edinburgh university press scottish modernism and its contexts 1918-1959 literature national identity and cultural exchange may 2009

The book’s purpose is therefore a positive one which seeks to situate Scottish culture in the modernist context of the early twentieth century by expanding the existing limited and poten

Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959 Literature, National Identity and Cultural Exchange

Margery Palmer McCulloch

Scottish Modernism and its Contexts

1918–1959

who is also a Scottish modernist

Scottish Modernism and its

Contexts 1918–1959

Literature, National Identity and Cultural

Exchange

Margery Palmer McCulloch

Edinburgh University Press

Edinburgh University Press Ltd

22 George Square, Edinburgh

www.euppublishing.com

Typeset in Janson

by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and

printed and bound in Great Britain by

CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 0 7486 3474 3 (hardback)

The right of Margery Palmer McCulloch

to be identifi ed as author of this work

has been asserted in accordance with

the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Acknowledgements vi

Part I Transforming Traditions

Magazines and the Movement for Renewal

World

Part II Ideology and Literature

Fiction

Part III World War Two and its Aftermath

Index 223

I would like to express my thanks to staff at Glasgow University Library, the National Library of Scotland, the Mitchell Library, Glasgow, and the Poetry Library, Edinburgh for their helpfulness, and to the several research colleagues who have willingly answered queries or offered addi-tional information I am especially grateful to Dr Gerard Carruthers, Head of the Department of Scottish Literature at Glasgow University, for continuing academic and conference support Much encouragement for this Scottish modernist project has been provided by members of the recently established Scottish Network of Modernist Studies (SNOMS), and by the enthusiasm of international delegates at Modernist Magazines conferences in Leicester and Le Mans My thanks are due also to the editorial staff at Edinburgh University Press and, as always, to Ian and Euan for practical help.

Liberté j’écris ton nom

Paul Eluard

Don’t put ‘N B.’ on your paper; put Scotlandand be done with it [ .] The name of my nativeland is not North Britain, whatever may be the name of yours

Robert Louis Stevenson

Introduction: Modernism and

Scottish Modernism

There cannot be a revival in the real sense of the word [ .] unless these

potentialities are in accord with the newest tendencies of human thought.

C M Grieve, Scottish Chapbook (1923)

In a review article in the Athenaeum in 1919 T S Eliot posed the question

‘Was there a Scottish literature?’, rapidly concluding that there was not,

since Scotland had neither a single language nor a suffi ciently unfragmented

literary history to entitle it to claim what he called a distinctive ‘Scotch

lit-erature’.1 If Eliot were alive today, his question might well be ‘Was there a

Scottish modernism?’; and many academic scholars and critics – Scottish as

well as non-Scottish – would probably join him in doubting that there was

any such thing A perusal of critical studies of modernism in the past twenty

to thirty years, including the most recent, will rarely reveal a listing of ‘Hugh

MacDiarmid’ in their indexes, while the potential Scottish modernist territory

as a whole remains unexplored Similarly, studies of early twentieth-century

writing in Scotland seldom have the word ‘modernism’ in their indexes On

the surface, then, it might appear that there was no manifestation of literary

modernism worthy of discussion in that part of the United Kingdom which

in the early twentieth century was still called North Britain

This study starts from the dual premise that there was and still is a varied

and distinctive Scottish literature interacting with both traditional and

inter-national infl uences; and that there was in the post-1918 period a Scottish

liter-ary modernism drawing on artistic infl uences from European modernism and

rooted in the desire to recover a self-determining identity for Scotland both

culturally and politically The book’s purpose is therefore a positive one which

seeks to situate Scottish culture in the modernist context of the early twentieth

century by expanding the existing limited and potentially inward-looking idea

of an interwar ‘Scottish Renaissance’ movement to include its international

signifi cance as a Scottish manifestation of modernism In addition, and in

common with what is happening currently in other areas of modernist studies,

the conventional boundaries of modernism will be extended in order to

con-sider a late or transitional Scottish modernism, especially in poetry, in the

1940s and 1950s.While the primary aim of the study is therefore to further

awareness and understanding of Scottish culture, it is hoped that it will also assist in the ongoing international project of expanding perceptions of mod-ernism more generally through its documentation of the Scottish experience and the ways in which artistic experimentation and a response to ‘the new’ can simultaneously interact with political and social agendas, thus allowing the modernist artist a more active role in a changing world

As these previous comments imply, modernism as a movement has been undergoing fresh critical scrutiny and interpretation in recent years, with the earlier ‘high modernism’ emphasis on avant-garde artistic experimentation and withdrawal from direct involvement in social and political affairs being replaced by an understanding that there were in fact many modernisms and that their distinguishing qualities could, and did, vary, depending on the con-ditions of place and time In the Anglophone literary scene, for example, it is noticeable that the focus has now expanded from the group of male authors whom Wyndham Lewis characterised as ‘the men of 1914’ – Ezra Pound,

T S Eliot, W B Yeats and Lewis himself – to include a fuller consideration of participants in the early decades of the century This includes the contribution made by women writers and the importance of American modernist move-ments such as the Harlem Renaissance in addition to previously recognised poets such as William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens Reassessment is also taking place in relation to the creative work of the 1930s, long character-ised in critical discussion as the period of the ‘Auden generation’ and a marker

of the supposed end of modernism.2 As with historical transnational cultural movements such as the Renaissance or Romanticism, it is not really possible

to pin down precisely an end or a beginning to what is now known as ism Some cultural critics would put the starting point in the later nineteenth century, with the work of Impressionist painters in France, the infl uential drama of Ibsen in Norway, the fi ction of James and Conrad in England and the poetry of Whitman in America Others would see its beginnings even earlier in the developments of the mid-century, with the crisis of belief which took place then as a result of increasing industrialisation and its disruption of traditional social patterns; with the loss of religious faith brought about, at least in part, by Darwin’s evolutionary theories and by geological discoveries about the nature

modern-of the physical world Just as new political and social practices had to come into being to deal with the human and social actuality of this changing world,

so new art forms had to be created to give it expression, and new philosophical and intellectual approaches had to be developed to analyse its implications and possibilities Some of the writers and thinkers who signifi cantly infl uenced the art and ideas of the early years of the twentieth century, such as Nietzsche and Dostoevsky, came from this mid-nineteenth-century period, entering into the later and wider public perception through translation of their work Scottish writers such as Edwin Muir and Hugh MacDiarmid were both infl uenced by Nietzsche and Dostoevsky while Virginia Woolf described the latter as ‘this great genius who is beginning to permeate our lives so curiously’.3 In her essay

‘Character in Fiction’ (1924), Woolf also designated 1910 as the year in which

Introduction 3

it seemed to her that the human character itself changed, her marker of the

arrival of modernism This was the year of the major post-Impressionist

exhi-bition of paintings in London (soon to be followed by its infl uential showing

at the Armory in New York), an exhibition in which the iconoclastic work of

artists such as Cézanne, Gauguin, Matisse and Picasso seemed to capture the

unfamiliar identity of a newly arrived and still strange, modern world

Wherever modernism’s beginnings are seen to be situated, it is undeniable

that by the early years of the twentieth century terms such as ‘modernity’ or

‘the modern’ or ‘the new’ had established themselves as defi ning terminology

for the new age In London, The New Age journal under the editorship of A

R Orage became a principal line of communication for the new ideas and

art forms being developed in Britain and internationally This journal was

an important educational medium for Scottish autodidacts such as Muir and

MacDiarmid, both of whom became regular contributors, Muir in the World

War One period, MacDiarmid in the mid-1920s The American Ezra Pound

arrived in London in 1908 and immediately began to activate a critical and

creative revolution through his own writing, the little magazines he edited

or became involved with, and the avant-garde writers he championed such as

his fellow American T S Eliot who settled in London in 1915 The Italian

Futurist, Marinetti, took London by storm in 1914 and inspired, in response,

the short-lived Blast magazine founded by Pound and Wyndham Lewis,

together with their Vorticist movement: activities monitored with interest

by MacDiarmid during his war service in Salonika The French philosopher

Henri Bergson, author of Creative Evolution, lectured internationally on his

theories of memory and personality, including lectures in Edinburgh in 1914

which were reported in the Glasgow Herald and Scotsman newspapers, while

Sigmund Freud’s writings about the unconscious mind and James Frazer’s

anthropological theories became increasingly infl uential On the continent,

Paris developed as the principal centre of an avant-garde visual art which

interacted with music, ballet and literature One notable peak of this ferment

of creativity was reached in 1913 in the performance by Diaghilev’s Ballet

Russe of The Rite of Spring to the music of Stravinsky and designs by Picasso:

a performance of primitive power which caused a public furore on its opening

night This pre-1914 modernism was thus marked by its international nature,

its culturally interactive nature, and by its metropolitan nature For this was

a cultural movement centred on large European cities, including London,

bringing together artists and intellectuals who were responding to the

chal-lenges of the modern age And at this point in the century, these chalchal-lenges

were taken up with energy and exhilaration – even with a violent exuberance

– with a sense of active participation in the making of a new world Marinetti

and the Futurists embraced the new world of technology and the speed of

the machine; the anarchist movement was idealistic in a way that is foreign to

our present-day perceptions of anarchism; and in the years before the 1917

Revolution, artists in Russia such as Malevich and Tatlin were insisting and

demonstrating that artists could also be the transformers of their societies

Scotland too had a modernist presence in the pre-1914 years Although Scottish poetry and fi ction were in decline as a result of increasing Anglicisation, the visual arts were prospering and interacting with develop-ments in Europe as Scottish painters travelled and exhibited internationally, bringing new forms into their own work J D Fergusson fi rst went to Paris

in the late 1890s, before setting up an atelier there in 1905 and becoming

involved with the many international artists who had made their home in the city Like the painters who became known along with himself as the ‘Scottish Colourists’ (S J Peploe, F C B Cadell and Leslie Hunter), Fergusson also lived for periods in the south of France, in Nice and Antibes, and came under the infl uence of the southern light as well as of post-Impressionist move-ments He later co-operated with Middleton Murry in the publication of his

Rhythm magazine, acting as Art Editor between 1914 and 1916 and producing

striking modern covers for the magazine These early years of the century also saw a fl ourishing of the arts in Glasgow when the Art School underwent

a period of revival under its director Francis (‘Fra’) Newbery This artistic activity was related to the innovative Arts and Crafts movement in Scotland

at the turn of the century and was especially strong in female designers and painters such as Jessie M King, Margaret and Frances Macdonald, Bessie MacNicol and Newbery’s wife Jessie who established a revolutionary (in

artistic terms) Department of Embroidery at Glasgow School of Art The

architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh was the outstanding modernist of this group of Glasgow artists, designing the Glasgow School of Art building and bringing his awareness of new forms into all his design work Mackintosh, the Macdonald sisters and Herbert McNair exhibited to acclaim at the Vienna Secession exhibitions and in Turin, while Bessie MacNicol, Jessie M King and other women artists also exhibited in Vienna and elsewhere in Europe From 1904, the art dealer Alexander Reid’s gallery – La Société des Beaux Arts – was situated in West George Street in Glasgow, bringing Impressionist paintings to the city which were bought by wealthy business men and acquired

by Kelvingrove Art Gallery Reid himself had his portrait painted on several occasions by Van Gogh However, unlike the literary modernism which was

to develop in the post-1918 period, this earlier visual arts fl owering did not have an ideological or national renewal element in its innovatory artistic work which might have sustained it in adverse circumstances, and it did not survive World War One By the end of the war European exhibiting connections had been disrupted, artists began to go their individual ways, most often out

of Scotland, and economic decline made it all too clear that Glasgow was no longer the ‘second city of the Empire’ Reid’s gallery continued to sell French Impressionist paintings during the early 1920s, along with paintings by the Scottish Colourists, but public taste changed, there was not the same interest

in post-Impressionist work, and the gallery’s business moved to the London

fi rm Reid and Lefevre in 1928.4

This disruption of the Scottish visual arts situation patterned in some respects the effect of the outbreak of war on the early and celebratory phase

Introduction 5

of European modernism itself The previous self-chosen emigration of artists

and intellectuals to the international creativity of European metropolitan

cul-tural centres was transformed into a philosophical exile of lost idealism as well

as an actual displacement of peoples from destroyed homes and destroyed

national identities as frontiers changed as a result of ‘peace’ settlements The

experience of World War One – a war unlike any previous European war

in terms of human carnage and civilian involvement – was an unexpected

and diabolic manifestation of the potentiality of the new world so recently

celebrated It was thus a powerful infl uence on the character of the phase of

modernist artistic expression which developed in the post-1918 period In a

pre-war essay on Cavalcanti, Ezra Pound, talking of the need to revitalise the

art of poetry, had commented that ‘we appear to have lost the radiant world

where one thought cuts through another with a clear edge’.5 In the

after-shock of the war, it was clear that the loss of the radiant world had taken on

more widespread and sinister cultural, social and political implications T S

Eliot, discussing James Joyce’s infl uential and experimental novel Ulysses in

1923, placed it in a context of ‘the immense panorama of futility and anarchy

which is contemporary history’.6 Eliot’s own fragmented long poem The

Waste Land, published in the previous year, was ‘celebrated’ by many of its

readers as a paradigm of just such a futility, both in its diffi culty of

interpre-tation and the negativity of its message once interpreted: a negativity which

appeared to give formal expression to their own sense of despair

This post-1918 situation was the context in which a new Scottish

modern-ism – this time literature-led and ideological in nature – was born It was given

impulse by the journalist and poet C M Grieve (Hugh MacDiarmid) who

returned from war service in Europe determined to make a name for himself

as a writer of consequence and determined also to fi nd a way to regenerate

both his country’s literature and its capacity for self-determination The little

magazines he edited from the small east-coast town of Montrose on his return

from the war soon generated a group of activists willing to support him in his

self-appointed task, including the writers Neil M Gunn, Edwin and Willa

Muir, Catherine Carswell, and in the 1930s Lewis Grassic Gibbon, together

with the musician Francis George Scott and the painters William McCance

and William Johnstone, who, although they were forced to fi nd their living

outside Scotland, were supportive of the new initiatives The revival

move-ment itself became popularly known as the ‘Scottish Renaissance’ and this

terminology has lasted through to our own time as the signifi er of an

inter-war literary movement with several adherents but centred primarily on the

poetry and nationalist politics of Hugh MacDiarmid While such a

percep-tion has some truth in it in relapercep-tion to MacDiarmid’s prominence, artistically

and polemically, it offers a partial view which ignores both the diversity and

strength of other participants and the interactive, outward-looking nature of

Scottish culture in this period Tom Nairn’s infl uential book The Break-up

of Britain (1979) which considers MacDiarmid’s A Drunk Man Looks at the

Thistle to be the expression of a delayed Scottish Romantic nationalism, has

encouraged a focus on what some critics have seen as a national essentialism

in the movement, a looking backwards and inwards as opposed to the nity and internationalism of the context in which these Scottish Renaissance writers considered themselves to be working What is needed for a more accurate understanding of this important period in Scottish literary culture

moder-is a return to the writings of the participants in the movement and so to an understanding of how they perceived their relationship with the world in which they operated For these writers were in no doubt that what they were

engaged in was a modern project Edwin Muir’s fi rst published book was titled We Moderns (1918); MacDiarmid’s editorials in his Scottish Chapbook,

founded in 1922, consistently used the word ‘modern’ and emphasised that

‘there cannot be a revival in the real sense of the word [ .] unless these potentialities are in accord with the newest tendencies of human thought’.7

One of Catherine Carswell’s earliest essays was on Marcel Proust (1923) and

she was a supportive reviewer of D H Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers (1913) and

The Rainbow (1915), and a regular correspondent until his death Her memoir

of Lawrence, The Savage Pilgrimage, was published in 1932 In addition, for

these post-World War One writers and their supporters, nationalism and internationalism were two sides of the one coin, not opposing positions, while

in the national context they believed that any lasting artistic revival must be accompanied by renewal in the life of the nation as a whole They were not

in the business of a narrow ‘art for art’s sake’ or of a narrow nationalism, but were seeking to reach out from an aesthetically and politically revitalised Scotland to interact with the international scene

A primary aim of this book, therefore, is to resituate the Scottish revival

of the post-1918 period in the context of the Anglophone and European modernism of the early twentieth century, and in the context of how it was perceived by its principal activists in its own time Such a context will allow a wider, less fragmented and less insular view of Scottish cultural developments

in the postwar period, including Scottish responses to modernity – to sophical, ideological and technological as well as artistic change – alongside more specifi cally national questions This Scottish modernism, on the other hand, is not entirely synonymous with what we have become used to calling the Scottish Renaissance, although it is closely related to it The Scottish Renaissance movement included many supporters who were encouraged by the new optimistic atmosphere to work for change in Scotland both politically and artistically or behind the scenes as ‘enablers’ Not all such activities could

philo-be characterised as ‘modernist’, even in an expanded sense The journalist William Power was one such enabler, both behind the scenes and in print through articles and editorials, as were the writers F Marian McNeill and Helen Cruickshank Alexander Gray took up the international and the Scots-language challenge by translating German and Danish ballads into Scots, thus bringing to attention similarities between the European and Scottish ballad traditions Gray’s focus, on the other hand, was on accuracy of translation and

on a shared heritage He was not a modernist ‘re-creator’, or ‘transformer’,

Introduction 7

such as MacDiarmid or Pound Similarly, John Buchan was an early supporter

of the new movement, appearing as poet in MacDiarmid’s fi rst Northern

Numbers anthology and writing the foreword to his collection of Scots lyrics,

Sangschaw Yet as Buchan’s introduction to his own historical anthology of

Scottish poetry The Northern Muse (published like Sangschaw in 1925) makes

clear, he, as with Stevenson before him, did not believe that there was a future

for Scots-language poetry and so his anthology is valedictory as opposed to

forward-looking, while his own poetry is traditional rather than

experimen-tal This non-modernistic involvement is true of several writers in the period

who contributed to the recovery of Scots as a literary language by revitalising

existing traditions as opposed to being infl uenced by contemporary modernist

writing And while in the 1930s, Lewis Grassic Gibbon developed a

modern-ist fi ctional form and innovative use of Scots which matched MacDiarmid’s

experiments in poetry, and adapted this to deal with the depiction of the

proletarian city, not all new fi ction writers associated with the literary revival

who wrote about the contemporary world could be considered as modernist

writers For example, Eric Linklater’s 1930s novel Magnus Merriman provides

an ironic, at times farcical, account of the political and artistic performances

of Scottish Renaissance activists with a barely disguised MacDiarmid in the

character of Hugh Skene Yet Linklater’s fi ction, although admired by many

readers, is by nature picaresque rather than consciously challenging in order

to build something new (artistically or politically) Despite some ‘modern’

themes, it cannot be considered ‘modernist’ writing In addition, drama was

an art form struggling to fi nd an identity in the early decades of the century,

and its priorities were survival rather than competition with the modernist

drama of Europe Such qualifi cations mean that although the present study

will attempt to provide the contexts out of which a Scottish modernism of the

post-1918 period developed and in which it operated, the writers selected for

specifi c discussion will be those who consciously sought to fi nd new forms in

their creative work both for artistic purposes and in order to critique and give

expression to the changing, modern world around them This is therefore

not an historical account of Scottish writing published in the period, but an

account of what I would see as Scotland’s contribution to the phase of

modern-ist culture which developed after the ending of World War One

One of the more provocative aspects of the study may be its extension into

the late 1950s in order to take account of the late poetry of Edwin Muir and

Hugh MacDiarmid as well as new poetry in the 1940s and 1950s While the

early revolutionary and optimistic phase of the literary revival had come to an

end by the late 1930s, and the outbreak of war (as in World War One) brought

many writing careers as well as lives to an end, the narrative of this Scottish

con-tribution to modernism is left incomplete if it does not include this late phase

Several of the poets who came to attention in the 1940s drew on the legacy of

MacDiarmid’s revitalisation of Scots as a modern literary language and on the

ideas behind the revival movement, although experimenting with these infl

u-ences in new ways A poet such as Sydney Goodsir Smith, for example, was an

outstanding new late modernist writer in Scots, while Sorley MacLean brought the long-awaited development of Gaelic as a modern – and modernist – liter-

ary language to fruition with his Dàin do Eimhir (Poems to Eimhir) published by

William Maclellan of Glasgow in 1943 Maclellan also published a new series of little magazines and poetry anthologies in the 1940s which supported the new

poetry, as well as publishing MacDiarmid’s In Memoriam James Joyce in 1955

The late poetry of Muir and MacDiarmid is also left in limbo by the tion of a Scottish literary revival that ended in 1939 Muir took a long time to mature as poet, although his strong reputation as critic dates from the World War One period Yet his most achieved and innovative modern poetry comes in the 1940s and 1950s under the pressure of what he called this ‘single, disunited world’.8 MacDiarmid’s diffi culty in fi nding publishing outlets after the out-break of war and his consequent abstracting, borrowing and collaging practices have resulted in him being considered by some critics as a proto-postmodernist writer as opposed to the continuing modernist poet the visionary nature of his objectives and the initial context of his compositions might well show him to

percep-be For all these reasons, it seems relevant to propose a Scottish modernism

which extends selectively from the publication of Edwin Muir’s We Moderns

in 1918 to his death in 1959, and which thus takes in late work by the writers associated with the principal phase of the movement as well as new voices which draw on its infl uences The study will begin with a chapter on C M Grieve (Hugh MacDiarmid), his correspondence from Salonika and Marseilles during the war, and the little magazines he founded and edited in the early 1920s, thus initiating this Scottish contribution to literary modernism

Notes

1 Eliot, ‘Was There a Scottish Literature?’, The Athenaeum, 1 August 1919,

pp 680–1; reprinted in McCulloch (ed.), Modernism and Nationalism, pp 7–10.

2 As, for example, in Samuel Hynes, The Auden Generation.

3 Woolf, review of Feodor Dostoevsky’s The Eternal Husband, trans Constance Garnett, Times Literary Supplement, 22 February 1917, p 91 McCulloch (ed.),

Modernism and Nationalism, p 162.

4 See Frances Fowle, ‘Art Dealing in Glasgow Between the Wars: The Rise and Fall

of La Société des Beaux-Arts’, Journal of the Scottish Society for Art History, vol 12

(2007).

5 Ezra Pound, ‘Cavalcanti’, in Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, p 124.

6 Eliot, ‘Ulysses, Order and Myth’, The Dial, November 1923, p 483.

7 Grieve, ‘A Theory of Scots Letters’, Scottish Chapbook, February 1923, p 182 McCulloch (ed.), Modernism and Nationalism, p 26.

8 Muir, An Autobiography, p 194.

Part I

Transforming Traditions

Chapter 1

Towards a Scottish Modernism:

C M Grieve, Little Magazines and

the Movement for Renewal

None of those signifi cant little periodicals – crude, absurd, enthusiastic, vital

– have yet appeared in Auchtermuchty or Ardnamurchan No new

publish-ing houses have sprung up mushroom-like [ .] It is discouragpublish-ing to refl ect

that this is not the way the Dadaists go about the business!

C M Grieve, Scottish Chapbook (1922)

Christopher Murray Grieve was born and brought up in the small town of

Langholm in the Scottish Borders He enlisted in the war in late 1915 and

after a period of training was posted to Salonika in Macedonia with the Royal

Army Medical Corps, arriving at the 42nd General Hospital there in August

1916 A record of his war service and – more important for the poet Hugh

MacDiarmid he was to become – a record of his psychological and intellectual

development during these years is provided by the series of letters he wrote

from Greece and later from France to George Ogilvie, his former English

teacher at Broughton Junior Student Centre in Edinburgh Grieve’s letters to

Ogilvie continued after the war, through the development of what came to be

known as the Scottish Renaissance movement and into the early 1930s, thus

offering what might be seen as the ‘growth of a [Scottish] poet’s mind’ At this

early stage, however, the European correspondence of the war years charts

Grieve’s gradual progress towards his postwar role as modernist editor and

poet by way of a multiplicity of eclectic reading and writing projects, while at

the same time capturing his early interest in the cultural avant-garde.1

The principal fi ghting in Greece was over when Grieve’s unit arrived in

the summer of 1916 It appears from his letters that once his various duties

at the hospital and as quartermaster were fulfi lled, he had considerable time

left over for reading and thinking about his future plans Indeed, ‘thinking’

– in Salonika as throughout his life – appears to have been an obsession and

something of a trial to Grieve whose thoughts, like those of his future poetic

persona the Drunk Man, tended to ‘circle like hobby-horses’.2 As a fl edgling

newspaper reporter in Wales in 1911, he had written to Ogilvie about his

overactive brain: ‘I wish some device could be patented whereby my fl ying

thoughts could be photographed: that might give me a chance to express my

present mental stage with some adequacy’ (Letters, p 6) Now, fi ve years later,

he was still trying to bring order to thoughts threatening to overwhelm him

He wrote in a long letter of 20 August 1916:

[M]y thoughts are thus forever like a man moving through the ever-increasing and various confusion of an enormous higgledy-piggledy lumber-room [ .] But I cannot get that breathing space Nor can I hit on any super shorthand to keep pace

with my continuing mental ‘spate’ and make up back-time (Letters, p 11)

Grieve had left Broughton Student Centre without taking a teaching qualifi tion, and his letters give the impression of a young man of enormous ambition, but of as yet unfocused talent, an enthusiastic and eclectic reader, pouncing on whatever is new and intellectually and artistically challenging He is anxious to compete with the authors he reads, but at the same time appears psychologi-cally insecure, despite the confi dent, even arrogant, persona adopted in many

ca-of the letters; uncertain that he will ever be able to fi nd a way to give expression

to the latent creativity he feels he has within him

These letters are interesting not only for the light they throw on the psychology of their immature writer-to-be, but also for the information they contain about Grieve’s reading material in the war years and the proposed projects deriving from it One series of Scottish studies concerns Scottish visual art, a topic of continuing interest throughout his life and one which at this point indicates his growing interest in Wyndham Lewis and avant-garde developments as well as implicitly looking forward to the visual quality in the imagery of his future Scots-language poetry:

I have my The Scottish Vortex (as per system exemplifi ed in Blast), Caricature in

Scotland – and lost opportunities, A Copy of Burns I want (suggestions to illustrators

on a personal visualization of the national pictures evoked in the poems), Scottish

Colour-Thought (a study of the aesthetic condition of Scottish nationality in the

last three centuries) and The Alienation of Our Artistic Ability (the factors which

prevent the formation of a ‘national’ school and drive our artists to other lands and

to ‘foreign portrayal’) (Letters, p 9)

Such Scottish projects – or as he calls them, his ‘Scots Bureau’ (Letters, p 20)

– are documented as a part only (‘extracted from my notebook at random’)

of his ‘ceaseless reading, wide as the world of books, in every conceivable subject’, while his interests range ‘from gardening to bacteriology and from fox-hunting to scientifi c indexing – I have planned books and articles on a

thousand and one topics’ (Letters, pp 8, 14) Such mental tentacles might

certainly be seen to stretch forward to the author of the late intellectual and

cultural collage of In Memoriam James Joyce, but there is as yet little to suggest

the instigator of a vernacular literary revival in the years immediately after World War One These letters to Ogilvie are notable for the absence of ver-nacular Scots in his writing, despite his Borders upbringing (Like the letters

of the eighteenth-century Burns, Grieve’s wartime correspondence appears

to be the product of a carefully constructed persona.) Similarly, despite the fact that ‘most of my reading comes from “The Soldiers’ Recreation Friend,

Towards a Scottish Modernism 13

29 Drumsheugh Gardens, Edinburgh”’ (Letters, p 24), he mentions no

Scottish periodicals alongside the English, Irish and European magazines

which were part of his regular reading material Grieve would appear to have

been at least one Scottish soldier for whom the British war propaganda in

Blackwood’s Magazine was not required reading.3

On the other hand, what is relevant to Grieve’s future situation as a

Scottish modernist is his interest in the cultural avant-garde and his

increas-ing awareness of and identifi cation with European artistic movements, as

well as his recognition of the importance of Ezra Pound and Wyndham

Lewis in the London avant-garde scene Grieve had been introduced by

Ogilvie to The New Age under the editorship of A R Orage when he was at

Broughton, and had himself contributed an article ‘The Young Astrology’

in 1911, when he was nineteen As with Edwin Muir, whose fi rst book We

Moderns (1918) began life as a series of articles in Orage’s magazine, The New

Age had acted, and continued to act, as a kind of ‘Open University’ in

rela-tion to Grieve’s post-school educarela-tion in philosophy, European literature,

and contemporary artistic, intellectual, scientifi c and social ideas Now in

Greece, and later in France, his reading included not only The New Age and

other English periodicals such as The Spectator, Nation, and English Review,

together with the Irish Dublin Review and Dublin Leader, but also modern

writers such as the American Henry James, the Irish playwright J M Synge

and the Russians Maxim Gorky and the earlier Ivan Turgenev From 1918

onwards, such contemporary references predominate in his correspondence

He continues his early interest in Wyndham Lewis by discussing the Little

Review’s obscenity problems with his short story ‘Cantleman’s Spring-Mate’

(‘The case of “Cantleman” was taken into court in New York and brilliantly

and humorously defended, but to no avail’, Letters, p 20); and refers also to

Emily Dickinson, Rebecca West and the Sitwells as well as to composers such

as Debussy, Stravinsky and Rimsky-Korsakov La Revue Trans-Macedonienne

as well as La Vie Parisienne and Le Rêve have been added to his periodical

reading He writes that he is reading ‘in the original a big anthology of

con-temporary French Poets and am in communication now with Paul Valéry,

André Gide, Albert Samhain and a few others’ (Letters, p 33) His travels

include visits to the French/Spanish border area, to Lourdes, to Biarritz, and

to Paris

By December 1918, therefore, when Grieve is waiting impatiently in

Marseilles for demobilisation, there are more defi nite signs of the editor

and writer he would become in the postwar years His projects continue to

multiply: ‘It is better to be an electric current for fi ve years than a vegetable

for fi fty’, he writes to Ogilvie on 27 December (Letters, p 30) His ideas,

however, appear more focused, and his own creative writing occupies a

higher profi le in the activities planned He is negotiating for the publication

of a small poetry collection titled A Voice from Macedonia, and is continuing

with plans for a trilogy of novels His atmospheric sketch ‘Casualties’ is to

be published in the Broughton Magazine in the summer of 1919 He writes

also of a completed study ‘Triangular’ which is ‘an essay in futurism’ (Letters,

p 33) What is interesting in relation to the specifi cally Scottish situation is that he is now beginning to make contact with other Scottish writers, some of whom are, like himself, ex-pupils of Ogilvie The name of Roderick Watson Kerr (the future co-founder of Porpoise Press) appears frequently in the cor-

respondence Kerr’s war poems had been published in the English Review and

in his collection War Daubs, and Grieve is anxious for news of their reception

Although his own war poems from Macedonia had apparently been ably received by John Buchan, they had not achieved book publication as planned due to a number of misunderstandings and confusions (a foretaste of many similar publishing diffi culties to come) He refers also to the political situation at home – ‘Exciting rumours of industrial happenings are trickling

favour-through’ – and expresses a wish to be part of it (Letters, p 34) We can see in

these later letters, therefore, the steps being taken towards the Scottish ary and national ventures which were to move centre stage from the summer

liter-of 1919 onwards

Grieve’s main place of residence from his demobilisation in 1919 until the late 1920s was Montrose, a small town on the north-east coast of Scotland,

where he worked as a journalist on the Montrose Review, became elected as

an Independent Labour Party Councillor, and began his family life It was therefore from Montrose that he launched the ambitious programme for cultural and national renewal that became known as the Scottish Renaissance Movement: a Scottish modernism deriving from the periphery of a peripheral small country, as opposed to the high modernism of a European cosmopoli-tan metropolis.4 His fi rst venture was a series of anthologies of contempo-

rary Scottish poetry titled Northern Numbers, modelled on Edward Marsh’s

Georgian Poetry anthologies Although Marsh’s anthologies could not be

considered as avant-garde, Grieve had read and admired them during his war service and was impressed by their popularity with readers His Foreword to

his own fi rst Northern Numbers collection, published by Foulis in Edinburgh

in 1920, stressed that it did not aim to be a comprehensive anthology of temporary Scottish poetry, but consisted of ‘representative selections (chosen

con-by the contributors themselves) from the mainly current work of certain Scottish poets of today’ – and he added, signifi cantly, ‘and to-morrow’ This modest ‘manifesto’ therefore looked to the future and confi dence grew when

it was found to be ‘selling splendidly’.5 The journalist and poet William Jeffrey may even have made the fi rst use of the term ‘renaissance’ to defi ne the new

movement when his positive review in the Glasgow Bulletin on 17 January

1921 was titled ‘Is this a Scottish poetry renaissance?’ (p 6) Foulis published the second series in October 1921, with additional authors allowing Grieve to claim in his Foreword that the contributors ‘now represent poetically every district in Scotland including London’ By the next year, however, Foulis was

in fi nancial diffi culties and Grieve published the third series himself from Montrose Whether by coincidence or not, this third anthology appears the most forward-looking, with several of the older, more traditional writers

Towards a Scottish Modernism 15

replaced by younger, more adventurous contributors Grieve’s own

English-language contributions, although eye-catching, show him still struggling

linguistically and thematically to articulate his metaphysical ideas, with only

the imagistic ‘Cattle Show’ (later collected in Stony Limits of 1934) achieving

resolution The loss of Foulis also meant that his own experimental collection

of poetry and prose, Annals of the Five Senses, which derived from his time in

Macedonia, was now without a publisher As with the third Northern Numbers,

Grieve eventually published this collection himself from Montrose in 1923

Grieve had achieved much since returning to Scotland in 1919, but it

was becoming increasingly clear to him that in order for any lasting renewal

movement to take place, there had to be some ‘place of exchange’, a forum

or market place for forward-looking literary and national debate and for the

presentation of new creative writing The collapse of Foulis and the diffi

cul-ties he himself was experiencing in placing his various projects only served

to emphasise the need for a more controllable outlet In the inaugural issue

of The Scottish Chapbook, fi rst discussed with Foulis in 1920, but eventually

edited and published by himself from Montrose in August 1922, he lamented

the lack in Scotland of ‘phenomena recognisable as a propaganda of ideas [ .]

these signifi cant little periodicals – crude, absurd, enthusiastic, vital’, adding:

‘it is discouraging to refl ect that this is not the way the Dadaists go about the

business’.6 Yet, although Tristan Tzara’s Dada Manifesto of 1918 may have

introduced a new phase of European avant-garde art in the postwar period,

and ‘signifi cant little periodicals’ such as Blast, The Egoist and The Little

Review had launched new aesthetic ideas and creative writing in cosmopolitan

centres in these early years of the century, Grieve was ironically idealistic in

looking for them in Scotland at this time Edinburgh was now a provincial

North British city as opposed to an Enlightenment capital, and the great

publishing days of the Edinburgh Review and Blackwood’s had come to an end,

although the latter magazine had enjoyed a temporary return to prosperity

in its role of purveyor of British propaganda during the war Nor could the

generalist and conventional nature of the Scottish periodical press as a whole

offer a platform for experimental literature and innovatory polemics

As so often in his future literary life, Grieve in this early period did not sit

down to his publishing troubles, but set about providing his own solutions

In a letter published in the Glasgow Herald on 15 May 1922, he advertised his

intention to publish a new monthly magazine under his editorship to be called

The Scottish Chapbook, giving its aims and intended readership, and asking for

supporters to contact him He stated his belief that

a minority in Scotland, suffi ciently interested or capable of being interested in

experimental poetics, is now quite large enough to justify the publication of such a

monthly periodical as is indicated [ .] The venture is not to be a commercial one

It is intended to cover expenses and no more [ .] Only a very limited number of

subscribers at 10s annually (for which they will receive the twelve monthly issues

post free) are needed (Letters, p 757)

Suffi cient subscribers (including the writers Helen Cruickshank, Neil M Gunn and William Soutar, who also became contributors) were achieved to

launch The Scottish Chapbook in August 1922, shortly before the launch of the

Criterion under the editorship of T S Eliot in October of that year.

As has often been remarked, 1922 was something of an annus mirabilis

in postwar English-language literary modernism, since in addition to the

Criterion under Eliot’s editorship, the year saw the publication of James

Joyce’s Ulysses by Sylvia Beach of Shakespeare & Co in Paris in February, Eliot’s The Waste Land in the American magazine The Dial in November, and

the appearance in London of new fi ction by D H Lawrence and Virginia Woolf To this was added in Scotland not only Grieve’s editorship of a new mould-breaking magazine, but, even more important for the revival of Scotland’s literary reputation, his appearance in its third issue of October

1922 as the modernist Scots-language poet ‘Hugh M’Diarmid’

With its red cover, lion rampant cover image and motto proclaiming

‘Not Traditions – Precedents’, The Scottish Chapbook offered an mising platform for a ‘propaganda of ideas’ Its manifesto, The Chapbook

uncompro-Programme, featured prominently in the inaugural and all subsequent issues,

and took as its motto the quotation: ‘Il far un libro meno e che niente/Se

il libro fatto non rifa la gente ’ (‘To make a book is less than nothing unless the book, when made, makes people anew’).7 Its general objective was to ‘meddle wi’ the thistle’ and specifi c aims included: ‘to encourage and publish the work of contemporary Scottish poets and dramatists, whether in English, Gaelic or Braid Scots’; ‘to insist upon truer evaluations of the work

of Scottish writers than are usually given in the present over-Anglicised condition of British literary journalism, and, in criticism, elucidate, apply, and develop the distinctively Scottish range of values’ Most importantly,

it sought ‘to bring Scottish Literature into closer touch with current European tendencies in technique and ideation’.8 This, then, was to be a forward-looking movement which would not only seek to revitalise Scottish writing in all three of Scotland’s indigenous languages, but would also seek

to bring these Scottish traditions into contact with modern European tive and intellectual ideas And instead of lamenting Scotland’s linguistic diversity as a hindrance to the development of a distinctive literature (as Eliot had considered it to be in his review article ‘Was there a Scottish literature?’), Grieve looked in his fi rst Book Review column to the earlier

crea-European example of La Jeune Belgique for a way forward in relation to the

several languages of Scotland:

What Belgium did, Scotland can do Literary Scotland, like Belgium, is a country of mixed nationality Instead of two languages, Flemish and French, we have Braid Scots, Gaelic and English Let the exponents of these three sections in Scottish Literature

to-day make common cause as the young Belgian writers [ .] did in La Jeune Belgique

and elsewhere; and the next decade or two will see a Scottish Renascence as swift and

Towards a Scottish Modernism 17 The Scottish Chapbook was probably more truly a modernist ‘little maga-

zine’ – shortlived, impecunious and iconoclastic – than was Eliot’s more

securely founded and structured Criterion Its capacity for polemic was

dem-onstrated in its third issue of October 1922 by the unexpected introduction

of the new Scots-language poet ‘Hugh M’Diarmid’, and by its editor’s

‘Causeries’ arguing out the case against and for Scots which culminated in

the important series ‘A Theory of Scots Letters’ in February and March

1923: a debate which changed the future course of Scottish writing The

new magazine had in fact been launched in the context of its editor’s dispute

with the London Burns Club over the Club’s establishment of a Vernacular

Circle with the aim of promoting the Scots language: a dispute which had

been conducted in an acrimonious correspondence in the Aberdeen Free

Press from December 1921 At this earlier point Grieve believed that the

modern Scottish literature he envisaged would of necessity have to be

developed in English, since the decline of Scots since the time of Burns

had left the language unsuitable for ambitious literary purposes In this he

looked to the Irish literary revival for support, arguing that ‘Synge, Yeats

and other great Irish writers found no diffi culty in expressing themselves

in an English which they yet made distinctively Irish’ (Letters, p 751) In

addition, he had recently come under the infl uence of Gregory Smith’s

Scottish Literature: Character and Infl uence of 1919, whose coining of the

term ‘Caledonian Antisyzygy’ as the descriptor of the contradictory nature

of Scottish writing he was later to adopt in his own work In his dispute with

the Burns Club, however, it was Smith’s sarcastic dismissal of the

Scots-language poet who ‘waddles in good duck fashion through his Jamieson

[Scots-language dictionary], snapping up fat expressive words with nice

little bits of green idiom for fl avouring’ that made him fear that a fl ight from

the kailyard could not possibly be achieved through the medium of Scots.10

(Ironically, as we shall see, this was exactly the practice that brought him,

as MacDiarmid, to prominence as a modernist poet.) In his disagreement

with the Burns Club’s position, therefore, he insisted that ‘any attempt to

create a Doric “boom” just now – or even to maintain the existing

vernacu-lar cult in anything like its present tendencies – would be a gross disservice

to Scottish life and letters’ (Letters, p 755).

What brought about Grieve’s change of mind is uncertain, although, as we

have seen, the inaugural Chapbook Programme emphasised renewal in all three

of Scotland’s languages, and by its second and third issues of September and

October 1922 he was becoming more conciliatory towards the Burns Club,

commenting that ‘the struggle is really between those whose allegiance is to

the letter of Burnsiana and those who are fi lled with the spirit of Burns’.11 He

continued to equivocate, however, and this ambivalence is even more sharply

illustrated by his ‘Scottish Books and Bookmen’ columns in the Dunfermline

Press, which ran in parallel with his Chapbook deliberations On 5 August

1922, for example, he is reiterating the position taken months previously in

the Aberdeen Free Press, as he insists that

most of it [Scottish Literature] is, of course, and must continue to be, written in English But it is not English on that account, although it is denounced on that score by the ardent minority bent upon the revival of the Doric [ .] It is no more English in spirit than the literature of the Irish Literary Revival, most of which was written in the English language, was English in spirit

Yet, just a few weeks later on 30 September 1922, he purports to be

intro-ducing a ‘friend’ who has discovered a copy of Sir James Wilson’s Lowland

Scotch in the corner of his (Grieve’s) bookshelf Reminding his readers

of his previously expressed ‘strong view in regard to the literary uses of the Venacular’, he nevertheless confesses his ‘great delight in words; and the obsolete, the distinctively local, the idiomatic, the unusual attract me strongly’.12 Such qualities have apparently attracted his mythical friend also, and the result is ‘The Watergaw’ and ‘The Blaward and the Skelly’, pub-

lished in the Dunfermline Press shortly before the more ‘offi cial’ appearance

of ‘The Watergaw’ under the name of ‘Hugh M’Diarmid’ in the October

Scottish Chapbook Grieve commented in relation to the poems’ appearance in

the Dunfermline Press that they ‘serve a useful purpose [ .] in rescuing from

oblivion and restoring to literary use forgotten words that have a descriptive potency otherwise unavailable [ .] but apart from that philological interest they have, in my opinion, some genuine merit too’.13 In the Chapbook appear-

ance, he more confi dently draws attention to his friend ‘M’Diarmid’ and his activities, describing him as:

the fi rst Scottish writer who has addressed himself to the question of the ability (without psychological violence) of the vernacular to embrace the whole range of modern culture [ .] what he has to do is to adopt an essentially rustic tongue to the very much more complex requirements of our urban civilisation – to give it all the almost illimitable suggestability it lacks (compared, say, with con- temporary English or French) but would have had if it had continued in general use in highly cultured circles to the present day A modern consciousness cannot fully express itself in the Doric as it exists

extend-In contrast to its present limitations, however, he emphasises the potential of the language as achieved in his friend’s poem:

[T]ranslate it into English – that is the test [ .] Not only so, but the temper of the poem is modern and the Doric is adequate to it It is disfi gured by none of the

usual sentimentality It has a distinctively Scottish sinisterness for which expression

is too seldom found nowadays

And in a fi nal fl ourish, he cuts himself and Mr M’Diarmid off from some

of his previous Northern Numbers colleagues as he insists that: ‘The whole

trouble with the Doric as a literary language to-day is that the vast majority

of its exponents are hopelessly limited culturally – and that the others (such

as Mrs Violet Jacob, Mr Charles Murray, and Miss Mary Symon) only use it for limited purposes.’14

Towards a Scottish Modernism 19

What is noticeable about Grieve/MacDiarmid’s continuing debate with

himself and his readers about the viability of Scots as a modern literary

lan-guage is the emphasis he places on the importance of the ‘modern’ What he

does not want is some ‘museum department of our consciousness’, adding:

‘The rooms of thought are choc-a-bloc with far too much dingy rubbish as it

is.’ Any revival must have ‘potentialities [which] are in accord with the newest

tendencies of human thought’.15 Alan Bold has suggested in his biography

of MacDiarmid that his move to Scots may have been encouraged by James

Joyce’s linguistic experimentation in Ulysses, which he may have read either

through its serialisation from 1918 in Margaret Anderson’s Little Review or

by acquiring a copy of Sylvia Beach’s 1922 Paris edition.16 Whatever the

reason, it is interesting that in the course of ‘A Theory of Scots Letters’ we

fi nd that instead of the earlier relationship postulated between a modern

Scottish literature in English and the work of J M Synge and Yeats, he now

sees a link between the Scots Vernacular and the more recent modernist

language experimentation of James Joyce In particular, he comments that

he has been

enormously struck by the resemblance – the moral resemblance – between

Jamieson’s Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish language and James Joyce’s

Ulysses A vis comica that has not yet been liberated lies bound by desuetude and

misappreciation in the recesses of the Doric: and its potential uprising would be no

less prodigious, uncontrollable, and utterly at variance with conventional morality

as was Joyce’s tremendous outpouring.

By March 1923, the Scots Vernacular has replaced English as the language

of a new Scots literature which will take Scottish culture back into the

main-stream of Europe Scots is now

the only language in Western Europe instinct with those uncanny spiritual and

pathological perceptions alike which constitute the uniqueness of Dostoevski’s

work [ and] is a vast storehouse of just the very peculiar and subtle effects which

modern European literature in general is assiduously seeking [ .] It is an inchoate

Marcel Proust – a Dostoevskian debris of ideas – an inexhaustible quarry of subtle

Over the course of these Chapbook editorials, Grieve had succeeded in

estab-lishing in his own mind at least the potential and viability of Scots as a literary

language for a modern Scotland and one that could also make its

contribu-tion to European culture From this point onwards, at least from Grieve/

MacDiarmid’s perspective, the Scots language was not only something to be

encouraged along with the Gaelic, but was to be the cornerstone of a modern

literary revival, and at the same time the marker of a revitalised Scottish

iden-tity distinctive from English; it had become the signifi er and the symbol of

both the aesthetic and political objectives of the revival movement

The Chapbook continued publication until November/December 1923,

and although its Causeries lost momentum to some extent after the end

of the language debate, it continued to publish poems by MacDiarmid in Scots, with the August 1923 issue containing some of these translated into French by Denis Saurat, Professor of French at Glasgow University, who had become involved with the revival movement Edwin Muir and Neil M Gunn also began to appear in its pages, Muir contributing from Europe where he was then living, and, unusually, with a poem in Scots (‘The Black Douglas’) Gunn, equally unusually, contributed as poet, although his short fi ction was published in Grieve’s subsequent magazines Contributions in Gaelic,

‘Continental Sonnets’ in English by C M Grieve and the exploration of a

‘Russo-Scottish Parallelism’ pointed to its continuing internationalism in addition to its Scottish objectives

On the other hand, it may be that the format of the Chapbook was not

suffi ciently fl exible for the wider cultural and national agenda Grieve had initially intended to pursue, especially when the editor’s Causeries on the topic of the Scots language dominated its content He had made an admission

of this kind himself at the outset of his venture when he wrote to Ogilvie in

October 1922: ‘I quite agree with you as to the format of Chapbook There are

diffi culties about changing it: but I shall do so at the earliest possible

oppor-tunity’ (Letters, p 78) Instead of changing The Scottish Chapbook, however, he began in May 1923 a new weekly magazine The Scottish Nation, again edited

and published by himself from Montrose Although its opening issue called for the freeing of Scotland from English infl uence (perhaps to encourage support from the nationalist businessman R H Muirhead, which in the end

did not materialise in a fi nancial form), The Scottish Nation’s agenda was not

explicitly a political one, but was modelled on the international and eclectic

format of Orage’s New Age In the Scottish context, the new magazine

regu-larly covered music in Scotland (with some of the articles written by Grieve himself under the byline of ‘Isobel Guthrie’), new novels, contemporary art, religion and ethics, Gaelic language matters, education and employment and political questions relating to the Labour Party in Scotland and the per-ceived problem of the Irish in Scotland ‘International Art and Affairs’ was a regular feature Edwin Muir contributed the important two-part essay ‘The Assault on Humanism’, an attack on what he saw as the nihilistic direction

D H Lawrence was pursuing in his work, a charge refuted by Grieve in a subsequent issue Muir also introduced the German poet Hölderlin to an English-speaking public in his essay ‘A Note on Friedrich Hölderlin’ and

there were reviews of Babette Deutsch and Avrahm Yarmolinsky’s Modern

Russian Poetry and Contemporary German Poetry, translations which may

well have encouraged Grieve/MacDiarmid’s future experimentation with

adaptations from European poetry in A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle The

literary revival itself featured regularly in Grieve’s series ‘At the Sign of the Thistle’ and included items such as ‘Burns and Baudelaire’, ‘Braid Scots and the Sense of Smell’ and ‘The Neglect of Scottish Literature’ In addition

to Scots-language poems by MacDiarmid, there were poems in Scots by Lewis Spence, a supporter who took a different route to the revival of Scots

Towards a Scottish Modernism 21

for literary purposes The Scottish Nation can therefore be seen as symbolic

of the attempt to create a new intellectual and European-oriented

move-ment in Scottish culture, but one which was also rooted in contemporary

Scottish life Unfortunately, such an ambitious weekly magazine attempting

to follow the format of The New Age (which itself had never made a profi t)

proved impossible to sustain without fi nancial backing and without a stronger

contributor and readership base And these, apparently, were not yet to be

found in Scotland Nor was there the type of rich, cosmopolitan patron who

had been willing to support the early projects of Pound, Eliot and H D In

contrast, The Scottish Nation was once again edited and funded from Montrose

through Grieve’s activities as a journalist, and supported by the goodwill of

his unpaid contributors (many of whom, and often the most stimulating, were

eventually himself wearing diverse disguises) The magazine ran in parallel

with the monthly Scottish Chapbook until December 1923 when both ceased

publication They were followed, briefl y, by a return to monthly publication

with The Northern Review, edited by Grieve with two assistant editors and

a London agent This too was without external funding, and it ran for four

issues only from May to September 1924

Although these periodicals initiated and edited by Grieve were short-lived,

as with little modernist magazines elsewhere, they had an impact beyond

their brief lives By 1925, when Grieve’s alter ego MacDiarmid published

Sangschaw, his fi rst collection of Scots lyrics, the principal Scottish

newspa-pers regularly included articles and letters on the new direction in Scottish

literature and cultural life, and the terminology ‘Scottish Renaissance’ was

in common use to describe the new movement Professor Denis Saurat took

it abroad in his article ‘Le groupe de “la Renaissance Ecossaise”’ published

in the Revue Anglo-Americaine in April 1924, and it gained even greater

currency after MacDiarmid’s Penny Wheep and A Drunk Man Looks at the

Thistle followed Sangschaw in 1926, with all three works being reviewed in

Scottish newspapers and in periodicals outwith Scotland such as the Times

Literary Supplement, Nineteenth Century and the American Saturday Review of

Literature A few years later, in October 1933, the London Spectator was to

announce an editorial policy of regular coverage of Scottish affairs because

‘developments are in progress in Scotland that are far too little understood or

discussed outside Scotland [ .] The cultivation of Gaelic and the conscious

development of a modern Scottish literature are movements demanding not

only observation but discussion’.18

Grieve himself ceased to have a magazine under his editorship after the

demise of the Northern Review but he continued to be a presence on the

periodical scene, contributing both to established journals and to several

new ones which began to appear in the later 1920s, most probably

encour-aged by his earlier example Although these magazines were not

avant-garde in nature, or even specifi cally literary or arts-based, most of them

were characterised by their commitment to the regeneration of the life of

the country, culturally, politically and economically In May 1925, Grieve

was commissioned by the editor of the Scottish Educational Journal to write

a series of assessments of Scottish literary fi gures, a project he had

tenta-tively begun in the Scottish Chapbook This caused much controversy in the

Journal’s pages, while at the same time furthering awareness of the revival

movement and its challenge to existing traditions The series was published

in London in 1926 as Contemporary Scottish Studies The same year also saw the founding of the Scots Independent, a nationalist political magazine, and the Scots Observer: A Weekly Journal of Religious & National Interest edited by

William Power Despite its stated purpose ‘to strengthen and make socially manifest the spiritual leadership of the Scottish Protestant Churches’,19 the

Scots Observer carried a wide range of literary and other cultural and social

material and many of its contributors were associated with the literary

revival movement Another new magazine was the Pictish Review, edited by

the Celtic nationalist Ruairidh Erskine of Marr whose inaugural editorial in

1927 included the aim ‘to re-elucidate the values implicit, and explicit, in Pictish history and civilisation’.20 In the early 1930s, The Free Man, edited in

Edinburgh by Robin Black, and associated with no specifi c political party or organisation, offered its pages to those committed to the renewal of Scotland and, among a wide range of topics, provided space for discussion of Highland regeneration and, especially, for discussion of the present condition and revitalisation of the Gaelic language Highland regeneration was also the principal theme of the many articles written in the 1930s by Neil M Gunn

for the established Scots Magazine, under the editorship of J B Salmond

Of more specifi c relevance to the literary and European-oriented revival

initiated by Grieve in the early 1920s was The Modern Scot which took over

his avant-garde role in the early to mid-1930s, when he himself was living

in a kind of voluntary exile on the small Shetland island of Whalsay The

Modern Scot was both owned and edited by James Whyte, a wealthy young

American who ran a bookshop with his partner in St Andrews, a douce university town which was somewhat scandalised by Whyte’s bisexuality and what were seen as his and his bookshop’s avant-garde activities His comfortable fi nancial background meant that he was able to conduct his

magazine independently and, unusually, to pay his contributors well The

Modern Scot therefore had something of the kind of patronage enjoyed by

cosmopolitan magazines such as The Little Review or The Egoist – an tage sorely lacking in Grieve’s earlier precarious journals Despite being

advan-a non-Scot, Whyte wadvan-as strongly supportive of the politicadvan-al advan-and culturadvan-al aims of the Scottish Renaissance and confi rmed his magazine’s intention

to continue to encourage new writing and criticism within Scotland, and in all three of Scotland’s languages, while maintaining the connections with continental Europe established by the Grieve magazines Even a cursory reading of the indexes to the various annual volumes indicates how suc-cessfully this commitment, as well as the interaction of the political and the aesthetic, was carried out, aided by Whyte’s large stable of contributors and also, no doubt, by the greater amount of time he himself was able to give to

Towards a Scottish Modernism 23

planning his issues coherently For example, the Winter issue of Volume

One included reviews of André Gide’s L’Immoraliste and his Dostoevsky and a

study of Marcel Proust by Armand Dandieu alongside reviews of Catherine

Carswell’s Life of Robert Burns (a ground-breaking, novelistic biography

which focused on Burns’s sexuality and attracted much hostility from the

traditionalists of the Burns Clubs) The issue also contained reviews of

Scottish Gaelic publications and one (under the initials C M G.) of La

Langue de Relations Interceltiques by Louis de Roux: thus bringing together

in the one issue French, Celtic and Scots connections New creative writing

represented included a poem by Edwin Muir and a review of Neil Gunn’s

novel Morning Tide This interactive Scottish and European pattern

con-tinued throughout the magazine’s life, with a noticeable increase in the

work from Scotland being featured, including not only creative writing

and reviews of new writing, but also visual art images and articles, together

with the music for Francis George Scott’s settings of some of MacDiarmid’s

early Scots lyrics – the music itself infl uenced by European modernist

experimentation of the early century There are articles that focus on the

development of Scottish drama, something that had disappeared in the

wake of the Calvinist reformation of the sixteenth century, but was

begin-ning hesitantly to re-emerge in the interwar period (although it was not

until the re-emergence of political nationalism in the 1970s that anything

approaching an avant-garde or agit-prop theatre movement developed in

Scotland) In a decade such as the 1930s, politics were inescapable, and in

addition to the expected critiques and endorsements of Scottish national

politics – including the editor’s own acute analysis of the difference

between national and nationalist literature – there were uncompromising

critical analyses of Wyndham Lewis’s book on Hitler, politicial poems by

MacDiarmid and both positive and negative reviews of his Hymns to Lenin,

with the ‘First Hymn’ reviewed by A R Orage In excerpts from her Russian

Diary, Naomi Mitchison considered her own equivocal responses to what

she called the ‘she-sailors’ on the boat which took her to Russia, and to

the supposed emancipated condition of women generally under the Soviet

system The Muirs presented translations of Kafka’s Aphorisms and work

by Hermann Broch, whose trilogy Die Schlafwandler (The Sleepwalkers) they

were also translating And there were praises for and explanations of Major

Douglas’s social credit system, an almost obligatory item in anti-capitalist

modern magazines in these early decades of the century Altogether, The

Modern Scot was a splendidly interactive and cosmopolitan modern journal

which probably more successfully fulfi lled Grieve’s early vision of an

inspi-rational aesthetic and political Scottish periodical than did his own

hand-to-mouth little magazines Yet, ironically, it was his iconoclastic, unstable

and short-lived ventures that had created the climate in which a more

sophisticated modern magazine such as The Modern Scot could emerge and

fl ourish for a longer period

The continuing problem, however, was the absence in Scotland of a

suffi ciently large and adventurous audience interested in the promotion of new ideas, both Scottish and emanating from beyond Scotland In the mid-

1930s, The Modern Scot merged with another journal to become Outlook This

merger produced a magazine which, although less culturally adventurous than its predecessor, achieved lasting notoriety as a result of printing pre-

publication excerpts from Edwin Muir’s 1936 book Scott and Scotland in which

he suggested that the only way forward for an ambitious writer in Scotland

was to use the English language and literary tradition – a proposal that seemed

to be a denial of all that had been achieved as a result of MacDiarmid’s guage experimentation in the 1920s, and one that caused a breach between

lan-the two poets that was never healed In 1937 Outlook itself ceased publication

as the political climate in Europe darkened and James Whyte returned to America; and in 1938 MacDiarmid himself returned to periodical publication

with The Voice of Scotland which he edited from the Shetlands assisted by a

young managing editor in Edinburgh: an initiative that will be discussed in later political chapters

In 1926, the poet and journalist Lewis Spence had claimed that Grieve was ‘amongst the fi rst to recognise that post-war Scotland was ripe for a new literary dispensation’, and had described his activities in these years as

the creation of ‘a veritable kulturkampf in Scottish literary circles, a tumult

in which his ideas have been greeted with the most savage condemnation mingled with praise almost extravagant’.21 Grieve was certainly both the instigator and, as MacDiarmid, the outstanding artistic practitioner of the modern renewal movement during the 1920s in particular Yet he was not alone, for as the contributor lists for his own magazines and the periodicals which followed after them show, there were many others willing to support the debate about national identity he had launched and to contribute to it through creative and discursive writing of their own For example, 1922

had seen not only the launch of The Scottish Chapbook but also the

found-ing of the Porpoise Press by two students from Edinburgh University:

Roderick Watson Kerr (author of the War Daubs poetry collection Grieve

asked about so often in his war correspondence with Ogilvie), and George Malcolm Thomson (who was later to publish controversial social and eco-nomic accounts of the condition of Scotland) As with the lack of forward-looking little magazines that could provide a home for innovatory work, the absence of a Scottish publishing house for such new writing was one

of the obstacles in the path of the early reformers Porpoise Press was a modest venture, but it was especially important in its encouragement of Scots-language poetry, both by new writers and others who had previously experienced diffi culty in putting out a solo collection of work in Scots One such poet was Marion Angus from the north-east of the country – on the surface a more traditional poet than MacDiarmid, drawing her infl uences from the Scottish ballads Yet in her poetic scenarios, written from a female perspective, Angus explored the tropes of time, memory and other-worldly states of being which are found in the art of the modernist period as well

Towards a Scottish Modernism 25

as in the elliptical narratives of the ballad tradition, and her haunting,

enig-matic poems have probably received more appreciative attention in our own

time than in the male-dominated poetry context of the 1920s Porpoise

also published work by supporters of the revival movement such as Lewis

Spence and William Jeffrey as well as poems by Kerr himself; translations

of Ronsard by Charles Graves and translations by Alexander Gray of the

Heine poems set to music in Schumann’s Dichterliebe It reprinted poems by

Robert Henryson and Robert Fergusson from earlier periods of Scotland’s

literary tradition as well as Grieve’s experimental English-language Annals

of the Five Senses which he had previously published himself as a result of the

failure of Foulis, and in which the poetry and prose contributions in English

show that he was potentially a modernist writer before he revitalised Scots

as a modern literary language An important addition in 1929 was Hidden

Doors, a fi rst collection of short stories by Neil M Gunn, whose next fi ve

novels were published under the Porpoise imprint Porpoise was taken over

by Faber when its founders had to leave Scotland in order to further their

careers, but it maintained its original name and a continuing editorial

func-tion for a number of years, and while it existed was an important presence

on the Scottish publishing scene As with the articles and discussions in the

Grieve magazines, the advertisements for new writing carried in the various

Porpoise pamphlets and broadsheets helped create an atmosphere of

crea-tive activity and opportunity

Neil M Gunn and Edwin Muir were among the movement’s early

sup-porters The success of Muir’s fi rst book We Moderns had resulted in a

con-tract with the American Freeman magazine which allowed him and his wife

Willa to live in Europe in the early 1920s, and his letters to relatives show

that he watched the new developments in Scotland with interest,

eventu-ally becoming a contributor to Grieve’s magazines Although his reputation

is now principally as poet, throughout the 1920s Muir was developing a

strong reputation as an international critic, contributing to London-based

and American periodicals, travelling in Europe and translating and writing

about German literature He was therefore an important acquisition for the

movement, giving it a tangible European dimension Grieve described him

as ‘a critic incontestably in the fi rst fl ight of contemporary critics of

welt-literatur [ .] a Pan-European intervening in the world-debate on its highest

plane’. 22 Muir would also prove to be one of the most perceptive critics of

MacDiarmid’s modernist Scots-language poetry and his reviews did much to

help its early reception Gunn was another important recruit, although his

most signifi cant work as novelist of the Highlands came in the 1930s and early

1940s, as opposed to the poetry-driven 1920s Nevertheless, on the

publica-tion of his fi rst novel The Grey Coast in 1926, he was praised by Grieve as ‘the

only Scottish prose-writer of promise, that is to say, in relation to that which

is distinctively Scottish rather than tributary to the “vast engulfi ng sea” of

English literature’. 23 He was also a signifi cant member of the movement in

view of its commitment to the regeneration of the Highlands An outstanding

new associate in the 1930s was Lewis Grassic Gibbon whose trilogy A Scots

Quair transposed MacDiarmid’s earlier Scots language experimentation from

poetry to fi ction, bringing it together with a stream of consciousness

meth-odology adapted from Joyce and Woolf Scottish Scene, the book he published

jointly with MacDiarmid in 1934, showed that he was also a match for his co-author in outrageous polemic

What emerges from this ferment of activity in the post-1918 years,

as evidenced in the arguments of the discursive periodical writing and

in the movement’s ambitions for a modern, outward-looking Scottish literature, is an unprecedented challenge by the nation’s writers and their supporters to the increasingly subservient position of Scotland as a North British region of the Union In the process, many of the country’s existing cultural icons were toppled from their pedestals Burns and Scott both fared badly in this reassessment, with Muir famously characteris-ing both as ‘sham bards of a sham nation’ in his poem ‘Scotland 1941’.24

As in his diffi culties with the Burns Club over the revival of the Scots language, Grieve/MacDiarmid was equivocal in his attitude to Burns: at times denouncing him for the sentimental legacy he had left to less tal-

ented imitators; at others – as in A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle – seeing

him, like Christ, as the victim of those who took them as ‘an /Excuse for

faitherin’ Genius wi’ their thochts’.25 Catherine Carswell fi rst came into

association with the revival movement by taking issue with Grieve’s Radio

Times article ‘Scotsmen Make a God of Robert Burns’ in January 1930

Her response, ‘The “Giant Ploughman” Can Withstand His Critics’, while seeing off his criticism, showed that she was also on his side in relation to the need for renewal Walter Scott was even less popular than Burns and this had much to do with his support of the Union and the fact that his historical novels did not envisage a Scottish future being built on the past he portrayed Muir found ‘a very curious emptiness [ .] behind the wealth of his imagination’,26 and both Scott and the later Stevenson certainly wrote in a valedictory way about Scotland’s distinctive tradi-

tions: Scott in his postscript to Waverley (1914) referring to his task ‘of

tracing the evanescent manners of his own country’; and Stevenson in his

note to the Scots-language poems in Underwoods (1887) seeing his wish

to have his ‘hour as a native Maker’ as ‘an ambition surely rather of the heart than of the head, so restricted as it is in prospect of endurance, so parochial in bounds of space’.27

Such elegiac attitudes were foreign to the ambitions of the Scottish

modernists Grieve’s Chapbook may have had as its slogan ‘Not Traditions

– Precedents’, but, as in much modern art of the time, he and other writers committed to renewal often creatively transformed outworn traditions by adapting them and allowing them to interact with very different ideas and forms from the modern period in order to produce something new We will see this practice in action in the new literature discussed in the chapters which follow: in, for example, the recreation of Scots as a literary language in

Towards a Scottish Modernism 27

MacDiarmid’s lyrics and A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle as well as in Grassic

Gibbon’s Marxist Scots-language fi ction; in the way that women writers adapt

and redirect male literary traditions in order to suit their new female needs;

and in Gunn’s use of Celtic myth and legend, drawn from both Scotland and

Ireland, in order to re-imagine the Highlands All such ‘recreations’ involve

the aim to restore what Gunn called ‘belief in ourselves’. 28

Notes

1 The letters from Grieve to George Ogilvie are reprinted in Hugh MacDiarmid,

The Hugh MacDiarmid-George Ogilvie Letters (1988), ed Catherine Kerrigan,

and in Hugh MacDiarmid, The Letters of Hugh MacDiarmid (1984), ed Alan

Bold Although Kerrigan has more editorial material specifi cally related to these

letters, for convenience any page references in the text will relate to the Bold

edition This will be abbreviated in the text as Letters.

2 Hugh MacDiarmid, A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle (1926), in MacDiarmid,

Complete Poems 1920–1976, Vol I, p 112.

3 For Blackwood’s role during the war, see David Finkelstein, ‘Literature,

Propaganda and the First World War’, pp 1–28.

4 A surprising number of creative people came together in Montrose in the 1920s

Willa Muir was brought up in Montrose and she and Edwin visited her mother

there and met with the Grieves and with Francis George Scott who also visited

The painter Edward Baird lived and worked there, and the fi ction writer Fionn

MacColla (Tom MacDonald) was born there, and his parents were close

neigh-bours of the Grieves in Links Avenue.

5 Letter to George Ogilvie, 19 December 1920, in MacDiarmid, Hugh

MacDiarmid-George Ogilvie Letters, ed Catherine Kerrigan, p 67 This letter is not reprinted

in Bold.

6 Grieve, Scottish Chapbook l 1, August 1922, pp 4–5; reprinted in MacDiarmid,

Selected Prose, p 7.

7 This Italian quotation comes from Giuseppe Giusti (1808–50) I am grateful to

postgraduate student Thomas Murphy for this information.

8 Grieve, Chapbook Programme, reprinted in McCulloch (ed.), Modernism and

Nationalism, p xii.

9 Grieve, Scottish Chapbook, August 1922, p 28, reprinted in McCulloch (ed.),

Modernism and Nationalism, p 53.

10 Smith, Scottish Literature: Character and Infl uence, pp 138–9.

11 Grieve, Scottish Chapbook, September 1922, p 38.

12 Dunfermline Press, 5 August 1922, p 6; 30 September 1922, p 7, reprinted in

McCulloch (ed.), Modernism and Nationalism, pp 23–4.

13 Ibid.

Modernism and Nationalism, pp 24–5.

15 Grieve, Scottish Chapbook, February 1923, p 182.

16 Bold, MacDiarmid: Christopher Murray Grieve, p 192 Future page numbers will

be given in the text.

17 Grieve, Scottish Chapbook, February 1923, p 183 and March 1923, p 210.

18 Spectator, October 1933, p 434.

19 Scots Observer, 2 October 1926, p 1.

20 Pictish Review, November 1927, p 1.

21 Spence, ‘The Scottish Literary Renaissance’, The Nineteenth Century, July 1926,

p 123.

22 Grieve, Contemporary Scottish Studies, p 108.

23 Ibid., p 268.

will be given in the text.

25 MacDiarmid, Complete Poems, I, p 84 Page numbers for future quotations will

be given in the text.

26 Muir, Scott and Scotland, p 2.

27 Scott, Waverley, p 478 Stevenson, Underwoods, p xii.

28 Gunn, Landscape and Light, p 158.

Thunner’s a tinklin’ bell: an’ Time

Whuds like a fl ee.

‘Au Clair de la Lune’, Sangschaw (1925)

The interwar phase of Scottish modernism appears to divide itself into two

decades: the movement towards artistic renewal in the 1920s, and a more

intense involvement with politics and social concerns – national and

interna-tional – in the 1930s In addition, while poetry is the dominant art form of

the earlier decade, in the 1930s there is a signifi cant amount of new fi ction

writing In both decades, however, the principal writers contribute to the

national and artistic renewal debate through critical and discursive prose as

well as through their creative writing The narrative of the movement, as

presented here, is therefore a continuous one, led by aesthetic developments

and the contexts from which they derived, rather than by any intentional

chronological periodisation

Just as poetry was the dominant literary activity of the 1920s, so poetry

itself was dominated by MacDiarmid’s revival of the Scots vernacular as a

modern, avant-garde medium: ‘a vast storehouse of just the very peculiar and

subtle effects which modern European literature in general is assiduously

seeking’, as he claimed in the Scottish Chapbook of February 1923.1 As we have

seen in the previous chapter, MacDiarmid’s self-conversion to Scots was hard

won and initially fi ercely resisted Edwin Muir may have incited the modern

writer to ‘wrestle with his age’,2 but for MacDiarmid the struggle was less

with modernity itself than with the outworn traditions of his country which

seemed to him to be holding Scotland back from entering the modern world

In the literary context, the Scots language and the now debased poetry

tradi-tion of Burns were among these impediments

In contrast, MacDiarmid had early been attracted to European poetry, to

the poetry of Yeats and the Irish Revival, and to the new ideas about poetry

and other art forms being discussed in the New Age and the other magazines

he read when serving in Greece and France during World War One In his

autobiography Lucky Poet, published in 1943, he tells of his ‘fi rst introduction

to Rilke’s work’ through Jethro Bithell’s translation of his poems:

and to Stefan George’s, Richard Dehmel’s, and many another German poet who has since meant so much to me, away back in 1909, when a young poet friend, John Bogue Nisbet, who was killed at Loos, and I used to go cycling and camping in

Later MacDiarmid became interested in the Symbolist movement, in the poetry and ideas of the Russian Alexander Blok, and the French Stéphane Mallarmé with whom he shared a belief in ‘the act of poetry being the reverse

of what it is usually thought to be; not an idea gradually shaping itself in

words, but deriving entirely from words’, as he described it in Lucky Poet.4

Mallarmé’s disciple Paul Valéry and the American Ezra Pound were among other early poetic infl uences This eclectic, cosmopolitan, poetic gathering then interacted with home-grown infl uences such as the Scottish ballads and in some instances the legacy of the English Romantics to produce the

unique, modernist, Scots-language lyrics collected in Sangschaw (1925) and

Penny Wheep (1926).

By the beginning of the twentieth century, poetic forms and poetic guage were generally considered to have become outworn, unable to meet

lan-the conditions of a new age One innovation was lan-the introduction of vers

libre or ‘free verse’, of especial interest in France in an attempt to escape the

straitjacket of the Alexandrine, but used also by English-language poets such

as D H Lawrence, Edith Sitwell, Ezra Pound and T S Eliot, although the

two last-named also warned against it In his ‘Re Vers Libre’ of 1917, Pound

acknowledged his experimental use of the form while suggesting that ‘one

should write vers libre only when one “must”’ and that ‘progress lies rather in

an attempt to approximate classical quantitative metres (NOT to copy them) than in a carelessness regarding such things’.5 Eliot, in his ‘Refl ections on

vers libre’ of the same year, denied the reality of a vers libre ‘school’, instead

proposing that there is ‘no escape from metre’ and that ‘the most interesting verse that has been written in the language has been done either by taking

a very simple form, like the iambic pentameter, and constantly ing from it, or taking no form at all, and constantly approximating to a very simple one’.6 And this is the method that characterises the various sections of

withdraw-his long poem of 1922, The Waste Land.

For MacDiarmid, on the other hand, the standard form to approach or withdraw from was not the iambic pentameter of Shakespeare and later canonical English poets Neither did he turn to the familiar Scots ‘Standart Habbie’, better known as the ‘Burns Stanza’; nor attempt to revive other now obsolete Scottish poetic forms Instead, he chose the demotic form of the Scottish ballads, which provided him with both the fl exibility and the unobtrusive shaping medium he needed for his new poetry: its oral origins allowing him to vary stress patterns as the speaking voice required, to accept the customary four line abcb rhyming verse form or depart from it by adding

Hugh MacDiarmid 31

lines and/or varying the rhyming pattern, or by using it unrhymed In

‘Gairmscoile’ from the Penny Wheep collection, the speaker insists that ‘it’s

soon’ [sound] no’ sense, that faddoms the herts o’ men’ (CP, I, p 74),7 and this

credo seems peculiarly applicable to MacDiarmid’s new Scots-language lyrics,

linking as it does with his earlier Chapbook description of the vernacular as

‘an inexhaustible quarry of subtle and signifi cant sound’.8 The ‘Gairmscoile’

quotation is also provocative in its rejection of ‘sense’ in relation to a poet

who was to prove himself to be very much a poet of ‘ideas’, and in the way

that rejection opens up for enquiry his understanding of Mallarmé’s

percep-tion of poetic language as expressed in his statement ‘Ce n’est pas avec des

idées qu’on fait des vers, c’est avec des mots’: a quotation used supportively

by MacDiarmid in his New Age essay on Paul Valéry.9

Mallarmé’s insistence on the importance of language per se was no doubt

important to MacDiarmid as he attempted to raise the standard of Scots as

a modern, avant-garde literary language Yet there are signifi cant

differ-ences between the two poets’ understanding and use of language, not least in

relation to the question of sound and sense Mallarmé’s Symbolist practice

proceeded from a belief that language was pre-eminent in poetry and that

its importance was for itself, not for its referential use in communicating

previously conceived ideas to the reader Appreciation of a poem should

derive from appreciation of the structure of its syntax and from the symbolic

nature of the language selected And although Mallarmé, like the later Pound,

insisted that the rhythm of poetry should not be that of the metronome, the

‘music’ of his Symbolist poetry seems as much music for the eyes scanning the

page as it is for the ears This is very different in effect from MacDiarmid’s

lyrics, where the actual ‘soon’ [ .] faddoms the herts o’ men’.10

In the essay ‘Symbolism, Decadence and Impressionism’, Clive Scott

con-siders the seminal role of Mallarmé in the development of late

nineteenth-century Symbolism, and the characterisation of that Symbolist aesthetic

by his “‘direct” successor’, Paul Valéry Scott quotes from Valéry’s essay

‘Littérature’ in Tel Quel:

Longtemps, longtemps, la voix humaine fut base et condition de la littérature Un jour vint

ó l’on sut lire des yeux sans épeler, sans entendre, et la littérature en fut tout altérée.11

Here we have, not as in the long past days of the oral ballad tradition ‘la voix

humaine’, the human voice, at the foundation of literature, but a new

litera-ture ‘sans entendre’, which does not depend upon orality, upon hearing the

‘sound’ of a poem communicated by a speaker, but where the eyes moving

freely across its lines can enjoy a variety of language effects impersonally and

without sound being linked to meaning As with Mallarmé, Valéry’s own

poetry exemplifi es this change:

Ce toit tranquille, ó marchent des colombes,

Entre les pins palpite, entre les tombes;

Midi le juste y compose de feux