Here Comes
Langholm: Birthplace of Hugh MacDiarmid: An Introduction
by Alan Riach,
Professor of Scottish Literature, University of Glasgow
When Scotland
becomes an independent nation once again, our best poets and artists
will surely come into their own. Generations have passed knowing nothing
of them, our education has neglected their value, our institutions have
dismissed their significance.
It is time to change this.
The
prospect of political change, real educational and cultural vitality,
has taken a century to be brought to the present stage, where we do have
a choice about what might be done next, and one man was more of a
catalyst for this than any other: Hugh MacDiarmid.
He
was born Christopher Murray Grieve in 1892 in Langholm, a small town
just north of the Scottish border with England. His father was the local
postman, his mother's people lived in neighbouring towns and villages.
As a boy, he roamed the nearby hills and forests and read all the books
in the public library housed above the family home. In later essays he
recollected the loveliness of the country around him and claimed to be
able to identify his location by the sound alone of the three rivers
that run into a confluence in Langholm: the Wauchope, the Esk and the
Ewes. But the early years of the twentieth century were full of war and
revolution. He joined the British army for the First World War but he
was deeply affected by the Easter Rising in Ireland in 1916: a Celtic
nation violently asserting independence from the authority of British
imperialism; and by the Russian Revolution in 1917: a socialist ideal, a
Communist revolution, an act of defiance towards the class system,
social hierarchy, economic discrimination. Later, he joined the
Communist Party, believing in the ideal of international socialism, and
he was a founder-member of the National Party of Scotland in 1928,
believing in the cultural difference and value of Scotland, as opposed
to the British imperial ethos.
All the arts are ways of exploring the
world, of representing reality, of criticising what is taken for
granted. When he began to explore it seriously, he found that his own
national cultural identity included different languages: Gaelic, Scots
and English, different geographical terrains: borderlands, industrial
cities, fertile heartlands, stretching Highland moors and mountains,
island archipelagoes, landscapes, seascapes, cityscapes: this variety
was not compatible with a single London-centred British state.
So
he had a vision. What was required now, after he was demobilized and
returned to Scotland, was a strategy.
He went to the north-east seaside town
of Montrose, became a journalist on the local newspaper, a socialist
Justice of the Peace. He started writing in Scots, using words and
phrases he knew from boyhood in Langholm and acquired from reading in
dictionaries and works of Scottish literature from earlier eras. His
poems were shocking, adult, wry, difficult, piercingly sweet,
unsentimental and sometimes brutal. They established a new dispensation
for Scottish and modern literature, alongside James Joyce, D.H.
Lawrence, William Carlos Williams, T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, Ezra Pound
and Virginia Woolf, Wallace Stevens and Paul Valéry. MacDiarmid is of
their company. He argued for plurality, the specifics of multiple
strands of history, the coherence that might be found in the diversity
of Scotland and in the international world at large.
He
travelled: to Shetland, the furthest archipelago in the North Sea, where
he suffered physical and mental breakdown after a period of intense
isolation, introspection and psychological anxiety. Yet his greatest
poems of the 1930s delivered a way through the crises. 'Lament for the
Great Music' reconnects with deeper traditions, the classical music of
the Highland bagpipe and all that signifies for a multi-layered,
complex, tragic, defiant, strengthening, persistent national character.
'On a Raised Beach' begins with the poet utterly alone but it ends with
the understanding that life is an act of participation in a way the
lonely observer could not comprehend. The later work, In Memoriam
James Joyce (1955) and The Kind of Poetry I Want (1961)
extend this comprehensive vision. These poems attempt to accommodate as
many of all the languages and art-forms of the world, gathering
information about subjects you would never encounter anywhere else,
turning from Finnish dialect to Fred Astaire, from Shakespeare to
Tarzan. And yet, his favoured place remained Langholm.
After
the Second World War, a new generation of great Scottish poets, writers
and thinkers grew up around him, lyrical, intellectual, sharply
perceptive, passionately commmitted, and each with their own favoured
place: Sorley MacLean from Raasay and Skye, Norman MacCaig from
Edinburgh but also from Lochinver in the far north west of Scotland,
Robert Garioch from Edinburgh, George Mackay Brown from the Orkney
achipelago, Iain Crichton Smith from Lewis in the Outer Hebrides, Edwin
Morgan from Glasgow, Sydney Goodsir Smith born in New Zealand, but
adopted by Edinburgh, the philosopher George Elder Davie, proposing the
ideal of the 'Democratic Intellect' – the idea that intellectual
distinction was to be prized but must always be open to all – Ronald
Stevenson, foremost Scottish composer, Alan Bold, poet, polemicist and
MacDiarmid's biographer, Tom Fleming, one of Scotland's finest actors,
and Neal Ascherson, political thinker and journalist, whose recent
reports on the political state of our country show clearly how far
MacDiarmid was right in his visionary hope and strategic work for a new,
artistically regenerated Scotland.
When Scotland becomes an independent
nation once again, MacDiarmid, the company he kept, and the values he
learned as a boy in Langholm, will remain vital co-ordinate points, as
this splendid exhibition of marvellous portraits by Alexander Moffat
reminds us.
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