Hugh MacDiarmid | |
|---|---|
.jpg) A bust of MacDiarmid sculpted in 1927 | |
| Born | Christopher Murray Grieve 11 August 1892 (1892-08-11) Langholm,Dumfriesshire, Scotland |
| Died | 9 September 1978(1978-09-09) (aged 86) Edinburgh, Scotland |
| Occupation | Poet |
| Literary movement | Scottish Renaissance |
| Notable works | A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle |
Christopher Murray Grieve (11 August 1892 – 9 September 1978), best known by his pen nameHugh MacDiarmid (/məkˈdɜːrmɪd/mək-DUR-mid;Scots:[ˈhjuməkˈdjɑrmɪd]), was a Scottish poet, journalist, essayist and political figure. He is considered one of the principal forces behind theScottish Renaissance and has had a lasting impact on Scottish culture and politics. He was a founding member of theNational Party of Scotland in 1928 but left in 1933 due to hisMarxist–Leninist views. He joined theCommunist Party of Great Britain the following year only to be expelled in 1938 for hisnationalist sympathies. He subsequently stood as a parliamentary candidate for both theScottish National Party (1945) andCommunist Party of Great Britain (1964).
Grieve's earliest work, includingAnnals of the Five Senses, was written in English, but he is best known for his use of "synthetic Scots", a literary version of theScots language that he himself developed. From the early 1930s onwards MacDiarmid made greater use of English, sometimes a "synthetic English" that was supplemented by scientific and technical vocabularies.
The son of a postman, MacDiarmid was born in the Scottish border town ofLangholm,Dumfriesshire. He was educated at Langholm Academy before becoming a teacher for a brief time at Broughton Higher Grade School inEdinburgh. He began his writing career as a journalist in Wales,[1][2][3] contributing to the socialist newspaperThe Merthyr Pioneer run byLabour party founderKeir Hardie[2] before joining theRoyal Army Medical Corps at the outbreak of the First World War.[3] He served in Salonica, Greece and France before developing cerebral malaria and subsequently returning to Scotland in 1918. MacDiarmid's time in the army was influential in his political and artistic development.
After the war he continued to work as a journalist, living in Montrose where he became editor and reporter of theMontrose Review[4] as well as a justice of the peace and a member of the county council. In 1923 his first book,Annals of the Five Senses, was published at his own expense, followed bySangschaw in 1925, andPenny Wheep.A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle, published in 1926, is generally regarded as MacDiarmid's most famous and influential work.[4]
Moving to the Shetland island ofWhalsay in 1933 with his sonMichael and second wife, Valda Trevlyn, MacDiarmid continued to write essays and poetry despite being cut off from mainland cultural developments for much of the 1930s.[3] He died at his cottage Brownsbank, nearBiggar, in 1978 at the age of 86.[5]
At different times throughout his life, MacDiarmid was a supporter ofFascism,[6][7]Stalinism, andScottish nationalism, views that routinely put him at acrimonious odds with his contemporaries. He was a founding member of theNational Party of Scotland,[3] forerunner to the modernScottish National Party. He stood as a candidate for the Scottish National Party in 1945 and 1950, and for theCommunist Party of Great Britain in 1964.[4] In 1949, MacDiarmid's opinions ledGeorge Orwell to include his name in a list of "those who should not be trusted"[8] toMI5. Today, MacDiarmid's work is credited with inspiring a new generation of writers. Fellow poetEdwin Morgan said of him: "Eccentric and often maddening genius he may be, but MacDiarmid has produced many works which, in the only test possible, go on haunting the mind and memory and castingColeridgean seeds of insight and surprise."[1]
Grieve was born in Langholm in 1892.[9] His father was a postman; his family lived above the town library, giving MacDiarmid access to books from an early age. Grieve attendedLangholm Academy and, from 1908, Broughton Junior Student Centre inEdinburgh, where he studied under George Ogilvie who introduced him to the magazineThe New Age. He left the school on 27 January 1911, following the theft of some books and postage stamps; his father died eight days later, on 3 February 1911.
Following Grieve's departure from Broughton, Ogilvie arranged for Grieve to be employed as a journalist with theEdinburgh Evening Dispatch. He lost the job later in 1911, but on 20 July of that year he had his first article, "The Young Astrology", published inThe New Age. In October 1911, Grieve moved toEbbw Vale inMonmouthshire,Wales[10] where he worked as a newspaper reporter; by 1913 he had returned to Scotland and was working for theClydebank and Renfrew Press inClydebank, nearGlasgow. It was here that Grieve first encountered the work ofJohn Maclean, Neil Malcolm Maclean, andJames Maxton.
In July 1915 Grieve left the town ofForfar in eastern Scotland and travelled to the Hillsborough barracks inSheffield. He went on to serve in theRoyal Army Medical Corps inSalonica, Greece and France during theFirst World War. After the war, he married and returned to journalism.
MacDiarmid's first book,Annals of the Five Senses, was a mixture of prose and poetry written in English, and was published in 1923 while MacDiarmid was living in Montrose. At about this time MacDiarmid turned to Scots for a series of books, culminating in what is probably his best known work, the book-lengthA Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle. This poem is widely regarded as one of the most important long poems in 20th-centuryScottish literature. After that, he published several books containing poems in both English and Scots.[citation needed]
From 1929 to 1930 MacDiarmid lived in London, and worked forCompton Mackenzie's magazineVox. MacDiarmid lived in Liverpool from 1930 to 1931, before returning to London; he left again in 1932, and lived in the village ofThakeham in West Sussex until he returned to Scotland in 1932.
MacDiarmid lived inSodom[11] on the island ofWhalsay, Shetland, from 1933 until 1942. He often asked the local fishermen to take him out in their boats and once asked them to leave him on an uninhabited island for a night and pick him up again in the morning. Local legend has it that he asked about Whalsay words and some of the Whalsay folk made up fantastical words that did not exist. The dialect is strong on the island and any strange words would have probably sounded quite plausible. "The often tormented genius wrote much of his finest poetry (including 'On a Raised Beach') and, via the Whalsay post office, conducted furious correspondence with the leading writers and thinkers of his generation."[12]The croft house that was his Whalsay home was later made into a campingböd (traditionally a building used to house fishermen and their gear), the Grieves House böd, run by Shetland Amenity Trust. It is in a state of disrepair and "closed for maintenance" as of 2022.[13]
In 1942 MacDiarmid was directed to war work and moved to Glasgow, where he lived until 1949. Between 1949 and 1951 he lived in a cottage on the grounds ofDungavel House,Lanarkshire, before moving to his final home: "Brownsbank", a cottage in Candymill, nearBiggar in the Scottish Borders. He died, aged 86, inEdinburgh.[14]
In 1928, MacDiarmid helped found theNational Party of Scotland,[15] but was expelled during the 1930s.[16] MacDiarmid was at times a member of theCommunist Party of Great Britain, but he was expelled twice. John Baglow reports that "his comrades never really knew what to make of him."[17] Indeed, he was expelled from the Communist Party for being a Scottish Nationalist, and from theNational Party of Scotland for being a Communist. As a follower of the Scottish revolutionary socialistJohn Maclean, he saw no contradiction between international socialism and the nationalist vision of a Scottish workers' republic, but this ensured a fraught relationship with organised political parties. MacDiarmid's Scottish nationalism often manifested in open bigotry towards England: he listed "Anglophobia" as one of his recreations inWho's Who.[18][19] Anticipatingthe Blitz, MacDiarmid wrote a poem entitled "On The Imminent Destruction Of London, June 1940", where he celebrated the Luftwaffe's potential bombing of London and compared the city to "a foul disease": "death and destruction has gone out from London all over the world".[20]
From 1931, whilst he was in London, until 1943, after he left the Shetland island ofWhalsay, MacDiarmid was under surveillance byBritish counterintelligence operatives.[21] In 1949,George Orwell included MacDiarmid ina list he wrote for theInformation Research Department of fellow left-wing writers whom he suspected of sympathies for theSoviet Union or direct links with theSoviet secret police (NKVD). MacDiarmid stood in theGlasgow Kelvingrove constituency in the1945 and1950 general elections. He stood against the Conservative Prime MinisterAlec Douglas-Home inKinross and Western Perthshire at the1964 election, taking only 127 votes.
In 2010 letters were discovered showing that MacDiarmid believed aNazi invasion of Britain would benefit Scotland. In a letter sent from Whalsay in April 1941, he wrote: "On balance I regard theAxis powers, tho' more violently evil for the time being, less dangerous than our own government in the long run and indistinguishable in purpose."[6] A year earlier, in June 1940, he wrote: "Although the Germans are appalling enough, they cannot win, but the British and French bourgeoisie can and they are a far greater enemy. If the Germans win they could not hold their gain for long, but if the French and British win it will be infinitely more difficult to get rid of them".
MacDiarmid weaponized an accusation offascism againstSouth African poetRoy Campbell over their differing opinions of theSpanish Civil War, which set off a decades-long and very acrimonious public feud.[22] But MacDiarmid had his own relationship to fascism, as Marc Horne has commented in theDaily Telegraph: "MacDiarmid flirted withfascism in his early thirties, when he believed it was a doctrine of the left. In two articles written in 1923,Plea for a Scottish Fascism andProgramme for a Scottish Fascism, he appeared to support Mussolini's regime.[23] By the 1930s, however, following Mussolini's lurch to the right, his position had changed and he castigatedNeville Chamberlain over hisappeasement of Hitler's expansionism."[7] In response to a discussion of these changes of political position, Deirdre Grieve, MacDiarmid's daughter-in-law and literary executor, noted: "I think he entertained almost every ideal it was possible to entertain at one point or another."[7]
Throughout his life,[24] MacDiarmid was a follower of the economic theory ofSocial Credit developed byC. H. Douglas. After being introduced to the idea byAlfred Orage, the editor ofThe New Age, MacDiarmid was active in Social Credit groups in the 1930s and publicly espoused the idea on many occasions.[24] Social Credit theory was received well in theNational Party of Scotland, but did not become part of the party's platform.[24] MacDiarmid saw no major contradiction between Marxism and Social Credit and believed in the validity of both theories until his death.[24]
Much of the work that MacDiarmid published in the 1920s was written in what he termed "Synthetic Scots": a version of the Scots language that "synthesised" multiple local dialects, which MacDiarmid constructed from dictionaries and other sources.
From the 1930s onwards, MacDiarmid turned increasingly to English as a means of expression and most of his later poetry was written in that language. His ambition was to live up toRilke's dictum that 'the poet must know everything' and to write poetry that contained all knowledge. As a result, many of the poems inStony Limits (1934) and later volumes are a kind offound poetry reusing text from a range of sources. Just as he had usedJohn Jamieson's dialect dictionary for his poems in 'synthetic Scots', so he usedChambers Twentieth Century Dictionary for poems such as 'On a Raised Beach'.[25] Other poems, including 'On a Raised Beach' and 'Etika Preobrazhennavo Erosa' used extensive passages of prose.[26][27] This practice, particularly in the poem 'Perfect', led to accusations ofplagiarism[28] from supporters of the Welsh poetGlyn Jones, to which MacDiarmid's response was 'The greater the plagiarism the greater the work of art.' The great achievement of this late poetry is to attempt on anepic scale to capture the idea of a world without God in which all the facts the poetry deals with are scientifically verifiable. In his critical workLives of the Poets,Michael Schmidt notes that Hugh MacDiarmid 'had redrawn the map of Scottish poetry and affected the whole configuration of English literature'.[29]
MacDiarmid wrote a number of non-fiction prose works, includingScottish Eccentrics and his autobiographyLucky Poet. He also did a number of translations fromScottish Gaelic, includingDuncan Ban MacIntyre'sPraise of Ben Dorain, which were well received by native speakers, includingSorley MacLean.
He had a daughter, Christine, and a son, Walter, by his first wife Peggy Skinner. He had a son,James Michael Trevlyn, known as Michael, by his second wife Valda Trevlyn (1906–1989); Michael was aconscientious objector to post-World War II National Service and became vice chair of theScottish National Party.
MacDiarmid grew up in the Scottish town ofLangholm inDumfriesshire. The town is home to a monument in his honour made of cast iron which takes the form of a large open book depicting images from his writings.[30]
MacDiarmid lived inMontrose for a time where he worked for the local newspaper theMontrose Review.[31]
MacDiarmid also lived on the isle ofWhalsay inShetland, inSodom (Sudheim). The house is now one of Shetland's 'Camping Bods', offering basic, bothy-style accommodation to visitors.
Brownsbank Cottage, nearBiggar, South Lanarkshire, the home of MacDiarmid and his wife Valda from 1952 until their deaths, has been restored by theBiggar Museum Trust.[32]
Hugh MacDiarmid is commemorated inMakars' Court, outside theWriters' Museum, Lawnmarket, Edinburgh. Selections for Makars' Court are made by the Writers' Museum, theSaltire Society and theScottish Poetry Library.
Hugh MacDiarmid sat for sculptorAlan Thornhill and a bronze was acquired by theNational Portrait Gallery.[33] The terracotta original is held in the collection of the artist.[34] The correspondence file relating to the MacDiarmid bust is held in the archive[35] of theHenry Moore Foundation'sHenry Moore Institute inLeeds.
Filmmaker and poetMargaret Tait made a filmHugh MacDiarmid, A Portrait (1964)[36] when the poet was seventy-one which novelist Ali Smith describes as 'a model of versatility, a meld of voice and image each illuminating the other'. The poems heard read by MacDiarmid are 'You Know Not Who I Am', 'Somersault', 'Krang' and some lines from 'The Kind of Poetry I Want'. Writing of MacDiarmid and Tait,[37] academic Sarah Neely notes 'MacDiarmid was also a champion of Tait's work as a film-maker and poet; he published a few of her poems and also organised a screening of her films at the Dunedin Society'.[38]
MacDiarmid's career – and especially his later career – is characterised by proposals for long poems, often themselves made up of multiple volumes, each of which could be considered a long poem in its own right.
For example, the critic W. N. Herbert reconstructs a project of MacDiarmid's called Mature Art, concluding that it “could be described as a six-volume poem consisting of the CornishHeroic Song …, The Red Lion (reassembled from Second Hymn, the ‘Hitherto Uncollected Section’ of the Complete Poems, and the ‘Third Hymn’), The Battle Continues, The Kind of Poetry I Want, and In Memoriam more or less as printed, and Impavidi Progrediamur according to the parameters defined by the broadcast",[39] i.e., the version of the poem that had been read on the BBC radio Third Programme on 19 December 1956.
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