0:00:13 > 0:00:17The Union between Scotland and England is 307 years old.
0:00:18 > 0:00:21And for most of those years, the best of Scotland's writers,
0:00:21 > 0:00:26poets, novelists, and journalists have struggled to understand
0:00:26 > 0:00:29the Union and even at times have tried to change its nature.
0:00:30 > 0:00:35However, that Union may be about to end.
0:00:35 > 0:00:39On September the 18th, Scotland votes on the independence referendum.
0:00:39 > 0:00:42Now, the polls have gone up and down and wafted all over the place,
0:00:42 > 0:00:46but hundreds of thousands of Scots have kept their views
0:00:46 > 0:00:49firmly to themselves, and therefore, it is at least possible
0:00:49 > 0:00:53that on that date, Scotland will vote "Yes".
0:00:57 > 0:01:01A few times lately, when he's been particularly hepped up,
0:01:01 > 0:01:05Alex Salmond has reached into the rattle bag of Scottish poetry
0:01:05 > 0:01:08to find words equal to the occasion.
0:01:08 > 0:01:13And he has pulled out, not Robert Burns, but somebody else entirely.
0:01:13 > 0:01:16Now let me leave you with a quote from Hugh MacDiarmid.
0:01:16 > 0:01:19"We have faith in Scotland's hidden powers -
0:01:19 > 0:01:25"the present's theirs, but the past and the future is ours."
0:01:25 > 0:01:30Now, I know that Hugh MacDiarmid isn't exactly a household name -
0:01:30 > 0:01:34though I've always loved his poetry. I studied it at university,
0:01:34 > 0:01:37which is the kind of strange thing students do.
0:01:37 > 0:01:40I soon discovered that Hugh MacDiarmid was just a pen name.
0:01:40 > 0:01:43The man was really called Christopher Murray Grieve.
0:01:43 > 0:01:46I read and adored his great epic poem,
0:01:46 > 0:01:48A Drunk Man Looks At The Thistle,
0:01:48 > 0:01:51and it soon became clear he devoted his entire life
0:01:51 > 0:01:56to the causes of communism and Scottish Independence.
0:01:56 > 0:01:59England still thinks it is a world influence and a world mission
0:01:59 > 0:02:03and so on. Let's get rid of England somehow or other.
0:02:03 > 0:02:05Completely.
0:02:06 > 0:02:09Could it possibly be that Hugh MacDiarmid -
0:02:09 > 0:02:12a man who hated the English, flirted with fascism,
0:02:12 > 0:02:15and greatly admired Joseph Stalin,
0:02:15 > 0:02:18could have anything to do with modern Scottish nationalism?
0:02:36 > 0:02:40It's sleepy now, the Border town of Langholm,
0:02:40 > 0:02:43birthplace of Scotland's most bothersome poet -
0:02:43 > 0:02:45but it wasn't when he was born here,
0:02:45 > 0:02:49to the local postman and his wife, in 1892.
0:02:49 > 0:02:52Weaving was the town's daily bread.
0:02:55 > 0:03:00The people in the Border towns when I was a boy were very radical,
0:03:00 > 0:03:05and they all shared this frontier feeling of difference
0:03:05 > 0:03:08from the English and in fact, animosity to them.
0:03:08 > 0:03:13The old Border tradition of raids and reivers and so on,
0:03:13 > 0:03:16and I seized on these things very early.
0:03:16 > 0:03:21The Grieve family lived in rooms below the town library,
0:03:21 > 0:03:26and the young Christopher Murray Grieve read everything it contained.
0:03:26 > 0:03:29He joined the Independent Labour Party when he was just 16.
0:03:29 > 0:03:32He worked as a journalist for local newspapers
0:03:32 > 0:03:34and in 1915, he went to war.
0:03:43 > 0:03:46The Scots were a fighting people - they made up a tenth
0:03:46 > 0:03:49of the British population, and a fifth of British casualties.
0:03:52 > 0:03:57After the Armistice of 1918, the survivors trickled slowly back
0:03:57 > 0:04:00to Scotland by ones and twos.
0:04:00 > 0:04:03And tens and thousands demobilised.
0:04:08 > 0:04:11Grieve had spent the war on the bitter sideshow
0:04:11 > 0:04:14of the Eastern Front, the war in Greece and Turkey
0:04:14 > 0:04:15with the Ottoman Empire.
0:04:15 > 0:04:19And while he was there, he'd slowly built up a head of steam.
0:04:19 > 0:04:24A simmering resentment of the condescending, patronising attitudes
0:04:24 > 0:04:27of the English officer class.
0:04:27 > 0:04:31The Welsh soldiers, the Irish and the Scots, he'd later say,
0:04:31 > 0:04:34had a natural comradeship which the English officers
0:04:34 > 0:04:37could not understand, never mind share.
0:04:38 > 0:04:41Grieve had resented the English well before the war,
0:04:41 > 0:04:45but during it, his loathing of the officer classes
0:04:45 > 0:04:48curdled into a loathing of the English generally,
0:04:48 > 0:04:52and their assumption that the Union was theirs, as of right, to lead,
0:04:52 > 0:04:56and Scotland, some kind of diddly afterthought.
0:04:56 > 0:04:57Grieve hated them.
0:04:57 > 0:05:02Hating was the first of his talents and the worst of his vices.
0:05:06 > 0:05:09When he got back to Britain in 1919,
0:05:09 > 0:05:13everything he wanted for Scotland was happening across the Irish Sea.
0:05:15 > 0:05:18Ireland was fighting for her independence,
0:05:18 > 0:05:21and there was a lesson that Grieve could learn from the Irish conflict.
0:05:23 > 0:05:28By 1919, the guns were drawn, and the grenades were flying.
0:05:28 > 0:05:31But he was very well aware that Ireland's independence battles
0:05:31 > 0:05:33had begun with her writers.
0:05:36 > 0:05:37As the 19th century ended,
0:05:37 > 0:05:41William Butler Yeats and JM Synge had explored, and restored,
0:05:41 > 0:05:43Ireland's sense of herself -
0:05:43 > 0:05:47her Celtic history, her God-bothered present.
0:05:47 > 0:05:51Younger writers like Sean O'Casey went further -
0:05:51 > 0:05:54political change was what they wanted, violently if necessary.
0:05:54 > 0:05:57Chris Grieve wanted exactly that for Scotland.
0:05:57 > 0:06:00And like O'Casey, he wanted communism, too.
0:06:00 > 0:06:04He wanted a Scottish Communist Republic, and to get there,
0:06:04 > 0:06:07he needed a new kind of Scottish writing
0:06:07 > 0:06:10sharpened and refashioned as a weapon.
0:06:10 > 0:06:13He wanted a Scottish literary renaissance.
0:06:15 > 0:06:19And that renaissance would begin here - in a little market town,
0:06:19 > 0:06:22a bit south of Aberdeen. Montrose.
0:06:34 > 0:06:36This is the sort of place you might have found him
0:06:36 > 0:06:38in the early 1920s.
0:06:38 > 0:06:43Taking an interest in the price of cattle, tups and tractors.
0:06:47 > 0:06:52He was the only journalist working for the Montrose Review -
0:06:52 > 0:06:56a little newspaper, full of farming news, church announcements,
0:06:56 > 0:06:57deaths and births.
0:07:00 > 0:07:02A married man needs a day job,
0:07:02 > 0:07:05especially when he has a secret agenda -
0:07:05 > 0:07:07the tearing apart of the United Kingdom.
0:07:07 > 0:07:10And if you look closely, it becomes more interesting -
0:07:10 > 0:07:14Grieve was a town councillor, a parish councillor, a JP,
0:07:14 > 0:07:18pursuing surprisingly left-wing ends.
0:07:18 > 0:07:22A bar-room Bolshevik, a parish-council communist.
0:07:28 > 0:07:32In whatever spare time he could find, he thought, and he wrote
0:07:32 > 0:07:36at the home he shared with his wife Peggy - a council house,
0:07:36 > 0:07:38number 16, Links Avenue, Montrose.
0:07:40 > 0:07:43There, he laid his plans for the Scottish Renaissance.
0:07:43 > 0:07:47There was a great deal of work to do, because by the 1920s,
0:07:47 > 0:07:50Scottish culture had come to mean something like this.
0:07:55 > 0:07:59# I love a lassie, a bonnie Hieland lassie
0:07:59 > 0:08:02# If you saw her, you would fancy her as well... #
0:08:02 > 0:08:06Ever since the Union, Scottish literature had been in decline.
0:08:06 > 0:08:09Once a year, Scots at home and abroad warmed their hands
0:08:09 > 0:08:14at the immortal memory of Scotland's national Bard, Robert Burns.
0:08:15 > 0:08:20But Burns had been the last gasp of great serious writing in Scots.
0:08:20 > 0:08:23After Burns, Walter Scott had laid down the facts
0:08:23 > 0:08:25in his fictions of Scottish history.
0:08:26 > 0:08:31In Scott, the Scottish characters speak Scots -
0:08:31 > 0:08:35the narrator, the man in charge, speaks English.
0:08:35 > 0:08:39By the 1920s, the Scottish language had been demoted
0:08:39 > 0:08:42to little more than comic local colour.
0:08:42 > 0:08:45And the man who embodied this more than anything else,
0:08:45 > 0:08:49a kind of three-dimensional living cliche of Scottishness,
0:08:49 > 0:08:52was somebody that Chris Grieve detested.
0:08:52 > 0:08:53Harry Lauder.
0:08:57 > 0:09:02Immensely popular in both England and Scotland, on stage and off,
0:09:02 > 0:09:04kilted, sporraned, and bonneted,
0:09:04 > 0:09:07Lauder played the stereotypical Scot.
0:09:07 > 0:09:09Unionist to the core,
0:09:09 > 0:09:13his stage banter bristled with hackneyed Scottish sayings.
0:09:15 > 0:09:20"It's a braw bricht moonlicht nicht the nicht, mercy me!
0:09:20 > 0:09:23"Lang may yer lums reek!"
0:09:23 > 0:09:26And the behaviour onstage was just as hackneyed.
0:09:26 > 0:09:29Lauder spent a lot of time pretending to be drunk.
0:09:29 > 0:09:32# Roaming in the gloaming with a lassie by my side... #
0:09:33 > 0:09:38For Christopher Grieve, this was the Scot who had devoted his life
0:09:38 > 0:09:41to making Scottishness itself a figure of fun.
0:09:51 > 0:09:54I've always been an intellectual.
0:09:54 > 0:09:58That may be disputed, but I don't think it's disputable.
0:09:58 > 0:09:59And...
0:10:01 > 0:10:05I was opposed to certain ideas that were current at that time,
0:10:05 > 0:10:10promulgated by the Burns... Club Of London.
0:10:10 > 0:10:12Other bodies.
0:10:12 > 0:10:14And I knew what they wanted - they wanted
0:10:14 > 0:10:19a continuation of the Harry Lauder Scottish comic sort of thing,
0:10:19 > 0:10:23and I decided, in consonance with my own character,
0:10:23 > 0:10:26to take a very different angle of approach.
0:10:30 > 0:10:33Grieve was trying to reclaim two things from Harry Lauder,
0:10:33 > 0:10:36from Walter Scott, and from the miserably reduced figure
0:10:36 > 0:10:39of Robert Burns, the sanctified National Bard,
0:10:39 > 0:10:43whose actual words no longer seemed to matter more than once a year.
0:10:43 > 0:10:48He wanted to reclaim Scots itself as a language for serious writing,
0:10:48 > 0:10:51and he wanted to reclaim the very idea of the Scotsman.
0:10:53 > 0:10:57The kilt and tartan were obviously the wardrobe of the stereotype,
0:10:57 > 0:11:01but on the other hand, you didn't see English people walking about in kilts.
0:11:01 > 0:11:06And making things as Scottish as possible was what Grieve was up to.
0:11:06 > 0:11:09And so he invented a poet.
0:11:09 > 0:11:14A very Scottish poet - a poet who could not be, like Grieve himself,
0:11:14 > 0:11:19a Lowlander, coming from a little town just eight or nine miles away from the English Border.
0:11:19 > 0:11:22But a Highland poet, the kind of poet you might see in a kilt,
0:11:22 > 0:11:25and sporran, and a lovat jacket.
0:11:25 > 0:11:29A poet with a proper Highland name - Hugh MacDiarmid.
0:11:33 > 0:11:36Grieve invented a new kind of Scots, as well.
0:11:36 > 0:11:39He looked through a recent history of Lowland Scots dialect,
0:11:39 > 0:11:43and a massive 19th century dictionary of the Scots language,
0:11:43 > 0:11:46quarrying words out from every part of Scotland,
0:11:46 > 0:11:51seeking, always, words as different as possible from the English.
0:11:51 > 0:11:55And he called the result, with commendable honesty,
0:11:55 > 0:11:57"synthetic Scots".
0:11:57 > 0:12:02And for some time, Hugh MacDiarmid would write only in this new,
0:12:02 > 0:12:05more colourful, richer, more pungent Scots,
0:12:05 > 0:12:09and for several years he tried very hard to persuade his readers
0:12:09 > 0:12:14that Chris Grieve and Hugh MacDiarmid were two completely separate people.
0:12:15 > 0:12:18(Funny how you never see them together.)
0:12:20 > 0:12:23So far, so funny - but comedy wasn't the point.
0:12:27 > 0:12:30The first new Scots poem he wrote was The Watergaw -
0:12:30 > 0:12:34"the rainbow" - a memory of his father's death.
0:12:35 > 0:12:38A crazed look that had come across his father's face
0:12:38 > 0:12:41in his last moments, blended with another memory -
0:12:41 > 0:12:46a rainbow in midsummer, seen through a storm of wind and rain.
0:12:49 > 0:12:53Ae weet forenicht I' the yow-trummle
0:12:53 > 0:12:54I saw yon antrin thing
0:12:57 > 0:13:02A watergaw wi' its chitterin licht
0:13:02 > 0:13:04Ayont the on-ding
0:13:06 > 0:13:10An I thocht o' the last wild look ye gied
0:13:10 > 0:13:12Afore ye deed!
0:13:14 > 0:13:19There was nae reek I' the laverock's hoose that nicht
0:13:19 > 0:13:21an nane I' mine
0:13:22 > 0:13:26But I hae thocht o' that foolish licht
0:13:26 > 0:13:28Ever sin syne
0:13:31 > 0:13:38An' I think that mebbe at last I ken
0:13:40 > 0:13:42What your look meant then.
0:13:47 > 0:13:50The Watergaw is a wonderful little poem.
0:13:50 > 0:13:53And yes, it could be translated into English,
0:13:53 > 0:13:57but that required many more words and produced something
0:13:57 > 0:14:02that didn't have the original's force and pungency and special magic.
0:14:02 > 0:14:06And what that showed was that Scots was a tongue which could express
0:14:06 > 0:14:10different ways of seeing, than thinking, than English
0:14:10 > 0:14:13and was valuable in its own right.
0:14:13 > 0:14:17This was the beginning of the Scottish literary renaissance.
0:14:17 > 0:14:21Out of the ground, a long-buried tradition was starting to slither
0:14:21 > 0:14:23and emerge into the daylight.
0:14:25 > 0:14:27Meanwhile...
0:14:27 > 0:14:31Hugh MacDiarmid's special friend, the one you never saw him with,
0:14:31 > 0:14:35the one who looked exactly like him, edited magazines
0:14:35 > 0:14:39which he printed at the presses of the Montrose Review just behind me -
0:14:39 > 0:14:42by kind permission of the owner.
0:14:42 > 0:14:43And in these magazines -
0:14:43 > 0:14:46The Scottish Nation, The Scottish Chapbook -
0:14:46 > 0:14:49you would find poems by Hugh MacDiarmid,
0:14:49 > 0:14:53prose articles by Hugh MacDiarmid, editorials by Hugh MacDiarmid,
0:14:53 > 0:14:57all on a very high-minded literary theme.
0:14:57 > 0:15:01Reflections On Burns And Burns Suppers,
0:15:01 > 0:15:06A Celebration Of Jamieson's Etymological Dictionary Of The Scottish Tongue,
0:15:06 > 0:15:10and, perhaps, A Programme For Scottish Fascism!
0:15:14 > 0:15:17It seems shocking now, but that's NOW.
0:15:17 > 0:15:20As far as anyone could see in 1923,
0:15:20 > 0:15:24Mussolini's antics in Italy were no more than a mix of patriotism,
0:15:24 > 0:15:27socialism and theatricality.
0:15:27 > 0:15:31We know how dark things would get. MacDiarmid simply didn't.
0:15:31 > 0:15:33No-one did.
0:15:33 > 0:15:36These were still very early days and there were huge numbers
0:15:36 > 0:15:40of apologists for fascism, including Irish poets like Yeats,
0:15:40 > 0:15:43and English writers like Percy Wyndham Lewis.
0:15:43 > 0:15:46But to get a Scottish fascism going
0:15:46 > 0:15:50would have required the creation of a Scottish fascist party,
0:15:50 > 0:15:53and that was still absolutely on MacDiarmid's mind.
0:15:58 > 0:16:01In 1924, two more writers - a husband and wife -
0:16:01 > 0:16:03arrived in Montrose,
0:16:03 > 0:16:07and they'd become willing recruits to MacDiarmid's paradise
0:16:07 > 0:16:09of home-made nationalist propaganda.
0:16:11 > 0:16:14Edwin Muir was a well-respected literary critic,
0:16:14 > 0:16:16with poetic ambitions.
0:16:16 > 0:16:18His wife, Willa, was a translator.
0:16:18 > 0:16:22She had family here. They were a sort of literary double act.
0:16:22 > 0:16:25To the Muirs, Montrose was a cultural desert,
0:16:25 > 0:16:29apart from a small oasis at 16, Links Avenue.
0:16:29 > 0:16:31And the friendship was instant.
0:16:31 > 0:16:34The Muirs often visited the Grieves.
0:16:34 > 0:16:36They never knew quite what to expect.
0:16:36 > 0:16:37On one occasion, they found
0:16:37 > 0:16:40Peggy outside the house, very distressed.
0:16:40 > 0:16:44Hugh MacDiarmid had been to a meeting of Montrose farmers
0:16:44 > 0:16:46and become very drunk indeed.
0:16:46 > 0:16:48He'd then gone back and locked himself into the bathroom,
0:16:48 > 0:16:51where he'd gone silent and wouldn't come out.
0:16:51 > 0:16:53What had happened?
0:16:53 > 0:16:57Was Scotland about to lose her great literary hero?
0:16:57 > 0:16:59Now, Edwin Muir was not an athletic man.
0:16:59 > 0:17:03He'd been turned down as "unfit for army service".
0:17:03 > 0:17:05But he knew his patriotic duty
0:17:05 > 0:17:07and he forced his way in through a tiny window,
0:17:07 > 0:17:10into the bathroom, where he found
0:17:10 > 0:17:11the great Hugh MacDiarmid,
0:17:11 > 0:17:14lying, stark naked, in an empty bath.
0:17:14 > 0:17:18The drunk man, asleep with his thistle.
0:17:19 > 0:17:22Muir and MacDiarmid became a double act, as well.
0:17:22 > 0:17:26Edwin Muir - specs, hair carefully combed -
0:17:26 > 0:17:28was the straight man.
0:17:28 > 0:17:31Hugh MacDiarmid, with hair like his ideas,
0:17:31 > 0:17:34boiling off his skull in all directions,
0:17:34 > 0:17:37was the revolutionary - the rebel poet.
0:17:37 > 0:17:40Both of these men were really worried
0:17:40 > 0:17:44that Scotland had not had her own serious mainstream
0:17:44 > 0:17:46literature for more than 100 years.
0:17:47 > 0:17:49They both thought that this had
0:17:49 > 0:17:52psychologically devastated the nation.
0:17:52 > 0:17:55And they both returned to the Irish example.
0:17:55 > 0:17:57If literature was the nation,
0:17:57 > 0:18:01and there was no modern literature, then their duty was clear.
0:18:01 > 0:18:05They just had to roll up their sleeves and create one themselves.
0:18:08 > 0:18:10And so they did, in Montrose,
0:18:10 > 0:18:13birthplace of the Scottish Renaissance.
0:18:13 > 0:18:17Muir's role was as a critic, supporting the publication of
0:18:17 > 0:18:20MacDiarmid's first book in 1925 -
0:18:20 > 0:18:23Sangschaw, or "Songshow", "song festival".
0:18:26 > 0:18:28Muir used his critical connections to place a powerfully
0:18:28 > 0:18:33positive review of Sangschaw not in a British cultural review,
0:18:33 > 0:18:35but an American one.
0:18:35 > 0:18:38International impact was essential to the cause.
0:18:38 > 0:18:41And, in this review, Muir asserted
0:18:41 > 0:18:45that not only was a reimagined and revitalised Scottish literature
0:18:45 > 0:18:48in a reimagined Scots tongue possible,
0:18:48 > 0:18:50it was already fact.
0:18:52 > 0:18:55Sangschaw exploded in all directions.
0:18:55 > 0:18:58Here again was the Watergaw,
0:18:58 > 0:19:00celebrations of sexuality,
0:19:00 > 0:19:03collisions of cosmology and religion,
0:19:03 > 0:19:07the Planet Earth depicted as a "bonnie broukit bairn",
0:19:07 > 0:19:08a "strapping, scruffy child".
0:19:08 > 0:19:14Here was an infinity of Christs born on other, alien worlds.
0:19:14 > 0:19:16Here was the Resurrection
0:19:16 > 0:19:20in this graveyard, Crowdieknowe, near Langholm.
0:19:26 > 0:19:28Oh, to be at Crowdieknowe
0:19:28 > 0:19:31When the last trumpet blaws
0:19:31 > 0:19:34An' see the deid come loupin' owre
0:19:34 > 0:19:36The auld grey wa's.
0:19:39 > 0:19:43Many of MacDiarmid's ancestors lay buried here and
0:19:43 > 0:19:47he imagines them as less than pleased with God for waking them.
0:19:48 > 0:19:54My uncles and other relatives, big, burly, bearded men, and so on,
0:19:54 > 0:19:58and I imagined them rising from these crowded graves
0:19:58 > 0:20:01in a little churchyard, and how they would behave,
0:20:01 > 0:20:03because they were wild men.
0:20:04 > 0:20:07Muckle men wi' tousled beards
0:20:07 > 0:20:09I grat at as a bairn
0:20:09 > 0:20:12'll scramble frae the croodit clay
0:20:12 > 0:20:13Wi' feck o'swearin'.
0:20:16 > 0:20:19An' glower at God an' a'
0:20:19 > 0:20:22His gang o' angels I' the lift
0:20:22 > 0:20:26Thae trashy bleezin' French-like folk
0:20:26 > 0:20:29Wha gar'd them shift!
0:20:31 > 0:20:36So, here it was. A whole volume of serious poetry in Scots.
0:20:36 > 0:20:39MacDiarmid's poems and Muir's reviews generated
0:20:39 > 0:20:43plenty of column inches, but sales weren't great.
0:20:44 > 0:20:48In 1926, Sangschaw sold a total of...
0:20:48 > 0:20:51106 copies.
0:20:51 > 0:20:54MacDiarmid always said that that the raw numbers didn't matter.
0:20:54 > 0:20:57But there were other bad signs, as well.
0:20:57 > 0:21:02In fact, there was absolutely no sign that Scotland was noticing
0:21:02 > 0:21:04MacDiarmid's urgent political message.
0:21:04 > 0:21:08And, in May of 1926,
0:21:08 > 0:21:12the country missed what he regarded as another wonderful opportunity.
0:21:14 > 0:21:16At its height,
0:21:16 > 0:21:20the General Strike of 1926 involved 1.75 million workers,
0:21:20 > 0:21:22both north and south of the Border.
0:21:22 > 0:21:27The establishment feared communist revolution.
0:21:27 > 0:21:30Members of the public were asked to volunteer as blackleg labour
0:21:30 > 0:21:32for essential industries.
0:21:33 > 0:21:37In Montrose, MacDiarmid threw himself into the grassroots
0:21:37 > 0:21:39organisation of the strike.
0:21:39 > 0:21:42But the revolution failed to materialise.
0:21:42 > 0:21:45The strike was over in just ten days.
0:21:49 > 0:21:52MacDiarmid's bitter disappointment was at least part of the inspiration
0:21:52 > 0:21:55for what would become his most famous work,
0:21:55 > 0:21:58A Drunk Man Looks At The Thistle.
0:22:04 > 0:22:08The poem was set in his home town of Langholm.
0:22:08 > 0:22:11There's an annual ceremony, called the Common Riding,
0:22:11 > 0:22:16designed to enable the people to assert their rights to certain
0:22:16 > 0:22:20ancient privileges they had on the moors and hills.
0:22:20 > 0:22:23And the programme ends with dancing in the marketplace,
0:22:23 > 0:22:26which I commemorate in this poem.
0:22:26 > 0:22:29Drums in the Walligate, pipes in the air
0:22:29 > 0:22:31Come and hear the cryin o the Fair
0:22:31 > 0:22:34Aa as it used to be, when I was a loon
0:22:34 > 0:22:36On Common-Ridin Day in the Muckle Toon.
0:22:40 > 0:22:43Drums in the Walligate, pipes in the air
0:22:43 > 0:22:46The wallopin thistle is ill to bear.
0:22:46 > 0:22:49MacDiarmid's great poem is absolutely rooted
0:22:49 > 0:22:52here in Langholm and the Scotland he knew.
0:22:52 > 0:22:55But like any great work of modernism,
0:22:55 > 0:22:58it deliberately breaks its own boundaries.
0:22:58 > 0:22:59It breaks the borders of Langholm,
0:22:59 > 0:23:02it breaks the borders of the Borders,
0:23:02 > 0:23:04it breaks the borders of Scotland.
0:23:04 > 0:23:08It embraces French poetry, the Russian poetry of Alexander Blok,
0:23:08 > 0:23:11the thought of the great German philosopher Nietzsche,
0:23:11 > 0:23:15the Russian Revolution, arguments about Christianity and sexuality.
0:23:15 > 0:23:18It is a deliberately difficult poem.
0:23:18 > 0:23:21It's difficult not just because it's in Scots, but because the words,
0:23:21 > 0:23:24and the expressions, and the arguments are themselves
0:23:24 > 0:23:25quite difficult.
0:23:25 > 0:23:28It requires serious, hard work. A lot of brain thought.
0:23:28 > 0:23:30The question is not, is this difficult?
0:23:30 > 0:23:32Does it need a dictionary?
0:23:32 > 0:23:35Yes. You need a dictionary to read Shakespeare, too.
0:23:35 > 0:23:39You need a dictionary to read lots of poets. Ezra Pound, TS Eliot.
0:23:39 > 0:23:40They're all difficult.
0:23:40 > 0:23:44The question is, is this a poem so great, so important
0:23:44 > 0:23:47in its thought, so well expressed, that the difficulty is worth it?
0:23:47 > 0:23:51And the answer is, "Absolutely, yes".
0:23:54 > 0:23:57The poem's written from the viewpoint of a man
0:23:57 > 0:23:59who's watched the thistle borne through Langholm,
0:23:59 > 0:24:03watched the borders of the town being ridden, and then, finally,
0:24:03 > 0:24:07drunkenly, laid down in the heather to think about a Scotland
0:24:07 > 0:24:08that enrages him.
0:24:10 > 0:24:14Scotland is compared, at one point, to a patch of dried semen.
0:24:14 > 0:24:18The Scots are passive, ignorant, and deluded.
0:24:20 > 0:24:25The only race in history who've Bidden in the same category
0:24:25 > 0:24:28Frae stert to present o their story
0:24:28 > 0:24:32And deem their ignorance their glory
0:24:32 > 0:24:37The mair they differ, mair the same
0:24:37 > 0:24:40The wheel can whummle aa but them
0:24:40 > 0:24:43They caa their obstinacy 'Hame'
0:24:44 > 0:24:49And, "Puir Auld Scotland" bleat wi pride
0:24:49 > 0:24:54And wi their minds made up to bide
0:24:56 > 0:25:00A thorn in aa the wide world's side.
0:25:01 > 0:25:04O Scotland is THE barren fig
0:25:04 > 0:25:06Up, carles, up And roond it jig
0:25:06 > 0:25:09Auld Moses took A dry stick and
0:25:09 > 0:25:12Instantly it Flooered in his hand
0:25:12 > 0:25:14Pu' Scotland up, And wha can say
0:25:14 > 0:25:17It winna bud And blossom tae
0:25:17 > 0:25:19A miracle's Oor only chance
0:25:19 > 0:25:21Up, carles, up And let us dance!
0:25:22 > 0:25:25It's a scene that I think is happening all over the world.
0:25:25 > 0:25:28Small minorities, language minorities,
0:25:28 > 0:25:32cultural minorities, asserting themselves and rebasing,
0:25:32 > 0:25:36or trying to rebase, their cultures on an indigenous basis.
0:25:36 > 0:25:39And it is exactly the same thing in Scotland.
0:25:42 > 0:25:45It was a political and cultural manifesto,
0:25:45 > 0:25:48a poem to be brandished as well as read.
0:25:48 > 0:25:51And it contained the absolute essence of MacDiarmid.
0:25:51 > 0:25:53His personal mission statement.
0:25:54 > 0:25:59I'll ha'e nae hauf-way hoose, but aye be whaur
0:25:59 > 0:26:03Extremes meet - it's the only way I ken
0:26:03 > 0:26:07To dodge the curst conceit o' bein' richt
0:26:07 > 0:26:10That damns the vast majority o' men.
0:26:14 > 0:26:18A Drunk Man was published in November, 1926.
0:26:18 > 0:26:22Edwin Muir's review described it as, "The only poem of importance
0:26:22 > 0:26:26"in Scots which has appeared since the death of Burns."
0:26:26 > 0:26:28Other reviews were less positive.
0:26:28 > 0:26:30And sales were dire.
0:26:30 > 0:26:33Trying to turn the Scottish public into political nationalists
0:26:33 > 0:26:37by means of poetry was proving less than possible.
0:26:37 > 0:26:40MacDiarmid's mind turned to more obvious approaches.
0:26:43 > 0:26:49The National Party of Scotland was formed on the 10th May, 1928.
0:26:49 > 0:26:52The single issue that united its founders
0:26:52 > 0:26:56was their wish for Scottish home rule, or, as we'd say, "devolution".
0:26:56 > 0:26:59MacDiarmid, of course, wanted complete independence.
0:26:59 > 0:27:03His fellow founders thought that was too much to ask,
0:27:03 > 0:27:05but at least he'd got the party started.
0:27:05 > 0:27:10The NPS set about fielding candidates in by-elections,
0:27:10 > 0:27:11pushing their home rule agenda.
0:27:11 > 0:27:15It would be an exaggeration to say that nobody voted for them.
0:27:15 > 0:27:17But only a slight one.
0:27:18 > 0:27:22MacDiarmid's literary renaissance, however, was gathering pace.
0:27:22 > 0:27:25Other novelists and poets were joining the cause of Scottish
0:27:25 > 0:27:27literature, and for both movements,
0:27:27 > 0:27:31MacDiarmid provided a public face, offering aggressively
0:27:31 > 0:27:34anti-English analysis of any issue.
0:27:34 > 0:27:37But soon convinced that the National Party was too timid,
0:27:37 > 0:27:41MacDiarmid set up an organisation called Clan Albain,
0:27:41 > 0:27:45one of whose many plots involved the capture of Edinburgh Castle.
0:27:45 > 0:27:49In an article in the Daily Record, MacDiarmid wrote that the clan's
0:27:49 > 0:27:52aims were essentially fascist and claimed that most of
0:27:52 > 0:27:56the members of the National Party, were members of the clan as well.
0:27:56 > 0:28:00I know no national liberation movement that has been won
0:28:00 > 0:28:04without a terrible struggle, without civil disobedience, violence,
0:28:04 > 0:28:06war or civil war.
0:28:06 > 0:28:10No great national movement was ever founded on caution.
0:28:10 > 0:28:14I do not understand at all how, in regard to any principle,
0:28:14 > 0:28:17it can be claimed that one can go too far.
0:28:23 > 0:28:28Slowly but surely, he became the rotten egg on the party's face
0:28:28 > 0:28:31and was expelled from it in 1933,
0:28:31 > 0:28:35on the grounds of his communism. His life was falling apart.
0:28:35 > 0:28:37Peggy had left him
0:28:37 > 0:28:41and the long-suffering owner of the Montrose Review had sacked him.
0:28:43 > 0:28:46MacDiarmid took it all on his prominent chin.
0:28:46 > 0:28:49Always desperate for money, he accepted the offer of cheap
0:28:49 > 0:28:53accommodation on the island of Whalsay in the Shetlands.
0:28:54 > 0:28:57This was a retreat, a withdrawal.
0:28:57 > 0:29:01But, for MacDiarmid, it was a new beginning as well.
0:29:01 > 0:29:04Here he wrote a major new poem that explored what Shetland
0:29:04 > 0:29:07had to offer his bruised soul.
0:29:07 > 0:29:12Now, as he'd created a new Scots, he created a new English.
0:29:12 > 0:29:15And, in the stones of Shetland's beaches
0:29:15 > 0:29:20and the language of geological science, he found a kind of peace.
0:29:22 > 0:29:26All is lithogenesis or lochia
0:29:26 > 0:29:28Carpolite fruit of the forbidden tree
0:29:28 > 0:29:31Stones blacker than any in Caaba
0:29:33 > 0:29:36Cream-coloured caen-stone, chatoyant pieces
0:29:36 > 0:29:40Celadon and corbeau, bistre and beige
0:29:40 > 0:29:45Glaucous, hoar, enfouldered, cyathiform...
0:29:49 > 0:29:52Yes, MacDiarmid's been eating dictionaries again.
0:29:52 > 0:29:56In this case, mainly the Chambers 20th Century English Dictionary,
0:29:56 > 0:30:00but he's doing it for a very specific purpose.
0:30:00 > 0:30:03Every one of these words, once you know what they mean, make perfect
0:30:03 > 0:30:05sense, and are perfectly chosen
0:30:05 > 0:30:08for a very, very great work of poetry.
0:30:08 > 0:30:12This is a man who believes that easy words produce easy thoughts,
0:30:12 > 0:30:14familiar words, familiar thoughts.
0:30:14 > 0:30:17If you really want to challenge people and make them think harder,
0:30:17 > 0:30:20you have to smash the language up and remake it.
0:30:20 > 0:30:22And that's what he's doing.
0:30:22 > 0:30:26A lot of people say that after his Scots poetry, MacDiarmid went off.
0:30:26 > 0:30:30The correct literary critical term for this opinion is "wrong".
0:30:31 > 0:30:33Scott, is it reasonable,
0:30:33 > 0:30:37is it fair to describe On A Raised Beach as a great poem?
0:30:37 > 0:30:40I think it's one of the great poems of the 20th century.
0:30:40 > 0:30:44I think it's one of the great poems of the modern poetic movement.
0:30:44 > 0:30:48It's one of certainly the great poems of MacDiarmid's career.
0:30:48 > 0:30:52He talks about God in this poem. It's a sermonic poem.
0:30:52 > 0:30:55He behaves in this poem as if he's a preacher at the pulpit,
0:30:55 > 0:30:58saying things like, "We must be humble."
0:30:58 > 0:31:01And it's an argumentative, kind of finger-wagging poem,
0:31:01 > 0:31:04in some ways, and he talks about God, but it's not really,
0:31:04 > 0:31:07I don't think, a religious poem in that sense and,
0:31:07 > 0:31:10certainly not a Christian poem in that sense.
0:31:10 > 0:31:13I think, in some ways, On A Raised Beach is a great materialist poem
0:31:13 > 0:31:16because the meaning that he finds is a meaning in the earth,
0:31:16 > 0:31:20and a meaning in the stones rather than a meaning in a hereafter.
0:31:25 > 0:31:29So let us beware of death; the stones will have
0:31:29 > 0:31:34Their revenge; we have lost all approach to them
0:31:36 > 0:31:40But soon we shall become as those we have betrayed
0:31:40 > 0:31:43And they will seal us as fast in our graves
0:31:43 > 0:31:48As our indifference and ignorance seals them
0:31:50 > 0:31:53But let us not be afraid to die.
0:31:55 > 0:31:59No heavier and colder and quieter then
0:31:59 > 0:32:03No more motionless, do stones lie
0:32:03 > 0:32:07In death than in life to all men.
0:32:10 > 0:32:13I produced an enormous amount of stuff there.
0:32:13 > 0:32:17I found the change of environment extremely stimulating.
0:32:17 > 0:32:19And I liked the Shetland people immensely.
0:32:19 > 0:32:22But it didn't solve the problem of ways and means.
0:32:22 > 0:32:25I had no visible means of support.
0:32:25 > 0:32:28With the consequence that we had a very lean time indeed.
0:32:31 > 0:32:33So, here we have a modernist poet,
0:32:33 > 0:32:36isolated on the island of Whalsay, surrounded by little more
0:32:36 > 0:32:39than stones, and writing a poem about the ultimate realities.
0:32:39 > 0:32:43- At the same time, he's being spied upon by MI5.- He was indeed.
0:32:43 > 0:32:46He was watched by the security services from 1931
0:32:46 > 0:32:52when he was in London, he goes to Shetland to live in Whalsay in 1933.
0:32:52 > 0:32:55He's continually watched throughout this time.
0:32:55 > 0:32:58Meanwhile, he was trying to propagandise for communism
0:32:58 > 0:33:01with mixed success, he said delicately, on Whalsay.
0:33:01 > 0:33:04Certainly on Whalsay, he had mixed success.
0:33:04 > 0:33:07There were a few meetings that he held in cottages in Whalsay.
0:33:07 > 0:33:11I think some people turned up for the promise, really, of free beer.
0:33:11 > 0:33:13But the security services did take this seriously.
0:33:13 > 0:33:17He was called "a rabid nationalist" by the security services.
0:33:17 > 0:33:20And, so, they took his politics seriously,
0:33:20 > 0:33:23and they took his politics seriously in relation to his family, too.
0:33:23 > 0:33:25His first wife was tracked for
0:33:25 > 0:33:29many, many years after MacDiarmid and she split up.
0:33:31 > 0:33:35But how good were MI5, really? Here's one thing they missed.
0:33:35 > 0:33:38The Stone of Destiny was the ancient bit of rock
0:33:38 > 0:33:41on which Scottish kings were crowned.
0:33:41 > 0:33:45It was nicked by that famous robber, Edward I of England,
0:33:45 > 0:33:47and taken back down to London.
0:33:47 > 0:33:49And there was a Scottish nationalist plot
0:33:49 > 0:33:53in the 1930s to steal it back and return it to Scotland.
0:33:53 > 0:33:55MacDiarmid was central to this plot.
0:33:55 > 0:33:58All his letters about it were sent by Royal Mail.
0:33:58 > 0:34:03And, yet, somehow, MI5 missed the entire thing.
0:34:05 > 0:34:09On 15th of January, 1934, Graham MacGibbon,
0:34:09 > 0:34:11the Glasgow-based engineer,
0:34:11 > 0:34:16wrote to MacDiarmid in an ecstasy of anticipation.
0:34:16 > 0:34:18"I am delighted to hear that things are moving
0:34:18 > 0:34:22"and can almost visualise the symbol being borne along Princes Street
0:34:22 > 0:34:26"in the glare of thousands of torches. What a scene!
0:34:26 > 0:34:30"Remember, we're with you to the bitter end, and absolutely at
0:34:30 > 0:34:35"your command as far as our present state of economic slavery permits."
0:34:56 > 0:34:59On or around the 23rd January,
0:34:59 > 0:35:04an observant verger might have seen a man prowling around the chair
0:35:04 > 0:35:08and observing the stone with more than usual curiosity,
0:35:08 > 0:35:12trying to guess its weight, and looking around for exit routes.
0:35:15 > 0:35:18He drew a map which he then passed to MacDiarmid.
0:35:19 > 0:35:23And here it is. The clearest possible demonstration
0:35:23 > 0:35:27of the essential nature of the plan to steal the Stone of Scone.
0:35:27 > 0:35:30It was, at its very best, sketchy.
0:35:32 > 0:35:36MacDiarmid was obsessed by the idea of obtaining
0:35:36 > 0:35:38a fast car for the getaway.
0:35:38 > 0:35:41Graham MacGibbon disagreed. What if it broke down?
0:35:41 > 0:35:44There would need to be at least three fast cars,
0:35:44 > 0:35:46travelling in convoy.
0:35:46 > 0:35:49And MacGibbon was also against the notion of taking
0:35:49 > 0:35:51the stone up north by train. Which is a pity, really.
0:35:51 > 0:35:56Imagine the notion of a hairy poet sitting overnight on the Flying Scot
0:35:56 > 0:36:00with the Stone of Destiny bouncing above him in the luggage rack.
0:36:02 > 0:36:04Had he made that momentous journey,
0:36:04 > 0:36:07MacDiarmid's plan was to hide the stone in a Scottish burn,
0:36:07 > 0:36:11where its true and fateful nature would be invisible.
0:36:16 > 0:36:20MacDiarmid arrived in London in March 1934,
0:36:20 > 0:36:24and he went to see the Muirs in their rented Hampstead house.
0:36:24 > 0:36:26According to Willa Muir,
0:36:26 > 0:36:28he very, very confidentially mentioned his plan
0:36:28 > 0:36:31"to liberate the stone" and amused them
0:36:31 > 0:36:34by talking again and again about the need for a fast car,
0:36:34 > 0:36:36and raising money for that.
0:36:36 > 0:36:40Because he then very, very confidentially mentioned his plan
0:36:40 > 0:36:44to virtually every Scot living in London, he did raise the money.
0:36:44 > 0:36:46But then came the problem because MacDiarmid
0:36:46 > 0:36:51was a gregarious and open-handed man, and in this very pub,
0:36:51 > 0:36:54he bought a round for each customer several times.
0:36:54 > 0:36:59The fast car money made only one short journey,
0:36:59 > 0:37:03from those beer taps to the urinals round the corner.
0:37:03 > 0:37:06And as for the poor old Stone of Destiny,
0:37:06 > 0:37:09it remained in the hands of the wicked English.
0:37:12 > 0:37:16MacDiarmid always denied that the money had been misspent.
0:37:16 > 0:37:19But he certainly returned to Whalsay without the stone.
0:37:21 > 0:37:26He was profoundly depressed. He had something like a nervous breakdown.
0:37:26 > 0:37:28He was now expelled from the Communist Party
0:37:28 > 0:37:31for his excessive nationalist sympathies.
0:37:31 > 0:37:35He seemed to belong nowhere, to no viable political tendency at all,
0:37:35 > 0:37:39and his old friend Edwin Muir, once his closest collaborator,
0:37:39 > 0:37:44was about to stab him in the back.
0:37:44 > 0:37:47For two years, Muir had been struggling
0:37:47 > 0:37:49with a sort of loss of faith.
0:37:51 > 0:37:53In 1933, he'd been visiting Scotland,
0:37:53 > 0:37:56driving in Lanarkshire, south of Glasgow,
0:37:56 > 0:38:01an area in which industry was entering the last stages of its decline.
0:38:03 > 0:38:06Edwin Muir was a terrible driver.
0:38:06 > 0:38:09He was nervous and hesitant, and he preferred to drive
0:38:09 > 0:38:13with the hood down, which meant that he had a lot of trouble
0:38:13 > 0:38:14with insects and rain,
0:38:14 > 0:38:17two phenomena that never occur in Scotland.
0:38:18 > 0:38:21Anyway, he wasn't much interested in the road ahead,
0:38:21 > 0:38:24he was too busy looking around him
0:38:24 > 0:38:28gathering evidence on the condition of Scotland for a book.
0:38:28 > 0:38:31Scottish Journey sounds like a jolly guidebook.
0:38:31 > 0:38:34It is in fact, in the entire history of Scotland,
0:38:34 > 0:38:38the single most dispiriting work ever written about the country.
0:38:40 > 0:38:45The houses looked empty and unemployed, like their tenants,
0:38:45 > 0:38:51and the road along which the car stumbled was pitted and rent,
0:38:51 > 0:38:55as if it had been recently under shell-fire.
0:38:55 > 0:39:00Everything had the look of a Sunday which had lasted for many years,
0:39:00 > 0:39:04during which the bells had forgotten to ring.
0:39:04 > 0:39:08A disused, slovenly, everlasting Sunday.
0:39:09 > 0:39:13What he saw gnawed away at Muir,
0:39:13 > 0:39:17and so he carried on, crisscrossing the whole of Scotland.
0:39:17 > 0:39:20He didn't do it in a oner - he would come back
0:39:20 > 0:39:23whenever he had time and could find a car to borrow.
0:39:23 > 0:39:25The whole process took him two years.
0:39:32 > 0:39:36By 1935, he had finished his long, sporadic road trip.
0:39:36 > 0:39:40Scottish Journey gathered together his impressions of what he'd seen.
0:39:40 > 0:39:46The emptiness in Lanarkshire was everywhere in Scotland.
0:39:46 > 0:39:48No sign of any national culture.
0:39:48 > 0:39:51No universal Scottishness.
0:39:51 > 0:39:55The Borders differed from the Highlands.
0:39:55 > 0:39:58Edinburgh and Glasgow were unalike.
0:40:04 > 0:40:07The journey had ended in a hotel on the Beauly Firth,
0:40:07 > 0:40:09not far from the battlefield of Culloden,
0:40:09 > 0:40:13and it was here that Edwin Muir finally faced the fact
0:40:13 > 0:40:17he could no longer keep faith with MacDiarmid's nationalist dreams.
0:40:18 > 0:40:21I went over in my mind what Scottish history
0:40:21 > 0:40:27I could remember, hoping to find some faint sign that Scotland's annals
0:40:27 > 0:40:30need not have led to the end of Scotland as a nation.
0:40:30 > 0:40:34But I reflected that Wallace had been betrayed,
0:40:34 > 0:40:37I remembered Culloden and the Highland clans delivered
0:40:37 > 0:40:41helpless to Cumberland because of the intrigues of their chieftains.
0:40:43 > 0:40:47The pageant of Scottish history played through Muir's mind
0:40:47 > 0:40:52and it told him a story of internal strife, wavering commitments
0:40:52 > 0:40:55and unresolved differences.
0:40:55 > 0:40:58The people of the kingdom of Scotland had consistently
0:40:58 > 0:41:02failed to keep faith with one other.
0:41:02 > 0:41:05There had been glorious victories such as Bannockburn,
0:41:05 > 0:41:10but even that had been followed by squalid deals and backsliding.
0:41:10 > 0:41:13For Muir, the truth was horribly simple.
0:41:13 > 0:41:19There was no Scotland, because she had betrayed herself long ago.
0:41:21 > 0:41:24It is these things that make
0:41:24 > 0:41:28the National Party of Scotland so unconvincing.
0:41:28 > 0:41:32One can see that self-government for Scotland is a desirable ideal,
0:41:32 > 0:41:35but like all Utopian ideals,
0:41:35 > 0:41:39it takes no account of history, past or present.
0:41:39 > 0:41:42Muir looked into Scottish history
0:41:42 > 0:41:47and all he saw was a lost and distant medieval kingdom.
0:41:47 > 0:41:50What Scotland needed now wasn't nationalism.
0:41:50 > 0:41:52It was socialism.
0:41:54 > 0:41:55In his next book,
0:41:55 > 0:42:00Scott And Scotland: The Predicament Of The Scottish Writer,
0:42:00 > 0:42:02Muir went further still.
0:42:02 > 0:42:05This was a meditation on the legacy of Walter Scott,
0:42:05 > 0:42:10and on Edinburgh, a powerless capital city, a blank.
0:42:10 > 0:42:13Muir laid much of the blame for Edinburgh's irrelevance,
0:42:13 > 0:42:16and the demotion of the Scottish tongue at Scott's door,
0:42:16 > 0:42:19but the damage, he felt, was done.
0:42:19 > 0:42:25Muir concluded that writing in Scots dialect was inescapably provincial.
0:42:25 > 0:42:27But the introduction was even worse.
0:42:27 > 0:42:31In it, and Muir must have known the implications of what he was writing,
0:42:31 > 0:42:34he said that the problems of Scotland would never
0:42:34 > 0:42:38be solved by writing poems in Scots.
0:42:38 > 0:42:43After 11 years of friendship and close collaboration,
0:42:43 > 0:42:48Muir was rejecting everything that MacDiarmid was and stood for.
0:42:48 > 0:42:51He and MacDiarmid never spoke again.
0:42:53 > 0:42:58MacDiarmid hated Muir's belief that Scotland was a dead thing,
0:42:58 > 0:43:01that its ills were curable only by a kind of wet socialism,
0:43:01 > 0:43:04north and south of the Border,
0:43:04 > 0:43:07that would make the Border itself irrelevant.
0:43:07 > 0:43:10But he couldn't avoid the fact of Scotland's apathy,
0:43:10 > 0:43:14or the fact that Scots habitually sent large numbers
0:43:14 > 0:43:16of Unionist Tory MPs down to Westminster.
0:43:16 > 0:43:20He railed more fiercely than ever.
0:43:22 > 0:43:24By the beginning of 1940, he was writing poems
0:43:24 > 0:43:28in which he contemplated the bombing of London by German planes
0:43:28 > 0:43:30and admitted, "He couldna care".
0:43:30 > 0:43:35Letters in which he said the Nazis were less damaging
0:43:35 > 0:43:37than the English bourgeoisie.
0:43:37 > 0:43:40It's not really politics, is it? It's spittle.
0:43:49 > 0:43:53In the aftermath of that second apocalypse, there was
0:43:53 > 0:43:55a genuine consensus in British politics.
0:43:55 > 0:43:59An agreement between both Labour and Conservative politicians
0:43:59 > 0:44:02that there was a debt owed to soldiers that had lived and died,
0:44:02 > 0:44:05to their families - indeed, to an entire class.
0:44:07 > 0:44:09Labour created the welfare state,
0:44:09 > 0:44:11but the Tories certainly didn't dismantle it.
0:44:11 > 0:44:15Council houses, the Coal Board, the Gas Board, British Steel,
0:44:15 > 0:44:17British Rail, the National Health Service,
0:44:17 > 0:44:21state education, free milk, free teeth.
0:44:21 > 0:44:25Here was the socialism, north and south of the Border,
0:44:25 > 0:44:27that Muir had called for.
0:44:27 > 0:44:29And in this climate, MacDiarmid's twin demands -
0:44:29 > 0:44:34republican communism and Scottish nationalism - seemed ludicrous.
0:44:41 > 0:44:45And there was a sort of rebirth of Britishness, too,
0:44:45 > 0:44:49which began with the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II.
0:44:49 > 0:44:53She presided over a New Elizabethan age in which the nation's
0:44:53 > 0:44:58gift to her was built at John Brown's shipyard in Clydebank.
0:44:58 > 0:45:02The Royal Yacht Britannia.
0:45:05 > 0:45:09And an idea of Britishness set sail with her,
0:45:09 > 0:45:13in which Hugh MacDiarmid was picturesque, entertaining,
0:45:13 > 0:45:17and irrelevant, in receipt of that final insult.
0:45:17 > 0:45:20He was rewarded a special pension,
0:45:20 > 0:45:25for services to literature, society and culture.
0:45:25 > 0:45:29A civil list pension from the very same Westminster government
0:45:29 > 0:45:31he was so determined to overthrow.
0:45:31 > 0:45:34And he took it.
0:45:34 > 0:45:37Even poets have to eat. But where did it leave him?
0:45:37 > 0:45:40An Establishment trophy on the wall,
0:45:40 > 0:45:44a spiky little pet, a rebel poet no longer?
0:45:44 > 0:45:47Over to the Highlands to Perth.
0:45:47 > 0:45:51No. The civil list pension was just another contradiction.
0:45:51 > 0:45:55He remained a rebel poet happy to bite the hand that fed him.
0:45:58 > 0:46:00In the general election of 1964,
0:46:00 > 0:46:02MacDiarmid stood for the Communist Party
0:46:02 > 0:46:06in the constituency of Kinross and West Perthshire
0:46:06 > 0:46:10against the then-Prime Minister, the Conservative Sir Alec Douglas-Home.
0:46:10 > 0:46:13Sir Alexander Frederick Douglas-Home,
0:46:13 > 0:46:1716,659.
0:46:17 > 0:46:20Andrew Forrester,
0:46:20 > 0:46:234,687.
0:46:23 > 0:46:28Christopher Murray Grieve, 127.
0:46:28 > 0:46:32JEERING AND CHEERING
0:46:32 > 0:46:37I, therefore, declare that Sir Alexander Frederick Douglas-Home...
0:46:37 > 0:46:39MacDiarmid described his opponent
0:46:39 > 0:46:42as "a yes-man of the Pentagon" and "a zombie".
0:46:42 > 0:46:43He was still doing his job,
0:46:43 > 0:46:47still the same communist nationalist troublemaker as ever,
0:46:47 > 0:46:50and he carried on right into the 1970s,
0:46:50 > 0:46:53when I first encountered his work at the age of 16.
0:46:55 > 0:46:57I literally pulled a book off the shelf
0:46:57 > 0:47:01and opened it in a library, and I was immediately transfixed.
0:47:01 > 0:47:05I had never read anything remotely like this before.
0:47:05 > 0:47:08And for all the offensive extremism of the politics,
0:47:08 > 0:47:11and the difficulty of the Scots, there was something
0:47:11 > 0:47:14about the language. It was speckled, it was hard-edged,
0:47:14 > 0:47:16it was adamantine, it gripped.
0:47:16 > 0:47:20MacDiarmid crawled up my nostrils and into my brain
0:47:20 > 0:47:23and he has been sitting there, fizzing away, ever since.
0:47:25 > 0:47:29MacDiarmid fizzed away on television too, reliably providing
0:47:29 > 0:47:33cross-grained political opinions whenever required.
0:47:33 > 0:47:35MacDiarmid, 86 this month,
0:47:35 > 0:47:37lives here at Biggar in the Lanarkshire hills.
0:47:37 > 0:47:40In his poetry, he tackles what he sees as a crucial matter,
0:47:40 > 0:47:43the revival of Scots as a literary language.
0:47:43 > 0:47:45How far did it succeed?
0:47:45 > 0:47:49In all our universities, there are courses in Scottish literature.
0:47:49 > 0:47:52That's all within the last 20 years.
0:47:52 > 0:47:56It's a radical change, and it's bound to bear fruit
0:47:56 > 0:47:58with subsequent generations.
0:47:58 > 0:48:02The older ones, even the writers,
0:48:02 > 0:48:05my own generation and so on,
0:48:05 > 0:48:08we're brought up wholly on English literature.
0:48:08 > 0:48:11- You're very pleased about the change. - I'm very pleased about it
0:48:11 > 0:48:13and I would like to see it go very much further.
0:48:13 > 0:48:16How much further?
0:48:16 > 0:48:18Well, English is a compulsory subject.
0:48:18 > 0:48:20I don't see why it should be.
0:48:20 > 0:48:21Why not French?
0:48:21 > 0:48:26What do you think is the connection between political identity,
0:48:26 > 0:48:31a sense of nationhood, and a country's cultural development?
0:48:31 > 0:48:35They're inseverable from my point of view.
0:48:35 > 0:48:37I can't see any break between them.
0:48:37 > 0:48:41I certainly wouldn't be writing the kind of poetry I have written
0:48:41 > 0:48:45if I weren't a Scottish nationalist and a communist.
0:49:10 > 0:49:13Hugh MacDiarmid lived to a ripe old age,
0:49:13 > 0:49:16with his National Health Service gnashers,
0:49:16 > 0:49:20sustained by a diet of tea, biscuits, whisky and cigarettes,
0:49:20 > 0:49:23with his beloved second wife Valda,
0:49:23 > 0:49:27living in this tiny cottage in the Scottish Borders.
0:49:27 > 0:49:30He died of cancer in 1978,
0:49:30 > 0:49:35a hinge year in the story of modern Britain,
0:49:35 > 0:49:38just after that great celebration of Britishness
0:49:38 > 0:49:40which was the Queen's Silver Jubilee,
0:49:40 > 0:49:44and just before the arrival in power of Margaret Thatcher,
0:49:44 > 0:49:46and the death of the consensus politics
0:49:46 > 0:49:50through which he'd lived so much of his life.
0:49:50 > 0:49:54There are no Hugh MacDiarmid poems, therefore, about Thatcherism,
0:49:54 > 0:49:56more's the pity.
0:50:03 > 0:50:07The political world has changed almost out of recognition
0:50:07 > 0:50:10since Hugh MacDiarmid's death.
0:50:10 > 0:50:12A majority of English voters
0:50:12 > 0:50:15seemed to turn away from the post-war consensus.
0:50:15 > 0:50:19Industrial confrontation, unpopular wars abroad,
0:50:19 > 0:50:21and a belief that it was no longer possible
0:50:21 > 0:50:25to achieve a social democratic welfare state via Westminster
0:50:25 > 0:50:28turned more and more Scots towards independence.
0:50:32 > 0:50:34But if Alex Salmond was prepared to quote MacDiarmid,
0:50:34 > 0:50:37the modern SNP's version of independence
0:50:37 > 0:50:42was a million miles away from his communist and anti-English Utopia.
0:50:42 > 0:50:45It was deliberately centre ground.
0:50:45 > 0:50:50The angry old man would have been entirely contemptuous.
0:50:51 > 0:50:55So, Hugh MacDiarmid left no legacy to modern Scotland?
0:50:55 > 0:50:58Not true. But it was mainly a cultural legacy,
0:50:58 > 0:50:59not a political one.
0:50:59 > 0:51:03When he started, there were very few serious Scottish writers,
0:51:03 > 0:51:06and hardly any who actually lived in Scotland.
0:51:06 > 0:51:09And now, partly thanks to him, that is absolutely not true.
0:51:09 > 0:51:12There was first the great Scottish Renaissance generation,
0:51:12 > 0:51:16people like Robert Garioch, Norman MacCaig, Lewis Grassic Gibbon,
0:51:16 > 0:51:18Sydney Goodsir Smith.
0:51:18 > 0:51:22Great writers, all of them. Neil Gunn, the great novelist.
0:51:22 > 0:51:25Then after that, more and more writers of all kinds
0:51:25 > 0:51:28pouring out through Scotland. The list is almost too long to remember,
0:51:28 > 0:51:30but I'm going to try. Kathleen Jamie,
0:51:30 > 0:51:34Robert Crawford, Liz Lochhead, Edwin Morgan, Jackie Kay,
0:51:34 > 0:51:37Andrew Greig, Alasdair Gray, Robin Jenkins, Don Paterson,
0:51:37 > 0:51:40AL Kennedy, John Burnside, James Kelman, Janice Galloway,
0:51:40 > 0:51:44James Robertson, James Meek, Irvine Welsh, Iain Banks,
0:51:44 > 0:51:46Carol Ann Duffy, Kate Atkinson, Allan Massie,
0:51:46 > 0:51:49and in a sense, they're all MacDiarmid's children,
0:51:49 > 0:51:51because he taught the Scots to do it BIG,
0:51:51 > 0:51:55do it NOW, and do it HERE.
0:51:57 > 0:51:59He was a towering, towering figure,
0:51:59 > 0:52:02and vitally important.
0:52:02 > 0:52:07I think people now feel that they don't need to be validated elsewhere,
0:52:07 > 0:52:09I think that was one of things he gave.
0:52:09 > 0:52:12He took that position.
0:52:12 > 0:52:16"I can do this and I can self-validate.
0:52:16 > 0:52:19"I have the right to write in this language
0:52:19 > 0:52:22"and be regarded as an international modernist poet."
0:52:22 > 0:52:27I suppose, MacDiarmid gave people the sense
0:52:27 > 0:52:31to make themselves central, just as he did himself.
0:52:31 > 0:52:34I think there seems to have been a big difference
0:52:34 > 0:52:35between the public MacDiarmid -
0:52:35 > 0:52:38aggressive, embattled, provocative MacDiarmid -
0:52:38 > 0:52:41- and the man, Chris Grieve.- Because he changed his mind all the time.
0:52:41 > 0:52:43- All the time. - He didn't have an easy life.
0:52:43 > 0:52:46MacDiarmid did not have an easy life.
0:52:46 > 0:52:50He didn't make his life easy for himself, he never sought that out.
0:52:52 > 0:52:55I think there's a sort of element of that
0:52:55 > 0:52:57in very many of us Scots.
0:52:57 > 0:53:01His thrawnness, we might kind of roll our eyes at it,
0:53:01 > 0:53:03but we admire it deeply.
0:53:08 > 0:53:11Most people don't understand poets.
0:53:13 > 0:53:16They see them as rebels against the system
0:53:16 > 0:53:19to which they themselves have automatically conformed.
0:53:21 > 0:53:23Poets are a very small minority of people,
0:53:23 > 0:53:28who for some obscure reason have failed to grow up.
0:53:31 > 0:53:33Everyone living in Scotland today
0:53:33 > 0:53:36has to wrestle with the same questions about security,
0:53:36 > 0:53:39prosperity, identity, democracy.
0:53:39 > 0:53:43In this series, they've seen that they are not alone and never have been.
0:53:43 > 0:53:47In James Boswell, the great and lovable journalist,
0:53:47 > 0:53:51we have seen the tension between the fruits the Union has to offer
0:53:51 > 0:53:53and instinctive Scottish patriotism.
0:53:54 > 0:53:58Sir Walter Scott was a Unionist and a Tory tormented by some
0:53:58 > 0:54:02of the things the modern world had done to his beloved Scotland.
0:54:02 > 0:54:05And Hugh MacDiarmid, the greatest modern Scottish poet,
0:54:05 > 0:54:10was a ferocious believer in independence and Scottish identity,
0:54:10 > 0:54:14but his extremism has made him almost a modern pariah.
0:54:19 > 0:54:23MacDiarmid's monument, his memorial,
0:54:23 > 0:54:25is near his birthplace, Langholm.
0:54:25 > 0:54:28You get the feeling that they are proud of him.
0:54:28 > 0:54:32"Slow down, here comes Langholm, birthplace of Hugh MacDiarmid,"
0:54:32 > 0:54:34say the signs as you drive into the town.
0:54:35 > 0:54:39But they keep him at a certain distance, too.
0:54:39 > 0:54:44The monument is hidden away in the treeless hills behind the town.
0:54:53 > 0:54:57In 1970, the idea of giving MacDiarmid
0:54:57 > 0:54:59the freedom of the borough was briefly mooted,
0:54:59 > 0:55:02but they gave it to Neil Armstrong instead,
0:55:02 > 0:55:06because the first man on the moon's distant ancestors came from round here.
0:55:08 > 0:55:12The monument, to borrow one of the phrases of the man himself,
0:55:12 > 0:55:17is "an antrin thing". You won't see anything else quite like it.
0:55:17 > 0:55:20It's a rusting representation of an open book,
0:55:20 > 0:55:22full of images from his poetry.
0:55:24 > 0:55:27On worse days than this, the wind whistles through it.
0:55:27 > 0:55:29It hums to itself.
0:55:31 > 0:55:32I like it.
0:55:32 > 0:55:34I think it's exactly right.
0:55:34 > 0:55:37It's like the man himself.
0:55:37 > 0:55:38Inconvenient.
0:55:38 > 0:55:39Angular.
0:55:39 > 0:55:41Undeniable.
0:55:44 > 0:55:47Do you know, it would be the easiest thing in the world
0:55:47 > 0:55:50to totally dismiss Hugh MacDiarmid. Very, very simple.
0:55:50 > 0:55:54He had hateful opinions, he was horrible about the English,
0:55:54 > 0:55:56he was naive about Marxism,
0:55:56 > 0:55:59he was wrong when he was young about fascism,
0:55:59 > 0:56:01and much else besides.
0:56:01 > 0:56:03A dead easy call.
0:56:03 > 0:56:07And that is presumably why so many people in the Yes Campaign
0:56:07 > 0:56:10and the No Campaign would love never to hear the words
0:56:10 > 0:56:14"Hugh MacDiarmid" ever again, never mind have them splashed
0:56:14 > 0:56:15all over the BBC.
0:56:15 > 0:56:20But here's the little problem that they've got, the tiny problem.
0:56:20 > 0:56:25Scotland today is culturally - never mind politics, culturally -
0:56:25 > 0:56:28a nest of singing birds, a garden of delights.
0:56:28 > 0:56:34It is crammed with wonderful poets, novelists, writers of all kinds,
0:56:34 > 0:56:37artists, sculptors, composers, musicians.
0:56:37 > 0:56:41I think, culturally, Scotland is as self-confident
0:56:41 > 0:56:43as anywhere else in Europe.
0:56:43 > 0:56:48And that was certainly not the case when Hugh MacDiarmid got started.
0:56:48 > 0:56:50Scotland is on fire.
0:56:50 > 0:56:53Who set the blaze? He did!
0:57:04 > 0:57:06Scotland small?
0:57:06 > 0:57:11Our multiform, our infinite Scotland small?
0:57:11 > 0:57:16Only as a patch of hillside may be a cliche corner
0:57:16 > 0:57:20To a fool who cries "Nothing but heather!"
0:57:20 > 0:57:22Where in September another
0:57:22 > 0:57:26Sitting there and resting and gazing around
0:57:26 > 0:57:30Sees not only heather but blaeberries
0:57:30 > 0:57:35With bright green leaves and leaves already turned scarlet
0:57:35 > 0:57:39Hiding ripe blue berries, and amongst the sage-green leaves
0:57:39 > 0:57:44Of the bog-myrtle the golden flowers of the tormentil shining
0:57:44 > 0:57:47And nodding harebells vying in their colour
0:57:47 > 0:57:52With the blue butterflies that poise themselves delicately upon them
0:57:52 > 0:57:59And stunted rowans with harsh dry leaves of glorious colour
0:57:59 > 0:58:02"Nothing but heather!"
0:58:02 > 0:58:06How marvellously descriptive!
0:58:06 > 0:58:09And incomplete!