Hugh MacDiarmid

Hugh MacDiarmid
A bust of MacDiarmid sculpted in 1927 by William Lamb
Born	Christopher Murray Grieve 11 August 1892 Langholm, Dumfriesshire, Scotland
Died	9 September 1978(1978-09-09) (aged 86) Edinburgh, Scotland
Occupation	Poet
Literary movement	Scottish Renaissance

Christopher Murray Grieve (11 August 1892 – 9 September 1978), known by his pen name Hugh MacDiarmid (/məkˈdɜːrmɪd/), was a Scottish poet, journalist, essayist and political figure. He is best known for his works written in 'synthetic Scots', a literary version of the Scots language that MacDiarmid himself developed. However, Grieve's earliest work -- such as Annals of the Five Senses was written in English, and from the early 1930s onwards much of the poetry published under MacDiarmid's name was written in an English that was supplemented to varying degrees by scientific and technical vocabularies.

The son of a postman, MacDiarmid was born in the Scottish border town of Langholm, Dumfriesshire. He was educated at Langholm Academy before becoming a teacher for a brief time at Broughton Higher Grade School in Edinburgh. He began his writing career as a journalist in Wales,^[1][2][3] contributing to the socialist newspaper The Merthyr Pioneer run by Labour party founder Keir Hardie^[2] before joining the Royal Army Medical Corps on the outbreak of the First World War.^[3] He served in Salonica, Greece and France before developing cerebral malaria and subsequently returning to Scotland in 1918. MacDiarmid's time in the army was influential in his political and artistic development.

After the war he continued to work as a journalist, living in Montrose where he became editor and reporter of the Montrose Review^[4] as well as a justice of the peace and a member of the county council. In 1923 his first book, Annals of the Five Senses, was published at his own expense, followed by 'Sangschaw' in 1925 and 'Penny Wheep' and 'A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle' in 1926. A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle, is generally regarded as MacDiarmid's most famous and influential work.^[4]

Moving to the Shetland island of Whalsay in 1933 with his son Michael and second wife, Valda Trevlyn, MacDiarmid continued to write essays and poetry despite being cut off from mainland cultural developments for much of the 1930s.^[3] He died at his cottage Brownsbank, near Biggar, in 1978 at the age of 86.

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

A controversial figure whilst alive, MacDiarmid is now considered one of the principal forces behind the Scottish Renaissance and has had a lasting impact on Scottish culture and politics. Fellow poet Edwin Morgan said of him: 'Eccentric and often maddening genius he may be, but MacDiarmid has produced many works which, in the only test possible, go on haunting the mind and memory and casting Coleridgean seeds of insight and surprise.’^[1]

Biography

Politics

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

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

He was a member of Clann Albain, a secret Scottish nationalist society.^[8]

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

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

In 2010 letters were discovered showing that he believed a Nazi invasion of Britain would benefit Scotland. In a letter sent from Whalsay, Shetland, in April 1941, he wrote: “On balance I regard the Axis powers, tho’ more violently evil for the time being, less dangerous than our own government in the long run and indistinguishable in purpose." A year earlier, in June 1940, he wrote: “Although the Germans are appalling enough, they cannot win, but the British and French bourgeoisie can and they are a far greater enemy. If the Germans win they could not hold their gain for long, but if the French and British win it will be infinitely more difficult to get rid of them.”

Marc Horne in the Daily Telegraph commented: "MacDiarmid flirted with fascism in his early thirties, when he believed it was a doctrine of the left. In two articles written in 1923, Plea for a Scottish Fascism and Programme for a Scottish Fascism, he appeared to support Mussolini’s regime. By the 1930s however, following Mussolini’s lurch to the right, his position had changed and he castigated Neville Chamberlain over his appeasement of Hitler’s expansionism."^[9] Deirdre Grieve, MacDiarmid’s daughter-in-law and literary executor, noted: “I think he entertained almost every ideal it was possible to entertain at one point or another."^[9]

Later writings

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

MacDiarmid Memorial near Langholm

As his interest in science and linguistics increased, MacDiarmid found himself turning more and more to English as a means of expression so that most of his later poetry is written in that language. His ambition was to live up to Rilke's dictum that 'the poet must know everything' and to write a poetry that contained all knowledge. As a result, many of the poems in Stony Limits (1934) and later volumes are a kind of found poetry reusing text from a range of sources. Just as he had used Jameson's dialect dictionary for his poems in 'synthetic Scots', so he used Chambers Twentieth Century Dictionary for poems such as 'On a Raised Beach'.^[10] Other poems, including 'On a Raised Beach' and 'Etika Preobrazhennavo Erosa' used extensive passages of prose.^[11][12] This practice, particularly in the poem 'Perfect', led to accusations of plagiarism^[13] from supporters of the Welsh poet Glyn Jones, to which MacDiarmid's response was 'The greater the plagiarism the greater the work of art.' The great achievement of this late poetry is to attempt on an epic scale to capture the idea of a world without God in which all the facts the poetry deals with are scientifically verifiable. In his critical work Lives of the Poets, Michael Schmidt notes that Hugh MacDiarmid 'had redrawn the map of Scottish poetry and affected the whole configuration of English literature'.^[14]

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

Personal life

He had a daughter, Christine, and a son, Walter, by his first wife Peggy Skinner. He had a son, James Michael Trevlyn, known as Michael, by his second wife Valda Trevlyn (1906-1989); Michael was a conscientious objector to post-World War II National Service and became vice chair of the Scottish National Party.

Places of interest

MacDiarmid grew up in the Scottish town of Langholm in Dumfriesshire. The town is home to a monument in his honour made of cast iron which takes the form of a large open book depicting images from his writings.^[15]

MacDiarmid lived in Montrose for a time where he worked for the local newspaper the Montrose Review.^[16]

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

Brownsbank Cottage, near Biggar, South Lanarkshire, the home of MacDiarmid and his wife Valda from 1952 until their deaths, has been restored by the Biggar Museum Trust.^[17]

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

Portrait in National Portrait Gallery primary collection

Hugh MacDiarmid sat for sculptor Alan Thornhill and a bronze was acquired by the National Portrait Gallery.^[18] The terracotta original is held in the collection of the artist.^[19] The correspondence file relating to the MacDiarmid bust is held in the archive^[20] of the Henry Moore Foundation's Henry Moore Institute in Leeds.

References

Bibliography

Further reading

• Baglow, John (1987). Hugh MacDiarmid: The Poetry of Self McGill-Queen’s Press
• Bold, Alan (1983). MacDiarmid: The Terrible Crystal, Routledge & Kegan Paul* Bold, Alan (1988). MacDiarmid A Critical Biography, John Murray
• Glen, Duncan (1964). Hugh Macdiarmid (Christopher Murray Grieve) and the Scottish Renaissance , Chambers, Edinburgh et al.
• Herbert, W. N. (1992). To Circumjack MacDiarmid: The Poetry and Prose of Hugh MacDiarmid. Oxford: Clarendon
• Lyall, Scott (2006). Hugh MacDiarmid's Poetry and Politics of Place: Imagining a Scottish Republic, Edinburgh University Press
• Lyall, Scott and Margery Palmer McCulloch (eds) (2011). The Edinburgh Companion to Hugh MacDiarmid, Edinburgh University Press
• Purdie, Bob (2012). Hugh MacDiarmid, Black, Green, Red and Tartan Welsh Academic Press
• Riach, Alan (1991). Hugh MacDiarmid’s Epic Poetry, Edinburgh University Press
• Wright, Gordon (1977). MacDiarmid: An Illustrated Biography, Gordon Wright Publishing

External links

• Quotations related to Hugh MacDiarmid at Wikiquote
• Hugh MacDiarmid profile at Carcanet Press
• Hugh MacDiarmid reading his poetry at the Poetry Archive
• Second Hymn to Lenin by Hugh MacDiarmid
• HUGH MACDIARMID: A Portrait Film about MacDiarmid at the Scottish Screen Archive, National Library of Scotland
• Review of Bob Purdie's book
• Archival material at Leeds University Library
• Some notes of MacDiarmid's Gaelic Idea