“I have too many books but I only have my shelf to blame.”

The pun came via Twitter. As does my very limited knowledge of celebrity news. Thanks to Twitter trends I know that this week Kanye and Drake have had some long-standing feud about something or other and now it has taken a turn for the better for some reason. And it’ll be the same next time there is vital news about a hockey game or a London derby like Arsenal v. Tottenham. Or whether Lady Gaga is more famous than Beyoncé or whether either is feuding with Taylor Swift or joining the Kardashian clan or taking up boxing..  

Such is breaking news – a steady stream of urgent information about people about whom you mostly know nothing. And you wonder…

Let’s just say I’m hopelessly backward when it comes to most popular music, sports and what’s on TV. 

The poet Hugh MacDiarmid had some observations on the state of popular culture although his specific concern was Scotland in the 20th century. More on MacDiarmid in a minute. 

De-cluttering

I was busy engaged in the hobby-du-jour – decluttering the bookshelves, blaming myself for the excess – when I refound an essential item not to be culled: British Poetry Since 1945, edited by Edward Lucie-Smith  

And that’s where MacDiarmid comes in. 

This is the revised 1985 edition of the 1970 original. I can’t compare the two editions but I can comment that the editor did nothing to address the egregious absence of women from his collection.

Where are the women?

Ninety eight poets and only five women – Stevie Smith, Patricia Beer, Elizabeth Jennings, Sylvia Plath, Karen Gershon and Medbh McGuckian. A glorious total of 15 poems out of 255. Just under 6%.

What was he thinking? Was he thinking?

And the editor allows for four of his own poems which is more than any of the women and indeed and more than Dylan Thomas and a whole raft of others. What’s up with that?

And while of course, we are thankful for representation from Northern Ireland and Scotland where are the poets of color? This in spite of a section called; “Influences from Abroad.”

I like the way Edward Lucie-Smith segmented the poets under various headings. I have no idea whether it make sense from a literary history point of view but the clusters make for an orderly approach. Call the anthology White Male British Poetry since 1945 and it’s not a bad volume. 

OK so grousing aside.

The Past is Prologue

Hugh MacDiarmid is one of the first poets in the book, represented by four poems one of which – “Glasgow 1960” – was first published in the London Mercury in 1935.

It’s a fantasy vision of a future Scotland. He looks a generation ahead to 1960 and imagines a return to Glasgow after a long absence. He thinks that nothing has changed very much. The cultural obsession is football and the buses and trams still packed with people going to Ibrox Park – home stadium of Glasgow Rangers. 

But –  he asks, just to check …

… and to his amazement and delight the record gate at Ibrox is not for football but for an intellectual debate about “the law of inverse effort” – that is, “when there’s a conflict between imagination and reality, imagination wins” as in, you can walk along a plank on a floor but place it across the gap between two tall buildings and you start imagining that you’ll fall. 

Things have indeed changed. And – Holy snakes! – the newspaper accounts of Turkish poetry and Scottish authors’ opinions are hot news. 

Communist, Nationalist, Fascist, Poet

MacDiarmid’s life makes for a fascinating story of contradictions and reversals.

In the 1920s MacDiarmid helped to found the National Party of Scotland, forerunner of today’s Scottish National Party. He was expelled from the party for being a communist and then from the Communist party for being a nationalist. After the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 – when many British communists left the CP in protest and disgust – MacDiarmid rejoined. He stood for Parliament several times as a Scottish Nationalist and as a Communist. 

He flirted with fascism. In 1923 he argued for a Scottish version of fascism, and in 1929 for the formation of Clann Albain (Gaelic for Children of Scotland). This was a secret fascistic para-military society that would fight for Scottish freedom. 

Clann Albain members were expelled by the SNP and at one point they planned to steal the Stone of Scone from Westminster Abbey but nothing came of it.

At one time MacDiarmid believed that a Nazi invasion of Britain would benefit Scotland. In June 1940, he wrote to fellow communist Sorley MacLean: “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.”  

In a letter sent  in April 1941, he wrote: “On balance I regard the Axis powers, tho’ more violently evil for the time being, less dangerous than our own government in the long run and indistinguishable in purpose.”

He was prone to extremes and sometimes to extremist and absurdist positions. In a posthumously published poem he posed the question:

“Is a Mussolini or a Hitler / Worse than a Bevin or a Morrison”? – referring to Britain’s wartime Minister of Labour and Home Secretary – democratic socialists who believed in, and fought for, the welfare state. 

MacDiarmid wrote poems to Lenin and was at times an admirer of Mussolini and Stalin. George Orwell was correct when he named him as a Stalinist and put him on his 1949 list of “crypto-communists” and “fellow travellers”. In another poem published after his death, he expresses indifference to the Nazi bombing of London.

George Orwell called such believers the “lunatic fringe”.  He nailed such nationalism and nationalists with this definition:

Nationalism is power-hunger tempered by self-deception. Every nationalist is capable of the most flagrant dishonesty, but he is also — since he is conscious of serving something bigger than himself — unshakeably certain of being in the right. Notes on Nationalism

In that essay, Orwell named three characteristics of the nationalist: Obsession, Instability, and Indifference to Reality. Sound like anyone you know? Like the self-professed nationalist in the White House for instance? But I digress. 

MacDiarmid had a pattern of firing off positions, opinions, ideas, and antagonisms: 

I think he entertained almost every ideal it was possible to entertain at one point or another. He was, in many ways, a delightful man, but he didn’t feel he had to justify his beliefs in straightforward, logical terms.”- Deirdre Grieve, MacDiarmid’s daughter-in-law and literary executor – The Scotsman 

Cultural Renewal

MacDiarmid saw cultural regeneration as essential to establishing Scottish political autonomy. In 1926 he helped found Scottish PEN and he published A Drunk Man Looks at a Thistle.

His mission was nothing less than the cultural reawakening of a Scotland he saw mired in material and spiritual poverty – a tartan-waving, kilted-kitsch, Burns-night parody of itself distracted by football and religion.

MacDiarmid hurled poetic abuse not at Robert Burns but at the Burns night celebrants who ignored the realities of Scotlands’s social deprivation and the work and words of Burns himself. 

“Mair nonsense has been uttered in his name/ Than in ony’s barrin liberty and Christ.”

(More nonsense has been uttered in his name/ Than in anyone’s barring liberty and Christ.)

He castigated the self-satisfied and sentimental Burns nighters for their ignorance of the language. He argued: “No wan in fifty kens a wurd Burns wrote.”

Anglophobia is my Hobby

He strove to free Scotland from the yoke of English and the English. He listed Anglophobia as one of his hobbies in Who’s Who and for many years he wrote in a new Scottish hybrid language – a synthetic vernacular that borrowed from many different varieties of the Scots language, spoken at different times in different parts of the country. He later chose to write in standard English claiming it to be a superior medium for expression. 

To his enemies, MacDiarmid’s adoption of a Scottish language was as fabricated as his name; he was a false prophet; an apologist for dictators and a stooge of tyranny. He was born Christopher Murray Grieve and created the name and persona of Hugh MacDiarmid as a nom de guerre for the culture wars. To his supporters, he was a champion of authentic Scottish culture and of the revival of national pride based not on tartan-waving mythology but on reality and a vision of a better future that was both nationalist and internationalist.

As a poet MacDiarmid was prolific. He had a lot to say – his Complete Poems, published after his death was in two volumes and ran to 1500 pages.

The Poets’ Pub

We have no use for emotions, let alone sentiments, but are solely concerned with passions.
 The Scottish Review of Books uses those words from MacDiarmid as a kind of tag line. It seems an accurate reflection of MacDiarmid at least.

MacDiarmid was an influential, controversial, and combative figure who feuded with almost everyone and who was for a while at the center of Scottish cultural and literary life. This centrality is captured by this painting of a group of poets and writers who used to meet in the bars and pubs of Edinburgh in the decades after the war.

In the spirit of Scottish skeptics, let’s take a look at this wonderful 1980 painting by Sandy Moffat. It shows an imaginary gathering of Scottish poets and authors in a mash-up of the bars and pubs they frequented in Edinburgh – Milne’s bar, the Abbotsford, and the Café Royal.

So what’s going on? MacDiarmid is at the center, holding court. With his white hair and the cast of the light he seem to glow.

Why is John Tonge struggling on the stairs and what’s with “The Falling Soldier ” (Robert Capa) silhouetted on the wall under the light in the background?

And where are the women?

Pushed to the edge, sidelined that’s where. One has her head in her hand alone, ignored at a table; another in the background is half-dressed, fist raised and waving the banner; and who is that walking the street outside?

You have to wonder what MacDiamid would make of current Scotland where there’s a resurgence of national pride based on new Scottish prosperity, creativity and sense of place in the world. Modern Scotland that voted to stay in Europe and against #Brexit, where women poets are in abundance and where the current equivalent of the Poet Laureate – the Makar, or Maker – is a women of color. Jackie Kay. 

And then of course there’s Nicola Sturgeon who serves as the fifth and current First Minister of Scotland and leader of the Scottish National Party (SNP). 

MacDiarmid strove for a revived national cultural identity – one not based on souvenir tartan kitsch, the cult of Burns and nostalgic sentimentality. Along the way he turned a blind eye to some of the worst of the 20th century and was an apologist for atrocity.

He wanted a Scotland that spoke with a voice that was fiercely and distinctively Scottish yet had an internationalist and progressive outlook.  It is interesting to look at current Scottish politics and culture through this lens. 

Scotland the brave new world I say. But then I’m English and live in America.