B. McGuinness (London: Routledge, 1997) Žižek, Slavoj, On Belief (London: Routledge, 2001)

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Websites Carcanet Press: http://www.carcanet.co.uk/ Polygon Press: http://polygon.birlinn.co.uk/ John Murray: http://www.hodderheadline.co.uk/index.asp?area=murray Scottish Poetry Libray: http://www.spl.org.uk/ The George Mackay Brown website: http://www.georgemackaybrown.co.uk/

Photographic credits Chapter 1 (17): Sorley MacLean © Roddy Simpson Chapter 2 (34): Iain Crichton Smith © Roddy Simpson Chapter 3 (58): Norman MacCaig © Roddy Simpson Chapter 4 (83): George Mackay Brown © Gordon Wright Chapter 5 (104): Edwin Morgan at the opening of the Scottish Poetry Library © Roddy Simpson For other Humanities-Ebooks titles please visit http://www.Humanities-Ebooks.co.uk