Finders Keepers

by Seamus Heaney

  Paulin has written on Clare most recently in an essay of brilliant advocacy in Minotaur (1992), his book about poetry and the nation state. But here I want to draw attention to the very suggestive remarks he made earlier in his introduction to The Faber Book of Vernacular Verse (1990), where he had this to say about Clare’s texts as we now have them, restored to their original unpunctuated condition:

  The restored texts of the poems embody an alternative social idea. With their lack of punctuation, freedom from standard spelling and charged demotic ripples, they become a form of Nation Language that rejects the polished urbanity of Official Standard.

  And then, having alluded to the poet’s ‘Ranter’s sense of being trapped within an unjust society and an authoritarian language’, Paulin concludes that ‘Clare dramatizes his experience of the class system and its codified language as exile and imprisonment in Babylon.’ By implication, then Clare is a sponsor and a forerunner of modern poetry in post-colonial nation languages, poetry that springs from the difference and/or disaffection of those whose spoken tongue is an English which sets them at cultural and perhaps political odds with others in possession of that normative ‘Official Standard’. Paulin’s contention is that wherever the accents of exacerbation and orality enter a text, be it in Belfast or Brooklyn or Brixton, we are within earshot of Clare’s influence and example. What was once regarded as Clare’s out-of-stepness with the main trends has become his central relevance: as ever, the need for a new kind of poetry in the present has called into being precursors out of the past.

  But still, when we look at Paulin’s own poetry, and that of Les Murray, Liz Lochhead, Tony Harrison, Derek Walcott, Edward Kamau Brathwaite and many figures in the dub and reggae tradition, it becomes evident that nobody can any longer belong as innocently or entirely within the acoustic of a first local or focal language as Clare could – focus being, you remember, the Latin word for hearth. Nowadays, every isle – be it Aran or Orkney or Ireland or Trinidad – is full of broadcast noises, every ear full of media accents and expendable idioms. In the few nooks of dialect I have kept in touch with over the years, the first things children speak nowadays are more likely to be in imitation of TV jingles than of the tones of their parents. So what a poet takes from Clare in these conditions is not an antiquarian devotion to dialect or a nostalgia for folkways; rather, the instructive thing about Clare’s practice is the way it shows the necessity for being forever at the ready, always in good linguistic shape, limber and fit to go intelligently with the impulse.

  In the shorter poems I have been praising, Clare exhibits the same kind of self-galvanizing, gap-jumping life that sends poems by Tom Paulin and Les Murray catapulting and skimming off and over two or three different language levels. The kind of learned and local words that propel their poems and open them inward and forward, the whole unruly combination of phonetic jolts and associated sidewindings, all this obviously issues from a far more eclectic relish of language than Clare ever developed. Nevertheless, he would have been at home with the verve and impatience which the vocabulary of these poets manifests, their need to body-swerve past the censor and shoulder through decorum, to go on a poetic roll that can turn on occasion into a political rough ride.

  Clare, in fact, inspires one to trust that poetry can break through the glissando of post-modernism and get stuck in the mud of real imaginative haulage work. He never heard Mandelstam’s famous phrase about Acmeism being a ‘nostalgia for world culture’, but oddly enough, it makes sense to think of Clare in relation to the arrival of poetry in that longed-for place or state – an arrival which John Bayley has recently observed in the work of many gifted contemporaries. The dream of a world culture, after all, is a dream of a world where no language will be relegated, a world where the ancient rural province of Boeotia (which Les Murray has made an image for all the outback and dialect cultures of history) will be on an equal footing with the city-state of Athens; where not just Homer but Hesiod will have his due honour. Clare’s poetry underwrites a vision like this, where one will never have to think twice about the cultural and linguistic expression of one’s world on its own terms since nobody else’s terms will be imposed as normative and official. To read him for the exotic flavours of an archaic diction and the picturesque vistas of a bucolic past is to miss the trust he instills in the possibility of a self-respecting future for all languages, an immense, creative volubility where human existence comes to life and has life more abundantly because it is now being expressed in its own self-gratifying and unhindered words.

  Oxford Lectures, October 1992; ‘John Clare – A Bicentenary Lecture’ in John Clare in Context, ed. H. Haughton, A. Phillips and G. Summerfield (Cambridge University Press, 1994)

  A Torchlight Procession of One: Hugh MacDiarmid

  Christopher Murray Grieve took the pseudonym Hugh MacDiarmid in 1922 and between then and his death in 1978 turned himself into one of the most excessive writers of the twentieth century. His Complete Poems, in two volumes, run to some 1500 pages and represent only a fraction of his total output; the prose is more voluminous still, for MacDiarmid was a journalist and controversialist from his teenage years and made his living by producing copy for newspapers and undertaking commissions for a variety of full-length books. The work as a whole reveals a disconcerting unevenness, but the quality of his best poetry and the historic importance of his whole endeavour mean that MacDiarmid deserves more attention than he has received outside his native Scotland.

  MacDiarmid’s position in Scottish literature and culture is in many respects analogous to that of Yeats in Ireland, and the liberationist ambitions of Irish writers were always of great importance to him. His linguistic overweening was hugely encouraged by the example of Joyce, whilst Yeats and other post-Revival writers continued to be highly influential in his programme of cultural nationalism. One could even say that MacDiarmid achieved for Scotland what the combined efforts of the Gaelic League and the Literary Revival achieved for Ireland: first of all, he effected a reorientation of attitudes to the country’s two indigenous languages, the Scots Gaelic of the Highlands and Islands and the vernacular Scots of the Borders and Lowlands. And secondly, MacDiarmid also more or less singlehandedly created a literature in one of these languages, and acted as an inspiration for the poet who was to change the course of poetry in the other.

  In the 1920s, MacDiarmid himself emerged fully fledged as a writer of lyric genius in the language he had invented and which he called Synthetic Scots; in the 1930s, his friendship with Sorley MacLean helped MacLean to fare forward and become the redemptive genius of modern poetry in Gaelic. Within the contemporary conditions, in other words, MacDiarmid demonstrated the artistic possibilities of the indigenous speech and in so doing brought to the fore what he called ‘lapsed or unrealized qualities’ in the two linguistic heritages which corresponded ‘to “unconscious” elements in a distinctive Scottish psychology’. All in all, his practice and example have had an inestimable influence on the history of Scottish writing in particular, and Scottish culture in general over the last fifty years. There is a demonstrable link between MacDiarmid’s act of cultural resistance in the Scotland of the 1920s and the literary self-possession of writers such as Alasdair Gray, Tom Leonard, Liz Lochhead and James Kelman in the 1980s and 1990s. He prepared the ground for a Scottish literature that would be self-critical and experimental in relation to its own inherited forms and idioms, but one that would also be stimulated by developments elsewhere in world literature.

  MacDiarmid, then, was an inspirational writer whose artistic achievement remains problematic. He was a communist and a nationalist, a propagandist and a plagiarist, a drinker and a messer, and he carried out all these roles with immense panache. He made enemies with as much flair as he made friends. He was a Stalinist and a chauvinist, he was Anglophobic and arrogant, but the very excessiveness which he constantly manifested, the exorbitant quality that marked everything he did, also charged his positive achievements and gave them real
staying power. To put it another way, MacDiarmid possessed that ‘forcibleness’ which Sir Philip Sidney judged to be the ultimately distinguishing mark of poetry itself, although it was a forcibleness which revealed itself as unmistakably in the aggravations and affronts of his work as in its triumphs.

  So the negative things that can be said about MacDiarmid’s poetry do not invalidate his achievement, nor would they have greatly disturbed the poet himself. He was very clear-headed about his productions and in the 1960s wrote to a BBC producer as follows: ‘My job, as I see it, has never been to lay a tit’s egg, but to erupt like a volcano, emitting not only flame, but a lot of rubbish.’ From a person of less abundant capacity and with a less compulsive appetite for overdoing things, this could have sounded like an excuse; from MacDiarmid, however, it emerges as a boast. With him, the speech from the dock is sure to be a roar of defiance. No wonder Norman MacCaig suggested that the anniversary of his death should be marked each year by the observance of two minutes of pandemonium. ‘He would walk into my mind,’ MacCaig said at the graveside in Langholm in 1978, ‘as if it were a town and he a torchlight procession of one, lighting up the streets …’

  Still, although his vitality was epoch-making, MacDiarmid has probably written more disconcertingly than any other major twentieth-century poet. Anybody who wishes to praise the work has to admit straight away that there is an unget-roundable connection between the prodigality of his gifts and the prodigious-ness of his blather. The task for everybody confronted with the immense bulk of his collected verse is to make a firm distinction between the true poetry and what we might call the habitual printout. And then there are the questions that arise because of his magpie habits of composition (or is it modernist collage?): the silent incorporation into his own text of the texts of others, sometimes of a technical nature, sometimes discursive, sometimes even literary, the most notorious case here being the eight-line lyric entitled ‘Perfect’, which – depending upon how much of a critical Malvolio you want to be – can be regarded as either a found poem or a plagiarism from a story by Glyn Thomas. Even if all that mileage of earnest, pedantic and notoriously problematic verse does not disqualify him from the league of the major talents, it does prevent him from being regarded as ‘a master’. If we call a writer a master, it suggests an oeuvre with a kind of roundedness and finish that MacDiarmid did not even aspire to. He was more devoted to opening salvoes than finishing touches; and even though as a poet he must have approved the idea that every force evolves its form, he was one of those whose faculties rally more naturally to the banner of force.

  So the volcanic image he used about himself was entirely appropriate, and, in fact, MacDiarmid the poet was himself the result of an eruption. In 1922 he emerged like a new and fiery form out of the agitated element of Christopher Grieve’s imagination; or it could be said with equal justification that he emerged from the awakened energies of the Scots language itself. These had been long dormant as a literary resource until they were stirred into fresh activity when Grieve encountered a learned monograph entitled Lowland Scotch as Spoken in the Lower Strathearn District of Perthshire and wrote his first poem in a new version of that old speech. And it was at this moment that he took the pseudonym Hugh MacDiarmid, as if he knew instinctively that he had been born again, as if his boydeeds as a literary figure were now over and he had discovered his heroic name and destiny. MacDiarmid arrived as a fully developed phenomenon, one who both produced and was produced by the language he wrote in, henceforth to be known variously as Synthetic Scots or Vernacular Scots or the Doric. And the first poem of the new language was called ‘The Watergaw’:

  Ae weet forenicht i’ the yow-trummle

  I saw yon antrin thing,

  A watergaw wi’ its chitterin’ licht

  Ayont the on-ding;

  An’ I thocht o’ the last wild look ye gied

  Afore ye deed!

  There was nae reek i’ the laverock’s hoose

  That nicht – an’ nane i’ mine;

  But I hae thocht o’ that foolish licht

  Ever sin’ syne;

  An’ I think that mebbe at last I ken

  What your look meant then.

  The poet’s biographer, Alan Bold, records how these lines came about, when Grieve focused upon two pages of Sir James Wilson’s researches in the book I have just mentioned:

  Most of the words in ‘The Watergaw’ … came from two pages of Wilson’s work. Yow-trummle (‘cold weather in July after shearing’), watergaw (‘indistinct rainbow’) and on-ding (‘beating rain or snow’) are all on one page; the first phrase of the second stanza ‘There was nae reek i’ the laverock’s hoose/ That nicht’ appears in Wilson’s list of Proverbs and Sayings … where it is glossed as ‘There’s no smoke in the lark’s house tonight’ (said when the night is cold and stormy).

  The use Grieve made of these found elements was a far cry from the kind of busy transcription out of dictionaries and reference books which would disfigure so much of his later work in English. In 1922, however, what the recorded words and expressions did was to stretch a tripwire in the path of Grieve’s auditory imagination so that he was pitched headlong into his linguistic unconscious, into a network of emotional and linguistic systems that had been in place since childhood. The common speech of his subcultural life as a youngster in Dumfriesshire was suddenly ratified by the authority of scholarship. His little self, the dialect creature at the core of his adult speech, began to hear itself amplified within a larger historical acoustic. Grieve turned into MacDiarmid when he realized that his writing identity depended for its empowerment upon his securing an ever deepening access to those primary linguistic strata in his own and his country’s memory. And this sense of a nascent truth, of a something not quite clearly apprehended but very definitely experienced, is exactly what is embodied in ‘The Watergaw’.

  Its real subject is the uncanny. The watergaw, the faint rainbow glimmering in chittering light, provides a sort of epiphany, and MacDiarmid connects the shimmer and weakness and possible revelation in the light behind the drizzle with the indecipherable look he received from his father on his deathbed. But how the poem sounds is probably more important than what it sees. What constitutes the true originality here is the combined sensation of strangeness and at-homeness which the words create. Each expression, each cadence, each rhyme is as surely and reliably in place as a stone on a hillside. The words themselves are uncanny: whether or not their dictionary meaning is understood, it is hard to resist their phonetic allure, their aura of a meaning which has been intuited but not yet quite formulated. Just as the dying father’s look transmitted a definite if mysterious promise of revelation, so, on the verge of its disappearance as a living speech, the old language rallies and delivers a new poetry for the future.

  What happened in ‘The Watergaw’, of course, and in other famous lyrics that followed it such as ‘The Eemis Stane’ and ‘Wheesht, Wheesht’ and ‘The Bonnie Broukit Bairn’, was what typically happens in lyric poetry of the purest sort. Suddenly the thing chanced upon comes forth as the thing predestined: the unforeseen appears as the inevitable. The poem’s words seem always to have belonged together and to have enjoyed a distinct existence apart from all other words. Here, for example, is another one of those lyrics upon which MacDiarmid’s fame rests, a very short one called ‘The Bonnie Broukit Bairn’. The bairn or baby in question is the earth itself, which is distinguished here from other planets by its ability to ‘greet’, which is to say its ability to weep or cry like an infant. The crimson aura of Mars and the green luminosity of Venus represent one kind of beauty. But earth’s beauty is different, since earth is the site of human suffering, and this gives it a more grievous and vulnerable presence in the firmament than any of the other planets. ‘Crammasy’ means crimson, ‘gowden’ feathers are golden feathers, ‘wheen o’ blethers’ is a pack of nonsense, ‘broukit bairn’ is a neglected baby, and the ‘haill clanjamfrie’ is the whole bloody lot of them.

&
nbsp; Mars is braw in crammasy,

  Venus in a green silk goun,

  The auld mune shak’s her gowden feathers,

  Their starry talk’s a wheen o’ blethers,

  Nane for thee a thochtie sparin’,

  Earth, thou Bonnie broukit bairn!

  – But greet, an’ in your tears ye’ll droun

  The haill clanjamfrie!

  When he wrote this poem, Grieve was thirty-one years of age, a working journalist with an intense commitment to cultural and political renewal within Scotland, which for him boiled down to resisting and reversing the influence and impositions of English standards and English ways. Born in 1892 in the town of Langholm in Dumfriesshire, he was the first child of a postman father who had died young in 1910. His mother came from farming stock and had revealed her own gift for the demotic when she described the newborn poet as ‘an eaten and spewed lookin’ wee thing wi’ een like twa burned holes in a blanket’. After being educated locally and having read, by his own account, everything in the local Carnegie Library, Grieve went at the age of sixteen to a teacher training college in Edinburgh, an institution from which he was forced to withdraw because of an escapade involving the theft of the headmaster’s books. From then on, he made his living as a migrant journalist, although it has to be admitted that the migrancy was helped along by Grieve’s innate gift for falling out with bosses and his rapidly developing capacity as a whisky drinker.