Book reviews: Dear Grieve: Letters to Hugh Macdiarmid

It is unsurprising that such an elder statesman was in communication with international authors. But of all poetic figures, perhaps only MacDiarmid’s postbag would also include items like the letter from SJ Quothquar (22 February, 1977) which begins: “Dear who? the mcdiarmid? I listened last night to your vapourings on the telly”, and ends “you are a disgrace to a great people and a great country as well as being a miserable old curmudgeon. Get thee gone, thou cream-faced Communist loon! Scotland will be better without thee! Silly Old Bugger”.

This selection of letters to MacDiarmid, judiciously and sensitively edited by John Manson, is a wonderful testament to his consistent intemperance and brilliance. It functions as a kind of biography, in that the major incidents of MacDiarmid’s life are refracted and reflected in the concerns of his correspondents. But it also allows for a more nuanced and subtle reading of those incidents.

MacDiarmid’s feuds were legion – with Maurice Lindsay, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Alexander Trocchi… (Helen Cruikshank’s letter to him begins: “Some time ago someone said to me that I was about the only person he knew whom Grieve had never attacked. I replied ‘Don’t worry, my time will come’”). But this volume gives a more sensitive account of them.

Take, for example, the spectacular falling-out with the poet Edwin Muir. MacDiarmid took umbrage at Muir’s 1938 book Scott And Scotland, in which Muir argued that the Scots language was incapable of expressing modern consciousness. In a letter of 8 January, 1933, Muir writes to MacDiarmid that Scotland’s “real job is to become originative rather than derivative in general: and for that it has to become a nation: so that nationalism is in a way everything at this stage: once a nation Scotland will have a function – at present it has none”.

This must have been the ceòl mòr to MacDiarmid’s ears. When MacDiarmid read the “introductory” remarks to Scott And Scotland five years later – “if [a Scottish writer] wishes to add to an indigenous Scottish literature, he will find there, no matter how long he may search, neither an organic community to round off his conceptions, nor a major literary tradition to support him, nor even a faith among the people themselves that a Scottish literature is possible or desirable”, and the conclusion: “I do not believe in the programme of the Scottish Nationalists, for it goes against my reading of history, and seems to me a trivial response to a serious problem” – it must have seemed like an absolute betrayal.

But then to go on to Muir’s 1947 note, asking if MacDiarmid would contribute to a new Czech literary quarterly, one can detect a tone of regret: “We seem to have been at odds for a long time; I think that is quite unnecessary, since we used to be friends.” MacDiarmid did send something, but the magazine never appeared; and I can only imagine MacDiarmid’s initial response on seeing a letter from Muir, on notepaper headed “The British Institute, Prague”.

Finally, we get Muir’s wife Willa’s late letter to MacDiarmid after Muir’s death, a letter both sharply pointed and aiming at softening. Along the way we have the astonishing correspondence with the composer FG Scott, who had taught the young MacDiarmid at Langholm. The older man cautions against MacDiarmid’s intransigent critical chafing at Muir – and if these letters reveal one thing, it is MacDiarmid’s reliance on Scott as an intellectual equal and spiritual collaborator.

Certain biographical elements – notably his son Michael’s troubles over his father’s “Scottish Resistance”, campaigning against conscription; certain sexual and alcoholic concerns with his first wife Peggy – come into clearer focus; and yet there is also a more sentimental MacDiarmid, making contact with his daughter by his first marriage in later life. The extent of MacDiarmid’s involvement in the 1934/5 plan to steal the Stone of Destiny reveals how close that plan came to a successful conclusion.

Some of the letters are almost “stand alone” delights: in particular, there is a letter from Norman MacCaig, dated 8 July, 1953, from Ward 13, Edinburgh Royal Infirmary, which is the clearest exposition of MacCaig’s ideas about poetry that I have read. Occasionally, there are letters about contracts and commissions that are tantalising. A contact was signed with Musarts Ltd on 1 November, 1945, for a novel – MacDiarmid has seemingly suggested a Highland novel and a Clydeside novel. Musarts then suspended all publications. The idea of a novel by MacDiarmid remains a will-o-the-wisp.

The last letter, from Joseph Chiari, has an absolutely astonishing claim. Chiari writes that TS Eliot had told him that “in spite of your very different social and political attitudes”, MacDiarmid was the poet he admired most. Such revelations show the extent to which any published correspondence is only the public trace of private beliefs.

DEAR GRIEVE: LETTERS TO HUGH MACDIARMID

Selected And Edited By John Manson

Kennedy & Boyd, £35.00