Hugh MacDiarmid

Hugh MacDiarmid

A bust of MacDiarmid in South Gyle, Edinburgh
Born Christopher Murray Grieve
11 August 1892
Langholm, Dumfriesshire, Scotland
Died 9 September 1978(1978-09-09) (aged 86)
Edinburgh, Scotland
Occupation Poet
Literary movement Scottish Renaissance

Christopher Murray Grieve (11 August 1892 – 9 September 1978), known by his pen name Hugh MacDiarmid, was a Scottish poet, journalist, essayist and political figure. He is best known for his works written in 'synthetic Scots', or Lallans, a literary version of the Scots language that MacDiarmid himself developed.

The son of a postman, MacDiarmid was born in the Scottish border town of Langholm, Dumfriesshire. He was educated at Langholm Academy before becoming a teacher for a brief time at Broughton Higher Grade School in Edinburgh. He began his writing career as a journalist in Wales,[1][2][3] contributing to the socialist newspaper The Merthyr Pioneer run by Labour party founder Keir Hardie[2] before joining the Royal Army Medical Corps on 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 the Montrose 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 by 'Sangschaw' in 1925 and 'Penny Wheep' and 'A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle' in 1926. A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle, is generally regarded as MacDiarmid's most famous and influential work.[4]

Moving to the Shetland island of Whalsay in 1933 with his son Michael 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, near Biggar, in 1978 at the age of 86.

MacDiarmid was a lifelong supporter of both communism and Scottish nationalism, views that often put him at odds with his contemporaries.[1] He was a founding member of the National Party of Scotland[3] (forerunner of the modern Scottish National Party) and stood as a candidate for the Scottish National Party in 1945 and 1950, and for the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1964.[4]

A controversial figure whilst alive, MacDiarmid is now considered one of the principal forces behind the Scottish Renaissance and has had a lasting impact on Scottish culture and politics. Fellow poet Edwin 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 casting Coleridgean seeds of insight and surprise.’[1]

Biography

Early life

Christopher Grieve was born in Langholm in 1892.[5] His father was a postman; his family lived above the town library, giving MacDiarmid access to books from an early age. Grieve attended Langholm Academy and, from 1908, Broughton Junior Student Centre in Edinburgh, where he studied under George Ogilvie who introduced him to the magazine The 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 the Edinburgh Evening Dispatch. Grieve was to lose this job later in 1911, but on 20 July of that year he had his first article, "The Young Astrology" published in The New Age. Later in 1922 Grieve moved to Ebbw Vale in Monmouthshire, Wales, where he worked as a newspaper reporter; by 1913 he had returned to Scotland and was working for the Clydebank and Renfrew Press in Clydebank, near Glasgow. It was here that Grieve first encountered the work of John Maclean, Neil Malcolm Maclean, and James Maxton.

First World War

In July 1915 Grieve left the town of Forfar in eastern Scotland and travelled to the Hillsborough barracks in Sheffield. He went on to serve in the Royal Army Medical Corps in Salonica, Greece and France during the First World War. After the war, he married and returned to journalism.

Return to Scotland

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-length A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle. This poem is widely regarded as one of the most important long poems in 20th-century Scottish literature. After that, he published several books containing poems in both English and Scots.

Time in England

From 1929 to 1930 MacDiarmid lived in London, and worked for Compton Mackenzie's magazine, Vox. MacDiarmid lived in Liverpool from 1930 to 1931, before returning to London; he left again in 1932, and lived in the village of Thakeham in West Sussex until he returned to Scotland in 1932.

Shetland

MacDiarmid lived in the island of Whalsay, Shetland, from 1933 until 1942.

Return to the Scottish Mainland

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 of Dungavel House, Lanarkshire, before moving to his final home: "Brownsbank", a cottage in Candymill, near Biggar in the Scottish Borders. He died, aged 86, in Edinburgh.[6]

Politics

In 1928, MacDiarmid helped found the National Party of Scotland. He was also a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain. He was expelled from both parties during the 1930s.

From 1931, whilst he was in London, until 1943, after he had left the Shetland island of Whalsay, MacDiarmid was watched by the British Intelligence Services.[7] In 1949, George Orwell compiled a list of suspected communist sympathisers for British intelligence. He included MacDiarmid in this list. In 1956, MacDiarmid rejoined the Communist Party.

MacDiarmid stood in the Glasgow Kelvingrove constituency in the 1945 and 1950 general elections. He stood against the Conservative Prime Minister Alec Douglas-Home in Kinross and Western Perthshire at the 1964 election, taking only 127 votes.

MacDiarmid listed Anglophobia among his hobbies in his Who's Who entry.

In 2010 letters were discovered showing that he believed a Nazi invasion of Britain would benefit Scotland. In a letter sent from Whalsay, Shetland, 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." 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.” Marc Horne in the Daily Telegraph commented: "MacDiarmid flirted with fascism 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 and Programme for a Scottish Fascism, he appeared to support Mussolini’s regime. By the 1930s however, following Mussolini’s lurch to the right, his position had changed and he castigated Neville Chamberlain over his appeasement of Hitler’s expansionism."[8] 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."[8]

Later writings

Plaque on a building near Gladstone Court Museum, Biggar, South Lanarkshire which was opened by MacDiarmid in 1968. The inscription reads "Let the lesson be - to be yersel's and to mak' that worth bein'"
MacDiarmid Memorial near Langholm

As his interest in science and linguistics increased, MacDiarmid found himself turning more and more to English as a means of expression so that most of his later poetry is written in that language. His ambition was to live up to Rilke's dictum that 'the poet must know everything' and to write a poetry that contained all knowledge. As a result, many of the poems in Stony Limits (1934) and later volumes are a kind of found poetry reusing text from a range of sources. Just as he had used Jameson's dialect dictionary for his poems in 'synthetic Scots', so he used Chambers Twentieth Century Dictionary for poems such as 'On a Raised Beach'.[9] Other poems, including 'On a Raised Beach' and 'Etika Preobrazhennavo Erosa' used extensive passages of prose.[10][11] This practice, particularly in the poem 'Perfect', led to accusations of plagiarism[12] from supporters of the Welsh poet Glyn 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 an epic 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 work Lives of the Poets, Michael Schmidt notes that Hugh MacDiarmid 'had redrawn the map of Scottish poetry and affected the whole configuration of English literature'.[13]

MacDiarmid wrote a number of non-fiction prose works, including Scottish Eccentrics and his autobiography Lucky Poet. He also did a number of translations from Scottish Gaelic, including Duncan Ban MacIntyre's Praise of Ben Dorain, which were well received by native speakers including Sorley MacLean.

Personal life

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 a conscientious objector to post-World War II National Service and became vice chair of the Scottish National Party.

Places of interest

MacDiarmid grew up in the Scottish town of Langholm in Dumfries and Galloway. 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.[14]

MacDiarmid lived in Montrose for a time where he worked for the local newspaper the Montrose Review.[15]

MacDiarmid also lived on the isle of Whalsay in Shetland, in Sodom (Sudheim). The house is now one of Shetland's 'Camping Bods', offering basic, bothy-style accommodation to visitors.

Brownsbank Cottage, near Biggar, South Lanarkshire, the home of MacDiarmid and his wife Valda from 1952 until their deaths, has been restored by the Biggar Museum Trust.[16]

Hugh MacDiarmid is commemorated in Makars' Court, outside The Writers' Museum, Lawnmarket, Edinburgh. Selections for Makars' Court are made by The Writers' Museum, The Saltire Society and The Scottish Poetry Library.

Hugh MacDiarmid sat for sculptor Alan Thornhill and a bronze was acquired by the National Portrait Gallery.[17] The terracotta original is held in the collection of the artist.[18] The correspondence file relating to the MacDiarmid bust is held in the archive[19] of the Henry Moore Foundation's Henry Moore Institute in Leeds.

References

  1. 1 2 3 "Hugh MacDiarmid | Poetry | Scottish Poetry Library". www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk. Retrieved 2015-09-28.
  2. 1 2 MacDiarmid, Hugh (1970-01-01). Selected Essays of Hugh MacDiarmid. University of California Press. ISBN 9780520016187.
  3. 1 2 3 4 "Writing Scotland - Hugh MacDiarmid - BBC Two". BBC. Retrieved 2015-09-28.
  4. 1 2 3 "Grieve, Christopher Murray (Hugh MacDiarmid) genealogy Scotland - ScotlandsPeople". www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk. Retrieved 2015-09-28.
  5. ↑ Bold, Alan. "MacDiarmid". London: Paladin, 1190. p 35.
  6. ↑ Bold, Alan. "MacDiarmid". London: Paladin, 1190. p 493.
  7. ↑ Scott Lyall, '"The Man is a Menace": MacDiarmid and Military Intelligence', in Scottish Studies Review 8.1, Spring 2007, pp. 37-52.
  8. 1 2 The Sunday Times 4 April 2010 "Hugh MacDiarmid: I’d prefer Nazi rule"
  9. ↑ M. H. Whitworth, ‘Hugh MacDiarmid and Chambers’s Twentieth Century Dictionary,’ Notes and Queries, 55 (2008), 78-80.
  10. ↑ M. H. Whitworth, ‘Three Prose Sources for Hugh MacDiarmid’s “On a Raised Beach,”’ Notes and Queries, 54 (2007), 175-77
  11. ↑ M. H. Whitworth, ‘Forms of Culture in Hugh MacDiarmid’s “Etika Preobrazhennavo Erosa,”’ International Journal of Scottish Literature, no.5 (Autumn/Winter 2009). www.ijsl. stir.ac.uk.
  12. ↑ Hugh Gordon Porteus, letter, TLS (4 Feb. 1965), 87
  13. ↑ Schmidt, Michael: Lives of the Poets, page 643. Wiedenfeld and Nicolson, 2007.
  14. ↑ "MacDiarmid Memorial Unveiled". The Glasgow Herald. 12/08/1985. p. 5. Check date values in: |date= (help)
  15. ↑ Scott Lyall, '"Genius in a Provincial Town": MacDiarmid's Poetry and Politics in Montrose', in Scottish Studies Review 5.2, Autumn 2004, pp. 41-55.
  16. ↑ "Brownsbank cottage - Biggar Museum". biggarmuseumtrust.co.uk.
  17. ↑ "National Portrait Gallery - Portrait - NPG 5230; Hugh MacDiarmid". npg.org.uk.
  18. ↑ Terracotta head of Hugh MacDiarmid by Alan Thornhill
  19. ↑ http://www.henry-moore-fdn.co.uk/matrix_engine/content.php?page_id=584 HMI Archive

Bibliography

Poetry

Letters

Also see:

Anthologies edited by MacDiarmid

Other

Further reading

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