Shadow player

Edited by Beth Junor

Word Power Books, 278pp, 20

WHEN 25-YEAR-OLD VALDA Trevlyn met Christopher Grieve in a Bloomsbury pub, it is unlikely that her hopes for the future included marrying a poet and intellectual who was challenging cultural life in Scotland and beyond. She had left her native Cornwall in search of wider horizons. Under the pen-name Hugh MacDiarmid, Grieve had published several volumes of poetry, including A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle (1926), as well as provocative comment in areas of literature and politics. The years that followed would involve formidable struggles to survive and keep writing. Sharing that struggle was Trevlyn.

When they met, in 1931, Grieve's first marriage was in the final stages of disintegration. Two years later he and Trevlyn, married with an infant son, were embarking on life in a damp cottage in Whalsay, Shetland, with no secure income. The story chronicled in Valda's letters to Grieve opens in Cornwall, where Trevlyn is staying with her ageing mother and aunts and trying, at long distance, to organise the infrastructure of their coming life in Shetland. "I'm overwhelmed already at the mere thought of my new responsibilities," she writes. "How can I - You expect too much." The letters, judiciously and sensitively edited by Beth Junor with an evocative foreword by Deirdre Grieve, Trevlyn's daughter-in-law, demonstrate that she rose to the challenge, with courage, determination and frequent exasperation. It was Grieve's first wife Peggy who said, "Living with, or being a friend of, a poet is no joke." Trevlyn had much cause to agree.

There would be no letters without absences, and they both led peripatetic lives. Trevlyn was often in Cornwall, latterly caring for her only surviving aunt, and literary and political affairs frequently took Grieve away. There was a spell in hospital after his breakdown in 1935, and in 1942 industrial conscription took him to a munitions factory in Glasgow. Yet if Trevlyn's letters don't directly document their life together, they convey the volatile nature of their relationship and particularly the depth of her commitment. Elsewhere, she said that she was never "in love with" Christopher Grieve and had little patience with the notion of poet as icon, but her protective love is palpable and without illusions. If her early letters express doubts as to her capacity to handle this brilliant, unpredictable and often irresponsible man 14 years her senior, the later letters, after Brownsbank Cottage near Biggar provided a measure of security, suggest a firmer and almost mellow grip on their life together.

The letters are much more than testimony to a remarkable woman and an extraordinary partnership. They reveal the fabric of a life that was both highly individual and rooted in the practicalities of sustaining herself and her husband and child. Christopher's intolerance of what he called, in "Second Hymn to Lenin", "breid-and-butter problems" redounded on Trevlyn, and meant that much of her time was dominated by the radical demands of survival. She knitted vests, scrubbed sculleries, hauled water, did the great man's washing, fended off creditors, and organised numerous flittings. She was making-do and mending long before it became a wartime slogan. Money, or the lack of it, is a consistent theme. In Cornwall, she is embarrassed to ask her aunts for 1d for a stamp. In July 1947 she is running out of money for food although Grieve is earning 7-10s a week. "I presume you are not going without your smokes - or your beer," she writes, adding, "Christopher, I'm not making any more sacrifices for you." She did, of course.

The tale of a woman who suppresses her own needs for the sake of an ambitious man is familiar enough. But that is not quite the picture that emerges here. Rather, we see a woman who engages in life with impressive vigour, and reminds us of the value of precisely those "breid-and-butter" activities that her husband felt should not be "in ony man's way". Over and over again Trevlyn deals with crisis and chaos, as well as with the daily business of life with a man as prone to drunken mishaps as to inspired outbursts. There is never any hint of martyrdom, though there are times when she threatens to leave him, and times when she spells out her displeasure. Responding to his excuses for failing to supply funds, she writes, "I think it is high time you gave me a little credit for some intelligence - it is rather wearisome to be always treated as a very small child or someone mentally deficient" - especially, she might have added, when the person responsible is sometimes lacking in the grown-up department. Later she says of another lapse that his explanation "reminded me of one of Churchill's war speeches". It wasn't intended as a compliment.

In making Valda Grieve's letters available, Beth Junor has done us a great service. They are a wonderful read with or without a knowledge of the man who received them - although Junor expresses the hope that they will send readers back to MacDiarmid's poetry. In her introduction, she draws attention to highly pertinent issues of cultural environment and support. In these days of a pending - or perhaps not - Culture Bill the way Scotland's writers and their families lived then reveals much that is instructive.