Finders Keepers

by Seamus Heaney

  Be that as it may, between January 1911 (when he quit college in Edinburgh) and July 1915 (when he joined the British Army and went off to serve with the Medical Corps in Salonika) Christopher Grieve had worked with the Edinburgh Evening Despatch, the Monmouthshire Labour News, the Clydebank and Renfrew Press, the Fife Herald, and the Fife Coast Chronicle. He had also read voraciously and had contributed articles to the journal which was to be central to his whole intellectual development, A. R. Orage’s The New Age. Through contact with Orage and his magazine, he was led to read, among others, Nietzsche and Bergson, and was as deeply susceptible to the Nietzschean injunction ‘Become what thou art’ as he was to Bergson’s claim that it was creative urge rather than natural selection which promoted the evolutionary process. But for Grieve to become what he was would mean becoming MacDiarmid, which in turn would mean achieving a Scottish identity long repressed by Anglocentric attitudes and standard English speech: the evolutionary process would have to be creative at both personal and political levels.

  He returned from the war with a gradually clarifying programme and developed into a propagandist for a new Scottish Idea, something that would take off from and reflect in literary terms Whitman’s democratic American idea and Yeats’s cultural nationalism; whilst in the political sphere, the project for a new Scotland would be fired by Lenin’s communism and by a vestigial but emotionally decisive predisposition to the Christian way of redemption through self-sacrifice. Grieve, moreover, had been initiated into the rough and tumble of politics during a miners’ strike in Wales in 1911, and after that through his contacts with socialist activists in Scotland, people like John MacLean and James Maxton; so naturally he was deeply stirred by the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916 and the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia the following year, two events which had a powerful impact on the way he would henceforth imagine the future, both nationally and internationally.

  There was generosity as well as ferocity in MacDiarmid’s espousals, and it is well to be reminded that behind his habitual self-promotions there was a constant desire to be of service. As Douglas Sealy observed in a recent review, he had a calling which he served rather than a career which he worked at. By 1922, at any rate, Christopher Grieve had perfected his idiom as a polemicist and propagandist and was ready for pupation into Hugh MacDiarmid, a creature he would later variously describe as the ‘stone among the pigeons’ and ‘the catfish that vitalizes the other torpid denizens of the aquarium’. Here he is, getting into his stride in an editorial in the first number of the Scottish Cbapbook, a journal edited by Grieve and devoted to the creation of a new movement in Scottish literature:

  Scottish literature, like all other literatures, has been written almost exclusively by blasphemers, immoralists, dipsomaniacs, and madmen, but, unlike most other literatures, has been written about almost exclusively by ministers, with, on the whole, an effect similar to that produced by the statement (of the worthy Dr John Mclntosh) that ‘as a novelist, Robert Louis Stevenson had the art of rendering his writings

  This prose was fired off in 1922, and represents Grieve in typically provocative form: zesty, head-on, fiercely devoted to eliciting a response. His polemical writings had all the trouble-making tactics of a dangerman in a bar, stripped to his shirt-sleeves and squaring up to anyone and everyone. Protest and crusade rather than nostalgia and pathos were the hallmarks of his new commitment to the old words. There was nothing backward-looking in the impulse, for MacDiarmid was very consciously organizing a new movement in literature and revealing the ambitions of an experimenter: he could never have been accused of subscribing to some form of arrested linguistic development. Synthetic Scots was not simply meant to give audiences the pleasures of self-recognition, for that could lead to the sentimentality and self-indulgence which MacDiarmid wanted to banish from the culture altogether. Nor was his first purpose to proclaim the superior vitality of the local language over the compromised and compromising idiom of standardized modern English. These things might be incidental to his effort, but central to it was the challenge of jump-starting a language interrupted by history (as Douglas Dunn has called it) and getting it into modern running order. In fact, MacDiarmid’s ways with the old words were as revolutionary and self-conscious as the young Ezra Pound’s ways with a diction based upon archaism and a translatorese derived from Anglo-Saxon, Latin and Chinese originals. And there was also something in his practice which corresponded to the poetics of Robert Frost, in so far as the thing that MacDiarmid was after in the deep Scottish ear resembled what Frost called ‘the sound of sense’, a phonetic patterning which preceded speech and authenticated it, a kind of pre-verbal register to which the poetic voice had to be tuned.

  What gave these ideas and hopes credibility was not, however, MacDiarmid’s forcible personality, but rather the astonishing poem which he published in 1926 called A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle. The title tells all that a reader needs to know before plunging in: this is an encounter between an intoxicated imagination and everything which that imagination can invent by meditation upon the national symbol of Scotland. At one moment, for example, the thistle has a mainly domestic and negative meaning, and is perceived by the drunk man as part and parcel of Scottish kitsch, of a piece with tartan for tourists, Burns suppers, haggises, Harry Lauder and every kind of Caledonian corniness. But at another moment it becomes the yggdrasil, the world-tree, a cosmic symbol that allows for poetry that is more visionary than satiric, a poetry of great sweep and intellectual resonance which nevertheless still keeps its ear to the native ground. In these lines towards the end of the poem, for example, you can hear the reassuring democratic measure of the ballad stanza; but you can also hear something more stately and deeply orchestrated. There is a stereophonic scope to the music, as if the gravitas of the medieval Scots poet William Dunbar were echoing within the stellar reaches of Dante’s Divine Comedy. (The word ‘hain’ here, incidentally, means to keep or preserve, and ‘toom’ to empty out, but what is more important than these details of sense is the sureness of the tone of the whole passage.)

  The stars like thistle’s roses floo’er

  The sterile growth o’ Space ootour,

  That clad in bitter blasts spreids oot

  Frae me, the sustenance o’ its root.

  Ο fain I’d keep my hert entire,

  Fain hain the licht o’ my desire,

  But ech, the shinin’ streams ascend,

  And leave me empty at the end.

  For aince it’s toomed my hert and brain

  The thistle needs maun fa’ again.

  – But a’ its growth’ll never fill

  The hole it’s turned my life intill! …

  Yet hae I silence left, the croon o’ a’.

  Through the deep reach of this poem’s music, through its associative range and its inclusion of haunting translations from Russian and French sources, MacDiarmid served notice that his sympathies and concerns were not confined to the local scene, and that his outrage at the condition of Scotland was just an aspect of his longing for a totally transformed life for all human beings on the planet. In other words, if MacDiarmid did have a nostalgia, it was the one which Osip Mandelstam embraced, a ‘nostalgia for world culture’.

  And yet A Drunk Man could hardly be described as a solemn bid in the high-cultural stakes. On the contrary, what distinguishes it is its inspired down-to-earthness. It has a huge improvisational energy and is driven forward by an impetuous anti-Establishment urge. Even though this impetuousness is an effect of the poem’s style, it seems paradoxically to manifest an impatience with the very idea of style per se. The overriding impression is that the poem has too much business to get through to be bothered with merely literary considerations. It can be as close to doggerel as to Dante – and get away with it. Here, for instance, are a few lines from a rough-and-tumble section where the drunk man has a vision of the great cosmic wheel, where Scotland and the dramatis personae of Scottish history are at once set up and cut down within t
he perspectives of infinity:

  I felt it turn, and syne I saw

  John Knox and Clavers in my raw,

  And Mary Queen o’ Scots ana’,

  And Robbie Burns and Weelum Wallace

  And Carlyle lookin’ unco’ gallus,

  And Harry Lauder (to enthrall us).

  And as I looked I saw them a’,

  A’ the Scots baith big and sma’,

  That e’er the braith o’ life did draw.

  ‘Mercy o’ Gode, I canna thole

  Wi sic an orra mob to roll.’

  – ‘Wheesht! It’s for the guid o’ your soul!’

  *

  ‘But in this huge ineducable

  Heterogeneous hotch and rabble

  Why am I condemned to squabble?’

  ‘A Scottish poet maun assume

  The burden o’ his people’s doom,

  And dee to brak’ their livin’ tomb.

  Mony ha’e tried, but a’ ha’e failed.

  Their sacrifice has nocht availed.

  Upon the thistle they’re impaled!’

  The mixture of passion and irreverence is everywhere in A Drunk Man and relates it to Irish masterpieces like Brian Mernman’s The Midnight Court and Patrick Kavanagh’s The Great Hunger, poems which similarly combine the expression of poetic high spirits, personal outrage and social protest. Merriman’s metrical vitality and insinuating intelligence remind me of parallel qualities in the MacDiarmid poem; and Kavanagh’s rawer expression of personal and social trauma is also akin to much that is going on in the Scottish work. Yet perhaps the main point is that none of these poems is directly confessional; all of them are more than simply therapeutic. They do get something aggrieved out of their authors’ systems, but their purpose is as public as it is personal. They act like their society’s immunity systems, going to attack whatever unhealthy or debilitating forces are at work in the body politic. And in this, they manifest poetry’s high potential, its function as an agent of positive transformation.

  This poem is MacDiarmid’s masterpiece. Even if his political programme failed to materialize, even if the nationalism and socialism which he espoused found themselves unrealized and unpopular, even if his vernacular republic did not attain constitutional status, the fact is that A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle did achieve the redress of poetry. MacDiarmid created a fully realized, imaginatively coherent work, one that contained such life-enhancing satire, such emotional weight and such specific imaginative gravity that it could be placed in the mind’s scales as something both equal to and corrective of the prevailing conditions. It was a magnificent intervention by creative power into an historical situation. Its force was the force of the glimpsed alternative and it still gives credence to MacDiarmid’s wonderfully stirring affirmation in another context that poetry is human existence come to life. In the year of its publication, it may have sold only ninety-nine copies, but already it was on its way to that most important audience of all, ‘the reader in posterity’. It released in the Scots language what MacDiarmid also accurately called a vis comica, a capacity for comedy in the widest sense; it was both a deluge and an overflow, so much so that we might say the poem introduced an almost magical element into Scottish life, the kind represented by the crane bag in old Irish mythology.

  The crane bag belonged to Manannan, the god of the sea, and contained every precious thing that he possessed. And then ‘when the sea was full, all the treasures were visible in it; but when the fierce sea ebbed, the crane bag was empty.’ Similarly, A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle contains all the treasures that might or might not become available and life-enhancing within the personal and national life of Scotland. Indeed, there are moments when the drunk man himself seems to have intimations that the poem he is speaking relates to the crane bag myth. In the following stanza, for example, he says that his ‘harns’ or brains respond to the ebb and flow of inspiration as seaweed responds to the ebb and flow of tides. And the poem itself will be forever correspondingly susceptible to the changing capacities of its audience. Like Manannan’s marvellous sporran, it will reveal or retain its treasures, depending upon the fullness or emptiness of the imaginative world in which it subsists:

  My harns are seaweed – when the tide is in

  They swall like blethers and in comfort float,

  But when the tide is oot they lie like gealed

  And runkled auld bluid-vessels in a knot.

  The tidal wave of MacDiarmid’s verse in Vernacular Scots was to keep running long after he completed A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle, and it sustained him through many other astonishing performances, such as ‘Water Music’ and ‘Tarras’ and the title poem of the volume in which these appeared in 1932, Scots Unbound. In that book, the poet is in his element, hitting the note and holding the tune with all his old resource and exhilaration. But at this point I must take my leave of MacDiarmid, the Scots ‘makar’ redivivus, and turn, too briefly and in conclusion, to the problematic status of MacDiarmid’s vast output of verse in English during the remainder of his always amazing writing life.

  *

  I was once told about the entry procedures to be followed at a hospital run by a fundamentalist religious group in Tulsa, Oklahoma: incoming patients are asked to fill out a form which requires them to declare, among other things, the date of their birth, and then, the date of their rebirth. For Grieve, there would have been no problem with this: birth, 1892; rebirth, 1922. But the fact of the matter is that MacDiarmid qua MacDiarmid could have come up with two sets of dates also, in so far as he was born in Synthetic Scots in 1922 and reborn in English some time around 1933.

  Personally, I find this period the most moving in the whole of MacDiarmid’s life. These were the years when he lived with his second wife Valda Trevlyn and his newborn son Michael on the small island of Whalsay in the Shetlands. In retreat. Over the top and out of sight, so to speak, both physically and psychologically. Drink, the strain of breaking up with his first wife, political hassles, financial troubles, the tension of personal enmities – in the early 1930s, all of these things brought MacDiarmid to the stage of nervous breakdown. But he survived, and his survival had to do with his getting down to the bedrock of his own resources, a bedrock which was reinforced at the time by contact with the stoical fishermen of the Shetland Islands and his at-homeness in the bleakness of the actual geological conditions. Racked by the huge ambitions he had imagined for himself, he now endured the beginnings of an ordeal in his poetic being, one in which the megalomaniac and the marvel-worker vied for the voice of the bard; where the blether of William McGonagall sporadically overwhelmed the strains of Hugh MacDiarmid; where the plagiarist too readily gained an upper hand over the poet; where the sureness of tone and dramatic inevitability which pervade his masterpiece deserted him and a disconcerting unreliability entered his poetic voice.

  This is the MacDiarmid who breaks the heart because he so often and so enragingly fumbles the job, the poet who can at one moment transport a reader’s ear and body into a wonderfully sustaining element, a language pure as air or water, a language which carries the reader (as the truest poetry always does) into the sensation of walking on air or swimming free – but then the air fails or the water drains, a disastrous drop occurs in the vocal and metrical pressure, what was fluent becomes flaccid, what was detail becomes data and what was poetry becomes pedantry and plagiarism. Such let-downs keep happening at crucial turns in poems which are elsewhere full of lovely clarity and temperate, steady wisdom, poems such as ‘Island Funeral’ or ‘Lament for the Great Music’ or ‘Direadh III’. And the failure derives in the main from three typical aspects of MacDiarmid’s later writing: his increasingly propagandist stance, the uncertainty of his ear outside his native Scots, and his more and more compulsive habit of transcription (perhaps in the end a better term than plagiarism, since his habits were by then so well known to his readership and regarded with such indulgence).

  When he wrote A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle, MacDi
armid was less tied to the Communist Party line than he would be in years ahead, although there was already a strong admixture of Leninism to corroborate his natural sympathy with the underdog. As time went on, however, Lenin’s dream of world revolution gradually became associated in MacDiarmid’s mind with the boundary-crossing powers of a new world language, one which he took to be foreshadowed in the experimental, meaning-melting ventures of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. Joyce’s move from the baby-babble of a Dublin infant at the beginning of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man to the dream-speak of a world-embracing, multilingual consciousness in Finnegans Wake was, for MacDiarmid, a pattern of the way local speech could exfoliate into an all-inclusive world idiom, and be fundamental to the evolution of that higher intellectual and imaginative plane which the revolution would promote. In practice, however, these two writers differed greatly in so far as Joyce’s linguistic virtuosity was radically pleasure-seeking and absolved of any didactic purpose, whereas MacDiarmid’s attempts at philological inclusiveness were doctrinaire and strenuously politically correct. Unfortunately, too, his identification of himself with the great prophets and projects of modernism led to an astounding self-inflation and to a verse that eventually strayed into megalomaniac fantasy. It even attained a certain monstrous dimension in poems like the ‘First Hymn to Lenin’ where MacDiarmid declares that the murderous activities of the Cheka (the secret police of the USSR) are a fair price to have to pay for the maintenance of that evolutionary momentum which he and his hero prized so much:

  As necessary, and insignificant, as death