“Mom!” Agnes opens the kitchen door and shouts to be heard over the music. “Papa wants to talk to you.”
“Tell him I’m working. He can email me.”
Am I imagining it, or does Agnes slam the door with unnecessary force?
After she finishes her call and goes up to bed, I return to silence, the sobering letters and the Compendium.
—
In 1974 McWatt made several trips to Edinburgh to give readings and meet publishers but he had moved on from sofa beds in fellow poets’ flats and austere bed and breakfasts. He would stay in a two-star hotel with a licensed bar off the Royal Mile, and visit the Rose Street pubs where Maclean, MacCaig, Mackay Brown, Crichton Smith and Morgan could still be sighted, usually, these days, singly or in pairs. The poets, whose raucous repartee once commanded the bar, now had to fight their way through thronging students and festivalgoers to get served and, wrote McWatt in the Compendium, “we had to yell till we were hoarse to make ourselves heard over the racket of the jukebox.” Lilias, “the fiery comet,” according to McWatt, “had crashed to earth” and was no longer welcome in the old haunts.
Inevitably, she came to hear of these visits after he’d left and in several letters expressed her hurt and anger at the snub. She wrote, as a postscript to a congratulatory note sent to him after he’d won the 1975 Kerr-MacDonald Award for Poetry in Edinburgh (prize: £80 and publication of a single poem in the Scotsman): “I wouldn’t expect you to ask an old boiler like me to put on my sad glad rags and be your date for the evening. You must have younger, more pleasing fish—a whole shoal of silver darlings—to fry these days. And then there is the sainted bloody Jean. But I can’t deny I was pained to learn that after your stuffed-shirt celebratory dinner you slunk away back to your island holt without paying a call on your Former Muse, who would have raised an unreproachful glass to your genius.”
That note of bitterness again.
—
It’s after midnight. I stretch out on the couch, put in my earbuds and select one more Alex Harvey track. An insinuating song, in the style of Kurt Weill, about another Isobel, Goudie not Grant; not a twentieth-century Scottish museum curator—history’s blameless handmaiden, whose story brought me here in the first place—but a seventeenth-century Scottish witch, according to her confession exacted under torture. Another wronged woman, looking for love in the wrong place. It didn’t end well for Isobel Goudie either.
The oil industry’s interest in Fascaray suddenly ceased in 1975, when it was finally established that the water around the island wasn’t deep enough to accommodate a pipeline.
“No more hovering helicopters making an infernal racket over our heads, no more sharp suits in cowboy boots demanding custom in the inn,” exulted McWatt in the Pibroch. “Our geology, which threatened to be our undoing, has saved us.”
Attention had switched to the mainland coast off Auchwinnie, where a 200-acre parcel of farmland had been allocated for a terminal to house four vast storage tanks, each the size of an ocean liner and capable of holding 500,000 barrels of oil. The march of modernity seemed unstoppable but for now it had taken a detour round Fascaray.
Up at Balnasaig, where Pan, the stars and all the plant spirits had been enlisted in the fight against the oil giant, the Seekers saw the scrapping of the island pipeline as a personal triumph. But their celebrations were short-lived; Althea and Evelyn fell out badly, and in the struggle that followed, Althea’s past-life expertise was no match for the combined forces of Evelyn’s plant yakshas. “Althea, accompanied by an Australian devotee fourteen years her junior who goes by the ‘spirit name’ of Dzaq, has moved back to the mainland where they plan to set up a commune in the Borders,” wrote McWatt in the Compendium. Evelyn, he recorded, “has moved into Neville’s bed.”
Nineteen seventy-five was also the year the island became the site of one of Britain’s first experiments in fish farming when Alec Campbell and his son Wee Eck (whose nickname, innocently conferred in childhood, now seemed a sardonic reference to his impressive height and girth) received grants from the Highlands and Islands Development Board and Auchwinnie Council for two floating cages containing turbot.
“It reduces fishing to a fairground game, or dooking for apples,” wrote McWatt in the Auchwinnie Pibroch. “Like colour television, it’s expensive, no great improvement on the existing arrangement, no one needs it and it’ll never catch on.” On one issue only, McWatt was avid for change: “The island must and will shake off the yoke of foreign oppression.” But, even as he engaged with politics, local and national, the poet never forgot his “first duty,” as he reminded himself in The Fascaray Compendium in December 1975—“to immerse myself in the pleasures of the natural world and the music and discipline of poetry.”
A Granite Ballad—The Reimagining of Grigor McWatt, Mhairi McPhail (Thackeray College Press, 2016)
Tae Hairst
Season o haars an maumie fruitfu’ness
Close bosie-pal o the mucklin sun
Colloguin wi him how tae laid an bliss
Wi fruit the brammles that sae fykie rin,
Tae swell the marrae, pluff the puddock stuils,
Tae boucht wi apples crofters’ foggie trees,
Tae fill wi kernels douce the hizzel huils
An gie bouquets o flooers tae eydent bees,
An fill aw fruit wi ripeness tae amaze,
Enchant the eye an set the whin ablaze,
Untae we ween sic days will nivir end,
For simmer’s gien us bounteous dividend.
—Grigor McWatt, efter John Keats, 1975*
* * *
* From Wappenshaw, Virr Press, 1986. Reprinted in Warld in a Gless: The Collected Varse of Grigor McWatt, Smeddum Beuks, 1992.
As Professor Alastair Galbraith observed, McWatt, like MacDiarmid, was always good at grudges. And both poets didn’t confine their contempt solely to the English. So it was inevitable that when the two fell out, neither went quietly.
What appears to have triggered the row was MacDiarmid’s abandonment of the poetic language he had once approvingly termed “Synthetic Scots”—his experimental linguistic synthesis of Scotland’s vernacular variants, ancient and modern, largely gleaned from dictionaries of the old tongue. Instead, in his verse, MacDiarmid had turned to English, and an English rich, some said clotted, with modern scientific terminology. McWatt, in his Auchwinnie Pibroch column of 1 September 1975,*1 accused MacDiarmid of “wilful obscurantism and a shameful betrayal of our language, our land and our people.”
MacDiarmid, inevitably, did not take this accusation lightly, dismissing McWatt in the letters page of the Scotsman*2 as a “penny balladeer and composer of jingles for the wireless.” The insult was reciprocated in the Glasgow Herald*3—“Although his long-suffering friends and supporters have forborne from saying it, the truth is that the self-styled Hugh MacDiarmid, has not written a decent poem since 1933”—and returned again, in the same newspaper*4—“How odd it is to see McWatt, this passionate defender of the Scots tongue, crouched over his desk by the spectral light of a Tilley lamp spending all his time rewriting, like a schoolboy at his lines, with varying degrees of success, the literature of the enemy.”
That week, McWatt devoted all six hundred words of his “Frae Mambeag Brae” column*5 to the feud. “It seems that, in politics as in poetry, Hugh MacDiarmid has lost the heid. He has sacrificed his lyrical, nimble native tongue for the kind of recondite English terminology that seems to have been cribbed from a Porton Down laboratory report and this former scourge of Empire now defends the coloniser’s right to appropriate the riches of the earth. Why should England have it all? I have, in my small way, devoted my life to a literary Land Raid, seizing a few acres of the abundant miles of English verse, staking them off, recultivating them and returning them to the people of Scotland.”
MacDiarmid’s response was printed in the Scotsman.*6 “The day Grigor McWatt, the Harry Lauder of letters, writes anything beyond the banal and derivative
is the day I throw my principles to the wind and cast my vote for the Conservative and Unionist Party. Until then, I have no wish to hear his name or renew our slight acquaintance.”
McWatt, however, had the last public word on the subject. “Our Sassenach enemies have dismissed our magnificent vernacular verse as ‘doggerel in dialect.’ But, to quote the linguist Max Weinreich: ‘A language is a dialect with an army.’ I am a proud conscript to the commando division of that army, ready to do battle for the cause of our great tradition. MacDiarmid, or Grieve, has proved to be in this, as in so many other areas of life, a feartie conscientious objector and a collaborator.”*7
The press, in England as well as Scotland, made much of the spat, and in 1976 Bowster Books brought out a chapbook, The Flyting of McWatt and MacDiarmid, anthologising the poets’ mutual insults and placing their hostilities in the context of Scotland’s medieval tradition of poetic sparring. Alastair Galbraith, writing in the Quill & Thistle,*8 dismissed the book—and the quarrel—as “the unedifying spectacle of two kilties fighting over a sporran.”
Several friends, among them Lilias Hogg, attempted to effect a reconciliation but both men were implacable and when MacDiarmid died two years later, in 1978, McWatt marked the event in his Pibroch column*9 with two brief sentences, in which he referred to the poet by his real name, Christopher Grieve: “So MacDiarmid is silent at last. Grieve not.”
McWatt also fell out with George Mackay Brown, “the papist of Papa Westray,” over his conversion to Catholicism; with Ian Crichton Smith, “mild as milk,” over his refusal to take sides in the argument with MacDiarmid; with Sydney Goodsir Smith, “the English public schoolboy and kilted kiwi,” for not being sufficiently Scottish; and with Norman MacCaig who, in an unguarded moment, questioned the “exhumation of obsolete Scots words” for poetic purposes, and, fatally for his friendship with McWatt, described vernacular verse as “a queer marriage…of the dying with the dead.”
A Granite Ballad—The Reimagining of Grigor McWatt, Mhairi McPhail (Thackeray College Press, 2016)
* * *
*1 Reprinted in Frae Mambeag Brae: Selected Columns and Essays of Grigor McWatt, Stravaigin Press, 1985.
*2 Scotsman, 5 September 1975.
*3 Glasgow Herald, 8 September 1975.
*4 Glasgow Herald, 10 September 1975.
*5 Auchwinnie Pibroch, 13 September 1975. Reprinted in Frae Mambeag Brae: Selected Columns and Essays of Grigor McWatt, Stravaigin Press, 1985.
*6 Scotsman, 17 September 1975.
*7 Auchwinnie Pibroch, 20 September 1975. Reprinted in Frae Mambeag Brae: Selected Columns and Essays of Grigor McWatt, Stravaigin Press, 1985.
*8 “It’s Square Go the Poetry Men,” Alastair Galbraith, Quill & Thistle, October 1976.
*9 Auchwinnie Pibroch, 16 September 1978. Reprinted in Frae Mambeag Brae: Selected Columns and Essays of Grigor McWatt, Stravaigin Press, 1985.
Tae a Laverock
Hoy tae thee, blythe bogle!
Wee chookie birdie thou werenae,
That frae Heiv’n, or naur aboots,
Skinkest thy fu hert
In routhie strains o unettled ert.
Abuin aye and abuin
Frae the yird thou lowpest
Like a smuir o gleed;
The blae howe thou wingest,
An bayin aye dost brall, and brallin aye bayest.
—Grigor McWatt, efter Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1978*
* * *
* From Wappenshaw, Virr Press, 1986. Reprinted in Warld in a Gless: The Collected Varse of Grigor McWatt, Smeddum Beuks, 1992.
For Fascaray, the 1970s ended on a dissonant chord of optimism, frustration and anger, which, in some cases, resonated all the way down to Westminster.
Nationally, the promise of a referendum on Scottish devolution had brought heady new hopes for the future; hopes that were eventually dashed in what McWatt called “a humiliating victory.” Fifty-two per cent of Scots voted in favour of greater independence, 48 per cent against. But, McWatt wrote in the Auchwinnie Pibroch, “Once more the English establishment has set us up, massaging the figures. It’s another fix.” Westminster had ruled, late in the day, that the referendum results were to be adjusted to reflect turnout, “making fifty plus two equal thirty-two” by stipulating that a minimum of 40 per cent of the electorate had to exercise their vote in favour of devolution before any constitutional change could take place. “The English didn’t just move the goalposts, they dug them up, rolled up the pitch, dismantled the stands and took the whole stadium back to London,” McWatt wrote.
And so it was, by the law of unintended consequences, that after furious Scottish Nationalist MPs withdrew support from the Labour government, a general election was forced and a Conservative government, headed by the first woman to lead a UK political party, was returned with little support in Scotland. As McWatt wrote, the new prime minister’s “ill will towards Scotland has not been seen since the Butcher Cumberland rode into Culloden.” His choleric post-election column appeared in the Pibroch under the headline “MAGGIE THATCHER: MY PART IN HER ASCENT.”
Locally, news that the nationalised ferry operator Caledonian MacBrayne proposed a regular passenger service between Auchwinnie and Fascaray was welcomed by everyone except the laird, who, writing from his London town house, opposed the idea of a regular link with the mainland, on the grounds that it would “destroy the character of our paradise island” during his annual six-week visits. The ferry proposal was scrapped by the Westminster government’s Scottish Office and islanders suspected that Lord Montfitchett’s close friendship with the flamboyant Scottish Tory MP Nicholas Fairbairn, a confidant of Margaret Thatcher, played a key part in the decision.
At Balnasaig Farm, Tam Macpherson finally ceded the reins to his grandson, Innes, a cheerful, leonine twenty-year-old. Tam had, at seventy-six and despite ill health, fought retirement desperately, resisting all pressure from his daughters Maggie and Sheena. But once the resourceful Innes was installed, Tam seemed reinvigorated in his new role as Farmer Emeritus, dispensing agricultural and horticultural advice at the Finnverinnity Inn to anyone who asked for it, “and a fair few who didn’t,” McWatt wrote in The Fascaray Compendium.
While Balnasaig Farm made a graceful transition to new management, over at Balnasaig Lodge the Seekers were in turmoil. Evelyn Fletcher had uncovered evidence of Neville Booth’s affair with their administrator, Izzy Wallop, and turned them both out, denouncing the lovers, as she wrote in The Wisdom of the Wilderness Within, for “deception and coarse venality which contravened the spirit of Balnasaig.” Izzy had fled the island but returned a week later and moved into Alec Campbell’s old caravan behind the herring sheds. Neville checked into the Bothy for three lonely nights before Evelyn forgave him, blaming “dark forces” which had identified Balnasaig Lodge as a target and were working to tempt him from the Path. Perhaps it was in the spirit of reconciliation, or as a simple diversionary tactic, that Neville ordered the felling of an ancient stand of Caledonian pines behind Balnasaig Lodge to “vanquish the darkness, bring in the light and await the arrival of sensitives from other realms,” as he wrote in his own memoir, Reflections from the Pilgrim Path.
A Granite Ballad—The Reimagining of Grigor McWatt, Mhairi McPhail (Thackeray College Press, 2016)
30 November 2014
It’s Sunday. St. Andrew’s Day, Agnes tells me.
“He’s the patron saint of Scotland. He died on a cross shaped like an ‘X.’ You know, like a kiss. And that white kiss on a blue flag, the Saltire, that’s St. Andrew’s cross.”
“Great,” I say, looking up from my end of the kitchen table, which is heaped with typed pages from my book, the latest edited sections of The Fascaray Compendium and an unsorted batch of letters from Lilias Hogg. Over at my daughter’s end, she’s working on another school project.
There’s a ceilidh tonight in the village hall and she wants me to go with her. Twenty years ago, the idea of a Sabbath ceilidh would have been unthinka
ble in Finnverinnity. In my present mood, my sympathies are with the old-school Calvinist grouches.
“Please, Mom! There’s going to be dancing and bagpipes and everyone on the island will be there.”
How could she know that her three arguments for going to the ceilidh are precisely my three reasons for staying away? Plus the work, of course.
“Sorry, honey, I’m busy. You go with Oonagh and her mom. You’ll have a great time.”
I wave them off and get back to my evening’s tasks. Sixteen letters from Lilias. Two replies from Grigor. Early in 1980, after suffering a number of dizzy spells, Lilias was admitted to hospital and diagnosed with polyneuropathy, or “not-so-pretty polyneuropathy” as she wrote, brought on, said the doctors, by alcohol abuse.
“Very sorry indeed to hear about your bad turn,” Grigor wrote in February. “Is it too much to ask that you might start taking care of yourself and forswearing old pleasures that now bring only harm?”
After two weeks in hospital she returned home and resolved to stay dry. But the damage had already been done.
“I’m a husk,” she wrote to McWatt, “trembling in the slightest breeze.”
In response to her request for a loan, McWatt sent her money to pay the rent arrears on her bedsit in Cowgate. She wrote to him a week later: “I used your money wisely, if not well. We always abhorred the property-owning classes so instead of shelling out to my Edinburgh Rachman I decided to hand the lot to landlords of another stripe, revisiting old haunts and raking over old passions. The Menzies’ barman was new, a guileless lad who kennt naught of my reputation and served me till the lights went out. Of the old passions, I saw only ghosts and instead of all our brave talk of poetry, politics and art, the air was shrill with the idle chatter and inane jukebox music of the young.”
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