Bog Myrtle & Peat

There were drinks and reminiscences at a party to mark the 132nd birthday of the poet Hugh MacDiarmid. Hosted by his surviving family and friends, the event was held in a beautiful terraced house on a leafy street in the heart of Glasgow’s West End, and I’m nothing short of immensely grateful to have been invited. But from a start-point of ambivalence, I came away feeling even less sure of the man and his work. Hugh MacDiarmid was the pen name of CM Greive, and these real and imagined selves rubbed up against one another throughout a life which has become a confusingly unavoidable landmark in Scottish literature. Even forty years after his death, both Greive and MacDiarmid were present at that party – and each still seems to obscure the other.

When I have sometimes leaned towards MacDiarmid, I’ve felt him push me away. He’s been abrasive, confrontational and deliberately opaque. I’ve even felt that he’s making fun of me, sneering and preening and vaulting from one extremity to another. I’ve frequently recoiled from MacDiarmid – and failing to understand his legacy, I’ve tried to trivialise him. But at other times, he seems to have spoken directly into my ear with smell of sunshine on Langholm Moor. It’s been hard to imagine that any other writer could have distilled Scotland into words with greater ambition and verve. 

I’ve felt closest to MacDiarmid in the hills above Dumfries. I can see the place where he grew up from the moors where I was born a century later. They aren’t the same, but they are connected – so when he writes about home, I sense the deep and sure association. But in reality, his corbie’s eye for observation was nothing like mine. He occupied the shapes and feeling of words, adapting their meanings as a secondary concern. From a friend of MacDiarmid’s at the birthday party, I learned about the poet’s habit of wordplay and his ability to recall not only the meanings of ancient vocabularies, but also the constituent etymologies from a palette of German, Breton, Gaelic and Welsh. Tangents opened onto deeper complexities, and I began to feel like his world was more lexical than literal. My astonished delight to find a writer who could admire the wonder of a flower like milkwort dissolved at the realisation that for him, milkwort was simply the right word.

A few of MacDiarmid’s friends and family members spoke at the party, describing a man who could shift and vary from eye to eye. He began to feel puckish and lithe, dependable and reckless in a single moment. As the anecdotes piled up around his memory, a sense of confection or affectation grew, as if it had all been an act or a joke he played upon the world – but even that façade was uneven; what he pretended to be seemed to shift and change like steam on a window, and while the show ran riots around the marches, the real man was watching carefully through the narrowed eyeslits of a mask. 

I even felt that this house in the West End was all wrong as the place to mark a poet who was surely more accustomed to whinns and myrtle – but that tough rug was pulled from beneath my feet as well. Because here was Glasgow after all, and the man as at home in the city as on the hills above Eskdale. Crowded with busts and portraits and cartoons, the house is nothing like a shrine or museum to the memory of the poet – it’s a reflection of his own outlandish sound and fury, but it’s more approachably human than I had expected. Then no sooner had I discovered a sense of relatable fragility than it vanished again; caricatures which hung on the walls embellished MacDiarmid’s extraordinary hair and his puggish, bulbous eyes. In this, cartoonists could only push the point so far without acknowledging the reality; that it’s hard to make a funny-looking man look funnier.

Knowing that performances were layered inside deeper concealments is useful – but it didn’t take me closer to the truth. At the same time, there were moments when the squeak of velvet and the chink of chilled white wine began to make that party feel comfortably bourgeois and intellectual, but it was possible that occasional Communist MacDiarmid was present in this too. 

Feeling tormented, rejected and embraced by MacDiarmid all at once, it’s hard to understand his legacy in Scotland today. He’s certainly problematic and challenging, and he doesn’t make an easy bedfellow for modern Scottish Nationalists who worry about flashes of xenophobia and exceptionalism in his work. But like John Donne’s deliberate push towards impregnability on the basis that hard work is part of literature’s reward, it’s certain that MacDiarmid is being difficult for a reason. He’s driving us away because he wants us to look closer, and the trick is appealing when it’s played by similarly monumental writers like the Welshman RS Thomas. The difference with Thomas is that his irascible fury was stable; you could model it and understand where the pressure points lay as part of a clear world-view. I love Thomas because I know where to find him; by contrast, MacDiarmid was forever on the move – even if you agree with him today, he’ll have discovered somewhere new to strike you tomorrow.

When I’m repelled by MacDiarmid’s poetry, I never reach the point at which I have to throw the book away – but combative provocation is a narrow line to walk. It’s wearing to feel continually under attack, even when you understand that the results of an argument are always worthwhile. If modern readers struggle to make sense of MacDiarmid nowadays, it’s partly because we prefer sweeter, softer nuts to crack.

Picture: my sketch of one of many MacDiarmid portraits