There were fewer Gaelic speakers in the Highlands when Angus MacPhee entered Craig Dunain 80 years later, and a much higher percentage of Gaels who, like him, also spoke English. But there were still almost 100,000 Scottish people who were fluent in Gaelic, and most of them were everyday users of the language in Highland communities. Unavoidably, during Angus MacPhee’s time at Craig Dunain he was in the company of Gaelic-speaking nurses, doctors, psychiatrists, cleaners, cooks and other patients.
But he did not often speak a word to them, in Gaelic or in English. He spoke to Uibhistich. He spoke to Jimmy ‘Apples’ MacDonald, a nurse manager at Craig Dunain who became a Highland councillor. Jimmy MacDonald had moved as a teenager from Baleshare in North Uist to Inverness. As well as building a new life and career, he hoped there to jettison the embarrassing childhood nickname which had been given him in Uist because of his plump red cheeks. All was going well until, walking one day through Craig Dunain, he crossed the path of a patient from North Uist who innocently called out ‘Hello, Apples!’ It stuck for the rest of his busy time in Inverness and earned the impertinent patient, Jimmy Apples would joke, an especially painful injection.
‘I’ve known him for 30 years,’ Jimmy said of Angus MacPhee in 1997, ‘since I started to work in Craig Dunain.’
He would wear a long coat, with a rope that he’d made himself tied around the waist.
If it rained Angus would go into the shelter of trees and collect grass and bring it to a sheltered spot – there was a lot of grass around the hospital to harvest. He made hats, shoes, coats, ropes, horse collars, mufflers, knitted handkerchiefs . . .
People realise now how sad it is that they didn’t keep those things and save them for the years to come. I don’t think people understood how good he was with his hands and how well he made things, and how apt he was at living out in the woods. If one day there was suddenly no hospital, if Craig Dunain had completely disappeared, Angus would have survived on his own out there.
I’m sure that the publicity he got would have appealed to him. It would have lifted his spirits – knitting grass was his world. That was what kept him alive and gave him the hope to carry on.
When I became a councillor I’d be on the radio. I’d go in and see Angus, and he’d tell me he’d heard me, in Gaelic of course. It was nonsense to say he never spoke to anybody. He didn’t say much, but he spoke. Truth is, I’m not sure he should ever have been in there.
While Angus MacPhee was working the home farm at Craig Dunain Hospital and quietly plaiting, weaving and knitting his extraordinary creations, far away the islands of Uist slowly changed. His sisters married. Two of them, Mary Ellen and Peigi, went with their soldier husbands to England. Patricia married a man called Donald John Campbell from two crofts away in Balgarva and stayed at home to raise her family.
Their father, Neil MacPhee, was bedridden for the last years of his life. In 1947, the year after his only son and natural assignee of his croft was admitted to Inverness Asylum, Neil applied for ‘leave to assign his holding at No. 52 Balgarva to his daughter, Mrs Patricia Campbell’. It was an unusual application. Women had hitherto been disregarded in croft assignations. But it was allowed by the Scottish Land Court, and Ellen McHendry’s middle daughter became the first registered female crofter in South Uist. Her father Neil died in Balgarva of natural causes in 1951 at the age of 90 years. Angus could not attend his funeral.
By then a low bridge spanned the South Ford between Iochdar and Creagorry, linking South Uist and Benbecula by road. It was known locally as Drochaid O’Reagan, O’Reagan’s Bridge, after the parish priest at Benbecula who had campaigned for many years for a safe crossing between his island and South Uist. A causeway across the North Ford between Benbecula and North Uist would be opened in 1960, connecting all three islands for the first time since the last Ice Age and enabling routine social and professional contact between all the Uibhistich.
Car ferries began to sail from the mainland to Lochboisdale and motorised transport became ever more common. The ancient horse culture of the island withered away. Foodstuffs such as sliced white bread and bottled milk were increasingly imported, and the days of griddled breads, oatmeal cakes, and a milking cow on every croft slipped into history. Commercial civilian flights disturbed the skies over Iochdar as they arrived and departed from an airstrip built during the Second World War at Balivanich in Benbecula.
A famous American collector of folksongs visited the Uists in 1951 to record on tape what he could of this culture while it survived. ‘I have never met a set of people I liked as well anywhere,’ Alan Lomax wrote to a friend after returning to mainland Britain, ‘and the astonishing number of beautiful tunes that came pouring into the microphone just completely astounded me. If all the rest of the tunes of the world were to be suddenly wiped out by an evil magician, the Hebrides could fill up the gap without half trying.’
A famous American photographer was persuaded by Alan Lomax to visit the Uists in 1954. Paul Strand recorded the place and its people on black-and-white film. He titled his subsequent collection of island images ‘Tir a’ Mhurain’. ‘In Gaelic, the language of the Hebrides,’ explained Basil Davidson in his commentary on Strand’s photographs, ‘South Uist is known traditionally as Tir a’ Mhurain, the Land of Bent Grass, of the marram grass that spreads along its sandy western shore in a myriad of green needles which bend and ripple with the never-ceasing wind.’
A tweed-weaving factory was established in Iochdar in the 1950s. It rose and fell in a few short years, and the men returned to their crofts and their boats. In 1958 a military rocket-testing range was built at Gerinish in the south of the district of Iochdar. In response to the sudden influx of soldiers and their weapons of mass destruction, the local priest Father John Morrison persuaded each village in Iochdar to erect a wayside shrine. Father Morrison also commissioned the sculptor Huw Lorimer to carve ‘Our Lady of the Isles’, the largest outdoor religious statue in Britain, which was placed on the slopes of a hill overlooking the new rocket range and all the townships of Iochdar.
Electricity arrived in the islands, and telephones and television. New houses were built with roof tiles, and the skills of making marram grass and heather thatch were lost within a few generations. Old Uist was resilient. Its crofting lifestyle and its Gaelic language and culture remained strong in the second half of the twentieth century. But the wholly insular, self-contained pre-war world familiar to Angus MacPhee, the world which had stood almost still for centuries, would never be reclaimed. By the 1960s, few people in Uist plaited marram grass into rope, let alone baskets, and none of them made boots or hats. That tradition was sustained and given the power of flight by a silent, solitary, middle-aged man in the grounds of an Inverness hospital.
But for a happy occurrence, his work too would all have been lost. In 1977, when Angus MacPhee was 62 years old and had been in Craig Dunain Hospital for half of his life, a visitor who would safeguard his unique and strangely brilliant legacy arrived in Inverness.
5
A RARE STATE OF PURITY
‘I was disappointed. We’d heard there was a man made things out of grass, and nobody knows anything about it.’
Despite being born a few years and even fewer miles apart, Tom McGrath and Angus MacPhee lived in different worlds. Different worlds very occasionally collide.
Tom McGrath, who died in 2009, is categorised as a playwright and jazz pianist. The description is inadequate. McGrath was a prominent mover and shaker in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s libertarian, metropolitan, beat and hip, art, publishing and music culture.
A Lanarkshire Glaswegian (he was born in 1940 in Rutherglen, 25 years after Angus MacPhee was born ten miles away in Nettlehole), McGrath moved to London in the 1960s. There he performed at the seminal International Poetry Olympics at the Royal Albert Hall and worked on the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament’s publication Peace News before helping to found the first British counter-cultural ‘underground’ magazine, International Times.
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He returned to Glasgow in the late 1960s, threw off a heroin habit, collaborated with the young musician and comedian Billy Connolly, persuaded Miles Davis, Duke Ellington and the Mahavishnu Orchestra to perform in his home city, and wrote a popular play called Laurel and Hardy.
In 1974 McGrath established the Third Eye Centre in Glasgow’s Sauchiehall Street. As its original name suggests, the Third Eye Centre was a place for psychedelic and other happenings; a ‘shrine to the avant-garde’ exhibition and performance arena, it was typical of those which had flowered briefly during the 1960s in London, San Francisco, Birmingham, Amsterdam and New York. It came later to Glasgow, but it lasted longer. Prosaically retitled the Centre for Contemporary Arts, the Third Eye Centre outlived its founder and was still thriving in the second decade of the twenty-first century.
In 1977 McGrath travelled to continental Europe in search of inspiration and exhibits for the Third Eye Centre. In Switzerland he visited the Collection de l’Art Brut in Lausanne and saw for the first time the extraordinary collection of raw, compulsive outsider art which had been assembled by Jean Dubuffet. Tom McGrath’s mind, said a friend, was blown.
The Dubuffet collection in Lausanne represented a sea-change in twentieth-century concepts of art. Jean Dubuffet was a French bourgeois artistic rebel. He was born, the son of a wine merchant, in the Atlantic port of Le Havre in 1901. Like other French men and women of his generation, he would live to see two world wars fought on his country’s soil. Dubuffet was too young to be enlisted in the first one and too old for the second. It was a recipe for disillusion, disobedience and mutiny.
While trench warfare consumed the east of his country from Dunkirk to Verdun, Jean Dubuffet did well at his Le Havre lycée. After the Armistice was signed in 1918 he travelled to the Académie Julian in Paris to study painting. The Académie Julian was a distinguished and relatively progressive school (unusually, it admitted women, who were doubly unusually permitted to paint and sketch nude models from life), but Dubuffet stuck it out for just six months. He wrote later that a conversation with a teacher had encapsulated his disaffection from establishment art.
The young Dubuffet suggested to his teacher that there must have been, throughout history, forms of art which had been alien to the dominant culture of their time, and which had consequently been neglected and lost. The teacher replied that this was unlikely, because the experts of the past could be trusted to separate the wheat from the chaff. If those hypothetical experts had judged an artwork to be unworthy of preservation, it probably had been unworthy of preservation.
Jean Dubuffet considered such reasoning to be simply stupid. ‘Experts’ of any age, he thought, were not objective. They were the products of cultural conditioning. In his own time at least, their definitions were moulded by the Graeco-Roman representative tradition, which had become moribund and stifling. His own teacher ‘bowed before the prevailing wind emitted by the Establishment, and could consent to find objective beauty only in the place marked out by a superior order’. Dubuffet did not want to be like that, so he left the Académie Julian.
He slipped easily into Bohemian Paris, learning to play the accordion and bagpipes, befriending poets and painting in his own time, in his own way, at his own pace.
In 1925 Jean Dubuffet returned to Le Havre, married, had a daughter, and in 1930 the small young family went back to Paris and opened a franchise of his father’s wine business in the capital city.
If the career of a vintner had satisfied Jean Dubuffet, nobody outside South Uist and Craig Dunain Hospital might ever have heard of Angus MacPhee. But at some point in his twenties or early thirties, Jean Dubuffet read a book called Artistry of the Mentally Ill by Hans Prinzhorn. It changed his and many other people’s lives.
Hans Prinzhorn was not the first European psychiatrist to take a professional interest in the artwork of his patients. Prinzhorn himself inherited the collection of ‘psychotic art’ amassed at the psychiatric hospital of the University of Heidelberg by Emil Kraepelin. The true original in the field was neither Prinzhorn nor Kraepelin, but was probably a Scot named Dr William A.F. Browne. William Browne was a friend of Charles Darwin and a physician superintendent of lunatic asylums in Montrose and Dumfries between 1834 and 1857, when he was appointed Commissioner for Lunacy in Scotland. Browne introduced such activities for patients as writing, art and drama. He experimented with early forms of occupational and art therapy, and made a collection of the artistic work of his inmates.
But neither William Browne nor Emil Kraepelin wrote the book. Hans Prinzhorn did. Bildnerei der Geisteskranken, or Artistry of the Mentally Ill was published in 1922. Prinzhorn presented and analysed the work of ten ‘schizophrenic masters’ from his and Kraepelin’s Heidelberg collection. One made obscene figures out of chewed bread until a physician persuaded him to turn to woodcarving, at which he proved unusually adept. Another painted compulsively on his wall with the dyes and juices hand-squeezed from plants. Yet another made designs with animal fat on the wallpaper of his room. ‘He always allows himself to be driven by momentary impulses,’ Hans Prinzhorn wrote of this man, ‘so that his pictures generally incorporate the unconscious components of pictorial creation in a rare state of purity . . . he composes completely passively, almost as a spectator . . .’
They all had artistic ability, but their subjects, style and motivations were very far from the Beaux-Arts ideal of the Académie Julian and other representatives of nineteenth-century European civilisation. That was enough to enchant Jean Dubuffet. He left his wife and his business and returned to art – but this time, ‘There is no art without intoxication. But I mean a mad intoxication! Let reason teeter! Delirium! The highest degree of delirium! Plunged in burning dementia! Art is the most enrapturing orgy within man’s reach . . . Art must make you laugh a little and make you a little afraid. Anything as long as it doesn’t bore.’
While Jean Dubuffet found a new wife and a new vocation in Paris and painted crazed portraits which ‘depersonalized most of his subjects, comically exaggerating proportions and idiosyncrasies’, across the border in Nazi Germany the psychotic, outsider art collection made at Heidelberg by Kraepelin and Prinzhorn received what in retrospect would be seen as its greatest pre-war accolade.
Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist Party, which took power in Germany in 1933, liked ‘traditional’ art that exalted Aryan purity and militarism. They disliked almost everything else. Most of all, they disliked what had become known as ‘modern’ art. They called modern art entartete Kunst, or degenerate art. It was not only a categorisation; it was a sanction and a threat. German ‘modern’ artists were, at best, forbidden to sell their work, to teach or even to paint. Some were sent to concentration camps.
In order to illustrate this appalling stuff, the Nazis mounted an exhibition – a counter-exhibition – of degenerate modern art. Five thousand works were seized from private collections and museums by a Third Reich Visual Arts Commission. The ‘Entartete Kunst’ show opened in Munich in July 1937 and ran for four months, attracting huge crowds, before moving on to 11 other cities in Germany and Austria.
The exhibition contained work by Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall, Henri Matisse, Paul Klee and Vincent Van Gogh.
It also included, behind the labels ‘Madness Becomes Method’ and ‘Nature as Seen by Sick Minds’, some of the art by schizophrenics which had been collected by Emil Kraepelin and Hans Prinzhorn at Heidelberg, and which had been introduced to the world by Prinzhorn 15 years earlier as Artistry of the Mentally Ill.
Jean Dubuffet and the rest of the European and American art world and intelligentsia then had several easy questions to answer. Whose madness was preferable, that of Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse or that of Adolf Hitler and Josef Goebbels? Whose company would any serious artist sooner join? With what authority did the eminences of the Nazi Party disparage others as having ‘sick minds’? If the Third Reich proscribed somebody for being ‘mad’, was it not likely that they were something else altogeth
er, something valuable and praiseworthy, such as challenging, original and subversively creative?
After the defeat of the Third Reich, while Angus MacPhee was silently settling into Craig Dunain Hospital, Jean Dubuffet travelled to Heidelberg to see what was left of Prinzhorn’s collection. He then toured the asylums of Switzerland for three years, assembling his own collection of l’art des fous.
Back in Paris, Dubuffet showed his examples of the art of the insane to friends. Five of them were sufficiently enthused to join him in establishing the Compagnie de l’Art Brut – the Society of Rough, or Raw, Art – in 1948. The five were the surrealist writer and poet André Breton, the critic and publisher Jean Paulhan, the art collector and dealer Charles Ratton, the artist and collector H.P. Roche and the expressionist critic and curator Michel Tapié. With the exception of Ratton, whose reputation for dealing with the Nazis during the occupation haunted him for life, it was a company whose eminence grew as the twentieth century progressed.
Dubuffet was perfectly capable of explaining for himself why he thought that art should be discovered outside the academies, the galleries and the museums – as far outside them as possible – and why art produced by people in extraordinary states of mind was valuable. But in 1948, André Breton said it for him. Breton had joined the Compagnie de l’Art Brut, he wrote, because
I am not afraid to put forward the idea – paradoxical only at first sight – that the art of those who are nowadays classified as the mentally ill constitutes a reservoir of moral health.
Indeed it eludes all that tends to falsify its message and which is of the order of external influences, calculations, success or disappointment in the social sphere, etc. Here the mechanisms of artistic creation are freed of all impediment. By way of an overwhelming dialectical reaction, the fact of internment and the renunciation of profits as of all vanities, despite the individual suffering these may entail, emerge here as guarantees of that total authenticity which is lacking in all other quarters and for which we thirst more and more each day.
The Silent Weaver Page 10